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Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies

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Title: Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies

Author: George Santayana


        
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                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

And Later Soliloquies

by

GEORGE SANTAYANA







New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1922




PREFACE


Many of these Soliloquies have appeared in _The Athenaeum_ and one or
more in _The London Mercury_, _The Nation_, _The New Republic_, _The
Dial_, and _The Journal of Philosophy_. The author's thanks are due to
the Editors of all these reviews for permission to reprint the articles.

For convenience, three Soliloquies on Liberty, written in 1915, have
been placed in the second group; and perhaps it should be added that
not a few of the later pieces were written in France, Spain, or Italy,
although still for the most part on English themes and under the
influence of English impressions.



CONTENTS

Prologue

SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND, 1914-1918

   1. ATMOSPHERE
   2. GRISAILLE
   3. PRAISES OF WATER
   4. THE TWO PARENTS OF VISION
   5. AVERSION FROM PLATONISM
   6. CLOUD CASTLES
   7. CROSS-LIGHTS
   8. HAMLET'S QUESTION
   9. THE BRITISH CHARACTER
  10. SEAFARING
  11. PRIVACY
  12. THE LION AND THE UNICORN
  13. DONS
  14. APOLOGY FOR SNOBS
  15. THE HIGHER SNOBBERY
  16. DISTINCTION IN ENGLISHMEN
  17. FRIENDSHIPS
  18. DICKENS
  19. THE HUMAN SCALE
  20. ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE
  21. THE ENGLISH CHURCH
  22. LEAVING CHURCH
  23. DEATH-BED MANNERS
  24. WAR SHRINES
  25. TIPPERARY
  26. SKYLARKS
  27. AT HEAVEN'S GATE

LATER SOLILOQUIES, 1918-1921

  28. SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE
  29. IMAGINATION
  30. THE WORLD'S A STAGE
  31. MASKS
  32. THE TRAGIC MASK
  33. THE COMIC MASK
  34. CARNIVAL
  35. QUEEN MAB
  36. A CONTRAST WITH SPANISH DRAMA
  37. THE CENSOR AND THE POET
  38. THE MASK OF THE PHILOSOPHER
  39. THE VOYAGE OF THE SAINT CHRISTOPHER
  40. CLASSIC LIBERTY
  41. GERMAN FREEDOM
  42. LIBERALISM AND CULTURE
  43. THE IRONY OF LIBERALISM
  44. JOHN BULL AND HIS PHILOSOPHERS
  45. OCCAM'S RAZOR
  46. EMPIRICISM
  47. THE BRITISH HEGELIANS
  48. THE PROGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY
  49. THE PSYCHE
  50. REVERSION TO PLATONISM
  51. IDEAS
  52. THE MANSIONS OF HELEN
  53. THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS
  54. ON MY FRIENDLY CRITICS
  55. HERMES THE INTERPRETER



PROLOGUE


The outbreak of war in the year 1914 found me by chance in England,
and there I remained, chiefly at Oxford, until the day of the peace.
During those five years, in rambles to Iffley and Sandford, to Godstow
and Wytham, to the hospitable eminence of Chilswell, to Wood Eaton or
Nuneham or Abingdon or Stanton Harcourt,

Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,

these Soliloquies were composed, or the notes scribbled from which they
have been expanded. Often over Port Meadow the whirr of aeroplanes sent
an iron tremor through these reveries, and the daily casualty list,
the constant sight of the wounded, the cadets strangely replacing the
undergraduates, made the foreground to these distances. Yet nature
and solitude continued to envelop me in their gentleness, and seemed
to remain nearer to me than all that was so near. They muffled the
importunity of the hour; perhaps its very bitterness and incubus of
horror drove my thoughts deeper than they would otherwise have ventured
into the maze of reflection and of dreams. It is a single maze, though
we traverse it in opposite moods, and distinct threads conduct us; for
when the most dire events have assumed their punctiform places in the
history of our lives, where they will stand eternally, what are they
but absurd episodes in a once tormenting dream? And when our despised
night-dreams are regarded and respected as they deserve to be (since
all their troubles are actual and all their tints evident), do they
prove more arbitrary or less significant than our waking thoughts, or
than those more studious daylight fictions which we call history or
philosophy? The human mind at best is a sort of song; the music of it
runs away with the words, and even the words, which pass for the names
of things, are but poor wild symbols for their unfathomed objects. So
are these Soliloquies compared with their occasions; and I should be
the first to hate their verbiage, if a certain spiritual happiness did
not seem to breathe through it, and redeem its irrelevance. Their very
abstraction from the time in which they were written may commend them
to a free mind. Spirit refuses to be caught in a vice; it triumphs
over the existence which begets it. The moving world which feeds it
is not its adequate theme. Spirit hates its father and its mother. It
spreads from its burning focus into the infinite, careless whether
that focus burns to ashes or not. From its pinnacle of earthly time it
pours its little life into spheres not temporal nor earthly, and half
in playfulness, half in sacrifice, it finds its joy in the irony of
eternal things, which know nothing of it.

Spirit, however, cannot fly from matter without material wings;
the most abstract art is compacted of images, the most mystical
renunciation obeys some passion of the heart. Images and passion,
even if they are not easily recognizable in these Soliloquies as now
coldly written down, were not absent from them when inwardly spoken.
The images were English images, the passion was the love of England
and, behind England, of Greece. What I love in Greece and in England
is contentment in finitude, fair outward ways, manly perfection and
simplicity. Admiration for England, of a certain sort, was instilled
into me in my youth. My father (who read the language with ease
although he did not speak it) had a profound respect for British polity
and British power. In this admiration there was no touch of sentiment
nor even of sympathy; behind it lay something like an ulterior
contempt, such as we feel for the strong man exhibiting at a fair. The
performance may be astonishing but the achievement is mean. So in the
middle of the nineteenth century an intelligent foreigner, the native
of a country materially impoverished, could look to England for a model
of that irresistible energy and public discipline which afterwards
were even more conspicuous in Bismarckian Germany and in the United
States. It was admiration for material progress, for wealth, for the
inimitable gift of success; and it was not free, perhaps, from the poor
man's illusion, who jealously sets his heart on prosperity, and lets
it blind him to the subtler sources of greatness. We should none of us
admire England to-day, if we had to admire it only for its conquering
commerce, its pompous noblemen, or its parliamentary government. I
feel no great reverence even for the British Navy, which may be in
the junk-shop to-morrow; but I heartily like the British sailor, with
his clear-cut and dogged way of facing the world. It is health, not
policy nor wilfulness, that gives true strength in the moral world,
as in the animal kingdom; nature and fortune in the end are on the
side of health. There is, or was, a beautifully healthy England hidden
from most foreigners; the England of the countryside and of the poets,
domestic, sporting, gallant, boyish, of a sure and delicate heart,
which it has been mine to feel beating, though not so early in my life
as I could have wished. In childhood I saw only Cardiff on a Sunday,
and the docks of Liverpool; but books and prints soon opened to me more
important vistas. I read the poets; and although British painting,
when it tries to idealize human subjects, has always made me laugh, I
was quick to discern an ethereal beauty in the landscapes of Turner.
Furgueson's _Cathedrals of England_, too, and the great mansions in
the Italian style depicted in the eighth edition of the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_, revealed to me even when a boy the rare charm that can
envelop the most conventional things when they are associated with
tender thoughts or with noble ways of living.

It was with a premonition of things noble and tender, and yet
conventional, that after a term at the University of Berlin I went to
spend my first holidays in England. Those were the great free days of
my youth. I had lived familiarly in Spain and in the United States;
I had had a glimpse of France and of Germany, and French literature
had been my daily bread: it had taught me how to think, but had not
given me much to think about. I was not mistaken in surmising that in
England I should find a _tertium quid_, something soberer and juster
than anything I yet knew, and at the same time greener and richer.
I felt at once that here was a distinctive society, a way of living
fundamentally _foreign_ to me, but deeply attractive. At first all
gates seemed shut and bristling with incommunication; but soon in
some embowered corner I found the stile I might climb over, and the
ancient right of way. Those peaceful parks, and those minds no less
retired, seemed positively to welcome me; and though I was still
divided from them by inevitable partitions, these were in places so
thin and yielding, that the separation seemed hardly greater than is
requisite for union and sympathy between autonomous minds. Indeed, I
was soon satisfied that no climate, no manners, no comrades on earth
(where nothing is perfect) could be more congenial to my complexion.
Not that I ever had the least desire or tendency to become an
Englishman. Nationality and religion are like oar love and loyalty
towards women: things too radically intertwined with oar moral essence
to be changed honourably, and too accidental to the free mind to be
worth changing. My own origins were living within me; by their light
I could see clearly that this England was pre-eminently the home of
decent happiness and a quiet pleasure in being oneself. I found here
the same sort of manliness which I had learned to love in America, yet
softer, and not at all obstreperous; a manliness which when refined
a little creates the gentleman, since its instinct is to hide its
strength for an adequate occasion and for the service of others. It is
self-reliant, but with a saving touch of practicality and humour; for
there is a becoming self-confidence, based on actual performance, like
the confidence of the athlete, and free from any exorbitant estimate of
what that performance is worth. Such modesty in strength is entirely
absent from the effusive temperament of the Latin, who is cocky and
punctilious so long as his conceit holds out, and then utterly humbled
and easily corrupted; entirely absent also from the doctrinaire of the
German school, in his dense vanity and officiousness, that nothing can
put to shame. So much had I come to count on this sort of manliness
in the friends of my youth, that without it the most admirable and
gifted persons seemed to me hardly _men_: they fell rather into an
ambiguous retinue, the camp followers of man, cleverer but meaner than
himself--the priests, politicians, actors, pedagogues, and shopkeepers.
The _man_ is he who lives and relies directly on nature, not on the
needs or weaknesses of other people. These self-sufficing Englishmen,
in their reserve and decision, seemed to me truly men, creatures of
fixed rational habit, people in whose somewhat inarticulate society
one might feel safe and at home. The low pressure at which their minds
seemed to work showed how little they were alarmed about anything:
things would all be managed somehow. They were good company even when
they said nothing. Their aspect, their habits, their invincible likes
and dislikes seemed like an anchor to me in the currents of this
turbid age. They were a gift of the gods, like the sunshine or the
fresh air or the memory of the Greeks: they were superior beings, and
yet more animal than the rest of us, calmer, with a different scale
of consciousness and a slower pace of thought. There were glints in
them sometimes of a mystical oddity; they loved the wilds; and yet
ordinarily they were wonderfully sane and human, and responsive to the
right touch. Moreover, these semi-divine animals could talk like men
of the world. If some of them, and not the least charming, said little
but "Oh, really," and "How stupid of me," I soon discovered how far
others could carry scholarly distinction, rich humour, and refinement
of diction. I confess, however, that when they were very exquisite or
subtle they seemed to me like cut flowers; the finer they were the
frailer, and the cleverer the more wrong-headed. Delicacy did not come
to them, as to Latin minds, as an added ornament, a finer means of
being passionate, a trill in a song that flows full-chested from the
whole man; their purity was Puritanism, it came by exclusion of what
they thought lower. It impoverished their sympathies, it severed them
from their national roots, it turned to affectation or fanaticism,
it rendered them acrid and fussy and eccentric and sad. It is truly
English, in one sense, to fume against England, individuality tearing
its own nest; and often these frantic poses neutralize one another and
do no harm on the whole. Nevertheless it is the full-bodied Englishman
who has so far ballasted the ship, he who, like Shakespeare, can wear
gracefully the fashion of the hour, can play with fancy, and remain a
man. When he ceases to be sensual and national, adventurous and steady,
reticent and religious, the Englishman is a mad ghost; and wherever he
prevails he turns pleasant England, like Greece, into a memory.

Those first holidays of mine, when I was twenty-three years of
age, laid the foundation of a lifelong attachment--of which these
Soliloquies are a late fruit--to both Oxford and Cambridge: not so much
to the learned society of those places as to their picturesque aspects
and to the possibility of enjoying there in seclusion the intense
companionship of the past and of the beautiful; also the intense
companionship of youth, to which more advanced years in themselves are
no obstacle, if the soul remains free. I have never liked the taste of
academic straw; but there are fat grains and seeds of novelty even at
universities, which the lively young wits that twitter in those shades
pick up like hungry sparrows, yet without unmitigated seriousness; and
unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. Let
not the unwary reader think me flippant for saying so; it was Plato,
in his solemn old age, who said it. He added that our ignominious
condition forces us, nevertheless, to be often terribly in earnest.
Wanton and transitory as our existence is, and comic as it must appear
in the eyes of the happy gods, it is all in all to our mortal nature;
and whilst intellectually we may judge ourselves somewhat as the gods
might judge us, and may commend our lives to the keeping of eternity,
our poor animal souls are caught inextricably in the toils of time,
which devours us and all our possessions. The artist playing a farce
for others suffers a tragedy in himself. When he aspires to shed as
much as possible the delusions of earthly passion, and to look at
things joyfully and unselfishly, with the clear eyes of youth, it is
not because he feels no weight of affliction, but precisely because he
feels its weight to the full, and how final it is. Lest it should seem
inhuman of me to have been piping soliloquies whilst Rome was burning,
I will transcribe here some desperate verses extorted from me by events
during those same years. I am hardly a poet in the magic sense of the
word, but when one's thoughts have taken instinctively a metrical form,
why should they be forbidden to wear it? I do not ask the reader to
admire these sonnets, but to believe them.


A PREMONITION

_Cambridge, October_ 1913

Grey walls, broad fields, fresh voices, rippling weir,
I know you well: ten faces, for each face
That passes smiling, haunt this hallowed place,
And nothing not thrice noted greets me here.
Soft watery winds, wide twilight skies and clear,
Refresh my spirit at its founts of grace,
And a strange sorrow masters me, to pace
These willowed paths, in this autumnal year.
Soon, lovely England, soon thy secular dreams,
Thy lisping comrades, shall be thine no more.
A world's loosed troubles flood thy gated streams
And drown, methinks, thy towers; and the tears start
As if an iron hand had clutched my heart,
And knowledge is a pang, like love of yore.


THE UNDERGRADUATE KILLED IN BATTLE

_Oxford_, 1915

Sweet as the lawn beneath his sandalled tread,
Or the scarce rippled stream beneath his oar,
So gently buffeted it laughed the more,
His life was, and the few blithe words he said.
One or two poets read he, and reread;
One or two friends with boyish ardour wore
Close to his heart, incurious of the lore
Dodonian woods might murmur overhead.
Ah, demons of the whirlwind, have a care,
What, trumpeting your triumphs, ye undo!
The earth once won, begins your long despair
That never, never is his bliss for you.
He breathed betimes this clement island air
And in unwitting lordship saw the blue.


THE DARKEST HOUR

_Oxford_, 1917

Smother thy flickering light, the vigil's o'er.
Hope, early wounded, of his wounds is dead.
Many a night long he smiled, his drooping head
Laid on thy breast, and that brave smile he wore
Not yet from his unbreathing lips is fled.
Enough: on mortal sweetness look no more,
Pent in this charnel-house, fling wide the door
And on the stars that killed him gaze instead.
The world's too vast for hope. The unteachable sun
Rises again and will reflood his sphere,
Blotting with light what yesterday was done;
But the unavailing truth, though dead, lives on,
And in eternal night, unkindly clear,
A cold moon gilds the waves of Acheron.




SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

1914-1918



1

ATMOSPHERE


The stars lie above all countries alike, but the atmosphere that
intervenes is denser in one place than in another; and even where
it is purest, if once its atoms catch the sunlight, it cuts off the
prospect beyond. In some climates the veil of earthly weather is so
thick and blotted that even the plodder with his eyes on the ground
finds its density inconvenient, and misses his way home. The advantage
of having eyes is neutralized at such moments, and it would be better
to have retained the power of going on all fours and being guided by
scent. In fact human beings everywhere are like marine animals and live
in a congenial watery medium, which like themselves is an emanation
of mother earth; and they are content for the most part to glide
through it horizontally at their native level. They ignore the third,
the vertical dimension; or if they ever get some inkling of empty
heights or rigid depths where they could not breathe, they dismiss
that speculative thought with a shudder, and continue to dart about in
their familiar aquarium, immersed in an opaque fluid that cools their
passions, protects their intellect from mental dispersion, keeps them
from idle gazing, and screens them from impertinent observation by
those who have no business in the premises.

The stellar universe that silently surrounds them, if while swimming
they ever think of it, seems to them something foreign and not quite
credibly reported. How should anything exist so unlike home, so out of
scale with their affairs, so little watery, and so little human? Their
philosophers confirm them in that incredulity; and the sea-caves hold
conclaves of profound thinkers congregated to prove that only fog can
be real. The dry, their council decrees, is but a vain abstraction, a
mere negative which human imagination opposes to the moist, of which
alone, since life is moist, there can be positive experience.

As for the stars, these inspired children of the mist have discovered
that they are nothing but postulates of astronomy, imagined for a
moment to exist, in order that a beautiful human science may be
constructed about them. Duller people, born in the same fog, may not
understand so transcendental a philosophy, but they spontaneously
frame others of their own, not unlike it in principle. In the middle
of the night, when the starlight best manages to pierce to the lowest
strata of the air, these good people are asleep; yet occasionally when
they are returning somewhat disappointed from a party, or when illness
or anxiety or love-hunger keeps them pacing their chamber or tossing
in their beds, by chance they may catch a glimpse of a star or two
twinkling between their curtains. Idle objects, they say to themselves,
like dots upon the wall-paper. Why should there be stars at all, and
why so many of them? Certainly they shed a little light and are pretty;
and they are a convenience sometimes in the country when there is no
moon and no lamp-posts; and they are said to be useful in navigation
and to enable the astronomers to calculate sidereal time in addition
to solar time, which is doubtless a great satisfaction to them. But
all this hardly seems to justify such an expense of matter and energy
as is involved in celestial mechanics. To have so much going on so far
away, and for such prodigious lengths of time, seems rather futile and
terrible. Who knows? Astrologers used to foretell people's character
and destiny by their horoscope; perhaps they may turn out to have been
more or less right after all, now that science is coming round to
support more and more what our fathers called superstitions. There may
be some meaning in the stars, a sort of code-language such as Bacon put
into Shakespeare's sonnets, which would prove to us, if we could only
read it, not how insignificant, but how very important we are in the
world, since the very stars are talking about us.

The safest thing, however, is to agree with the great idealists, who
say there are really no stars at all. Or, if their philosophy seems
insecure--and there are rumours that even the professors are hedging
on the subject--we can always take refuge in faith, and think of the
heavenly bodies as beautiful new homes in which we are to meet and work
together again when we die; and as in time we might grow weary even
there, with being every day busier and busier, there must always be
other stars at hand for us to move to, each happier and busier than the
last; and since we wish to live and to progress for ever, the number of
habitable planets provided for us has to be infinite. Certainly faith
is far better than science for explaining everything.

So the embryonic soul reasons in her shell of vapour; her huddled
philosophy is, as it were, pre-natal, and discredits the possibility
of ever peeping into a cold outer world. Yet in time this shell may
grow dangerously thin in places, and a little vague light may filter
through. Strange promptings and premonitions at the same time may visit
the imprisoned spirit, as if it might not be impossible nor inglorious
to venture into a world that was not oneself. At last, willy-nilly, the
soul may be actually hatched, and may suddenly find herself horribly
exposed, cast perhaps on the Arabian desert, or on some high, scorched,
open place that resembles it, like the uplands of Castile. There the
rarefied atmosphere lets the stars down upon her overwhelmingly, like a
veritable host of heaven. There the barren earth entwines few tentacles
about the heart; it stretches away dark and empty beneath our feet, a
mere footstool for meditation. It is a thing to look away from, too
indifferent and accidental even to spurn; for after all it supports
us, and though small and extinguished it is one of the stars. In these
regions the shepherds first thought of God.




