Part 10

Most sensible people say that adults cannot be expected to appreciate Christmas as much as children appreciate it. At least, Mr. G. S. Street said so, who is the most sensible man now writing in the English language. But I am not sure that even sensible people are always right; and this has been my principal reason for deciding to be silly--a decision that is now irrevocable. It may be only because I am silly, but I rather think that, relatively to the rest of the year, I enjoy Christmas more than I did when I was a child. Of course, children do enjoy Christmas--they enjoy almost everything except actually being smacked: from which truth the custom no doubt arose. But the real point is not whether a schoolboy would enjoy Christmas. The point is that he would also enjoy No Christmas. Now I say most emphatically that I should denounce, detest, abominate, and abjure the insolent institution of No Christmas. The child is glad to find a new ball, let us say, which Uncle William (dressed as St. Nicholas in everything except the halo) has put in his stocking. But if he had no new ball, he would make a hundred new balls out of the snow. And for them he would be indebted not to Christmas, but to winter. I suppose snowballing is being put down by the police, like every other Christian custom. No more will a prosperous and serious City man have a large silver star splashed suddenly on his waistcoat, veritably investing him with the Order of the Star of Bethlehem. For it is the star of innocence and novelty, and should remind him that a child can still be born. But indeed, in one sense, we may truly say the children enjoy no seasons, because they enjoy all. I myself am of the physical type that greatly prefers cold weather to hot; and I could more easily believe that Eden was at the North Pole than anywhere in the Tropics. It is hard to define the effect of weather: I can only say that all the rest of the year I am untidy, but in summer I feel untidy. Yet although (according to the modern biologists) my hereditary human body must have been of the same essential type in my boyhood as in my present decrepitude, I can distinctly remember hailing the idea of freedom and even energy on days that were quite horribly hot. It was the excellent custom at my school to give the boys a half-holiday when it seemed too hot for working. And I can well remember the gigantic joy with which I left off reading Virgil and began to run round and round a field. My tastes in this matter have changed. Nay, they have been reversed. If I now found myself (by some process I cannot easily conjecture) on a burning summer day running round and round a field, I hope I shall not appear pedantic if I say I should prefer to be reading Virgil.

And thus it is really possible, from one point of view, for elderly gentlemen to frolic at Christmas more than children can. They may really come to find Christmas more entertaining, as they have come to find Virgil more entertaining. And, in spite of all the talk about the coldness of classicism, the poet who wrote about the man who in his own country home fears neither King nor crowd was not by any means incapable of understanding Mr. Wardle. And it is exactly those sentiments, and similar ones, that the adult does appreciate better than the child. The adult, for instance, appreciates domesticity better than the child. And one of the pillars and first principles of domesticity, as Mr. Belloc has rightly pointed out, is the institution of private property. The Christmas pudding represents the mature mystery of property; and the proof of it is in the eating.

I have always held that Peter Pan was wrong. He was a charming boy, and sincere in his adventurousness; but though he was brave like a boy, he was also a coward--like a boy. He admitted it would be a great adventure to die; but it did not seem to occur to him that it would be a great adventure to live. If he had consented to march with the fraternity of his fellow-creatures, he would have found that there were solid experiences and important revelations even in growing up. They are realities which could not possibly have been made real to him without wrecking the real good in his own juvenile point of view. But that is exactly why he ought to have done as he was told. That is the only argument for parental authority. In dealing with childhood, we have a right to command it--because we should kill the childhood if we convinced it.

