Part 12

Second Stupidity. The extraordinary confusion by which it becomes not only wicked to possess wine (though you never drink it), but becomes wicked even to destroy it. This goes, I think, much further than this queer materialist madness has yet gone. If a champagne bottle is smashed to smithereens over the prow of a ship, I should have thought the most logical teetotaller would merely have been glad that there was one champagne bottle less in the world. As he would probably not be a person with any special sympathy with the old ceremonials of revelry, that is the only possible way in which I can imagine the thing affecting him. We in England used to think we could trace a slight streak of fanaticism in good Mrs. Carrie Nation, who used to go about breaking other people’s wine and spirit bottles with her little hatchet. But now it would appear that Mrs. Carrie Nation was a wobbler, one weakly compromising with the fiend of fermented drink, perhaps nobbled by the Liquor Trade--or, worse still, verging on the loathly state of a moderate drinker. She ought to have been summoned before a tribunal of these New Teetotallers and condemned for ever having gone near enough to a bottle to touch it, even with a hatchet; condemned for having so much as hung about the hellish tavern, where the very fumes of its fiery poisons might have mounted to her head. The principle is an interesting one, and might be extended to many cases. Thus, when the common hangman burned a book of treason or heresy, he may be supposed to have been infected by the intellectual errors it contained. Thus when a censor blacks out a paragraph in a newspaper, he may be held to have sinned even in looking to see where the paragraph was. This, apparently, is the new barbaric fancy: that certain vegetable drinks are so demonic that we not only are wrong when we drink them, but are wrong when we do our best to render them undrinkable.

Third Stupidity. The curious deadness of the mind in such men is illustrated at the next stage; that of clinging convulsively to a mere form; and not only not knowing, but not so much as wondering--first, whether the idea is worth preserving; and, secondly, whether they are preserving it. The mark of this dead and broken traditionalism is always two-fold. It can be seen in these two facts: that men alter a thing as if it had no sense in it; and yet they never have the sense to abolish what is for them a senseless thing. I can see much dignity in absolute austerity and the refusal of symbol; I can see some dignity even in dingy utilitarianism and the refusal of art. I could respect the perfect plainness of an early Quaker like Penn when he would not take his hat off in the palace, because it was an idle form. I do not despise him because he came afterwards (I believe) to see that keeping your hat on is just as much of a form as taking it off; and took off his hat like other people. But if Penn had strictly confined himself, say, to taking off his hatband with laborious care, every time he entered the Royal presence, I should say that he had lost both his Quakerism and his sociability. He would have lost the independence that refuses recognition to the world, and he would not have gained the disputable substitute of good manners. Similarly, I could respect (though I could not envy) the flinty old Manchester manufacturers who regarded all expenditure on arms, especially on drums, flags, or trumpets, as so much babyish waste of money. But I should not even have respected them if they had proposed that the British Army should fly the White Flag in every battle because it was cheaper than a coloured one. Why have a flag at all, if it comes to that? Or, again, I can understand the unconverted Scrooge with his bowl of gruel; and I like the converted Scrooge with his bowl of punch. But if Scrooge had insisted every Christmas on having a punch-bowl with no punch in it, I should not understand at all.

Fourth Stupidity. Besides this general deadness, there is a strange special deadness to the human sentiment behind that special sort of ceremony. Don’t express the sentiment if you think it a silly sentiment; but don’t so express it as to prove that you haven’t got it. That sentiment is the ancient sentiment of sacrifice. The thing sacrificed may be anything: wine, as on the battleship; gold, as when the Doge threw his ring into the sea; an ox or a sheep, as among the ancient pagans; and very occasionally, when tribes savage or civilized are seized with Satanist panic, a man. But it must be something _valuable_, or the particular thrill, wholesome or unwholesome, is not obtained. It was generally the best sheep or the best ox; and in the rare cases of human sacrifice, generally somebody like the King’s daughter. Like all human appetites, it is both good and evil; it has many roots, a gesture of generosity, an appeal to the unknown, a guarantee against arrogance, a dim idea of not taking all one’s advantage from fortune: but they all depend on the _value_, and these men evidently understand none of them, when they fill the bottle with water.

