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THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 

GIFT  OF 

Estate  of  Evalyn  Thomas 


TRADITION   AND 
PROGRESS 


BY 

GILBERT    MURRAY 

LL.D.,  D.Litt..  F.B.A. 

REGIUS  PROFESSOR  OF  GREEK   IN  THE   UNIVERSITY  OF  OXFORD 

DELEGATE   FOR   SOUTH   AFRICA  TO  THE  SECOND  ASSEMBLY 

OF  THE  LEAGUE  OF   NATIONS,    1921 


BOSTON    &    NEW   YORK 

HOUGHTON   MIFFLIN   COMPANY 

1922 


College 
Library 


QVAE  IUVENIS  IUVENI  VITAM  MECUM  CONSOCIAVIT 

M.  H.  M. 

CONSILIORUM  PARTICIPI  CONSOLATRICI  LABORUM 

TEMPORIS  UNA  EXACTI  DISPERSOS  FRUCTUS 

DEDICO 


PREFACE 

SEVERAL  of  these  papers  have  appeared  in  periodicals 
or  been  published  in  the  proceedings  of  societies,  and  I 
have  to  thank  the  editors  or  the  committees  for  the  per- 
mission to  reprint. 

To  make  a  collection  even  on  a  small  scale  of  one's 
occasional  writings  on  popular  subjects  throughout  a 
long  period  of  years  is,  I  find,  a  matter  of  some  anxiety. 
A  man  has  generally  little  confidence  in  his  past  self. 
There  is  no  knowing  what  it  may  have  done,  or  what 
foolish  things  it  may  have  thought  or  written,  ten  or 
twenty  years  ago.  I  confess  that  when  I  began  to  look 
through  my  papers  with  a  view  to  the  present  selection 
I  rather  expected  to  find  embarrassing  self-contradictions 
or  indiscretions  of  which  I  should  now  be  ashamed.  In 
this  I  was  agreeably  disappointed,  but  I  did  find  what  from 
the  reader's  point  of  view  is  perhaps  worse,  a  good  deal  of 
repetition,  or  rather  a  constant  attempt,  by  different  means 
and  in  different  contexts,  to  say  very  much  the  same  thing. 

This  discovery  has  suggested  the  order  in  which  the 
essays  are  now  arranged.  Popular  essays — if  I  may 
venture  to  hope  that  these  are  in  any  sense  popular — are 
normally  written  upon  large  and  profound  subjects  about 
which  neither  the  writer  nor  the  reader  can  claim  exact 
knowledge.  That  is  inevitable  and  by  no  means  blame- 
worthy. Yet  it  does  seem  fair  to  ask  that  one  who  takes 
it  upon  him  to  advise  his  neighbours  about  uncertain 
and  speculative  things  ought  first  to  possess  exact  know- 
ledge about  something  or  other.  It  is  not  merely  that 
he  ought  to  know  some  little  corner  of  the  world  before 
passing  judgements  on  the  world  as  a  whole.  He  ought 
also  to  know  the  difference  between  knowing  and  not 


8  PREFACE 

knowing  ;  he  ought  to  have  mastered,  in  some  one  subject, 
the  method  by  which  knowledge  is  acquired.  And 
whatever  his  subject  is,  his  experience  of  it  will  be  an 
invaluable  help  to  him  in  understanding  matters  outside 
it,  and  will  probably  here  and  there  enable  him  to  see 
some  things  which  people  with  a  different  experience 
have  failed  to  see.  Of  course  it  will  also  to  some  extent 
mislead  him  ;  that  is  inevitable.  It  will,  in  spite  of  all 
vigilance,  give  a  bias  or  a  colour  to  his  conceptions. 

For  good  and  evil,  the  present  writer  is  a  "  grammaticus  " 
and  in  particular  a  Greek  student.  His  special  form  of 
experience  and  the  point  of  view  to  which  it  leads  are 
given  in  the  first  paper,  Religio  Grammaiici.  Starting 
from  some  study  of  "  letters "  as  the  record  made  by 
the  human  soul  of  those  moments  of  life  which  it  has 
valued  most  and  most  longs  to  preserve,  he  makes  his 
attempt  to  understand  its  present  adventures  and  prospects. 
The  next  three  essays  deal  more  or  less  directly  with 
Greek  subjects,  or  rather  with  the  light  thrown  by 
particular  phases  of  Greek  experience  upon  modern 
problems  of  society  and  conduct  and  literature.  Then  the 
connexion  with  Greece  becomes  slighter,  and  by  the  end 
of  the  book  we  are  dealing  directly  with  modern  questions. 

Most  of  the  papers  are  recent.  One  only  is  twenty 
years  old.  The  address  on  National  Ideals  has  been 
included  here  after  some  hesitation  because,  in  spite 
of  a  certain  crudity  and  perhaps  ferocity  of  tone,  it  seemed 
to  me  that  its  expression  of  the  feelings  of  the  Liberal 
minority  in  England  during  the  Boer  War  afforded  an 
interesting  parallel  to  the  feelings  of  the  same  minority 
twenty  years  later,  at  the  close  of  the  Great  War.  I 
will  not  lay  stress  on  the  similarities  nor  yet  on  the 
differences,  except  one  :  that  now  there  is  a  League  of 
Nations  and  then  there  was  not.  To  a  present-day  reader 
the  last  half-desperate  pages  of  that  paper  seem  almost 
like  a  conscious  argument  for  the  foundation  of  a  League 
of  Nations ;  but  of  course  at  that  time  the  name  of  the 
League  had  never  been  spoken  nor  the  idea  conceived 
except  as  a  fantasy. 

G.  M. 


CONTENTS 


PACK 

PREFACE     .  7 

I.     RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI:   THE  RELIGION  OF  A  4«MAN 

OF  LETTERS" n 

(Being  a  Presidential  Address  delivered  to  the  Classical  Associa- 
tion  on  January  8,  1918) 

II.    ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY  .  .  .31 

(Being  the  Creighton  Lecture  delivered  at  the  London  School  of 
Economics,  1918) 

III.  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES         .  .  .  .56 

(Originally  an  introduction  to  a  volume  of  translations  oj  the 
"  Hippolytus,"  "  Bacchat"  and  "Frogs"  {.Vol.  Ill  of  "The 
Athenian  Drama  "] .  George  Allen  &•  Unwin,  Ltd.  1902) 

IV.  THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY 88 

( The  Moncure  Conway  Memorial  Lecture  delivered  at  South  Place 
Institute  on  March  16,  1915) 

V.     POESIS  AND  MIMESIS 107 

(The  Henry  Sidgwick  Lecture  delivered  at  Cambridge^  1920) 

VI.     LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION         .  .  .  .125 

( I'ht  Robert  S fence  Watson  Lecture  delivered  to  the  Literary  and 
Philosophical  Society  of  Nevocastle-upon-Tyne,  October  i,  1917) 

VII.    THE  SOUL  AS  IT  IS  AND  HOW  TO  DEAL  WITH    IT  .  142 

(From  "  The  Hibbert  Journal"  January,  1918,  being  a  Lecture 
delivered  at  the  Hackney  Theological  College,  1917) 

VIII.    NATIONAL  IDEALS :  CONSCIOUS  AND  UNCONSCIOUS  .  160 
("  The  international  Journal  of  Ethics,"  October,  1900) 

IX.    ORBIS  TERRESTRIS 183 

(A  Presidential  Address  delivered  to  the  Geographical  Association, 
1920) 

X.    SATANISM   AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER       .  .  .  aoa 

( The  Adamson  Lecture  delivered  at  Manchester  University,  October, 
1919) 


Tradition    and    Progress 

i 

RELIGIO^  GRAMMATIGI  • 

THE    RELIGION    OF    A    ••  MAN    OF    LETTERS  " 

IT  is  the  general  custom  of  this  Association  to  choose 
as  its  President  alternately  a  Classical  Scholar  and 
a  man  of  wide  eminence  outside  the  classics.  Next 
year  you  are  to  have  a  man  of  science,  a  great  physician 
who  is  also  famous  in  the  world  of  learning  and  literature. 
Last  year  you  had  a  statesman,  though  a  statesman 
who  is  also  a  great  scholar  and  man  of  letters,  a  sage  and 
counsellor  in  the  antique  mould,  of  world-wide  fame  and 
unique  influence.3  And  since,  between  these  two,  you 
have  chosen,  in  your  kindness  to  me,  a  professional  scholar 
and  teacher,  you  might  well  expect  from  him  an  address 
containing  practical  educational  advice  in  a  practical 
educational  crisis.  But  that,  I  fear,  is  just  what  I 
cannot  give.  My  experience  is  too  one-sided.  I  know 
little  of  schools  and  not  much  even  of  pass-men.  I 
know  little  of  such  material  facts  as  curricula  and  time- 
tables and  parents  and  examination  papers.  I  sometimes 
feel — as  all  men  of  fifty  should — my  ignorance  even  of 
boys  and  girls.  Besides  that,  I  have  the  honour  at 
present  to  be  an  official  of  the  Board  of  Education; 
and  in  public  discussions  of  current  educational  subjects 
an  officer  of  the  Board  must  in  duty  be  like  the  poetical 
heroine — "  He  cannot  argue,  he  can  only  feel." 

1  Being    a    Presidential    Address    to    the    Classical    Association    on 
January  8.   1918. 

1  Sir  William  Osier  and  Lord  Bryce. 

11 


12  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 

I  believe,  therefore,  that  the  best  I  can  do,  when  the 
horizon  looks  somewhat  dark  not  only  for  the  particular 
studies  which  we  in  this  Society  love  most,  but  for  the 
habits  of  mind  which  we  connect  with  those  studies,  the 
philosophic  temper,  the  gentle  judgement,  the  interest 
in  knowledge  and  beauty  for  their  own  sake,  will  be  simply, 
with  your  assistance,  to  look  inward  and  try  to  realize  my 
own  Confession  of  Faith.  I  do,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  feel 
clear  that,  even  if  knowledge  of  Greek,  instead  of  leading 
to  Bishoprics  as  it  once  did,  is  in  future  to  be  regarded 
with  popular  suspicion  as  a  mark  of  either  a  reactionary 
or  an  unusually  feckless  temper,  I  am  nevertheless  not 
in  the  least  sorry  that  I  have  spent  a  large  part  of  my  life 
in  Greek  studies,  not  in  the  least  penitent  that  I  have 
been  the  cause  of  others  doing  the  same.  That  is  my  feeling, 
and  there  must  be  some  base  for  it.  There  must  be  such 
a  thing  as  Religio  Grammatici,  the  special  religion  of  a 
"  Man  of  Letters." 

The  greater  part  of  life,  both  for  man  and  beast,  is  rigidly 
confined  in  the  round  of  things  that  happen  from  hour  to 
hour.  It  is  em  avpfopais,  exposed  for  circumstances 
to  beat  upon  ;  its  stream  of  consciousness  channelled  and 
directed  by  the  events  and  environments  of  the  moment. 
Man  is  imprisoned  in  the  external  present ;  and  what  we 
call  a  man's  religion  is,  to  a  great  extent,  the  thing  that 
offers  him  a  secret  and  permanent  means  of  escape  from 
that  prison,  a  breaking  of  the  prison  walls  which  leaves 
him  standing,  of  course,  still  in  the  present,  but  in  a  present 
so  enlarged  and  enfranchised  that  it  is  become  not  a  prison 
but  a  free  world.  Religion,  even  in  the  narrow  sense,  is 
always  seeking  for  Sot&ria,  for  escape,  for  some  salvation 
from  the  terror  to  come  or  some  deliverance  from  the  body 
of  this  death. 

And  men  find  it,  of  course,  in  a  thousand  ways,  with 
different  degrees  of  ease  and  of  certainty.  I  am  not  wish- 
ing to  praise  my  talisman  at  the  expense  of  other  talismans. 
Some  find  it  in  theology,  some  in  art,  in  human  affection  ; 
in  the  anodyne  of  constant  work  ;  in  that  permanent  exer- 
cise of  the  inquiring  intellect  which  is  commonly  called  the 
search  for  Truth  ;  some  find  it  in  carefully  cultivated  illu- 


RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI  18 

sions  of  one  sort  or  another,  in  passionate  faiths  and  un- 
dying pugnacities ;  some,  \  believe,  find  a  substitute  by 
simply  rejoicing  in  their  prison,  and  living  furiously,  for 
good  or  ill,  in  the  actual  moment. 

And  a  Scholar,  I  think,  secures  his  freedom  by  keeping 
hold  always  of  the  past  and  treasuring  up  the  best  out  of 
the  past,  so  that  in  a  present  that  may  be  angry  or  sordid 
he  can  call  back  memories  of  calm  or  of  high  passion,  in  a 
present  that  requires  resignation  or  courage  he  can  call  back 
the  spirit  with  which  brave  men  long  ago  faced  the  same 
evils.  He  draws  out  of  the  past  high  thoughts  and  great' 
emotions ;  he  also  draws  the  strength  that  comes  from 
communion  or  brotherhood. 

Blind  Thamyris  and  blind  Maeonides, 
And  Tiresias  and  Phineus,  prophets  old, 

come  back  to  comfort  another  blind  poet  in  his  affliction. 
The  Psalms,  turned  into  strange  languages,  their  original 
meaning  often  lost,  live  on  as  a  real  influence  in  human  life, 
a  strong  and  almost  always  an  ennobling  influence.  I 
know  the  figures  in  the  tradition  may  be  unreal,  their  words 
may  be  misinterpreted.  But  the  communion  is  quite  a  real 
fact.  And  the  student,  as  he  realizes  it,  feels  himself  one 
of  a  long  line  of  torchbearers.  He  attains  that  which  is 
the  most  compelling  desire  of  every  human  being,  a  work 
in  life  which  it  is  worth  living  for,  and  which  is  not  cut 
short  by  the  accident  of  his  own  death. 

It  is  in  that  sense  that  I  understand  Religio.  And  now 
I  would  ask  you  to  consider  with  me  the  proper  meaning 
of  Grammatikt,  and  the  true  business  of  the  "  Man  of 
Letters  "  or  "  Grammatics  s." 


II 

A  very,  very  long  time  ago — the  palaeontologists  refuse  to 
give  us  dates — mankind,  trying  to  escape  from  his  mortality, 
invented  Grammata  or  letters.  Instead  of  being  content 
with  his  spoken  words,  circa  Trrcpocvra  which  fly  as  a 
bird  flies  and  are  past,  he  struck  out  the  plan  of  making 


14  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 

marks  on  wood  or  stone,  or  bone  or  leather  or  some  other 
material,  significant  marks  which  should  somehow  last  on, 
charged  with  meaning,  in  place  of  the  word  that  had  perished. 
Of  course  the  subjects  for  such  perpetuation  were  severely 
selected.  Infinitely  the  greater  part  of  man's  life,  even  now, 
is  in  the  moment,  the  sort  of  thing  that  is  lived  and  passes 
without  causing  any  particular  regret,  or  rousing  any  de- 
finite action  for  the  purpose  of  retaining  it.  And  when  the 
whole  process  of  writing  or  graving  was  as  difficult  as  it 
must  have  been  in  remote  antiquity,  the  words  that  were 
recorded,  the  moments  that  were  so  to  speak  made  imperish- 
able, must  have  been  very  rare  indeed.  One  is  tempted  to 
think  of  the  end  of  Faust ;  was  not  the  graving  of  a  thing 
on  brass  or  stone,  was  not  even  the  painting  of  a  reindeer 
in  the  depths  of  a  palaeolithic  cave,  a  practical  though  im- 
perfect method  of  saying  to  the  moment  "  Verweile  dock, 
Du  bist  so  schon  "  ("  Stay  longer,  thou  art  so  beautiful  ")  ? 
Of  course  the  choice  was,  as  you  would  expect,  mostly  based 
on  material  considerations  and  on  miserably  wrong  con- 
siderations at  that.  I  suppose  the  greater  number  of  very 
ancient  inscriptions  or  Grammata  known  to  the  world  con- 
sist either  in  magical  or  religious  formulae,  supposed  to  be 
effective  in  producing  material  welfare ;  or  else  in  titles  of 
kings  and  honorific  records  of  their  achievements  ;  or  else 
in  contracts  and  laws  in  which  the  spoken  word  eminently 
needed  preserving.  Either  charms  or  else  boasts  or  else  con- 
tracts; and  it  is  worth  remembering  that  so  far  as  they 
have  any  interest  for  us  now  it  is  an  interest  quite  different 
from  that  for  which  they  were  engraved.  They  were  all 
selected  for  immortality  by  reason  of  some  present  personal 
urgency.  The  charm  was  expected  to  work ;  the  boast 
delighted  the  heart  of  the  boaster ;  the  contract  would 
compel  certain  slippery  or  forgetful  persons  to  keep  their 
word.  And  now  we  know  that  the  charm  did  not  work. 
We  do  not  know  who  the  boaster  was,  and,  if  we  did, 
would  probably  not  admire  him  for  the  thing  he  boasts 
about.  And  the  slippery  or  forgetful  persons  have  long 
since  been  incapable  of '  either  breaking  or  fulfilling  the 
contract.  We  are  in  each  case  only  interested  in  some 
quality  in  the  record  which  is  different  from  that  for  which 


RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI  15 

people  recorded  it.  Of  course  there  may  be  also  the  mere 
historical  interest  in  these  things  as  facts  ;  but  that  again 
is  quite  different  from  the  motive  for  their  recording. 

In  fact  one  might  say  to  all  these  records  of  human  life, 
all  these  Grammata  that  have  come  down  to  us,  what  Marcus 
Aurelius  teaches  us  to  say  to  ourselves :  ifwx<*Plov  ^ 
/Jaora^ov  veKpov ;  each  one  is  "a  little  soul  carrying  a 
corpse."  Each  one,  besides  the  material  and  temporary 
message  it  bears,  is  a  record,  however  imperfect,  of  human 
life  and  character  and  feeling.  In  so  far  as  the  record  can 
get  across  the  boundary  that  separates  mere  record  of 
fact  from  philosophy  or  poetry,  so  far  it  has  a  soul  and 
still  lives. 

This  is  clearest,  of  course,  in  the  records  to  which  we  can 
definitely  attribute  beauty.  Take  a  tragedy  of  Aeschylus, 
a  dialogue  of  Plato,  take  one  of  the  very  ancient  Babylonian 
hymns  or  an  oracle  of  Isaiah.  The  prophecy  of  Isaiah  re- 
ferred primarily  to  a  definite  set  of  facts  and  contained 
some  definite — and  generally  violent — political  advice  ;  but 
we  often  do  not  know  what  those  facts  were,  nor  care  one 
way  or  another  about  the  advice.  Welovethe  prophecyn 
and  value  it  because  of  some  quality  oTBeauty,  wnicE^sfllH'| 
ststs  whenmie^  value  ortEe~a3vice  is  iniw  Hgfld  ;  because  of 
soine^50uT'thaf~ts~theTIe"JwTiich  3oes  not  perish.  It  is  the 
same  with  those  magnificent  Babylonian  hymns.  Their  re- 
corders were  doubtless  conscious  of  their  beauty,  but  they 
thought  much  more  of  their  religious  effectiveness.  With 
the  tragedy  of  Aeschylus  or  the  dialogue  of  Plato  the  case 
is  different,  but  only  different  in  degree.  If  we  ask  why 
they  were  valued  and  recorded,  the  answer  must  be  that  it* 
was  mainly  for  their  poetic  beauty  and  philosophic  truth, 
the  very  reasons  for  which  they  are  read  and  valued  now. 
But  even  here  it  is  easy  to  see  that  there  must  have  been 
some  causes  at  work  which  derived  their  force  simply  from 
the  urgency  of  the  present,  and  therefore  died  when  that 
present  faded  away. 

And  similarly  an  ancient  work  may,  or  indeed  must, 
gather  about  itself  new  special  environments  and  points  of 
relevance.  Thucydides  and  Aristophanes'  Knights  and  even 
Jane  Austen  are  different  things  now  from  what  they  were 


16  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 

in  1913.  I  can  imagine  a  translation  of  the  Knights  which 
would  read  like  a  brand-new  topical  satire.  No  need  to 
(labour  the  point.  I  think_itjs_clear  thai  in  any  great  work^ 
^literature  there  is  a  soul  which  lives  and  a  body  which 
and  further,  ^mce  the  soul  cannot__£Ygr  be  foun4_ 
dthout  any  body_at_all,  it  is  making  for 
time  new  bodies,  changing  with  the 


III 

Both  soul  and  body  are  preserved,  imperfectly  of  course, 
in  Grammata  or  Letters  ;  in  a  long  series  of  marks  scratched, 
daubed,  engraved,  written  or  printed,  stretching  from  the 
inscribed  bone  implements  and  painted  rocks  of  prehistoric 
man,  through  the  great  literatures  of  the  world,  down  to 
this  morning's  newspaper  and  the  MS.  from  which  I  am 
speaking ;  marks  which  have  their  own  history  also  and  their 
own  vast  varieties.  And  "the  office  of  the  art  Grammatike 
is  so  to  deal  with  the  Grammata  as  to  recover  from  them  all 
that  can  be  recovered  of  that  which  they  have  saved  from 
oblivion,  to  reinstate  as  far  as  possible  the  spoken  word  in 
its  first  impressiveness  and  musicalness."  »  That  is  not  a 
piece  of  modern  sentiment.  It  is  the  strict  doctrine  of 
the  scribes.  Dionysius  Thrax  gives  us  the  definition ;  $ 

Fpa[JI,(J.aTlKTJ    iS    €fJ.7T€Lpia    TIS    W?    €7Tl   TO  TToXv  TWV  TTapa  TTOITJTCU? 

Tf  KOI  avyypa^c3(j{.  Aeyo^ieVtov ;  an  €/A7rctp/a,^a_sldlLprpduced 
byjoratctice,  in^the^hings  said  in  poets  and  prose- writersj 
and  he  goes  on  to  divide  it  into  its  six  parts,  of  which  the,. 
first  and  most  essential  is  Reading  Alouct  Kara  -npoaipbiav — 
withjusj^the^ccent,  thejcadencesr  the  expression,   witlj- 
which  the  words  were  originally  spoken^before  they_  _wera 
turned  from  AtJyoi  to  ypd^fiara, from  "  winged  '*  wqrds  to  per-^ 
manent  Letters.    The  other  five  parts  are  concerned,  with 
analysis ;   interpretation  of  figures  of  speech ;  explanation 
of  oBsolete  words  and  customs ;   etymology  ;  grammar  in 
the  narrow  modern  sense ;  and  lastly  Kpicris  rrcn^ijAr^v,  or, 
roughly,  literary TfriticisnT.    The  first  partis  synthetic  and 
in^sensecreative^  and  most  of  the  others  are  subservient 

«  Rutherford,  History  of  Annotation,  p.  12. 


RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI  17 

to  it.    For  I  suppose  if  you  had  attained  by  study  the 
power^  ofjgacEbg  aioud  a"play  of^  ^^^^^peare  exactly  as 

!^halrp<;yv»a|y  ^fofllCI1  *^*  »*<«qp  to  fr$  ffpOJCCO,  you  WOUld 

bg  pretty  sure  to  have  mastered  the  fiynr^of  speech  and 

nbsolete   words   and   niceties  of  grammar.     At   any  rate, 
whethejLor  no  von  ***flf\  manage  tbe  etymoKgi^L_ajKr_jhg_ 
literary  critidim.  you  jyould  have  done  the  "main  thing. 
You  would  r  subject  to  the^imitations  we~consi3ere6T  above. 
have  recreated 


We  intellectuals  of  the  twentieth  century,  poor  things, 
are  so  intimately  accustomed  to  the  use  of  Grammata  that 
probably  many  of  us  write  more  than  we  talk  and  read  far 
more  than  we  listen.  Language  has  become  to  us  primarily 
a  matter  of  Grammata.  We  have  largely  ceased  to  demand 
from  the  readers  of  a  book  any  imaginative  transliteration 
into  the  living  voice.  But  mankind  was  slow  in  acquiescing 
in  this  renunciation.  Isocrates,  in  a  well-known  passage 
(5,  10)  of  his  Letter  to  Philip,  laments  that  the  scroll  he 
sends  will  not  be  able  to  say  what  he  wants  it  to  say.  Philip 
will  hand  it  to  a  secretary  and  the  secretary,  neither  know- 
ing nor  caring  what  it  is  all  about,  will  read  it  out  "  with 
no  persuasiveness,  no  indication  of  changes  of  feeling,  as  if 
he  were  giving  a  list  of  items."  The  early  Arab  writers  in 
the  same  situation  used  to  meet  it  squarely.  The  sage 
wrote  his  own  book  and  trained  his  disciples  to  read  it 
aloud,  each  sentence  exactly  right  ;  and  generally,  to  avoid 
the  mistakes  of  the  ordinary  untrained  reader,  he  took 
care  that  the  script  should  not  be  intelligible  to  such 
persons. 

These  instances  show  us  in  what  spirit  the  first  Gram- 
matici,  our  fathers  in  the  art,  conceived  their  task,  and  what 
a  duty  they  have  laid  upon  us.  I  am  not  of  course  over- 
looking the  other  and  perhaps  more  extensive  side  of  a 
scholar's  work  ;  the  side  which  regards  a  piece  of  ancient 
or  foreign  writing  as  a  phenomenon  of  language  to  be 
analysed  and  placed,  not  as  a  thing  of  beauty  to  be  re- 
created or  kept  alive.  On  that  side  of  his  work  the  Gram- 
maticus  is  a  man  of  science  or  Wissenschaft,  like  another. 
The  science  of  Language  demands  for  its  successful  study 
the  same  rigorous  exactitude  as  the  other  natural  sciences, 

2 


18  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 

while  it  has  for  educational  purposes  some  advantages  over 
most  of  them.  Notably,  its  subject  matter  is  intimately 
familiar  to  the  average  student,  and  his  ear  very  sensitive 
to  its  varieties.  The  study  of  it  needs  almost  no  apparatus, 
and  gives  great  scope  for  variety  and  originality  of  attack. 
Lastly,  its  extent  is  vast  and  its  subtlety  almost  infinite  ; 
for  it  is  a  record,  and  a  very  fine  one,  of  all  the  immeasurable 
varieties  and  gradations  of  human  consciousness.  Indeed, 
as  the  Grammata  are  related  to  the  spoken  word,  so  is  the 
spoken  word  itself  related  to  the  thought  or  feeling.  It  is 
the  simplest  record,  the  first  precipitation.  But  I  am  not 
dealing  now  with  the  Grammaticus  as  a  man  of  science,  or 
an  educator  of  the  young ;  I  am  considering  that  part  of 
his  function  which  belongs  specially  to  Religio  or  Pietas. 


IV 

Proceeding  on  these  lines  we  see  that  the  Scholar's  special 
duty  is  to  turn  the  written  signs  in  which  old  poetry  or 
philosophy  is  now  enshrined  back  into  living  thought  or 
feeling.  He  must  so  understand  as  to  re-live.  And  here 
he  is  met  at  the  present  day  by  a  direct  frontal  criticism. 
"  Suppose,  after  great  toil  and  the  expenditure  of  much  subtlety 
of  intellect,  you  succeed  in  re-living  the  best  works  of  the  past, 
is  that  a  desirable  end  ?  Surely  our  business  is  with  the  future 
and  present,  not  with  the  past.  If  there  is  any  progress  in  the 
world  or  any  hope  for  struggling  humanity,  does  it  not  lie 
precisely  in  shaking  off  the  chains  of  the  past  and  looking 
steadily  forward  ?  "  How  shall  we  meet  this  question  ? 

First,  we  may  say,  the  chains  of  the  mind  are  not  broken 
by  any  form  of  ignorance.  The  chains  of  the  mind  are 
broken  by  understanding.  And  so  far  as  men  are  unduly 
enslaved  by  the  past  it  is  by  understanding  the  past  that 
they  may  hope  to  be  freed.  But,  secondly,  it  is  never  really 
the  past — the  true  past — that  enslaves  us  ;  it  is  always  the 
present.  It  is  not  the  conventions  of  the  seventeenth  or 
eighteenth  century  that  now  make  men  conventional.  It 
is  the  conventions  of  our  own  age  ;  though  of  course  I 
would  not  deny  that  in  any  age  there  are  always  fragments 


RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI  19 

of  the  uncomprehended  past  still  floating,  like  dead  things 
pretending  to  be  alive.  What  one  always  needs  for  freedom 
is  some  sort  of  escape  from  the  thing  that  now  holds  him. 
A  man  who  is  the  slave  of  theories  must  get  outside  them 
and  see  facts  ;  a  man  who  is  the  slave  of  his  own  desires  and 
prejudices  must  widen  the  range  of  his  experience  and 
imagination.  But  the  thing  that  enslaves  us  most,  narrows 
the  range  of  our  thought,  cramps  our  capacities  and  lowers 
our  standards,  is  the  mere  Present  —  the  present  that  is  all 
round  us,  accepted  and  taken  for  granted,  as  we  in  London 
accept  the  grit  in  the  air  and  the  dirt  on  our  hands  and  faces. 
The  material  present,  the  thing  that  is  omnipotent  over  us, 
not  because  it  is  either  good  or  evil,  but  just  because  it 
happens  to  be  here,  is  the  great  Jailer  and  Imprisoner  of 
man's  mind  ;  and  the  only  true  method  of  escape  from  him 
is  the  contemplation  of  things  that  are  not  present.  Of 
the  future  ?  Yes  ;  but  you  cannot  study  the  future. 
You  can  only  make  conjectures  about  it,  and  the  conjec- 
tures will  not  be  much  good  unless  you  have  in  some  way 
studied  other  places  and  other  ages.  There  has  been  hardly 
any  great  forward  movement  of  humanity  which  did  not 
draw  inspiration  from  the  knowledge,  or  the  idealization,  of 
the  past. 

No  :   to  ,search  the  past  is  not  to  go  into  jrjrison.     Itjjjj. 
to  escape_put  ofjprison.  because  it  compels  us  to  compare^. 
the_  ways  of  our  own  age  with  other  ways,.     And  L 


Progress,  it  is  no  _doubt  £_real_fact  .  Tojnany  of  us  it  is  a 
truTnthat  lies  jspme  where  near  jhe_roots_pf  our  religion, 
But  it  is  never  a  straight  march  forward  :  itjs_neyer-2Lresuk 
thathappensjpf  its_own  accord.  __  Itisjmly  a  name  for  the 
mass_ofaccumulated_human  effort,  successful  here,  baffled 
there,  misdirected  and  driven  astray  in  a  third  region,  but 
on  the  whole  and  in  the  main  producing  some  cumulative 
result.  I  belieyethis  difficultv_a.bout  Progress,  thi 
tliat  in  studying  t'he  great  teachers  ^jjthje^pas^  we  are 
some  sense  wantonly  sitting  at  the  feet_of_savages.  causes. 
reaFTrouSIe  of  'mind  to  many  keen  students.  The  f  uiL. 
anjswejitp^  wjojil^a&L^  pape* 

ajjcL  beyond  niy  own  range^  ofJoiQwiedge,    But  the,  main 
linesjrf  the  answer  seem  to  me  clear.    There  are  in  life  twjj 


20  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 


one  transitory  and  progressive.  j  the  other_jcom- 
paratively  if  not  absolutelj/_non-progressive  and  p.tp.rna.1,  ajH 
tn£j*3Ul_Qijnail4s  chiefly  rnnrprnpH  with  th^gfnQ^  •  Try 
to  compare  our  inventions,  our  material  civilization,  our 
stores  of  accumulated  knowledge,  with  those  of  the  age  of 
Aeschylus  or  Aristotle  or  St.  Francis,  and  the  comparison 
is  absurd.  Our  superiority  is  beyond  question  and  beyond 
measure.  Butjcornpare^  any^chosen^qet  of_our_age_with 
Aesghylus,  any  philosopher  with  Aristotle,  any  saintly 

,  and_ttie  resjilt_is_totally  different. 


I  jiojiotjwish  to  argue  that  wejhajrejalleji^^ 
dardofthose  pasfage^  f^ut  itisclear  thatwe  arejiotde-^ 
fimtdy^^ovethenx  The  thinffTof  the  spirit  depend  on 
ydll,__pn  efiort,  on  aspiration^on  the  quaHty'bf  the  individual 
soul ;  and  not  oji  discoveries  and  material^  advances  which 
can  be  accumulated  and  added Jjj?T~ 

~As  I  tried  to  putTtKe^point  some  ten  years  ago,  in  my 
Inaugural  Address  at  Oxford,  "  one  might  say  roughly  that 
material  things  are  superseded  but  spiritual  things  not ;  or 
that  everything  considered  as  an  achievement  can  be  super- 
seded, but  considered  as  so  much  life,  not.  Neither  classi- 
fication is  exact,  but  let  it  pass.  Our  own  generation  is 
perhaps  unusually  conscious  of  the  element  of  change.  We 
live,  since  the  opening  of  the  great  epoch  of  scientific  in- 
vention in  the  nineteenth  century,  in  a  world  utterly  trans- 
formed from  any  that  existed  before.  Yet  we  know  that 
behind  all  changes  the  main  web  of  life  is  permanent.  The 
joy  of  an  Egyptian  child  of  the  First  Dynasty  in  a  clay  doll 
was  every  bit  as  keen  as  the  joy  of  a  child  now  in  a  number 
of  vastly  better  dolls.  Her  grief  was  as  great  when  it  was 
taken  away.  Those  are  very  simple  emotions,  but  I  believe 
the  same  holds  good  of  emotions  much  more  complex.  The 
joy  and  grief  of  the  artist  in  his  art,  of  the  strong  man  in 
his  fighting,  of  the  seeker  after  knowledge  or  righteousness 
in  his  many  wanderings ;  these  and  things  like  them,  all 
the  great  terrors  and  desires  and  beauties,  belong  somewhere 
to  the  permanent  stuff  of  which  daily  life  consists  ;  they  go 
with  hunger  and  thirst  and  love  and  the  facing  of  death. 
And  these  it  is  that  make  the  permanence  of  literature. 
There  are  many  elements  in  the  work  of  Homer  or  Aeschylus 


RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI  21 

which  are  obsolete  and  even  worthless,  but  there  is  no 
surpassing  their  essential  poetry.  It  is  there,  a  permanent 
power  which  we  can  feel  or  fail  to  feel,  and  if  we  fail  the 
world  is  poorer.  And  the  same  is  true,  though  a  little  less 
easy  to  see,  of  the  essential  work  of  the  historian  or  the 
philosopher." 

You  will  say  perhaps  that  I  am  still  denying  the  essence 
of  human  Progress ;  denying  the  progress  of  the  human 
soul,  and  admitting  only  the  sort  of  progress  that  consists 
in  the  improvement  of  tools,  the  discovery  of  new  facts, 
the  recombining  of  elements.  As  to  that  I  can  only  admit 
frankly  that  I  am  not  clear. 

I  believe  we  do  not  know  enough  to  answer.  I  observe  -* 
that  some  recent  authorities  are  arguing  that  we  have  all 
done  injustice  to  our  palaeolithic  forefathers,  when  we  drew 
pictures  of  them  with  small  brain-pans  and  no  chins.  They 
had  brains  as  large  and  perhaps  as  exquisitely  convoluted 
as  our  own  ;  while  their  achievements  against  the  gigantic 
beasts  of  prey  that  surrounded  them  show  a  courage  and 
ingenuity  and  power  of  unselfish  co-operation  which  have 
perhaps  never  since  been  surpassed.  As  to  that  I  can  form 
no  opinion  ;  I  can  quite  imagine  that,  by  the  standards  of 
the  last  Judgement,  some  of  our  modern  philanthropists  and 
military  experts  may  cut  rather  a  poor  figure  beside  some 
nameless  Magdalenian  or  Mousterian  who  died  to  save 
another,  or,  naked  and  almost  weaponless,  defeated  a  sabre- 
toothed  tiger  or  a  cave-bear.  But  I  should  be  more  inclined 
to  lay  stress  on  two  points.  First,  on  the  extreme  recent- 
ness,  by  anthropological  standards,  of  the  whole  of  our 
historic  period.  Man  has  been  on  the  earth  at  least  some 
twenty  or  thirty  thousand  years,  and  it  is  only  the  last 
three  thousand  that  we  are  much  concerned  with.  To 
suppose  that  a  modern  Englishman  must  necessarily  be  at 
;  a  higher  stage  of  mental  development  than  an  ancient 
i  Greek  is  almost  the  same  mistake  as  to  argue  that  Browning 
must  be  a  better  poet  than  Wordsworth  because  he  came 
later.  If  the  soul,  or  the  brain,  of  man  is  developing,  it  is 
not  developing  so  fast  or  so  steadily  as  all  that. 

And  next  I  would  observe  that  the  moving  force  in  human 
progress  is  not  widespread  over  the  world.     The  uplifting 


22  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 

of  man  has  been  the  work  of  a  chosen  few ;  a  few  cities, 
a  few  races,  a  few  great  ages,  have  scaled  the  heights  for 
us  and  made  the  upward  way  easy.  And  the  record  in 
the  Grammata  is  precisely  the  record  of  these  chosen  few. 
Of  course  the  record  is  redundant.  It  contains  masses  of 
matter  that  is  now  dead.  Of  course,  also  it  is  incomplete. 
There  lived  brave  men  before  Agamemnon.  There  have 
been  saints,  sages,  heroes,  lovers,  inspired  poets  in  multi- 
tudes and  multitudes,  whose  thoughts  for  one  reason  or 
another  were  never  enshrined  in  the  record,  or  if  recorded 
were  soon  obliterated.  The  treasures  man  has  wasted  must 
be  infinitely  greater  than  those  he  has  saved.  But,  such  as 
it  is,  with  all  its  imperfections  the  record  he  has  kept  is 
the  record  of  the  triumph  of  the  human  soul — the  Triumph 
or,  in  Aristotle's  sense  of  the  word,  the  Tragedy. 

It  is  there.  That  is  my  present  argument.  The  soul 
of  man,  comprising  the  forces  that  have  made  progress  and 
those  that  have  achieved  in  themselves  the  end  of  progress, 
the  moments  of  living  to  which  he  has  said  that  they  are 
too  beautiful  to  be  allowed  to  pass ;  the  soul  of  man 
stands  at  the  door  and  knocks.  It  is  for  each  one  of  us  to 
open  or  not  to  open. 

For  we  must  not  forget  the  extraordinary  frailty  of  the 
tenure  on  which  these  past  moments  of  glory  hold  their 
potential  immortality.  They  only  live  in  so  far  as  we  can 
reach  them  ;  and  we  can  only  reach  them  by  some  labour, 
some  skill,  some  imaginative  effort  and  some  sacrifice.  They 
cannot  compel  us,  and  if  we  do  not  open  to  them  they  die. 


And  here  perhaps  we  should  meet  another  of  the  objections 
raised  by  modernists  against  our  preoccupation  with  the 
past.  "  Granted,  they  will  say,  that  the  ancient  poets  and 
philosophers  were  all  that  you  say,  surely  the  valuable  parts  of 
their  thought  have  been  absorbed  long  since  in  the  common  fund 
of  humanity.  A  rchimedes,  we  are  told,  invented  the  screw  ; 
Eratosthenes  invented  the  conception  of  longitude.  Well,  now 
we  habitually  operate  with  screws  and  longitude,  both  in  a 


RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI  23 

greatly  improved  form.    And,  when  we  have  recorded  the  names 
of  those  two  worthies  and  put  up  imaginary  statues  of  them 
on  a  few  scientific  laboratories,  we  have  surely  repaid  any 
debt  we  owe  them.     We  do  not  go  back  laboriously  with  the 
help  of  a  trained  Grammaticus,  and  read  their  works  in  the 
original.    Now    admitting — what    is  far  from    clear — that 
Aeschylus  and  Plato  did  make  contributions^^  the  spirituaL 
wealth  eBJie  human  race  comparable_tg  the  inventions  ^of  Lhe_ 
screw  andjo£  longitude,  sure^jKosecojUrjhitiiQns  have  been  _ 
absorbedjind  digested,  an^have  become  parts  of  OUIL  ordinary 
dqttylife  ?     Why  go   back  and  labour  gver  their  aflual 
woms?     We  do  not  most  of  us  wanTTo  re-read  even  Newton' s_ 
Prmctpia.'^ 

This  argument  raises  exactly  the  point  of  difference 
between  the  humane  and  the  physical.  The  invention  of 
the  screw  or  the  telephone  is  a  fine  achievement  of  man ; 
the  effort  and  experience  of  the  inventor  make  what  we  have 
called  above  a  moment  of  glory.  But  you  and  I  when  using 
the  telephone  have  no  share  whatever  in  that  moment  or 
that  achievement.  The  only  way  in  which  we  could  begin 
in  any  way  to  share  in  them  would  be  by  a  process  which 
is  really  artistic  or  literary ;  the  process  of  studying  the 
inventor's  life,  realizing  exactly  his  difficulties  and  his  data 
and  imaginatively  trying  to  live  again  his  triumphant 
experience.  That  would  mean  imaginative  effort  and 
literary  study.  In  the  meantime  we  use  the  telephone 
without  any  effort  and  at  the  same  time  without  any 
spiritual  gain  at  all,  merely  a  gain — supposing  it  is  a  gain — 
in  practical  convenience. 

If  we  take  on  the  other  hand  the  invention,  or  creation, 
of  Romeo  and  Juliet,  it  is  quite  clear  that  you  can  in  a  sense 
by  using  it — that  is,  by  reading  the  play — recapture  the 
moment  of  glory  :  but  not  without, .effort.  It  is  ditterent' 
fiTkind  from  a  telephone  or  a  hot-water  tap.  The  only  way 
of  utilizing  it  at  all  is  by  the  method  of  Grammatikfi  ;  by 
reading  it  or  hearing  it  read  and  at  the  same  time  making  a 
definite  effort  of  imaginative  understanding  so  as  to  re-live, 
as  best  one  can,  the  experience  of  the  creator  of  it.  (I 
do  not  of  course  mean  his  whole  actual  experience  in  writing 
the  play,  but  the  relevant  and  essential  part  of  that  experi- 


24  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 

ence.)  This  method,  the  method  of  intelligent  and  loving 
study,  is  the  only  way  there  is  of  getting  any  sort  of  use 
out  of  Romeo  and  Juliet.  It  is  not  quite  true,  but  nearly 
true,  to  say  that  the  value  of  Romeo  and  Juliet  to  any  given 
man  is  exactly  proportionate  to  the  amount  of  loving  effort 
he  has  spent  in  trying  to  re-live  it.  Certainly,  in  the  absence 
of  such  effort  Romeo  and  Juliet  is  without  value  and  must  die. 
It  may  stand  at  the  door  and  knock,  but  its  voice  is  not  heard 
amid  the  rumble  of  the  drums  of  Santerre.  And  the  same 
is  true  of  all  great  works  of  art  or  imagination,  especially 
those  which  are  in  any  way  removed  from  us  by  differences 
of  age  or  of  language.  We  need  not  repine  at  this.  The 
fact  that  so  many  works  whose  value  and  beauty  is  uni- 
versally recognized  require  effort  for  their  understanding 
is  really  a  great  benefit  to  contemporary  and  future  work, 
because  it  accustoms  the  reader  or  spectator  to  the  expecta- 
tion of  effort.  And  the  unwillingness  to  make  imagina- 
tive effort  is  the  prime  cause  of  almost  all  decay  of  art.  It 
is  the  caterer,  the  man  whose  business  it  is  to  provide 
enjoyment  with  the  very  minimum  of  effort,  who  is  in  matters 
of  art  the  real  assassin. 

VI 

I  have  spoken  so  far  of  Grammatike1  in  the  widest  sense, 
as  the  art  of  interpreting  the  Grammata  and  so  re-living 
the  chosen  moments  of  human  life  wherever  they  are  re- 
corded. But  of  course  that  undertaking  is  too  vast  for  any 
human  brain,  and  furthermore,  as  we  have  noticed  above, 
a  great  mass  of  the  matter  recorded  is  either  badly  recorded 
or  badly  chosen.  There  has  to  be  selection,  and  selection 
of  a  very  drastic  and  ruthless  kind.  It  is  impossible  to 
say  exactly  how  much  of  life  ought  to  be  put  down  in  Gram- 
mata, but  it  is  fairly  clear  that  in  very  ancient  times  there 
was  too  little  and  in  modern  times  there  is  too  much.  Most 
of  the  books  in  any  great  library,  even  a  library  much  fre- 
quented by  students,  lie  undisturbed  for  generations.  And 
yet  if  you  begin  what  seems  like  the  audacious  and  impossible 
task  of  measuring  up  the  accumulated  treasures  of  the  race 
in  the  field  of  letters,  it  is  curious  how  quickly  in  its  main 


RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI  25 

lines  the  enterprise  becomes  possible  and  even  practicable. 
The  period  of  recorded  history  is  not  very  long.  Eighty 
generations  might  well  take  us  back  before  the  beginnings 
of  history-writing  in  Europe ;  and  though  the  beginnings 
of  Accad  and  of  Egypt,  to  say  nothing  of  the  cave-drawings 
of  Altamira,  might  take  one  almost  incalculably  further  in 
time,  the  actual  amount  of  Grammata  which  they  provide 
is  not  large.  Thus,  firstly,  the  period  is  not  very  long ; 
and,  again,  the  extension  of  literature  over  the  world  is 
not  very  wide,  especially  if  we  confine  ourselves  to  that  con- 
tinuous tradition  of  literature  on  which  the  life  of  modern 
Europe  and  America  is  built.  China  and  India  form,  in 
the  main,  another  tradition,  which  may  stimulate  and  in- 
struct us,  but  cannot  be  said  to  have  formed  our  thought. 