Now the mistake of Peter Pan is the mistake of the new theory of life. I might call it Peter Pantheism. It is the notion that there is _no_ advantage in striking root. Yet, if you talk intelligently to the nearest tree, the tree will tell you that you are an unobservant ass. There is an advantage in root; and the name of it is fruit. It is not true that the nomad is even freer than the peasant. The Bedouin may rush past on his camel, leaving a whirl of dust; but dust is not free because it flies. Neither is the nomad free because he flies. You cannot grow cabbages on a camel, any more than in a condemned cell. Moreover, I believe camels commonly walk in a comparatively leisurely manner. Anyhow, most merely nomadic creatures do, for it is a great nuisance to “carry one’s house with one.” Gipsies do it; so do snails; but neither of them travel very fast. I inhabit one of the smallest houses that can be conceived by the cultivated classes; but I frankly confess I should be sorry to carry it with me whenever I went out for a walk. It is true that some motorists almost live in their motor-cars. But it gratifies me to state that these motorists generally die in their motor-cars too. They perish, I am pleased to say, in a startling and horrible manner, as a judgment on them for trying to outstrip creatures higher than themselves--such as the gipsy and the snail. But, broadly speaking, a house is a thing that stands still. And a thing that stands still is a thing that strikes root. One of the things that strike root is Christmas: and another is middle-age. The other great pillar of private life besides property is marriage; but I will not deal with it here. Suppose a man has neither wife nor child: suppose he has only a good servant, or only a small garden, or only a small house, or only a small dog. He will still find he has struck unintentional root. He realizes there is something in his own garden that was not even in the Garden of Eden; and therefore is not (I kiss my hand to the Socialists) in Kew Gardens or in Kensington Gardens. He realizes, what Peter Pan could not be made to realize, that a plain human house of one’s own, standing in one’s own backyard, is really quite as romantic as a rather cloudy house at the top of a tree or a highly conspiratorial house underneath the roots of it. But this is because he has explored his own house, which Peter Pan and such discontented children seldom do. All the same, the children ought to think of the Never-Never Land--the world that is outside. But we ought to think of the Ever-Ever Land--the world which is inside, and the world which will last. And that is why, wicked as we are, we know most about Christmas.

Dickens Again

I am sorry that the comic costume festival which was organized for Christmas by one of the chief Dickensian societies has unavoidably fallen through. It is not for me to reproach those traitors who found it impossible to turn up: for I was one of those traitors myself. Whatever character it was that I was expected to appear in--Jingle, I suppose, or possibly Uriah Heep--was, under a final press of business, refused by me. These Dickensian enthusiasts were going to have a Christmas party at Rochester, where they would brew punch and drink punch, and drive coaches and fall off coaches, and do all the proper Pickwickian things. How many of them were ready to make a hole in the ice, to be wheeled about in a wheelbarrow, or to wait all night outside a ladies’ school, the official documents have not informed me. But I would gladly take a moderate part. I could not brew punch for the Pickwick Club; but I could drink it. I could not drive the coach for the Pickwick Club--or, indeed, for any club except the Suicide Club; but I could fall off the coach amid repeated applause and enthusiastic encores. I should be only too proud if it could be said of me, as of Sam’s hyperbolical old gentleman who was tipped into the hyperbolical canal, that “'is 'at was found, but I can’t be certain 'is 'ead was in it.” It seems to me like a euthanasia: more beautiful than the passing of Arthur.

But though the failure of this particular festivity was merely accidental (like my own unfortunate fall off the coach), it is not without its parallel in the present position of Dickensians and Christmas. For the truth is that we simply cannot recreate the Pickwick Club--unless we have a moral basis as sturdy as that of Dickens, and even a religious basis as sturdy as that of Christmas. Men at such a time turn their backs to the solemn thing they are celebrating, as the horses turn their backs to the coach. But they are pulling the coach. And the best of it is this: that so long as the Christmas feast had some kind of assumed and admitted meaning, it was praised, and praised sympathetically, by the great men whom we should call most unsympathetic with it. That Shakespeare and Dickens and Walter Scott should write of it seems quite natural. They were people who would be as welcome at Christmas as Santa Claus. But I do not think many people have ever wished they could ask Milton to eat the Christmas pudding. Nevertheless, it is quite certain that his Christmas ode is not only one of the richest but one of the most human of his masterpieces. I do not think that anyone specially wanting a rollicking article on Christmas would desire, by mere instinct, the literary style of Addison. Yet it is quite certain that the somewhat difficult task of really liking Addison is rendered easier by his account of the Coverley Christmas than by anything else he wrote. I even go so far as to doubt whether one of the little Cratchits (who stuffed their spoons in their mouths lest they should scream for goose) would have removed the spoon to say, “Oh, that Tennyson were here!” Yet certainly Tennyson’s spirits do seem to revive in a more or less real way at the ringing of the Christmas bells in the most melancholy part of _In Memoriam_. These great men were not trying to be merry: some of them, indeed, were trying to be miserable. But the day itself was too strong for them; the time was more than their temperaments; the tradition was alive. The festival was roaring in the streets, so that prigs and even prophets (who are sometimes worse still) were honestly carried off their feet.

