Part 5

Even after the ghastly enlightenment of the war there are people who cannot clear their minds of the notion that the Prussian is the Progressive. They think he is progressing now, because he is picking up new things. Picking up new things is not the way to progress, any more than picking up grass by the roots is the way to make it grow. The northern barbarian always has picked up new things, especially when they were other people’s things. It was still only picking up new things, whether it was picking pockets or picking brains. And there was always one other note about the new things--that they never lived to be old. The barbarians followed the creed of Arius as they followed the ensign of Attila. But nobody remembers Attila as everybody remembered Alfred; and, though some modern people object to hearing the Athanasian Creed, they have no opportunity of objecting to hearing the Arian Creed. The enthusiasms of semi-savages do not last.

On Pigs as Pets

A dream of my pure and aspiring boyhood has been realized in the following paragraph, which I quote exactly as it stands:

A complaint by the Epping Rural District Council against a spinster keeping a pig in her house has evoked the following reply: “I received your letter, and felt very much cut up, as I am laying in the pig’s room. I have not been able to stand up or get on my legs; when I can, I will get him in his own room, that was built for him. As to getting him off the premises, I shall do no such thing, as he is no nuisance to anyone. We have had to be in the pig’s room now for three years. I am not going to get rid of my pet. We must all live together. I will move him as soon as God gives me strength to do so.”

The Rev. T. C. Spurgin observed: “The lady will require a good deal of strength to move her pet, which weighs forty stone.”

It appears to me that the Rev. T. C. Spurgin ought, as a matter of chivalry, to assist the lady to move the pig, if it is indeed too heavy for her strength; no gentleman should permit a lady, who is already very much cut up, to lift forty stone of still animated and recalcitrant pork; he should himself escort the animal downstairs. It is an unusual situation, I admit. In the normal life of humanity the gentleman gives his arm to the lady, and not to the pig; and it is the pig who is very much cut up. But the situation seems to be exceptional in every way. It is all very well for the lady to say that the pig is no nuisance to anyone: as it seems that she has established herself in the pig’s private suite of apartments, the question rather is whether she is a nuisance to the pig. But indeed I do not think that this poor woman’s fad is an inch more fantastic than many such oddities indulged in by rich and reputable people; and, as I say, I have from my boyhood entertained the dream. I never could imagine why pigs should not be kept as pets. To begin with, pigs are very beautiful animals. Those who think otherwise are those who do not look at anything with their own eyes, but only through other people’s eyeglasses. The actual lines of a pig (I mean of a really fat pig) are among the loveliest and most luxuriant in nature; the pig has the same great curves, swift and yet heavy, which we see in rushing water or in rolling cloud. Compared to him, the horse, for instance, is a bony, angular, and abrupt animal. I remember that Mr. H. G. Wells, in arguing for the relativity of things (a subject over which even the Greek philosophers went to sleep until Christianity woke them up), pointed out that, while a horse is commonly beautiful if seen in profile, he is excessively ugly if seen from the top of a dogcart, having a long, lean neck, and a body like a fiddle. Now, there is no point of view from which a really corpulent pig is not full of sumptuous and satisfying curves. You can look down on a pig from the top of the most unnaturally lofty dogcart; you can (if not pressed for time) allow the pig to draw the dogcart; and I suppose a dogcart has as much to do with pigs as it has with dogs. You can examine the pig from the top of an omnibus, from the top of the Monument, from a balloon, or an airship; and as long as he is visible he will be beautiful. In short, he has that fuller, subtler, and more universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking (gazing at pigs and distinguished journalists) mistake for a mere absence of shape. For fatness itself is a valuable quality. While it creates admiration in the onlookers, it creates modesty in the possessor. If there is anything on which I differ from the monastic institutions of the past, it is that they sometimes sought to achieve humility by means of emaciation. It may be that the thin monks were holy, but I am sure it was the fat monks who were humble. Falstaff said that to be fat is not to be hated; but it certainly is to be laughed at, and that is a more wholesome experience for the soul of man.