2

GRISAILLE


England is pre-eminently a land of atmosphere. A luminous haze
permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives,
transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing the accidental, making
beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavement
become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross world are
shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels, more appealing than
precious stones to the poet, because they are insubstantial and must be
loved without being possessed. Mists prolong the most sentimental and
soothing of hours, the twilight, through the long summer evenings and
the whole winter's day. In these country-sides so full of habitations
and these towns so full of verdure, lamplight and twilight cross their
rays; and the passers-by, mercifully wrapped alike in one crepuscular
mantle, are reduced to unison and simplicity, as if sketched at one
stroke by the hand of a master.

English landscape, if we think only of the land and the works of man
upon it, is seldom on the grand scale. Charming, clement, and eminently
habitable, it is almost too domestic, as if only home passions and
caged souls could live there. But lift the eyes for a moment above the
line of roofs or of tree-tops, and there the grandeur you miss on the
earth is spread gloriously before you. The spirit of the atmosphere
is not compelled, like the god of pantheism, to descend in order to
exist, and wholly to diffuse itself amongst earthly objects. It exists
absolutely in its own person as well, and enjoys in the sky, like a
true deity, its separate life and being. There the veil of Maya, the
heavenly Penelope, is being woven and rent perpetually, and the winds
of destiny are always charmingly defeating their apparent intentions.
Here is the playground of those early nebulous gods that had the bodies
of giants and the minds of children.

In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and rainbows appears
but seldom; such contrasts are too violent and definite for these
tender skies. Here the conflict between light and darkness, like
all other conflicts, ends in a compromise; cataclysms are rare, but
revolution is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified; all is
luminous and all is grey.




3

PRAISES OF WATER


The transformation of landscape by moisture is no matter of appearance
only, no mere optical illusion or effect of liquid stained glass. It
is a sort of echo or symbol to our senses of very serious events in
prehistoric times. Water, which now seems only to lap the earth or to
cloud it, was the chisel which originally carved its surface. They say
that when the planet, recently thrown off from the sun, was still on
fire, the lighter elements rose in the form of gases around the molten
metallic core; and the outer parts of this nucleus in cooling formed
a crust of igneous rock which, as the earth contracted, was crushed
together and wrinkled like the skin of a raisin. These wrinkles are
our mountain chains, made even more rugged and villainous by belated
eruptions. On that early earth there was no water. All was sheer peaks,
ledges, and chasms, red-hot or coal-black, or of such livid metallic
hues, crimson, saffron, and purple, as may still be seen on the shores
of the Dead Sea or in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado--rifts that
allow us to peep into the infernal regions, happily in those places
at least without inhabitants. This hellish sort of landscape, which
we must now plunge into the depths to find, was the first general
landscape of earth.

As the cooling progressed, however, the steam that was in the upper
atmosphere began to condense and to fall in rain. At first the hot
drops no doubt sizzled as they fell and rose again immediately in
vapour, yet the meteorological cycle was established notwithstanding.
The rain that evaporated descended once more, each time colder and
more abundant, until it cut channels amongst the crags, ground and
polished their fragments into boulders and pebbles, formed pools in the
hollows, and finally covered the earth up to its chin with the oceans.
Much detritus meantime was washed down from the rocks; it gathered in
crevices and along the pockets and slacker reaches of rivers. This
sediment was soaked with moisture and mixed with dissolved acids; it
became the first soft layer of earth and finally a fertile soil. Water
in this way softened the outlines of the mountains, laid the floor of
the valleys, and made a leafy and a cloudy place of the planet.

The sages (and some of them much more recent than Thales) tell us
that water not only wears away the rocks, but has a singular power of
carrying away their subtler elements in solution, especially carbonic
acid, of which the atmosphere also is full; and it happens that
these elements can combine with the volatile dements of water into
innumerable highly complex substances, all of which the atmospheric
cycle carries with it wherever it goes; and with these complex
substances, which are the requisite materials for living bodies, it
everywhere fills the sea and impregnates the land.

Even if life, then, is not actually born of the moist element, it is at
least suckled by it; the water-laden atmosphere is the wet nurse, if
not the mother, of the earth-soul. The earth has its soul outside its
body, as many a philosopher would have wished to have his. The winds
that play about it are its breath, the water that rains down and rises
again in mist is its circulating blood; and the death of the earth will
come when some day it sucks in the atmosphere and the sea, gets its
soul inside its body again, turns its animating gases back into solids,
and becomes altogether a skeleton of stone.

No wonder that living creatures find things that are fluid and immersed
in moisture friendly to the watery core of their own being. Seeds,
blood, and tears are liquid; nothing else is so poignant as what passes
and flows, like music and love; and if this irreparable fluidity is
sad, anything stark and arrested is still sadder. Life is compelled to
flow, and things must either flow with it or, like Lot's wife, in the
petrified gesture of refusal, remain to mock their own hope.




4

THE TWO PARENTS OF VISION


It would seem that when a heavenly body ceases to shine by its own
light, it becomes capable of breeding eyes with which to profit by the
light other bodies are shedding; whereas, so long as it was itself
on fire, no part of it could see. Is life a gift which cooling stars
receive from those still incandescent, when some ray falls upon a moist
spot, making it a focus of warmth and luminous energy, and reversing
at that point the general refrigeration? It is certain, at any rate,
that if light did not pour down from the sun no earthly animal would
have developed an eye. Yet there was another partner in this business
of seeing, who would have flatly refused to undertake it, had the sole
profit been the possibility of star-gazing.

Star-gazing is an ulterior platonic homage which we pay to our
celestial sources, as a sort of pious acknowledgment of their
munificence in unconsciously begetting us. But this is an
acknowledgment which they are far from demanding or noticing, not
being vain or anxious to be admired, like popular gods; and if we
omitted it, they would continue to perform their offices towards us
with the same contemptuous regularity. Star-gazing is, therefore, a
pure waste of time in the estimation of the other partner in vision,
besides celestial light--I mean, that clod of moist earth which the
light quickens, that plastic home-keeping parent of the mind, whom we
might call old mother Psyche, and whose primary care is to keep the
body in order and guide it prudently over the earth's surface. For
such a purpose the direct rays of the sun are blinding, and those of
the moon and stars fit only to breed lunatics. To mother Psyche it
seems a blessing that the view of the infinite from the earth is so
often intercepted; else it might have sunk into her heart (for she has
watched through many a night in her long vegetative career), and might
have stretched her comfortable industrious sanity into a sort of divine
madness or reason, very disconcerting in her business. Indeed, she
would never have consented to look or to see at all, except for this
circumstance, that the rays coming from heavenly bodies are reflected
by earthly bodies upon one another; so that by becoming sensitive to
light the Psyche could receive a most useful warning of what to seek or
to avoid. Instead of merely stretching or poking or sniffing through
the world, she could now map it at a glance, and turn instinct into
foresight.

This was a great turn in her career, wonderful in its tragic
possibilities, and something like falling in love; for her new art
brought her a new pleasure and a new unrest, purer and more continual
than those drowsy and terrible ones which she knew before. Reflected
light is beautiful. The direct downpour of light through space leaves
space wonderfully dark, and it falls on the earth indiscriminately
upon the wise and the foolish, to warm or to scorch them; but the
few rays caught by solid matter or drifting vapour become prismatic,
soft, and infinitely varied; not only reporting truly the position and
material diversity of things, but adding to them an orchestration in
design and colour bewitching to the senses. It was not the stars but
the terrestrial atmosphere that the eyes of the flesh were made to
see; even mother Psyche can love the light, when it clothes or betrays
something else that matters; and the fleshly-spiritual Goethe said most
truly: _Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben_.




5

AVERSION FROM PLATONISM


Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve,
and in those Mediterranean regions that nurtured the classic mind,
by continually repeating the same definite scenes, nature forced it
to fix its ideas. Every one learned to think that the earth and the
gods were more permanent than himself; he perused them, he returned to
them, he studied them at arm's length, and he recognized their external
divinity. But where the Atlantic mists envelop everything, though we
must repeatedly use the same names for new-born things, as we continue
to christen children John and Mary, yet we feel that the facts, like
the persons, are never really alike; everything is so fused, merged,
and continuous, that whatever element we may choose to say is repeated
seems but a mental abstraction and a creature of language. The weather
has got into our bones; there is a fog in the brain; the limits of our
own being become uncertain to us. Yet what is the harm, if only we
move and change inwardly in harmony with the ambient flux? Why this
mania for naming and measuring and mastering what is carrying us so
merrily along? Why shouldn't the intellect be vague while the heart is
comfortable?




6

CLOUD CASTLES


The heavens are the most constant thing we know, the skies the most
inconstant. Even the Olympian expanse, when blue and cloudless, is
an aspect of terrestrial atmosphere in a holiday mood, a sort of gay
parasol which the Earth holds up when she walks in the sun, and takes
down again when she walks in the shadow; while clouds are veils wrapped
more closely about her, and even more friendly to her frailty. Nor are
these feminine trappings less lovely for being easily blown about, and
always fresh and in the latest fashion. It is a prejudice to suppose
that instability must be sad or must be trivial. A new cloud castle is
probably well worth an old one; any one of them may equal in beauty
the monotonous gold and black vault which it conceals from us, and all
of them together certainly surpass that tragic decoration in spiritual
suggestion. Something in us no doubt regrets that these airy visions
vanish so quickly and are irrecoverable; but this is a sort of fleshly
sentimentality of ours and not reasonable. In nature, what disappears
never narrows the range of what is yet to be. If we were immortally
young, like the atmosphere, the lapse of things would not grieve us,
nor would inconstancy be a vice in ourselves. Nobody's future would be
blighted by his past; and this perhaps explains the morals of the gods.
Change to us is an omen of death, and only in the timeless can we feel
secure; but if we were safe in our plastic existence, like nature and
the gods of nature, fidelity to a single love might seem foolish in
us; being and possessing any one thing would not then be incompatible
with sooner or later being and possessing everything else. Nature and
substance are like the absolute actor with an equal affinity for every
part, and changing sex, age, and station with perfect good grace.

A great principle of charity in morals is not to blame the fishes for
their bad taste in liking to live under water. Yet many philosophers
seem to have sinned against this reasonable law, since they have blamed
life and nature for liking to change, which is as much as to say for
liking to live. Certainly life and nature, when they produce thought,
turn from themselves towards the eternal, but it is by a glance, itself
momentary, that they turn to it; for if they were themselves converted
into something changeless, they could neither live, think, nor turn.
In the realm of existence it is not sinful to be fugitive nor in bad
taste to be new. Accordingly cloud castles have nothing to blush for;
if they have a weak hold on existence, so has everything good. We are
warned that the day of judgement will be full of surprises: perhaps
one of them may be that in heaven things are even more unstable than
on earth, and that the mansions reserved for us there are not only
many but insecure. Cloud castles are hints to us that eternity has
nothing to do with duration, nor beauty with substantial existence, and
that even in heaven our bliss would have to be founded on a smiling
renunciation. Did Mohammed, I wonder, misunderstand the archangel
Gabriel in gathering that celestial beauties (unlike the lights and
voices of Dante's paradise) could be embraced as well as admired?
And in promising that our heavenly brides would daily recover their
virginity, did he simply clothe in a congenial metaphor the fact that
they would be different brides every day, and that if we wished to
dwell in a true paradise, and not in a quarrelsome and sordid harem, we
must never dream of seeing any of them a second time?

Fidelity is a virtue akin to habit and rooted in the inertia of animal
life, which would run amok without trusty allies and familiar signals.
We have an inveterate love of _The Same_, because our mortal condition
obliges us to reconsider facts and to accumulate possessions; by
instinct both the heart and the intellect hug everything they touch,
and to let anything go is a sort of death to them. This spirit of
pathetic fidelity in us would certainly reproach those ethereal visions
for being ephemeral, and Cupid for having wings and no heart; but
might not the visiting angels in turn reproach us for clownishness in
wishing to detain them? They are not made of flesh and blood; they are
not condemned to bear children. Their smile, their voice, and the joy
they bring us are the only life they have. They are fertile only like
the clouds, in that by dissolving they give place to some other form,
no less lovely and elusive than themselves; and perhaps if we took a
long view we should not feel that our own passage through existence
had a very different quality. We last as a strain of music lasts, and
we go where it goes. Is it not enough that matter should illustrate
each ideal possibility only once and for a moment, and that Caesar or
Shakespeare should figure once in this world? To repeat them would not
intensify their reality, while it would impoverish and make ridiculous
the pageant of time, like a stage army running round behind the scenes
in order to reappear. To come to an end is a virtue when one has had
one's day, seeing that in the womb of the infinite there are always
other essences no less deserving of existence.

Even cloud castles, however, have a double lien on permanence. A flash
of lightning is soon over, yet so long as the earth is wrapped in
its present atmosphere, flashes will recur from time to time so very
like this one that the mind will make the same comment upon them, and
its pronouncements on its past experience will remain applicable to
its experience to come. Fleeting things in this way, when they are
repeated, survive and are united in the wisdom which they teach us in
common. At the same time they inwardly contain something positively
eternal, since the essences they manifest are immutable in character,
and from their platonic heaven laugh at this inconstant world, into
which they peep for a moment, when a chance collocation of atoms
suggests one or another of them to our minds. To these essences mind
is constitutionally addressed, and into them it likes to sink in its
self-forgetfulness. It is only our poor mother Psyche, being justly
afraid of growing old, who must grudge the exchange of one vision
for another. Material life is sluggish and conservative; it would
gladly drag the whole weary length of its past behind it, like a worm
afraid of being cut in two in its crawling. It is haunted by a ghostly
memory, a wonderful but not successful expedient for calling the dead
to life, in order, somewhat inconsistently, to mourn over them and be
comforted. Why not kiss our successive pleasures good-bye, simply and
without marking our preferences, as we do our children when they file
to bed? A free mind does not measure the worth of anything by the worth
of anything else. It is itself at least as plastic as nature and has
nothing to fear from revolutions. To live in the moment would indeed be
brutish and dangerous if we narrowed to a moment the time embraced in
our field of view, since with the wider scope of thought come serenity
and dominion; but to live in the moment is the only possible life if
we consider the spiritual activity itself. The most protracted life,
in the actual living, can be nothing but a chain of moments, each
the seat of its irrecoverable vision, each a dramatic perspective of
the world, seen in the light of a particular passion at a particular
juncture. But at each moment the wholeness of mind is spiritual and
aesthetic, the wholeness of a meaning or a picture, and no knife can
divide it. Its immortality, too, is timeless, like that of the truths
and forms in which it is absorbed. Therefore apprehension can afford
to hasten all the more trippingly in its career, touching the facts
here and there for a moment, and building its cloud castles out of
light and air, movement and irony, to let them lapse again without a
pang. Contemplation, when it frees itself from animal anxiety about
existence, ceases to question and castigate its visions, as if they
were mere signals of alarm or hints of hidden treasures; and then it
cannot help seeing what treasures these visions hold within themselves,
each framing some luminous and divine essence, as a telescope frames a
star; and something of their inalienable distinction and firmness seems
to linger in our minds, though in the exigencies of our hurried life we
must turn away from each of them and forget them.




7

CROSS-LIGHTS


They say the sun is a very small star, and the thing is plausible
enough in itself, without the proofs which presumably the astronomers
can give of it. That which nature produces she is apt to produce in
crowds; what she does once, if she has her way, she will do often, with
a persistency and monotony which would be intolerable to her if she
were endowed with memory; but hers is a life of habit and automatic
repetition, varied only when there is some hitch in the clockwork, and
she begins hurriedly beating a new tune. Accordingly, what any creature
calls the present time, the living interest, the ruling power, or the
true religion is almost always but as one leaf in a tree. The same
plastic stress which created it creates a million comparable things
around it. Yet it is easy for each to ignore its neighbours, and to be
shocked at the notion of loving them as itself; for they all have their
separate places or seasons, and bloom on their several stems, so that
an accident that overwhelms one of them may easily leave the others
unscathed. But for all that, they are as multitudinous and similar as
the waves of the sea. Take any star at random, like our sun, or any
poet, or any idea, and whilst certainly it will be the nearest and
warmest to somebody, it is not at all likely to be the greatest of its
kind, or even very remarkable.

Nevertheless, in a moral perspective, nearness makes all the
difference; and for us the sun is a veritable ruling deity and parent
of light; he is the centre and monarch of our home system. Similarly
each living being is a sort of sun to itself; this spark within me,
by whose light I see at all, is a great sun to me; and considering
how wide a berth other spiritual luminaries seem to give me, I must
warm myself chiefly by my own combustion, and remain singularly
important to myself. This importance belongs to the humour of material
existence, visible when I look at my seamy side; it vanishes in so
far as my little light actually bums clear, and my intent flies with
it to whatever objects its rays can reach, no matter how distant or
alien. Yet this very intelligence and scope in me are functions of my
inward fire: seeing, too, is burning. An atomic and spark-like form of
existence, prevalent in nature, is absolutely essential to spirit; and
I find it very acceptable. It is a free, happy, and humble condition.
I welcome the minute bulk, the negligible power, the chance quality
and oddity of my being, combined as it is with vital independence
and adequate fuel in my small bunkers for my brief voyage. On a
vaster scale, I think the sun, for all his littleness, has a splendid
prerogative, and I honour Phoebus as a happy god. The happiest part
of his condition and his best claim to deity lie in this: that he can
irradiate and kindle the frozen or vaporous bodies that swim about him;
he can create the moonlight and the earthlight, much more powerful than
the moonlight. This earthlight, if we could only get far enough from
the earth to see it, would seem strangely brilliant and beautiful; it
would show sea-tints and snow-tints and sand-tints; there would be
greens and purples in it reflected from summer and winter zones, dotted
with cinder scars and smoke-wreaths of cities. Yet all these lights are
only sunlight, received and returned with thanks.

Nor is this surface shimmer, visible to telescopic observers, the
only benefit gained: something is kept back and absorbed; some warmth
sinks into the substance of the earth and permeates its watery soil,
initiating currents in the sea and air, and quickening many a nest of
particles into magnetic and explosive and contagious motions. This
life which arises in the earth is an obeisance to the sun. The flowers
turn to the light and the eye follows it, animal bodies imbibe it, and
send it forth again in glad looks and keen attention; and when dreams
and thoughts, even with the eyes shut, play within us like flamelets
amongst the coals, it is still the light of the sun, strangely stored
and transmuted, that shines in those visions. Certainly intelligence
in its cognitive intent is radically immaterial, and nothing could be
more heterogeneous from vibrations, attractions, or ethereal currents
than the power to make assertions that shall be true or false, relevant
or irrelevant to outlying things; but this so spiritual power is
profoundly natural; it plainly exhibits an animal awaking to the
presence of other bodies that actually surround him, resenting their
cruelty or warming to their conquest and absorption. Apart from its
roots in animal predicaments, spirit would be wholly inexplicable in
its moods and arbitrary in its deliverance. The more ecstatic or the
more tragic experience is, the more unmistakably it is the voice of
matter. It then obviously retraces and makes incandescent the silent
relations of things with things, by which its weal or woe is decided.
Sometimes it simply burns in their midst and moves in their company
like the sun amongst the stars he ignores; sometimes it gilds in its
highly coloured lights the surface of things turned in its direction.
Were not the distances between bodies spanned by some universal
gravitation (which we are now told may be a sort of light), we may be
sure that sense and fancy, which are profoundly vegetative things,
would never leap from their source and discount their images in the
heroic effort to understand the world. But the fire of life casts
its passionate illumination on the dead things that control it, and
raises to aesthetic actuality various poetic symbols of their power.
Dead things possess, of course, in their own right, their material and
logical being, but they borrow from the adventitious interest which a
living creature must needs take in them their various moral dignities
and all their part in the conscious world. It is intelligible that
moralists and psychologists should be absorbed in those reflections
of their attention which reach them from things distant or near, and
that they should pronounce the whole universe to be nothing but their
experience of it, a sort of rainbow or crescent kindly decorating their
personal sky. On the same principle the sun (who, being a material
creature, would also be subject to egotism) might say that the only
substance in the universe was light, and that the earth and moon were
nothing but ethereal mirrors palely reflecting his own fire. It would
seem absurd to him that the earth or its inhabitants should profess to
have any bowels. Inextinguishable laughter and self-assurance would
seize him at the report that any dark places existed, or any invisible
thoughts. He would never admit that, in all this, he was himself
thinking; what we should call his thoughts he would maintain (without
thinking!) were evident meteors moving and shining on their own account.

