Part 3

That is the penalty of the jester on serious subjects like murder. He is nearly always believed. The very mention of prepense death puts a great many people into a solemn mood that is hostile to wit and humour and any kind of facetiousness. I have met men and women, for instance, who were quite unable to see the entertaining side of cannibalism. Gilbert's ballad of the _Nancy Lee_, about the cook who gradually ate all the rest of the crew, moves them not to laughter but to horror. When the cook, or somebody else, as he gobbles one of his mates, enthusiastically exclaims: "Oh, how like pig!" they merely shudder. Those of us who are amused, on the other hand, are so only because we are not such inveterate realists as our neighbours. We treat comic murders as Charles Lamb treated comic cuckoldries. We regard them as happening, not in our world of realities, but in a kind of no-man's-land of humour. If it were not so, we should probably be as shocked as anyone else--those of us, that is, who are old-fashioned enough to consider murder and adultery as on the whole reprehensible. Luckily, human beings in the mass have gradually developed an artistic sense which enables them to leave the world of serious facts for the world of comic pretences at a moment's notice. And even the strictest humanitarian can smile with a good conscience at the most hideous of the tortures--"something with boiling oil in it"--discussed in the paper-fan world of _The Mikado_. I can imagine a sensitive child's being sharply disturbed by the punishments that at one time seem to be in store for so many of the characters in the opera. But for the rest of us Gilbert's Japan is as unreal as a nest of insects, where even the crimes seem funny. In the same way we have made a child's joke of Bluebeard, whose prototype was at least as atrocious a character as Jack the Ripper. Perhaps, in some distant island of the South Seas, where Europe is sufficiently remote to be unreal, the children are already enjoying the humours of Jack the Ripper in the local substitute for the Christmas pantomime.

Even a real murder, however, may strike one as amusing, if only it has about it something incongruous. A thousand people have laughed for one who has wept over Wainwright's murder of Helen Abercrombie, not because it was not a filthy deed, but because the murderer, on being reproached for it, uttered his famous reply: "Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles." Here it is the incongruity between the deed and the excuse for it that appeals to our sense of humour. We laugh at it as we would laugh at Milton's Satan if we saw him dressed in baby clothes. Similarly, when Peer Gynt and the Cook fight after the shipwreck for possession of the place of safety on the upturned boat, and Peer in effect murders the Cook, the situation is comic because of the incongruity between what is said and what is done. Take, for instance, the Lord's Prayer scene:

THE COOK (_slipping_): I'm drowning!

PEER (_seizing him_): By this wisp of hair I'll hold you; say your Lord's Prayer, quick!

THE COOK: I can't remember; all turns black----

PEER: Come, the essentials in a word!

THE COOK: Give us this day----!

PEER: Skip that part, Cook. You'll get all _you_ need, safe enough.

THE COOK: Give us this day----

PEER: The same old song! 'Tis plain you were a cook in life----

(THE COOK _slips from his grasp_.)

THE COOK (_sinking_): Give us this day our---- (_Disappears.)_

PEER: Amen, lad! To the last gasp you were yourself. (_Draws himself up on to the bottom of the boat._) So long as there is life there's hope.

It is the paradox that delights us here--the exquisite inappropriateness of Peer's invitation to the Cook to say a prayer before he lets him dip under for the last time, and of the only petition which the Cook can remember in his extremity. The latter amuses us like Mr George Moore's story about the Irish poet who was asked to say a prayer when out in a curragh on Galway Bay during a furious gale, and who astonished the boat's crew by beginning: "Of man's first disobedience and the fruit." Even in _The Playboy_ it is the humours of the inappropriate that make Christy Mahon's narrative of how he slew his da comic. One remembers the sentence in which he first lets the secret of his deed slip out:

CHRISTY: Don't strike me. I killed my poor father, Tuesday was a week, for doing the like of that.

PEGEEN (_in blank amazement_): Is it killed your father?

CHRISTY (_subsiding_): With the help of God I did surely, and that the Holy Immaculate Mother may intercede for his soul.

