Part 6

If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be done with a coil of rope; and some of them might be practical. He could tow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat's cradle or pick oakum. He could construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her boxes for a travelling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he could hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveller who should find a telephone in the desert. You can telephone with a telephone: you cannot do anything else with it.

He disparages the hot-water pipe in order to exalt the open fire. He argues that "the ancient and universal things" can be turned to many uses, but that the "modern and specialist things" are strictly limited to one purpose.

There may be much in his argument, though his examples hardly support him, but how much is not apparent. Take the case of the man in the desert who finds a coil of rope, and compare him with the man in the desert who finds a telephone. Mr. Chesterton begs us to observe how happy is the former compared with the latter, but is he one-half so happy? The absorbing passion of a man's life in a desert would be the desire to get out of the desert as quickly as possible. How far would a rope help him to realize his desire? He could not tow a boat or lasso a horse because there would not be any water on which to tow the boat or any horse to lasso. If there were a horse to lasso it would either be wild and unrideable or private property. He could play at cat's cradle with the rope if it were not a rope at all--if, that is to say it were twine; and perhaps this would help him to pass away the time before he died of starvation. He could pick oakum if he wished to un-rope the rope and had never been to prison to discover what a loathsome job oakum-picking is. But he could not construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress or cord her boxes for his travelling maiden aunt, because the eloping heiress would not be eloping in a desert, and his maiden aunt would hardly be packing her trunk in the Sahara. He might be able to tie a bow. He might even be able to hang himself, though that is doubtful, for trees are not prolific in deserts. But I cannot see what comfort he would derive from either of these accomplishments.

To sum up, a man in a desert with nothing but a coil of rope between him and civilization would be in as complete a state of isolation as it would be possible for a man to imagine. How different would be the case of the man in a desert with the despised "modern and specialist" telephone! For he, finding a telephone, would instantly be able to communicate with other people and to direct them to his rescue. If he were anxious to hang himself, he could more effectively do so in the neighbourhood of a telephone than in the neighbourhood of a coil of rope, for where there are telephones there are generally telegraph-poles!

Even in the case of the open fire and hot-water pipe, as much can be said for the "modern and specialist thing" as can be said for the "ancient and universal thing," and in some instances, more can be said for it. We get a cheerful glow from an open fire that certainly is not to be got from a hot-water pipe; but Mr. Chesterton must have noticed on many occasions that whereas one gets tolerably toasted on one side by an open fire, the other side is usually left cold. Thus a man, on a wintry night, sitting before the fire, may be too warm in front, and half-frozen behind. But a hot-water pipe creates an equable temperature in a room and leaves a man warm on all sides.

IV

He is a nationalist and therefore opposed to imperialism. His belief in peasant proprietorship flows naturally from his belief in nationalism. He defends peasant proprietorship in "Irish Impressions" because he believes that a country controlled by peasants will survive long after more majestically-governed nations have declined and fallen:--

I do not know how far modern Europe really shows a menace of Bolshevism, or how far merely a panic of Capitalism. But I know that if any honest resistance has to be offered to mere robbery, the resistance of Ireland will be the most honest and probably the most important.... It is where property is well distributed that it will be well defended. The post of honour will be with those who fight in very truth for their own land.

Now, here we are on very debateable ground, as debateable as his statement that "honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters," which is surely an obscure rendering of the entirely commercial statement that "honesty is the best policy." Honour is not honour when a man uses it merely because it is profitable to him, and I cannot see much virtue in him who fights for his land simply because he owns it. Honour is admirable when it brings not profit but loss to the man who wears it. Virtue is in the man who fights for his country though he does not own an inch of it. And here I come to my objection to Mr. Chesterton's beloved peasant proprietorship, the cause of my dismay at the thought that my own country of Ireland may soon be controlled by small farmers.