The difficulty with Dickens is not any failure in Dickens, nor even in the popularity of Dickens. On the contrary, he has recaptured his creative reputation and fascination far more than any of the other great Victorians. Macaulay, who was really great in his way, is rejected; Cobbett, who was much greater, is forgotten. Dickens is not merely alive: he is risen from the dead. But the difficulty is in the failing under his feet, as it were, of that firm historic platform on which he had performed his Christmas pantomimes: a platform of which he was quite as unconscious as we, most of us, are of the floor we walk about on. The fact is that the fun of Christmas is founded on the seriousness of Christmas; and to pull away the latter support even from under a Christmas clown is to let him down through a trap-door. And even clowns do not like the trap-doors that they do not expect. Thus it is unfortunately true that so glorious a thing as a Pickwick party tends to lose the splendid quality of a mere Mummery, and become that much more dull and conventional thing, a Covent Garden Ball. We are not ourselves living in the proper spirit of Pickwick. We are pretending to be old Dickens characters, when we ought to be new Dickens characters in reality.

The conditions are further complicated by the fact that while reading Dickens may make a man Dickensian, studying Dickens makes him quite the reverse. One might as well expect the aged custodian of a museum of sculpture to look (and dress) like the Apollo Belvedere, as expect the Pickwickian qualities in those literary critics who are attracted by the Dickens fiction as the materials for a biography or the subject of a controversy; as a mass of detail; as a record and a riddle. Those who study such things are a most valuable class of the community, and they do good service to Dickens in their own way. But their type and temperament are not, in the nature of things, likely to be full of the festive magic of their master. Take, for example, these endless discussions about the proper ending of _Edwin Drood_. I thought Mr. William Archer’s contributions to the query some time ago were particularly able and interesting; but I could not, with my hand on my heart, call Mr. William Archer a festive gentleman, or one supremely fitted to follow Mr. Swiveller as Perpetual Grand of the Glorious Apollos. Or again, I see that Sir William Robertson Nicoll has been writing on the same Drood mystery; and I know that his knowledge of Victorian literature is both vast and exact. But I hardly think that a Puritan Scot with a sharp individualistic philosophy would be the right person to fall off the coach. Sir William Nicoll, if I remember right, once forcibly described his individualist philosophy as “firing out the fools.” And certainly the spirit of Dickens could be best described as the delight in firing them in. It is exactly because Christmas is not only a feast of children, but in some sense a feast of fools, that Dickens is in touch with its mystery.

Taffy

I do not understand Welshmen. When we say we do not understand such-and-such a person, we usually mean that he has been making himself a nuisance. He has been bothering us in some way; and the puzzle of his motives and further intentions has become a practical one. I do not mean anything of the kind here: I mean barely what I say. The distant Trojans never injured me. Taffy never came to my house or stole any part of the provisions. On the contrary, historically speaking, I went to Taffy’s house and took away a good deal of what belonged to him. I do not think that Taffy is a thief; I do not even know enough about him to be sure of the preliminary statement that he is a Welshman. I mean, quite simply and ingenuously, that I know nothing about Wales--not even (for certain) that there is such a place. I went, indeed, a few weeks ago to a curious place full of rocks; and the people there _said_ it was Wales. But, then, other people said that these people were very sly, and that you could not believe anything they said. But, then, as I did not believe the second people who did not believe the first people, it all came back to the same comfortable condition as before, which is one of blank and disinterested nescience. It is a condition I am in with regard to a large number of things in this world. I keep my faith for the things of another world. About this world I am a complete agnostic.

