Part 11

I need not say I do not mind being called fat; for deprived of that jest, I should be almost a serious writer. I do not even mind being supposed to mind being called fat. But being supposed to be contented, and contented with the present institutions of modern society, is a mortal slander I will not take from any man.

Whatever are the institutions I defend, they are not primarily those of the present. They have been attempted in the past; and I hope they may be achieved in the future; but they are not present, but conspicuous by their absence. Mr. Skimpole truly says that I defend domesticity and piety and patriotism, but these are not the typical institutions of to-day.

The typical institutions of to-day are a Divorce Court cutting up families with the speed of a sausage machine; a Science which preaches the destiny without the divinity of Calvinism; and a Finance that crosses all frontiers with the same enlightened indifference that is shown by cholera.

These are the institutions of the instant, and even Mr. Skimpole has realized them as those of the immediate future. In a somewhat innocent passage he says that “it is of no use for Shaw to point out” to me the hope of a cosmopolitan future; “that Internationalism, social class-feeling, and Imperialism all point the same way he refuses to see.”

It is indeed useless for Shaw to point out to me that I should follow the lead of these things; since I happen to detest Imperialism, disbelieve in Internationalism and distrust “social class-feeling,” so far as I know what it means. I am well aware that an Imperial Chancellor in Berlin, an international money-lender in Johannesburg, and an anarchist spy in Petrograd, are “all pointing the same way”; and that is why I feel pretty safe in going the other.

I warmly apologize to Mr. Skimpole for writing a personal explanation instead of a review of his book, which contains many things well worth writing and reviewing; notably the shrewd remark about Shaw’s style; in which what is a paradox in spirit is seldom an epigram in form. It takes our breath away rather by taking itself for granted than by defining itself like a defiance. But I fancy Mr. Skimpole will sympathize with me if I am primarily concerned with his convictions, as he is with mine, and as we both are with Shaw’s.

And he has gone to the vital point in emphasizing this matter of the things permanent in man. When I say that religion and marriage and local loyalty are permanent in humanity, I mean that they recur when humanity is most human; and only comparatively decline when society is comparatively inhuman.

They have declined in the modern world. They may return through the war; but anyhow, where we have the small farm and the free man and the fighting spirit, there we shall have the salute to the soil and the roof and to the altar.

To take a more casual case: I believe that when men are happy, they sing; not only at the piano but at the plough, or at least in the intervals of ploughing; at their work and in their walks abroad. I am well aware that modern men do not sing in the street very much. I am well aware that cosmopolitan money-lenders never sing, but die with all their music in them. I know that the Song of the Happy Meat-Contractor is not one of “our present institutions.”

I know that one can seldom come at dawn upon some solitary London banker carolling more sweetly than the lark; and even his clerks do not often sing in chorus over their ledgers. But I still think it is more human to sing than not to sing; and that, being more human, it is more permanent in humanity.

Some righteous revolution will teach the bankers and contractors that little birds who can sing and won’t sing must be made to sing--or at any rate made to squeal. In the interlude, the instinct of song takes refuge in the lesser thing called poetry, or even prose; and to-morrow the fever of personal sincerity may have passed; and I shall return, with a lowly air, to literature.

