Part 4

With the warning of the cheerful theatre before us, then, it would be the stupidest folly to pay any heed to the new plea for cheerful books. It is an extraordinary fact that thousands of people can be serious to the point of bad temper over a political argument or a game of cards or tennis; but if you asked them to take a book seriously, they would regard the prospect as worse than a dry pharyngitis. They put literature on a level not with their games, but with the chocolates and drinks they consume when they are resting from their games. It is of the chocolate kind of literature that ninety-nine out of a hundred persons are thinking when they applaud phrases about the books that cheer us all up. Or it might be nearer the mark to liken the sort of literature they have in mind to one of those brands of medicated port which innocent old ladies find grateful and comforting. We live in an age of advertised brain-fag, and we demand of literature that it shall be the literature of brain-fag. We ask of it not friendship, but a drug. That is the heresy which must be killed if letters are to live. Till it is killed they will not even be enjoyed. I grant at once that it would be an impudence to expect an average sensual man to regard books with the same profound interest as his business affairs or his wife. On the other hand, persuade him that it is pleasant to put as much of his heart into the enjoyment of a book as he puts into the enjoyment of a football match, and you will produce a revolution among the book-reading public. No man who is not eccentric dreams of asking that a football match shall be amusing or a game of chess cheerful. He goes to the one for its furious energy, for the thrill of the rivalry of real people; he turns to the other for an experience of intensity, of prescient skill. It is for energetic experiences of a comparable kind, as Mr R. A. Scott-James suggestively pointed out in a recent volume, that we go to literature. Literature is not primarily meant to cheer us up when we are too tired to read the paper, though incidentally it often does so, and to despise this kind of literature would be as sinful as to despise Christmas pudding and brandy sauce. But the purpose of literature is not to be an epilogue to energy. It involves not a slackening, but a change, of effort. That is why even the difficult authors like the Browning of _Sordello_ attract us. They have the appeal of pathless mountains. It is a curious fact, at the same time, that some of those who delight most boldly in physical experiences turn from intellectual and imaginative experiences with a kind of contempt. They despise from their hearts the mollycoddle who will not risk a wound or a cold for the pleasures of the sun and air. But, so far as the imagination is concerned, they themselves are mollycoddles who will not venture beyond a game of halma or a sugarstick by the hearth. What the world of literature needs most is not cheerful writers, but adventurous readers. The reading of poetry will become as popular as swimming when once it is recognised that it is as natural and as exhilarating.

Literature thus justifies itself not so much by cheering us all up when we are limp as by its appeal to the spirit of adventure, or, if you like the phrase better, the spirit of experience. That is the explanation of the pleasure we take in tragic literature. Tragedy reminds certain spiritual energies in us that they are alive. It enables them to expand, to exert themselves, to breathe freely. That is why, in literature, it makes us happy to be miserable. To put forth our strength, whether of limb or of imagination, makes for our happiness far more than the passive cheerfulness of the fireside; or if not more, at least as much. It would be ungrateful to speak slightingly of the easy-chair and its pleasures. But the chief danger in literature at present is not that the easy-chair will be neglected, but that it will be given a place of far too great importance. Hence it is necessary to emphasise the pleasures of the strenuous life in contrast. This may seem to some readers a tolerable excuse for liking tragedy and poetry, but a poor defence of the taste for realism, naturalism, or whatever you like to call it. Even those who respond immediately to the appeal of the mountains and the sea will often resist the invitation of Zola and Huysmans and their followers to seek adventures in the slums. They will not see that it is as natural to go on one's travels in the slums as in the most beautiful lakeland on earth. As a matter of fact, the discovery of the slums was one of the most tremendous discoveries of the nineteenth century. It was one of those revolutionary discoveries that have changed our whole view of society. Whether it was the men of letters or the sociologists who first discovered them I do not know. I contend, however, that the men of letters had as much right to go to them as the sociologists. They found life expressed there in horror and beauty, in sordidness and nobility, and to reveal this in literature was to some extent to create a new world for the imagination. It was to do more than this. Society could not become fully self-conscious or articulate until the pauper aspect of it was expressed in literature. Hence the novelist of mean streets extended the boundaries of social self-consciousness. The realists indeed have brought the remedial imagination to us as the sociologist has brought the remedial facts and figures. This remedialism, no doubt, is an extra-literary interest. But nothing is quite alien to literature which touches the imagination. The imagination may find its treasures in Tyre and Sidon or in an alley off a back street, or even in a semi-detached villa. One must not limit it in its wanderings to safe and clean and comfortable places.