If  you  take  any  particular  form  of  literature,  the  limits 
of  its  achievement  become  quickly  visible.  Take  drama ; 
there  are  not  very  many  very  good  plays  in  the  world  : 
Greece,  France,  England,  Spain,  and  for  brief  periods  Russia, 
Scandinavia,  and  Germany,  have  made  their  contributions  ; 
but,  apart  from  the  trouble  of  learning  the  languages,  a 
man  could  read  all  the  very  good  plays  in  the  world  in  a  few 
months.  Take  lyric  or  narrative  poetry ;  philosophy ; 
history  :  there  is  not  so  much  first-rate  lyric  poetry  in  the 
world,  nor  yet  narrative  ;  nor  much  first-rate  philosophy  ; 
nor  even  history.  No  doubt  when  you  consider  the  books 
that  have  to  be  read  in  order  to  study  the  history  of  a  par- 
ticular modern  period — say,  the  time  of  Napoleon  or  the 
French  Revolution — the  number  seems  absolutely  vast  and 
overwhelming,  but  when  you  look  for  those  histories  which 
have  the  special  gift  that  we  are  considering,  that  is 
the  gift  of  retaining  and  expressing  a  very  high  quality 
of  thought  or  emotion — the  number  dwindles  at  an  amaz- 
ing rate.  And  in  every  one  of  these  forms  of  literature 
that  I  have  mentioned,  as  well  as  many  others,  we  shall 
find  our  list  of  the  few  selected  works  of  outstanding  genius 
begin  with  a  Greek  name. 

"  That  depends,"  our  modernist  may  say,  "  on  the  princi- 
ples on  which  you  make  your  selection.  Of  course  the  average 
Grammaticus  of  the  present  day  will  begin  his  selected  his- 
torians with  Herodotus  and  Thucydides,  just  as  he  will  begin 


26  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 

his  poets  with  Homer,  because  he  has  been  brought  up  to  think 
that  sort  of  thing.  He  is  blinded,  as  usual,  with  tfo  past. 
Give  us  a  Greekless  generation  or  two  and  the  superstition 
will  disappear."  How  are  we  to  answer  this  ? 

With  due  humility,  I  think,  and  yet  with  a  certain  degree 
of  confidence.  According  to  Dionysius  Thrax  the  last  and 
highest  of  the  six  divisions  of  Grammatike'  was  npims 
TToirjudrcDv,  the  judgement  or  criticism  of  works  of  imagina- 
tion. And  the  voice  of  the  great  mass  of  trained  Gram- 
matici  counts  for  something.  Of  course  they  have  their 
faults  and  prejudices.  The  tradition  constantly  needs 
correcting.  But  we  must  use  the  best  criteria  that  we  can 
get.  As  a  rule  any  man  who  reads  Herodotus  and  Thucy- 
dides  with  due  care  and  understanding  recognizes  their 
greatness.  If  a  particular  person  refuses  to  do  so,  I  think 
we  can  fairly  ask  him  to  consider  the  opinions  of  recog- 
nized judges.  And  the  judgement  of  those  who  know  the 
Grammata  most  widely  and  deeply  will  certainly  put  these 
Greek  names  very  high  in  their  respective  lists. 

On  the  ground  of  pure  intellectual  merit,  therefore, 
apart  from  any  other  considerations,  I  think  any  person 
ambitious  of  obtaining  some  central  grasp  on  the  Grammata 
of  the  human  race  would  always  do  well  to  put  a  good  deal 
of  his  study  into  Greek  literature.  Even  if  he  were  father- 
less, like  Melchizedek,  or  homeless,  like  a  visitor  from  Mars, 
I  think  this  would  hold.  But  if  he  is  a  member  of  our 
Western  civilization,  a  citizen  of  Europe  or  America,  the 
reasons  for  studying  Greek  and  Latin  increase  and  multiply. 
Western  civilization,  especially  the  soul  of  it  as  distinguished 
from  its  accidental  manifestations,  is  after  all  a  unity  and 
not  a  chaos  ;  and  it  is  a  unity  chiefly  because  of  its  ancestry, 
a  unity  of  descent  and  of  brotherhood.  (If  any  one  thinks 
my  word  "  brotherhood  "  too  strong  in  the  present  state 
of  Europe,  I  would  remind  him  of  the  relationship  between 
Cain  and  Abel.) 

VII 

The  civilization  of  the  Western  world  is  a  unity  of  descent 
and  brotherhood  ;    and  when  we  study  the  Grammata  of 


RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI  27 

bygone  men  we  naturally  look  to  the  writings  from  which 
our  own  are  descended.  Now,  I  am  sometimes  astonished 
at  the  irrevelant  and  materialistic  way  in  which  this  idea  is 
interpreted.  People  talk  as  if  our  thoughts  were  descended 
from  the  fathers  of  our  flesh,  and  the  fountain-head  of  our 
present  literature  and  art  and  feeling  was  to  be  sought  among 
the  Jutes  and  Angles. 

Paradise  Lost  and  Prometheus  Unbound  are  not  the  chil- 
dren of  Piers  Ploughman  and  Beowulf ;  they  are  the  children 
of  Vergil  and  Homer,  of  Aeschylus  and  Plato.  And  Hamlet 
and  Midsummer  Night's  Dream  come  mainly  from  the 
same  ancestors,  though  by  a  less  direct  descent. 

I  do  not  wish  to  exaggerate.  The  mere  language  in  which 
a  book  is  written  counts  of  course  for  much.  It  fixes  to 
some  extent  the  forms  of  the  writer's  art  and  thought. 
Paradise  Lost  is  clearly  much  more  English  in  character 
than  Lucan's  Pharsalia  is  Spanish  or  Augustine's  City  of  God 
African.  Let  us  admit  freely  that  there  must  of  necessity  be 
in  all  English  literature  a  strain  of  what  one  may  call  vernacu- 
lar English  thought,  and  that  some  currents  of  it,  currents 
of  great  beauty  and  freshness,  would  hardly  have  been 
different  if  all  Romance  literature  had  been  a  sealed  book 
to  our  tradition.  It  remains  true  that  from  the  Renaissance 
onward,  nay,  from  Chaucer  and  even  from  Alfred,  the  higher 
and  more  massive  workings  of  our  literature  owe  more  to 
the  Greeks  and  Romans  than  to  our  own  un-Romanized 
ancestors.  And  the  same  is  true  of  every  country  in  Europe. 
Even  in  Scandinavia,  which  possesses  a  really  great  home 
literature,  in  some  ways  as  noble  as  the  Greek  or  the 
Hebrew,  the  main  currents  of  literary  thought  and  feeling, 
the  philosophy  and  religion  and  the  higher  poetry,  owe  more 
to  the  Graeco-Roman  world  than  to  that  of  the  Vikings. 
The  movements  that  from  time  to  time  spring  up  in  various 
countries  for  reviving  the  old  home  tradition  and  expelling 
the  foreigner  have  always  had  an  exotic  character.  The 
German  attempts  to  worship  Odin,  to  regard  the  Empire 
as  a  gathering  of  the  German  tribes,  to  expel  all  non-Ger- 
manic words  from  the  language  by  the  help  of  an  instru- 
ment called — not  very  fortunately — a  "  Zentralbureau," 
have  surely  been  symptoms  of  an  error  only  not  ridiculous 


28  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 

because  it  is  so  deeply  tragic.  The  twisting  of  the  English 
language  by  some  fine  writers,  so  that  a  simple  Latin  word 
like  "cave"  gives  place  to  a  recondite  old  English  "stoney- 
dark" ;  the  attempts  in  France  to  reject  the  "  Gaulois  "  and 
become  truly  "  Celtique,"  are  more  attractive  but  hardly 
in  essence  more  defensible.  There  is  room  for  them  as 
protests,  as  experiments,  as  personal  adventures,  or  as 
reactions  against  a  dominant  main  stream.  They  are  not 
a  main  stream  themselves.  The  main  stream  is  that  which 
runs  from  Rome  and  Greece  and  Palestine,  the  Christian 
and  classical  tradition.  We  nations  of  Europe  would  do 
well  to  recognize  it  and  rejoice  in  it.  It  is  in  that  stream 
that  we  find  our  unity,  unity  of  origin  in  the  past,  unity  of 
movement  and  imagination  in  the  present ;  to  that  stream 
that  we  owe  our  common  memories  and  our  power  of  under- 
standing one  another,  despite  the  confusion  of  tongues  that 
has  now  fallen  upon  us  and  the  inflamed  sensibilities  of 
modern  nationalism.  The  German  Emperor's  dictum, 
that  the  boys  and  girls  in  his  Empire  must  "  grow  up 
little  Germans  and  not  little  Greeks  and  Romans,"  is 
both  intellectually  a  Philistine  policy  and  politically  a 
gospel  of  strife. 

I  trust  no  one  will  suppose  that  I  am  pleading  for  a  dead 
orthodoxy,  or  an  enforced  uniformity  of  taste  or  thought. 
There  is  always  a  place  for  protests  against  the  main  con- 
vention, for  rebellion,  paradox,  partisanship,  and  individu- 
ality, and  for  every  personal  taste  that  is  sincere.  Pro- 
gress comes  by  contradiction.  Eddies  and  tossing  spray 
add  to  the  beauty  of  every  stream  and  keep  the  water 
from  stagnancy.  But  the  true  Grammaticus,  while  express- 
ing faithfully  his  personal  predilections  or  special  sensitive- 
nesses, will  stand  in  the  midst  of  the  Grammata,  not  as  a 
captious  critic,  nor  yet  as  a  jealous  seller  of  rival  wares, 
but  as  a  returned  traveller  amid  the  country  and  landscape 
that  he  loves.  He  will  realize  the  amount  of  love  and  care 
which  has  gone  to  the  making  of  the  Traditio,  the  handing 
down  of  the  intellectual  acquisitions  of  the  human  race 
from  one  generation  to  another,  the  constant  selection  of 
thoughts  and  discoveries  and  feelings  and  events  so  precious 
that  they  must  be  made  into  books,  and  then  of  books  so 


RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI  29 

precious  that  they  must  be  copied  and  recopied  and  not 
allowed  to  die.  The  Traditio  itself  is  a  wonderful  and 
august  process,  full  no  doubt  of  abysmal  gaps  and  faults, 
like  all  things  human,  but  full  also  of  that  strange  half 
baffled  and  yet  not  wholly  baffled  splendour  which  marks 
the  characteristic  works  of  man.  I  think  the  Grammaticus, 
while  not  sacrificing  his  judgement,  should  accept  the 
Traditio  and  rejoice  in,  it,  rejoice  to  be  the  intellectual  child 
of  his  great  forefathers,  to  catch  at  their  spirit,  to  carry  on 
their  work,  to  live  and  die  for  the  great  unknown  purpose 
which  the  eternal  spirit  of  man  seems  to  be  working  out  upon 
the  earth.  He  will  work  under  the  guidance  of  love  and 
faith  ;  not,  as  so  many  do,  under  that  of  ennui  and  irritation. 


VIII 

My  subject  to-day  has  been  the  faith  of  a  scholar,  Religio 
Grammatici.  This  does  not  mean  any  denial  or  disrespect 
toward  the  religions  of  others.  A  Grammaticus  who  cannot 
understand  other  people's  minds  is  failing  in  an  essential 
part  of  his  work.  The  religion  of  those  who  follow  physical 
science  is  a  magnificent  and  life-giving  thing.  The  Traditio 
would  be  utterly  wrecked  without  it.  It  also  gives  man  an 
escape  from  the  world  about  him,  an  escape  from  the  noisy 
present  into  a  region  of  facts  which  are  as  they  are  and  not 
as  foolish  human  beings  want  them  to  be  ;  an  escape  from 
the  commonness  of  daily  happenings  into  the  remote  world 
of  high  and  severely  trained  imagination  ;  an  escape  from 
mortality  in  the  service  of  a  growing  and  durable  purpose, 
the  progressive  discovery  of  truth.  I  can  understand  also 
the  religion  of  the  artist,  the  religion  of  the  philanthropist. 
I  can  understand  the  religion  of  those  many  people,  mostly 
young,  who  reject  alike  books  and  microscopes  and  easels 
and  committees,  and  live  rejoicing  in  an  actual  concrete 
present  which  they  can  ennoble  by  merely  loving  it.  And 
the  religion  of  Democracy  ?  That  is  just  what  I  am 
preaching  throughout  this  discourse.  For  the  cardinal 
doctrine  of  that  religion  is  the  right  of  every  human 
soul  to  enter,  unhindered  except  by  the  limitation  of  its 


30  RELIGIO  GRAMMATICI 

own  powers  and  desires,    into  the  full  spiritual  heritage 
of  the  race. 

All  these  things  are  good,  and  those  who  pursue  them 
may  well  be  soldiers  in  one  army  or  pilgrims  on  the  same 
eternal  quest.  If  we  fret  and  argue  and  fight  one  another 
now,  it  is  mainly  because  we  are  so  much  under  the  power 
of  the  enemy.  I  sometimes  wish  that  we  men  of  science 
and  letters  could  all  be  bound  by  some  vow  of  renunciation 
or  poverty,  like  monks  of  the  Middle  Age ;  but  of  course 
no  renunciation  could  be  so  all-embracing  as  really  to  save 
us  from  that  power.  The  enemy  has  no  definite  name, 
though  in  a  certain  degree  we  all  know  him.  He  who 
puts  always  the  body  before  the  spirit,  the  dead  before 
the  living,  the  dray/ccuov  before  the  KaXov ;  who  makes 
things  only  in  order  to  sell  them ;  who  has  forgotten  that 
there  is  such  a  thing  as  truth,  and  measures  the  world  by 
advertisement  or  by  money ;  who  daily  defiles  the  beauty 
that  surrounds  him  and  makes  vulgar  the  tragedy  ;  whose 
innermost  religion  is  the  worship  of  the  Lie  in  his  Soul. 
The  Philistine,  the  vulgarian,  the  Great  Sophist,  the  passer 
of  base  coin  for  true,  he  is  all  about  us  and,  worse,  he  has  his 
outposts  inside  us,  persecuting  our  peace,  spoiling  our  sight, 
confusing  our  values,  making  a  man's  self  seem  greater 
than  the  race  and  the  present  thing  more  important  than 
the  eternal.  From  him  and  his  influence  we  find  our 
escape  by  means  of  the  Grammata  into  that  calm  world 
of  theirs,  where  stridency  and  clamour  are  forgotten  in 
the  ancient  stillness,  and  that  which  was  in  its  essence 
material  and  transitory  has  for  the  most  part  perished, 
while  the  things  of  the  spirit  still  shine  like  stars.  Not 
only  the  great  things  are  there,  seeming  to  stand  out  the 
greater  because  of  their  loneliness ;  there  is  room  also  for 
many  that  were  once  in  themselves  quite  little,  but  now 
through  the  Grammata  have  acquired  a  magic  poignancy, 
echoes  of  old  tenderness  or  striving  or  laughter  beckoning 
across  gulfs  of  death  and  change  ;  the  watchwords  that  our 
dead  leaders  and  forefathers  loved,  viva  adhuc  et  desiderio 
pulcriora.1 

1  "  Living  still  and  more  beautiful  because  of  our  longing." 


II 

ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY « 

THERE  is  no  commoner  cause  of  historical  misjudge- 
ment than  the  tendency  to  read  the  events  of  the 
past  too  exclusively  in  the  light  of  the  present,  and 
so  twist  the  cold  and  unconscious  record  into  the  burning 
service  of  controversial  politics.  And  yet  history  is  inevit- 
ably to  a  great  extent  a  work  of  the  imagination.  No  good 
historian  is  content  merely  to  repeat  the  record  of  the  past. 
He  has  to  understand  it,  to  see  behind  it,  to  find  more  in 
it  than  it  actually  says.  He  cannot  understand  without 
the  use  of  his  constructive  imagination,  and  he  cannot 
imagine  effectively  without  the  use  of  his  experience. 
I  believe  it  is  one  of  the  marks  of  a  great  historian,  such 
as  he  in  whose  honour  this  annual  lecture  was  established, 
such  as  he  who  now  does  us  the  honour  of  occupying  the 
chair,3  to  see  both  present  and  past,  as  it  were,  with  the 
same  unclouded  eye ;  to  realize  the  past  story  as  if  it  were 
now  proceeding  before  him,  and  to  envisage  the  present 
much  in  the  same  perspective  as  it  will  bear  when  it  is 
one  chapter,  or  so  many  pages,  in  the  great  volume  of  the 
past. 

We  know  in  Gibbon's  case  how  much  the  historian  of 
the  Roman  Empire  learnt  from  the  Captain  of  the  Hamp- 
shire Grenadiers.  And  it  would  surely  be  folly  to  tell  a 
man  who  had  lived  through  the  French  or  the  Russian 
Revolution  to  forget  his  own  experience  when  he  came  to 
treat  of  similar  events  in  history.  To  do  so  is  to  fall  into 
that  great  delusion  that  haunts  the  hopes  of  so  many  savants, 
the  delusion  of  supposing  that  in  these  matters  man  can 

1  Being  the  Creighton  Lecture,   1918. 

1  Dr.  Mandcll  Creighton  and  Lord  Bryce, 

31 


82     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

attain  truth  by  some  sure  mechanical  process  without 
ever  committing  himself  to  the  fallible  engine  of  his  own 
personality. 

Greek  History  has  been,  for  reasons  not  difficult  to  unravel, 
constantly  reinterpreted  according  to  the  political  experi- 
ences and  preferences  of  its  writers.  Cleon  in  particular, 
the  most  vivid  figure  of  the  Peloponnesian  War,  plays  in 
the  history  books  many  varied  parts.  Heeren  and  Passow, 
writing  under  the  influence  of  the  French  Revolution,  treat 
him  as  a  "  bloodthirsty  sans-culotte  "  who  established  a 
reign  of  terror.  (Busolt,  iii.  988  ff.)  Mitford,  a  good  English 
Tory  reeling  under  the  horror  of  the  first  Reform  Bill,  took 
him  as  a  shocking  example  of  what  democracy  really  is 
and  must  be.  Grote,  on  the  contrary,  saw  him  as  a  vigorous 
and  much-abused  Radical,  and  justified  his  war-policy  for 
the  sake  of  his  democratic  ardour  at  home.  In  our  own 
day  Mr.  Grundy  and  Mr.  Walker  somewhat  reinforce  the 
position  of  Mitford,  while  Mr.  Zimmern,  following  Beloch 
and  Ferrero,  sees  in  Cleon  little  more  than  the  figurehead 
of  a  great  social  and  economic  movement.  For  my  own 
part  I  would  fain  go  back  to  the  actual  language  of  Thucy- 
dides  and  regard  Cleon  simply  as  "  the  most  violent  of  the 
citizens,  and  at  that  time  most  persuasive  to  the  multitude." 
We  need  bring  in  no  nicknames  of  modern  parties ;  that 
phrase  tells  us  essentially  what  we  need  to  know. 

I  propose  to-day  to  consider  the  impression  made  on 
Athenian  society  by  that  long  and  tremendous  conflict 
between  Athens  and  Sparta  which  is  called  the  Peloponnesian 
War,  using  the  light  thrown  by  our  own  recent  experience. 
That  war  was  in  many  respects  curiously  similar  to  the 
present  war.  It  was,  as  far  as  the  Hellenic  peoples  were 
concerned,  a  world-war.  No  part  of  the  Greek  race  was 
unaffected.  It  was  the  greatest  war  there  had  ever  been. 
Arising  suddenly  among  civilized  nations,  accustomed  to 
comparatively  decent  and  half-hearted  wars,  it  startled 
the  world  by  its  uncompromising  ferocity.  Again,  it  was 
a  struggle  between  Sea-power  and  Land-power ;  though 
Athens,  like  ourselves,  was  far  from  despicable  on  land, 
and  Sparta,  like  Germany,  had  a  formidable  fleet,  and 
adopted  the  same  terrorist  policy  of  sinking  all  craft 


whatsoever,  enemy  or  neutral,  which  they  found  at  sea. 
(Thucydides  ii.  67.)  It  was  a  struggle  between  the  principles 
of  democracy  and  military  monarchy  ;  and  in  consequence 
throughout  the  Hellenic  world  there  was  a  violent  dissidence 
of  sympathy,  the  military  and  aristocratic  parties  every- 
where being  pro-Spartan,  and  the  democratic  parties  pro- 
Athenian.  From  the  point  of  view  of  military  geography, 
again,  the  democratic  sea-empire  of  Athens  suffered  much 
from  its  lack  of  cohesion  and  its  dependence  on  sea-borne  re- 
sources, while  the  military  land  empire  of  the  Peloponnesians 
gained  from  its  compact  and  central  position.  It  would 
perhaps  be  fanciful  to  go  further  and  suggest  that  the 
Thracian  hordes  played  something  the  same  part  in  the 
mind  of  the  Athenians  as  the  Russians  with  some  of  us. 
And,  when  they  failed,  alas,  there  was  no  America  to 
make  sure  that  the  right  side  won  ! 

Again,  in  the  commonplaces  of  political  argument,  we 
find  in  that  part  of  the  Peloponnesian  War  about  which 
we  have  adequate  information,  a  division  of  parties  curiously 
similar  to  our  own.  There  were  no  pro-Spartans  in  Athens, 
just  as  there  are  no  pro-Germans  in  the  proper  sense  of  the 
word  with  us.  There  was  roughly  a  Peace  by  Negotiation 
party,  led  by  Nicias,  and  a  Knock-out-Blow  party,  led  by 
Cleon.  The  latter  emphasized  the  delusiveness  of  an 
"  inconclusive  Peace  "  and  the  impossibility  of  ever  trusting 
the  word  of  a  Spartan  ;  the  former  maintained  that  a  war 
to  the  bitter  end  would  only  result  in  the  exhaustion  of 
both  sets  of  combatants  and  the  ruin  of  Greece  as  a  whole. 
And  Providence,  unusually  indulgent,  vouchsafed  to  both 
parties  the  opportunity  of  proving  that  they  were  right. 
After  ten  years  of  war  Nicias  succeeded  in  making  a  Peace 
treaty,  which,  however,  the  firebrands  on  both  sides  pro- 
ceeded at  once  to  violate ;  war  broke  out  again,  as  the  War 
party  had  always  said  it  would,  and  after  continuing  alto- 
gether twenty-seven  years  left  Athens  wrecked  and  Sparta 
bleeding  to  death,  just  as  the  Peace  party  had  always 
prophesied  ! 