It is true that a peasant will fight desperately for his own piece of land, but he manifests a sturdy reluctance to fight for another man's land; and I cannot understand why Mr. Chesterton regards his determination to hold on to his property as more "honest," or more "honourable" than the determination of a Victory bondholder to get the last cent of interest out of the taxpayers. Peasants, no less than other men, in fact more than other men, have itching palms, and it is sheer sentimentalism to describe as "honest" or "honourable" behaviour in them which is denounced as dishonest and dishonourable in a stockbroker. It is true that Lenin's schemes collapsed completely before the resistance of the Russian peasants, and that his plans for the nationization of everything failed to include the principal thing of all, namely, the land; but Mr. Chesterton will hardly maintain that the Russian peasants had disinterested motives in offering this resistance to Lenin. He may, indeed, insist that their motives were entirely interested and base his case for the Distributive State, as Mr. Belloc named it, on that very interest. But a nation should be something more than a crowd of peasants digging in the earth for their personal profit, and when Mr. Chesterton commends his peasant proprietors to me, I ask not for the signs of their interested behaviour, but for the signs of their disinterested behaviour. When he tells me that the peasant will fight for his own land, I ask him whether the peasant will fight for his neighbour's land? When he tells me that the Irish peasant will resist the attempts of the Bolshevist to communalize his land, I ask him whether the Irish peasant is equally ready to defend the French peasant from Russian aggression? Mr. Chesterton declares that France had claims on the gratitude of Ireland. Did the Irish peasant farmer remember those claims on his gratitude? Or did he find it more convenient and profitable to ejaculate, "Yah, dirty atheist, go and fight your own battles!" In deriding the idea of empire, Mr. Chesterton says in this book of "Irish Impressions" that "the British combination" is "more lax and liable to schism" than a combination of peasants. I do not believe there is any truth in this statement, particularly when I remember that "the British combination" held together for five years in circumstances that might have been expected to shake it to pieces. Let me give you an example, out of my experience during the War, of the way in which the Imperial idea rallies men to its support to their own loss. While I was being trained to be an officer, I shared a hut with twenty-five other men. Between us, we represented every part of the British Empire. The twenty-six men in that hut included Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and two Irishmen (one of whom was an Orangeman, and the other, myself, a Home Ruler). In addition to these, there were two Australians, a man from New Zealand, two men from Canada, two from South Africa and a couple of men from South America, one a Spaniard and the other the son of English parents. Many of these men had travelled for thousands of miles at their own expense in order to join the British Army. They were volunteers. I would like to see the community of peasants that would travel ten yards to defend anything but their own personal property, except under compulsion.

When I cited this case to Mr. Chesterton some time ago, in controversy with him, he replied with characteristic amiability, that Serbia was a community of peasants, and that Serbia had fought in the War. When I asked whether Serbia would have fought for Montenegro, he replied that she had done more than that, she had fought for "the wholly invisible bond of all Christendom." But Serbia did nothing of the sort. She fought for herself because she was invaded. That was a perfectly proper thing to do, but there is no comparison between it and the behaviour of men responding at their own cost to the Imperial idea, although many hundreds of miles away from the place of argument and under no compulsion to go to it.

The truth about a peasant civilization is that it is a mean civilization, in which mean virtues compete with mean vices, and the small and local thing is esteemed above the big and worldwide thing. There are many defects in empires, even in one so loosely-bound as the British Empire, but although those who control an empire are often guilty of cruel deeds, there is at least this to be said in their defense, that they honestly believe themselves to be possessed of greater wisdom than those whom they oppress, and do desire in their stupid fashion to govern them for their good.

On the whole, freedom may be defined as the right to choose; but that definition must obviously be subject to limitations. There is a sort of wild and woolly democrat who believes in the right of uninstructed persons to choose wrong. It is not a right in which I believe. Mr. Chesterton thinks, not without justification, that the common man can choose in a right manner. If his creed were confined to that clause we could accept it with heartiness, but there are times when he seems to think that the common man chooses aright because he is a common man, and he leaves us with the impression that he can never quite forgive Magna Charta because it was won by peers, and not by peasants. He seems not to realize that if Magna Charta had depended upon peasants, it would never have been won.

V

But he helps us to keep a balance. His service to us is that when we are inclined to run frantically after the superman, he reminds us of the existence of the common man. If he were not so well-padded with flesh, I should describe him as the skeleton at a feast of supermen, reminding them that even a superman can be a fool.

There are times indeed, when his faith in the common man undergoes a sea-change, and he utters sentiments that might be spoken by Mr. H. L. Mencken, who cannot abide the common mind. In one of his essays, Mr. Chesterton says, "I certainly would much rather share my apartments with a gentleman who thought he was God than with a gentleman who thought he was a grasshopper." So would Nietzsche. But I doubt whether the Early Christians would have approved his preference. They, who were ready to pronounce all flesh to be grass, would not have found anything incompatible with their faith in a gentleman who regarded himself as a grasshopper. They would certainly have considered his rival in misapprehension to be a blasphemer. And if Mr. Chesterton would fail to find pleasure in the company of a man who believed himself to be that interesting but monotonous insect, how much less pleasure would he derive from sharing his apartments with a man who believed not only himself, but all men, to be worms?