This seems to me to be the great justification of the demand, not for cheerful books, but for cheerful and courageous readers. The cheerful reader will be able to go to hell with Dante and to hospital with Esther Waters; and though this may be but a poor and secondhand courage, it is at least preferable to the intellectual and imaginative cowardice which will admit danger into literature only when it has been stripped of every semblance of reality. The courage of the study, it may be, is not so fine a thing as the courage of the workshop and the field. But it is finer than is generally admitted. And it is much rarer. There is no place in which men and women are so shamelessly lazy and timid as among their books. If happiness lay in that direction, the laziness might be justified. But it does not. Happiness can never come from the atrophy of nine-tenths of our nature. It is the result of the vigorous delight of heart and mind and spirit as well as of body. The cheerful reader feels as ready for AEschylus and his furies as the yachtsman for his sail on a choppy sea. He fears the tragic satire of _Madame Bovary_ no more than a good pedestrian fears the east wind. This is not to say that he does not enjoy cheerful books when he finds them. He may even prefer _Tristram Shandy_ and _The Pickwick Papers_ to Tolstoi. But he realises that cheerfulness in a book is a delightful accident, not a necessity of literature. He knows that to be cheerful is his own business, whether he goes with his author into the dark and solitary places or into the sheltered and smiling gardens of the sun.

VIII

ST G. B. S. AND THE BISHOP

There has been a delightful correspondence going on in the _Times_ about Mdlle Gaby Deslys. It owed not a little of its charm, I suspect, to the fact that none of the correspondents had seen Gaby. The Bishop of Kensington had not seen her; Mr H. B. Irving had not seen her; Mr Bernard Shaw had not seen her. So they quarrelled furiously over her as men have always quarrelled over the unseen, and if AEsop had been alive, he might have got a fable out of the affair. The Bishop made the mistake at the beginning of calling upon the Censor to suppress Gaby. Mr Shaw, at mention of the Censor, immediately saw red, and Gaby of the Lilies presented herself to his inflamed vision as a beautiful damsel who was about to be made a meal of by an ecclesiastical monster. He at once challenged the Bishop to battle--a battle of theories. The Bishop unfortunately had no theory with him. He took his stand upon the law. After the manner of Shylock, he insisted upon his pound of flesh. Mr Shaw, of course, who bristled with theories could not stand this. So he gave the Bishop his choice of theories and even put several into his mouth, and forced a conflict upon him. And it was a famous victory.

But what they fought each other for I could not well make out.

Perhaps Mr Shaw himself did not quite know. But he made during the fight some weird statements which are well worth examination.

One of these was that, in regard to sex as in regard to religion, it is very difficult to say what is good and what is evil, and more difficult still to suppress the one without suppressing the other. So much is this so according to Mr Shaw that "one man seeing a beautiful actress will feel that she has made all common debaucheries impossible to him; another seeing the same actress in the same part will plunge straight into those debaucheries because he has seen her body without seeing her soul." But why choose a beautiful actress for the argument? This matter can only be debated fairly if we take the case of an actress whose lure is not beauty but some indecency of attitude, gesture or phrase, which is meant to awaken the debauchee keeping house in the breast of each of us with the ineffectual angel, and which either does this or bores us into the bar. (I do not, I may say, refer to Gaby Deslys, whom I, too, have not seen. I made more than one attempt, but the crush of beauty-lovers was too great.) It is quite easy to imagine an actress such as I have described: most of us have, in the course of many hours misspent in music-halls, seen her. To say that she may do good as well as harm is the same as saying that an indecent photograph may do good as well as harm. If this is to be the last word on the subject, then there is no logical reason why we should not decorate the walls of elementary schools with indecent photographs instead of maps, and teach the children limericks instead of _Lady Clara Vere de Vere_ and _The Wreck of the Hesperus_. Mr Shaw may retort that he would allow any man who did not find indecent photographs and limericks "objectionable" to have his fill of them, but that he would not allow him to thrust them upon children. But this is to pass a moral judgment. If it is not certain whether the dangers of the sensual parodies of the arts are greater than the dangers of religion--or say, of geography--there is surely no more reason for preserving the children from one than from the other.