There you have incongruity to a point that shocks an ordinary Christian like a blasphemy. And Christy's reflection, as he finds that the supposed murder has made him a hero--"I'm thinking this night wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by"--tickles us because it brings a new and incongruous standard to the measurement of moral values. De Quincey's essay, "On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts," owes its reputation for humour to the same kind of unexpectedness in its table of values. At least, that passage in which the lecturer of the essay describes the warning he gave to a new servant whom he suspected of dabbling in murder plays a delightful topsy-turvy game with our everyday moral world:

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think very little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

Humour is largely a matter of new proportions and unexpected elements. And it visits the gaol as readily as the music-hall, and attends us in our hearse no less than in our perambulator. Self-murder is not in itself a funny subject, but who can remain solemn over the case of the man who put an end to his life because he got tired of all the buttoning and unbuttoning. Similarly, detestable a crime as we may think cannibalism, we cannot help smiling when a traveller notes, as a recent traveller in West Africa did, that human flesh never gives the eater indigestion as the flesh of beasts does. It is--at least, I suppose it is--merely a statement of fact, but it amuses us because it introduces an inappropriate and unexpected element into our consideration of cannibalism.

Perhaps Sir James Barrie would prefer to defend the humour of _The Adored One_ on the ground, not that it is the humour of unreality, but that, like the examples I have quoted, it is the humour of incongruity. And, indeed, we only laugh at Leonora's murder in the train because the reason for it was so disproportionate to the crime. It is not funny for a woman to kill a man because he has beaten her black and blue. It is not funny for her to kill him for his money, or for any other reasonable motive. On the other hand, it would be funny if she killed him for smoking a pipe while wearing a tall hat, or because he said "lay" instead of "lie." It is the unreason of the thing that appeals to us, and no amount of theorising about the immorality of murder can deprive us of our joke. At the same time one is willing to admit the excellence of those people who are so overwhelmed by the exceeding sinfulness of sin that they cannot raise a smile over even the most ridiculous scenes of murder and marital infidelity. I know a great many people who can see nothing comic in the upside-down antics of the drunken; they feel as if in laughing at the absurdities of vice they would be acquiescing in vice. Perhaps they would. Perhaps laughter is given to sinners as a compensation for sins. It makes us tolerant by making us cheerful, and if we could really laugh at murders and all indecencies, we should possibly end in thinking that they are far less black than they are painted. So, I imagine, the unlaughing saints reason. They always visualise sin in its horror in a way that is beyond most of us, and we can respect their gloom. But we who are more complex than the saints--we know well enough that so paradoxical an affair is the human soul that a man may laugh and laugh and keep the Ten Commandments; and we claim the right, on the plea that "my mind to me a kingdom is," of maintaining a court fool in our hearts to parody our royal existence, and so keep it from going stale. In any case, we can no more help laughing than we can help the colour of our hair. That is why we shall go on laughing at the humours of the seven deadly sins, and why old scoundrels like Nero and Gilles de Retz and Henry VIII are likely to remain favourite characters in the comic chapters of human life till the book is burnt and a new volume opens.

VI

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF HELL

It is significant of the change that has come over the religious imagination that a number of representative clergymen have issued a manifesto of disbelief in Hell and no heresy-hunt has begun. Disbelief in Hell, it must in fairness be added, not as a symbol of something sufficiently real, but as a definite place on the map of the Universe, a gulf of wild flame and red-hot torments without end. There was a time when to doubt any jot or tittle in the scenery and rhetoric of Hell would have been thought a kind of atheism, and a world without Hell would have seemed to many religious minds almost as lonely as a world without God. Life was conceived chiefly in terms of Hell. It was a kind of tight-rope walk across a bottomless pit of shooting fires and the intolerable wailing of the damned. Heaven was sought less almost for its proper delights than as an escape from the malignance of the demons in this vast torture-chamber. Hell, indeed, was the most desperately real of countries. For centuries men studied its geography with greater zeal of research than we devote to-day to the geography of Africa. They described its rule and estimated its population, one author, with how much belief I know not, detailing the names of seventy-two of its princes with 7,405,926 devils serving them. In _The Apocalypse of St Peter_, which is as old at least as the second century, the occupations of the damned are set forth with a horrid carefulness. Hell is depicted as a continent of lakes of fire and burning mud, over which adulterers hang by the hair and blasphemers of the way of righteousness by the tongue. False witnesses chew tongues of fire in their mouths. Misers roll on red-hot stones sharper than spikes. Men who have committed unnatural crimes are endlessly hurled from the top of dreadful crags. And this is but one of the first of a long line of visions of the hereafter which appeared, like the season's fruits, all through the early Christian centuries and the Middle Ages, and achieved their perfect statement in Dante. Every new writer sought out the most exquisite torments a sensational imagination could invent, and added them to the picture of the daily life of Hell and Purgatory. The Monk of Evesham saw in his dream of Purgatory men being fried in a pan and others "pierced with fiery nails even to their bones and to the loosening of their joints." Others were gnawed by worms or dragged with hooks, or hung on gallows, or "soaked in baths of pitch and brimstone with a horrible stench," and, if they tried to escape, "the devils that met with them beat them sorely with scourges and forks and other kinds of torments." But we need not go back beyond our own days for instances of these torturing imaginations. Many who are now living have had the night-fears of their childhood made monstrous with stories of devils with red-hot pincers to tear one's flesh and with red-hot nails to lacerate one's back. I have a friend who loves to tell of the regular Sunday summons of an ancient clergyman to his congregation to flee from the doom of the condemned sinner whom he invariably pictured as "seated upon a projecting crag over a lurid, hissing, moaning, raging sea of an undone Eternity, calling out, 'The harvest is past and I am not saved.'"