Of  course  such  parallels  must  only  be  allowed  to  amuse 
our  reflections,  not  to  distort  our  judgements.  It  would 
be  easy  to  note  a  thousand  points  of  difference  between 

3 


84     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

the  two  great  contests.  But  I  must  notice  in  closing  one 
last  similarity  between  the  atmospheres  of  the  two  wars 
which  is  profoundly  pathetic,  if  not  actually  disquieting. 
The  more  the  cities  of  Greece  were  ruined  by  the  havoc  of 
war,  the  more  the  lives  of  men  and  women  were  poisoned 
by  the  fear  and  hate  and  suspicion  which  it  engendered, 
the  more  was  Athens  haunted  by  shining  dreams  of  the 
future  reconstruction  of  human  life.  Not  only  in  the 
speculations  of  philosophers  like  Protagoras  and  Plato, 
or  town-planners  like  Hippodamus,  but  in  comedy  after 
comedy  of  Aristophanes  and  his  compeers — the  names 
are  too  many  to  mention — we  find  plans  for  a  new  life  ; 
a  great  dream-city  in  which  the  desolate  and  oppressed 
come  by  their  own  again,  where  rich  and  poor,  man  and 
woman,  Athenian  and  Spartan  are  all  equal  and  all  at 
peace,  where  there  are  no  false  accusers  and — sometimes — 
where  men  have  wings.  This  Utopia  begins  as  a  world- 
city  full  of  glory  and  generous  hope ;  it  ends,  in  Plato's 
Laws,  as  one  little  hard-living  asylum  of  the  righteous  on 
a  remote  Cretan  hill-top,  from  which  all  infection  of  the 
outer  world  is  rigorously  excluded,  where  no  religious 
heretics  may  live,  where  every  man  is  a  spiritual  soldier, 
and  even  every  woman  must  be  ready  to  "  fight  for  her 
young,  as  birds  do."  The  great  hope  had  dwindled  to  be 
very  like  despair  ;  and  even  in  that  form  it  was  not  fulfilled. 

The  war  broke  out  in  432  B.C.  between  the  Athenian 
Empire,  comprising  nearly  all  the  maritime  states  of  Greece, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  the  Peloponnesian 
Alliance  led  by  Sparta.  The  first  war  lasted  till  421 ; 
then  followed  the  Peace  of  Nicias,  interrupted  by  desultory 
encroachments  and  conflicts  not  amounting  to  open  war 
till  418  when  the  full  flood  recommenced  and  lasted  till 
the  destruction  of  Athens  in  404. 

I  wish  to  note  first  a  few  of  the  obvious  results  arising 
from  so  long  and  serious  a  war.  The  most  obvious  was  the 
over-crowding  of  Athens  due  to  the  influx  of  refugees 
from  the  districts  exposed  to  invasion.  They  lived,  says 
Thucydicles,  in  stuffy  huts  or  slept  in  temples  and  public 
buildings  and  the  gates  of  the  city  wall,  as  best  they  could 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY     85 

(Thucydides  ii.  52.)  "  You  love  the  people  ?  "  says  the 
Sausage-monger  in  Aristophanes'  Knights  to  Cleon,  "  but 
here  they  are  for  seven  years  living  in  casks  and  holes  and 
gateways.  And  much  you  care  !  You  just  shut  them  up 
and  milk  them."  As  every  one  knows,  this  over-crowding 
resulted  in  the  great  outbreak  of  a  plague,  similar  to  the 
Black  Death,  in  430,  a  point  emphasized  by  Thucydides 
but  not,  if  I  remember  rightly,  ever  mentioned  by  Aristo- 
phanes. I  suppose  there  are  some  things  which,  even  to 
a  comic  genius,  are  not  funny. 

There  was  great  scarcity  of  food,  of  oil  for  lighting,  and 
of  charcoal  for  burning.  "  No  oil  left,"  says  a  slave  in 
the  Clouds  :  "  Confound  it,"  answers  his  master  ;  "  why 
did  you  light  that  drunkard  of  a  lamp  ?  "  (Clouds  56.) 
"  What  are  you  poking  the  wick  for,"  says  an  Old  Man 
to  his  son  in  the  Wasps,  "  when  oil  is  so  scarce,  silly  ? 
Any  one  can  see  you  don't  have  to  pay  for  it  1  "  (Wasps 
252  ff.)  But  food  was  dearer  still.  "  Good  boy,"  says 
the  same  Old  Man  a  little  later,  "  I'll  buy  you  something 
nice.  You  would  like  some  knuckle-bones,  I  suppose  ?  " 

BOY.     I'd  sooner  have  figs,  papa. 

OLD  MAN.  Figs  ?  I'd  see  you  all  hanged  first.  Out 
of  this  beggarly  pay  I  have  to  buy  meal  and  wood  and  some 
bit  of  meat  or  fish  for  three.  And  you  ask  for  figs  1  " 
And  the  Boy  bursts  into  tears. 

I  think  the  passage  in  the  Acharnians  where  the  hero, 
parodying  a  scene  in  a  tragedy,  threatens  to  murder  a 
sack  of  charcoal,  and  the  Chorus  of  charcoal-burners  are 
broken-hearted  at  the  thought,  is  perhaps  more  intelligible 
to  us  this  winter  than  it  was  before  the  war. 

The  scarcity  of  food  is  dwelt  upon  again  and  again.  It 
is  treated  almost  always  as  a  joke,  but  it  is  a  joke  with 
a  grim  bacl%round.  Many  places  suffered  far  more  than 
Athens.  Melos  had  been  reduced  by  famine.  (Birds  186.) 
The  much-ravaged  Megara,  an  enemy  so  contemptibly 
weak  and  yet,  for  geographical  reasons,  so  maddeningly 
inconvenient  to  the  Athenians,  was  absolutely  starving. 
Farce  comes  near  to  the  border  of  tears  in  the  scene  of  the 
Acharnians  where  the  Megarian  comes  to  sell  his  children 
in  a  sack,  as  pigs,  and  we  hear  how  the  fashionable  amuse- 


36     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

ment  in  Megara  is  to  have  starving-matches  round  a  fire. 
(Acharnians  750-752.) 

In  Athens  itself  prices  were  high,  as  we  saw  in  the  scene 
from  the  Wasps.  Everybody  was  in  debt,  like  Strepsiades 
in  the  Clouds,  like  Peithetairos  and  Euelpides  in  the  Birds. 
The  King  of  the  Birds,  we  hear,  "  had  once  been  a  human 
being,  like  you  and  me  ;  and  owed  money,  like  you  and  me  ; 
and  was  thankful  not  to  pay  it,  like  you  and  me."  (Birds 
114  ff.)  That  was  one  of  the  reasons  why,  though  Athens 
was  certainly  "  a  great  and  prosperous  city  and  open  to 
every  one  to  spend  money  in,"  the  heroes  of  that  play 
determined  to  seek  another  home. 

But  the  liveliest  description  of  the  general  lack  of  food 
is  in  the  Knights,  in  a  scene  of  which  the  point  has  often 
been  missed.  Cleon  is  addressing  the  Council,  thundering 
accusations  of  conspiracy  and  "  the  hidden  hand,"  when 
the  Sausage-monger  resolves  to  interrupt  him  and  bursts — 
quite  illegally — in  with  the  news  that  a  shoal  of  sprats  has 
come  into  the  Piraeus  and  can  be  had  cheap,  extraordinarily 
cheap.  The  hungry  and  anxious  faces  suddenly  clear.  They 
vote  a  crown  to  the  bringer  of  good  tidings,  and  prepare 
to  rush  off.  Cleon,  to  regain  his  ascendancy,  proposes  a 
vast  sacrifice  of  kids,  as  a  thank-offering.  The  Sausage- 
monger  at  once  doubles  the  number,  and  proposes  a  still 
further  extravagance  of  public  feasting  next  day  if  sprats 
fall  to  a  hundred  the  obol.  The  councillors  accept  the 
proposal  without  discussion  and  stream  out.  Cleon  shrieks 
for  them  to  wait :  a  herald  has  come  from  the  Spartans 
to  propose  terms  of  Peace  !  At  another  time  that  would 
have  held  them.  But  now  there  are  cries  of  derision. 
"  Peace  ?  Yes,  of  course.  When  they  know  that  we 
have  cheap  fish.  We  don't  want  Peace  !  Let  the  war 
rip  !  "  Cleon  had  taught  them  their  lesson  only  too  well. 
(Knights  625-680.) 

Another  effect  of  the  war  was  the  absence  of  men  of 
military  age  from  Athens.  The  place  was  full  of  women 
and  Gerontes — technically,  men  over  sixty.  And  the  young 
men  were  being  killed  out.  That  explains  such  phrases, 
for  example,  as  the  remark  that  Argos  was  now  powerful 
because  she  had  plenty  of  young  men.  (Contrast  Hdt.  vi.  83.) 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY     87 

It  explains  too  why  the  plots  of  three  of  our  eleven  extant 
Comedies,  and  quite  a  number  of  those  only  known  from 
fragments,  are  based  on  suppositions  of  what  the  women 
might  do  if  they  held  together.  In  the  Lysistrata — the 
name  means  Dismisser  of  Armies — the  heroine,  determined 
on  compelling  both  sides  to  make  Peace,  organizes  a  general 
strike  of  all  wives  and  mistresses,  both  in  Athens  and  Sparta. 
They  seize  the  Acropolis,  and  dress  themselves  in  their 
most  bewitching  clothes,  but  will  not  say  a  word  to  any 
husband  or  lover  till  Peace  is  made.  And  when  the  authori- 
ties are  summoned  to  put  the  revolt  down,  alas,  they 
amount  to  nothing  but  a  crowd  of  scolding  old  gentlemen. 
It  is  much  the  same  in  the  Ecclesiazusae,  or  Women  in 
Parliament,  only  there  they  pack  the  Assembly  disguised 
as  men,  carry  a  measure  transferring  the  voting  power 
from  men  to  women  and  then  introduce  a  socialist  Utopia. 
The  third  woman-play,  the  Thesmophoriazusae,  turns  on 
literature,  not  on  politics. 

The  evidence  is  not  sufficient  to  show  whether  there 
really  was  any  general  movement  for  Peace  among  the 
women,  or  yet  for  Socialism.  At  the  present  time  women 
probably  feel  the  pinch  of  scarcity  and  the  difficulties 
of  housekeeping  more  than  men  do  ;  and  possibly  they 
feel  the  deaths  of  the  young  men  more  than  the  old  men  do. 
But  these  are  only  two  factors  among  an  enormous  number 
that  are  operating. 

The  third  material  result  which  seems  worth  specially 
mentioning  was  the  dearth  of  servants,  though  this  was 
due  to  a  different  cause  from  those  which  produce  the 
same  effect  among  us.  It  was  that  the  slaves,  who  of 
course  had  no  patriotism  towards  the  city  of  their  owners, 
deserted  in  vast  numbers.  At  a  certain  moment  we  are 
told  that  more  than  20,000  had  escaped  from  Athens. 
Life  no  doubt  was  extra  hard,  and  escape  was  easy.  The 
master,  if  he  was  under  sixty,  was  apt  to  be  away  on  duty  ; 
and  if  you  once  got  outside  the  town  into  the  open  country, 
where  the  enemy  was  in  force,  there  was  a  good  chance 
of  not  being  pursued. 

The  slaves  thus  correspond  to  what  is  called  the  "  inter- 
national proletariate,"  or  would  correspond  if  such  a  class 


38     ARISTOPHANES   AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

really  existed.  They  were  a  class  without  rights,  with- 
out interests,  without  preference  for  one  country  or  one 
set  of  masters  over  another.  In  modern  Europe  it  seems 
as  a  rule  to  take  an  extraordinary  amount  of  prolonged 
misery  before  an  oppressed  class  loses  its  national 
feeling. 

Now  let  us  turn  from  the  material  effects  of  the  war  to 
a  more  interesting  side  of  the  subject,  the  effects  upon 
political  opinion.  I  think  that  on  this  point,  owing  to  the 
exceptional  vividness  and  richness  of  our  sources,  quite 
a  good  deal  can  be  made  out.  We  have  not  only  the  direct 
narrative  of  Thucydides,  who  writes  at  first  hand  of  what 
he  has  himself  observed  and  felt,  and  several  speeches  of 
contemporary  orators,  concerned  with  public  or  private 
suits.  We  have  also  the  eleven  Comedies  of  Aristophanes, 
representing  the  political  opposition,  and  treating  of  public 
affairs  with  unusual  freedom  of  speech  and  also,  amid  the 
wildest  exaggerations,  with  a  singularly  acute  perception 
of  his  opponent's  point  of  view.  The  Greeks  were  not 
politicians  and  dramatists  for  nothing. 

The  first  simple  fact  to  realize  is  that  the  war  was  a  long, 
hard,  and  evenly  balanced  war.  Consequently  each  side, 
as  usual,  thought  its  own  successes  much  greater  than 
they  really  were,  though  of  course  much  less  than  they 
ought  to  be.  They  could  not  understand  why,  considering 
their  own  moral  and  intellectual  superiority  to  the  enemy, 
they  did  not  succeed  sooner  in  completely  crushing  him. 
There  arose  a  demand  for  energy,  energy  at  any  price, 
and  then  more  energy.  But  why,  even  with  energy,  did 
things  continue  to  go  wrong  ?  The  mob  became  hysterical. 
Evidently  there  was  a  hidden  hand  ;  there  were  traitors 
in  our  midst !  This  was  dreadful  enough ;  but  the 
fact  that  with  the  utmost  vigilance  it  was  impossible 
to  discover  any  traitors,  made  it  infinitely  exasperating. 
Athens  swarmed  with  informers  and  false  accusers.  The 
Old  Comedy  is  full  of  hits  at  these  public  nuisances,  and 
they  have  left  their  mark  on  the  historians  and  even  the 
non-political  writers.  In  tragedy,  for  example,  references 
to  contemporary  affairs  are  extremely  rare,  but  Euripides 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY     89 

in  the  Ion,  written  in  415,  alludes  passingly  to  Athens  as 
"  a  city  full  of  terror."  (Ion  601.) 

In  this  state  of  things  it  became  of  course  extremely 
difficult,  if  not  dangerous,  to  work  for  Peace.  Nicias  no 
doubt  wished  for  a  peace  on  reasonable  terms,  to  be  followed 
by  an  alliance  with  Sparta  and  a  loyal  co-operation  between 
the  two  chief  states  of  Greece.  And  there  was,  as  far 
as  we  can  see,  no  particular  reason  to  regard  Sparta  as  in 
any  special  sense  an  outcast  from  Greek  civilization,  or 
congenitally  incapable  of  loyal  action.  But  though  all 
our  authorities  agree  in  praising  both  the  character  and 
abilities  of  Nicias,  there  is  a  constant  complaint  of  his 
slowness,  his  lack  of  dash,  and  his  reluctance  to  face,  or 
to  encourage,  the  howls  of  the  patriotic  mob.  When  he 
was  commander-in-chief,  Plutarch  tells  us,  he  lost  popularity 
by  spending  all  his  day  working  at  the  Stratfegion,  or  War 
Office,  and  then  going  straight  home,  instead  of  making 
himself  agreeable  to  the  orators  and  disseminators  of 
news,  or  making  speeches  to  "  ginger  "  the  Assembly. 

As  an  offset  to  this  rather  gloomy  picture,  it  is  worth 
noting  that  Athenian  civilization  was  hard  to  destroy. 
There  were  very  few  executions  of  citizens  and  no  judicial 
murders  even  when  passions  ran  most  fiercely.  And 
pari  passu  there  were  no  assassinations.  And  though 
Aristophanes  and  the  other  Comedians  speak  a  good  deal 
of  the  danger  they  run  in  attacking  Cleon,  they  seem  to 
have  exercised  during  the  first  ten  years  or  so  of  the  war 
a  degree  of  freedom  of  speech  which  is  almost  without  a 
parallel  in  history.  If  you  can  with  impunity,  in  public, 
refer  to  the  leading  statesman  of  the  day  as  "  a  whale  that 
keeps  a  public-house  and  has  a  voice  like  a  pig  with  its 
bristles  on  fire,"  you  are  somewhat  debarred  from  denouncing 
the  rigours  of  the  censorship.  (Wasps  35  ff.)  In  other 
Greek  states,  of  which  Corcyra  is  the  standing  example, 
there  were  civil  wars,  political  proscriptions,  and  massacres. 
But  it  took  a  long  time  even  for  a  war  so  deep-rooted  and 
corrupting  as  the  Peloponnesian  to  destroy  the  high  civiliza- 
tion that  had  been  built  up  in  the  Athens  of  Pericles.  The 
only  really  atrocious  acts  which  can  be  laid  to  the  account 
of  the  war  party  at  Athens  are  acts  of  ferocity  to  enemies 


40     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

or  quasi-enemies,  like  the  treatment  of  Megara  and  M&os  ; 
monstrous  severity  to  those  parts  of  the  Empire  which 
showed  disloyalty  during  the  war,  like  the  massacres  of 
Mityl6n6  and  Skionfi ;  and  thirdly,  unless  I  am  mistaken, 
a  pretty  constant  practice  of  harsh  and  unscrupulous 
exploitation  of  subject-allies,  which  at  times  amounted 
to  absolute  tyranny  and  extortion. 

After  these  general  considerations,  let  us  proceed  to  re- 
construct the  definite  political  criticism  passed  by  the 
moderates  or  "  pacifists  "  on  the  government  of  Cleon. 
Of  course  such  reconstruction  is  not  quite  easy.  The 
criticism  is  hardly  ever  both  directly  and  seriously  expressed. 
In  Thucydides  it  is  serious  but  seldom  direct  ;  it  has  mostly 
to  be  gathered  from  implications.  In  the  orators  it  is 
allusive  and  powerfully  affected  by  the  necessities  of  the 
particular  cause  which  the  speaker  is  pleading.  In  Aristo- 
phanes it  is  abundant  and  in  one  sense  direct  enough  to 
satisfy  the  most  exacting  critic  ;  but  it  is  confused  first 
by  the  wild  and  farcical  atmosphere  of  the  Old  Comedy, 
which  attains  its  end  sometimes  by  exaggeration  and 
sometimes,  on  the  contrary,  by  paradox — I  mean,  by  re- 
presenting a  public  man  in  a  character  exactly  the  opposite 
to  that  for  which  he  is  notorious ;  and  secondly,  a  point 
which  is  apt  to  be  forgotten,  by  the  subtle  tact  with  which 
the  poet  has  always  to  be  handling  his  audience.  To  allow 
for  these  distorting  media  is  not  a  question  of  scientific 
method  ;  it  is  a  question  of  familiarity  with  the  subject 
and  the  language,  of  humour  and  of  common  sense.  And 
it  follows  that  one's  interpretation  can  never  be  absolutely 
certain. 

However,  to  take  first  the  attitude  of  the  Opposition 
towards  the  enemy.  It  is  plain  enough  how  the  average 
Athenian  citizen  under  the  influence  of  war-fever  regarded 
him.  It  was  folly  to  speak  of  ever  making  any  treaty 
with  a  Spartan,  "  who  was  no  more  to  be  trusted  than  a 
hungry  wolf  with  its  mouth  open."  (Lysistrata  629.)  The 
Spartans  are  to  blame  for  everything,  everything  that  has 
gone  wrong  ;  they  are  creatures  "  for  whom  there  exists 
no  altar  and  no  honour  and  no  oath ! "  (Acharnians 
308,  311.)  The  clergy,  that  is  to  say,  the  prophets  and 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY     41 

oracle-dealers,  are  represented  in  Greek  Comedy,  just  as 
they  are  later  by  Erasmus  and  Voltaire,  as  more  ferocious 
in  their  war-passions  than  the  average  layman.  For 
example,  in  the  Peace,  when  that  buried  goddess  has  been 
recovered  from  the  bowels  of  the  earth  and  all  the  nations 
are  rejoicing,  the  soothsayer  Hierocles  comes  to  interrupt 
the  peace-libations  with  his  oracles  :  "  O  miserable  creatures 
and  blind,  not  knowing  the  mind  of  the  gods !  Behold, 
men  have  made  covenants  with  angry-eyed  apes.  Tremb- 
ling gulls  have  put  their  trust  in  the  children  of  foxes." 
And  again,  "  Behold,  it  is  not  the  pleasure  of  the  blessed 
gods  that  ye  cease  from  war  until  the  wolf  weds  the  lamb." 
Again,  "  Never  shall  ye  make  the  crab  walk  straight ;  never 
shall  ye  make  the  sea-urchin  smooth."  (Peace  1049- 
1120.) 

These  prophets  are  never  sympathetically  treated  by 
Aristophanes.  Sometimes  they  are  simply  kicked  or 
beaten  at  sight.  Sometimes  they  are  argued  with,  as  in 
this  scene.  "  Are  we  never  to  stop  fighting  ?  "  asks  the 
hero  of  the  play.  "  Are  we  to  draw  lots  for  which  goes 
to  the  Devil  deepest,  when  we  might  simply  make  peace 
and  together  be  the  leaders  of  Hellas  ?  "  And  a  little  later 
he  retorts  on  the  oracles  which  Hierocles  quotes  from 
the  prophet  Bakis  with  a  better  oracle  from  Homer  :  "  With- 
out kindred  or  law  or  hearthstone  is  the  man  who  loves 
war  among  his  people."  (Peace  1096  ff.) 

In  the  Acharnians  the  hero  deliberately  undertakes  to 
argue  that  the  Spartans — whom  he  duly  hates,  and  hopes 
that  an  earthquake  may  destroy  them,  for  he  too  has  had 
his  vineyard  ravaged — were,  after  all,  not  to  blame  in 
everything ;  on  the  contrary,  they  have  in  some  points 
been  treated  unjustly.  It  is  a  bold  undertaking.  In 
very  few  great  wars  can  it  have  been  possible  for  a  man  on 
the  public  stage  to  argue  such  a  thesis  on  behalf  of  the 
enemy  ;  and  Dicaeopolis  has  to  do  it  with  a  block  ready 
for  cutting  his  head  off  if  he  does  not  prove  his  point.  His 
argument  is  that  the  cause  of  the  war  was  the  Athenians' 
tariff-war  against  Megara — a  small  Dorian  state  under 
the  protection  of  Sparta.  There  was  a  deliberately  in- 
jurious tariff  against  Megarian  goods ;  and  then,  instead 


42     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

of  letting  the  tariff  work  in  the  casual  happy-go-lucky 
way  that  was  usual  in  antiquity,  "a  lot  of  wicked  little 
pinch-beck  creatures,  degraded,  falsely  stamped  and  falsely 
born,"  made  a  trade  of  informing  against  Megarian  woollen 
goods.  And  if  ever  they  saw  a  pumpkin  or  a  hare  or  a 
young  pig  or  a  head  of  garlic  or  some  stray  lumps  of  salt, 
"  that's  from  Megara  !  "  they  shouted,  and  it  was  confiscated 
before  nightfall.  This  led  naturally  enough  to  troubles 
on  the  frontier.  Drunken  young  Athenians  began  making 
outrages  across  the  Megarian  border — the  current  form 
of  outrage  was  to  carry  off  a  female  slave ;  angry  young 
Megarians  made  reprisals,  till 

At  last  in  wrath  the  Olympian  Pericles 

Broke  into  thunder,  lightning  and  damnation 

On  Greece ;    passed  laws  written  like  drinking-songs. 