On Historical Novels ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It is very easy, of course, to smile at such schoolboy fiction as the novels of Mr. Henty, in which the same very English and modern young gentleman from Rugby or Harrow turns up again and again as a Young Greek, a Young Carthaginian, a Young Scandinavian, a Young Gaul, a Young Visigoth, a Young Ancient Briton, and almost everything short of a Young Negro. But Mr. Henty had the merits of his industry and fecundity; and one of them was that he did take a boy’s imagination into many and varied parts of human history, however conventional the figure he followed through them might be. The English boy will not find out as much about the soul of Carthage from the _Young Carthaginian_ as a lover of letters may from _Salammbô_; but at least he will know that Carthage was conquered--and that is (for various reasons) a good thing for English people to know. And since the Henty period our historical novels have fallen with terrible sameness into two or three grooves. We might almost say that a man is not allowed to write an historical novel except about four different historical periods, about six different historical characters; and even about them he is not allowed to take any view except that taken by the other romances on the same subject. Now, considering the countless millions of marvellous, amusing, unique, and picturesque things that have thronged on top of each other through all our wonderful three thousand years of European history, this state of affairs is as Byzantine and benighted as if no landscape painter ever painted anything but a larch tree, or as if none of our sculptors could model anything except the left leg.

You may write a novel about the time of Henry of Navarre--in fact, it might almost be said that you must write a novel about the time of Henry of Navarre. If you go in for writing historical novels at all, somebody--the publisher or the office-boy--makes you do this. In this novel, Huguenots must be gallant gentlemen, with a touch of bluffness; Catholics must also be gallant gentlemen, with a touch of slyness. All important political questions must be settled by duels fought with long rapiers at wayside inns. You must stick to one side of the quarrel; but even in that you must not bring any of the charges that a person of the period might really have brought. For instance, the Court must be perpetually engaged in plotting to stab the bluff Huguenot: but you must not insist that the Huguenot was a Puritan, and his objection to the Court would largely be that it was a Renaissance Court. You must not, however delicately, bring in that presence of florid pagan sensuality and princely indecorum which we feel in Brantome or the Tales of the Queen of Navarre. The Latins must stick to assassination. There must be no people to speak of in Paris, though it was the people of Paris who, for good or evil, changed the whole course of the history. Men like Sully may be introduced; but their talents must be entirely occupied in serving the Prince in his personal love-affairs and in his duels in inns. Above all, slap in the very middle of the Wars of Religion, nobody must seem to have any clear idea of what his own religion is about. You may also write a novel about the time of Richelieu. But it must be governed by the same principles. Richelieu must be a sinister yet magnanimous enemy of the hero. He must try to kill the hero, and unaccountably fail. At this stage of the writing of historical novels, it is important to be an imitator of Dumas. There are critics who maintain that Dumas was largely written by imitators of Dumas. This is an exaggeration; but, at the worst, they were good imitators. There are chapters in the triple tale of the Musketeers of which I can only say that, if anyone but he wrote them, he could hire hearts and heads as well as hands. But my warning to the young writer of entirely useless historical novels is this: He must not go outside France, or treat that country otherwise than as an insulated elfland. He must not carry off General Monk in a box. Think what a frightful mistake would have been made--from the English Puritan point of view--if d’Artagnan had carried off General Cromwell by mistake! All this happened in the time of Mazarin and not Richelieu, but the principle will be found reliable. The principle is that neither Richelieu nor anybody else should show the faintest interest in the future of France.

You may write a novel about the French Revolution. You may do it on your head, as the jolly habitual criminals say. The essential principles of this sort of novel are: (1) That the populace of Paris from 1790 to 1794 never had any meals, nor even sat down in a café. They stood about in the street all night and all day, sufficiently sustained by the sight of Blood, especially Blue Blood. (2) All power during the Terror was in the hands of the public executioner and of Robespierre; and these persons were subject to abrupt changes of mind, and frequently redeemed their habit of killing people for no apparent reason by letting them off at the last moment, for no apparent reason either. (3) Aristocrats are of two kinds--the very wicked and the entirely blameless; and both are invariably good-looking. Both also appear rather to prefer being guillotined. (4) Such things as the invasion of France, the idea of a Republic, the influence of Rousseau, the nearness of national bankruptcy, the work of Carnot with the armies, the policy of Pitt, the policy of Austria, the ineradicable habit of protecting one’s property against foreigners, and the presence of persons carrying guns at the Battle of Valmy--all these things had nothing to do with the French Revolution, and should be omitted.

