Part 7

But strangest of all, did Shakespeare think much of himself? He was utterly careless of the fate of his own literary labours. He never published one of his own plays. After his death the stage copies of his plays were carefully collected together by two prudent men, Heming and Condell, with an eye to business. Seven years later the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays appeared in print. The first edition is full of glaring blunders, compiled as it was from the stage versions--the manuscripts that the players used in the theatres. Those well-thumbed dog-eared copies of the plays, very interesting documents to own if one could be placed on the market to-day: worn and torn, scored with erasures, interlined with emendations, stained with spilt wine and small beer, greasy with handling of midnight study, and crumpled after pouching in the players' pockets cheek by jowl with incongruous trifles--could you expect literary finish to adorn these fugitive children of the playhouse? Ever since that day learned commentators have laboured assiduously correcting the text of the plays and combing out the tangle, quarrelling fraternally amongst themselves over the correct word for the place and the correct place for a word. The quarrel of the commentators still flourishes, for the muddle of the text has yet to be tidied up.

*XI*

*THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY*

Democracy is the rising star, mounting clear and bright over falling kingdoms and toppling empires. Crowns are going cheap in the market to-day, and the divine right of kings is a broken weapon flung in the mud of the world's scorn and picked up as a toy for _Punch_ to provoke laughter. The old nobility is losing its ancient charter to sit exclusive in the high places of honour, and the common people--the new caste--are coming into possession and power. The working-man must be tailored to the grand part he plays in history. He will feel uneasy perhaps wearing his first new dress suit--it will worry him like a misfit. But clothes add splendour to our common lot. With the salvation of the country dependent on his nod he must cast the stodgy cloth cap that clowns his head on bank holidays and nod heroically to the admirers who retinue his movements.

Democracy is the unknown god it will be fashionable to worship when the war is over. Now we are all wasting ink and paper and taxing our small brains prophesying what the world will be like in the flowering-time of peace, when everybody will become deliriously happy, wise, and good. We shall move more cautiously then, like a cat stepping circumspectly over broken glass on top of the garden wall. We will make no mistakes, as we did in the feckless past, bringing us not only bleeding feet, but wounded hearts. There must be no party politics in the land as there used to be when politicians sold their country to buy their party into power, and sold themselves to keep the power which they had bought. Everyone will want to do good to his neighbour, and our neighbour will want to do good to himself, and so social reform now and henceforth is the compelling idea that holds the public fancy.

But no two social reformers think alike or advance the same doctrines of reform, although the same idea dominates the mind of all the doctrinaires. An idea is an abstract, invisible, impalpable, thing that enters into the mind of man naked and unadorned. Before exposing this naked idea to public observation it must be clothed and attractively dressed. Confusion comes in with the clothes. Fashions in clothes differ so that the same idea differently dressed appears to be a different object. However, it is not. Ideas do not differ: it is the expression of them that differs. It is when you clothe your idea with words and deck it in literary plumage that the mischief stalks in and divergent opinions clash and confound us.

We all believe in Utopia, but none of us hold the clue to the high road that gallops straight into it. We take trial trips over new ground and get sloughed up on false trails. Plato and Socrates, Francesco d'Assisi and Philip Sydney, Ruskin and Tolstoi, have each been famous architects of Utopia in the dim dreamland of the past, and each propounded his own scheme as being the very healthiest and happiest earthly paradise ever constructed for man to dwell in. They all have some aims and ends in common, considering thoughtfully the welfare of the people bodily and morally: but the distinctive personality of the architect slyly creeps in, and on the rock of personal vanity they split into rival factions and a general quarrel ensues, rending the best-laid schemes man ever devised for the emancipation of the human race. And so the egg of social reform gets addled before it is hatched, and alas! the glittering city of ten thousand joys for mankind to dwell in recedes farther and farther into the sweet dreamland of the future.

One architect of Utopia proposes to upbuild the city of Human Happiness by hand labour. Brick by brick it is to rise in colossal proportions and flowering beauty. He starts with the individual as the foundation and finishes with the individual as top-stone. He works by gradual and peaceful process to attain his splendid purpose. His method of work is unpopular because it is slow.