Such are the cross-lights of animal persuasion. Things, when seen,
seem to come and go with our visions; and visions, when we do not know
why they visit us, seem to be things. But this is not the end of the
story. Opacity is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals
the existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact live and
spread their roots in the darkness, which embosoms and creates the
light, though the light does not comprehend it. If sensuous evidence
flooded the whole sphere with which souls are conversant, they would
have no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did not
see, and they would live in a fool's paradise of lucidity. Fortunately
for their wisdom, if not for their comfort, they come upon mysteries
and surprises, earthquakes and rumblings in their hidden selves and
in their undeciphered environment; they live in time, which is a
double abyss of darkness; and the primary and urgent object of their
curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which from its ambush
governs their fortunes. The proud, who shine by their own light, do
not perceive matter, the fuel that feeds and will some day fail them;
but the knowledge of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light
and almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm themselves at
a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its favourable shining.
When we are on the shady side of the earth we can, as a compensation,
range in knowledge far beyond our painted atmosphere, and far beyond
that little sun who, so long as he shone upon us, seemed to ride at
the top of heaven; we can perceive a galaxy of other lights, no less
original than he, to which his glory blinded us; we can even discover
how he himself, if his hot head of burning hair would only suffer him
to notice it, lives subject to their perpetual influence. Beautiful and
happy god as Phoebus may be, he is not a just god nor an everlasting
one. He is a lyric singer; he is not responsible save to his own
heart, and not obliged to know other things. He lives in the eternal,
and does not need to be perpetual. And he is often beneficent in his
spontaneity, and many of us have cause to thank and to love him. There
is an uncovenanted society of spirits, like that of the morning stars
singing together, or of all the larks at once in the sky; it is a happy
accident of freedom and a conspiracy of solitudes. When people _talk
together_, they are at once entangled in a mesh of instrumentalities,
irrelevance, misunderstanding, vanity, and propaganda; and all to no
purpose, for why should creatures become alike who are different? But
when minds, being naturally akin and each alone in its own heaven,
_soliloquize in harmony_, saying compatible things only because their
hearts are similar, then society is friendship in the spirit; and the
unison of many thoughts twinkles happily in the night across the void
of separation.




8

HAMLET'S QUESTION


To be born is painful, and the profit of it so uncertain that we need
not wonder if sometimes the mind as well as the body seems to hold
back. The winds of February are not colder to a featherless chick than
are the surprises which nature and truth bring to our dreaming egotism.
It was warm and safe in the egg; exciting enough, too, to feel a new
organ throbbing here or a fresh limb growing out there. No suspicion
visited the happy creature that these budding domestic functions were
but preparations for foreign wars and omens of a disastrous death, to
overtake it sooner or later in a barbarous, militant, incomprehensible
world. Of death, and even of birth (its ominous counterpart) the embryo
had no idea. It believed simply in the tight spherical universe which
it knew, and was confident of living in it for ever. It would have
thought heaven had fallen if its shell had cracked. How should life
be possible in a world of uncertain dimensions, where incalculable
blows might fall upon us at any time from any quarter? What a wild
philosophy, to invent objects and dangers of which there was absolutely
no experience! And yet for us now, accustomed to the buffets and
ambitions of life in the open, that pre-natal vegetative dream seems
worthless and contemptible, and hardly deserving the name of existence.

Could we have debated Hamlet's question before we were conceived, the
answer might well have been doubtful; or rather reason, not serving
any prior instinct, could have expressed no preference and must have
left the decision to chance. Birth and death are the right moments for
absolute courage. But when once the die is cast and we exist, so that
Hamlet's question can be put to us, the answer is already given; nature
in forming us has compelled us to prejudge the case. She has decreed
that all the beasts and many a man should propagate without knowing
what they are about; and the infant soul for its part, when once
begotten, is constitutionally bent on working out its powers and daring
the adventure of life. To have made the great refusal at the beginning,
for fear of what shocks and hardships might come, seems to us, now that
we are launched, morose and cowardly. Our soul, with its fluttering
hopes and alarmed curiosity, is made to flee from death, and seems to
think, if we judge by its action, that to miss experience altogether is
worse and sadder than any life, however troubled or short. If nature
has fooled us in this, she doubtless saw no harm in doing so, and
thought it quite compatible with heartily loving us in her rough way.
She merely yielded to a tendency to tease which is strangely prevalent
among nurses. With a sort of tyrannical fondness, to make us show our
paces, she dangled this exciting and unsatisfactory bauble of life
before us for a moment, only to laugh at us, and kiss us, and presently
lay our head again on her appeasing breast.

The fear which children feel at being left in the dark or alone or
among strangers goes somewhat beyond what a useful instinct would
require; for they are likely to be still pretty well embosomed and
protected, not to say smothered. It is as if the happy inmate of
some model gad took alarm at the opening of his cell door, thinking
he was to be driven out and forced to take his chances again in this
rough wide world, when, in fact, all was well and he was only being
invited to walk in the prison garden. Just so when the young mind
hears the perilous summons to think, it is usually a false alarm. In
its philosophical excursions it is likely to remain well blanketed
from the truth and comfortably muffled in its own atmosphere. Groping
and empirical in its habits, it will continue in the path it happens
to have turned into; for in a fog how should it otherwise choose
its direction? Its natural preference is to be guided by touch and
smell, but it sometimes finds it convenient to use its eyes and ears
as a substitute. So long as the reference to the vegetative soul
and its comforts remains dominant, this substitution is harmless.
Sights and sounds will then be but flowers in the prisoner's garden,
and intelligence a maze through which at best he will find his way
home again. Some danger there always is, even in such an outing; for
this walled garden has gates into the fields, which by chance may
be left open. Sight and sound, in their useful ministrations, may
create a new interest, and run into sheer music and star-gazing.
The life the senses were meant to serve will then be forgotten; the
psychic atmosphere--which of course is indispensable--will be pierced,
discounted, and used as a pleasant vehicle to things and to truths; and
the motherly soul, having unintentionally given birth to the intellect,
will grumble at her runaway and thankless child. As for the truant
himself, Hamlet's question will lapse from his view altogether, not
because nature has answered it for him beforehand, but because his own
disinterestedness and rapture have robbed it of all urgency. Intellect
is passionate, and natural, and human enough, as singing is; it is all
the purer and keener for having emancipated itself, like singing, from
its uses, if it ever had any, and having become a delight in itself.
But it is not concerned with its own organs or their longevity; it
cannot understand why its mother, the earthly soul, thinks all the good
and evil things that happen in this world are of no consequence, if
they do not happen to her.




9

THE BRITISH CHARACTER


What is it that governs the Englishman? Certainly not intelligence;
seldom passion; hardly self-interest, since what we call self-interest
is nothing but some dull passion served by a brisk intelligence. The
Englishman's heart is perhaps capricious or silent; it is seldom
designing or mean. There are nations where people are always innocently
explaining how they have been lying and cheating in small matters,
to get out of some predicament, or secure some advantage; that seems
to them a part of the art of living. Such is not the Englishman's
way: it is easier for him to face or to break opposition than to
circumvent it. If we tried to say that what governs him is convention,
we should have to ask ourselves how it comes about that England is
the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies,
hobbies, and humours. Nowhere do we come oftener upon those two social
abortions--the affected and the disaffected. Where else would a man
inform you, with a sort of proud challenge, that he lived on nuts, or
was in correspondence through a medium with Sir Joshua Reynolds, or had
been disgustingly housed when last in prison? Where else would a young
woman, in dress and manners the close copy of a man, tell you that her
parents were odious, and that she desired a husband but no children, or
children without a husband? It is true that these novelties soon become
the conventions of some narrower circle, or may even have been adopted
_en bloc_ in emotional desperation, as when people are converted; and
the oddest sects demand the strictest self-surrender. Nevertheless,
when people are dissident and supercilious by temperament, they manage
to wear their uniforms with a difference, turning them by some lordly
adaptation into a part of their own person.

Let me come to the point boldly; what governs the Englishman is his
inner atmosphere, the weather in his soul. It is nothing particularly
spiritual or mysterious. When he has taken his exercise and is drinking
his tea or his beer and lighting his pipe; when, in his garden or
by his fire, he sprawls in an aggressively comfortable chair; when,
well-washed and well-brushed, he resolutely turns in church to the east
and recites the Creed (with genuflexions, if he likes genuflexions)
without in the least implying that he believes one word of it;
when he hears or sings the most crudely sentimental and thinnest
of popular songs, unmoved but not disgusted; when he makes up his
mind who is his best friend or his favourite poet; when he adopts a
party or a sweetheart; when he is hunting or shooting or boating, or
striding through the fields; when he is choosing his clothes or his
profession--never is it a precise reason, or purpose, or outer fact
that determines him; it is always the atmosphere of his inner man.

To say that this atmosphere was simply a sense of physical well-being,
of coursing blood and a prosperous digestion, would be far too gross;
for while psychic weather is all that, it is also a witness to some
settled disposition, some ripening inclination for this or that, deeply
rooted in the soul. It gives a sense of direction in life which is
virtually a code of ethics, and a religion behind religion. On the
other hand, to say it was the vision of any ideal or allegiance to
any principle would be making it far too articulate and abstract.
The inner atmosphere, when compelled to condense into words, may
precipitate some curt maxim or over-simple theory as a sort of war-cry;
but its puerile language does it injustice, because it broods at a
much deeper level than language or even thought. It is a mass of dumb
instincts and allegiances, the love of a certain quality of life, to
be maintained manfully. It is pregnant with many a stubborn assertion
and rejection. It fights under its trivial fluttering opinions like
a smoking battleship under its flags and signals; you must consider,
not what they are, but why they have been hoisted and will not be
lowered. One is tempted at times to turn away in despair from the most
delightful acquaintance--the picture of manliness, grace, simplicity,
and honour, apparently rich in knowledge and humour--because of some
enormous platitude he reverts to, some hopelessly stupid little dogma
from which one knows that nothing can ever liberate him. The reformer
must give him up; but why should one wish to reform a person so much
better than oneself? He is like a thoroughbred horse, satisfying to the
trained eye, docile to the light touch, and coursing in most wonderful
unison with you through the open world. What do you care what words he
uses? Are you impatient with the lark because he sings rather than
talks? and if he could talk, would you be irritated by his curious
opinions? Of course, if any one positively asserts what is contrary to
fact, there is an error, though the error may be harmless; and most
divergencies between men should interest us rather than offend us,
because they are effects of perspective, or of legitimate diversity in
experience and interests. Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and
is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long
beards. Jupiter decided the most intricate questions with a nod, and a
very few words and no gestures suffice for the Englishman to make his
inner mind felt most unequivocably when occasion requires.

Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers
the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather
glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers
strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly
he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being;
he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the
instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change
him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English
weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in
the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of
mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a
sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race
when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage
to supplant him.




10

SEAFARING


All peoples that dwell by the sea sometimes venture out upon it.
The boys are eager to swim and sail, and the men may be turned into
habitual navigators by the spirit of enterprise or by necessity. But
some races take to the water more kindly than others, either because
they love the waves more or the furrow less. We may imagine that
sheer distress drove the Norse fishermen and pirates into their open
boats. The ocean they explored was rough and desolate; the fish and the
pillaged foreigner had to compensate them for their privations. They
quitted their fiords and brackish islands dreaming of happier lands.
But with the Greeks and the English the case was somewhat different.
There are no happier lands than theirs; and they set forth for the most
part on summer seas, towards wilder and less populous regions. They
went armed, of course, and ready to give battle: they had no scruples
about carrying home anything they might purloin or obtain by enormously
advantageous barter, but they were not in quest of softer climes or
foreign models; their home remained their ideal. They were scarcely
willing to settle in foreign parts unless they could live their home
life there.

This love of home merged in their minds with the love of liberty; it
was a loyalty inwardly grounded and not a mere tribute to habit or
external influences. They could consequently retain their manners
wherever they went, and could found free colonies, almost as Greek or
as English as the mother country; for it was not Greece that originally
formed the Greeks nor England the English, but the other way round; the
Greeks and the English, wherever they might be, spun their institutions
about them like a cocoon. Certainly the geographical environment was
favourable; the skies and waters that embosomed them--when in their
migrations they had reached those climes--simply met their native
genius half-way and allowed it to bloom as it had not elsewhere. But
the winds could carry that same seed to fructify in other soils; and
as there were many Greek cities sprung from one, so there are several
local Englands in Great Britain, and others all over the world. Even
people who are not heirs of these nations according to the flesh may
assimilate their spirit in some measure. All men are Greek in the best
sense in so far as they are rational, and live and think on the human
scale; and all are English in so far as their souls are individual,
each the imperturbably dominant cell in its own organism, each faithful
to its inner oracle.

Life at sea is very favourable to this empire of personal liberty.
The inner man, the hereditary Psyche that breeds the body and its
discursive thoughts, craves to exercise ascendancy; it is essentially a
formative principle, an organ of government. Mere solitude and monastic
reverie, such as a hermit or satirist may enjoy even in great cities,
weary and oppress the Englishman. He wants to do something or else to
play at something. His thoughts are not vivid and substantial enough
for company; his passions are too nebulous to define their innate
objects, until accident offers something that perhaps may serve. At sea
there is always something doing: you must mind the helm, the sails, or
the engines; you must keep things shipshape; brasses must be always
bright and eyes sharp; decorum is essential, since discipline is so;
you may even dress for dinner and read prayers on Sunday. This routine
does not trespass on the liberty and reserve of your inner man. You can
exchange a few hearty commonplaces with the other officers and sailors,
or even with a casual passenger; now and then you may indulge in a long
talk, pacing the deck beneath the stars. There is space, there is the
constant shadow of danger, the chance of some adventure at sea or on
a strange shore. There is a continual test and tension of character.
There are degrees of authority and of competence, but the sailor's art
is finite; his ship, however complicated and delicate a creature, has
a known structure and known organs; she will not do anything without
a reason; she is not too wayward (as is the course of things on terra
firma) for a clear-headed man to understand nor for a firm hand to
steer. Maritime fortune in its uncertainty has after all not many forms
of caprice; its worst tricks are familiar; your life-belt is hanging
over your bunk, and you are ready.

Every one grumbles at his lot and at his profession; but what is man
that he should ask for more? These buffeting winds, these long hours of
deep breathing, these habits of quick decision and sharp movement whet
your appetite; you relish your solid plain food, whilst your accustomed
drink smooths over the petty worries of the day, and liberates your
private musings; and what a companionable thing your pipe is! The
women--dear, dogmatic, fussy angels--are not here; that is a relief;
and yet you are counting the weeks before you can return to them at
home. And all those tender episodes of a more fugitive sort, how
merrily you think them over now! more merrily perhaps than you enacted
them, since you need not call to mind the little shabby accompaniments
and false notes that may have marred them in reality. Your remoter
future, too, is smiling enough for an honest man who believes in God
and is not a snob in the things of the spirit. You see in your mind's
eye a cottage on some sunny hillside over-looking the sea; near it,
from a signal-post that is a ship's mast, the flags are flapping in
the breeze; your children are playing on the beach--except the eldest,
perhaps, already a sailor. There is a blessed simplicity about the sea,
with its vast inhumanity islanding and freeing the humanity of man.




12

PRIVACY


The secret of English mastery is self-mastery. The Englishman
establishes a sort of satisfaction and equilibrium in his inner man,
and from that citadel of rightness he easily measures the value of
everything that comes within his moral horizon. In what may lie beyond
he takes but a feeble interest. Enterprising enough when in a roving
mood, and fond of collecting outlandish objects and ideas, he seldom
allows his wanderings and discoveries to unhinge his home loyalties or
ruffle his self-possession; and he remains, after all his adventures,
intellectually as indolent and secure as in the beginning. As to
speculative truth, he instinctively halts short of it, as it looms
in the distance and threatens to cast a contemptuous and chilling
shadow across his life. He would be very severe to any who dreaded
cold water and wouldn't learn to swim; yet in the moral world he is
himself subject to illusions of timidity. He does not believe, there,
in the overwhelming rewards of courage. His chosen life is indeed
beautiful--as the shy boy's might be--ill its finitude; all the more
beautiful and worth preserving because, like his country, it is an
island in the sea. His domestic thermometer and barometer have
sufficed to guide him to the right hygiene.

Hygiene does not require telescopes nor microscopes. It is not
concerned, like medicine or psychology, with the profound hidden
workings of our bodies or minds, complexities hardly less foreign
to our discoursing selves than are the mysteries of the great outer
world. Hygiene regards only the right regimen of man in his obvious
environment, judged by his conscious well-being. If it goes afield
at all, it does so in the interests of privacy. All it asks of life
is that it should be comely, spontaneous, and unimpeded: all it asks
of the earth is that it should be fit for sport and for habitation.
Men, to be of the right hygienic sort, must love the earth, and must
know how to range in it. This the Englishman knows; and just as, in
spite of his insularity, he loves this whole terraqueous globe simply
and genuinely, so the earth, turned into mud by the vain stampings of
so many garrulous and sickly nations, would doubtless say: Let the
Englishman inhabit me, and I shall be green again.

In matters of hygiene the Englishman's maxims are definite and his
practice refined. He has discovered what he calls good form, and
is obstinately conservative about it, not from inertia, but in the
interests of pure vitality. Experience has taught him the uses to which
vitality can be put, so as to preserve and refresh it. He knows the
right degree of exertion normally required to do things well--to walk
or to talk, for instance; he does not saunter nor scramble, he does
not gesticulate nor scream. In consequence, perhaps, on extraordinary
occasions he fails at first to exert himself enough; and his eloquence
is not torrential nor inspired, even at those rare moments when it
ought to be so. But when nothing presses, he shows abundant energy,
without flurry or excess. In manners and morals, too, he has found the
right mean between anarchy and servitude, and the wholesome measure
of comfort. What those who dislike him call his hypocrisy is but
timeliness in his instincts, and a certain modesty on their part in not
intruding upon one another. Your prayers are not necessarily insincere
because you pray only in church; you are not concealing a passion if
for a time you forget it and slough it off. These alternations are
phases of the inner man, not masks put on in turn by some insidious
and calculating knave. All the Englishman's attitudes and habits--his
out-of-door life, his clubs, his conventicles, his business--when they
are spontaneous and truly British, are for the sake of his inner man
in its privacy. Other people, unless the game calls for them, are in
the way, and uninteresting. His spirit is like Wordsworth's skylark,
true to the kindred points of heaven and home; and perhaps these points
seem to him kindred only because they are both functions of himself.
Home is the centre of his physical and moral comfort, his headquarters
in the war of life, where lie his spiritual stores. Heaven is a realm
of friendly inspiring breezes and setting suns, enveloping his rambles
and his perplexities. The world to him is a theatre for the soliloquy
of action. There is a comfortable luxuriousness in all his attitudes.
He thinks the prize of life worth winning, but not worth snatching. If
you snatch it, as Germans, Jews, and Americans seem inclined to do, you
abdicate the sovereignty of your inner man, you miss delight, dignity,
and peace; and in that case the prize of life has escaped you.