That  no  Megarian  by  land  or  sea 

Or  sky  or  market  should  be  left  alive  I 

(The  allusion  is  to  a  drinking-song  beginning  "  Would 
that  not  by  land  or  sea,"  etc.)  The  Megarians  were  re- 
duced to  starvation  ;  Sparta,  intervening,  made  a  petition 
on  behalf  of  Megara  to  have  the  decree  rescinded.  They 
pleaded  many  times  and  Athens  refused ;  and  then  came 
the  rattling  of  shields.  "  They  ought  not  to  have  rattled 
their  shields,  you  say  ?  Well,  what  ought  they  to  have 
done  ?  Suppose  a  Spartan  had  sailed  out  in  a  skiff  and 
confiscated  a  puppy-dog  belonging  to  the  smallest  islander 
in  your  League,  would  you  have  sat  still  ?  God  bless  us, 
no.  In  a  moment  you  would  have  had  three  hundred  ships 
of  war  on  the  water,"  and  so  on,  and  so  on. 

The  Chorus  who  listen  to  this  bold  pleading  are  shaken 
by  it.  Half  go  with  the  speaker,  and  half  not.  (Acharnians 
496-561.) 

Much  the  same  account  is  given  a  few  years  later  in  the 
Peace  (Peace  603-656).  The  hostile  tariff  against  Megara 
was  the  first  cause  of  the  war ;  but  the  speaker  here  is 
more  interested  in  what  happened  after.  '  Your  depen- 
dencies, or  subject-allies,"  he  says,  "  saw  that  you  and 
the  Spartans  were  snarling  at  each  other ;  so,  in  fear  of 
the  tribute  you  made  them  pay,  they  moved  heaven  and 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY     43 

earth  to  induce  the  chief  men  in  Sparta  to  fight  for  their 
independence.  And  they,  like  the  covetous  curs  and  deceiv- 
ers of  strangers  that  they  are,  drove  Peace  with  shame  out 
of  the  world  and  grabbed  at  war."  He  goes  on  to  show 
how  most  of  the  suffering  fell  on  the  tillers  of  the  soil. 

I  will  not  discuss  the  truth  of  this  account  further  than 
to  observe  that  to  my  mind  the  only  question  is  a  question 
of  proportion.  The  cruel  tariff-war  against  Megara  is  a 
vera  causa.  It  did  exist,  and  it  did  act,  as  such  tyrannies 
always  act,  as  a  cause  of  war.  But  how  much  weight  it 
should  be  given  among  all  the  other  causes  is  a  question 
it  would  be  futile  at  present  to  discuss.  The  object  of 
Pericles'  policy  was,  as  far  as  we  can  judge,  to  compel 
Megara  by  sheer  coercion  to  join  the  Athenian  alliance, 
to  which  it  seemed  naturally  to  belong  by  geography  and 
commercial  interest,  and  give  up  the  Spartan  alliance, 
to  which  it  belonged  by  race  and  sympathy. 

The  next  point  at  issue  between  Aristophanes  and  Cleon 
is  an  interesting  one.  It  is  the  treatment  of  the  depen- 
dencies. Athens  was  the  head  of  a  great  league,  originally 
formed  for  defence  against  the  Persians,  and  consisting 
chiefly  of  the  Ionian  islands  and  maritime  states  which 
had  been  under  the  Persian  yoke.  This  league  of  equals 
had  gradually  transformed  itself  into  an  Empire,  in  which 
Athens  provided  most  of  the  military  and  naval  force  and 
dictated  the  foreign  policy,  while  the  dependencies  paid 
tribute  for  their  protection. 

These  Ionian  cities  had  been  outstripped  in  power  and 
wealth  by  Athens  and  the  larger  commercial  units.  But 
they  had  a  tradition  of  ancient  culture  and  refinement. 
Their  language  was  still  the  authorized  dialect  of  poetry 
and  the  higher  prose.  And,  though  most  of  them  were  now 
democratically  governed,  their  old  families  had  still  much 
influence  and  wealth.  Aristophanes,  like  Sophocles  and 
other  Athenian  writers,  had  strong  links  of  sympathy  with 
Ionia.  His  policy  would  doubtless  have  been  that  of 
Aristides,  whose  arrangement  of  the  tribute  payable  by 
the  dependencies  was  accepted  as  a  model  of  justice. 
The  democratic  war  party  took  just  the  opposite  view. 
There  were  remnants  of  the  old  aristocratic  families  still 


44     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

in  the  islands  ;  they  must  be  taught  a  lesson.  There  was 
money  :  it  must  be  extorted  to  provide  pay  for  the  Athenian 
populace.  There  was  secret  disaffection :  it  must  be 
rooted  out.  There  was  occasionally  an  open  rebellion  : 
it  must  be  met  by  wholesale  executions.  The  islanders 
were  all  traitors  at  heart,  and  the  worst  they  got  was 
better  than  their  deserts ! 

In  the  year  426,  just  before  the  earliest  of  his  comedies 
that  has  come  down  to  us  entire,  Aristophanes  produced 
a  play  of  extraordinary  daring,  called  the  Babylonians, 
in  which  he  represented  all  the  dependencies  as  slaves  on 
a  treadmill,  watched  by  a  flogging  gaoler  called  Demos. 
One  fragment  describes  soldiers  demanding  billets.  Another 
shows  some  extortioner  saying, "  We  need  200  drachmae." 
"  How  am  I  to  get  them  ?  "  asks  the  unhappy  islander.  "  In 
this  quart  pot !  "  is  the  answer.  There  is  mention  of  some 
soldier  ordering  a  yoke  of  plough-oxen  to  be  killed  because 
he  wanted  beef.  To  make  the  insult  to  the  Athenian  Govern- 
ment greater,  the  play  was  produced  at  the  Great  Dionysia, 
in  the  summer,  when  visitors  from  the  Ionian  cities  were 
present  in  large  numbers  in  Athens.  One  can  imagine  their 
passionate  delight  at  finding  such  a  champion. 

It  was  a  little  too  much.  Cleon  brought  a  series  of 
prosecutions  against  the  poet,  who  remarks  in  a  subsequent 
comedy  (Acharnians  377  ff.)  : 

And  how  Cleon  made  me  pay — 
I've  not  forgotten — for  my  last  year's  play  ! 
Dragged  me  before  the  Council,  brought  his  spies 
To  slander  me,  gargled  his  throat  with  lies, 
Niagaraed  me  and  slooshed  me,  till — almost — 
With  so  much  sewage  I  gave  up  the  ghost ! 

His  spirit  was  not  quenched,  however.  His  next  play, 
the  Acharnians,  was  a  definite  plea  for  Peace,  and  his  next, 
the  Knights,  a  perfectly  exuberant  and  uncompromising 
attack  on  Cleon,  now  at  the  very  height  of  his  power. 

It  is  noteworthy  that  in  the  Knights  there  is  clear  evi- 
dence of  the  terror  that  Cleon  inspired.  The  character  who 
represents  him  was  not  made  up  to  look  like  him,  and 
was  not  called  by  his  name — at  least  not  till  the  play  was 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY     45 

more  than  half  finished,  and  it  was  clear  how  the  audience 
would  take  it.  Furthermore,  though  I  think  the  most 
burning  cause  of  quarrel  that  Aristophanes  had  against 
Cleon  was  his  treatment  of  the  dependencies,  or  allies, 
these  are  not  once  mentioned  by  name  till  the  last  word 
of  the  last  line  of  the  play,  when  Cleon  is  removed  from 
office  and  borne  off  to  pursue  his  true  vocation  of  selling 
cat's  meat  at  the  city  gates,  and  exchanging  "  billingsgate  " 
with  the  fish-sellers  and  prostitutes. 

Carry  him  high 
And  show  him  to  the  Allies  whom  he  wronged. 

There  are  plenty  of  general  references  to  extortion,  how- 
ever. Cleon  stands  on  the  Council  rock  watching  the 
sea,  like  the  look-out  man  watching  for  herrings  or 
tunnies,  ready  to  harpoon  the  tribute  as  it  comes.  (313.) 
He  knows  all  the  rich  and  harmless  men  who  have  held 
any  office  and  are  consequently  open  to  prosecution  and 
blackmail.  (260  ff.)  He  saves  money  by  not  paying  the 
sailors,  but  letting  them  live  on  the  islanders  instead. 
(Knights  1366  f.  ;  Acharnians  161-163.)  In  anY  strait 
he  demands  war-ships  for  collecting  arrears — there  were 
probably  always  arrears  of  tribute  due  from  some  place 
or  other — and  sends  them  out  to  collect — with  no  questions 
asked.  (1070-1078.)  An  informer  in  another  play,  the 
Birds,  mentions  with  glee  his  own  method,  which  is  to  go 
to  an  island  and  summon  a  rich  islander  to  trial  in  Athens. 
Then,  in  the  scarcity  of  ships,  the  islander  cannot  get  a 
passage  to  Athens,  while  the  informer  is  allowed  to  go  in 
a  man-of-war.  The  trial  is  brought  on  at  once  and  the 
islander  condemned  in  his  absence.  (Birds  1410-1468.) 

Cleon 's  defence  of  his  own  policy  is  illuminating.  The 
war  meant  vast  expenditure  and  crippled  production. 
The  country  population  were  driven  for  safety  into  the 
towns  and  ceased  to  produce  wealth,  while  of  course  they 
had  to  be  fed.  Wealth  and  food  must  be  got  from  some- 
where, and  Cleon  undertook  to  get  it.  "  When  I  was 
on  the  Council,  O  Demos,"  he  says,  "  I  produced  a  huge 
balance  in  the  treasury.  I  racked  these  men  and  squeezed 
those  and  blackmailed  the  others.  I  cared  not  a  jot  for 


46     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

any  private  person  as  long  as  I  could  make  you  happy." 
As  Lysias,  the  respectable  democratic  orator,  puts  it, 
"  When  the  Council  has  sufficient  revenue  it  commits  no 
offences ;  but  when  it  is  in  difficulties  it  is  compelled  to 
accept  impeachments  and  confiscations  of  property,  and 
to  follow  the  proposals  of  the  most  unprincipled  speakers." 
(Lysias  30,  22.)  Of  course  the  art  of  popular  extortion 
lies  in  choosing  your  victims.  Rich  lonians  could  be  robbed 
without  the  Athenian  mob  turning  a  hair ;  and  when  that 
supply  failed  it  was  fairly  safe  to  attack  rich  Athenians 
suspected  of  "  moderatism."  "  What  will  you  do,"  asks 
the  Sausage-monger  of  the  reformed  and  converted  Demos 
at  the  end  of  the  Knights,  "  if  some  low  lawyer  argues  to 
the  jury  that  there  will  be  no  food  for  them  unless  they 
find  the  defendant  guilty  ?  "  "  Lift  him  up  and  fling  him 
into  the  Pit,"  cries  the  indignant  Demos,  "  with  the  fattest 
of  the  informers  as  a  millstone  round  his  neck."  (Knights 
1358-1363.)  Such  arguments  were  heard  in  the  French 
Revolution,  and  are  mentioned  also  by  Lysias.  (27,  I.) 

Cleon's  policy  was  to  win,  to  win  completely,  at  any  cost 
and  by  any  means.  And,  as  in  the  French  Revolution,  such 
a  policy  became  more  and  more  repulsive  to  decent  men. 
Nicias,  the  leader  of  Cleon's  opponents,  wanted  a  Peace 
of  Reconciliation,  but  he  seldom  faced  the  Assembly.  He 
was  a  good  soldier,  a  good  organizer,  a  skilful  engineer ; 
he  devoted  himself  to  his  military  work  and  increasingly 
stood  out  from  politics.  Our  witnesses  are  unanimous 
in  saying  that  from  the  time  of  Pericles  onward  there  was 
a  rapid  arid  progressive  deterioration  in  the  class  of  man 
who  acquired  ascendancy  in  Athens.  In  part  no  doubt 
this  alleged  deterioration  merely  represented  a  change  in 
social  class  ;  the  traders  or  business  men,  the  "  mongers  " 
as  Aristophanes  derisively  calls  them,  came  to  the  front 
in  place  of  the  landed  classes  and  the  families  of  ancient 
culture.  But  I  hardly  see  how  we  can  doubt  that  there 
really  was  a  moral  and  spiritual  degradation  as  well,  from 
Pericles  and  Cimon  to  Hyperbolus  and  his  successors. 

The  locus  classicus  is,  of  course,  the  scene  in  the  Knights 
where  the  Sausage-man  or  Offal-monger  is  introduced  as 
the  only  possible  rival  for  Cleon,  the  tanner  or  Leather- 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY     47 

monger.  In  this  scene  the  Paphlagonian  slave,  i.e.  Cleon, 
has  fallen  asleep,  and  two  of  his  fellow-slaves,  representing 
Cleon's  honest  and  disgraced  rivals,  Nicias  and  Demosthenes, 
succeed  in  stealing  a  book  of  oracles  which  he  keeps  under 
his  pillow. 

The  two-thousand-year-old  jests  may  strike  us  as  some- 
times coarse  and  sometimes  frigid ;  and  my  translation  is 
a  rough  one.  But  there  is  a  passion  in  the  scene  that  keeps 
it  alive  and  significant.  Demosthenes,  I  should  explain, 
is  a  little  drunk  from  the  start.  (Knights  125-225.)  He 
holds  the  book  of  oracles. 

DEMOSTHENES.    You  gory  Paphlagonian,  you  did  well 
To  keep  this  close  !     You  feared  the  oracle 
About  yourself. 

NICIAS.  About  himself  ?     Eh,  what  ? 

DEMOSTHENES.     It's  written  here,  man,  how  he  goes  to  pot. 

NICIAS.     How  ? 

DEMOSTHENES.     How  ?    This  book  quite  plainly  prophesies 
How  first  a  Rope-monger  must  needs  arise 
The  fortunes  of  all  Athens  to  control.  .  .  . 

NICIAS.    Monger  the  first !     What  follows  in  the  roll  ? 

DEMOSTHENES.     A  Mutton-monger  next  our  lord  shall  be.  ... 

NICIAS.    Monger  the  second  1     What's  his  destiny  ? 

DEMOSTHENES.    To  reign  in  pride  until  some  dirtier  soul 
Rise  than  himself.     That  hour  his  knell  shall  toll. 
For  close  behind  a  Leather-monger  reels, 
— Our  Paphlagonian — lunging  at  his  heels, 
Niagara-voiced,  a  roaring  beast  of  prey. 

NICIAS.    The  Mutton-monger  runs,  and  fades  away 
Before  him  ? 

DEMOSTHENES.    Yes. 

NICIAS.  And  that's  the  end  ?     The  store 

Is  finished  ?     Oh,  for  just  one  monger  more  ! 

DEMOSTHENES.    There  is  one  more,  and  one  you'd  never  guess. 

NICIAS.    There  is  1     What  is  he  ? 

DEMOSTHENES.  Shall  I  tell  you  ? 

NICIAS.  Yes ! 

DEMOSTHENES.     His  fall  is  by  an  Offal-monger  made. 

NICIAS.     An  offal-monger  ?     Glory,  what  a  trade  I  ... 
Up,  and  to  work  !     That  monger  must  be  found  1 

DEMOSTHENES.  We'll  seek  him  out.  [They  proceed  to  go  seeking, 
when  they  see  a  man  with  a  pieman's  tray  hanging  round  his 
neck,  selling  offal.] 

NICIAS.  See  !     On  this  very  ground, 

By  Providence  I 


48     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

DEMOSTHENES.     O  blessing  without  end  1 
O  Offal-monger,  friend  and  more  than  friend  1 
To  us,  to  Athens,  saviour  evermore  1  ... 
This  way  ! 

OFFAL-MONGER.     What's  up  ?     What  are  you  shouting  for  ? 
DEMOSTHENES.    Come    here :     come    forward,    and    be    taught 

by  me 
Your  splendid  fate,  your  rich  felicity  ! 

NICIAS.     Here  !     Take  his  tray  off  I     Pour  into  his  head 
The  blessed  oracles  and  all  they've  said. 

I'll  go  and  keep  my  eye  on  Paphlagon.  [Exit  NICIAS.] 

DEMOSTHENES.    Come,  my  good  man,  put  all  these  gadgets  down. 
Kiss  Earth  thy  Mother  and  the  gods  adore. 
OFFAL-MONGER.    There.     What's  it  all  about  ? 
DEMOSTHENES.  O  blest  and  more  ! 

Now  nothing  but  to-morrow,  Lord  of  All ! 
0  Prince  of  Athens  the  majestical  .  .  . 
OFFAL-MONGER.    Look  here,  gents,  can't  you  let  me  wash  my 

stuff 
And  sell  the  puddings  ?     I've  had  mor'n  enough. 

DEMOSTHENES.     Puddings,  deluded  being  ?     Just  look  up. 
You  see  those  rows  and  rows  of  people  ? 
OFFAL-MONGER.  Yup. 

DEMOSTHENES.    You    are    their    Lord    and    Master !     You, 

heaven-sent. 

To  people,  market,  harbour,  parliament, 
To  kick  the  Council,  break  the  High  Command, 
Send  men  to  gaol,  get  drunk  in  the  Grand  Stand.  .  .  . 
OFFAL-MONGER.     Not  me  ? 

DEMOSTHENES.  Yes — and  you  don't  yet  see  it — you  1 

Get  up  on  ...  here,  your  own  old  tray  will  do. 
See  all  the  islands  dotted  round  the  scene  ? 
OFFAL-MONGER.    Yes, 

DEMOSTHENES.  The  great  ports,  the  mercantile  marine  ? 

OFFAL-MONGER.     Yes. 
DEMOSTHENES.  Yes  1     And   then   the  man   denies  he's 

blest! 

Now  cast  one  eye  towards  Carthage  in  the  west, 
One  round  to  Caria — take  the  whole  imprint. 

OFFAL-MONGER.     Shall  I  be  any  happier  with  a  squint  ? 
DEMOSTHENES.     Tut,  tut,  man  !     All  you  see  is  yours  to  sell. 
You  shall  become,  so  all  the  stars  foretell, 
A  great,  great  man. 

OFFAL-MONGER.        But  do  explain  :    how  can 
A  poor  little  Offal-monger  be  a  man  ? 
DEMOSTHENES.    That's   just   the   reason   why   you    are    bound 

to  grow, 
Because  you  are  street-bred,  brazen-faced  and  low. 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY     49 

OFFAL-MONGER.    You  know,  I  don't  know  quite  as  I  deserve  .  .  . 

DEMOSTHENES.     You    don't    know    quite  ?     What    means    this 

shaken  nerve  ? 

Some  secret  virtue  ?     No  ? — Don't  say  you  came 
Of  honest  parents  ! 

OFFAL-MONGER.     Honest  ?     Lord,  not  them  ! 
Both  pretty  queer  ! 

DEMOSTHENES.        Oh,  happy  man  and  wife  f 
To  start  your  son  so  well  for  public  life. 

OFFAL-MONGER.     Just  think  of  the  eddication  I  ain't  had. 
Bar  letters  :    and  I  mostly  learnt  them  bad  ! 

DEMOSTHENES.    The  pity  is  you  learnt  such  things  at  all. 
'Tis  not  for  learning  now  the  people  call, 
Nor  thoughtfulness,  nor  men  of  generous  make. 
'Tis  brute  beasts  without  conscience.     Come  and  tak« 
The  prize  that  gods  and  prophets  offer  you. 


OFFAL-MONGER.     Of  course  I  like  them.     But  I  can't  see  yet 
How  ever  I  shall  learn  to  rule  a  state. 

DEMOSTHENES.     Easy  as  lying  !     Do  as  now  you  do. 
Turn  every  question  to  a  public  stew  ; 
Hash  things,  and  cook  things.     Win  the  common  herd 
By  sweet  strong  sauces  in  your  every  word. 
For  other  gifts,  you  have  half  the  catalogue 
Already,  for  the  perfect  demagogue, 
A  blood-shot  voice,  low  breeding,  huckster's  tricks — 
What  more  can  man  require  for  politics  ? 
The  prophets  and  Apollo's  word  concur. 
Up  I     To  all  Sleeping  Snakes  libation  pour, 
And  crown  your  brow,  and  fight  him  ! 

OFFAL-MONGER.  Who  will  fight 

Beside  me  ?     All  the  rich  are  in  a  fright 
Before  him,  and  the  poor  folk  of  the  town 
Turn  green  and  vomit  if  they  see  him  frown. 

You  feel  the  tone.  The  bitter  contempt,  in  part  the 
contempt  of  the  beaten  aristocrat  for  the  conquering 
plebeian,  of  the  partisan  for  his  opponent,  of  the  educated 
man  for  the  uneducated,  but  in  part,  I  think,  genuinely 
the  contempt  of  the  man  of  honest  traditions  in  manners 
and  morals  for  the  self-seeker  with  no  traditions  at  all. 
It  recurs  again  and  again,  in  all  mentions  of  Cleon  and  his 
successor  Hyperbolus,  or  their  flatterers  and  hangers-on ; 
priests  and  prophets,  shirkers  of  military  service,  rich 

4 


50     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

profiteers  with  a  pull  on  the  government,  and  above  all 
of  course  the  informers,  or  false-accusers. 

The  informers  rose  into  prominence  for  several  causes. 
First,  the  war-fever  and  the  spy-mania  of  the  time ;  next, 
the  general  exasperation  of  nerves,  leading  to  quarrels 
and  litigation  ;  next,  the  general  poverty  and  the  difficulty 
of  earning  a  living.  An  informer  if  he  won  his  case  received 
a  large  percentage  of  the  penalty  imposed.  By  the  time 
of  the  Birds  (414  B.C.)  and  the  Ecclesiazusae  (389  B.C.) 
Aristophanes  implies  jestingly  that  it  was  the  only 
way  left  of  making  a  living,  and  every  one  was  in 
it.  (Ecclesiazusae  562.)  In  the  Plutus  an  informer  bursts 
into  tears  because,  in  the  New  World  introduced  by  the 
denouement  of  that  play,  a  good  man  and  a  patriot,  like 
himself,  is  reduced  to  suffering.  "  You  a  good  man  and 
a  patriot  ?  "  "If  ever  there  was  one."  ..."  Are  you 
a  tiller  of  the  soil  ?  "  "  Do  you  think  I  am  mad  ?  "  "A 
merchant  ?  "  "  H'm,  that  is  how  I  describe  myself  when 
I  have  to  sign  a  paper."  "  Have  you  learnt  any  profession  ?" 
"  Rather  not."  "  Then  how  do  you  live  ?  "  "I  am  a  general 
supervisor  of  the  affairs  of  the  City  and  of  all  private 
persons."  "  What  is  your  qualification  ?  "  "I  like  it." 
The  informer  scores  a  point  later  on.  "  Can't  you  leave 
these  trials  and  accusations  to  the  proper  officials  ?  "  they 
say  to  him.  "  The  City  appoints  paid  judges  to  settle 
these  things."  "  And  who  brings  the  accusation  ?  "  says 
the  informer.  "  Any  one  who  likes."  "  Just  so.  I  am  a 
person  who  likes."  (Plutus  901-919.) 

