Part 9

It is clear, then, that being shocked is simply a way of recovering our balance. It is also a way of recovering our sense of superiority. There is more pleasure in being shocked by the sin of one's neighbour or one's neighbour's wife than in eating cream buns. Not, indeed, that it is always the sins that shock us most. Much as we enjoy the whisper of how a great man beats his wife, or a poet drinks, or some merry Greek has flirted her virtue away, we would shake our heads over them with equal gravity if they had the virtues of Buddhist monks and sisters. It is the virtues that shock us no less than the vices. Perhaps it was because Swinburne gave utterance to the horror a great many quite normal people feel for virtue that, in spite of an intellect of far from splendid quality, he ended his life as something of a prophet. Tolstoi never shocked Europe more than a hair's weight so long as he blundered through the seven sins like nearly any other man of his class. He only scandalised us when he began to try to live in literal obedience to the Sermon on the Mount. When we are in church, no doubt, we say fie to the young man who had great possessions and would not sell all that he had and give to the poor, as Jesus commanded him. But in real life we should be troubled only if the young man took such a command seriously. Obviously, then, the psychology of being shocked cannot be explained in terms of triumphant virtue. We must look for an explanation rather in the widespread instinct which forbids a man to be different either in virtues or in vices from other people. It arises out of a loyalty to ordinary standards, which the average man has made for his comfort--perhaps, we should say, for his self-respect. To deny these standards in one's life is like denying a foot-rule--which would be an outrage on the common-sense of the whole trade union of carpenters. Or one might put it this way. To live publicly like a saint is as disturbing as if you were to ask a tailor to measure your soul instead of your legs. It is to whisk your neighbour into a world of new dimensions--to leave him dangling where he can scarcely breathe. This does not, it may be thought, explain the attitude of the shocked man towards sinners. But, after all, we are very tolerant of sinners until they break some code of our class. John Bright defended adulteration because he was a manufacturer. Grocers object to the forgery of cheques, which is a danger to their business, in a manner in which they do not object to the forgery of jam, which puts money in their purses. We are more shocked by the man who gets drunk furiously once in six months than by the man who tipples all the time, not because the former is more surely destroying himself, but because he is more likely to do something that will inconvenience business or society. We can forgive almost all sins except those that inconvenience us. There are others, it may be argued, that we hate for their own sake. But is not a part of our hatred even of these due to the fact that they inconvenience our minds, having about them something novel or immeasurable? It is in the last analysis that breaches of codes and conventions shock us most. If your uncle danced down Piccadilly dressed like a Chinaman, your sense of propriety would be more outraged than if he appeared in the Divorce Court, since, bad as the latter is, it is less bewilderingly abnormal. Mr Wells, in _The Passionate Friends_, offers a defence of the conventions by which Society attempts to reduce us all to a common pattern. He sees in them, as it were, angels with flaming swords against the remorseless individualism that flesh is heir to. They are a sort of compulsion to brotherhood. They are signs to us that we must not live merely to ourselves, but that we must in some way identify ourselves with the larger self of human society. It is a tempting paradox, and, in so far as it is true, it is a defence of all the orthodoxies that have ever existed. Every orthodoxy is a little brotherhood of men. At least, it is so until it becomes a little brotherhood of parrots. It only breaks down when some horribly original person discovers the old truth that it is a shocking thing for men to be turned into parrots, and gives up his life to the work of rescuing us from our unnatural cages. Perhaps a brotherhood of parrots is better than no brotherhood at all. But the worst of it is, the conventions do not gather us into one brood even of this kind. They sort us into a thousand different painted and chattering groups, each screaming against the other like, in the vulgar phrase, the Devil. No: brotherhood does not lie that way. Perched vainly in his cage of malice and uncharitableness, man feels more like a boss than a brother. There is nothing so like an average superman as a parrot.

The passion for being shocked, then, must be redeemed from its present cheapness if it is to help us on the way to being fit for the double life of the individual and society. We must learn to be shocked by the normal things--by the conventions themselves rather than by breaches of the conventions. Those who lift their hands in pious horror over conventional Christianity should also lift their hands in pious horror over conventional un-Christianity. The conventions are often merely truths that have got the sleeping-sickness; but by this very fact they are disabled as regards any useful purpose. Every great leader, whether in religion or in the reform of society, comes to us with living truths to take the place of conventions. He gives the lie to our bread-and-butter existence, and teaches us to be shocked by most things to which we are accustomed and many things which we have treasured. Society progresses only in so far as it learns to be shocked, not by other people, but by itself. What did England ever gain except a purr or a glow from being shocked by French morals or German manners? The English taste for being shocked is only worth its weight in old iron when it is directed on some thing such as the procession of the poor and the ill-clad that circulates from morning till night in the streets of English slums. Being shocked is a maker of revolutions and literatures when men are shocked by the right things--or, rather, by the wrong things. Out of a mood of shock came Blake's fiery rout of proverbs in that poem which begins:

A Robin Redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage.