The Plan for a New Universe

There is one theory of the Origin of Species which I have never seen suggested. Probably this is because I have never read the numberless and voluminous works in which it has been suggested. For I have read much madder things, and nothing mad is likely to have been missed by the modern mind. But since it shocked the respectability of agnostics to suggest that all creatures had been made different by God, why did nobody suggest that they had been made different by Man? Why not trace the vast variety of animals as we can really trace the vast variety of dogs? The dog is already almost a world in himself, with all the appearance of distinct orders and types. A St. Bernard approaches the size and surpasses the legendary virtues of a lion; while there is a sort of Pekinese which a man might almost tread on as a somewhat unpleasing insect. Yet all this world of evolution has presumably had Man for its god. Suppose our sphere in space has itself been the Island of Dr. Moreau. Suppose Man had some prehistoric civilization so colossal and complete that all beasts were beasts of burden, or all animals were domestic animals; that all rabbits were pet rabbits or all fleas performing fleas. Suppose the tame bird came first, and what we know as the wild bird afterwards. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in one of his early anti-domestic diatribes, compared a woman in the home to a parrot in the cage, saying that mere custom made us think the connexion natural. The answer, it has always seemed to me, is strangely obvious. It is surely plain that the housewife is not the bird in the cage, but the bird in the nest. But if, in that age of wild sceptics, anyone had wished to outdo Mr. Shaw in paradox, he could have done it brilliantly by this hypothesis that the colours of a parrot were actually produced in a cage; and that an exiled bird only built himself a rude den of sticks and mud as an outlaw does when driven from his home. Suppose, in short, that Man has not only been a dog-fancier, but a wolf-fancier and a hyena-fancier. Suppose he really fancied a rhinoceros. Suppose some prehistoric squire kept a stud of giraffes; or his money-lender got a peerage on the plea that he had improved the breed of crocodiles. Then we have only to suppose this universal Zoo broken up like the Roman Empire; and all we see is its neglect and riot. The tiger is a stray cat; a specially large and handsome cat who took the prize (and the prize-giver) and escaped to the jungle. A whale was some sort of hornless cow sent into the sea like a Newfoundland dog, who suddenly refused to come back again. This thesis accounts for the comparative rapidity of the differentiation, over which the geologists fight with the biologists. It accounts rationalistically for those evidences of a creative purpose which are so distressing to a refined mind. It accounts for the camel, who seems always to have been in captivity; and accounting for a camel is something. Above all, it accounts for that very vivid impression of something in various species at once outrageous and exact. Jefferies found in the farcical outlines of fish or bird the notion that they must have been produced without design. To me this sounds like saying that the caricatures of Max Beerbohm must have been produced without design. I could as easily believe, so far as this mere æsthetic impression goes, that the face on a gargoyle was merely moulded by the pouring rain. Artistically, the sun-fish or the hornbill do not look in the least like accidents; but it might be maintained that they look like fashions. There are some tropical birds and fruits that really have the cut and colours of novelties in a shop window. We might fancy that an elephant was designed in the same taste as Babylonian architecture; or the leopard and the tiger to match the tapestries of the East. There is probably somewhere a bird as sinister and terrifying as a top-hat; and in some luxuriant jungle a plant as preposterous as a pair of trousers. The monsters may be only antiquated fashion-plates. For this is one of the numberless neglected fallacies in the clotted folly of Eugenics. Even if we could in the abstract breed humanity well, there would be a flutter of modes and crazes about what was considered well-bred. The dog is bred with design; but surely not always with discretion. The dachshund appears to have been pulled out on the rack of some demoniac vivisectionist; and somebody seems to have cut off the bull-dog’s nose, most emphatically to spite his face. On the analogy of the things we do breed, the Eugenist may be expected to produce a brood of hunchbacks or a pure race of Albinos.

It is, I hope, unnecessary to remark that I do not believe in this theory; but there have been people who might well have believed in it. There were people who could believe in Swinburne’s sentiment, “Glory to Man in the highest; for Man is the master of things”; and it would surely have completed this consciousness in the poet if he could have thought that the birds of Putney Heath, where he walked, or the fishes in the sea, where he was so fond of swimming, were doing tricks taught to them as to performing dogs. Suppose that such a fancy had fitted in with one of the humanitarian religions of that time, how far would it have satisfied what was often called the religious sentiment? It would not have satisfied any religious sentiment, not even Swinburne’s. He would have cared as little as Shelley to claim the birds when he could not claim the sky. He certainly would have been much annoyed with the notion of loving the fishes, if he were not allowed to go on loving the sea. And though he poisoned paganism with pessimism, a thing not only more false but more frivolous, though he tried to love the sea as a wanton or admire the sky as a tyrant, though this morbidity weakened his love of Nature not only as compared with Virgil or Dante, but as compared with Wordsworth or Whitman, yet he was like every poet elemental, and what he loved were the elementary things. And this is an essential of any poetry and any religion. It must appeal to the origins and deal with the first things, however much or little it may say about them. It must be at home in the homeless void, before the first star was made. The one thing every man knows about the unknowable is that it is the Indispensable.