As the Englishman disdains to peer and is slow to speculate, so
he resents any meddling or intrusion into his own preserves. How
sedulously he plants out his garden, however tiny, from his neighbours
and from the public road! If his windows look unmistakably on the
street, at least he fills his window-boxes with the semblance of a
hedge or a garden, and scarcely allows the dubious light to filter
through his blinds and lace curtains; and the space between them, in
the most dingy tenement, is blocked by an artificial plant. He is quite
willing not to be able to look out, if only he can prevent other people
from looking in. If they did, what would they see? Nothing shocking,
surely; his attitude by his fireside is perfectly seemly. He is not
throwing anything at the family; very likely they are not at home. Nor
has he introduced any low-class person by the tradesman's entrance,
in whose company he might blush to be spied. He is not in deshabille;
if he has changed any part of his street clothes it has not been from
any inclination to be slovenly in private, but on the contrary to
vindicate his self-respect and domestic decorum. He does not dress to
be seen of men, but of God. His elegance is an expression of comfort,
and his comfort a consciousness of elegance. The eyes of men disquiet
him, eminently presentable though he be, and he thinks it rude of them
to stare, even in simple admiration. It takes tact and patience in
strangers--perhaps at first an ostentatious indifference--to reassure
him and persuade him that he would be safe in liking them. His frigid
exterior is often a cuticle to protect his natural tenderness, which he
forces himself not to express, lest it should seem misplaced or clumsy.
There is a masculine sort of tenderness which is not fondness, but
craving and premonition of things untried; and the young Englishman is
full of it. His heart is quiet and full; he has not pumped it dry, like
ill-bred children, in tantrums and effusive fancies. On the other hand,
passions are atrophied if their expression is long suppressed, and we
soon have nothing to say if we never say anything. As he grows old the
Englishman may come to suspect, not without reason, that he might not
reward too close a perusal. His social bristles will then protect his
intellectual weakness, and he will puff himself out to disguise his
vacuity.

It is intelligible that a man of deep but inarticulate character
should feel more at ease in the fields and woods, at sea or in remote
enterprises, than in the press of men. In the world he is obliged to
maintain stiffly principles which he would prefer should be taken for
granted. Therefore when he sits in silence behind his window curtains,
with his newspaper, his wife, or his dog, his monumental passivity is
not a real indolence. He is busily reinforcing his character, ruffled
by the day's contact with hostile or indifferent things, and he is
gathering new strength for the fray. After the concessions imposed
upon him by necessity or courtesy, he is recovering his natural tone.
To-morrow he will issue forth fresh and confident, and exactly the same
as he was yesterday. His character is like his climate, gentle and
passing readily from dull to glorious, and back again; variable on the
surface, yet perpetually self-restored and invincibly the same.




12

THE LION AND THE UNICORN


Every one can see why the Lion should be a symbol for the British
nation. This noble animal loves dignified repose. He haunts by
preference solitary glades and pastoral landscapes. His movements are
slow, he yawns a good deal; he has small squinting eyes high up in
his head, a long displeased nose, and a prodigious maw. He apparently
has some difficulty in making things out at a distance, as if he had
forgotten his spectacles (for he is getting to be an elderly lion now),
but he snaps at the flies when they bother him too much. On the whole,
he is a tame lion; he has a cage called the Constitution, and a whole
parliament of keepers with high wages and a cockney accent; and he
submits to all the rules they make for him, growling only when he is
short of raw beef. The younger members of the nobility and gentry may
ride on his back, and he obligingly lets his tail hang out of the bars,
so that the little Americans and the little Irishmen and the little
Bolshevists, when they come to jeer at him, may twist it. Yet when the
old fellow goes for a walk, how all the domestic and foreign poultry
scamper! They know he can spring; his strength when aroused proves
altogether surprising and unaccountable, he never seems to mind a blow,
and his courage is terrible. The cattle, seeing there is no safety in
flight, herd together when he appears on the horizon, and try to look
unconscious; the hyenas go to snarl at a distance; the eagles and the
serpents aver afterwards that they were asleep. Even the insects that
buzz about his ears, and the very vermin in his skin, know him for the
king of beasts.

But why should the other supporter of the British arms be the Unicorn?
What are the mystic implications of having a single horn? This can
hardly be the monster spoken of in Scripture, into the reason for whose
existence, whether he be the rhinoceros of natural history or a slip
of an inspired pen, it would be blasphemy to inquire. This Unicorn
is a creature of mediaeval fancy, a horse rampant argent, only with
something queer about his head, as if a croquet-stake had been driven
into it, or he wore a very high and attenuated fool's cap. It would be
far-fetched to see in this ornament any allusion to deceived husbands,
as if in England the alleged injury never seemed worth two horns, or
divorce and damages soon removed one of them. More plausible is the
view that, as the Lion obviously expresses the British character, so
the Unicorn somewhat more subtly expresses the British intellect.
Whereas most truths have two faces, and at least half of any solid
fact escapes any single view of it, the English mind is monocular; the
odd and the singular have a special charm for it. This love of the
particular and the original leads the Englishman far afield in the
search for it; he collects curios, and taking all the nation together,
there is perhaps nothing that some Englishman has not seen, thought, or
known; but who sees things as a whole, or anything in its right place?
He inevitably rides some hobby. He travels through the wide world with
one eye shut, hops all over it on one leg, and plays all his scales
with one finger. There is fervour, there is accuracy, there is kindness
in his gaze, but there is no comprehension. He will defend the silliest
opinion with a mint of learning, and espouse the worst of causes on
the highest principles. It is notorious elsewhere that the world is
round, that nature has bulk, and three if not four dimensions; it is a
truism that things cannot be seen as a whole except in imagination. But
imagination, if he has it, the Englishman is too scrupulous to trust;
he observes the shapes and the colours of things intently, and behold,
they are quite flat, and he challenges you to show why, when every
visible part of everything is flat, anything should be supposed to be
round. He is a keen reformer, and certainly the world would be much
simpler, right opinion would be much lighter and wrong opinion much
wronger, if things had no third and no fourth dimension.

Ah, why did those early phrenologists, true and typical Englishmen
as they were, denounce the innocent midwife who by a little timely
pressure on the infant skull compressed, as they said, "the oval
of genius into the flatness of boobyism." Let us not be cowed by a
malicious epithet. What some people choose to call boobyism and
flatness may be the simplest, the most British, the most scientific
philosophy. Your true booby may be only he who, having perforce but
a flat view of a flat world, prates of genius and rotundity. Blessed
are they whose eye is single. Only when very drunk do we acknowledge
our double optics; when sober we endeavour to correct and ignore this
visual duplicity and to see as respectably as if we had only one
eye. The Unicorn might well say the same thing of two-horned beasts.
Such double and crooked weapons are wasteful and absurd. You can use
only one horn effectively even if you have two, but in a sidelong
and cross-eyed fashion; else your prey simply nestles between, where
eye cannot see it nor horn probe it. A single straight horn, on the
contrary, is like a lancet; it pierces to the heart of the enemy by a
sure frontal attack: nothing like it for pricking a bubble, or pointing
to a fact and scathingly asking the Government if they are aware of it.
In music likewise every pure melody passes from single note to note, as
do the sweet songs of nature. Away with your demoniac orchestras, and
your mad pianist, tossing his mane, and banging with his ten fingers
and his two feet at once I As to walking on two feet, that also is mere
wobbling and, as Schopenhauer observed, a fall perpetually arrested.
It is an unstable compromise between going on all fours, if you want
to be safe, and standing on one leg, like the exquisite flamingo, if
you aspire to be graceful and spiritually sensitive. There is really no
biped in nature except ridiculous man, as if the prancing Unicorn had
succeeded in always being rampant; your feathered creatures are bipeds
only on occasion and in their off moments; essentially they are winged
beings, and their legs serve only to prop them when at rest, like the
foot-piece of a motor-cycle which you let down when it stops.

The Lion is an actual beast, the Unicorn a chimera; and is not England
in fact always buoyed up on one side by some chimera, as on the other
by a sense for fact? Illusions are mighty, and must be reckoned with in
this world; but it is not necessary to share them or even to understand
them from within, because being illusions they do not prophesy the
probable consequences of their existence; they are irrelevant in
aspect to what they involve in effect. The dove of peace brings new
wars, the religion of love instigates crusades and lights faggots,
metaphysical idealism in practice is the worship of Mammon, government
by the people establishes the boss, free trade creates monopolies,
fondness smothers its pet, assurance precipitates disaster, fury ends
in smoke and in shaking hands. The shaggy Lion is dimly aware of all
this; he is ponderous and taciturn by an instinctive philosophy. Why
should he be troubled about the dreams of the Unicorn, more than
about those of the nightingale or the spider? He can roughly discount
these creatures' habits, in so far as they touch him at all, without
deciphering their fantastic minds. That makes the strength of England
in the world, the leonine fortitude that helps her, through a thousand
stupidities and blunders, always to pull through. But England is also,
more than any other country, the land of poetry and of the inner man.
Her sunlight and mists, her fields, cliffs, and moors are full of
aerial enchantment; it is a land of tenderness and dreams. The whole
nation hugs its hallowed shams; there is a real happiness, a sense
of safety, in agreeing not to acknowledge the obvious; there is a
universal conspiracy of respect for the non-existent. English religion,
English philosophy, English law, English domesticity could not get on
without this "tendency to feign." And see how admissible, how almost
natural this chimera is. A milk-white pony, elegantly Arabian, with a
mane like sea-foam, and a tail like a little silvery comet, sensitive
nostrils, eyes alight with recognition, a steed such as Phoebus might
well water at those springs that lie in the chalices of flowers, a
symbol at once of impetuosity and obedience, a heraldic image for the
daintiness of Ariel and the purity of Galahad. If somehow we suspect
that the poetical creature is light-witted, the stem Lion opposite
finds him nevertheless a sprightly and tender companion, as King Lear
did his exquisite Fool. Such a Pegasus cannot be a normal horse; he was
hatched in a cloud, and at his birth some inexorable ironic deity drove
a croquet-stake into his pate, and set an attenuated crown, very like a
fool's cap, between his startled ears.




13

DONS


Dons are picturesque figures. Their fussy ways and their oddities,
personal and intellectual, are as becoming to them as black feathers
to the blackbird. Their minds are all gaunt pinnacles, closed gates,
and little hidden gardens. A mediaeval tradition survives in their
notion of learning and in their manner of life; they are monks flown
from the dovecot, scholastics carrying their punctilious habits into
the family circle. In the grander ones there may be some assimilation
to a prelate, a country gentleman, or a party leader; but the rank and
file are modest, industrious pedagogues, sticklers for routine, with a
squinting knowledge of old books and of young men. Their politics are
narrow and their religion dubious. There was always something slippery
in the orthodoxy of scholastics, even in the Middle Ages; they are so
eager to define, to correct, and to trace back everything, that they
tend to cut the cloth on their own bias, and to make some crotchet
of theirs the fulcrum of the universe. The thoughts of these men are
like the Sibylline leaves, profound but lost. I should not call them
pedants, because what they pursue and insist on in little things is
the shadow of something great; trifles, as Michael Angelo said, make
perfection, and perfection is no trifle. Yet dry learning and much
chewing of the cud take the place amongst them of the two ways men
have of really understanding the world--science, which explores it,
and sound wit, which estimates humanly the value of science and of
everything else.

The function of dons is to expound a few classic documents, and to
hand down as large and as pleasant a store as possible of academic
habits, maxims, and anecdotes. They peruse with distrust the new
books published on the subject of their teaching; they refer to them
sometimes sarcastically, but their teaching remains the same. Their
conversation with outsiders is painfully amiable for a while; lassitude
soon puts the damper on it, unless they can lapse into the academic
question of the day, or take up the circle of their good old stories.
Their originality runs to interpreting some old text afresh, wearing
some odd garment, or frequenting in the holidays some unfrequented
spot. When they are bachelors, as properly they should be, their pupils
are their chief link with the world of affection, with mischievous
and merry things; and in exchange for this whiff of life, which they
receive with each yearly invasion of flowering youth, like the fresh
scent of hay every summer from the meadows, they furnish those empty
minds with some humorous memories, and some shreds of knowledge. It
does not matter very much whether what a don says is right or wrong,
provided it is quotable; nobody considers his opinions for the matter
they convey; the point is that by hearing them the pupils and the
public may discover what opinions, and on what subjects, it is possible
for mortals to devise. Their maxims are like those of the early
Greek philosophers, a proper introduction to the good society of the
intellectual world. So are the general systems to which the dons may
be addicted, probably some revision of Christian theology, of Platonic
mysticism, or of German philosophy. Such foreign doctrines do very well
for the dons of successive epochs, native British philosophy not being
fitted to edify the minds of the young: those vaster constructions
appeal more to the imagination, and their very artificiality and
ticklish architecture, like that of a house of cards, are part of
their function, calling for paradoxical faith and--what youth loves
quite as much--for captious and sophistical argument. They lie in the
fourth dimension of human belief, amongst the epicycles which ingenious
error describes about the unknown orbit of truth; for the truth is not
itself luminous, as wit is; the truth travels silently in the night
and requires to be caught by the searchlight of wit to become visible.
Meantime the mind plays innocently with its own phosphorescence, which
is what we call culture and what dons are created to keep alive.
Wit the dons often have, of an oblique kind, in the midst of their
much-indulged prejudices and foibles; and what with glints of wit and
scraps of learning, the soul is not sent away empty from their door:
better fed and healthier, indeed, for these rich crumbs from the
banquet of antiquity, when thought was fresh, than if it had been
reared on a stuffy diet of useful knowledge, or on some single dogmatic
system, to which life-slavery is attached. Poor, brusque, comic,
venerable dons! You watched over us tenderly once, whilst you blew your
long noses at us and scolded; then we thought only of the roses in
your garden, of your succulent dinners, or perhaps of your daughters;
but now we understand that you had hearts yourselves, that you were
song-birds grown old in your cages, having preferred fidelity to
adventure. We catch again the sweet inflection of your cracked notes,
and we bless you. You have washed your hands among the innocent; you
have loved the beauty of the Lord's house.




14

APOLOGY FOR SNOBS


British satirists are very scornful of snobbery; they seem oppressed
by the thought that wealth, rank, and finery are hideously inane and
that they are hideously powerful. Are these moralists really overcome
by a sense of the vanity of human wishes? It would hardly seem so;
for they often breathe a sentimental adoration for romantic love or
philanthropy or adventure or mystic piety or good cheer or ruthless
will--all of them passions as little likely as any snobbish impulse to
arise without some illusion or to end without some disappointment. Why
this exclusive hostility to the vanities dear to the snob? Have birth,
money, and fashion no value whatever? Do they not dazzle the innocent
and unsophisticated with a distant image of happiness? Are they not
actually, when enjoyed, very comforting and delightful things in their
way? What else than this sensitiveness to better social example--which
we may call snobbery if we please--lends English life in particular
its most characteristic excellences--order without constraint, leisure
without apathy, seclusion without solitude, good manners without
punctilio, emulation without intrigue, splendour without hollowness?
Why such bitterness about the harmless absurdities that may fringe
this national discipline? Are these moralists in fact only envious
and sulky? Is it sour grapes? It would sometimes seem as if, in
England, the less representative a man was the more eagerly he took to
literature, and thought that by hating his fellow-men and despising
their prevalent feelings he rendered himself eminently fit to be their
guide and redeemer.

In fact, there is a philosophical principle implied in snobbery, a
principle which is certainly false if made absolute, but which fairly
expresses the moral relations of things in a certain perspective. If
we all really stood on different steps in a single ladder of progress,
then to admire and imitate those above us and to identify ourselves
with them by hook or by crook would be simply to accelerate our natural
development, to expand into our higher self, and to avoid fatal abysses
to the right and to the left of the path marked out for us by our
innate vocation. Life would then be like the simple game which children
call Follow the Leader; and this scrupulous discipleship would be
perfect freedom, since the soul of our leader and our own soul that
chooses him would be the same. This principle is precisely that of
the transcendental philosophy where it maintains that there is but
one spirit in all men, and one logical moral evolution for the world.
In fact, it is the Germans rather than the English that are solemn,
convinced, and universal snobs. If they do not seem so much snobs in
particular, it is because they are snobs _überhaupt_. It is not only
from the nobility that grateful dews descend on their sensitive hearts,
as upon open flowers; they yearn also after the professors and the
artists, and assiduously dress their domestic mind, so far as the cloth
will go, in the latest intellectual fashion. Their respect for what
holds the official stage, and holds it for the moment, is beautiful in
its completeness. They can change their front without changing their
formation. And the occasional pricks and heartburnings of snobbery are
entirely drowned, in their case, in its voluminous vicarious joys.

On the whole, however, snobbish sentiment and transcendental philosophy
do not express the facts of nature. Men and nations do not really march
in single file, as if they were being shepherded into some Noah's Ark.
They have perhaps a common root and similar beginnings, but they
branch out at every step into forms of life between which there is
no further interchange of sap, and no common destiny. Their several
fruits become incommensurable in beauty and in value, like the poetry
of different languages, and more disparate the more each is perfected
after its kind. The whale is not a first sketch for the butterfly,
nor its culmination; the mind of an ox is not a fuller expression of
that of a rabbit. The poet does not evolve into the general, nor _vice
versa_; nor does a man, in growing further, become a woman, superior
as she may be in her own way. That is why snobbery is really a vice:
it tempts us to neglect and despise our proper virtues in aping those
of other people. If an angel appeared to me displaying his iridescent
wings and treble voice and heart fluttering with eternal love, I should
say, "Certainly, I congratulate you, but I do not wish to resemble
you." Snobbery haunts those who are not reconciled with themselves;
evolution is the hope of the immature. You cannot be everything. Why
not be what you are?

This contentment with oneself, in its rational mixture of pride with
humility, and its infinite indifference to possibilities which to
us are impossible, is well understood in the great East--which is a
moral as well as a geographical climate. There every one feels that
circumstances have not made and cannot unmake the soul. Variations of
fortune do not move a man from his inborn centre of gravity. Whatever
happens and whatever people say he puts up with as he would with bad
weather. He lets them thunder and rage, and continues to sit on his
heels in his corner, in the shade or in the sun according to the
season, munching his crust of bread, meditating on heaven and earth,
and publishing on occasion to the passers-by, or to the wilderness, the
revelations he receives from the spirit; and if these are particularly
vivid, he will not hesitate to cry, "So saith the Lord," with an equal
dignity or assurance whether he be sage, king, or beggar. Such firmness
and independence of character are admirable, so long as the expression
of them remains merely poetical or moral. It is enough if confessions
are sincere, and aspirations true to the heart that utters them. In the
heights and the depths we are all solitary, and we are deceived if we
think otherwise, even when people say they agree with us, or form a
sect under our name. As our radical bodily functions are incorrigibly
selfish and persistent, so our ultimate ideals, if they are sincere,
must for ever deviate from those of others and find their zenith in
a different star. The moral world is round like the heavens, and the
directions which life can take are infinitely divergent and unreturning.