Why the human imagination did not revolt against such a painful orgy of sensationalism long before it did, it is difficult to understand. Lecky tells us that the only prominent theologian to dispute the material fire of Hell throughout the Middle Ages was the Irishman Johannes Scotus Erigena. All the others accepted it either in terror or with delight. For who can question that men can obtain as fiercely sensual a pleasure from inflicting the pains of Hell on their enemies as from flogging children and slaves? One of the best known instances of this--shall I say, hellish?--sensualism, is the appeal of Tertullian to his fellow Christians not to attend public spectacles on the ground that they would one day behold the far more glorious spectacle of the heathen rolling in the flames of the Pit.

"What," he wrote, "shall be the magnitude of that scene? How shall I wonder? How shall I laugh? How shall I rejoice? How shall I triumph when I behold so many and such illustrious kings, who were said to be mounted into heaven groaning with Jupiter their god in the lowest darkness of Hell! Then shall the soldiers who persecuted the name of Christ burn in more cruel fire than any they had kindled for the saints.... Compared with such spectacles, with such subjects of triumph as these, what can praetor or consul, quaestor or pontiff, afford? And even now faith can bring them near, imagination can depict them as present."

Thus, Hell became the poor man's consolation, the oppressed and baited man's revenge. Sleep itself hardly brought greater balm that the thought of this large engulfing doom for opprobrious neighbours. It would be unfair, on the other hand, to suggest that the ordinary Christian ever believed in Hell save in honest misery of heart. "O, Lord," an old lay evangelist used to pray in the homes he visited, "shake these Thy children over Hell-fire, but shake them in marcy!" There you have the voice of one who regarded Hell, not with glee as the end of his enemies, but with desperate earnestness as a necessary moral agency--who believed that men must be terrorised into virtue or never know virtue at all. And, it is interesting to note, a clerical correspondent has been writing to the _Daily News_ expressing the same gloomy view. This writer declares, as the fruit of long experience, that he has never known a case of a man's being converted except through fear. It is common enough, too--or used to be--to hear church-going young men profess that if they did not believe in Hell, they would amaze the earth with their lusts and exploits. Viewed in this light, the Devil becomes the world's super-policeman, and those who seek to abolish him will naturally be looked on as dangerous anarchists who would destroy the foundations of the law. As for that, it would be foolish to deny the great part played by fear in the lives both of sinners and saints, but whether morality is ultimately served by our being afraid of the wrong things is a question that calls for consideration. Certainly, Hell has produced its crop of devils as well as of saints upon earth. It was men who believed in Hell who invented the thumb-screw and the rack, and many of the most fiendish instruments of torture the world has known.