In  the  Acharnians  (860-950),  when  the  Boeotian  farmer 
comes  to  market  with  his  abundance  of  good  things,  there 
arises  a  difficulty  about  any  export  adequate  to  repay 
such  imports.  He  wants  something  that  is  abundant  in 
Athens  but  scarce  in  Boeotia.  Fish  and  pottery  are  suggested, 
but  do  not  satisfy  him  :  when  the  brilliant  idea  occurs, 
Give  him  a  live  informer !  At  this  moment  an  informer 
enters ;  his  name  by  the  way  is  Nikarchos,  "  Beat-the- 
Government  " — a  name  formed  like  Nikoboulos,  "  Beat-the- 
Council  " — and  suggests  that  if  Cleon  on  the  whole  encouraged 
and  utilized  the  false  accusers  for  the  purpose  of  keeping 
his  rivals  out  of  power,  they  were  sometimes  too  strong 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE   WAR  PARTY     51 

for  him  himself.  "  He  is  rather  small,"  says  the  Boeotian 
doubtfully.  "  But  all  of  him  bad,"  is  the  comforting 
retort.  Nicarchus  immediately  denounces  the  Boeotian 
wares  as  contraband,  and  rinding  lamp-wicks  among 
them,  detects  a  pro-Spartan  plot  for  setting  the  docks 
on  fire.  He  is  still  speaking  when  he  is  seized  from 
behind,  tied  with  ropes,  wrapped  carefully  in  matting 
wrong  side  up,  so  as  not  to  break — and  carried  off. 

Besides  the  avKofavrcu  and  blackmailers,  we  hear  a  good 
deal  about  /cdAcucej,  or  flatterers  of  those  in  power,  and  a 
good  deal  about  profiteers.  There  are  the  Ambassadors 
and  people  on  government  missions  with  their  handsome 
maintenance  allowances,  young  officers  with  "  cushy  jobs  " 
(Acharnians  61-90,  135-137,  595-619),  the  people  who 
profit  by  confiscations  (Wasps  663-718),  the  various  trades 
that  gain  by  war  (Peace  1210-1255)  :  the  armourers,  crest- 
makers,  helmet-makers,  trumpet-makers ;  the  prophets 
and  priests,  who  gain  by  the  boom  in  superstition  ;  the 
geometers  or  surveyors,  who  survey  annexed  territory 
(Birds  960-1020),  together  with  other  colonially-minded 
profiteers.  In  the  Peace,  when  that  goddess  is  discovered 
buried  out  of  human  sight  in  a  deep  pit,  all  the  Greeks 
start  to  drag  her  out,  but  some  hinder  more  than  help. 
There  are  soldiers  who  want  promotion,  politicians  who 
want  to  be  generals,  slaves  who  want  to  desert,  and 
of  course  there  are  munition-workers.  As  the  work  goes 
on  it  appears  that  the  Boeotians,  who  have  plenty 
to  eat,  are  not  pulling ;  the  jingo  General,  Lamachus, 
is  not  pulling ;  the  Argives,  being  neutral,  have  never 
pulled  at  all ;  they  only  grinned  and  got  profit  from 
both  sides ;  and  the  unhappy  Megarians,  though  they 
are  doing  their  best,  are  too  weak  with  famine  to  have 
any  effect.  Eventually  all  these  people  are  warned  off ; 
so  are  the  chief  combatants,  the  Spartans  and  Athenians, 
because  they  do  nothing  but  quarrel  and  make  accusations 
against  each  other.  Only  the  tillers  of  the  soil  are  left 
to  pull,  the  peasants  and  farmers  of  all  nations  alike.  They 
are  not  politicians,  and  they  know  what  it  is  to  suffer. 
(Peace  441-510.)  So  the  goddess  is  hoisted  up,  and  the 
various  cities,  in  spite  of  their  wounds  and  bandages  and 


52     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

black-eyes  and  crutches,  fall  to  dancing  and  laughing  together 
for  very  joy. 

It  is  a  permanent  count  against  Cleon  that  he  has 
repeatedly  refused  Peace.  "  Archeptolemus  brought  us 
Peace,  and  you  spilt  it  on  the  ground.  You  insulted  every 
embassy  from  every  city  that  invited  us  to  treat,  and  kicked 
them  out  of  town."  (Knights  795  ff.)  "  And  why  ?  " 
answers  Cleon.  "  Because  I  mean  to  give  the  Athenian 
Demos  universal  Empire  over  Hellas."  "  Bosh,"  answers 
the  Sausage-man :  "  it  is  because  the  whole  atmosphere 
of  war  suits  you  !  The  general  darkness  and  ignorance, 
the  absence  of  financial  control,  the  nervous  terror  of  the 
populace,  and  even  their  very  poverty  and  hunger,  which 
make  them  more  and  more  dependent  on  you." 

In  the  Peace,  the  god  Hermes  makes  a  speech  to  the 
Athenians.     "  Whenever  the  Spartans  had  a  slight  advan- 
tage," he  says  (211  ff.),  "  it  was  '  Now,  by  God,  we've  got 
the  little  Attic  beasts  on  the  run  !  '     And  when  you  Athen- 
ians had  the  best  of  it  and  the  Spartans  came  with  Peace 
proposals,  '  It  is  a  cheat,'  you  cried.     '  Don't  trust  a  word 
they  say.     They'll  come  again  later,  if  we  stick  to  our 
gains.' '      "I  recognize  the  style,"  says  the  Athenian  who 
listens.     No  one  in  Athens  dared  to  propose  Peace.     In 
a  whimsical  scene  at  the  opening  of  the  Acharnians  an 
Archangel  or  Demi-god  walks  into  the  Assembly  explaining 
that  he  is  an  Immortal  Being,  but  the  authorities  will  not 
give  him  a  passport.     "  Why  does  he  want  one  ?  "     "  The 
gods  have  commissioned  him  to  go  to  Sparta  and  make 
Peace."     Immediately  there  is  a  cry  for  the  Police,  and 
the  Archangel  is  taught  that  there  are  certain  subjects 
that  even  an  immortal  must  not  meddle  with.     (Archarnians 
45-54.)     And  yet  if  Peace  is  not  made — one  would  imagine 
that  one  heard  the  voice  of  a  present-day  Moderate  speaking 
— it  means  the  destruction  not  of  Athens  or  Sparta  alone 
but  of  all  Hellas.     God  is  sweeping  Hellas  with  the  broom 
of  destruction.     (Peace  59.)     The  devil  of  War  has  the 
cities  in  a  mortar  and  is  only  looking  for  a  pestle  to  pound 
them  into  dust.     (Peace  228-287.)     By  good  luck  it  happens 
that  the  Athenian  pestle  is  just  broken — Cleon  killed  in 
Thrace — and  when  War  looks  for  the  Spartan  pestle  it  i§ 


lost  too — Brasidas,  the  Spartan  general,  also  killed.  So 
comes  the  chance  for  Peace,  and  for  the  policy  of  Nicias, 
which  comprised  an  alliance  between  Athens  and  Sparta 
and  a  pan-hellenic  patriotism.  It  is  noticeable  in  the 
Knights  that  the  pacifist  Offal-monger  retorts  on  Cleon 
the  accusation  of  not  possessing  an  "imperial  mind" 
Cleon,  in  his  war-hysteria,  is  for  making  Athens  a  mean 
city ;  making  it  hated  by  the  allies,  hated  by  the  rest  of 
Hellas,  thriving  on  the  misfortunes  of  others,  and  full 
of  hatred  against  a  great  part — not  to  say  the  best  part — 
of  its  own  citizens.  (Knights  817  f.)  And  when  Cleon 
finally  falls  the  cry  is  raised  "  Hellanie  Zeu  ! — Zeus  of  all 
Hellas — thine  is  the  prize  of  victory  !  "  The  Offal-monger, 
like  Aristophanes  himself,  was  "  a  good  European." 

The  Peace  of  Nicias  failed.  The  impetus  of  the  war 
was  too  great.  The  natural  drift  of  affairs  was  in  Cleon's 
direction,  and  the  farther  Athens  was  carried  the  harder 
it  became  for  any  human  wisdom  or  authority  to  check 
the  rush  of  the  infuriated  herd.  And  since  Nicias  was  too 
moderate  and  high-minded  and  law-abiding  to  fight  Cleon 
with  his  own  weapons,  he  lost  hold  on  the  more  extreme 
spirits  of  his  own  party  ;  so  that  at  the  end  of  the  war  the 
informers  had  created  the  very  thing  they  had  dreamed 
about  and  had  turned  their  own  lies  into  tnith.  There 
was  at  last  an  actual  pro-Spartan  group ;  there  were  real 
secret  societies,  real  conspiracies ;  and  a  party  that  was 
ready  to  join  hands  with  the  enemy  in  order  to  be 
delivered  from  the  corrupted  and  war-maddened  mob 
that  governed  them. 

One  is  tempted  in  a  case  like  this  to  pass  no  judgement 
on  men  or  policies,  but  merely  record  the  actual  course  of 
history  and  try  to  understand  the  conflicting  policies  and 
ideals ;  instead  of  judgement,  taking  refuge  in  the  lacrimae 
rerum — the  eternal  pity  that  springs  from  the  eternal 
tragedy  of  human  endeavour.  When  the  soldiers  of  Nicias 
in  Sicily,  mad  with  thirst,  pressed  on  to  drink  the  water, 
thick  with  blood  and  mire,  of  the  little  stream  where  the 
enemy  archers  shot  them  down  at  leisure,  it  was  not  only 
an  army  that  perished  but  a  nation,  and  a  nation  that  held 


54     ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY 

the  hopes  of  the  world.  When  we  read  that  immortal 
praise  of  Athens  which  our  historian  puts  into  the  mouth 
of  Pericles,  the  city  of  law  and  freedom,  of  simplicity  and 
beauty,  the  beloved  city  in  whose  service  men  live  and  die 
rejoicing  as  a  lover  in  his  mistress,  we  should  notice  that 
the  words  are  spoken  in  a  Funeral  Speech.  The  thing  so 
praised,  so  beloved,  is  dead ;  and  the  haunting  beauty 
of  the  words  is  in  part  merely  the  well-known  magic  of 
memory  and  of  longing.  For  Thucydides  the  dream  of  a 
regenerated  life  for  mankind  has  vanished  out  of  the  future, 
and  he  rebuilds  it  in  his  memory  of  the  past.  The  Pelopon- 
nesian  war  had  ended  wrong  ;  and  whatever  the  end  might 
have  been,  it  had  already  wrecked  Hellas. 

Our  war  has  at  least  ended  right :  and,  one  may  hope, 
not  too  late  for  the  recovery  of  civilization.  In  spite  of 
the  vast  material  destruction,  in  spite  of  the  blotting  out 
from  the  book  of  life  of  practically  one  whole  generation 
of  men,  in  spite  of  the  unmeasured  misery  which  has  reigned 
and  reigns  still  over  the  greater  part  of  Europe,  in  spite 
of  the  gigantic  difficulties  of  the  task  before  us ;  in  spite 
of  the  great  war-harvest  of  evil  and  the  exhaustion  of 
brain  and  spirit  in  most  of  the  victorious  nations  as  well 
as  in  the  vanquished,  our  war  has  ended  right ;  and  we  have 
such  an  opportunity  as  no  generation  of  mankind  has 
ever  had  of  building  out  of  these  ruins  a  better  international 
life  and  concomitantly  a  better  life  within  each  nation. 
I  know  not  which  thought  is  the  more  solemn,  the  more 
awful  in  its  responsibility :  the  thought  of  the  sacrifice 
we  survivors  have  asked  or  exacted  from  our  fellow-men ; 
or  the  thought  of  the  task  that  now  lies  upon  us  if  we  are 
not  to  make  that  sacrifice  a  crime  and  a  mockery.  Blood 
and  tears  to  which  we  had  some  right,  for  we  loved  those 
who  suffered  and  they  loved  us ;  blood  and  tears  to  which 
we  had  no  right,  for  those  who  suffered  knew  nothing  of  us, 
nor  we  of  them  ;  misery  of  the  innocent  beyond  measure 
or  understanding  and  hitherto  without  recompense  ;  that 
is  the  price  that  has  been  paid,  and  it  lies  on  us,  who  live, 
to  see  to  it  that  the  price  is  not  paid  in  vain.  By  some 
spirit  of  co-operation  instead  of  strife,  by  sobriety  instead 


ARISTOPHANES  AND  THE  WAR  PARTY     55 

of  madness,  by  resolute  sincerity  in  public  and  private 
things,  and  surely  by  some  self-consecration  to  the  great 
hope  for  which  those  who  loved  us  gave  their  lives. 

"  A  City  where  rich  and  poor,  man  and  woman,  Athenian 
and  Spartan,  are  all  equal  and  all  free ;  where  there  are 
no  false  accusers  and  where  men  " — or  at  least  the  souls 
of  men — "  have  wings."  That  was  the  old  dream  that 
failed.  Is  it  to  fail  always  and  for  ever  ? 

November  7,  1918. 


Ill 

THE  BACGHAE  IN  RELATION  TO  CER- 
TAIN CURRENTS  OF  THOUGHT  IN 
THE  FIFTH  CENTURY' 

OF  the  two  dramas  that  make  up  the  main  part  of 
this  volume,  the  Hippolytus  can  be  left  to  speak 
for  itself.  Its  two  thousand  five  hundred  years 
have  left  little  mark  upon  it.  It  has  something  of  the 
stateliness  of  age,  no  doubt,  but  none  of  the  staleness  or 
lack  of  sympathy.  With  all  the  severe  lines  of  its  beauty, 
it  is  tender,  subtle,  quick  with  human  feeling.  Even  its 
religious  conceptions,  if  we  will  but  take  them  simply, 
forgetting  the  false  mythology  we  have  learned  from  hand- 
books, are  easily  understood  and  full  of  truth.  One  of 
the  earliest,  if  not  the  very  earliest,  of  love  tragedies,  it 
deals  with  a  theme  that  might  easily  be  made  ugly.  It  is 
made  ugly  by  later  writers,  especially  by  the  commentators 
whom  we  can  see  always  at  work  from  the  times  of  the 
ancient  scholia  down  to  our  own  days.  Even  Racine, 
who  wished  to  be  kind  to  his  Phedre,  has  let  her  suffer 
by  contact  with  certain  deadly  and  misleading  suggestions. 
But  the  Phaedra  of  Euripides  was  quite  another  woman, 
and  the  quality  of  her  love,  apart  from  its  circumstances, 
is  entirely  fragrant  and  clear.  The  Hippolytus,  like  most 
works  that  come  from  a  strong  personality,  has  its  manner- 
isms and,  no  doubt,  its  flaws.  But  in  the  main  it  is  a 
singularly  satisfying  and  complete  work  of  art,  a  thing  of 
beauty,  to  contemplate  and  give  thanks  for,  surrounded 
by  an  atmosphere  of  haunting  purity. 

1  Originally    an     introduction    to     a    volume   of     translations   of   the 
Hippolytus,  Bacchae  and  Frogs  (vol.  iii  of  The  Athenian  Drama.     Qeo. 
and  Unwin,  Ltd.). 

00 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  57 

If  we  turn  to  The  Bacchae,  we  find  a  curious  difference.  As 
an  effort  of  genius  it  is  perhaps  greater  than  the  Hippolytus, 
at  any  rate  more  unusual  and  rare  in  quality.  But  it  is 
unsatisfying,  inhuman.  There  is  an  impression  of  coldness 
and  even  of  prolixity  amid  its  amazing  thrill,  a  strange 
unearthliness,  something  that  bewilders.  Most  readers,  I 
believe,  tend  to  ask  what  it  means,  and  to  feel,  by  implica- 
tion, that  it  means  something. 

Now  this  problem,  what  The  Bacchae  means  and  how 
Euripides  came  to  write  it,  is  not  only  of  real  interest  in 
itself ;  it  is  also,  I  think,  of  importance  with  regard  to 
certain  movements  in  fifth-century  Athens,  and  certain 
currents  of  thought  in  later  Greek  philosophy. 

The  remark  has  been  made,  that,  if  Aristotle  could 
have  seen  through  some  magic  glass  the  course  of  human 
development  and  decay  for  the  thousand  years  following 
his  death,  the  disappointment  would  have  broken  his 
heart.  A  disappointment  of  the  same  sort,  but  more  sharp 
and  stinging,  inasmuch  as  men's  hopes  were  both  higher 
and  cruder,  did,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  break  the  hearts  of 
many  men  two  or  three  generations  earlier.  It  is  the 
reflection  of  that  disappointment  on  the  work  of  Euripides, 
the  first  hopefulness,  the  embitterment,  the  despair,  followed 
at  last  by  a  final  half-prophetic  vision  of  the  truths  or 
possibilities  beyond  that  despair,  that  will,  I  think,  supply 
us  with  an  explanation  of  a  large  part  of  The  Bacchae, 
and  with  a  clue  to  a  great  deal  of  the  poet's  other  work. 

There  has  been,  perhaps,  no  period  in  the  world's  history, 
not  even  the  openings  of  the  French  Revolution,  when 
the  prospects  of  the  human  race  can  have  appeared  so 
brilliant  as  they  did  to  the  highest  minds  of  Eastern  Greece 
about  the  years  470-445  B.C.  To  us,  looking  critically 
back  upon  that  time,  it  is  as  though  the  tree  of  human 
life  had  burst  suddenly  into  flower,  into  that  exquisite 
and  short-lived  bloom  which  seems  so  disturbing  among 
the  ordinary  processes  of  historical  growth.  One  wonders 
how  it  must  have  felt  to  the  men  who  lived  in  it.  We 
have  but  little  direct  testimony.  There  is  the  tone  of 
solemn  exaltation  that  pervades  most  of  Aeschylus,  the 
high  confidence  of  the  Persae,  the  Prometheus,  the  Eutnenides- 


58  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

There  is  the  harassed  and  half-reluctant  splendour  of 
certain  parts  of  Pindar,  like  the  Dithyramb  to  Athens 
and  the  fourth  Nemean  Ode.  But  in  the  main  the  men 
of  that  day  were  too  busy,  one  would  fain  think  too  happy, 
to  write  books. 

There  is  an  interesting  witness,  however,  of  a  rather 
younger  generation.  Herodotus  finished  his  Histories 
when  the  glory  was  already  gone,  and  the  future  seemed 
about  equally  balanced  between  good  and  evil.  But  he 
had  lived  as  a  boy  in  the  great  time.  And  the  peculiar 
charm  of  his  work  often  seems  to  lie  mainly  in  a  certain 
strong  and  kindly  joyousness,  persistent  even  amid  his 
most  grisly  stories,  which  must  be  the  spirit  of  the  first 
Athenian  Confederation  not  yet  strangled  by  the  spirit 
of  the  Peloponnesian  war. 

What  was  the  object  of  this  enthusiasm,  the  ground  of 
this  high  hopefulness  ?  It  would,  of  course,  take  us  far 
beyond  our  limits  to  attempt  any  full  answer  to  such  a 
question.1  But  for  one  thing,  there  was  the  extraordinary 
swiftness  of  the  advances  made  ;  and,  for  another,  there 
was  a  circumstance  that  has  rarely  been  repeated  in  history 
— the  fact  that  all  the  different  advances  appeared  to  help 
one  another.  The  ideals  of  freedom,  law,  and  progress  ; 
of  truth  and  beauty,  of  knowledge  and  virtue,  of  humanity 
and  religion ;  high  things,  the  conflicts  between  which 
have  caused  most  of  the  disruptions  and  despondencies 
of  human  societies,  seemed  for  a  generation  or  two  at  this 
time  to  lie  all  in  the  same  direction.  And  in  that  direction, 
on  the  whole,  a  great  part  of  Greece  was  with  extraordinary 
swiftness  moving.  Of  course,  there  were  backwaters  and 
reactionary  forces.  There  was  Sparta  and  even  Aetolia ; 
Pythagoras  and  the  Oracle  at  Delphi.  But  in  the  main, 
all  good  things  went  hand  in  hand.  The  poets  and  the 
men  of  science,  the  moral  teachers  and  the  hardy  specu- 
lators, the  great  traders  and  the  political  reformers — all 
found  their  centre  of  life  and  aspiration  in  the  same  "  School 
of  Hellas,"  Athens.  The  final  seal  of  success  was  set 
upon  the  movement  by  the  defeat  of  the  Persian  invasion 

1  A  magnificent  text  for  such  a  discussion  would  be  found  in  the 
great  lyric  on  the  Rise  of  Man  in  Sophocles'  Antigone  (v.  332  ff ). 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  59 

and  the  formation  of  the  Athenian  League.  The  higher 
hopes  and  ideals  had  clashed  against  the  lower  under  con- 
ditions in  which  the  victory  of  the  lower  seemed  before- 
hand certain ;  and  somehow,  miraculously,  ununderstand- 
ably,  that  which  was  high  had  shown  that  it  was  also 
strong.  Athens  stood  out  as  the  chief  power  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean. 

Let  us  recall  briefly  a  few  well-known  passages  of 
Herodotus  to  illustrate  the  tone  of  the  time. 

Athens  represented  Hellenism  (Hdt.  i.  60).  "  The 
Greek  race  was  distinguished  of  old  from  the  barbarian 
as  nimbler  of  intellect  and  further  removed  from  primitive 
savagery  (or  stupidity).  .  .  .  And  of  all  Greeks  the  Athenians 
were  counted  the  first  for  wisdom." 

She  represented  the  triumph  of  Democracy  (Hdt.  v.  78). 
"  So  Athens  grew.  It  is  clear  not  in  one  thing  alone,  but 
wherever  you  test  it,  what  a  good  thing  is  equality  among 
men.  Even  in  war,  Athens,  when  under  the  tyrants,  was 
no  better  than  her  neighbours ;  when  freed  from  the 
tyrants,  she  was  far  the  first  of  all." 

And  Democracy  was  at  this  time  a  thing  which  stirred 
enthusiasm.  A  speaker  says  in  Herodotus  (iii.  80)  :  "A 
tyrant  disturbs  ancient  laws,  violates  women,  kills  men 
without  trial.  But  a  people  ruling— first,  the  very  name 
of  it  is  beautiful,  Isonomifi  (Equality  in  law)  ;  and, 
secondly,  a  people  does  none  of  these  things." 

"  The  very  name  of  it  is  beautiful !  "  It  was  some 
twenty-five  years  later  that  an  Athenian  statesman,  of 
moderate  or  rather  popular  antecedents,  said  in  a  speech 
at  Sparta  (Thuc.  vi.  89)  :  "  Of  course,  all  sensible  men 
know  what  Democracy  is,  and  I  better  than  most,  having 
suffered  ;  but  there  is  nothing  new  to  be  said  about  ac- 
knowledged insanity !  " 

That,  however,  is  looking  ahead.  We  must  note  that 
this  Democracy,  this  Freedom,  represented  by  Greece, 
and  especially  by  Athens,  was  always  the  Rule  of  Law. 
There  is  a  story  told  by  Aeschylus  of  the  Athenians,  by 
Herodotus  of  the  Spartans,  contrasting  either  with  the 
barbarians  and  their  lawless  absolute  monarchies.  Xerxes, 
learning  the  small  numbers  of  his  Greek  adversaries,  asks. 