But in the world of circumstances, in matters of politics and business,
information, and thrift, civilized men move together: their interests,
if not identical, are parallel, and their very conflicts and rivalries
arise out of this contact and relevance in their aims. Eminence in this
worldly sphere is unmistakable. One fortune in money can be measured
against another and may be increased to equal it; and in government,
fashion, and notoriety some people are unmistakably at the top of the
tree, and doubtless deserve to be there, having found the right method
of climbing. It is only natural that those who wish to climb too should
study and imitate them. Awe and respect for such persons is an honest
expression of social idealism: it is an admiration mixed with curiosity
and with the desire for propinquity, because their achievements are
in our own line of business and a prospective partnership is not
out of the question. Their life is the ideal of ours. Yet all such
conventional values and instrumentalities, in which we are perhaps
absorbed, in the end say nothing to the heart. If by chance, in the
shifts of this world, we pop up near the people whom we distantly
admired, and reach the crest of the wave in their company, we discover
how great an illusion it was that it would be good or possible for us
to resemble them; conventional friends, we have no instincts, joys, or
memories in common. It is, perhaps, from quite another age or race,
from an utterly different setting of worldly tasks and ambitions,
that some hint of true friendship and understanding reaches us in our
hermitage; and even this hint is probably a hollow reverberation of
our own soliloquy. In this slippery competitive earth snobbery is not
unreasonable; but in heaven and hell there are no snobs. There every
despised demon hugs his favourite vice for ever, and even the smallest
of the stars shines with a singular glory.




15

THE HIGHER SNOBBERY


To call an attitude snobbish, when the great and good recommend it as
the only right attitude, would be to condemn it without trial; yet I
do not know how else to name the sentiment that happiness of one sort
is better than happiness of another sort, and that perfection in one
animal is more admirable than perfection in another. I wish there was
a word for this arrangement of excellences in higher and lower classes
which did not imply approval or disapproval of such an arrangement. But
language is terribly moralistic, and I do not blame the logicians for
wishing to invent another which shall convey nothing to the mind with
which it has any previous acquaintance. The Psyche, who is the mother
of language as well as of intellect, feels things to be good or evil
before she notices what other qualities they may have: and she never
gets much beyond the first dichotomy of her feminine logic: wretch and
darling, nasty and nice. This is perhaps the true reason why Plato, who
in some respects had a feminine mind and whose metaphysics follows the
lines of language, tells us in one place that the good is the highest
of the Ideas, and the source of both essence and existence. Good and
bad are certainly the first qualities fixed by words: so that to call a
man a snob, for instance, is a very vague description but a very clear
insult. Suppose we found on examination that the person in question
had a retiring and discriminating disposition, that he shunned the
unwashed, that he resembled persons of distinction, and recognized the
superiority of those who were really his superiors; we should conclude
without hesitation that he was no snob at all, but a respectable,
right-minded person. If he had been really a snob, he would have looked
up stupidly to what has no true sublimity, like birth without money,
would have imitated what was not becoming to his station, and would
have shunned company, such as our own, which though perhaps not the
most fashionable is undoubtedly the best. As I can see no scientific
difference between this snob and that no-snob, I am constrained in my
own thoughts to class them together; but in order to remind myself that
the same principle may be approved in one case and condemned in the
other, I call snobbery, when people approve of it, the higher snobbery.

An interesting advocate of the higher snobbery is Nietzsche. Although
his admiring eye is fixed on the superman, who is to supersede our
common or garden humanity, the unique excellence of that future being
does not seem to lie merely in that he is future, or is destined to be
dominant in his day: after all, everything was once future, everything
was once the coming thing, and destined to prevail in its day. It
is only human to admire and copy the fashion of to-day, whether in
clothes, or politics, or literature, or speculation; but I have not yet
heard of any snob so far ahead of his times as to love the fashions
of doomsday. The worship of evolution, which counts for so much with
many higher snobs, does not seem essential in Nietzsche. The superman
no doubt is coming, but he is not coming to stay, since the world
repeats its evolution in perpetual cycles; and whilst he will give
its highest expression to the love of power, it does not appear that
he will care very much about controlling external things, or will be
able to control them. His superiority is to be intrinsic, and chiefly
composed of freedom. It was freedom, I think, that Nietzsche sighed
for in his heart, whilst in his cavalierly speculations he talked of
power. At least, unless by power he meant power to be oneself, the
notion that all nature was animated by the lust of power would lose
its plausibility; the ambition which we may poetically attribute
to all animals is rather to appropriate such things as serve their
use, perfection, or fancy, and to leave all else alone. There are
indications that the superman was to be a mystic and a wanderer, like
a god visiting the earth, and that what spell he exercised was to flow
from him almost unawares, whilst he mused about himself and about
higher things. So little was his power to involve subjection to what he
worked upon (which is the counterpart of all material power) that he
was to disregard the interests of others in a Spartan mood; he was to
ride ruthlessly through this nether world, half a poet, half a scourge,
with his breast uncovered to every treacherous shaft, and his head high
in the air.

Now I will not say whether such a romantic and Byronic life is worth
living in itself; there may be creatures whose only happiness is to
be like that, although I suspect that Byron and Nietzsche, Lohengrin
and Zarathustra, had not mastered the art of Socrates, and did not
know what they wanted. In any case, such a Dionysiac career would be
good only as the humblest human existence may be so; its excellence
would lie in its harmony with the nature of him who follows it,
not in its bombast, inflation, or superhumanity. Nietzsche was far
from ungenerous or unsympathetic towards the people. He wished them
(somewhat contemptuously) to be happy, whilst he and his superman
remained poetically wretched; he even said sometimes that in their own
sphere they might be perfect, and added--with that sincerity which,
in him, redeems so many follies--that nothing could be better than
such perfection. But if this admission is to be taken seriously, the
superman would be no better than the good slave. The whole principle of
the higher snobbery would be abandoned, and Nietzsche in the end would
only lead us back to Epictetus.

No, the higher snob will reply, the perfect superman may be no better
than the perfect slave, but he is _higher_. What does this word mean?
For the zealous evolutionist it seems to mean later, more complicated,
requiring a longer incubation and a more special environment. Therefore
what is higher is more expensive, and has a more precarious existence
than what is lower; so the lady is higher than the woman, fine art is
higher than useful art, and the height of the fashion in fine art is
the highest point in it. The higher is the more inclusive, requiring
everything else to produce it, and itself producing nothing, or
something higher still. Of course the higher is not merely the better;
because the standard of excellence itself changes as we proceed, and
according to the standard of the lower morality the higher state which
abolishes it will be worse. An orchid may not be more beautiful than
a lily, but it is higher; philosophy may not be truer than science,
nor true at all, but it is higher, because so much more comprehensive;
faith may not be more trustworthy than reason, but it is higher;
insatiable will may not be more beneficent than contentment in oneself
and respect for others, but it is higher; war is higher, though more
painful, than peace; perpetual motion is not more reasonable than
movement towards an end, and stilts are not more convenient than shoes,
but they are higher. In everything the higher, when not the better,
means what folly or vanity cannot bear to abandon. Higher is a word by
which we defend the indefensible; it is a declaration of impenitence on
the part of unreason, a cry to create prejudice in favour of all that
tyrannizes over mankind. It is the watchword of the higher snob. The
first to use it was Satan, when he declared that he was not satisfied
to be anything but the highest; whereas the highest thinks it no
derogation to take the form of the lowest since the lowest, too, has
its proper perfection, and there is nothing _better_ than that.




16

DISTINCTION IN ENGLISHMEN


England has been rich in poets, in novelists, in inventors, in
philosophers making new beginnings, in intrepid travellers, in learned
men whose researches are a hobby and almost a secret. The land was once
rich in saints, and is still rich in enthusiasts. But the official
leaders of the English people, the kings, prelates, professors, and
politicians, have usually been secondary men; and even they have been
far more distinguished in their private capacity than in their official
action and mind. English genius is anti-professional; its affinities
are with amateurs, and there is something of the amateur in the best
English artists, actors, and generals. Delicacy of conscience, mental
haze, care not to outrun the impulse of the soul, hold the Englishman
back midway in his achievements; there is in him a vague respect for
the unknown, a tacit diffidence in his own powers, which dissuade him
from venturing on the greatest things or from carrying them out in a
comprehensive manner. The truth is the British do not wish to be well
led. They are all individualistic and aristocratic at heart, and want
no leaders in ultimate things; the inner man must be his own guide. If
they had to live under the shadow of a splendid monarch, or a masterful
statesman, or an authoritative religion, or a deified state they would
not feel free. They wish to peck at their institutions, and tolerate
only such institutions as they can peck at. A certain ineptitude thus
comes to be amongst them an aptitude for office: it keeps the official
from acquiring too great an ascendancy. There is a sort of ostracism
by anticipation, to prevent men who are too good from coming forward
and upsetting the balance of British liberties; very like the vacuum
which is created in America around distinction, and which keeps the
national character there so true to type, so much on one lively level.
But in England distinction exists, because it escapes into privacy.
It is reserved for his Grace in his library and her Ladyship at her
tea-table; it fills the nursery with lisping sweetness and intrepid
singleness of will; it dwells with the poets in their solitary rambles
and midnight questionings; it bends with the scholar over immortal
texts; it is shut off from the profane by the high barriers of school
and college and hunting-field, by the sanctity and silence of dubs, by
the unspoken secrets of church and home.

The greatest distinction of English people, however, is one which,
whilst quite personal and private in its scope, is widely diffused
and strikingly characteristic of the better part of the nation;
I mean, distinction in the way of living. The Englishman does in
a distinguished way the simple things that other men might slur
over as unimportant or essentially gross or irremediable; he is
distinguished--he is disciplined, skilful, and calm--in eating, in
sport, in public gatherings, in hardship, in danger, in extremities.
It is in physical and rudimentary behaviour that the Englishman is
an artist; he is the ideal sailor, the ideal explorer, the ideal
comrade in a tight place; he knows how to be clean without fussiness,
well-dressed without show, and pleasure-loving without loudness.
This is why, although he is the most disliked of men the world over
(except where people need some one they can trust) he is also the
most imitated. What ferocious Anglophobe, whether a white man or a
black man, is not immensely flattered if you pretend to have mistaken
him for an Englishman? After all, this imitation of the physical
distinction of Englishmen is not absurd; here is something that _can_
be imitated: it is really the easiest way of doing easy things, which
only bad education and bad habits have made difficult for most people.
There is nothing impossible in adopting afternoon tea, football, and
boy scouts; what is impossible, and if possible very foolish, is to
adopt English religion, philosophy, or political institutions. But
why should any one wish to adopt them? They have their merits, of
course, and their propriety at home; but they are blind compromises,
and it is not in their principles that the English are distinguished,
but only in their practice. Their accents are more choice than their
words, and their words more choice than their ideas. This, which might
sound like a gibe, is to my mind a ground for great hope and for some
envy. Refinement, like charity, should begin at home. First the body
ought to be made fit and decent, then speech and manners, and habits
justly combining personal initiative with the power of co-operating
with others; and then, as this healthy life extends, the world will
begin to open out to the mind in the right perspectives: not at first,
perhaps never, in its total truth and its real proportions, but with
an ever-enlarging appreciation of what, for us, it can contain. The
mind of the Englishman, starting in this proud and--humble and profound
way from the inner man, pierces very often, in single directions, to
the limit of human faculty; and it seems to me to add to his humanity,
without injury to his speculation, that he instinctively withdraws
again into himself, as he might return home to marry and settle after
tempting fortune at the antipodes. His curious knowledge and his
personal opinions then become, as it were, mementos of his distant
adventures; but his sterling worth lies in himself. He is at his best
when free impulse or familiar habit takes an unquestioned lead, and
when the mind, not being expected to intervene, beats in easy unison
with the scene and the occasion, like a rider at home in the saddle and
one with his galloping horse. Then grace returns to him, so angular
often in his forced acts and his express tenets; the smile comes
unaffectedly, and the blithe quick words flow as they should; arm is
linked spontaneously in arm, laughter points the bull's-eye of truth,
the whole world and its mysteries, not being pressed, become amiable,
and the soul shines happy, and beautiful, and absolute mistress in her
comely house. Nothing in him then is gross; all is harmonized, all is
touched with natural life. His simplicity becomes wholeness, and he no
longer seems dull in any direction, but in all things sound, sensitive,
tender, watchful, and brave.




17

FRIENDSHIPS


Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part
of another; people are friends in spots. Friendship sometimes rests on
sharing early memories, as do brothers and schoolfellows, who often,
but for that now affectionate familiarity with the same old days, would
dislike and irritate one another extremely. Sometimes it hangs on
passing pleasures and amusements, or on special pursuits; sometimes on
mere convenience and comparative lack of friction in living together.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be
human. But there are youthful friendships of quite another quality,
which I seem to have discovered flourishing more often and more frankly
in England than in other countries; brief echoes, as it were, of that
love of comrades so much celebrated in antiquity. I do not refer to the
"friendship of virtue" mentioned by Aristotle, which means, I suppose,
community in allegiance or in ideals. It may come to that in the end,
considered externally; but community in allegiance or in ideals, if
genuine, expresses a common disposition, and its roots are deeper and
more physical than itself. The friendship I have in mind is a sense of
this initial harmony between two natures, a union of one whole man
with another whole man, a sympathy between the centres of their being,
radiating from those centres on occasion in unanimous thoughts, but
not essentially needing to radiate. Trust here is inwardly grounded;
likes and dislikes run together without harness, like the steeds of
Aurora; you may take agreement for granted without words; affection
is generously independent of all tests or external bonds; it can even
bear not to be mutual, not to be recognized; and in any case it shrinks
from the blatancy of open vows. In such friendships there is a touch of
passion and of shyness; an understanding which does not need to become
explicit or complete. There is wine in the cup; it is not to be spilled
nor gulped down unrelished, but to be sipped slowly, soberly, in the
long summer evening, with the window open to the college garden, and
the mind full of all that is sweetest to the mind.

Now there is a mystery here--though it need be no mystery--which some
people find strange and distressing and would like to hush up. This
profound physical sympathy may sometimes, for a moment, spread to the
senses; that is one of its possible radiations, though fugitive; and
there is a fashionable psychology at hand to explain all friendship,
for that reason, as an aberration of sex. Of course it is such in some
people, and in many people it may seem to be such at rare moments;
but it would be a plain abuse of language to call a mother's love
for her children sexual, even when they are boys, although certainly
she could not have that love, nor those children, if she had no sex.
Perhaps if we had no sex we should be incapable of tenderness of any
sort; but this fact does not make all forms of affection similar in
quality nor in tendency. The love of friends is not, like the love of
woman, a lyrical prologue to nest--building. Engaging, no doubt, the
same radical instincts, in a different environment and at another phase
of their development, it turns them, whilst still plastic, in other
directions. Human nature is still plastic, especially in the region
of emotion, as is proved by the ever-changing forms of religion and
art; and it is not a question of right and wrong, nor even, except
in extreme cases, of health and disease, but only a question of
alternative development, whether the human capacity to love is absorbed
in the family cycle, or extends to individual friendships, or to
communion with nature or with God. The love of friends in youth, in the
cases where it is love rather than friendship, has a mystical tendency.
In character, though seldom in intensity, it resembles the dart which,
in an ecstatic vision, pierced the heart of Saint Theresa, bursting
the normal integument by which the blood is kept coursing through
generation after generation, in the closed channel of human existence
and human slavery. Love then escapes from that round; it is, in one
sense, wasted and sterilized; but in being diverted from its earthly
labours it suffuses the whole universe with light; it casts its glowing
colours on the sunset, upon the altar, upon the past, upon the truth.
The anguished futility of love corrects its own selfishness, its own
illusion; gradually the whole world becomes beautiful in its inhuman
immensity; our very defeats are transfigured, and we see that it was
good for us to have gone up into that mountain.

That such mystic emotions, whether in religion or in friendship, are
erotic was well known before the day's of Freud. They have always
expressed themselves in erotic language. And why should they not be
erotic? Sexual passion is itself an incident in the life of the Psyche,
a transitive phase in the great cycle by which life on earth is kept
going. It grows insensibly out of bodily self-love, childish play, and
love of sensation; it merges in the end, after its midsummer night's
dream, into parental and kingly purposes. How casual, how comic, the
purely erotic impulse is, and how lightly nature plays with it, may be
seen in the passion of jealousy. Jealousy is inseparable from sexual
love, and yet jealousy is not itself erotic either in quality or in
effect, since it poisons pleasure, turns sympathy into suspicion,
love into hate, all in the interests of proprietorship. Why should
we be jealous, if we were simply merry? Nature weaves with a wide
loom, and crosses the threads; and erotic passion may be as easily
provoked peripherally by deeper impulses as be itself the root of other
propensities. Lovers sometimes pretend at first to be only friends,
and friends have sometimes fancied, at first blush, that they were
lovers; it is as easy for one habit or sentiment as for the other to
prove the radical one, and to prevail in the end. As for Englishmen,
the last thing they would do would be to disguise some base prompting
in high-flown language; they would call a spade a spade, if there were
occasion. They are shy of words, as of all manifestations; and this
very shyness, if it proves that there is at bottom a vital instinct
concerned, also proves that it is not intrinsically more erotic than
social, nor more social than intellectual. It is each of these things
potentially, for such faculties are not divided in nature as they are
in language; it may turn into any one of them if accident leads it that
way; but it reverts from every casual expression to its central seat,
which is the felt harmony of life with life, and of life with nature,
with everything that in the pulses of this world beats our own measure,
and swells the music of our thoughts.




18

DICKENS


If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the melting-pot,
human life would still remain amiable and quite adequately human. I
draw this comforting assurance from the pages of Dickens. Who could
not be happy in his world? Yet there is nothing essential to it which
the most destructive revolution would be able to destroy. People
would still be as different, as absurd, and as charming as are his
characters; the springs of kindness and folly in their lives would
not be dried up. Indeed, there is much in Dickens which communism, if
it came, would only emphasize and render universal. Those schools,
those poorhouses, those prisons, with those surviving shreds of family
life in them, show us what in the coming age (with some sanitary
improvements) would be the nursery and home of everybody. Everybody
would be a waif, like Oliver Twist, like Smike, like Pip, and like
David Copperfield; and amongst the agents and underlings of social
government, to whom all these waifs would be entrusted, there would
surely be a goodly sprinkling of Pecksniffs, Squeers's, and Fangs;
whilst the Fagins would be everywhere commissioners of the people.
Nor would there fail to be, in high places and in low, the occasional
sparkle of some Pickwick or Cheeryble Brothers or Sam Weller or
Mark Tapley; and the voluble Flora Finchings would be everywhere in
evidence, and the strong-minded Betsey Trotwoods in office. There
would also be, among the inefficient, many a Dora and Agnes and
Little Emily--with her charm but without her tragedy, since this is
one of the things which the promised social reform would happily
render impossible; I mean, by removing all the disgrace of it. The
only element in the world of Dickens which would become obsolete
would be the setting, the atmosphere of material instrumentalities
and arrangements, as travelling by coach is obsolete; but travelling
by rail, by motor, or by airship will emotionally be much the same
thing. It is worth noting how such instrumentalities, which absorb
modern life, are admired and enjoyed by Dickens, as they were by Homer.
The poets ought not to be afraid of them; they exercise the mind
congenially, and can be played with joyfully. Consider the black ships
and the chariots of Homer, the coaches and river-boats of Dickens,
and the aeroplanes of to-day; to what would an unspoiled young mind
turn with more interest? Dickens tells us little of English sports,
but he shares the sporting nature of the Englishman, to whom the whole
material world is a playing--field, the scene giving ample scope to his
love of action, legality, and pleasant achievement. His art is to sport
according to the rules of the game, and to do things for the sake of
doing them, rather than for any ulterior motive.