It is, unfortunately, not the Robin Redbreast in a cage that shocks us most now. It is rather the Robin Redbreast which revolts against being expected to sit behind bars and sing like a mechanical toy. Our resurrection as men and women will begin when we learn to be shocked by our mechanical servitudes, as Ruskin and Morris used to be in their fantastic way, instead of being shocked, as we are at present--the conventionally good, the conventionally bad, and the conventionally artistic who are too pallid to be either--by what are really only our immortal souls. At our present stage of evolution, Heaven would shock us far more than earth has succeeded in doing. That is at once our condemnation and our comedy.

XIX

CONFESSIONS

Father Hugh Benson has been praised for his courage in confessing that he could not read Sir Walter Scott. Surely this must be a world of lies if it is remarkable to find a man honest in so simple a matter as his tastes in literature. All but one--or it may even be a few hundred--we are under the empire of shame, which withers truth upon our lips and threatens us with the rack if we do not confess things that are lies. That is the reason why in any given year we all appear to have the same tastes. This year it is Croce; last year it was Bergson; the year before that it was William James; the year before that it was Nietzsche. In advanced circles you can already say what you like about Bergson. You will hardly dare to be frank about Croce till after midsummer. It is the same in literature as in philosophy. Twenty years ago we were all swearing that Stevenson and Kipling were two such artists as England had never seen before. We did not say they were greater than Dickens and Shakespeare. We simply accepted them as incomparable. To-day, no one who is not middle-aged speaks of Mr Kipling as an artist, and one is humoured as a fogey by boys and girls if one mentions Stevenson seriously in a discussion on literature. Nor can we blame this popular changeableness as entirely dishonest. We may love an author for his novelty for a time, as we loved Swinburne for his novel metres and Mr Kipling for his novel brutalities; and after a while, when the novelty has faded, we may see that there is little enough left--too little, at any rate, to justify our primrose praises. It is an ignominious confession to make that we have been taken in by a new kind of powder and paint, but, as everybody else has been taken in and afterwards disillusioned in the same way and in the same hour, that does not trouble us. We do not mind being ignominious in regiments. It is the refusal to right-about-face and to march at the public word of command that would be the difficult thing. We had rather go wrong with the crowd than be solitary and conspicuous in our rectitude. In the Sunday-school we used to sing "Dare to be a Daniel," but we sang it with a thousand voices. The lion's den was an acclaimed resort for the childish imagination at the moment. In one's surroundings, as a matter of fact, one could have achieved resemblance to Daniel only by some such extreme step as casting doubt upon his historical existence. Had one done so, the commiteee of the school would quickly have made it clear that Daniel in short breeches and a white Sunday tie was a most undesirable person. It has always been as great a crime to behave like Daniel as it has been an act of piety to praise him.