60  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

"  How  can  they  possibly  stand  against  us,  especially  when, 
as  you  tell  me,  they  are  all  free,  and  there  is  no  one  to 
compel  them  ?  "  And  the  Spartan  Demaratus  answers 
(Hdt.  vii.  104)  :  "  Free  are  they,  O  King,  yet  not  free  to 
do  everything  ;  for  there  is  a  master  over  them,  even 
Law,  whom  they  fear  more  than  thy  servants  fear  thee. 
At  least  they  obey  whatever  he  commands,  and  his  voice 
is  always  the  same."  In  Aeschylus  (Persae  241  seqq.) 
the  speakers  present  are  both  Persians,  so  the  point  about 
Law  cannot  be  explained.  It  is  left  a  mystery,  how  and 
why  the  free  Greeks  face  their  death. 

It  would  be  easy  to  assemble  many  passages  to  show 
that  Athens  represented  freedom  (e.g.  Hdt.  viii.  142)  and 
the  enfranchisement  of  the  oppressed  ;  but  what  is  even 
more  characteristic  than  the  insistence  on  Freedom  is  the 
insistence  on  A  r  e  1 6,  Virtue — the  demand  made  upon  each 
Greek,  and  especially  each  Athenian,  to  be  a  better  man 
than  the  ordinary.  It  comes  out  markedly  from  a  quarter 
where  we  should  scarcely  expect  it.  Herodotus  gives 
an  abstract  of  the  words  spoken  by  the  much-maligned 
Themistocles  before  the  battle  of  Salamis — a  brief,  grudging 
resume  of  a  speech  so  celebrated  that  it  could  not  in  decency 
be  entirely  passed  over  (Hdt.  viii.  83)  :  "  The  argument 
of  it  was  that  in  all  things  that  are  possible  to  man's  nature 
and  situation,  there  is  always  a  higher  and  a  lower  "  ;  and 
that  they  must  stand  for  the  higher.  We  should  have 
liked  to  hear  more  of  that  speech.  It  certainly  achieved 
its  end. 

There  was  insistence  on  Arete"  in  another  sense,  the 
sense  of  generosity  and  kindliness.  A  true  Athenian  must 
know  how  to  give  way.  When  the  various  states  were 
contending  for  the  leadership  before  the  battle  of  Artemisium, 
the  Athenians,  contributing  much  the  largest  and  finest 
fighting  force,  "  thought,"  we  are  told  (Hdt.  viii.  3),  "that 
the  great  thing  was  that  Greece  should  be  saved,  and  gave 
up  their  claims."  In  the  similar  dispute  for  the  post  of 
honour  and  danger  before  the  battle  of  Plataea,  the  Athenians 
did  plead  their  cause,  and  easily  won  it  (Hdt.  ix.  27). 
But  we  may  notice  not  only  the  moderate  and  disciplined 
spirit  in  which  they  promise  to  abide  by  Sparta's  decision, 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  61 

and  to  show  no  resentment  if  their  claim  is  rejected,  but 
also  the  grounds  upon  which  they  claim  honour — apart 
from  certain  obvious  points,  such  as  the  size  of  their  con- 
tingent. Their  claims  are  that  in  recent  years  they  alone 
have  met  the  Persians  single-handed  on  behalf  of  all  Greece  ; 
that  in  old  times  it  was  they  who  gave  refuge  to  the  Children 
of  Heracles  when  hunted  through  Greece  by  the  overmaster- 
ing tyrant,  Eurystheus ;  it  was  they  who  championed  the 
wives  and  mothers  of  the  Argives  slain  at  Thebes,  and  made 
war  upon  that  conquering  power  to  prevent  wrong-doing 
against  the  helpless  dead. 

These  passages,  which  could  easily  be  reinforced  by  a 
score  of  others,  illustrate,  not  of  course  what  Athens  as 
a  matter  of  hard  fact  was — no  state  has  ever  been  one 
compact  mass  of  noble  qualities — but  the  kind  of  ideal 
that  Athens  in  her  own  mind  had  formed  of  herself.  They 
help  us  to  see  what  she  appeared  to  the  imaginations  of 
Aeschylus  and  young  Euripides,  and  that  "  Band  of  Lovers  " 
which  Pericles  gathered  to  adore  his  Princess  of  Cities.1 
She  represented  Freedom  and  Law,  Hellenism  and  Intellect, 
Humanity,  Chivalry,  the  championship  of  the  helpless  and 
oppressed. 

Did  Euripides  feel  all  this  ?  one  may  ask.  The  answer 
to  that  doubt  is  best  to  be  found,  perhaps,  in  the  two  plays 
which  he  wrote  upon  the  two  traditional  feats  of  generosity 
mentioned  above — the  reception  of  the  Children  of  Heracles, 
and  the  championing  of  the  Argive  Suppliants.  The  former, 
beautiful  as  it  is,  is  seriously  mutilated,  so  the  Suppliants 
will  suit  our  purpose  best.  It  is,  I  think,  an  early  play 
rewritten  at  the  time  of  the  Peace  of  Nicias  (B.C.  421), 
about  the  beginning  of  the  poet's  middle  period,*  a 
poor  play  in  many  respects,  youthful,  obvious,  and 
crude,  but  all  aflame  with  this  chivalrous  and  confident 
spirit. 

1  Thuc.  2,  43.  "  Fix  your  eyes  on  what  she  might  be,  and  make 
yourselves  her  Lovers." 

»  Some  critics  consider  that  it  was  first  written  at  this  time.  If  so, 
we  must  attribute  the  apparent  marks  of  earliness  to  deliberate  archaism. 
There  is  no  doubt  that  the  reception  of  Suppliants  was  a  very  old  stage 
subject,  and  had  acquired  a  certain  traditional  stiffness  of  form,  seen 
at  its  acme  in  the  Suppliants  of  Aeschylus. 


62  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

The  situation  is  as  follows :  Adrastus,  King  of  Argos, 
has  led  the  ill-fated  expedition  of  the  Seven  Chieftains 
against  Thebes,  and  been  utterly  defeated.  The  Thebans 
have  brutally  refused  to  allow  the  Argives  to  bury  their 
dead.  The  bodies  are  lying  upon  the  field.  Adrastus, 
accompanied  by  the  mothers  and  wives  of  the  slain  chieftains, 
has  come  to  Attica,  and  appealed  to  Theseus  for  intercession. 
That  hero,  like  his  son  Demophon  in  The  Children  of  Heracles, 
like  his  ancestor  Cecrops  in  certain  older  poetry,  is  a  sort 
of  personification  of  Athens. 

He  explains  that  he  always  disapproved  of  Adrastus's 
expedition  ;  that  he  can  take  no  responsibility,  and  certainly 
not  risk  a  war  on  the  Argives'  account. 

He  is  turning  away  when  one  of  the  bereaved  women, 
lifting  her  suppliant  wreaths  and  branches,  cries  out  to 
him : — 

What  is  this  thing  thou  doest  ?     Wilt  despise 
All  these,  and  cast  us  from  thee  beggar-wise, 
Grey  women,  with  not  one  thing  of  all  we  crave  ? 
Nay,  the  wild  beast  for  refuge  hath  his  cave, 
The  slave  God's  altar ;  surely  in  the  deep 
Of  fortune  City  may  call  to  City,  and  creep, 
A  wounded  thing,  to  shelter. 

Observe  the  conception  of  the  duty  of  one  state  to  protect 
and  help  another. — Theseus  is  still  obdurate.  He  has 
responsibilities.  The  recklessness  of  Athens  in  foreign 
policy  has  become  a  reproach.  At  last  Aethra,  his  mother, 
can  keep  silence  no  more.  Can  he  really  allow  such  things 
to  be  done  ?  Can  Athens  really  put  considerations  of 
prudence  before  generosity  and  religion  ? 

Thou  shalt  not  suffer  it,  thou  being  my  child  ! 
Thou  hast  heard  men  scorn  thy  city,  call  her  wild 
Of  counsel,  mad  ;  thou  hast  seen  the  fire  of  morn 
Flash  from  her  eyes  in  answer  to  their  scorn  1 
Come  toil  on  toil,  'tis  this  that  makes  her  grand, 
Peril  on  peril !     And  common  states  that  stand 
In  caution,  twilight  cities,  dimly  wise — 
Ye  know  them  ;  for  no  light  is   in  their  eyes  ! 
Go  forth,  my  son,  and  help. — My  fear  is  fled. 
Women  in  sorrow  call  thee  and  men  dead  1 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  63 

To  help  the  helpless  was  a  necessary  part  of  what  we  call 
chivalry,  what  the  Greeks  called  religion.  Theseus  agrees 
to  consult  the  people  on  the  matter.  Meantime  there 
arrives  a  Theban  herald,  asking  arrogantly,  "  Who  is 
Master  of  the  land  ?  "  Theseus,  although  a  king,  is  too 
thorough  a  personification  of  democratic  Athens  to  let 
such  an  expression  pass — 

Nay,  peace,  Sir  Stranger !     Ill  hast  thou  begun. 
Seeking  a  Master  here.     No  will  of  one 
Holdeth  this  land  ;  it  is  a  city  and  free. 
The  whole  folk  year  by  year,  in  parity 
Of  service,  is  our  King.     Nor  yet  to  gold 
Give  we  high  seats,  but  in  one  honour  hold 
The  poor  man  and  the  rich. 

The  herald  replies  that  he  is  delighted  to  hear  that  Athens 
has  such  a  silly  constitution,  and  warns  Theseus  not  to 
interfere  with  Thebes  for  the  sake  of  a  beaten  cause.  Eventu- 
ally Theseus  gives  his  ultimatum  : — 

Let  the  slain  be  given 

To  us,  who  seek  to  obey  the  will  of  Heaven. 
Else,  know  for  sure,  I  come  to  seek  these  dead 
Myself,  for  burial. — It  shall  not  be  said 
An  ancient  ordinance  of  God,  that  cried 
To  Athens  and  her  King,  was  cast  aside  ! 

A  clear  issue  comes  in  the  conversation  that  follows  : — 

HERALD. 
Art  thou  so  strong  ?     Wilt  stand  against  all  Greece  ? 

THESEUS. 
Against  all  tyrants  1     With  the  rest  be  peace. 

HERALD. 
She  takes  too  much  upon  her,  this  thy  state  I 

THESEUS. 
Takes,  aye,  and  bears  it ;  therefore  is  she  great  1 

We  know  that  spirit  elsewhere  in  the  history  of  the 
world.     How  delightful  it  is,  and  green  and  fresh  and  thrill- 


64  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

ing  ;  and  how  often  it  has  paid  in  blood  and  ashes  the  penalty 
of  dreaming  and  of  TO  /LIT)  Ovrjra  <f>povelv ! 

There  is  one  other  small  point  that  calls  for  notice  before 
we  leave  this  curious  play.  Theseus  represents  not  only 
chivalry  and  freedom  and  law,  but  also  a  certain  delicacy 
of  feeling.  He  is  the  civilized  man  as  contrasted  with 
the  less  civilized.  It  was  a  custom  in  many  parts  of  Greece 
to  make  the  very  most  of  mourning  and  burial  rites,  to 
feel  the  wounds  of  the  slain,  and  vow  vengeance  with  wild 
outbursts  of  grief.  Athenian  feeling  disapproved  of  this. 

THESEUS. 

This  task 
Is  mine.     Advance  the  burden  of  the  dead  ! 

[The  attendants  bring  forward  the  bodies.] 

ADRASTUS. 
Up,  ye  sad  mothers,  where  your  sons  are  laid  ! 

THESEUS. 
Nay,  call  them  not,  Adrastus. 

ADRASTUS. 

That  were  strange  ! 
Shall  they  not  touch  their  children's  wounds  ? 

THESEUS. 

The  change 
In  that  dead  flesh  would  torture  them. 

ADRASTUS. 

'Tis  pain 
Alway,  to  count  the  gashes  of  the  slain. 

THESEUS. 
And  wouldst  thou  add  pain  to  the  pain  of  these  ? 

ADRASTUS  (after  a  pause). 

So  be  it ! — Ye  women,  wait  in  your  degrees  : 
Theseus  says  well. 

This  particular  trait,  this  civilization  or  delicacy  of 
feeling,  is  well  illustrated  in  a  much  finer  drama,  the  Heracles. 
The  hero  of  that  tragedy,  the  rudely  noble  Dorian  chief, 
has  in  a  fit  of  madness  killed  his  own  children.  In  the 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  65 

scene  to  be  cited  he  has  recovered  his  senses  and  is  sitting 
dumb  and  motionless,  veiled  by  his  mantle.  He  is,  by  all 
ordinary  notions,  accursed.  The  sight  of  his  face  will 
pollute  the  sun.  A  touch  from  him  or  even  a  spoken 
word  will  spread  to  another  the  contagion  of  his  horrible 
blood-stainedness.  To  him  comes  his  old  comrade  Theseus 
(Heracles  1214  ff.)  :— 

THESEUS. 

O  thou  that  sittest  in  the  shade  of  Death, 

Unveil  thy  brow  1     'Tis  a  friend  summoneth, 

And  never  darkness  bore  so  black  a  cloud 

In  all  this  world,  as  from  mine  eyes  could  shroud 

The  wreck  of  thee.  .  .  .  What  wouldst  thou  with  that  arm 

That  shakes,  and  shows  me  blood  ?     Dost  fear  to  harm 

Me  with  thy  words'  contagion  ?     Have  no  fear  ; 

What  is  it  if  I  suffer  with  thee  here  ? 

We  have  had  great  joys  together. — Call  back  now 

That  time  the  Dead  had  hold  of  me,  and  how 

Thou  earnest  conquering  1     Can  that  joy  grow  old. 

Or  friends  once  linked  in  sunshine,  when  the  cold 

Storm  falleth,  not  together  meet  the  sea  ? — 

Oh,  rise,  and  bare  thy  brow,  and  turn  to  me 

Thine  eyes  1     A  brave  man  faces  his  own  fall 

And  takes  it  to  him,  as  God  sends  withal. 

HERACLES. 
Theseus,  thou  seest  my  children  ? 

THESEUS. 

Surely  I  see 
All,  and  I  knew  it  ere  I  came  to  thee. 

HERACLES. 
Oh,  why  hast  bared  to  the  Sun  this  head  of  mine  ? 

THESEUS. 
How  can  thy  human  sin  stain  things  divine  ? 

HERACLES. 

Leave  me  !     I  am  all  blood.     The  curse  thereof 
Crawls.  .  .  . 

THESEUS. 

No  curse  cometh  between  love  and  love  t 

HERACLES. 

1  thank  thee.  .  .  .  Yes  ;  I  served  thee  long  ago. 

5 


66  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

Heracles  is  calmed  and  his  self-respect  partially  restored. 
But  he  still  cannot  bear  to  live.  Notice  the  attitude  of 
Theseus  towards  his  suicide — an  attitude  more  striking 
in  ancient  literature  than  it  would  be  in  modern. 

HERACLES. 
Therefore  is  all  made  ready  for  my  death. 

THESEUS. 
Thinkest  thou  God  feareth  what  thy  fury  saith  ? 

HERACLES  (rising). 
Oh,  God  is  hard  ;  and  I  hard  against  God  ! 

THESEUS. 
What  wilt  thou  ?     And  whither  on  thine  angry  road  ? 

HERACLES. 
Back  to  the  darkness  whence  my  race  began  1 

THESEUS. 
These  be  the  words  of  any  common  man  ! 

HERACLES  (taken  aback). 
Aye,  thou  art  scathless.     Chide  me  at  thine  ease ! 

THESEUS. 
Is  this  He  of  the  Labours,  Heracles  ? 

HERACLES. 
Of  none  like  this,  if  one  dare  measure  pain  ! 

THESEUS. 
The  Helper  of  the  World,  the  Friend  of  Man  ? 

HERACLES  (with  a  movement). 

Crushed  by  Her  hate  !     How  can  the  past  assuage 
This  horror.  .  .  . 

THESEUS. 

Thou  shalt  not  perish  in  thy  rage  ! 
Greece  will  not  suffer  it. 

The  passage  illustrates  not  only  nobility  of  feeling  in 
Theseus,  but,  in  a  way  very  characteristic  of  Euripides, 
the  fact  that  this  nobility  is  based  on  religious  reflection, 
on  genuinely  "  free "  thought.  Theseus  dares  the  con- 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  67 

tagion  for  the  sake  of  his  friendship.  He  also  does  not 
believe  in  the  contagion.  He  does  not  really  think  for  a 
moment  that  he  will  become  guilty  of  a  crime  because  he 
has  touched  some  one  who  committed  it.  He  is  in  every 
sense,  as  Herodotus  puts  it,  "  further  removed  from  primitive 
savagery." 

But  this  play  also  shows,  and  it  is  probably  the  very 
last  of  Euripides'  plays  which  does  show  it,  a  strong  serenity 
of  mind.  The  loss  of  this  serenity  is  one  of  the  most  signi- 
ficant marks  of  the  later  plays  of  Euripides  as  contrasted 
with  the  earlier.  We  must  not  overstate  the  antithesis. 
There  was  always  in  Euripides  a  vein  of  tonic  bitterness, 
a  hint  of  satire  or  criticism,  a  questioning  of  established 
things.  It  is  markedly  present  even  in  the  Akestis,  in 
the  scene  where  Adme'tus  is  denounced  by  his  old  father ; 
it  is  present  in  a  graver  form  in  the  Hippolytus.  Yet 
the  general  impression  produced  by  those  two  plays  when 
compared,  for  instance,  with  the  Electro,  and  the  Troades, 
is  undoubtedly  one  of  serenity  as  against  fever,  beauty 
as  against  horror.  And  the  same  will  nearly  always  hold 
for  the  comparison  of  any  of  his  early  plays  with  any  later 
one.  Of  course  not  quite  always.  If  we  take  the  Troades, 
in  the  year  415,  as  marking  the  turning-point,  we  shall 
find  the  Hecuba  very  bitter  among  the  early  plays,  the 
Helena  bright  and  light-hearted,  though  a  little  harsh, 
among  the  later.  This  is  only  natural.  There  is  always 
something  fitful  and  irregular  in  the  gathering  of  clouds, 
however  persistent. 

There  is  one  cloud  even  in  the  Suppliants,  possibly  a 
mark  of  the  later  retouching  of  that  play.  The  Theban 
herald  is  an  unsympathetic  character,  whose  business  is 
to  say  hard,  sinister  things,  and  be  confuted  by  Theseus. 
These  unsympathetic  heralds  are  common  stage  characters. 
They  stalk  in  with  insulting  messages  and  "  tyrannical  " 
sentiments,  are  surrounded  by  howling  indignation  from 
the  virtuous  populace,  stand  their  ground  motionless, 
defying  any  one  to  touch  their  sacred  persons,  and  go  off 
with  a  scornful  menace.  But  this  particular  herald  has 
some  lines  put  in  his  mouth  which  nobody  confutes,  and 
which  are  rather  too  strongly  expressed  for  the  situation. 


68  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

Theseus  is  prepared  for  his  chivalrous  war,  and  the 
people  clamour  for  it.  The  herald  says  (v.  484)  : — 

Oh,  it  were  well 

The  death  men  shout  for  could  stand  visible 
Above  the  urns  !     Then  never  Greece  had  reeled 
Blood-mad  to  ruin  o'er  many  a  stricken  field. 
Great  Heaven,  set  both  out  plain  and  all  can  tell 
The  False  word  from  the  True,  and  111  from  Well, 
And  how  much  Peace  is  better  !     Dear  is  Peace 
To  every  Muse  ;  she  walks  her  ways  and  sees 
No  haunting  Spirit  of  Judgment.     Glad  is  she 
With  noise  of  happy  children,  running  free 
With  corn  and  oil.     And  we,  so  vile  we  are. 
Forget,  and  cast  her  off,  and  call  for  War, 
City  on  city,  man  on  man,  to  break 
Weak  things  to  obey  us  for  our  greatness*  sake  ! 

If  it  is  true  that  the  Suppliants  was  rewritten,  that  must 
be  one  of  the  later  passages.  Athens  had  had  ten  years  of 
bitter  war  by  the  time  the  lines  were  actually  spoken. 

Let  us  again  take  a  few  typical  passages  from  the  historians 
to  see  the  form  in  which  the  clouds  gathered  over  Athens. 

The  first  and  most  obvious  will  be  from  that  curious 
chapter  in  which  Herodotus,  towards  the  end  of  his  life, 
is  summing  up  his  conclusions  about  the  Persian  war,  of 
which  Athens  was  so  indisputably  the  heroine.  He  observes 
(vii.  139)  :  "  Here  I  am  compelled  by  necessity  to  express 
an  opinion  which  will  be  offensive  to  most  of  mankind. 
But  I  cannot  refrain  from  putting  it  in  the  way  that  I 
believe  to  be  true.  .  .  .  The  Athenians  in  the  Persian 
wars  were  the  saviours  of  Hellas."  By  the  time  that 
passage  was  written,  apologies  were  necessary  if  you  wished 
to  say  a  good  word  for  Athens ! 

The  Athenian  League,  that  great  instrument  of  freedom, 
had  grown  into  an  Empire  or  ArchS.  Various  allies  had 
tried  to  secede  and  failed ;  had  been  conquered  and  made 
into  subjects.  The  greater  part  of  Greece  was  seething 
with  timorous  ill-feeling  against  what  they  called  "  The 
Tyrant  City."  And  by  the  opening  of  the  Peloponnesian 
war,  Athens  herself  had  practically  ceased  to  protest 
against  the  name.  It  is  strange  to  recall  such  words  as, 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  69 

for  instance,  the  Spartans  had  used  in  479,  when  it  was 
rumoured,  falsely,  that  Athens  thought  of  making  terms 
with  Persia  (Hdt.  viii.  142)  :  "  It  is  intoleiable  to  imagine 
that  Athens  should  ever  be  a  party  to  the  subjection  of 
any  Greek  state  ;  always  from  the  earliest  times  you  have 
been  known  as  the  Liberators  of  Many  Men."  It  is  strange 
to  compare  those  words  with  the  language  attributed  to 
Pericles  in  430  in  attacking  the  "  philosophic  radicals  " 
of  that  day  (Thuc.  ii.  63  )l : — 

"  Do  not  imagine  that  you  are  fighting  about  a  simple 
issue,  the  subjection  or  independence  of  certain  cities. 
You  have  an  empire  to  lose,  and  a  danger  to  face  from  those 
whom  your  imperial  rule  has  made  to  hate  you.  And 
it  is  impossible  for  you  to  resign  your  power — if  at  this 
crisis  some  timorous  and  inactive  spirits  are  hankering 
after  righteousness  even  at  that  price  !  For  by  this  time 
your  empire  has  become  a  Despotism  ('  Tyrannis '),  a 
thing  which  in  the  opinion  of  mankind  is  unjust  to  acquire, 
but  which  at  any  rate  cannot  be  safely  surrendered.  The 
men  of  whom  I  was  speaking,  if  they  could  find  followers, 
would  soon  ruin  the  city.  If  they  were  to  go  and  found  a 
state  of  their  own,  they  would  soon  ruin  that !  " 

It  would  not  be  relevant  here  to  appraise  this  policy  of 
Pericles,  to  discuss  how  far  events  had  really  made  it 
inevitable,  or  when  the  first  false  step  was  taken.  Our 
business,  at  the  moment,  is  merely  to  notice  the  extraordin- 
ary change  of  tone.  It  comes  out  even  more  strongly  in  a 
speech  made  by  Cleon,  the  successor  of  Pericles,  in  the 
debate  about  the  punishment  of  rebel  Mitylfinfi — a  debate 
remarkable  as  being  the  very  last  in  which  the  side  of 
clemency  gained  the  day  (Thuc.  iii.  37)  : — 

"  I  have  remarked  again  and  again  that  a  Democracy 
cannot  govern  an  empire  ;  and  never  more  clearly  than 
now,  when  I  see  you  regretting  your  sentence  upon  the 
Mitylenaeans.  Living  without  fear  and  suspicion  among 
yourselves,  you  deal  with  your  allies  upon  the  same  principle  ; 

1  These  speeches  were  revised  as  late  as  403,  and  may  well  be  coloured 
by  subsequent  experience.  But  this  particular  point  is  one  on  which 
Thucydides  may  be  absolutely  trusted.  He  would  not  attribute  the 
odious  sentiments  of  Cleon  to  his  hero  Pericles  without  cause. 


