Part 1

DEMOCRACY-- FALSE OR TRUE?

A Prologue and Dream

BY SIR WILLIAM BLAKE RICHMOND K.C.B., R.A.

London - - - Cecil Palmer Oakley House Bloomsbury Street WC1

Printed at The Morland Press Ltd 190 Ebury Street London SW1

Dedicated to the honest working classes of England, rich and poor, by one of themselves

FIRST EDITION 1920 COPY RIGHT

DEMOCRACY

§ 1

It is a dangerous, but agreeable, game to play the prophet, perhaps unwise; but while admitting that, I am going to do so, not because I feel sure, but because I want to sift my own thoughts. I may be told “why not do so in private?” I’ve done that already. Probably it does not matter what an old man says, “He is a weather beaten block waiting for axe or fire.” Whatever Ideals are mine, there are few which are in agreement with the fashion of to-day. Still I am capable of looking forward. I’ve looked back a great deal in my life, and been a humble student of “Cause and Effect.” Young enough to believe, even though it lies distant from hence, in Utopia, and I make bold to say so. I still believe in the human race. I still believe in a capacity for repentance and change of direction from bad to a better state of things. It is likely that the desirable, according to my philosophy, would be the undesirable to many, perhaps, just now, most people! Nevertheless I mean to state it.

William Morris made a delightful story, “News from Nowhere”; he thought that Socialism would realise his Ideal, perhaps it might; anyway Socialism is a pleasanter word than Individualism, it suggests “_Thou_,” the other cries “_I_.” _Thou_ has not been in the air of late. _I_ has been so, and prominently; of this, more presently!

Some great and wise men have spent considerable energies in building Utopia. Jesus Christ, Moses, Hamurrabbi, and Mohammed, Plato, Sir Thomas More, and, when I come to think of it, all leaders of thought have played with the bricks of that entertaining place. I imagine that the folk, who think at all, form a picture of their preference, which includes the future with the present. Seemingly, the future has a habit of taking care of itself; that is possibly a fatalistic fallacy! What _will_ be done in the future is in the making of the present. The flower is forming out of sight. We have no reason for knowing what kind of being the man of the future, even of the near future, is to be. One thing, however, is pretty certain; he will be as good or evil, ignorant or learned, as he chooses. We might reason together for a year as to the meaning of _Good_ and _Evil_. To clear the way I will state now that I am a firm believer in Free Will, in as far as conduct is concerned. We have to die; that is a physical law as that we live is; but we can retard even the supreme victor, death, by effort of Will. To wish ardently is half way to obtaining.

If we wish wickedly we are on the road to wickedness. For those who thus wish I have no words but these, “It is a bad habit, reverse it.” The foundation of good is to wish _Well_ and nobly, and Will strongly by action. Belief in Free Will is an incentive to industry, courage and stability. It includes _Hope_, the sister of Faith and Charity and courage to proceed through the thorny way of Life; Industry to make life happy; and Stability to maintain effort however adverse circumstances may be to it, and Hope to make us cling to the dream and to realise it in Vision if not yet in fact, which urged us at the outset. Did “Free Will,” in the abstract, exist before we came hither and will it continue after we go hence? I suggest that Free Will is eternal, that God is All Free Will; when He breathed His spirit into man’s body He imparted it to him. Plato’s sublime allegory of the soul driving her chariot, directing her horses antagonistic Eros and Himeros, proclaims the potentiality and immortality of the Soul. If matter does not die but is converted into other matter, can the Soul, created before matter, die? What the conversion of matter and Soul is, is beyond our thinking. But what does concern us is how we use the soul during its pilgrimage within the body! Its temporary home must be split up to effect an escape for the eternal organism. Perhaps death is really Life! Is it reasonable to believe that a live thing contains a dead one? If it is not so the soul was alive before it was environed by matter, and continues to live after its temporary shell is broken up and its particles are driven by Time hither and thither in dust.

The brain is matter, it is as wax, impressionable. From the first instant of its creation to its last effort it is receiving impressions. It dies as all matter dies. But do the impressions die? Instinct and reason say Nay. As far as they have exercised authority for good or evil upon the individual they do so reflectively upon a generation and progressively to succeeding generations. Philosophy tells us there is no waste in nature. If there is none as regards matter, is there likely to be as regards the soul which has been pre-existing and will be post-existing? If that is so and Free Will accepts and acts, brain impressions are immortal! Did the soul enter the body unasked? Does it leave unasked? A child under reprimand said, pathetically “I did not ask to be born,” that child was obviously alluding to her inclination. The child inadvertently spoke as a fatalist; it was a way of saying “I could not help what I did.” Before the soul enters the body is it an individual or only an atmosphere? Had it experience or not? Where has it been before? Has the soul a memory? These questions we all know have received answers from metaphysical and philosophic minds.