Whether it is the case that man made Hell because he believed in torture, or took to torture because he believed in Hell, there is no denying that the worst period of torture our European civilisation has known coincided with the time when men believed that God Himself doomed to savage and eternal torments men, women, and even infants in the cradle, on the most paltry excuses. And as man's conscience has more and more decisively forbidden him to use torture as a punishment, it has also forbidden him to believe that a beneficent Deity could do such a thing. It may be thought that a beneficent Deity who could permit cancer and the Putumayo and the factory system at its worst, might easily enough sanction the fires of the mediaeval Hell. But even cancer and the Putumayo are not a denial of what Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things." They are temporary, not eternal. Thoughtful Christians can no longer accept the old Hell, because it would mean, not the final triumph of righteousness, but the final defeat of God. Many of those who dutifully cling to the dogma of their Church on the point would agree with the French cure who said that he believed in Hell, but he did not think there was anybody in it except Voltaire. And even Voltaire will nowadays seem to most people to be hardly a sufficiently scandalous person to deserve infinite millions of years of anguish. The truth is, Hell shocks our moral sense. Tennyson put the modern disbelief in it with a theatrical forcibleness when he said that, if after death he woke up, even though it should be in Heaven, and found there was a Hell, he would turn round and shake his fist in the face of God Almighty. Since Tennyson's time Hell's foundations have subsided: the ancient flames have died down; and man has now for the background of his days no fierce and devouring universe, but a cricket score-board and a page of "thinklet" competitions in a penny paper. Perhaps the antithesis is an unfair one, but some cosmic sense has certainly been lost to the general imagination. No doubt it will return as moral ideas take the place of materialistic terrors; for out of the wreck of the fiery Hell a moral Hell is already rising. A moral Purgatory, one ought to say--a place of discipline made in the image of this disciplining earth. For the terrors of death and evil and pain all survive, and, even if we abolish utterly the Devil with the pitchfork, and put in his place the Button-moulder, is that a figure a pennyworth less dreadful? No, the escape from Hell is not so much a holiday as we thought. There is still an interval of adventure between us and Paradise, and all the perils and fears to be overcome as of old. We have chased an allegory from our doors, but its ghostly reality returns and stands outside the window. And salvation and damnation remain the two chief facts under the sun. And the saints and the parsons--and everybody, indeed, except gloating old Tertullian--were right after all.

VII

ON CHEERFUL READERS

There has been an increasing demand lately for cheerful books. Mr Balfour began it--at least, he gave it a voice by quoting approvingly a phrase from one of Mr Bennett's novels about the books that cheer us all up. It was a most unfortunate phrase to quote in public. It confirmed every bald old scaramouch in all his hostilities to realism, tragedy, and every other form of literature that does not go about with its hat over its eye. It also confirmed a popular prejudice to the effect that it is the duty of men of letters to be cheerful in a way in which it is not the duty, say, of mathematicians to be cheerful. Now, one need not be an enemy of cheerfulness to detest this theory. One merely needs to be sufficiently awake to recognise that cheerfulness may easily become a tyranny which will bind the hands and feet of literature as it has already bound the hands and feet of drama. Cheerfulness, cheerfulness, and yet again cheerfulness, is the all too golden rule in the theatre. One result of this is that Ibsen has been expelled from the stage for the only naughtiness of which the English theatre takes notice--the naughtiness of being serious. Even Mr Shaw, who possesses the comic spirit in greater abundance than any other writer of his time, is flayed alive by the critics on the production of each new play he writes, because, besides being cheerful, he is a man of ideas. It is not enough that you should be cheerful: you must be cheerful to the exclusion of everything else--everything, at least, that might bring unrest to the intellect or the spirit or to any other part of a man except the muscles that work the oil-wells of sentiment and the creaking jaws of laughter. The consequences might have been foreseen. No one unaided, could be quite so inhumanly vacuous as the audiences in the theatres expected him to be. And so the dramatic author had to call in to his aid the musicians, the poets, the limelight-men, the mask-sellers, the dancing girls, the dressmakers, and a host of other people, each of whom separately could only be a little inane, but all of whom together could be overwhelmingly inane; and among them they produced that overwhelming inanity, musical comedy. There you have the ultimate logic of cheerfulness in the theatre. It is like the obtrusive cheerfulness of the performing animals in music-halls. It is a tedious and beastly thing. It is cheerfulness without mind or meaning. It is like a laugh painted on a clown's face. Compulsory cheerfulness must always end like that, because, if one has to laugh all the time, it is far easier to put the laugh on with a brush than to keep one's face distorted by strength of will.