Now, considering the number of picturesque struggles there have been in the world, it seems to me that these subjects might be given a rest. There has been next to nothing written, for instance, about the other Wars of Religion, those that accompanied the construction of Catholic Europe, rather than its breaking up. There was the Iconoclast invasion of Italy, which ends with the entrance of Charlemagne. There has been next to nothing written about riots other than the Parisian; the many riots of Edinburgh, especially of those few days when it was almost as dangerous to be a doctor as to be a mad dog. Another advantage would be that, coming fresh to his historical problem, the writer might even read a little history.

On Monsters ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I once saw in the newspapers this paragraph, of which I made a note:

“LEPRECHAUN” CAUGHT

Great excitement has been caused in Mullingar, in the west of Ireland, by the report that the supposed “Leprechaun,” which several children stated they had seen at Killough, near Delvin, during the past two months, was captured. Two policemen found a creature of dwarfish proportions in a wood near the town, and brought the little man to Mullingar Workhouse, where he is now an inmate. He eats greedily, but all attempts to interview him have failed, his only reply being a peculiar sound between a growl and a squeal. The inmates regard him with interest mixed with awe.

This seems like the beginning of an important era of research; it seems as if the world of experiments had at last touched the world of reality. It is as if one read: “Great excitement has been caused in Rotten Row, in the west of London, by the fact that the centaur, previously seen by several colonels and young ladies, has at last been stopped in his lawless gallop.” Or it is as if one saw in a newspaper: “Slight perturbation has been caused at the west end of Margate by the capture of a mermaid,” or “A daring fowler, climbing the crags of the Black Mountains for a nest of eagles, found, somewhat unexpectedly, that it was a nest of angels.” It is wonderful to have the calm admission in cold print of such links between the human world and other worlds. It is interesting to know that they took the Leprechaun to a workhouse. It settles, and settles with a very sound instinct, the claim of humanity in such sublime curiosities. If a centaur were really found in Rotten Row, would they take him to a workhouse or to a stable? If a mermaid were really fished up at Margate, would they take her to a workhouse or to an aquarium? If people caught an angel unawares, would they put the angel in a workhouse? Or in an aviary?

The idea of the Missing Link was not at all new with Darwin; it was not invented merely by those vague but imaginative minor poets to whom we owe most of our ideas about evolution. Men had always played about with the idea of a possible link between human and bestial life; and the very existence--or, if you will, the very non-existence--of the centaur or the mermaid proves it. All the mythologies had dreamed of a half-human monster. The only objection to the centaur and the mermaid was that they could not be found. In every other respect their merits were of the most solid sort. So it is with the Darwinian ideal of a link between man and the brutes. There is no objection to it except that there is no evidence for it. The only objection to the Missing Link is that he is apparently fabulous, like the centaur and the mermaid, and all the other images under which man has imagined a bridge between himself and brutality. In short, the only objection to the Missing Link is that he is missing.