Another architect proposes to work by machinery, and to force it to a hasty finish. Organization and legislation are the instruments of torture proposed for the rapid promotion of his purpose. Human society--social and industrial--is stricken with fell disease, which can be cured promptly by Acts of Parliament and Orders in Council. By this drastic method the "organic welfare" of society is to be builded while you wait. The State is to be organized, thought is to be organized, the will is to be organized, and happiness is to be organized, and nothing of consequence is to be left unorganized; while the mere individual is to be wiped from the map as an unnecessary dot of disfigurement upon it. Wealth is to be handled by a new and better process; wealth is to be conscripted, which means one man is to make it and another man is to take it. Labour is not to be dealt with as a marketable commodity. It is an insult to the dignity of labour to measure a man's work and pay him exactly what his day's toil is worth in the market. The working-man is a member of the universal brotherhood, and needs elbow-room in the community to spread himself. He must have the wages he hankers after, and when too weary to work a pension granted from the State to make comfortable his latter end. In fact in Utopia every man, woman, and child claims sufficient income independent of work, and the State must be Paymaster-General.

Alas! universal happiness on these idealistic lines of compulsion and greed is like an echo. It answers your call but does not come. Socialism makes no progress in saving men; it has eyes to see man's misery, but no hands to lift him out of it.

The longer I live the more I am convinced that this great and vital problem of social regeneration is to be engineered only by slow gradations and with infinite patience and gentleness. Society is composed of dense masses and millions of frail, erring human beings, and to schedule a sudden inrush of perfect laws on the statute-book will not breed an improved strain of perfect citizens who can live up to the pose of perfection. You cannot legislate selfishness and weakness and greediness and vice out of human nature quickly, as you wring dirty water out of a wet sponge; neither can you pump purity and patience and brotherly love into humanity by Act of Parliament, and out of such shoddy material weave an ideal State in one round of the clock. Perfect laws are scarce as perfect men. Laws will grow better as we grow better--gradually. Laws and men act and react upon one another in mystic collusion. The great incoming tide of righteousness which shall fill all things will fill them. You cannot complete and furnish the top floor of the Palace of Humanity before you have laid the foundation solidly and deep on the rock of righteousness.

Labour has not yet won its charter of rights because it has neglected to perform its role of duties. Labour has to look the social problem squarely in the face with both eyes open. At present it only opens one eye--the eye which sees magnifically its rights. The other eye is shut which should observe its duties. The eye of Labour that should see its duties is sealed in darkness. The scales of Justice must balance truly before mankind is happy ever more.

Free labour is as necessary a commodity as free sunshine in a well-balanced State. If a man does his work well and does not require so much beer and tobacco and time for football as another man, he should be free to dispose of his labour as he chooses, without being picketed or bludgeoned by lewd fellows of the baser sort. Until there prevail an all-round correct idea of work, legislation will be a dead letter. God has not made one sun to shine on wages and another on capital, nor has He made two varieties of justice. He is God over all of us, and His law is impartial justice.

Capital is not immaculate. It sits the great god incarnate on its high gold throne, ruling men with sovereign power and using men as a means to wealth. Its vestments are of purple and fine linen. Costly raiment to wear, but unseemly smirched with the mud of gutter complots and stained red with blood sweated from the poor. Capital wants washing thoroughly from its iniquity and purging with hyssop before it is fragrant and can discourse virtue to the working classes.

Capital and Labour must forgive each the sins of the past, and as Brains and Hands work together in mutual confidence and esteem. Brains and Hands are not hard-set hereditary foes. They are blood relatives, members of the same body-politic, and must hold together for their common good. They are not even business opponents with clashing interests spoiling to cut each other's throat and smash the opposition concern with fiery glee of heart. They are copartners in the same business concern, and must combine, each having their own department to superintend. The interest of one is the interest of the other. If one department breaks, the other falls with it deep in disaster. Yet these two copartners of the same business firm are hating one another with a hot historical hatred that defies the flight of ages. They are locked together struggling for mastery, each hoping to throw the other and become top-dog and dictate new terms of partnership which never would be kept, for the articles of treaty would soon become merely "a scrap of paper." It is not conquest: it is co-operation that will bring peace and concord between Capital and Labour.

The world is ripe for a new social programme. The war has altered the map of Europe, and it will alter the map of men's minds. The war has swept away old crusted conventions which cobwebbed the mind, and false foundations of social science upon which men laboured vainly to build Utopia. These things must be reassessed at new values.

The working-man wanted to get in the sun and own his patch as a free and independent citizen. There is no such thing in the world as independence, complete and arrogant: either in art, science, revolting daughters or commerce. Independence is a fool's word or an anarchist's battle-cry. The nearest approach to it in the realm of reality is interdependence. Substitute this word "interdependence" in the place of the other insolent and erroneous one and you have a working proposition, for you establish a sense of justice between man and man, and you have gathered together raw material out of which to build a new heaven and a new earth.