I do not urge that it is effective upon the soul of a pig, who, indeed, seems somewhat indifferent to public opinion on this point. Nor do I mean that mere fatness is the only beauty of the pig. The beauty of the best pigs lies in a certain sleepy perfection of contour which links them especially to the smooth strength of our south English land in which they live. There are two other things in which one can see this perfect and piggish quality: one is in the silent and smooth swell of the Sussex downs, so enormous and yet so innocent. The other is in the sleek, strong limbs of those beech trees that grow so thick in their valleys. These three holy symbols, the pig, the beech tree, and the chalk down, stand for ever as expressing the one thing that England as England has to say--that power is not inconsistent with kindness. Tears of regret come into my eyes when I remember that three lions or leopards, or whatever they are, sprawl in a fantastic, foreign way across the arms of England. We ought to have three pigs passant, gardant, or on gules. It breaks my heart to think that four commonplace lions are couched around the base of the Nelson Column. There ought to be four colossal Hampshire hogs to keep watch over so national a spot. Perhaps some of our sculptors will attack the conception; perhaps the lady’s pig, which weighs forty stone and seems to be something of a domestic problem, might begin to earn its living as an artist’s model.

Again, we do not know what fascinating variations might happen in the pig if once the pig were a pet. The dog has been domesticated--that is, destroyed. Nobody now in London can form the faintest idea of what a dog would look like. You know a Dachshund in the street; you know a St. Bernard in the street. But if you saw a Dog in the street you would run from him screaming. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years no one has looked at the horrible hairy original thing called Dog. Why, then, should we be hopeless about the substantial and satisfying thing called Pig? Types of Pig may also be differentiated; delicate shades of Pig may also be produced. A monstrous pig as big as a pony may perambulate the streets like a St. Bernard without attracting attention. An elegant and unnaturally attenuated pig may have all the appearance of a greyhound. There may be little, frisky, fighting pigs like Irish or Scotch terriers; there may be little pathetic pigs like King Charles spaniels. Artificial breeding might reproduce the awful original pig, tusks and all, the terror of the forests--something bigger, more mysterious, and more bloody than the bloodhound. Those interested in hairdressing might amuse themselves by arranging the bristles like those of a poodle. Those fascinated by the Celtic mystery of the Western Highlands might see if they could train the bristles to be a veil or curtain for the eye, like those of a Skye terrier; that sensitive and invisible Celtic spirit. With elaborate training one might have a sheep-pig instead of a sheep-dog, a lap-pig instead of a lap-dog.

What is it that makes you look so incredulous? Why do you still feel slightly superior to the poor lady who would not be parted from her pig? Why do you not at once take the hog to your heart? Reason suggests his evident beauty. Evolution suggests his probable improvement. Is it, perhaps, some instinct, some tradition ...? Well, apply that to women, children, animals, and we will argue again.

The Romance of Rostand

Rostand, the romantic dramatist of France, and a very national poet, died almost on the day of the great national triumph. He had lived, to use his own imaginative heraldry, to see the golden eagles of Gaul and Rome drive back the black eagles of Prussia and Austria. He was too much of an earlier generation to take the precise part of Pequy or Claudel in the process which banished the birds of barbaric night from the land of the Eagles of the sun. But the part he had played in that earlier time might well merit the use of a kindred metaphor, drawn from his own fairyland of ornithology. He had a special claim to use as one of his titles the noble mediæval name of Chantecler. He might well be called the Gallic cock in that earlier twilight of vultures and bats. The end of the nineteenth century was a time of pessimism for Europe, and especially of pessimism for France; for pessimism was the shadow of Prussianism. Rostand was really a cock that crowed before the coming of sunrise. When it came it was red as blood; but the sun rose.

But that mediæval nickname of the cock contains a still more appropriate criticism. The word “clear” is always a clue to Rostand’s country, and to Rostand’s work. He suffered in the decadent days, he suffers to some extent still, from a strange blunder which supposes that what is clear must be shallow. It is chiefly founded on false figures of speech; and is akin to the mysteriously meaningless saying that still waters run deep. It is repeated without the least reference to the evident fact that the stillest of all waters do not run at all. They lie about in puddles, which are none the less shallow because they are covered with scum. Such were the North German philosophies fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century; men believed in the puddle’s profundity solely because of its opacity. When the decadent critics sneered at Rostand’s popularity, they were simply sneering at his lucidity. They were protesting against his power of conveying what he meant in the most direct and telling fashion. They were complaining bitterly because he did not think with a German accent, which is nearly the same thing as an impediment in the speech. The wit with which all his dialogues blazed was also a positive disadvantage in that muddle-headed modern world, which even now will only begin to realize gradually the greatness of France. Nothing has been so senselessly underrated as wit, even when it seems to be the mere wit of words. It is dismissed as merely verbal; but, in fact, it is more solemn writing that is merely verbal, or rather merely verbose. A joke is always a thought; it is grave and formal writing that can be quite literally thoughtless. This applies to jokes when they are not only quite verbal but quite vulgar. A good pun, or even a bad pun, is more intellectual than mere polysyllables. The man, the presumably prehistoric man, who invented the phrase, “When is a door not a door; when it’s ajar,” made a serious and successful mental effort of selection and combination. But a Prussian professor might begin on the same problem, “When is a door not a door; when its doorishness is a becoming rather than a being, and when the relativity of doorishness is co-ordinated with the evolution of doors from windows and skylights, of which approximation to new function, etc. etc.”--and the Prussian professor might go on like that for ever, and never come to the end because he would never come to the point. A pun or a riddle can never be in that sense a fraud. Real wisdom may be better than real wit, but there is much more sham wisdom than there is sham wit.