But in this particular case of ignorance I rather fancy that I am not alone. I think that the great majority of Englishmen have no real notion of the Welsh type or spirit, whatever it is. They have conceptions of the Scot and the Irishman, false conceptions, but always containing some lines of a true tradition. The Englishman does, so to speak, understand the Scotchman even when he misunderstands him. The Englishman does know what the Irish are, even while he demands indignantly of heaven why they are. The stingy Puritan in plaid trousers is a very crude and unjust version of that queer blend that makes the Scot--the combination of a certain coarseness of fibre with great intellectual keenness for abstract and even mystical things. Still, it is a version; the prose and poetry of the Scot remain in the caricature. The picture of Paddy at Donnybrook leaves out all the subtlety and self-tormenting irony that are mixed up with the pugnacity of the Irish. Still, the Irish are pugnacious; the Englishman has got the leading feature right. He knows that, for all his economics, the Scotchman often has a bee in his bonnet, and he knows that the Irishman generally has a wasp in his--a thing that will sting itself or anyone else merely for fun or glory.

In these cases, the caricature, though stiff, highly coloured, antiquated, and largely false, tells the remains of several truths. But who on earth has ever seen a caricature of a Welshman? In _Punch_ and such papers we never see anything but pictures of a Welshwoman--as if there were no males in that peculiar country with the rocks. Even the woman is only marked as Welsh by wearing an extraordinary costume, rather like that of Cinderella’s supernatural godmother. Without the artist suggesting any costume at all, one would recognize the very silly portraits of Irishmen with long upper lips, in the style of apes. Without any plaid trousers to assist the mind, one could spot the stiff beards and rocky cheek-bones of the Scotchmen of Charles Keene. But if you took away the Welshwoman’s extraordinary hat, there would be nothing whatever to show that she was a Welshwoman. We have not in our minds a Welsh type to make fun of. It is interesting to remember that apparently Shakespeare had.

This state of entire non-understanding (as distinct from misunderstanding) of the Welsh seems to me just now to be not only unique, but important and rather serious. For, unless I am very much mistaken, Wales is going to play some peculiar, and perhaps dominant, part in the developments of our extraordinary time. If the Welsh begin to influence us without our having yet even begun to imagine them, we shall have the whole Irish business over again; the gradual or imperfect understanding of a thing in the process of wrestling with it in the dark. The indications of such a movement in Wales (wherever it is), the suggestion of the growing influence of Welshmen (whoever they may be), is something that comes to us rather by widely distributed happenings and hints than in any theatrical example. Some, however, would call Mr. Lloyd George a theatrical example; he has been called even more extraordinary things. And in that degree the thing is true. Mr. Lloyd George is very much more genuine and sincere and formidable in his capacity as leader of the little Welsh nation than he is in any of the other capacities in which he is foolishly praised and ridiculously reviled. But to anyone who really has an eye for history in action, the smallest strike secretary in a Welsh railway or colliery bulks much bigger in the present picture than Mr. Lloyd George. And it has been in Wales that many of the most dramatic and effective labour revolts have happened: above all it was in Wales that they presented peculiar features of their own, bad or good, which marked them out from the whole temper and habit of England in recent times. The modern theory of animals was challenged in the episode of the ponies in the mines. The modern theory of Jews was challenged in the violent Anti-Semite riots of the last few weeks. Things fierce and unfamiliar, things lost since the Middle Ages, are coming upon us out of the West.