Even if we waive this point for the sake of argument, is Mr Shaw's other position tenable--that, if we consider any form of entertainment objectionable, we should show our disapproval, not by trying to have it stopped, but simply by staying away from it? Surely even in music-hall performances, there is a line to be drawn somewhere. We can no more be sure where good ends and evil begins than we can be sure where light ends and darkness begins. But we all have a good enough notion of when it is dark, and it is not so very difficult to tell when a music-hall turn is out of bounds. Some people, it may be granted, run to excess in their sense of propriety. They are as delicate as the lady who, when carving a chicken at table, used to inquire: "Will you have a wing or a limb?" On the other hand, there is an equally large number of people who have no delicacy at all but who are always ready to greet the obscene with a cheer. Their favourite meal of entertainment is brutality for an entree and sensuality for a sweet. They can even mix their dishes at times, as, many years ago in Paris, when a woman stripped to the waist and with her hands tied behind her back used to get down on her knees and wait for rats to be loosed out of a cage and kill them one by one with her mouth. Is there no reason for suppressing a show of this kind except that it is rough on rats? I think there is. It deserves suppression because it is what we call, in a vague word, degrading. It is easy enough for a lively imagination to picture as beastly a scene in which there would be no rats present, and which, even if a thousand youths and maidens were willing to pay night after night to see it, would still be a case for the police.

One cannot help feeling that, in attacking the Bishop in regard to the liberty of music-halls, Mr Shaw has allowed himself to be made angry by the way in which the Church nearly always concentrates on sex when it wishes to make war on sin. Probably he does well to be angry. It is always worth while to denounce the Church for making morality so much an affair of abstinences. On the other hand, the Church and the prophets have realised by a wise instinct that this planet on which we live tends perpetually to become a huge disorderly house, and that the history of the world is largely the history of a struggle for decency. At times, no doubt, the world has also been in danger of being converted into a tyrannous Sabbath-school. But that was usually an aftermath of disorder. There is no denying that the average human being finds it far easier to learn to leer than to learn to sing psalms. The fight against the leer is one of the first necessities of civilisation. It may be argued that a policeman cannot be sent in pursuit of a leer as he can in search of a pickpocket, and that, if he were, he would more probably than not run it to earth in some masterpiece of art or literature. But what about the leer when it has been isolated--when it has no more connection with art or literature than with Esperanto?

Mr Shaw seems to think that even in that case the attempt to suppress it would be a form of persecution. But is it persecution to take action against pickpockets or against employers who dodge the Factory Acts or against the corrupters of children? Surely there are offences that are capable of being dealt with by magistrates. Only the most innocent optimist can believe that sweating, for instance, can be put an end to by public opinion in the abstract as effectively as it can be stopped by public opinion acting through the police. It is no argument to say that, if we suppress certain music-hall turns because we dislike them, those who object to the theory of the Atonement have an equal right to try to suppress the teaching and preaching of that doctrine. Might not the same argument be used against interference with thieves and forgers or still more extreme criminals in the pursuit of their livelihood? After all, supposing the Methodists added to the Calvinist and Wesleyan varieties already in existence a new sect of, say, Aphrodisiac Methodists, it is quite easy to conceive not only public opinion, but the police interfering with it with the approval of the mass of moral and immoral citizens. Similarly, if a sect of Particular Baptist Thugs made its appearance, its religious complexion would hardly save it from suppression. There might still be half-a-dozen apostles of religious freedom who would tell you that you could not logically take action against the Thugs and the Aphrodisiacs without preparing the way for the prohibition of Bible-reading and for burning psalm-singers at the stake. But common-sense knows better. It knows that there are certain things which must be put down, either by public opinion or by the police, if the world is to remain a place into which it is worth a child's while to be born. It knows, too, that the liberty to seek after truth and beauty in one's own way does not necessarily involve the liberty to say or to do whatever beastly thing one pleases, even if thousands of people enjoy it. If it did, then the Censor's interference with _Mrs Warren's Profession_ would be an act of the same kind as Scotland Yard's interference with the worst kind of night clubs.