He is personally the most kindly and agreeable of men, in whom the one virtue commonly ascribed to fat men, that of good nature, is most highly developed. His anger is almost completely impersonal. His pardon is on the heels of his condemnation. The sins of jealousy and hatred are unknown to him, and he seems to be without the power of resenting spiteful things done to himself. He said to me on one occasion, "Arnold Bennett says I'm an imbecile!" in the tone of a man who was not in the least annoyed by the statement, but puzzled by the fact that any man should call another one an offensive name. We are all children of the one God, in his belief, even if some of us are Jews, and in some mystical manner he contrives, in his anger, to discriminate between the human being and the thing which the human being does. If ever he is moved to slay a sweater or an international financier or a Prohibitionist, he will do so entirely without prejudice to that person's right to be called a child of God. It is a tribute to the charm of his character and the equability of his temper that his stoutest admirers are those who most vigorously combat his opinions, and that most of his friends are men who do not share any of his views, except perhaps the only view that matters, the view that an ill deed must be exposed and a wrong put right. He is Don Quixote in the body of Sancho Panza.

JOHN GALSWORTHY

I

It is sometimes said that an artist never intrudes his personality into his work and that the great writers of the world have kept themselves so closely to themselves that their readers have never been able to discover anything of their faith or partialities. This is not only untrue, but is also absurd, for how can any man hope to exclude himself from his creations, since without him the creations would not be? There never was a book of any sort which did not in some fashion reveal the nature of its author to discerning readers, and I will personally undertake to give a fairly accurate account of the general character of any author after an attentive reading of all his writings. There are authors, such as Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, who do not make any pretence of excluding themselves from the notice of their readers: they deliberately force themselves into their books; and the habit has become so much a part of their nature that they sometimes do it unconsciously. One may say of them, perhaps, that we learn chiefly from their writings what their opinions are, but learn nothing of their characters. But while it is true that we do receive much information about their opinions, it is true also, I think, that they unmistakably reveal themselves, something of the intimate parts of them, to those who closely consider their books. Fielding formally held up the course of his stories in order that he might state his views to his readers, and Dickens and Thackeray followed his example; but all three of them revealed more than their beliefs to their readers--they revealed themselves. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells are excellent examples of what may be described as the Direct Revealers--writers who nakedly manifest their opinions and, more or less nakedly, their personalities in their books. The Indirect Revealers are best exemplified in two poets, Shakespeare and John Millington Synge, and one novelist and dramatist, Mr. John Galsworthy. We have very little documentary evidence of Shakespeare's existence, and it is impossible, therefore, to write his biography with the accuracy of detail with which one is able to record the events of, say, Roosevelt's career; but there is a clear and unmistakable account of his hopes and fears and beliefs and disbeliefs, a most faithful portrait of his character, contained in his poems and plays. How can any one fail to discover behind his work the figure of a grave, fastidious, disdainful and distrustful and solitary man whose spiritual solitude was concealed under an appearance of gregariousness and cheerful living that made him a good companion on most occasions without being excessively popular. Ben Jonson, despite his quarrelsome character, was probably more deeply loved by his contemporaries than Shakespeare was, because Shakespeare had more of reserve and spiritual isolation than Ben had, and was less willing to put faith in the virtue of the crowd; and I imagine that had one interrogated any of Shakespeare's friends, they would have said of him, "Oh, yes, I like William Shakespeare very much! Talks well! He's a good chap, but a little odd ... queer ... at times. It isn't easy to make friends with him. He always keeps us at our distance--not deliberately, of course, but in some vague way. He understands us all right, and he takes part in our revels, but he never completely descends to our level. Now, old Ben ... he's a good, hearty chap! He is so comradely that we frequently forget he is Ben Jonson and think of him as just one of ourselves. Shakespeare's friendly enough, but we never forget that he is Shakespeare. Sometimes, quite unintentionally, he makes us feel a little common!..."

The best biography of John Synge that I have read--and l have read all of them--is contained in his plays and poems. It is impossible to rise from his books without an impression of intense loneliness and unachievable desires, of a man eager to be the hero of romantic exploits, but totally unable to stand up to life and make himself a hero because of some spiritual ineffectiveness, some lack of assertion which results in fumbling and self-distrust; and one goes from the plays and poems to the biographies and is not surprised at reading of his lonely life. How often the word "lonesome" occurs in his writings, and how deeply he insists on the terrors of solitude! Pegeen Mike in the "The Playboy of the Western World" reproves her father for going "over the sands to Kate Cassidy's wake" and leaving her alone in the shebeen:

If I am a queer daughter, it's a queer father'd be leaving me lonesome these twelve hours of dark, and I piling the turf with the dogs barking, and the calves mooing, and my own teeth rattling with the fear.