A pre-war panacea for curing the ills of unrighteousness which blight society was the amelioration of environment--a sonorous, windy, academic platitude having more sound in it than sense. It was the pet scheme for manufacturing good citizens out of bad ones; it began at the outward condition of mankind and worked inward. It started with the barber, the schoolmaster, and the politician. By pursuing this method they started with folly and ended with failure. It is like telling a man to polish his boots when his heart wants cleaning. The favourite speculation of theorists was that perfect circumstances create perfect character. This is attractive reading in cheap handbooks of political economy for the working classes, but in this wicked world it fails to pan out when put to a working test. It is more important a man should start by mending himself, and his circumstances will quickly mend themselves.

To expect by flattening down inequalities, removing temptations, and giving everybody a living wage of L2 per week, England will flower into a Garden of Eden where people are all good and happy and pay no taxes, and where angels will come and converse with us in the cool of the day, is to expect the impossible. To expect by adapting the lot to man instead of adapting man to his lot you will create an earthly paradise out of a world of wickedness is to expose your ignorance of human nature and to admit your incapacity for adjusting its wrongs.

They tell us that in the New Democracy patriotism will be scrapped. Love of country is a parochial virtue; it will be swamped in the greater love of humanity which will rise like a swelling flood and cover all. In the new Garden of Eden we shall be a happy brotherhood, for the dangerous serpent will be scotched. This doctrine is maudlin sentimentalism with a tang of grotesque to flavour it. Humanity is an immense crowd to fall in love with _en bloc_; each individual will receive a very thin slice of your affection if all the world is to share in it alike. Love will die of starvation fed on these lean rations. As a _padre_ fresh from the Front persuasively raps out the truth, "the would-be cosmopolitan who will not narrow himself to love of country is rarely capable of any real self-devotion to the international ideal which he worships. The lover of humanity is more often than not utterly miserable travelling in a third-class railway-carriage."

Patriotism must survive as a national virtue, however violently the universal brotherhood flourishes, because the love of country is founded on the love of home and family, and the love of home and family is founded on the love of a man and a woman. You can never get over this nature-logic while men and women remain human beings with natural instincts which draw them to love one another and preserve the family feeling. I would rather be the victim of every insular prejudice possible than have no British prejudices to stir my British blood.

Another hope of the ages that has failed us in the hour of need is the Church. If all other saviours of society failed there remained the Church as by law established to rely upon as the great regenerating power in the land. Alas! the Church in our midst cannot cast out evil spirits. It has lost the gift of healing through respectability. It worships an ancient creed instead of the living Christ. Jesus of Nazareth is the great International Democrat of history. He was a tradesman's son and a working carpenter Himself. This fact shocks respectability. How many more people would be Christians if Christ had been born in a palace and not in a stable! This is the unsavoury feature of religion, and the exclusive dignitaries of the Church hover round it dubiously. They admit the historic fact with candour, but slither away silently from its indelicate associations as far as decency permits.

We have been told that bishops in gaiters and aprons harmonize daintily with the quiet cathedral close, shadowed by immemorial elms and the other minor glories of the Establishment; but bishops in gaiters do seem badly placed in a carpenter's shop, where their Lord and Master served His 'prentice years. The apron is an ancient figment of clothing bishops now wear in common with the working carpenter at his bench. It is a kind of retaining badge, signalling their humble origin and ancient descent.

Bishops, in general, are cultured and amiable men, more renowned for their learning than their piety. They are appointed by the State, and form the executive of the ecclesiastical machine to run the traditional piety of the land. They sometimes quarrel amongst themselves as to who is orthodox and who is not on the episcopal bench--quarrelling amongst bishops is only a human diversion--but touching the righteousness which is in the law they are all blameless men. There is something faulty in the religion they inculcate, for it does not grip the people. It is dreamy; it is not real. It is the vague pursuit of an unknown god ranging through a maze of decorative ritual and symbol, and there remain great arid spaces in our nature which it never fills up.

It has been said that the visible Church stands in the way of spiritual enlightenment of the people, just as stone idols of the heathen stand in the way of apprehension of God. What the eye sees before it the mind settles down upon, and roams no farther searching for a fuller vision of spiritual truth. The savage sees his stone idol, and never thinks beyond it religiously. It was his father's god, and it is god enough for him.