At the same time, one need not deny that the difficulty of deciding what should be suppressed and what should not is immense. I see that in some part of the world or other Isidora Duncan's dancing has been prohibited. I myself have met a lady, who, when she was taken to see Madame Duncan, was in an agony of blushes till she got out into the street. But she sat through _The Merry Widow_ without turning a hair. What, then, is to be the test in these matters? On the whole I think it is a good rule to fight against the suppression of anything that can by any stretch of the imagination be considered honestly intended or beautiful. In the arts, one can believe without casuistry, beauty ultimately transforms the beast. But there are forms of art, literature and drama which are nothing else than a kind of indecent exposure. Let us give them the benefit of the doubt, so long as there is a doubt. But when there is no doubt, let them be given the benefit of the policeman.

I wonder whether Mr Shaw would have argued so fiercely on the other side if the Bishop had not dragged in the Censor. If the controversy had not got mixed up with the Censorship, indeed, it would have greatly simplified matters. Mr Shaw seems to have begun to belabour the Bishop from a feeling that a blow to the Bishop was a blow to the Censor, but having once begun, he seems to have gone on simply because he enjoyed beating a Bishop. And of the remains there were gathered up twelve basketsful. But, all the same, I cannot help feeling that the Bishop perished in a good cause.

IX

STUPIDITY

"Surely honest men may thank God they belong to 'the Stupid Party'!"--_The Spectator_, March 28, 1914.

It is a terrible thing to boast of stupidity, even in irony. It is a still more terrible thing to associate stupidity with honesty. There is a good deal to be said in favour of honesty, but stupidity in the garb of honesty is the merest masquerader. There was once a member of a local body whom I heard praised in the words: "He's the only honest man in the Corporation, and that is because he is too stupid to be anything else." I doubt if predestined honesty of this sort is entitled to a statue. It has its public uses, no doubt, as an occasional stumbling-block to those who traffic both in their own and other people's virtue. Here, at least, is virtue that cannot be bought at a crisis. On the other hand, it does not withstand the temptations of gold a bit more sturdily than it withstands the appeals of reason. It will not move either for a thousand pounds or for the Archangel Gabriel. It bars the way to Heaven and the road to Hell impartially. It has the unbudgeableness of the ass rather than the adaptability which enables human beings to survive on this wrinkled planet. Even so, one may admit a sneaking respect and affection for honest stupid people in private life. It is when they feel called upon to devote their combined honesty and stupidity to public affairs that one begins to tremble and to wonder whether, after all, an honest fool or a clever rogue is likely to do better service to the State. Oscar Wilde once said it was well that good people did not live to see the evil results of their goodness and that wicked people did not live to see the good results of their wickedness. This is true, perhaps, no matter how cunning one may be in one's virtue or how provident in one's vices. But it is especially true of that blind and bigoted honesty which cannot see farther than its nose. I know a town where the lamplighter twenty years ago was an honest old man of the blind and bigoted type. It was his duty to go out and light the lamps of the little town on every night when there was no moon. One month, however, it was noticed that all the lamps were alight while the moon was blazing, and that when the moon was dark the lamps were dark too. The old man was called before the town committee to account for his disobedience to orders. Instead of apologising, however, he firmly insisted that he had done his duty, and produced a calendar to prove that there was no moon on the nights on which everybody had seen it shining, and that it might have reasonably been expected to shine on the nights on which it was obscured. He was asked why he did not trust his eyes, but he said that he always went by the calendar, and he would not yield an inch of his position till someone took the calendar from him and noticed that it was not even a current one, but a calendar of the previous year. There, I think, is a dramatisation of a very common form of honesty. It is as common among Cabinet Ministers and Churchmen as among aged lamplighters. It expresses itself in adherence not only to antiquated Mother Seigel calendars but to constitutions and confessions of faith that have lost their meaning. Whether this can justly be called honesty at all is a question with something to be said on both sides. It is certainly stupidity of the very best quality.