From the dawn of man’s intelligence, whenever that was, until to-day, mankind has yearned for an answer. A great philosopher and friend of mine, the Bishop of Durham, Dr. Westcott, said to me “Now-a-days there is nothing more difficult than to say bravely I _do not_ know.” Yes, I accept that modest statement from a great man but I cannot help casting about for an answer! The Truth is somewhere, perhaps in Utopia, even at the bottom of a well. There is something on a different plane than sophistry, poetical rhapsody. There is a great deal to be said for emotion, it is our strongest instinct. Reading Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Christian philosophy are we not drawn into the atmosphere of Rhapsody and Fancy? Even into a land of dreams if so we please to call Ideals. However they may urge Reason against Emotion, none of the great philosophers succeed in doing it themselves. If they did they would fall quite flat, because we who read are creatures of emotional instincts. All the great philosophers, though they wrote in prose, were poets, not by choice but necessity. Absolutely materialistic philosophy is, happily, rare. It may lay hold of certain minds for a time, but being contrary to our higher instincts its grip is only partial, unsatisfying and ephemeral. The great philosophers live in a land of Dreams or Ideals, a land from which mankind is always as substance. We want the dreams to come True as children do after hearing a fairy story. Plato, Confucius, Buddha, Aristotle, Paul, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, even Comte were idealists, builders of Utopia. They tried their minds in a furnace of difficulties, their chief effort was to reconcile emotion and reason.

They tried to account for _Feeling_ by Reason. However far Reason may travel, there is a point where it is arrested; speculation starts afresh. It is the poetry in all mythology, not its probability, which is neither here nor there, which touches the human heart; it is that which detains us and holds us fast. It is the poetry of Love that underlies the exquisite verse of Apulius. The story of the Soul of Love it is. French novels, marvellously clever, tell us the other side. I back Apulius’ story of Cupid and Psyche to outlive most of them. It is the abstract poetry of the wanderings of Osiris, not the philosophy built upon it, that engrosses us. The myth of the Delphic oracle, an inspired pastoral, clings when the Delphic oracle is no more. Goats and sheep skipping in rhapsody, their shepherd afterwards giving way to the _mania_ of prophecy, enchanted by the voice of Apollo from a bubbling stream, have more to say for us than the oracle said to the Greeks afterwards in a stately temple. There is something instinctively true in the first emotion, something untrue in the political use made of it by priests and politicians. It is not the political use made of Nature myths which we admire, but the imagination of a highly endowed temperament from which they sprang in the golden age of emotional invention, unrestrained by reason, yet having at the root a _True Ideal_. Psyche personated the soul! The poets have answered our question more simply than the philosophers, who have ploughed over the ground already sown with beautiful flowers, and not seldom have sown weeds on it.

The Churches have added nothing to the beauty of the Christian story. In their efforts to codify it and convert its simplicity into dogmatic and puzzling creeds, upon acceptance of which or not depends the salvation or damnation of the human race, they have not improved or better interpreted the amazing mystery which threads its way in and out among a tapestry of exquisite design. In their effort to materialise the spiritual or Ethos of the story they have often played havoc with it. As a wondrous story full of humanity it has passed through the fire of sophism, politics and Churchcraft, and remains as it was--a product of simple poetical mystical inspiration, and as such it will always touch the world. Whoever wrote the first chapter of Genesis was a great poet who has inspired multitudes, not by his science, which was _nil_, but by a poetic truth incomparably delightful and mythically _true_, It inspired M. Angelo, Raphael, and a host of great artists. Milton expanded and retold it in his immortal verse. It has supplied inspiration to musicians, and scientific men have done battle among themselves and over a Poem. Thus have they done it honour. If in details what is related breaks down under the cold light of science, what does that matter? The soul survives. The allegory is complete, the parable is untouched. If the mighty scenes portrayed with simple dignity and unapproachable reserve do not accord with the teachings of science, does that matter? Not one whit! The story is the same, as Homer’s tale of the Siege of Troy is the same, whoever wrote it or when it was written. Whether the “Iliad” was put together by travelling minstrels’ stories edited by Homer or his invention has nothing to do with its value as a poem. The history of the Jews, as related in the Bible, is full of strange and direct dealings with miraculous events which no science or sense can accept. What does it matter that the historian made a blunder in astronomy? It was not his business. We all know that the sun did not stand still for Joshua. The historian wrote for patriots, not for astronomers. To him the earth was stationary and flat, the sun rising and setting each day. Even now, with all our science, we talk of the setting and rising of the sun because it looks like that. To the people of that time the stars were as lamps slung from the blue vault of heaven, not at all a bad figure of the truth, they look so to us, and to-day Arabs speak of them as “lamps.”