It is because there are so few who are willing to face the terrors of isolation that any one who will do so gains an easy notoriety. A man has only to confess quite honestly that he has individual tastes and failings in order to take a place among men of genius. His confession, however, must be as honest as if vanity and pretence had never been known. It is not enough that he should confess his vices. It may be more fashionable at the time to confess one's vices than one's virtues. When a confession is merely a form of boasting it becomes as frivolous as Dr Cook's story of his discovery of the Pole. There is a natural humility in the great books of confessions: the writers of sham-confessions are no more capable of the act of bending than a balloon. It is possible to give the life-story of every sin one has ever committed and yet to remain dishonest. One may be attitudinising even while one tells the truth. It is, it may be granted, extraordinarily difficult to see oneself truly and without bias, and to refrain from discovering excuses for oneself faster almost than one discovers one's faults. It is this humbug sense of excuses in the background that makes most of us the merest pretenders when we confess that we are blackguards, and call ourselves by other insulting names. Our confessions are as often as not mean attempts to forestall the accusations of those we have injured. We make them in the hope of turning anger into pity, and when the trick has succeeded we laugh in secret triumph over the simplicity of human nature. Anatole France has maintained that all the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins. It is a paradox with the usual grain of truth. The self-analyst, probably enough, will fall in love with the material on which he works just as the surgeon does. One has heard surgeons wax enthusiastic over some unique case of disease which they have cured. They will even speak of such things as "lovely." It is thus a fighter shakes hands with his opponent. Similarly, the saint with his sins. For him they will always be illuminated, as it were, by grace. Saints have even been known to thank God for their sins as the means of their salvation. On the other hand, no good book of confessions is mere play-acting--lip-service to heaven, secret gratitude to the devil. When confession becomes a luxury of this dramatic sort, one may begin to suspect oneself as but a refined sort of sensualist. There are moods of false exaltation in which the confession that one has broken a commandment seems to add an inch to one's stature. The true confessor, on the other hand, will as soon confess a mouse as a mountain. He will not begin, like Baudelaire in the cafe: "On the night I killed my father...." He will more likely tell us, like Pepys, how he beat the servant-girl with a broom, or how, like Horace, he threw away his shield and ran from the battle. Pepys lives in literature because he was unblushingly, unboastingly, frank about his littleness--his jealousy of his wife, his petty conquests of other women, his eternal sensualities mixed with his eternal prayers. How vitally he portrays himself in a thousand sentences like: "I took occasion to be angry with my wife before I rose about her putting up half-a-crown of mine in a paper box, which she had forgotten where she had lain it. But we were friends again, as we are always!" Between that and the artistic attitude of naughtiness in a book like Mr George Moore's _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, what a gulf there is! The one is as fresh a piece of nature as a thorn-tree on a hill-side; the other is as near life as the cloak-and-dagger plays of the theatre. English prose literature has suffered immensely during the last century because it has shrunk from the honesty of Mr Pepys and attitudinised, now in the manner of Prince Albert, now in the manner of Mr Moore. It has worn the white flower of a blameless life--or the opposite--instead of the white sheet of repentance. It has suffered from the obsession at one time of sex, at another time of sexlessness. It has seldom, like modern Russian literature, been the confession of a man's or a people's soul.

It is not only in literature, however, that the supreme genius is the genius of confession. One demands the same kind of honest and personal speech from one's friends. One cannot be friends with a man who is not a man but an echo. The poets have sung of echo as a beautiful thing. It may be well enough among the mountains, but who would live in a world of echoes? One demands of one's friend that he shall be himself, even though it involves a liking for the poems of Mr G. R. Sims, rather than that he should be a boneless imitation who can talk the current jargon about Picasso and the cubists. To confess that one has no taste for the latest fad in the arts and philosophy is becoming a rarer and rarer form of originality. We utter our pallid judgments in terror at once of the clique of the moment and of posterity. We are afraid that our contemporaries may tell us that we no longer can keep abreast of _les jeunes_, but are become ossified. We are afraid that our grandchildren will look back on us with the smiling superiority with which we look back on those who raved against Wagner and flung epithets at Ibsen. Be in no trouble about that. Your grandchildren will smile at you in any case. Has not the reputation of Matthew Arnold already sunk lower than that of the reviewers in the daily papers? Is not even Pater being thrust into a second grave as an indolent driveller without judgment? There is no phylactery against the poor opinion of one's grandchildren. Nor need we be greatly in fear of damning bad art because an occasional Wagner has been condemned. After all, there were other people condemned besides Wagner. They were so bad, however, that we have forgotten what the critics said about them. Pope wrote his _Dunciad_ not against the Wagners and Ibsens of his day, but against all those fashionable fellows whose names survive only in his satire. No one would have the courage to write a _Dunciad_ to-day. We have discovered that there are no dunces except the people who were the vogue yesterday. Thus we chorus the season's reputations. We are ready to stab last week's gods in the back if it happens to be the fashion. We can all say what we please about Shakespeare now that it no longer requires courage to do so, but we dare not confess with equal frankness our feelings about some little wren of a minor poet who came out of the shell a month ago. The world has become a maze of echoes in which no honest conversation can be heard for the dull reverberant speech of the walls.