Now, if any reader thinks that the scientific heresy I sketched above is too irrational for moderns to have held, I have the pleasure of informing him that moderns are now about to announce, or have already announced, a new heresy somewhat analogous but much less rationalistic and much less rational. There is a new religion; that is a new fault being found with the old religion. There is a new plan for a new universe, which may be expected to last for many a long month to come. It is the view that seems to have satisfied Mr. Wells, or, at any rate, Mr. Britling. It is the view which has been more than once suggested by Mr. Shaw, and is repeated in the skeleton of certain lectures he is delivering. It is much more supernatural and even superstitious than my imaginary thesis; for instead of giving to man more of the powers of God, it arbitrarily imagines a God and then limits him with the impotence of man. He is not limited, as in the theologies, by his own reason or justice or desire for the freedom of man. He is limited by unreason and injustice and the impossibility of freedom even for himself. But I do not make this note upon the new development with any intention of discussing it thoroughly in its theological aspect; though there is one aspect of that aspect which may respectfully be called amusing. When I was a boy, Christianity was blamed by the freethinkers for its anthropomorphic demigod, substituted by savages for the Unknown God who made all things. Now Christianity is blamed for the flat contrary; because its God is unknown and not anthropomorphic enough. Thirty years ago we only needed the First Person of the Trinity; and thirty years later we have discovered that we only need the Second. This sort of fashion-plate philosophy will no doubt go on as usual. In a few decades we may be told that our fathers were profoundly right when they believed in the Archangel Gabriel, but made an inexplicable mistake when they believed in the Archangel Raphael. We shall learn that the Seraphim are an exploded superstition, but the Cherubim a most valuable and novel discovery. And as my note is not concerned with the theological, neither is it directly concerned with the purely logical side of it. Here again, it seems obvious that all the doubts which legitimately attach to the idea of a progressive humanity are absolutely fatal to the idea of a progressive divinity. A man may be progressing towards God; but what is a God progressing towards? And how does he know which of two developments in consciousness is the better (_e.g._, an imaginative compassion or an imaginative cruelty) if there be no aboriginal standard in his own nature? I am here only concerned to note the failure of this fancy where it is parallel to the failure of the fancy I mentioned first. And it is the weakness which would instantly be discovered in both of them, not only by every poet but by every child. It is that unless the sky is beautiful, nothing is beautiful. Unless the background of all things is good, it is no substitute to make the foreground better: it may be right to do so for other reasons, but not for the reason that is the root of religion. Materialism says the universe is mindless; and faith says it is ruled by the highest mind. Neither will be satisfied with the new progressive creed, which declares hopefully that the universe is half-witted.

George Wyndham ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I believe more and more that there are no trivialities but only truths neglected; but the things I myself neglect accumulate in mountains. I have made a note of one of them found in turning over the recent files of the _Nation_. Elsewhere was a reminder about a book I had long admired and enjoyed, but which had been crowded out of my mind by less pleasant things; the book of recollections about George Wyndham, recently written by Mr. Charles Gatty and published by Mr. Murray.[1] Even now I cannot do justice to the book; but I know Mr. Gatty will approve of my saying a word to correct an injustice to the subject of the book.

[Footnote 1: _George Wyndham: Recognita_, by C. T. Gatty. Murray. 7s. 6d. net.]

Some time ago the _Nation_ dismissed Mr. Gatty’s volume, not with disrespect, but with a certain distance and indifference evidently founded on a very mistaken idea. It implied that Wyndham was after all an intellectual aristocrat, whose culture was that of a clique, and who did not test it enough in popular and practical politics. The point is interesting; chiefly because it is the precise reverse of the truth. If anything could narrow a man like Wyndham, it was being political like the _Nation_; what broadened him to a universal brotherhood was getting far from politics--like the nation. His private life was much larger than his public life; though that in turn was larger than most public lives in the parliamentary decline. Being a politician, he had to be a parliamentarian; and being a parliamentarian, he had to be an oligarch. In so far as he did hold the aristocratic theory, it was exactly that aristocratic theory that forced him into political practice. He knew well enough, I think, that the English parliament is an aristocracy. He took the high ground of the responsibility of privilege; but he was far too sincere to deny that it was privilege. He said to a friend of mine, who thus lamented his laborious parliamentary botherations, “You see, I was born paid.” It was the aristocracy the _Nation_ reproves that necessitated the parliamentarism the _Nation_ desires or demands. Personally, I should not desire either; and I think the real Wyndham was in a larger world outside both. It was precisely where he was most domestic that he was most democratic. He was a poet among poets exactly as he might have been a pedestrian among pedestrians or, as he would have preferred to put it, a tramp among tramps. The sympathy with tramps might be taken literally; for I remember him defending the gipsies, when a more modern spirit wanted them taught the meaning of progress by being moved on by the police. He may have been right to work in cabinets and committees; but it was there, if anywhere, that he was in a clique. He may have been right not to follow his tastes, but it was his tastes that were popular and what many cliques would call vulgar. He may have been right not to be one of the idle rich, but he might have been even more superior to the limits of the rich, if he had been idler.