As the curious incident of the quarrels between Welshmen and Jews has been mentioned, I will take the opportunity here of correcting a curious mistake that clings to the minds of numbers of my correspondents. There is in particular a gloomy gentleman in America who keeps on asking me how my Anti-Semite prejudice is getting on, and generally displaying a curiosity about how many Hebrew teeth I have pulled out this week, and how often a Pogrom is held in front of my house. He appears to base it all on some statement of mine that Jews were tyrants and traitors. Upon this basis his indignation is eloquent, lengthy and (in my opinion) just. The only weakness affecting this superstructure is the curious detail that I never did say that Jews were tyrants and traitors. I said that a particular kind of Jew tended to be a tyrant and another particular kind of Jew tended to be a traitor. I say it again. Patent facts of this kind are permitted in the criticism of every other nation on the planet: it is not counted illiberal to say that a certain kind of Frenchman tends to be sensual. It is as plain as a pikestaff that the Parisian tradition of life and letters has a marked element of sensuality. It is also as plain as a pikestaff that those who are creditors will always have a temptation to be tyrants, and that those who are cosmopolitans will always have a temptation to be spies. This has nothing to do with alleging that the majority of any people falls into its typical temptations. In this respect I should imagine that Jews varied in their moral proportions as much as the rest of mankind. Rehoboam was a tyrant; Jehoshaphat was not. In what is perhaps the most celebrated collection of Jews in human history, the proportion of traitors was one in twelve. But I cannot see why the tyrants should not be called tyrants and the traitors traitors; why Rehoboam should not cause a rebellion or Judas become an object of dislike, merely because they happen to be members of a race persecuted for other reasons and on other occasions. Those are my views on Jews. They are more reasonable than those of the people that wreck their shops; and much more reasonable than those of the people who justify them on all occasions.

“Ego et Shavius Meus”

Accident has cut me off this week from many current publications; and left me much to my own devices. It is therefore my immutable purpose to write an article about myself, under the thin pretence of noticing a book about Mr. Bernard Shaw.

This is all the more fun because it is exactly what Mr. Bernard Shaw would do himself; nor should I blame him. I like Mr. Shaw’s type of Egoism; because, if he talks big, it is at least about big things; things bound to be bigger than himself.

I revolt, not against the loud egoist, but the gentle egoist; who talks tenderly of trifles; who says, “A sunbeam gilds the amber of my cigarette-holder; I find I cannot live without a cigarette-holder.” I resist this arrogance simply because it is more arrogant. For even so complete a fool cannot really suppose we are interested in his cigarette-holder; and therefore must suppose that we are interested in him. But I defend a dogmatic egoist precisely because he deals in dogmas.

The Apostles’ Creed is not regarded as a pose of foppish vanity; yet the word “I” comes before even the word “God.” The believer comes first; but he is soon dwarfed by his beliefs, swallowed in the creative whirlwind and the trumpets of the resurrection. And if a man says he believes in the Superman or the Socialist State, I think him equally modest; only not so sensible.

Mr. Herbert Skimpole’s book, _Bernard Shaw: the Man and His Work_, contains many suggestive and valuable things to which I cannot do justice, including allusions to myself mostly only too flattering, and in one case both amusing and mystifying. The passage suggests that all the active figures in my idle fictions are made as fat as I am; though I cannot recall that any of them are fat at all; except a semi-supernatural monster in a nightmare called _The Man Who Was Thursday_.

Let there be no alarm, however, that I shall talk about such nightmares, or any of my own tales; like Shaw, I am egoistic about things that matter. Mr. Skimpole says that while Shaw and I agree that the world should be adapted to the man, “Chesterton includes our present institutions among the parts of a man’s soul which cannot be altered.” Now there is here a potential mistake, which I will not apologize for taking more seriously than any fancy about the figures in my very amateurish romances.