§ 2

A new star, the story of the birth of Christ tells, guided the kings to the manger, where lay a girl-mother and her newborn child. She, one “of the people,” her reverent custodian a carpenter. That was what they went to see, and the new star was their guide. We need not take that literally; it is far more beautiful symbolically, figuratively, poetically: a new light was dawning upon a worn out faith, a new symbol of the Spirit of God arose, and not out of a palace or as a child of kings, but from a manger, from a straw bed, from a girl of the people and a craftsman. Not only did the three kings come thither guided by light in their hearts, but simple mountain shepherds too from their sheepfolds came. An angel of the heavenly host, three Oriental kings, a few shepherds, a maid, a carpenter, and a little child were the first actors in a great drama that has moved the world for two thousand years.

A shepherd, a flock of goats, a bubbling fountain form the _dramatis personæ_ of the myth of Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. From that sprang the Pithea and the thousands of votive statues for which Delphi became famous. Its temples and universities, its priests and politicians degraded the myth to a level of lies and deceit. “God set a bow in the sky for a sign.” How does it affect the promise that we know how the bow came there? We remember the promise in the poem. We are not concerned with the structure of the bow. Even now in these materialist days wherever we see the rainbow we recall God’s promise which, made or not made to mankind _in fact_, is so told in the poem.

Plato’s allegory in the “Phædrus” of the chariot of the soul, the antagonistic steeds Love and Desire, Eros and Himeros, struggling for supremacy, taken literally or judged from a scientific aspect, is nonsense; as a parable it is one of the truest, as a poem one of the most beautiful in Greek literature.

Apollo came over the mountains. The singer, minstrel, and healer came, bringing music from Olympus. We picture the Sun God lighting up the dense forests as he journeyed through them on the crests and edge of a mountain range. We can hear in our spiritual ears sweet music from his golden lyre, see the rivers as the Sun God passes over them, sparkling with amethyst diamond and silver as the light from him, the giver of light, kisses their surface. This is the figure of the Dorian invasion that the poets, not the scientists, present!

We still think of Apollo as the primitive author and forerunner of all that Greece became. When the Persians were on their way to invade Greece, Datis, the admiral of the great fleet, steered clear of the island of Delos, the birthplace of Apollo, for fear of vengeance from the God of Light, whom they worshipped. Even to-day Delos is a _sacred island_ where once a year Christian Mass is said by Roman and Greek priests upon an ancient altar to Apollo that I myself have seen. The myth of Apollo is still alive in poetry if it is dead in prose! The imagination still responds to it if reason does not accept it as a literal truth.

It surely was not the reverberation of the trumpets’ blasts from the hosts of Joshua which overthrew the walls of Jericho. Taken literally it is a ridiculous statement; figuratively, a very impressive one. The power of martial music is great; it stimulates courage, quickens the pulse, and inspires mad valour, which it urges until every obstacle in the way of a triumphant army is overthrown: an impressive metaphor so taken, but taken as a literal fact it is silly.

The power of music as an influence to calm a people maddened by lust of war is told by the poet. It is related by a Greek historian that one hundred harpists were sent to Sparta from Ionia to make gentle, seductive, sedative music to a wild people who knew it not, knowing only war. It prevailed! Their war instincts slept under the calming influence of Apollo’s art.

Strictly speaking, the event related may never have happened. As a poetical presentation of the power of music it is true! Was not the madness of Saul temporarily abated by the harpist David? The foregoing illustrations illustrate the range of art as a direct influence upon men in diametrically opposite directions.

That the Divine Spirit is very near, is even in our midst, is related in Genesis. “God walked in the garden in the cool of the day,” so sang the poet. The idea of God as subject to heat or cold is almost comical. The poet has anthropomorphised a mystery. To God he gives the feelings of the thing he has created, that is the way he presents God--God as very near to man and sharing his comforts and discomforts. The primitive poet made nonsense poetic sense.

The nearness of the spiritual world has been well said by a spiritual poet, “Heaven is only a foot above our heads.” How near, after all, is the Ideal to the Real, if we could only see; and yet we can feel it in our subconscious state to be so.

Now let us see for a moment how closely in touch Divinity is with agricultural life, how much it was in favour of it, how the gods were close to it, becoming even a part of it, not only by the benediction of it, but unison with it. Obviously, the gods thought well of labour and the labourer both loved and feared the gods.

As, to the Hebrew poet, God walked in the garden in the cool of the day, so to the Greek, “Speak low in the noontide, for then the gods sleep.” The mythical instances presented are only a few of many which occur in classical mythology. And be it remembered that we inherit Greek mythology. It is far nearer than we are apt to think to what are still primitive instincts, and specially so to those who till and sow the land, follow the plough, who guard our flocks, and being an out-of-door-living people are (may be mysteriously) in touch with mother Nature and the gods who watch over her.