It is remarkable, in spite of his ardent simplicity and openness of
heart, how insensible Dickens was to the greater themes of the human
imagination--religion, science, politics, art. He was a waif himself,
and utterly disinherited. For example, the terrible heritage of
contentious religions which fills the world seems not to exist for him.
In this matter he was like a sensitive child, with a most religious
disposition, but no religious ideas. Perhaps, properly speaking, he
had no _ideas_ on any subject; what he had was a vast sympathetic
participation in the daily life of mankind; and what he saw of ancient
institutions made him hate them, as needless sources of oppression,
misery, selfishness, and rancour. His one political passion was
philanthropy, genuine but felt only on its negative, reforming side;
of positive utopias or enthusiasms we hear nothing. The political
background of Christendom is only, so to speak, an old faded back-drop
for his stage; a castle, a frigate, a gallows, and a large female
angel with white wings standing above an orphan by an open grave--a
decoration which has to serve for all the melodramas in his theatre,
intellectually so provincial and poor. Common life as it is lived was
varied and lovable enough for Dickens, if only the pests and cruelties
could be removed from it. Suffering wounded him, but not vulgarity;
whatever pleased his senses and whatever shocked them filled his mind
alike with romantic wonder, with the endless delight of observation.
Vulgarity--and what can we relish, if we recoil at vulgarity?--was
innocent and amusing; in fact, for the humorist, it was the spice of
life. There was more piety in being human than in being pious. In
reviving Christmas, Dickens transformed it from the celebration of a
metaphysical mystery into a feast of overflowing simple kindness and
good cheer; the church bells were still there--in the orchestra; and
the angels of Bethlehem were still there--painted on the back-curtain.
Churches, in his novels, are vague, desolate places where one has
ghastly experiences, and where only the pew-opener is human; and such
religious and political conflicts as he depicts in _Barnaby Rudge_
and in _A Tale of Two Cities_ are street brawls and prison scenes and
conspiracies in taverns, without any indication of the contrasts in
mind or interests between the opposed parties. Nor had Dickens any
lively sense for fine art, classical tradition, science, or even the
manners and feelings of the upper classes in his own time and country:
in his novels we may almost say there is no army, no navy, no church,
no sport, no distant travel, no daring adventure, no feeling for the
watery wastes and the motley nations of the planet, and--luckily, with
his notion of them--no lords and ladies. Even love of the traditional
sort is hardly in Dickens's sphere--I mean the soldierly passion
in which a rather rakish gallantry was sobered by devotion, and
loyalty rested on pride. In Dickens love is sentimental or benevolent
or merry or sneaking or canine; in his last book he was going to
describe a love that was passionate and criminal; but love for him
was never chivalrous, never poetical. What he paints most tragically
is a quasi-paternal devotion in the old to the young, the love of Mr.
Peggotty for Little Emily, or of Solomon Gills for Walter Gay, A series
of shabby little adventures, such as might absorb the interest of an
average youth, were romantic enough for Dickens.

I say he was disinherited, but he inherited the most terrible
negations. Religion lay on him like the weight of the atmosphere,
sixteen pounds to the square inch, yet never noticed nor mentioned. He
lived and wrote in the shadow of the most awful prohibitions. Hearts
petrified by legality and falsified by worldliness offered, indeed,
a good subject for a novelist, and Dickens availed himself of it to
the extent of always contrasting natural goodness and happiness with
whatever is morose; but his morose people were wicked, not virtuous
in their own way; so that the protest of his temperament against
his environment never took a radical form nor went back to first
principles. He needed to feel, in his writing, that he was carrying
the sympathies of every man with him. In him conscience was single,
and he could not conceive how it could ever be divided in other men.
He denounced scandals without exposing shams, and conformed willingly
and scrupulously to the proprieties. Lady Dedlock's secret, for
instance, he treats as if it were the sin of Adam, remote, mysterious,
inexpiable. Mrs. Dombey is not allowed to deceive her husband except by
pretending to deceive him. The seduction of Little Emily is left out
altogether, with the whole character of Steerforth, the development of
which would have been so important in the moral experience of David
Copperfield himself. But it is not public prejudice alone that plays
the censor over Dickens's art; his own kindness and even weakness
of heart act sometimes as marplots. The character of Miss Mowcher,
for example, so brilliantly introduced, was evidently intended to
be shady, and to play a very important part in the story; but its
original in real life, which was recognized, had to be conciliated,
and the sequel was omitted and patched up with an apology--itself
admirable--for the poor dwarf. Such a sacrifice does honour to
Dickens's heart; but artists should meditate on their works in time,
and it is easy to remove any too great likeness in a portrait by a
few touches making it more consistent than real people are apt to be;
and in this case, if the little creature had been really guilty, how
much more subtle and tragic her apology for herself might have been,
like that of the bastard Edmund in _King Lear_! So, too, in _Dombey
and Son_, Dickens could not bear to let Walter Gay turn out badly,
as he had been meant to do, and to break his uncle's heart as well
as the heroine's; he was accordingly transformed into a stage hero
miraculously saved from shipwreck, and Florence was not allowed to
reward the admirable Toots, as she should have done, with her trembling
hand. But Dickens was no free artist; he had more genius than taste, a
warm fancy not aided by a thorough understanding of complex characters.
He worked under pressure, for money and applause, and often had to
cheapen in execution what his inspiration had so vividly conceived.

What, then, is there left, if Dickens has all these limitations? In
our romantic disgust we might be tempted to say, Nothing. But in fact
almost everything is left, almost everything that counts in the daily
life of mankind, or that by its presence or absence can determine
whether life shall be worth living or not; because a simple good life
is worth-living, and an elaborate bad life is not. There remains in the
first place eating and drinking; relished not bestially, but humanly,
jovially, as the sane and exhilarating basis for everything else. This
is a sound English beginning; but the immediate sequel, as the England
of that day presented it to Dickens, is no less delightful. There is
the ruddy glow of the hearth; the sparkle of glasses and brasses and
well-scrubbed pewter; the savoury fumes of the hot punch, after the
tingle of the wintry air; the coaching-scenes, the motley figures and
absurd incidents of travel; the changing sights and joys of the road.
And then, to balance this, the traffic of ports and cities, the hubbub
of crowded streets, the luxury of shop-windows and of palaces not to
be entered; the procession of the passers-by, shabby or ludicrously
genteel; the dingy look and musty smell of their lodgings; the
labyrinth of back-alleys, courts, and mews, with their crying children,
and scolding old women, and listless, half-drunken loiterers. These
sights, like fables, have a sort of moral in them to which Dickens was
very sensitive; the important airs of nobodies on great occasions,
the sadness and preoccupation of the great as they hasten by in their
mourning or on their pressing affairs; the sadly comic characters of
the tavern; the diligence of shopkeepers, like squirrels turning in
their cages; the children peeping out everywhere like grass in an
untrodden street; the charm of humble things, the nobleness of humble
people, the horror of crime, the ghastliness of vice, the deft hand and
shining face of virtue passing through the midst of it all; and finally
a fresh wind of indifference and change blowing across our troubles and
clearing the most lurid sky.

I do not know whether it was Christian charity or naturalistic insight,
or a mixture of both (for they are closely akin) that attracted Dickens
particularly to the deformed, the half-witted, the abandoned, or those
impeded or misunderstood by virtue of some singular inner consecration.
The visible moral of these things, when brutal prejudice does not
blind us to it, comes very near to true philosophy; one turn of the
screw, one flash of reflection, and we have understood nature and human
morality and the relation between them.

In his love of roads and wayfarers, of river-ports and wharves and the
idle or sinister figures that lounge about them, Dickens was like Walt
Whitman; and I think a second Dickens may any day appear in America,
when it is possible in that land of hurry to reach the same degree of
saturation, the same unquestioning pleasure in the familiar facts.
The spirit of Dickens would be better able to do justice to America
than was that of Walt Whitman; because America, although it may seem
nothing but a noisy nebula to the impressionist, is not a nebula but
a concourse of very distinct individual bodies, natural and social,
each with its definite interests and story. Walt Whitman had a sort of
transcendental philosophy which swallowed the universe whole, supposing
there was a universal spirit in things identical with the absolute
spirit that observed them; but Dickens was innocent of any such
clap-trap, and remained a true spirit in his own person. Kindly and
clear-sighted, but self-identical and unequivocally human, he glided
through the slums like one of his own little heroes, uncontaminated
by their squalor and confusion, courageous and firm in his clear
allegiances amid the flux of things, a pale angel at the Carnival,
his heart aflame, his voice always flute-like in its tenderness and
warning. This is the true relation of spirit to existence, not the
other which confuses them; for this earth (I cannot speak for the
universe at large) has no spirit of its own, but brings forth spirits
only at certain points, in the hearts and brains of frail living
creatures, who like insects flit through it, buzzing and gathering
what sweets they can; and it is the spaces they traverse in this
career, charged with their own moral burden, that they can report on or
describe, not things rolling on to infinity in their vain tides. To be
hypnotized by that flood would be a heathen idolatry. Accordingly Walt
Whitman, in his comprehensive democratic vistas, could never see the
trees for the wood, and remained incapable, for all his diffuse love
of the human herd, of ever painting a character or telling a story;
the very things in which Dickens was a master. It is this life of the
individual, as it may be lived in a given nation, that determines the
whole value of that nation to the poet, to the moralist, and to the
judicious historian. But for the excellence of the typical single life,
no nation deserves to be remembered more than the sands of the sea; and
America will not be a success, if every American is a failure.

Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage door; the shabby
little adventures of the actors in their private capacity replace for
him the mock tragedies which they enact before a dreaming public.
Mediocrity of circumstances and mediocrity of soul for ever return to
the centre of his stage; a more wretched or a grander existence is
sometimes broached, but the pendulum soon swings back, and we return,
with the relief with which we put on our slippers after the most
romantic excursion, to a golden mediocrity--to mutton and beer, and to
love and babies in a suburban villa with one frowsy maid. Dickens is
the poet of those acres of yellow brick streets which the traveller
sees from the railway viaducts as he approaches London; they need a
poet, and they deserve one, since a complete human life may very well
be lived there. Their little excitements and sorrows, their hopes and
humours are like those of the Wooden Midshipman in _Dombey and Son_;
but the sea is not far off, and the sky--Dickens never forgets it--is
above all those brief troubles. He had a sentiment in the presence
of this vast flatness of human fates, in spite of their individual
pungency, which I think might well be the dominant sentiment of mankind
in the future; a sense of happy freedom in littleness, an open-eyed
reverence and religion without words. This universal human anonymity
is like a sea, an infinitive democratic desert, chock-full and yet
the very image of emptiness, with nothing in it for the mind, except,
as the Moslems say, the presence of Allah. Awe is the counterpart
of humility--and this is perhaps religion enough. The atom in the
universal vortex ought to be humble; he ought to see that, materially,
he doesn't much matter, and that morally his loves are merely his own,
without authority over the universe. He can admit without obloquy that
he is what he is; and he can rejoice in his own being, and in that of
all other things in so far as he can share it sympathetically. The
apportionment of existence and of fortune is in Other Hands; his own
portion is contentment, vision, love, and laughter.

Having humility, that most liberating of sentiments, having a true
vision of human existence and joy in that vision, Dickens had in a
superlative degree the gift of humour, of mimicry, of unrestrained
farce. He was the perfect comedian. When people say Dickens
exaggerates, it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They
probably have only _notions_ of what things and people are; they accept
them conventionally, at their diplomatic value. Their minds run on
in the region of discourse, where there are masks only and no faces,
ideas and no facts; they have little sense for those living grimaces
that play from moment to moment upon the countenance of the world. The
world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the
mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. But as it
nevertheless intends all the time to be something different and highly
dignified, at the next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover
up the absurd thing it was; so that a conventional world, a world of
masks, is superimposed on the reality, and passes in every sphere of
human interest for the reality itself. Humour is the perception of
this illusion, the fact allowed to pierce here and there through the
convention, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we
had not observed its absurdity. Pure comedy is more radical, cruder,
in a certain sense less human; because comedy throws the convention
over altogether, revels for a moment in the fact, and brutally says to
the notions of mankind, as if it slapped them in the face, There, take
that! That's what you really are I At this the polite world pretends
to laugh, not tolerantly as it does at humour, but a little angrily.
It does not like to see itself by chance in the glass, without having
had time to compose its features for demure self-contemplation. "What
a bad mirror," it exclaims; "it must be concave or convex; for surely
I never looked like that. Mere caricature, farce, and horse play.
Dickens exaggerates; _I_ never was so sentimental as that; _I_ never
saw anything so dreadful; _I_ don't believe there were ever any people
like Quilp, or Squeers, or Serjeant Buzfuz." But the polite world is
lying; there _are_ such people; we are such people ourselves in our
true moments, in our veritable impulses; but we are careful to stifle
and to hide those moments from ourselves and from the world; to purse
and pucker ourselves into the mask of our conventional personality;
and so simpering, we profess that it is very coarse and inartistic
of Dickens to undo our life's work for us in an instant, and remind
us of what we are. And as to other people, though we may allow that
considered superficially they are often absurd, we do not wish to dwell
on their eccentricities, nor to mimic them. On the contrary, it is
good manners to look away quickly, to suppress a smile, and to say to
ourselves that the ludicrous figure in the street is not at all comic,
but a dull ordinary Christian, and that it is foolish to give any
importance to the fact that its hat has blown off, that it has slipped
on an orange-peel and unintentionally sat on the pavement, that it
has a pimple on its nose, that its one tooth projects over its lower
lip, that it is angry with things in general, and that it is looking
everywhere for the penny which it holds tightly in its hand. That may
fairly represent the moral condition of most of us at most times; but
we do not want to think of it; we do not want to see; we gloss the
fact over; we console ourselves before we are grieved, and reassert
our composure before we have laughed. We are afraid, ashamed, anxious
to be spared. What displeases us in Dickens is that he does not spare
us; he mimics things to the full; he dilates and exhausts and repeats;
he wallows. He is too intent on the passing experience to look over
his shoulder, and consider whether we have not already understood, and
had enough. He is not thinking of us; he is obeying the impulse of the
passion, the person, or the story he is enacting. This faculty, which
renders him a consummate comedian, is just what alienated from him a
later generation in which people of taste were aesthetes and virtuous
people were higher snobs; they wanted a mincing art, and he gave them
copious improvization, they wanted analysis and development, and he
gave them absolute comedy. I must confess, though the fault is mine
and not his, that sometimes his absoluteness is too much for me. When
I come to the death of Little Nell, or to What the Waves were always
Saying, or even to the incorrigible perversities of the pretty Dora,
I skip. I can't take my liquor neat in such draughts, and my inner
man says to Dickens, Please don't. But then I am a coward in so many
ways! There are so many things in this world that I skip, as I skip
the undiluted Dickens! When I reach Dover on a rough day, I wait there
until the Channel is smoother; am I not travelling for pleasure? But
my prudence does not blind me to the admirable virtue of the sailors
that cross in all weathers, nor even to the automatic determination of
the sea-sick ladies, who might so easily have followed my example, if
they were not the slaves of their railway tickets and of their labelled
luggage. They are loyal to their tour, and I to my philosophy. Yet as
wrapped in my great-coat and sure of a good dinner, I pace the windy
pier and soliloquize, I feel the superiority of the bluff tar, glad of
breeze, stretching a firm arm to the unsteady passenger, and watching
with a masterful thrill of emotion the home cliffs receding and the
foreign coasts ahead. It is only courage (which Dickens had without
knowing it) and universal kindness (which he knew he had) that are
requisite to nerve us for a true vision of this world. And as some of
us are cowards about crossing the Channel, and others about "crossing
the bar," so almost everybody is a coward about his own humanity. We do
not consent to be absurd, though absurd we are. We have no fundamental
humility. We do not wish the moments of our lives to be caught by a
quick eye in their grotesque initiative, and to be pilloried in this
way before our own eyes. For that reason we don't like Dickens, and
don't like comedy, and don't like the truth. Dickens could don the
comic mask with innocent courage; he could wear it with a grace, ease,
and irresistible vivacity seldom given to men. We must go back for
anything like it to the very greatest comic poets, to Shakespeare or to
Aristophanes. Who else, for instance, could have penned this:

      "It was all Mrs. Bumble. She _would_ do it," urged Mr.
      Bumble; first looking found to ascertain that his partner
      had left the room.

      "That is no excuse," replied Air. Brownlow. "You were
      present on the occasion of the destruction of these
      trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in
      the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife
      acts under your direction."

      "If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing
      his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass,
      a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a
      bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye
      may be opened by experience--by experience."

      Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words,
      Mr. Bumble fixed his hat on very tight, and putting his
      hands in his pockets, followed his helpmate downstairs.

This is high comedy; the irresistible, absurd, intense dream of the
old fool, personifying the law in order to convince and to punish
it. I can understand that this sort of thing should not be common in
English literature, nor much relished; because pure comedy is scornful,
merciless, devastating, holding no door open to anything beyond.
Cultivated English feeling winces at this brutality, although the
common people love it in clowns and in puppet shows; and I think they
are right. Dickens, who surely was tender enough, had so irresistible
a comic genius that it carried him beyond the gentle humour which most
Englishmen possess to the absolute grotesque reality. Squeers, for
instance, when he sips the wretched dilution which he has prepared for
his starved and shivering little pupils, smacks his lips and cries:
"Here's richness!" It is savage comedy; humour would come in if we
understood (what Dickens does not tell us) that the little creatures
were duly impressed and thought the thin liquid truly delicious. I
suspect that English sensibility prefers the humour and wit of Hamlet
to the pure comedy of Falstaff; and that even in Aristophanes it seeks
consolation in the lyrical poetry for the flaying of human life in
the comedy itself. Tastes are free; but we should not deny that in
merciless and rollicking comedy life is caught in the act. The most
grotesque creatures of Dickens are not exaggerations or mockeries of
something other than themselves; they arise because nature generates
them, like toadstools; they exist because they can't help it, as we
all do. The fact that these perfectly self-justified beings are absurd
appears only by comparison, and from outside; circumstances, or the
expectations of other people, make them ridiculous and force them to
contradict themselves; but in nature it is no crime to be exceptional.
Often, but for the savagery of the average man, it would not even be
a misfortune. The sleepy fat boy in _Pickwick_ looks foolish; but
in himself he is no more foolish, nor less solidly self-justified,
than a pumpkin lying on the ground. Toots seems ridiculous; and we
laugh heartily at his incoherence, his beautiful waistcoats, and his
extreme modesty; but when did anybody more obviously grow into what
he is because he couldn't grow otherwise? So with Mr. Pickwick, and
Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Micawber, and all the rest of this
wonderful gallery; they are ridiculous only by accident, and in a
context in which they never intended to appear. If Oedipus and Lear and
Cleopatra do not seem ridiculous, it is only because tragic reflection
has taken them out of the context in which, in real life, they would
have figured. If we saw them as facts, and not as emanations of a
poet's dream, we should laugh at them till doomsday; what grotesque
presumption, what silly whims, what mad contradiction of the simplest
realities! Yet we should not laugh at them without feeling how real
their griefs were; as real and terrible as the griefs of children and
of dreams. But facts, however serious inwardly, are always absurd
outwardly; and the just critic of life sees both truths at once, as
Cervantes did in _Don Quixote_. A pompous idealist who does not see the
ridiculous in _all_ things is the dupe of his sympathy and abstraction;
and a clown, who does not see that these ridiculous creatures are
living quite in earnest, is the dupe of his egotism. Dickens saw the
absurdity, and understood the life; I think he was a good philosopher.