The good Churchman is equally content to know nothing beyond the religious ceremonials which the Church ordains in the place of God, the Spiritual Father of us all. These ceremonials, sanctified by long observance, quenched the religious thirst of his forefathers, and they quench his thirst and he is satisfied. The Church is tenacious of her hold on men, not suffering the allegiance of the people to be shifted back to God the Father. The Church is said to be the one and only sacred aqueduct through which Divine grace can flow. The curse of the community is the middleman. He takes a heavy toll of profit in every business that feeds the people bodily or spiritually.

The New Democracy must return to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth to lay a solid foundation on which to build social righteousness and national greatness. The secret elements of social rectitude slumber in the words of Christ, and the volcanic action of the war will blast them into life and power.

Jesus Christ was not a theologian or schoolman of the fossil type of Gamaliel or Calvin, learned in booklore, but ignorant of men. He was not a stump orator inflaming the radical passions of the masses, bating them into red fury by pictorially describing the wickedness of the classes. He proposed no easy road to riches as a trap to catch the envious poor. He did not sit in his study formulating a scientific creed to mystify people with a religion of words and phrases; He lived in the open air a noble life that men could see and believe in. It is the mind, not the soul, that asks a creed to help its faith; the heart believes without the crutches of theological formula to support it. He stood for goodness pure and simple, for rich men and poor men alike. His teaching is exemplified in His life, and His life is a beautiful and faithful commentary on His teaching.

The careless world did not relish this straight talk on goodness--indoor and outdoor goodness. It was too realistic, too personal in its touch; but men are growing sensible now as the world grows older, and with reawakened conscience ask for the truth instead of its theological counterfeit, which does not heal the wounded spot. Out of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth grow eternal principles that build up the best governments and the wisest laws, that train the finest citizens, and regulate society on a basis of righteousness and mutual honour. The seeds of all possible national prosperity and generous manhood lie embedded in these teachings. Nations may rise, flourish, and decay, but the nation with the blood of Christ in its veins is immortal and shall endure for ever. May it be the British nation!

*XII*

*JESUS CHRIST THE LURE OF THE AGES*

Jesus Christ is the lure of the ages. He is the most interesting figure in history. History says little about Him, yet that little means much to us. It whets the appetite for more knowledge. The little is distinctly fascinating; what would be a full record of His sayings and doings, suppose such a narrative displayed in faded manuscript were unearthed from the musty archives of an old Eastern monastery and brought to daylight in the twentieth century? The fragmentary record that we hold is sufficiently vital to have kept His memory green for nearly two thousand years. What a glorious find a continuation of the wonderful story would be to those hungering for larger knowledge of their Lord's earthly life!

Jesus Christ is the unplaced figure in history. He occupies no niche in the secular temple of Fame. No historian of the country in which He lived paged His name amongst the worthies of the age or gave it mention in a footnote of history. Outside the covers of the Sacred Book Jesus Christ is an unknown quantity. During His lifetime the insignificance of the movement He promoted in Galilee was unworthy of serious attention from the authorities. His disciples were men of obscure origin, a mere handful of ignorant peasants and fishermen, rated as misguided, harmless fanatics following a crazy leader to oblivion, the foreordained end of a madman's escapade. Others before Him had started forth on the splendid expedition to set the world in order and were interrupted in the performance of their formidable task. It was towering madness to suppose permanent results could follow a single-handed fight against the world; to think that He could disturb the well-founded authority of King Herod or challenge Caesar seated in purple power on the seven hills of Rome: as likely He might uproot the seven hills themselves which cradle the imperial city on their nursing-lap. Yet to-day He ranks above all competing heroes and overlords earth and heaven in the compelling influence His solitary life imposes on the world's activities, and that influence is only just beginning to be felt by us; eventually it will succeed in refashioning the world after His own heart and conforming it to the likeness of His own image.

Jesus Christ is the lonely figure in history. He launched His mission on the world without human patronage to give it a winning start. Illustrious men of the age did not do Him reverence, nor contribute their sympathy and support to stiffen His cause; they were frankly hostile to Him. He had no family influence to help Him in the great adventure; His ancestry was illustrious, but His relatives were poor and uninfluential folk; His father was a village tradesman. He was not a University man distinguished in letters to gain the ear of the cultured classes. He had no well-to-do friends to back Him either socially or financially. No man ever stood more remote from the world's conventional smile than He did. He was a rank outsider. He battled onward through resisting foes, upholding the shining truth as a sun-bright banner for brave men to rally round and fight for the kingdom of God and the empire of good souls on earth. He dwelt in spiritual isolation, for a mighty purpose cut Him off from the current influences of His time. The world's cold stare was the freezing recognition given Him, and it chilled the finer sensibilities of His loving nature.