Æneas, the father of the Latin races (and as such not so distantly related to the British) was the son of the _herdsman_ Anchises, whom Venus chose to be the father of her son. The goddess chose her lover from the fields; not from a palace. Goat-footed Pan, the god of all, is the shepherds’ god, who initiated beautiful Paris, the chosen judge of beauty. Paris, a shepherd in the Italian upland, was the lover of beautiful Ænone, whom he deserted for licentious Venus. He did himself no good by casting off Ænone, his companion. Venus made game of him! Demeter, one of the most ancient of the circle of deities of Olympus, saved a child’s life from the fire; he was Triptolemus, afterwards the inventor of the plough. Demeter was the goddess of corn, the protectress of agriculture. Her child Persephone, carried away to the shades, where she was protected in winter, rose from thither as the almond blossoms heralded the approach of spring. Persephone was goddess of springtime, of its blossoms and flowers. The soul of the Greeks is read in their mythology. It is read also in her history. Athena was the protectress of Attica, and specially of Athens. It was she that brought the olive there, the origin of much wealth to the people, and it still is. When Paul preached from the “Areopagus” he faced the Acropolis of Athens, half a mile away. Over the top of the wall which contained the sacred buildings Paul saw the head of the golden spear of Athena gleaming from the bronze statue by Phidias of the virgin goddess, a beacon for ships as they passed the dangerous coast of Sunium to make for the harbour of Phaleron. Within that bronze effigy was a soul of the Athenian people as the statue was a symbol of it. Paul was not preaching anything new; he was concentrating a worship whose expansion, having left much of original simplicity behind, was giving way. Another primitive form of belief was taking root in monotheism, in which both shepherds and kings had taken a leading part. Apollo the Healer was to give way before the child of a Nazarene peasant and a humble carpenter. The _Cross_ was to be the future beacon for a while until a new faith shall grow out of the old again.

§ 3

Wisdom was symbolised by the owl, which crowned the helmet of the goddess Wisdom worshipped by the Greeks in the effigy of their protectress. The little Athenian owl still haunts the Acropolis. I have seen and heard it often there, and never without a thrill. Its plaintive cry proclaims the eternity of things and the never-changing voice of nature. As the owl hoots there so sings our nightingale in England’s woods. We too are reminded of the immortality of the soul of nature, perhaps also of the soul within us, and of its importance as the only part we can call immortal. Nearer to God are the songs of birds, the voices of the winds, even the wild utterances of beasts of the forest than the shrieks of machinery of which industrialism is so proud. Yes! All human makings are subject to destruction. The bronze Athena has gone. The golden and ivory statue of Athena is gone with the effigy of the owl. The shell has been broken, its parts are scattered, but the primitive faith within them lives although it has undergone change. Athens is not dead, saved from the brutal Turk she may become regenerate, she may again shine as a light to Europe, but if not that exactly, the light she shed may fix upon another city and shine there, so strange and mysterious are the comings and goings of nations! Recent discovery in Crete goes far to prove some fountain-head of truth in every ancient myth. Old Minos speaks! The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur is explained. The labyrinth he made is there now, and a Cretan civilization of 4,000 years ago has been revealed, and what a Civilisation! a very noble art going hand in hand with “modern” economies and created in a primitive age, as we call it. Knossos was well drained by drainpipes almost the same as would be turned out by a “company” to-day. Alas, the multitudes of inscriptions discovered in Crete have not yet been read. A key to the script has not yet been found. It may appear at any moment, and then who shall say what marvels it may tell us! Our much-praised civilisation may be found to be but a feeble echo of a past one. We are mighty clever, we moderns, not seldom in making unpleasant discoveries and using useful ones to the annoyance of many and destruction of better things. We have electric light, great scientists have given it us, but the keenest witted have not yet discovered how the tombs of the kings in Egypt were lit. We know that neither oil or tallow provided light in those dark miles of caves and chamber walls covered with pictures in delicate relief and exquisitely coloured.

Fresh as the day they were finished, these monuments to the skill, industry and genius of Egyptian craftsmen 4,000 years ago stand as an example to us moderns, who at present show no signs of handing their genius down even to a dozen generations. Had they electric light? It is quite possible. It is evident whatever artificial light they used _was smokeless_, because the ceiling and walls are not discoloured. What was the meaning of all this superb beauty of labour and craftsmanship? It was not to gain applause, because after years of labour each tomb was hermetically sealed and a stone was placed at the entrance. Their labour was an expression of their noble religion. Their respect for the great dead who must find silence in their tombs while their souls reached higher and higher levels in their spiritual kingdom till such time as, purified, they were to be one in the soul of Osiris. These people worked for a great Ideal, for the Utopia they ever held in view, _without advertisement_, probably with little reward. To them the soul grew always in dignity and beauty, visiting the body from time to time in silence.