This is the immediate point about Rostand, who had very real wit, but wit of a very poetic and sometimes epic order. It is very characteristic of him, and very puzzling to his critics, that he was witty even in repudiating wit. In the scene of _Cyrano de Bergerac_, in which the hero pleads in his friend’s name against the preciosity of the heroine, he quite naturally uses the phrase touching the evaporation of truth in artificial terminology, “Et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins.” That involves a pun and also involves a point; and it is a subject on which it would be quite easy to be earnest and pointless. A philosopher need never come to an end in talking about ends; precisely because he is not required to amuse anybody, he is not really required to mean anything. Every page, every paragraph, almost every line of Rostand’s plays bristles with these points, which are both verbal and vital. If any critic thinks it was easy to produce them by the hundred, there is an exceedingly easy test; let him try to produce one. In attempting to joke in this fashion, he will probably find himself thinking for the first time. For that matter, merely to make one of the better puns of _Punch_ or _Hood’s Annual_ would be enough to stump most of the sceptics who have been taught in the Teutonic schools to think a thing creative because it is chaotic, and vast because it is vague. A modern “thinker” will find it easier to make up a hundred problems than to make up one riddle. For in the case of the riddle he has to make up the answer.

The drama of Rostand was full of answers, if they seem to the superficial merely to be ringing repartees. In the ballade of the duel the hero says that the sword-thrust shall come at the end of the envoi, but something like it seems to come continually at the end of the line. But these retorts are really much more than superficial, because they have the ring of dogma, of affirmation and certainty, and therefore of triumph. The wit is heroic wit; and his sub-title was strictly correct when he called _Cyrano_ a heroic comedy. It was written in a literary period which was far too pessimistic to rise even to heroic Tragedy. It will grow in value in a more virile time, when the air has been cleared by a great crusade. Rostand’s poetry will certainly remain. It may not remain among the very greatest poetry, for the very reason that he fulfilled the office rather of the trumpet than the lyre. But he himself may well have shared the spirited taste of his own hero, and have preferred that something even more noble than the laurel should remain as a feather in his cap.

Wishes

Most of us, I suppose, have amused ourselves with the old and flippant fancy of what poets or orators would feel like if their wild wishes came true. The poet would be not a little surprised if the (somewhat inadequate) wings of a dove suddenly sprouted from his shoulder-blades. And I suspect that even the baby who cries for the moon would be rather frightened if it fell out of the sky, crushing forests and cities like a colossal snowball, shutting out the stars and darkening the earth it had illuminated. Shelley was magnificently moved when he wished to be a cloud driven before the wild West Wind: but even Shelley would have been not a little disconcerted if he had found himself turning head-over-heels in mid-air the instant he had written the line. He would even be somewhat relieved, I fancy, to fall upon the thorns of life and bleed a little more. When Keats, the human nightingale, lay listening to the feathered one, he expressed a strong desire for a long drink of red wine. In this I believe him to have accurately analysed his own sentiments. But when he proceeds to explain that he is strongly inclined at that moment to wish himself dead, I entertain strong doubts as to whether he is equally exact, and am by no means certain that he would really like “to cease upon the midnight” even “with no pain.” Such sceptical fantasies, I say, have occurred to most of us; they do not spoil fine poetry for those who really like it; they only salt it with humour and human fellowship. Things seriously beautiful are, perhaps, the only things that we can jest about with complete spiritual safety. One cannot insult the poem except by being afraid of the parody.