The beauty of Mr. Gatty’s book is that it is a brilliant scrap-book, the very variegated nature of which expresses this almost vagabond liberality. Even when it merely notes down such things as single lines of Shakespeare over which Wyndham lingered, or reproduces corners of carving or painting which arrested his eye, the method seems to me to work rightly; it seems somehow natural to talk of every other subject besides the subject himself; as he was always ready to talk of every other subject. And this aspect, by itself, accentuates the feeling that his holidays were his most useful days. In this mood one may well wish that he had never been near what he himself called the cesspool of politics; and one might well accept the _Nation’s_ suggestion of his aloofness from its own favourite parliamentary business with a somewhat dry assent. Wyndham certainly had little to do with the internal constructive legislation praised in progressive papers. He can claim none of the glory of the great social reforms of the period just before the War. He is not responsible for the permission to drag away a poor man’s child as a raving maniac, if his teacher thinks he is a little too stupid to learn, or his teacher is a little too stupid to teach him. He has not the honour of having abolished the Habeas Corpus Act, in order to allow amateur criminologists to keep a tramp in prison until they have invented a science of criminology. He did not establish the Labour Exchanges, and probably did not want to establish them, any more than the Labour Exchanges vividly described in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. It was not he who created by statute a servant class, of men made to spend their own wages on doctors they might never want, instead of on tools or tram-tickets they urgently wanted. He was largely detached from all this; and when reading a real record like Mr. Gatty’s one is moved to wish that he had been even more detached from it. Considering the liberty of his philosophical friendships, one respects but regrets the loyalty of his political friendships; and is sorry that common sense must be sacrificed to practical politics.

But when a book like Mr. Gatty’s has moved a reviewer to this mood of mere regret for a poet wasted in politics, there returns upon him after all one answer which is itself unanswerable. Judged by one ultimate test, he was after all right to remain in politics; even in the last putrefaction of parliamentary politics. At the price of nobody knows what pain and patience and contempt and concessions, he alone among modern politicians did leave not merely a name but a thing, that will remain after him as a scientific engine or a geographical discovery remains. He achieved a work which has changed the whole destiny of Western Europe; the resurrection of Ireland. There he established the free peasant; a work organically different from all the modern reforms that are merely imposed, whether right or wrong, whether servile or socialist. It is the difference between planting a tree and building a tower; once planted, the tree lives by its own life. He and his admirers, myself among the number, might well be content to contemplate such a work without afterthoughts; if there were not laid upon us like a load of memories, and almost like a living chain, the love of England.

For England, alas! has made to-day the worst possible compromise between aristocracy and democracy. It has kept the aristocracy and lost the aristocrats. The country is still as much ruled by squires, but not so much by country gentlemen; and the reform of the House of Lords seems to mean eliminating gentlemen and carefully preserving noblemen. It is as if there were a complaint of martial law; and it were met by keeping the whole machinery of militarism, but giving the arbitrary power to spies instead of soldiers. Or it is as if reactionaries erected a despotism, and then called themselves reformers because they did not care what dirty fellow was despot. But remote as Wyndham was from the sham gentry of the twentieth century, it would also be an error merely to merge him with the genuine gentry of the eighteenth. It would be to mark the type so as to miss the man. What distinguished him, as an individual, from good and bad squires, was something far older than squirarchy; the true sense of the squire expectant, eager to spring into the saddle of knighthood. His courage was far less static than that of a country gentleman. It was the thing in which a philologist might recognize that “courage” really means rushing; or from which a professor will probably some day prove that courage really means running away. He had that spiritual ambition which is itself the ascending flame of humility; and which has been wanting to the English since the squire grew greater than the knight. He seemed to await an adventure that never quite came to him on earth; and his life and death were swift, as if he were struck by lightning as with an accolade, or had won spurs that were wings upon the wind.

Four Stupidities ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I have just seen a newspaper paragraph which, whether it refers to a fact or merely a suggestion, seems to me to go down pretty well into that depth of mindlessness which calls itself the modern mind. It is said that influence is being brought to bear on the American Government to induce them to break a bottle of water instead of a bottle of champagne when they christen a battleship. Now it is not easy to deal adequately with the rich stupidity of that. It is about five follies thick, stupidity obscuring stupidity until one reader can hardly see more than one of the jokes at a time. There is something almost fascinating in the idea of trying to disentangle them.

First Stupidity. Note the notion that there is something so intrinsically and supernaturally evil about an intoxicant that the pure temperance man will not touch it even when it cannot intoxicate anybody. It is as if a man were to insist on having a teetotal boot-polish or a teetotal printing-ink. A cup of tea, or even of hot milk, becomes diabolic if you have boiled the kettle with methylated spirit. Eau-de-Cologne is a blackguard indulgence, though you use it only to scent your handkerchief. A liquor containing alcohol (such as ginger-beer) is simply and superstitiously an accursed thing, which is not only not to be touched with the lips, but not to be touched with the hands. After this case, the more intemperate “Temperance” people cannot pretend any longer that their proposal is merely a social reform; it is obviously and literally a mystical taboo. I do not see what right such people have to mock at the savage’s fear of a fetish, still less at the peasant’s respect for the relic of a saint. There might surely be such a thing as holy water, if it be so certain that there is such a thing as unholy water.