It is usual to compare Dickens with Thackeray, which is like comparing
the grape with the gooseberry; there are obvious points of resemblance,
and the gooseberry has some superior qualities of its own; but you
can't make red wine of it. The wine of Dickens is of the richest,
the purest, the sweetest, the most fortifying to the blood; there is
distilled in it, with the perfection of comedy, the perfection of
morals. I do not mean, of course, that Dickens appreciated all the
values that human life has or might have; that is beyond any man.
Even the greatest philosophers, such as Aristotle, have not always
much imagination to conceive forms of happiness or folly other than
those which their age or their temperament reveals to them; their
insight runs only to discovering the _principle_ of happiness, that
it is spontaneous life of any sort harmonized with circumstances. The
sympathies and imagination of Dickens, vivid in their sphere, were
no less limited in range; and of course it was not his business to
find philosophic formulas; nevertheless I call his the perfection of
morals for two reasons: that he put the distinction between good and
evil in the right place, and that he felt this distinction intensely.
A moralist might have excellent judgement, he might see what sort of
life is spontaneous in a given being and how far it may be harmonized
with circumstances, yet his heart might remain cold, he might not
suffer nor rejoice with the suffering or joy he foresaw. Humanitarians
like Bentham and Mill, who talked about the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, might conceivably be moral prigs in their own persons,
and they might have been chilled to the bone in their theoretic love
of mankind, if they had had the wit to imagine in what, as a matter of
fact, the majority would place their happiness. Even if their theory
had been correct (which I think it was in intention, though not in
statement) they would then not have been perfect moralists, because
their maxims would not have expressed their hearts. In expressing their
hearts, they ought to have embraced one of those forms of "idealism"
by which men fortify themselves in their bitter passions or in their
helpless commitments; for they do not wish mankind to be happy in
its own way, but in theirs. Dickens was not one of those moralists
who summon every man to do himself the greatest violence so that he
may not offend them, nor defeat their ideals. Love of the good of
others is something that shines in every page of Dickens with a truly
celestial splendour. How entirely limpid is his sympathy with life--a
sympathy uncontaminated by dogma or pedantry or snobbery or bias of
any kind! How generous is this keen, light spirit, how pure this open
heart! And yet, in spite of this extreme sensibility, not the least
wobbling; no deviation from a just severity of judgement, from an
uncompromising distinction between white and black. And this happens
as it ought to happen; sympathy is not checked by a flatly contrary
prejudice or commandment, by some categorical imperative irrelevant to
human nature; the check, like the cheer, comes by tracing the course
of spontaneous impulse amid circumstances that inexorably lead it to
success or to failure. There is a bed to this stream, freely as the
water may flow; when it comes to this precipice it must leap, when
it runs over these pebbles it must sing, and when it spreads into
that marsh it must become livid and malarial. The very sympathy with
human impulse quickens in Dickens the sense of danger; his very joy
in joy makes him stem to what kills it. How admirably drawn are his
surly villains! No rhetorical vilification of them, as in a sermon; no
exaggeration of their qualms or fears; rather a sense of how obvious
and human all their courses seem from their own point of view; and
yet no sentimental apology for them, no romantic worship of rebels in
their madness or crime. The pity of it, the waste of it all, are seen
not by a second vision but by the same original vision which revealed
the lure and the drift of the passion. Vice is a monster here of such
sorry mien, that the longer we see it the more we deplore it; that
other sort of vice which Pope found so seductive was perhaps only some
innocent impulse artificially suppressed, and called a vice because it
broke out inconveniently and displeased the company. True vice is human
nature strangled by the suicide of attempting the impossible. Those
so self-justified villains of Dickens never elude their fates. Bill
Sikes is not let off, neither is Nancy; the oddly benevolent Magwitch
does not escape from the net, nor does the unfortunate young Richard
Carstone, victim of the Circumlocution Office. The horror and ugliness
of their fall are rendered with the hand of a master; we see here, as
in the world, that in spite of the romanticists it is not virtue to
rush enthusiastically along any road. I think Dickens is one of the
best friends mankind has ever had. He has held the mirror up to nature,
and of its reflected fragments has composed a fresh world, where the
men and women differ from real people only in that they live in a
literary medium, so that all ages and places may know them. And they
are worth knowing, just as one's neighbours are, for their picturesque
characters and their pathetic fates. Their names should be in every
child's mouth; they ought to be adopted members of every household.
Their stories cause the merriest and the sweetest chimes to ring in the
fancy, without confusing our moral judgement or alienating our interest
from the motley commonplaces of daily life. In every English-speaking
home, in the four quarters of the globe, parents and children will
do well to read Dickens aloud of a winter's evening; they will love
winter, and one another, and God the better for it. What a wreath that
will be of ever-fresh holly, thick with bright berries, to hang to this
poet's memory--the very crown he would have chosen!




19

THE HUMAN SCALE


Great buildings often have great doors; but great doors are heavy to
swing, and if left open they may let in too much cold or glare; so that
we sometimes observe a small postern cut into one leaf of the large
door for more convenient entrance and exit, and it is seldom or never
that the monumental gates yawn in their somnolence. Here is the modest
human scale reasserting itself in the midst of a titanic structure, but
it reasserts itself with an ill grace and in the interests of frailty;
the patch it makes seems unintended and ignominious.

Yet the human scale is not essentially petty; when it does not slip
in as a sort of interloper it has nothing to apologize for. Between
the infinite and the infinitesimal all sizes are equally central.
The Greeks, the Saracens, the English, the Chinese, and Japanese
instinctively retain the human scale in all that part of their work
which is most characteristic of them and nearest to their affections.
A Greek temple or the hall of an English mansion can be spacious and
dignified enough, but they do not outrun familiar uses, and they lend
their spaciousness and dignity to the mind, instead of crushing it.
Everything about them has an air of friendliness and sufficiency; their
elegance is not pompous, and if they are noble they are certainly not
vast, cold, nor gilded.

The Saracens, Chinese, and Japanese in their various ways use the
human scale with even greater refinement, for they apply it also in a
sensuous and psychological direction. Not only is the size of their
works moderate by preference, like their brief lyrics, but they exactly
meet human sensibility by a great delicacy and concentration in design
and a fragrant simplicity in workmanship. Everything they make is
economical in its beauty and seems to say to us: "I exist only to be
enjoyed; there is nothing in me not merely delightful," Here the human
scale is not drawn from the human body so much as from the human soul;
its faculties are treated with deference--I mean the faculties it
really has, not those, like reason, which a flattering philosophy may
impute to it.

An English country house which is a cottage in appearance may turn
out on examination to be almost a palace in extent and appointments;
there is no parade, yet there is great profusion--too much furniture,
too many ornaments, too much food, too many flowers, too many people.
Everything there is on the human scale except the quantity of things,
which is oppressive. The Orientals are poorer, more voluptuous, and
more sensitive to calligraphy; they leave empty spaces about them and
enjoy one thing at a time and enjoy it longer.

One reason for this greater subtlety and mercifulness in the art of
Orientals is perhaps the fiercer assault made on their senses by
nature. The Englishman lives in a country which is itself on the human
scale, clement at all seasons, charming with a gently inconstant
atmospheric charm. The rare humanity of nature in his island permeates
his being from boyhood up with a delight that is half sentimental,
half physical and sporting. In his fields and moors he grows keen
and fond of exertion; there too his friendships and his estimates of
men are shaped unawares, as if under some silent superior influence.
There he imbibes the impressions that make him tender to poetry. He
may not require great subtlety in his poets, but he insists that their
sentiment shall have been felt and their images seen, and while the
obvious, even the shamelessly obvious, does not irritate him, he hates
cheap sublimity and false notes. He respects experience and is master
of it in his own field.

Thus the empty spaces with which a delicate art likes to surround
itself are supplied for the Englishman by his comradeship with nature,
his ranging habits, and the reticence of his imagination. There the
unexpressed dimension, the background of pregnant silence, exists for
him in all its power. For the Saracen, on the contrary, nature is an
abyss: parched deserts, hard mountains, night with its overwhelming
moon. Here the human scale is altogether transgressed; nature is cruel,
alien, excessive, to be fled from with a veiled face. For a relief and
solace he builds his house without windows; he makes his life simple,
his religion a single phrase, his art exquisite and slight, like the
jet of his fountain. It is sweet and necessary that the works of man
should respect the human scale when everything in nature so infinitely
transcends it.

Why the Egyptians loved things colossal I do not know, but the taste
of the Romans for the grandiose is easier to understand. It seems to
have been part and parcel of that yearning for the super-human which
filled late antiquity. This yearning took two distinct directions.
Among the worldly it fostered imperialism, organization, rhetoric,
portentous works, belief in the universality and eternity of Rome,
and actual deification of emperors. Among the spiritually-minded it
led to a violent abstraction from the world, so that the soul in its
inward solitude might feel itself inviolate and divine. The Christians
at first belonged of course to the latter party; they detested the
inflation of the empire, with its cold veneer of marble and of
optimism; they were nothing if not humble and dead to the world. Their
catacombs were perforce on the human scale, as a coffin is; but even
when they emerged to the surface, they reduced rather than enlarged
the temples and basilicas bequeathed to them by the pagans. Apart
from a few imperial structures at Constantinople or Ravenna their
churches for a thousand years kept to the human scale; often they were
diminutive; when necessary they were spread out to hold multitudes,
but remained low and in the nature of avenues to a tomb or a shrine.
The centre was some sombre precinct, often subterranean, where the
inward man might commune with the other world. The sacraments were
received with a bowed head; they did not call for architectural vistas.
The sumptuousness that in time encrusted these sanctuaries was that
of a jewel--the Oriental, interior, concentrated sumptuousness of the
cloistered arts. Yet the open-air pagan tradition was not dead. Roman
works were everywhere, and not all in ruins, and love of display and
of plastic grandiloquence lay hardly dormant in the breast of many.
It required only a little prosperity to dispel the mystical humility
and detachment which Christianity had brought with it at first; and the
human scale of the Christian Greeks yielded at the first opportunity
to the gigantic scale of the Romans. Spaces were cleared, vaults were
raised, arches were made pointed in order that they might be wider and
be poised higher, towers and spires were aimed at the clouds, usually
getting only half way, porches became immense caverns. Brunelleschi
accomplished a _tour de force_ in his dome and Michelangelo another in
his, even more stupendous. These various strained models, straining in
divergent directions, have kept artists uneasy and impotent ever since,
except when under some benign influence they have recovered the human
scale, and in domestic architecture or portrait painting have forgotten
to be grand and have become felicitous.

The same movement is perhaps easier to survey in philosophy than in
architecture. Scarcely had Socrates brought investigation down from
the heavens and limited it to morals--a realm essentially on the human
scale--when his pupils hastened to undo his work by projecting their
moral system again into the sky, denaturalizing both morals and nature.
They imagined a universe circling about man, tempering the light for
his eyes and making absolute his childlike wishes and judgements. This
was humanism out of scale and out of place, an attempt to cut not the
works of man but the universe to human measure. It was the nemesis that
overtook the Greeks for having become too complacently human. Earlier
the monstrous had played a great part in their religion; henceforth
that surrounding immensity having been falsely humanized, their modest
humanity itself had to be made monstrous to fill its place.

Hence we see the temples growing larger and larger, the dome
introduced, things on the human scale piled on one another to make a
sublime fabric, like Saint Sophia, triumphal arches on pedestals not
to be passed through, vain columns like towers, with a statue poised
on the summit like a weathercock, and finally doors so large that they
could not be opened and little doors had to be cut in them for men to
use. So the human scale turned up again irrepressibly, but for the
moment without its native dignity, because it had been stretched to
compass a lifeless dignity quite other than its own.




20

ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE


Nests were the first buildings; I suppose the birds built them long
before man ceased to be four-footed or four-handed, and to swing by
his tail from trees. The nests of man were coverts, something between
a hole in the ground and an arbour; a retreat easily turned into a
wig-warn, a hut, or a tent, when once man had begun to flay animals and
to weave mats. From the tent we can imagine the cart developing--one of
the earliest of human habitations--and from the cart the boat: tents,
boats, and carts (as the Englishman knows so well) are in a manner
more human than houses; they are the shelters of freemen. Some men,
those destined to higher things, are migratory; they have imagination,
being haunted by absent things, and distance of itself allures them,
even if dearth or danger does not drive them on; indeed, dearth and
danger would not of themselves act as incentives to migration, if some
safer and greener paradise were not present to the fancy. Ranging into
varied climates, these men feel the need of that portable shelter which
we call clothes; and at a slightly greater distance from their skins,
they surround themselves with a second integument, also portable, the
tent, cart, or boat. The first home of man is appropriately without
foundations, except in the instincts of his soul; and it is only by a
slight anchorage to the earth, in some tempting glen or by some flowing
river, that the cart, boat, or tent becomes a dwelling-house. Here
I see the secret of that paradox, that the English people who have
invented the word home, should be such travellers and colonists, and
should live so largely and so contentedly abroad. Home is essentially
portable; it has no terrene foundation, like a tomb, a well, or an
altar; it is an integument of the living man, as the body itself is;
and as the body is more than the raiment, and determines its form, so
the inner man is more than his dwelling, and causes it to mould and
to harden itself round him like a shell, wherever he may be. Home is
built round his bed, his cupboard, and his chimney-corner; and such a
nest, if it fits his habits, is home all the world over, from Hudson's
Bay to Malacca; at least, it becomes home when the inner man, as he is
prompted inwardly to do, surrounds himself there with a family; for a
home is a nest, and somehow incomplete without an egg to sit on.

This seems to me to be the true genealogy of English architecture,
in so far as it is English. Strictly speaking, there is no English
architecture at all, only foreign architecture adapted and domesticated
in England. But how thoroughly and admirably domesticated I How
entirely transmuted inwardly from the classic tragic monumental thing
it was, into something which, even if in abstract design it seems
unchanged, has a new expression, a new scale, a new subordination of
part to part, and as it were a new circulation of the blood within it!
It has all been made to bend and to cling like ivy round the inner
man; it has all been rendered domestic and converted into a home. Far
other was the character proper to nobler architecture in its foreign
seats. There it had been essentially military, religious, or civic:
it had begun perhaps with a slight modification or rearrangement of
great stones lying on the ground, perhaps infinitely rooted in its
depths. Its centre was no living person, but some spot with a magic and
compulsive influence, or with a communal function; it came to glorify
three slabs--the tomb, the hearth, and the altar--and to render them
monumental. The tribe or the king had a treasure to be roofed over and
walled in; the mound where the dead lay buried was marked with a heap
of stones; pillars were set up to the right and to the left of the
presiding deity, to dignify the place where he delivered true oracles,
and dispensed magic powers. This deity himself was a pillar, scarcely
humanized in form, or fantastically named after some animal; and as he
grew colossal, and his features took form and colour, his sacred head
had to be arched over with more labour and art; and the approach to him
was impressively delayed through pylons, courts, narthex, or nave,
into the sepulchral darkness of the holy of holies. Similarly defences
grew into citadels, and judgement-seats into palaces; and as for
individual men, if they did not sleep in the embrasure of some temple
gate, or under some public stair, they found cubicles in the galleries
of the king's court, or built themselves huts to breed in under the lee
of the fortifications.

This sort of architecture has a tragic character; it dominates the soul
rather than expresses it, and embodies stabilities and powers far older
than any one man, and far more lasting. It confronts each generation
like an inexorable deity, like death and war and labour; life is
passed, thoughtlessly but not happily, under that awful shadow. Of
course, there are acolytes in the temple and pages in the palace that
scamper all over the most hallowed precincts, tittering and larking;
and the same retreats may seem luminous and friendly afterwards to
the poet, the lover, or the mind bereaved; yet in their essential
function these monuments are arresting, serious, silent, overwhelming;
they are a source of terror and compunction, like tragedy; they are
favourable to prayer, ecstasy, and meditation. At other times they
become the scene of enormous gatherings, of parades and thrilling
celebrations; but always it is a vast affair, like a court ball, in
which one insinuates one's littleness into what corner one can, to see
and feel the movement of the whole, without playing any great part
in it. Even the most amiable forms of classic architecture have this
public character. There is the theatre and the circus, into which one
must squeeze one's person uncomfortably, in order to subject one's
mind to contagious emotions, and the judgements of the crowd; and even
the public fountain, at which the housemaids and water-boys wait for
their turn, plays for ever far above the heads of the people; as if
that Neptune and those dolphins were spouting for their own pleasure,
cooling the sunshine for their own bronze limbs, and never caring
whether they soused the passing mortal, or quenched his thirst.

All these forms and habits are intensely un-English, and yet England
is full of vestiges of them, not only because its fine arts are
derived from abroad, but because, however disguised, the same tragic
themes must appear everywhere. The tomb, the temple, the fortress are
obligatory things; but they become properly English in character only
when their public function recedes into the background, and they become
interesting to the inner man by virtue of associations or accidents
which harmonize them with his sentimental experience. They grow English
in growing picturesque. These castles and abbeys were Norman when
they were built, they were expressions of domination and fear, hard,
crude, practical, and foreign. But now the moat is grass-grown, the
cloister in ruins, the headless saints are posts for the roses to
creep over, the frowning keep has lost its battlements and become a
comfortable mansion mantled with ivy; before it the well-dressed young
people play croquet on the lawn; and the chapel, whitewashed within,
politely furnished with pews, and politely frequented on Sundays, is
embowered in a pretty garden of a graveyard, which the yew seems to
sanctify more than the cross, and the flowers to suit better than the
inscriptions; there is a bench there round the great tree, where the
old villagers sit of an evening, and its branches, far overtopping the
church spire with its restored sun-dial, seem to dispense a surer grace
and protection than the church itself: they seem more unequivocally
the symbol and the work of God. So everything, in its ruin, seems in
England to live a new life; and it is only this second life, this
cottage built in the fallen stronghold, that is English.

If great architecture has a tragic character, it does not exclude, in
the execution, a certain play of fancy, a sportive use of the forms
which the needful structure imposes; and these decorative frills or
arbitrary variations of theme might be called comic architecture. This
is the side of the art which is subject to fashion, and changes under
the same influences, with the same swiftness and the same unanimity.
But as fashions among peasants sometimes last for ages, so certain
decorative themes, although quite arbitrary, sometimes linger on
because of the inertia of the eye, which demands what it is used to,
or the poverty of invention in the designer. The worst taste and the
best taste revel in decoration; but the motive here is play and there
display. The Englishman deprecates both; he abominates the tawdry, the
theatrical, the unnecessarily elaborate; and at the same time he is
shy of novelty and playfulness; give him comfortable old grey clothes,
good for all weathers, and comfortable, pleasing, inconspicuous houses,
where he can live without feeling a fool or being the victim of his
possessions. The comic poses of architecture, which come to him from
abroad, together with its tragic structure, he accordingly tones down
and neutralizes as far as possible. How gently, for instance, how
pleasantly the wave of Italian architecture broke on these grassy
shores! The classic line, which is tragic in its simple veracity and
fixity, had already been submerged in attempts to vary it; in England,
as in France, the Gothic habit of letting each part of a building have
its own roof and its own symmetry, at once introduced the picturesque
into the most "classic" designs. The Italian scale, too, was at once
reduced, and the Italian rhetoric in stone, the baroque and the
spectacular, was obliterated. How pleasantly the Palladian forms were
fitted to their English setting; how the windows were widened and
subdivided, the show pediments forgotten, the wreathed urns shaved
into modest globes, the pilasters sensibly broadened into panels, and
the classical detail applied to the native Gothic framework, with
its gables, chimneys, and high roofs; whence the delightful brood of
Jacobean and Queen Anne houses; and in the next generation the so
genteel, so judicious Georgian mansion, with its ruddy brick, its broad
windows, and its delicate mouldings and accessories of stone. The
tragic and the comic were spirited away together, and only the domestic
remained.