I imagine that there is some deep personal feeling of Synge's in the speech he puts into the mouth of Christy Mahon in the second act of the same play:

CHRISTY: And isn't it a poor thing to be starting again, and I a lonesome fellow will be looking out on women and girls the way the needy fallen spirits do be looking for the Lord?

PEGEEN: What call have you to be lonesome when there's poor girls walking Mayo in their thousands now?

CHRISTY: It's well you know what call I have. It's well you know it's a lonesome thing to be passing small towns with the lights shining sideways when the night is down, or going in strange places with a dog noising before you and a dog noising behind, or drawn to the cities where you'd hear a voice kissing and talking deep love in every shadow of the ditch, and you passing on with an empty, hungry stomach failing from your heart.

PEGEEN: I'm thinking you're an odd man, Christy Mahon. The oddest walking fellow I ever set my eyes on to this hour to-day.

CHRISTY: What would any be but odd men and they living lonesome in the world?

The scene of all his plays is laid in a lonely place: the last cottage at the head of a long glen in Wicklow; a small and remote island off the west coast of Ireland; a distant hamlet in a mountainous district. His people are possessed of a perpetual fear of death and old age, and lead uneventful lives, having minds which continually crave for the performance of splendid and unusual deeds. Few men have put their longings and disappointments so boldly and plainly into their work as John Synge put his. I do not suggest that an author may be identified with every word and action of his creatures--a manifestly absurd suggestion--but I do suggest that it is possible for an intelligent reader to obtain a very clear and well-defined impression of the character and beliefs of an author from a careful study of the whole body of his work.

II

Mr. John Galsworthy is the most sensitive figure in the ranks of modern men of letters, but his sensitiveness is of a peculiar nature, for it is almost totally impersonal. One thinks of Dostoievsky eternally pitying himself in the belief that he was pitying humanity and particularly that part of it which is Russian; or of Maxim Gorki, as shown in his vivid and extraordinary study of Leo Tolstoi,[4] preoccupied with himself to the extent of imagining that Tolstoi, the aristocrat, related salacious stories in common speech to him, the peasant, because he imagined that Gorki, being of vulgar origin, could not appreciate refined conversation:

I remember my first meeting with him and his talk about "Varienka Oliessova" and "Twenty-six and One." From the ordinary point of view, what he said was a string of indecent words. I was perplexed by it and even offended. I thought that he considered me incapable of understanding any other kind of language. I understand now: it was silly to have felt offended.

One thinks, too, of Mr. Shaw's lively interest in himself, and of Mr. Wells's eagerness to remold the world nearer to his heart's desire. And remembering these men, intensely individual and not reluctant to speak of themselves, one is startled to discover how destitute of egotism Mr. Galsworthy seems to be. It may even be argued that his lack of interest in himself is a sign of inadequate artistry, that it is impossible for a man of supreme quality to be so utterly unconcerned about himself as Mr. Galsworthy is. He has written more than a dozen novels and at least a dozen plays, but there is not one line in any of them to denote that he takes any interest whatever in John Galsworthy. The most obvious characteristic of his work is an immense and, sometimes, indiscriminating pity, but I imagine that the only creature on whom he has no pity is himself. Whatever of joy and grief he has had in life has been closely retained, and the reticence which was characteristic of the English people--I am now using the word "English" in the strict sense--in pre-war times, but is hardly characteristic of them now, is most clearly to be observed in Mr. Galsworthy. And yet there are few among contemporary writers who reveal so much of themselves as he does. Neither Mr. Shaw nor Mr. Wells, who constantly expose their beliefs to their readers, do in the long run tell so much about their characters as Mr. Galsworthy, who never makes a conscious revelation of himself and is probably quite unaware that he had made any revelations at all. How often have we observed in our own relationships that some garrulous person, constantly engaged in egotistical conversation, contrives to conceal knowledge of himself from us, while some silent friend, with lips tightly closed, most amazingly gives himself away. One looks at Mr. Galsworthy's handsome, sensitive face and is immediately aware of tightened lips!... But the lips are not tightened because of things done to him, but because of things done to others.