But I think there is another and more curious cause for this common human fancy of a wild wish which is disappointed by being fulfilled. The idea is very common, of course, in popular tradition: in the tale of King Midas; in the tale of the Black Pudding; in the tale of the Goloshes of Fortune. My own personal feeling about it, I think, is that a world in which all one’s wishes were fulfilled would, quite apart from disappointments, be an unpleasant world to live in. The world would be too like a dream, and the dream too like a nightmare. The Ego would be too big for the Cosmos; it would be a bore to be so important as that. I believe a great part of such poetic pleasure as I have comes from a certain disdainful indifference in actual things. Demeter withered up the cornfields: I like the cornfields because they grow in spite of me. At least, I can lay my hand on my heart and say that no cornfield ever grew with my assistance. Ajax defied the lightning; but I like the lightning because it defies me. I enjoy stars and the sun or trees and the sea, because they exist in spite of me; and I believe the sentiment to be at the root of all that real kind of romance which makes life not a delusion of the night, but an adventure of the morning. It is, indeed, in the clash of circumstances that men are most alive. When we break a lance with an opponent the whole romance is in the fact that the lance does break. It breaks because it is real: it does not vanish like an elfin spear. And even when there is an element of the marvellous or impossible in true poetry, there is always also this element of resistance, of actuality and shock. The most really poetical impossibility is an irresistible force colliding with an immovable post. When that happens it will be the end of the world.

It is true, of course, that marvels, even marvels of transformation, illustrate the noblest histories and traditions. But we should notice a rather curious difference which the instinct of popular legend has in almost all cases kept. The wonder-working done by good people, saints and friends of man, is almost always represented in the form of restoring things or people to their proper shapes. St. Nicholas, the Patron Saint of Children, finds a boiling pot in which two children have been reduced to a sort of Irish stew. He restores them miraculously to life; because they ought to be children and ought not to be Irish stew. But he does not turn them into angels; and I can remember no case in hagiology of such an official promotion. If a woman were blind, the good wonder-workers would give her back her eyes; if a man were halt, they would give him back his leg. But they did not, I think, say to the man: “You are so good that you really ought to be a woman”; or to the woman: “You are so bothered it is time you had a holiday as a man.” I do not say there are no exceptions; but this is the general tone of the tales about good magic. But, on the other hand, the popular tales about bad magic are specially full of the idea that evil alters and destroys the personality. The black witch turns a child into a cat or a dog; the bad magician keeps the Prince captive in the form of a parrot, or the Princess in the form of a hind; in the gardens of the evil spirits human beings are frozen into statues or tied to the earth as trees. In all such instinctive literature the denial of identity is the very signature of Satan. In that sense it is true that the true God is the God of things as they are--or, at least, as they were meant to be. And I think that something of this healthy fear of losing self through the supernatural is behind the widespread sentiment of the Three Wishes; the sentiment which says, in the words of Thackeray:

Fairy roses, fairy rings Turn out sometimes troublesome things.

Now the transition may seem queer; but this power of seeing that a tree is _there_, in spite of you and me, that it holds of God and its own treeishness, is of great importance just now in practical politics. We are in sharp collision with a large number of things, some of which are real facts and all of which are real faiths. We must see these things objectively, as we do a tree; and understand that they exist whether we like them or not. We must not try and turn them into something different by the mere exercise of our own minds, as if we were witches. I happen to think, for instance, that it is silly of Orangemen to think they would be persecuted under Home Rule. But I think it is sillier to think that the Orangemen do not think so. It is sillier not to see that a man can fire off a gun for a prejudice as well as he can for an ideal. I disagree with the Orangemen; I don’t disagree with the Nationalists; but I deny neither. I sympathize with the Labour revolt; I don’t sympathize with the Feminist revolt; but I deny neither. Then, again, both these latter tendencies have succeeded in colliding violently with another reality, the priests of the ancient popular creed of Ireland. They achieved that catastrophe, not because they did not believe the creed, but because they could not even believe that it was believed.

Now you can, if you choose, pass your life in a wizard dream, in which all your enemies are turned into something else. You can insist that a priest is only a parrot, or a Suffragette always a wandering hind: but if you do, you will sooner or later get into your head what is meant by an immovable post.

The Futurists

There are still people talking about Futurism, though I should have thought it was now a thing of the past, exploded by its own silly gunpowder train of progressive theory. If a man only believed the world was round because his grandmother said it was flat, another man had only to say it was spiral in order to be a more advanced idiot than either of them. But, after all, the world is one shape and not another (I don’t care which myself, but certainly one), and will be when we all die, and would have been if no worm or weed had ever lived. And it amuses me to notice that the very Agnostics who still quote Galileo’s phrase about the earth, “And yet it moves!” are the very people who talk as if truth could be different from age to age--as if the whole world was a different shape when you or I were in a different frame of mind. Progressives of this kind _cannot_ say “And yet it moves” save in the sense that their own foot can roll it about like a football, or that their own finger can stop it as Joshua’s stopped the moon. They may control Nature like witches; but they cannot appeal to Nature like Galileo. They have no abiding objective fact to which to appeal. On the mere progressive theory there is no more immortality about the astronomy of Galileo than the medicine of Galen.