Nevertheless, at one of the greatest moments in its history, England
had seemed to revel in comic art, and to have made it thoroughly its
own. Domestic taste had reduced Gothic too, in England, to the human
scale; prodigies of height and width in vaulting were not attempted,
doors remained modest, hooded, perhaps, with an almost rustic porch;
the vast spaces were subdivided, they were encrusted with ornament; the
lines became playful, fan-tracery was invented, and floral pendants
of stone; the walls became all glass, the ceilings carved bowers,
and Gothic seemed on the point of smothering its rational skeleton
altogether in luxurious trappings and the millinery of fashion.
All England seemed to become one field of the cloth of gold; rooms
looked like gilded palanquins or silken tents, roofs were forests
of bannerets, pinnacles, and weathercocks; heraldry (a comic art)
overspread every garment and utensil. Poetry, too, became euphuistic
and labyrinthine and nevertheless friendly and familiar and full
of a luscious humour, like the wit of the people. Even prose was a
maze of metaphors and conceits, every phrase was embroidered, and
no self-respecting person could say yea or nay without some artful
circumlocution. It was this outburst of universal comedy that made
Shakespeare possible--an exuberant genius in some respects not like
a modern Englishman; he rose on the crest of a somewhat exotic wave
of passion and vivacity, which at once subsided. Some vestiges of
that spirit seem to linger in American manners; but for the most part
puritanism killed it; and I do not think we need regret its loss. What
could England have been but for the triumph of Protestantism there?
Only a coarser France, or a cockney Ireland. The puritan stiffening
was essential to raise England to its external dignity and greatness;
and it was needed to fortify the inner man, to sober him, and persuade
him to be worthy of himself. As for comic art, there is enough of it
elsewhere, in the oriental and the French schools, and in painting
and drawing, if not in architecture, all the younger artists are
experimenting with it. The sort of aestheticism which was the fashion
in London at the end of the nineteenth century tried to be playful,
and to dote on art for its own sake; but in reality it was full of a
perverted moralism; the aesthetes were simply Ruskin's pupils running
away from school; they thought it immensely important to be choice, and
quite disgraceful to think of morals. The architecture of that time was
certainly not comic in my sense of the word, it did not give a free
rein to exuberant fancy: it was only railway Gothic. But in England the
mists and the ivy and the green sward and the dark screening trees can
make endurable even that abortion of the ethics of Ruskin: and with
better models, and less wilfulness, I see the fresh building of to-day
recovering a national charm: the scale small, the detail polyglot, the
arrangement gracious and convenient, the marriage with the green earth
and the luminous air, foreseen and prepared for. Domestic architecture
in England follows to the letter the advice of Polonius:

Costly thy garment as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy: rich, not gaudy.




21

THE ENGLISH CHURCH


Compromise is odious to passionate natures because it seems a
surrender, and to intellectual natures because it seems a confusion;
but to the inner man, to the profound Psyche within us, whose life
is warm, nebulous, and plastic, compromise seems the path of profit
and justice. Health has many conditions; life is a resultant of many
forces. Are there not several impulses in us at every moment? Are there
not several sides to every question? Has not every party caught sight
of something veritably right and good? Is not the greatest practicable
harmony, or the least dissension, the highest good? And if by the
word "truth" we designate not the actual order of the facts, nor the
exact description of them, but some inner symbol of reconciliation
with reality on our own part, bringing comfort, safety, and assurance,
then truth also will lie in compromise: truth will be partly truth to
oneself, partly workable convention and plausibility. A man's life as
it flows is not a theorem to which there is any one rigid solution.
It is composed of many strands and looks to divers issues. There is
the love of home and the lure of adventure; there is chastity which is
a good, and there is love which is a good also; work must leave room
for sport, science for poetry, and reason for prejudice. Can it be a
man's duty to annul any of the elements that make up his moral being
and, because he possesses a religious tradition, shall he refuse the
gifts of his senses, of his affections, of his country and its history,
of the ruling science, morality, and taste of his day? Far from it:
religion, says the inner man, ought rather to be the highest synthesis
of our nature, and make room for all these things. It should not
succumb to any dead or foreign authority that ignores or dishonours
them. The Englishman finds that he was born a Christian, and therefore
wishes to remain a Christian; but his Christianity must be his own, no
less plastic and adaptable than his inner man; and it is an axiom with
him that nothing can be obligatory for a Christian which is unpalatable
to an Englishman.

Only a few years ago, if a traveller landing in England on a Sunday
and entering an Anglican church, had been told that the country
was Catholic and its church a branch of the Catholic church, his
astonishment would have been extreme. "Catholic" is opposed in the
first place to national and in the second place to Protestant; how
then, he would have asked himself, can a church be Catholic that is so
obviously and dismally Protestant, and so narrowly and primly national?
Why then this abuse of language? And why this silly provincialism of
insisting on always calling Catholics Roman Catholics, as if there were
any others, and they were not known by that name all the world over?
Nevertheless, the restoration of an elder Anglicanism in our day has
somewhat softened these paradoxes; and when we remember how fondly the
English screen their instincts in legal fictions and in genteel shams,
the paradoxes vanish altogether.

What is Protestantism? It is all things to all men, if they are
Protestants: but I see in it three leading _motifs_: to revert to
primitive Christianity, to inspire moral and political reform, and
to accept the religious witness of the inner man. Now the Church of
England, intensely Protestant as it seemed until the other day, is not
Protestant in any of these respects. No established national church
could possibly be so. The subjection to Parliament which renders the
English church not Catholic, renders it also not Protestant. To a
primitive Christian, to a puritan reformer or to a transcendental
mystic, a religion established by lay authority is a contradiction in
terms; a lay government may be more or less inspired by righteousness,
but it cannot mediate salvation. A Protestant is essentially a
nonconformist. Moreover, if we examine the theology of the English
church, we see that whilst incidentally very heretical, it is still
fundamentally Catholic; it admits only a single deposit of faith and
one apostolic fountain of grace for all mankind. But in its view heresy
in any branch of the church does not cut it off from the tree. Heresy
is something to which all churches are liable; the pope of Rome and
the patriarch of Constantinople fall into it hardly less often or less
desperately than the archbishop of Canterbury himself. Heresy is to be
conceived as eccentricity within the fold, not as separation from it;
it is the tacking of the ship on its voyage. Saint Peter or Saint Paul
or both of them must have been heretical in their little controversies;
and Christ himself must have had at times, if not always, but a
partial view of the truth; for instance, in respect to the date and
the material nature of his second coming. Accordingly, although it
may be a little trying to the nerves, it is no essential scandal that
a curate should be addicted to Mariolatry, or that a dean should be
unfortunately ambiguous on the subject of the Incarnation: such rapids
and backwaters in the stream of Christian thought only prove how broad
and full it is capable of being.

That many Catholic bodies, if not all, should be constantly schismatic
or heretical, is therefore no paradox with this conception of the
church; and it is obvious that Rome itself is heretical and schismatic
on this theory, since it has laid an exaggerated weight on the
text about Peter and the keys, and has claimed a jurisdiction Over
the eastern patriarchates which was certainly not primitive, and
which these patriarchates have never honestly acknowledged. On the
other hand, the Church of England belonged to the Western Empire
and its Christianity has always been Latin. It broke away from the
patriarchate of Rome not at all in sympathy with the claims of
Antioch or Constantinople, but notoriously in sympathy with German
Protestantism. This revolt was based on the same anti-Catholic and
inconsistent motives as the German Reformation--namely, greed and
desire for absolute power in princes, zeal in puritan reformers, and
impatience of moral and intellectual constraint in the body of the
clergy and laity. Nationalism, faith, learning, and licence were
curiously mingled in those turbid minds, and the Church of England
inherits all that indescribable spiritual confusion. It is national
in its morals and manners, mincing in its scholarship, snobbish in
its sympathies, sentimental in its emotions. Spiritual minds in the
church--of which there are many--suffer under this heredity incubus of
worldliness; but what can they avail? Some join the socialists; a few
escape to Rome; there at least the worldliness, however conspicuous,
is regarded as a vice and not as a virtue. The convert will find
no dearth of petty passions, machinations, vanities, tricks, and
shameless disbelief; but all this will be, like debauchery, a crust of
corruption, avowedly corrupt. It is dirt on the skin, not cancer at
the heart. But then the true Catholic has made the great surrender;
he has renounced, or never thought of maintaining, the authority of
his inner man. He is a catechumen; his teachers will read for him the
symptoms of health or disease visible in his thoughts and dispositions;
by their discipline--which is an ancient science--they will help him
to save his soul; a totally different thing from obeying the impulses
or extending the adventures of the transcendental self. The inner
man, for the Catholic as for the materialist, is only a pathological
phenomenon. Therefore the Englishman, as I conceive him, living in
and by his inner man, can never be really a Catholic, either Anglican
or Roman; if he likes to call himself by either name, it is equally a
masquerade, a fad like a thousand others to which the inner man, so
seriously playful, is prone to lend itself. He may go over to Rome on a
spiritual tour, as he might abscond for a year and live in Japan with
a Japanese wife; but if he is converted really, and becomes a Catholic
at heart, for good, and in all simplicity, then he is no longer the man
he was. Words cannot measure the chasm that must henceforth separate
him from everything at home. I am not surprised that he recoils from so
desperate a step. It is not only the outward coarseness and laxity of
Catholic manners that offend him; these vices are not universal, and he
would not need to share them. But for him, a modern Englishman, with
freedom and experiment and reserve in his blood, always nursing within
himself the silent love of nature and of rebellion, to go over to Rome
is an essential suicide: the inner man must succumb first. Such an
Englishman might become a saint, but only by becoming a foreigner.

There is another sense altogether in which the English church might
be catholic if it chose. Suppose we lay it down as an axiom that
whatever is acceptable to the inner man is good and true, and that
whatever is good and true is Christian--Christianity would then be
open to every influence which, whilst apparently denaturalizing it,
might help to manifest its fulness. It would cast off husk after husk
of doctrine, developing the living spirit and feeding it with every
substance which it was fitted to absorb. There is nothing new in this
process. Christianity was born of such a marriage between the Jewish
soul and the Greek. Greek philosophy was absorbed with magnificent
results; the restoration of Pauline theology, and the other insights
of Protestantism, led to German philosophy, which has been absorbed
too; the sloughing off of monasticism and ecclesiasticism have put
Christianity in a position to understand and express the modern world;
the reduction of revelation, by the higher criticism of the Bible, to
its true place in human history, will involve a new change of front;
and the absorption of modern science and of democracy would complete
the transformation.

To justify this method the church might appeal to an archbishop of
Canterbury who--this was in the old days--was also a saint and a great
philosopher. Saint Anselm has a famous proof of the existence of God
which runs as follows: God exists, because God is, by definition, the
most real of beings. According to this argument, if it should turn
out that the most real of beings was matter, it would follow that
matter was God. This might be thought a consequence drawn in mockery;
but I do not mean to deride Saint Anselm, whom I revere, but on the
contrary to lay bare the nerve of his argument which if the age had
given him scope, and he had not been Arch-bishop of Canterbury, he
might have followed to its sublime conclusion, as Spinoza did after
him. There is a dignity in existence, in fact, in truth which to some
speculative and rapt natures absorbs and cancels every other dignity:
and on this principle the English church might, without any sudden or
distressing negation, gradually turn its worship to the most real
of beings, wheresoever it may be found; and I presume the most real
of beings will be the whole of what is found everywhere. A narrower
conception of God might at each step give place to a wider one; and the
church, instead of embodying one particular revelation and striving
to impose it universally through propaganda, might become hospitable
to all revelations, and find a place for the inspirations of all ages
and countries under the aegis of its own progressive traditions. So
the religion of ancient Rome domesticated all the gods; and so the
English language, if it should become the medium of international
intercourse, might by translation or imitation of other literatures or
by the infiltration into it of foreign words and styles, really become
a vehicle for all human ideas.

I am not sure whether one party in the English church might not welcome
such a destiny; but at present, so far as I can see, the tenderer
and more poetical spirits in it take quite another direction. They
are trying to recover the insights and practices of mediaeval piety;
they are archaistic in devotion. There is a certain romance in their
decision to believe greatly, to feel mystically, to pray perpetually.
They study their attitudes, as they kneel in some correctly restored
church, hearing or intoning some revived early chant, and wondering why
they should not choose a divine lady in heaven to be their love and
their advocate, as did the troubadours, or why they should not have
recumbent effigies of themselves carved on their tombs, with their
legs crossed, like the crusaders. "_Things_" cried the rapturous young
priest who showed me the beautiful chapel of Pusey House, "what we need
is _Things_!"



22

LEAVING CHURCH


Protestant faith does not vanish into the sunlight as Catholic faith
does, but leaves a shadowy ghost haunting the night of the soul. Faith,
in the two cases, was not faith in the same sense; for the Catholic
it was belief in a report or an argument; for the Protestant it was
confidence in an allegiance. When Catholics leave the church they
do so by the south door, into the glare of the market-place, where
their eye is at once attracted by the wares displayed in the booths,
by the flower-stalls with their bright awnings, by the fountain with
its baroque Tritons blowing the spray into the air, and the children
laughing and playing round it, by the concourse of townspeople and
strangers, and by the soldiers, perhaps, marching past; and if they
cast a look back at the church at all, it is only to admire its antique
architecture, that crumbling filigree of stone so poetically surviving
in its incongruous setting. It is astonishing sometimes with what
contempt, with what a complete absence of understanding, unbelievers in
Catholic countries look back on their religion. For one cultivated mind
that sees in that religion a monument to his racial genius, a heritage
of poetry and aft almost as precious as the classical heritage, which
indeed it incorporated in a hybrid form, there are twenty ignorant
radicals who pass it by apologetically, as they might the broken
toys or dusty schoolbooks of childhood. Their political animosity,
legitimate in itself, blinds their imagination, and renders them even
politically foolish; because in their injustice to human nature and
to their national history they discredit their own cause, and provoke
reaction.

Protestants, on the contrary, leave the church by the north door, into
the damp solitude of a green churchyard, amid yews and weeping willows
and overgrown mounds and fallen illegible gravestones. They feel a
terrible chill; the few weedy flowers that may struggle through that
long grass do not console them; it was far brighter and warmer and more
decent inside. The church--boring as the platitudes and insincerities
were which you listened to there for hours--was an edifice, something
protective, social, and human; whereas here, in this vague unhomely
wilderness, nothing seems to await you but discouragement and
melancholy. Better the church than the madhouse. And yet the Protestant
can hardly go back, as the Catholic does easily on occasion, out of
habit, or fatigue, or disappointment in life, or metaphysical delusion,
or the emotional weakness of the death-bed. No, the Protestant is more
in earnest, he carries his problem and his religion within him. In
his very desolation he will find God. This has often been a cause of
wonder to me: the Protestant pious economy is so repressive and morose
and the Catholic so charitable and pagan, that I should have expected
the Catholic sometimes to sigh a little for his Virgin and his saints,
and the Protestant to shout for joy at having got rid of his God. But
the trouble is that the poor Protestant can't get rid of his God; for
his idea of God is a vague symbol that stands not essentially, as with
the Catholic, for a particular legendary or theological personage,
but rather for that unfathomable influence which, if it does not
make for righteousness, at least has so far made for existence and
has imposed it upon us; so that go through what doors you will and
discard what dogmas you choose, God will confront you still whichever
way you may turn. In this sense the enlightened Catholic, too, in
leaving the church, has merely rediscovered God, finding him now not
in the church alone, but in the church only as an expression of human
fancy, and in human life itself only as in one out of a myriad forms
of natural existence. But the Protestant is less dear in his gropings,
the atmosphere of his inner man is more charged with vapours, and it
takes longer for the light dubiously to break through; and often in his
wintry day the sun sets without shining.




23

DEATHBED MANNERS


In all Protestant countries I have noticed a certain hush about death,
an uncomfortable secrecy, and a fear as if of blasphemy whenever the
subject threatens to come up. Is it that hell is still felt to lie, for
the vast majority, immediately behind the curtain? Or is it that people
have encouraged themselves to live and love as if they were immortal,
and to this lifelong bluff of theirs death brings a contradiction which
they have not the courage to face? Or is it simply that death is too
painful, too sacred, or too unseemly for polite ears? That a desire
to ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this convention
seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude towards death which I
have observed among English people during this war. Some of them speak
of death quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip
to Brighton. "Oh yes, our two sons went down in the _Black Prince_.
They were such nice boys. Never heard a word about them, of course;
but probably the magazine blew up and they were all killed quite
_instantly_, so that we don't mind half so much as if they had had any
of those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn't have liked it at all being
crippled, you know; and we all think it is probably much better as it
is. Just _blown to atoms_! It is _such_ a blessing!"

Of course, the poor parents feel their hearts sink within them in
private; but their affectation of cheerfulness has its logic. Death
is a fact; and we had better accept it as such as we do the weather;
perhaps, if we pretend not to care, we really shan't care so much. The
men in the trenches and hospitals have often been bitterly unreconciled
and rebellious, and haunted by the cruel futility of their sufferings:
but the nursing everywhere has been devoted and heroic: and my
impression of the mourning at home is, that it has been philosophical.

English manners are sensible and conducive to comfort even at a
death-bed. No summoning of priests, no great concourse of friends
and relations, no loud grief, no passionate embraces and poignant
farewells; no endless confabulations in the antechamber, no gossip
about the symptoms, the remedies, or the doctors' quarrels and
blunders; no breathless enumeration of distinguished visitors, letters,
and telegrams; no tearful reconciliation of old family feuds nor
whisperings about the division of the property. Instead, either silence
and closed doors, if there is real sorrow, or more commonly only a
little physical weariness in the mourners, a little sigh or glance
at one another, as if to say: We are simply waiting for events; the
doctors and nurses, are attending to everything, and no doubt, when
the end comes, it will be for the best. In the departing soul, too,
probably dulness and indifference. No repentance, no anxiety, no
definite hopes or desires either for this life or for the next. Perhaps
old memories returning, old loves automatically reviving; possibly a
vision, by anticipation, of some reunion in the other world: but how
pale, how ghostly, how impotent this death-dream is! I seem to overhear
the last words, the last thoughts of a mother: "Dear children, you know
I love you. Provision has been made. I should be of little use to you
any longer. How pleasant to look out of that window into the park! Be
sure they don't forget to give Pup some meat with his dog-biscuit." It
is all very simple, very much repressed, the pattering echo of daily
words. Death, it is felt, is not important. What matters is the part
we have played in the world, or may still play there by our influence.
We are not going to a melodramatic Last Judgement. We are shrinking
into ourselves, into the seed we came from, into a long winter's sleep.
Perhaps in another springtime we may revive and come again to the light
somewhere, among those sweet flowers, those dear ones we have lost.
That is God's secret. We have tried to do right here. If there is any
Beyond, we shall try to do right there also.




24

WAR SHRINES


In many an English village there is nowadays a calvary. The novel
object merges with wonderful ease into the landscape, and one would
almost think it had always been there. The protecting wooden eaves have
already lost their rigidity and their varnish; the crucifix no longer
reminds one of the shop-window from which it came; it does not suggest
popish aggression nor the affectations of ritualism. Flecks of sunlight
play upon it familiarly, as upon the wayside stones, and it casts its
shadow across the common like any natural tree. The flowers in the
pots before it have withered, they droop half hidden in the ivy that
has overgrown them. Even the scroll of names has modified its official
ghastliness--all those newly dead obscure souls starkly ticketed
and numbered; the tragic page has got somewhat weather-stained and
illegible, and is curling up at the edges; it has become a dead leaf.
Decidedly the war-shrine is at home in the scene. It is a portion of
that unspoken truth which every one carries about with him, and the
people seem again to breathe freely under the shadow of the cross.

What does the cross signify? We are told that Christ died to save us,
and various analogies, legal, sentimental, or chivalrous, are put
forward to make that notion acceptable. I respect the sentiments of
duty and devotion which this doctrine of legal red

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