But there is also another very elementary difference. The Greeks and the Mediævals invented monstrosities. But they treated them as monstrosities--that is, they treated them as exceptions. They did not deduce any law from such lawless things as the centaur or the merman, the griffin or the hippogriff. But modern people did try to make a law out of the Missing Link. They made him a lawgiver, though they were hunting for him like a criminal. They built on the foundation of him before he was found. They made this unknown monster, the mixture of the man and ape, the founder of society and the accepted father of mankind. The ancients had a fancy that there was a mongrel of horse and man, a mongrel of fish and man. But they did not make it the father of anything; they did not ask the mad mongrel to breed. The ancients did not draw up a system of ethics based upon the centaur, showing how man in a civilized society must take care of his hands, but must not wholly forget his hooves. They never reminded woman that, although she had the golden hair of a goddess, she had the tail of a fish. But the moderns did talk to man as if he were the Missing Link; they did remind him that he must allow for apish imbecility and bestial tricks. The moderns did tell the woman that she was half a brute, for all her beauty; you can find the thing said again and again in Schopenhauer and other prophets of the modern spirit. That is the real difference between the two monsters. The Missing Link is still missing and so is the merman. On the top of all this we have the Leprechaun, apparently an actual monster at present in the charge of the police. It is unnecessary to say that numbers of learned people have proved again and again that it could not exist. It is equally unnecessary to say that numbers of unlearned people--children, mothers of children, workers, common people who grow corn or catch fish--had seen them existing. Almost every other simple type of our working population had seen a Leprechaun. A fisherman had seen a Leprechaun. A farmer had seen a Leprechaun. Even a postman had probably seen one. But there was one simple son of the people whose path had never before been crossed by the prodigy. Never until then had a policeman seen a Leprechaun. It was only a question of whether the monster should take the policeman away with him into Elfland (where such a policeman as he would certainly have been fettered by the fatal love of the fairy queen), or whether the policeman should take away the monster to the police-station. The forces of this earth prevailed; the constable captured the elf, instead of the elf capturing the constable. The officer took him to the workhouse, and opened a new epoch in the study of tradition and folk-lore.

What will the modern world do if it finds (as very likely it will) that the wildest fables have had a basis in fact; that there are creatures of the border land, that there are oddities on the fringe of fixed laws, that there are things so unnatural as easily to be called preternatural? I do not know what the modern world will do about these things; I only know what I hope. I hope the modern world will be as sane about these things as the mediæval world was about them. Because I believe that an ogre can have two heads, that is no reason why I should lose the only head that I have. Because the mediæval man thought that some man had the head of a dog, that was no reason why he himself should have the head of a donkey. The mediæval man was never essentially weak or stupid about any of his beliefs, however unfounded they were. He did not lack judgment; he only lacked the opportunities of judgment. He had superstitions; but he was not superstitious about them. He was wrong about Africa; but then, to do him justice, he did not care whether he was right. He had got that particular thing which some modern people call “the love of truth,” but which is really simply the power of taking one’s own mistakes seriously. He thought that ordinary men were a serious matter; as they are. He thought that extraordinary men were a fantastic fairy-tale; and he thought (very rightly) that the fairy-tale was all the more fantastic if it was true. He did not let dog-faced men affect his conception of mankind; he regarded them as a joke, the best as a practical joke. But in our time, I am sorry to say, we have seen some signs of the possibility that such aberrations or monstrosities as spiritual science may discover will be taken as real tests of, or keys to, the human lot. For instance, the psychological phenomenon called “dual personality” is certainly a thing so extraordinary that any old-fashioned rationalist or agnostic would simply have called it a miracle and disbelieved it. But nowadays those who do believe it will not treat it as a miracle--that is, as an exception. They try to make deductions from it, theories about identity and metempsychosis and psychical evolution, and God knows what. If it is true that one particular body has two souls, it is a joke, as if it had two noses. It must not be permitted to upset the actualities of our human happiness. If some one says, “Jones blew his nose,” and Jones is of so peculiar a formation that one may with logical propriety ask, “Which nose?” that is no reason why the ordinary formula should lose its ordinary human utility. This is, I think, one of the most real dangers that lie in front of the civilization that has just discovered the Leprechaun. We are going to find all the gods and fairies all over again, all the spiritual hybrids and all the jests of eternity. But we are not going to find them, as the pagans found them, in our youth, in an atmosphere in which gods can be jested with or giants slapped on the back. We are going to find them, in the old age of our society, in a mood dangerously morbid, in a spirit only too ready to take the exception instead of the rule. If we find creatures that are half human, we may only too possibly make them an excuse for being half-human ourselves. I should not be very painfully concerned about the Leprechaun if people had thrown stones at him as a bad fairy, or given him milk and fire as a good one. But there is something menacing about taking away a monster in order to study him. There is something sinister about putting a Leprechaun in the workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work.

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