XX

THE TERRORS OF POLITICS

There is a good deal to be said for Mr Lloyd George's complaint against the world for its treatment of politicians. In one sense, it may be better to throw a brick at a politician than to trust him. It encourages the others. Unhappily, it is a habit that, once acquired, is by no means easy to discontinue. One throws one's first brick as a public duty; before one has got through one's first cart-load, however, one is throwing for the sheer exhilaration of the thing. It is difficult, for instance, to believe that if Mr Leo Maxse went to Paradise itself, he would be able to forget his cunning with the words "swindlers," "rogues," and "cabals"; one feels sure that he would discover some angels requiring to be denounced for singing "cocoa" hymns, and some committee of the saints which it was necessary to arraign as Foozle & Co. The popularity of Mr Maxse's redundant abuse in _The National Review_ seems to me to be one of the most significant phenomena of the day. It is a symptom of the reviving taste for looking on one's political opponent not only as a public, but as a private, villain. There was probably never a time when it was a more popular amusement, both in print and at the dinner table, to give a twist of criminality to the portraiture of political enemies. When Daniel O'Connell denounced Disraeli as "the heir-at-law of the blasphemous thief who died on the cross," he was abusing him, not for his home life, but as a public figure. Similarly, when Sir William Harcourt described Mr Chamberlain as "a serpent gnawing a file," he said nothing which would make even the most proper lady shrink from bowing to Mr Chamberlain in the street. The modern sort of nomenclature, however, has gone beyond this. It is a constant suggestion that Cabinets are recruited from Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubs. One would hardly be surprised, on meeting a Prime Minister nowadays, to find that he had the bristly chin and the club of Bill Sikes. As for the rank and file of Ministers, one does not insult Bill Sikes by comparing them to him. One thinks of them rather as on the level with racecourse sneak-thieves and the bullies of disorderly houses. Decidedly, they are not persons to take tea with.

Calumny, of course, is as old as Adam--or, at least, as Joseph--and one remembers that even Mr Gladstone was accused of the vulgarest immorality till a journalist tracked him down and discovered that it was rescue work, and not the deadly sin with the largest circulation, which was his private hobby. That sort of libel no man can escape who risks remaining alive. Perhaps we should come to hate our public men as the Athenians came to hate Aristides if we could find nothing evil to think about them. What the politician of the present day has to fear is not an occasional high tide of calumny, or even a volley of the old-fashioned abusive epithets, which are, so to speak, all in the day's play. It is rather the million-eyed beast of suspicion which democracies every now and then take to their bosoms as a pet. Often it seems a noble beast, for it is impossible to be suspicious all the time without sometimes suspecting the truth. Its food, however, is neither primarily truth nor primarily falsehood; it thrives on both indifferently. And one foresees that, during the transition stage between the break-up of the old manners of servility and the inauguration of the new manners of service, this beast is going to be more voracious than ever. This may from some points of view be a good thing. It will be an announcement, at least, of new forces struggling to become politically articulate. On the other hand from the politician's point of view, it will be not only deplorable, but terrifying. It will be worse than having to fight wild beasts in the arena. Politics, it is safe to prophesy, will before long call for as cool a nerve, as determined a heroism, as aviation.

It may be that things have always been like this--that base motives have been imputed to politicians ever since politics began--that one's political enemies always charged one with a dishonest greed for the spoils of office and all the rest of it. But the terror of the politics of the future is likely to be, not that one will be abused by one's enemies, but that one will be abused by one's friends. That is the tendency in a democracy which has not yet found itself. It is a tendency which one sees occasionally at work to-day at labour conventions. The unofficial leaders denounce the official leaders; the official leaders retort in kind; and the hosts of Labour set out to face the enemy tugging at each other's ears. There is no job on earth less enviable than the job of a Labour leader. The Tory and Radical leaders are supported at least in public by their respective parties; but the Labour leader at home among his followers is commonly regarded as a cross between a skunk and a whited sepulchre. As a rule, it may be, he deserves all he gets, but the point is that he would get it just the same whether he deserved it or not. The light that beats upon a Labour M.P.'s seat on the platform is a thousand times fiercer and more devouring than any that ever beat upon a throne. This partly arises from the fact that the working classes are less practised than others in concealing what passes through their minds. If they suspect the worst they say so instead of passing a vote of thanks to the object of their suspicions. Further, they are still fresh enough to politics to be very exacting in their demands upon politicians. Other people have got accustomed to the idea that lawyers, whether Liberal or Tory, do not go into the House of Commons, as the Americans say, for their health. They have settled down comfortably to regard politics as a field of personal ambition even more than a field of public service. No doubt the two aims are, to a great extent, compatible, but, even so, no one expects the ordinary party politician to have the faith that goes to the stake for a conviction. Labour, on the other hand, in so far as it is articulate, does demand faith of this kind from its leaders. If they do not possess it already it is prepared to thump it into them with a big stick.