70  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

and  you  do  not  realize  that  whenever  you  make  a  concession 
to  them  out  of  pity,  or  are  misled  by  their  specious  reports, 
you  are  guilty  of  a  weakness  dangerous  to  yourselves,  and 
you  receive  no  gratitude  from  them.  You  must  remember 
that  your  empire  is  a  Despotism  exercised  over  unwilling 
subjects  who  are  always  conspiring  against  you.  They 
do  not  obey  in  return  for  any  kindness  you  do  them  ;  they 
obey  just  so  far  as  you  show  yourselves  their  masters." 

"  Do  not  be  misled,"  he  adds  a  little  later  (iii.  40),  "  by 
the  three  most  deadly  enemies  of  empire,  Pity  and  the 
Charm  of  Words  and  the  Generosity  of  Strength !  " 

It  is  a  change  indeed  !  A  change  which  the  common 
run  of  low  men,  no  doubt,  accepted  as  inevitable,  or  even 
as  a  matter  of  course  ;  which  the  merely  clever  and  practical 
men  insisted  upon,  and  the  more  brutal  "  patriots  "  delighted 
in  They  had  never  loved  or  understood  the  old  ideals  ! 

Some  great  political  changes  can  take  place  without  much 
effect  upon  men's  private  lives.  But  this  change  was  a 
blight  that  worked  upon  daily  conduct,  upon  the  roots 
of  character.  Thucydides,  writing  after  the  end  of  the 
war,  has  two  celebrated  and  terrible  chapters  (iii.  82,  83) 
on  that  side  of  the  question.  Every  word  is  apposite 
to  our  point ;  but  we  may  content  ourselves  with  a  few 
sentences  here  and  there. 

"  In  peace  and  prosperity  both  states  and  men,"  he  says, 
"  are  free  to  act  upon  higher  motives.  They  are  not  caught 
up  by  coils  of  circumstance  which  drive  them  without 
their  own  volition.  But  War,  taking  away  the  margin 
in  daily  life,  is  a  teacher  who  educates  by  violence ;  and 
he  makes  men's  characters  fit  their  conditions.  ..." 

The  later  actors  in  the  war  "  determined  to  outdo  the 
report  of  those  who  had  gone  before  them  by  the  ingenuity 
of  their  enterprises  and  the  enormity  of  their  reprisals.  ..." 
The  meaning  of  words,  he  notices,  changed  in  relation  to 
things.  Thoughtfulness,  prudence,  moderation,  generosity 
were  scouted  and  called  by  the  names  of  various  vices  : 
recklessness  and  treachery  were  prized.  "  Frantic  energy 
was  the  true  quality  of  a  man.  ..." 

"  Neither  side  cared  for  religion,  but  both  used  it  with 
enthusiasm  as  a  pretext  for  various  odious  purposes.  .  .  ." 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  71 

"  The  cause  of  all  these  evils  was  the  lust  of  empire, 
originating  in  avarice  and  ambition,  and  the  party  spirit 
which  is  engendered  from  such  circumstances  when  men 
settle  themselves  down  to  a  contest." 

"  Thus  Revolution  gave  birth  to  every  kind  of  wicked- 
ness in  Hellas.  The  simplicity  which  is  so  large  an  element 
in  a  noble  nature  disappeared  in  a  burst  of  derision.  An 
attitude  of  mistrustful  antagonism  prevailed  everywhere. 
No  power  existed  to  soften  it,  no  cogency  of  reason,  no  bond 
of  religion."  ..."  Inferior  characters  succeeded  best.  The 
higher  kinds  of  men  were  too  thoughtful,  and  were  swept 
aside." 

Men  caught  up  in  coils  of  circumstance  that  drive  them 
without  their  own  volition ;  ingenious  enterprises ;  enor- 
mous revenges  ;  mad  ambition  ;  mistrust ;  frantic  energy  ; 
the  abuse  of  religion  ;  simplicity  laughed  out  of  the  world  : 
it  is  a  terrible  picture,  and  it  is  exactly  the  picture  that 
meets  us  in  the  later  tragedies  of  Euripides.  Those  plays 
all,  as  Dr.  Verrall  has  acutely  remarked,  have  an  extra- 
ordinary air  of  referring  to  the  present  and  not  the  past, 
of  dealing  with  things  that  "  matter,"  not  things  made 
up  or  dreamed  about.  And  it  is  in  this  spirit  that  they 
deal  with  them.  Different  plays  may  be  despairing  like 
the  Troades,  cynical  like  the  Ion,  deliberately  hateful  like 
the  Electra,  frantic  and  fierce  like  the  Orestes ;  they  are 
nearly  all  violent,  nearly  all  misanthropic.  Amid  all 
their  poetical  beauty  there  sounds  from  time  to  time 
a  cry  of  nerves  frayed  to  the  snapping  point,  a  jarring 
note  of  fury  against  something  personal  to  the  poet  and 
not  always  relevant  to  the  play.  Their  very  splendours, 
the  lines  that  come  back  most  vividly  to  a  reader's  mind, 
consist  often  in  the  expression  of  some  vice.  There  are 
analyses  or  self-revelations,  like  the  famous  outburst  of 
the  usurping  Prince  Eteocle's  in  the  Phoenissae : — 

These  words  that  thou  wilt  praise 
The  Equal  and  the  Just, — in  all  men's  ways 
I  have  not  found  them  1     These  be  names,  not  things. 

Mother,  I  will  unveil  to  thee  the  springs 
That  well  within  me.     I  would  break  the  bars 
Of  Heaven,  and  past  the  risings  of  the  stars 


72  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

Climb,  aye,  or  sink  beneath  dark  Earth  and  Sea, 
To  clasp  my  goddess-bride,  my  Sovranty  ! 
This  is  my  good,  which  never  by  mine  own 
Will  shall  man  touch,  save  Eteocles  alone  ! 

There  are  flashes  of  cruel  hate  like  the  first  words  of 
old  Tyndareus  to  the  doomed  and  agonized  Orestes,  whose 
appearance  has  been  greeted  by  Menelaus  with  the  words  : — 

Who  cometh  ghastly  as  the  grave  ?  .  .  . 

TYNDAREUS. 

Ah  God, 

The  snake  !     The  snake,  that  drank  his  mother's  blood, 
Doth  hiss  and  flash  before  the  gates,  and  bow 
The  pestilence-ridden  glimmer  of  his  brow. 
I  sicken  at  him  ! — Wilt  thou  stain  thy  soul 
With  speech,  Menelaus,  of  a  thing  so  foul  ? 

Above  all,  there  is  what  I  will  not  venture  to  illustrate, 
the  celebrated  Euripidean  "  pathos,"  that  power  of  insight 
into  the  cruelty  of  suffering  :  the  weakness  and  sensitive- 
ness of  the  creatures  that  rend  one  another  ;  that  piteous- 
ness  in  the  badness  of  things  which  makes  them  half  lovable. 
This  is  the  one  characteristic  of  Euripides'  world  which  is 
not  present  in  that  of  Thucydides.  The  grimly  reticent 
historian  seldom  speaks  of  human  suffering  ;  the  tragedian 
keeps  it  always  before  our  eyes. 

This  gradual  embitterment  and  exacerbation  of  thought 
in  Euripides,  as  shown  by  the  later  plays  compared  with 
the  earlier,  is,  I  believe,  generally  recognized.  I  will 
choose  in  illustration  of  it  a  scene  from  the  Hecuba,  a 
tragedy  early  in  date,  but  in  tone  and  spirit  really  the  first 
of  the  late  series.1 

The  Hecuba  deals  with  the  taking  of  Troy,  the  great 
achievement  in  war  of  the  heroic  age  of  Greece.  And  the 
point  in  it  that  interests  Euripides  is,  as  often,  the  reverse 
of  the  picture — the  baseness  and,  what  is  worse,  the  un- 
interestingness  of  the  conquerors  ;  the  monstrous  wrongs 

1  I  am  the  more  moved  to  select  this  particular  scene  because  I  find 
that  the  text  and  punctuation  of  my  edition,  which  I  owe  to  a  remark 
of  Dr.  Verrall's,  confirmed  by  a  re-examination  of  the  Paris  MSS.,  bag 
caused  difficulties  to  some  scholars 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  7« 

of  the  conquered  ;  the  moral  degradation  of  both  parties, 
culminating  in  the  transformation  of  Hecuba  from  a  grave 
oriental  queen  into  a  kind  of  she-devil.  Among  the  heroes 
who  took  Troy  were,  as  every  Athenian  knew,  the  two 
sons  of  Theseus.  The  Athenian  public  would,  of  course, 
insist  on  their  being  mentioned.  And  they  are  mentioned — 
once  !  A  young  princess  is  to  be  cruelly  murdered  by  a 
vote  of  the  Greek  host.  One  wishes  to  know  what  these 
high  Athenians  had  to  say  when  the  villain  Odysseus 
consented  to  her  death.  And  we  are  told.  "  The  sons 
of  Theseus,  the  branches  of  Athens,  made  orations  contra- 
dicting each  other" — so  like  them  at  their  worst ! — "  but 
both  were  in  favour  of  the  murder  !  "  Small  wonder  that 
Euripides'  plays  were  awarded  only  four  first  prizes  in 
fifty  years ! 

In  the  scene  which  I  select  (vv.  795  ff.),  the  body  of 
Hecuba's  one  remaining  son,  Polydorus,  has  just  been  washed 
up  by  the  sea.  He,  being  very  young,  had  been  sent  away 
to  the  keeping  of  a  Thracian  chieftain,  an  old  friend,  till 
the  war  should  be  over.  And  now  it  proves  that  the 
Thracian,  as  soon  as  he  saw  that  the  Trojan  cause  was 
definitely  lost,  has  murdered  his  charge  !  Hecuba  appeals 
to  her  enemy  Agamemnon  for  help  to  avenge  the  murder. 
The  "King  of  Men"  is,  as  usual  in  Euripides,  a  poor 
creature,  a  brave  soldier  and  kindly  enough  amid  the 
havoc  he  makes,  but  morally  a  coward  and  a  sensualist. 
The  scene  is  outside  Agamemnon's  tent.  Inside  the  tent 
is  Hecuba's  one  remaining  daughter  Cassandra,  a  prophetess 
vowed  to  virginity  or  to  union  only  with  the  God  ;  she  is 
now  Agamemnon's  concubine  ! 

Observe  how  the  nobler  part  of  the  appeal  fails,  the  baser 
succeeds.  Hecuba  shows  Agamemnon  her  son's  body, 
and  tells  how  the  Thracian  slew  him  : — 

And  by  a  plot 

Slew  him  ;  and  when  he  slew  him,  could  he  not 
Throw  earth  upon  his  bones,  if  he  must  be 
A  murderer  ?     Cast  him  naked  to  the  sea  ? 
O  King,  I  am  but  one  amid  thy  throng 
Of  servants  ;  I  am  weak,  but  God  is  strong, 
God,  and  that  King  that  standeth  over  God, 
Law  ;  who  makes  gods  and  unmakes,  by  whose  rod 


74  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

We  live  dividing  the  Unjust  from  the  Just ; 

Whom  now  before  thee  standing  if  thou  thrust 

Away — if  men  that  murder  guests,  and  tear 

God's  house  down,  meet  from  thee  no  vengeance,  where 

Is  Justice  left  in  the  world  ?     Forbid  it,  thou  I 

Have  mercy  !     Dost  not  fear  to  wrong  me  now  ?  .  .  . 

Hate  me  no  more.     Stand  like  an  arbiter 

Apart,  and  count  the  weight  of  woes  I  bear. 

I  was  a  Queen  once,  now  I  am  thy  slave  ; 

I  had  children  once ;  but  not  now.     And  my  grave 

Near  ;  very  old,  broken  and  homeless.  .  .  .  Stay  ; 

[Agamemnon,  painfully  embarrassed,  has  moved 

towards  the  tent. 

God  help  me,  whither  dost  thou  shrink  away  ?  .  .  . 
It  seems  he  does  not  listen  !  .  .  . 

.  .  .  So,  'tis  plain 

Now.     I  must  never  think  of  hope  again.  .  .  . 
Those  that  are  left  me  are  dead  ;  dead  all  save  one  ; 
One  lives,  a  slave,  in  shame.  .  .  .  Ah,  I  am  gone  I  ... 
The  smoke  !     Troy  is  on  fire  !     The  smoke  all  round  ! 

[She  swoons.  Agamemnon  comes  back.  Her 
fellow-slaves  tend  her.  .  .  .  She  rises  again 
with  a  sudden  thought. 

What  ?  .  .  .  Yes,  I  might !  .  .  .  Oh,  what  a  hollow  sound, 
Love,  here  !     But  I  can  say  it !  ...  Let  me  be  !  ... 
King,  King,  there  sleepeth  side  by  side  with  thee 
My  child,  my  priestess,  whom  they  call  in  Troy 
Cassandra.     Wilt  thou  pay  not  for  thy  joy  ? 
Nothing  to  her  for  all  the  mystery, 
And  soft  words  of  the  dark  ?     Nothing  to  me 
For  her  ?     Nay,  mark  me ;  look  on  these  dead  eyes  ! 
This  is  her  brother ;  surely  thine  likewise ! 
Thou  wilt  avenge  him  ? 

This  desperate  and  horrible  appeal  stirs  him.  He  is 
much  occupied  with  Cassandra  for  the  moment.  But  he 
is  afraid.  "  The  King  of  Thrace  is  an  ally  of  the  Greeks, 
the  slain  boy  was  after  all  an  enemy.  People  will  say  he 
is  influenced  by  Cassandra.  If  it  were  not  for  that.  .  .  ." 
She  answers  him  in  words  which  might  stand  as  a  motto 
over  most  of  the  plays  of  this  period — as  they  might  over 
much  of  Tolstoy  : — 

Faugh !    There  is  no  man  free  in  all  this  world  1 
Slaves  of  possessions,  slaves  of  fortune,  hurled 
This  way  and  that.     Or  else  the  multitude 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  75 

Hath  hold  on  him  ;  or  laws  of  stone  and  wood 
Constrain,  and  will  not  let  him  use  the  soul 
Within  him  I  ...  So  thou  durst  not  ?     And  thine  whole 
Thought  hangs  on  what  thy  herd  will  say  ?     Nay.  then, 
My  master.  I  will  set  thee  free  again. 

She  arranges  a  plan  which  shall  not  implicate  him.  The 
Thracian  chieftain  is  allowed  to  visit  her.  On  the  pretence 
of  explaining  to  him  where  a  treasure  is  hidden,  she  entices 
him  and  his  two  children — "  it  is  more  prudent  to  have 
them  present,  in  case  he  should  die !  " — inside  the  tent 
of  the  captive  Trojan  women.  The  barbarian  women  make 
much  of  the  children,  and  gradually  separate  them  from 
their  father.  They  show  interest  in  his  Thracian  javelins 
and  the  texture  of  his  cloak,  and  so  form  a  group  round 
him.  At  a  given  signal  they  ding  to  him  and  hold  him 
fast,  murder  his  children  before  his  face,  and  then  tear  his 
eyes  out.  Agamemnon,  who  knew  that  something  would 
happen,  but  had  never  expected  this,  is  horrified  and 
impotent.  The  blinded  Thracian  comes  back  on  to  the 
stage,  crawling,  unable  to  stand.  He  gropes  for  the  bodies 
of  his  children  ;  for  some  one  to  help  him  ;  for  some  one 
to  tear  and  kill.  He  shrieks  like  a  wild  beast,  and  the 
horrible  scene  ends. 

We  will  not  go  farther  into  this  type  of  play.  More 
illustrations  would,  of  course,  prove  nothing.  It  is  the 
business  of  a  tragedian  to  be  harrowing.  It  is  a  dangerous 
and  a  somewhat  vulgar  course  to  deduce  from  a  poet's 
works  direct  conclusions  about  his  real  life ;  but  there  is 
on  the  one  hand  the  fact  of  progressive  bitterness  in  Euripides' 
plays,  and,  on  the  other,  as  we  have  noticed  above,  there 
is  the  peculiar  impression  which  they  make  of  dealing 
with  living  and  concrete  things.  But  it  is  not  really  any- 
thing positive  that  chiefly  illustrates  the  later  tone  of 
Euripides.  It  is  not  his  denunciations  of  nearly  all  the 
institutions  of  human  society — of  the  rich,  the  poor,  men, 
women,  slaves,  masters,  above  all,  of  democracies  and 
demagogues  ;  it  is  not  even  the  mass  of  sordid  and  unbal- 
anced characters  that  he  brings  upon  the  scene — trembling 
slaves  of  ambition  like  Agamemnon  ;  unscrupulous  and 
heartless  schemers  like  Odysseus ;  unstable  compounds  of 


76  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

chivalry  and  vanity  like  Achilles  in  the  second  Iphigenia; 
shallow  women  like  Helen  and  terrible  women  like  Electra 
in  the  Orestes — a  play  of  which  the  Scholiast  naively  remarks 
that  "  the  characters  are  all  bad  except  Pylades,"  the 
one  exception  being  a  reckless  murderer  who  was  at  least 
faithful  to  his  friends.  It  is  not  points  like  these  that  are 
most  significant.  It  is  the  gradual  dying  off  of  serenity 
and  hope.  I  think  most  students  of  Euripides  will  agree 
that  almost  the  only  remnant  of  the  spirit  of  the  Alcestis 
or  the  Hippolytus,  the  only  region  of  clear  beauty,  that  can 
still  be  found  in  the  later  tragedies,  lies  in  the  lyrical  element. 
There  are  one  or  two  plays,  like  the  Andromeda,  which 
seem  to  have  escaped  from  reality  to  the  country  of  Aristo- 
phanes' Birds,  and  read  like  mere  romance;  and  even  in 
the  Electra  there  are  the  songs.  Euripides  had  prayed 
some  twenty  years  before  his  death:  "May  I  not  live  if 
the  Muses  leave  me  !  "  And  that  prayer  was  heard.  The 
world  had  turned  dark,  sordid,  angry,  under  his  eyes,  but 
Poetry  remained  to  the  end  radiant  and  stainless. 

It  is  this  state  of  mind  and  a  natural  development  from 
it  which  afford  in  my  judgement  the  best  key  to  the  under- 
standing of  The  Bacchae,  his  last  play,  not  quite  finished 
at  his  death.  It  was  written  under  peculiar  circumstances. 

We  have  seen  from  Thucydides  what  Athenian  society 
had  become  in  these  last  years  of  the  death-struggle.  If 
to  Thucydides,  as  is  possible,  things  seemed  worse  than 
they  were,  we  must  remember  that  to  the  more  impulsive 
nature  and  equally  disappointed  hopes  of  Euripides  they 
are  not  likely  to  have  seemed  better.  We  know  that  he 
had  become  in  these  last  years  increasingly  unpopular  in 
Athens  ;  and  it  is  not  hard,  if  we  examine  the  groups  and 
parties  in  Athens  at  the  time,  to  understand  his  isolation. 

Most  of  the  high-minded  and  thoughtful  men  of  the  time 
were  to  some  extent  isolated,  and  many  retired  quietly 
from  public  notice.  But  Euripides  was  not  the  man  to 
be  quiet  in  his  rejected  state.  He  was  not  conciliatory, 
not  silent,  not  callous.  At  last  something  occurred  to  make 
his  life  in  Athens  finally  intolerable.  We  do  not  know 
exactly  what  it  was.  It  cannot  have  been  the  destruction 
of  his  estate;  that  had  been  destroyed  long  before.  It 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  77 

cannot  have  been  his  alleged  desertion  by  his  wife ;  she 
was  either  dead  or  over  seventy.  It  may  have  been  some- 
thing connected  with  his  prosecution  for  impiety,  the  charge 
on  which  Socrates  was  put  to  death  a  few  years  after. 
All  that  we  know  is  one  fragmentary  sentence  in  the  ancient 
Life  of  Euripides  :  "  He  had  to  leave  Athens  because  of 
the  malicious  exultation  over  him  of  nearly  all  the  city." 
Archelaiis,  King  of  Macedon,  had  long  been  inviting 
him.  The  poet  had  among  his  papers  a  play  called  A  rchelaus, 
written  to  celebrate  this  king's  legendary  ancestor,  so  he 
may  before  this  have  been  thinking  of  Macedonia  as  a 
possible  refuge.  He  went  now,  and  seems  to  have  lived 
in  some  wild  retreat  on  the  northern  slopes  of  Mount 
Olympus,  in  the  Muses'  country,  as  he  phrases  it : — 

In  the  elm-woods  and  the  oaken, 
There  where  Orpheus  harped  of  old, 

And  the  trees  awoke  and  knew  him. 

And  the  wild  things  gathered  to  him, 

As  he  sang  amid  the  broken 
Glens  his  music  manifold. 

The  spirit  of  the  place  passed  into  his  writings.  He 
had  produced  the  Orestes  in  408.  He  produced  nothing, 
so  far  as  has  been  made  out,  in  407.  He  died  in  406.  And 
after  his  death  there  appeared  in  Athens,  under  the  manage- 
ment of  his  son,  a  play  that  held  the  Greek  stage  for  five 
centuries,  a  strange  and  thrilling  tragedy,  enigmatical, 
inhuman,  at  times  actually  repellent,  yet  as  strong  and  as 
full  of  beauty  as  the  finest  work  of  his  prime. 

Two  other  plays  were  produced  with  it.  Of  one,  Alcmaeon 
in  Corinth,  we  know  nothing  characteristic  ;  the  second, 
iphigenia  in  A  ulis,  is  in  many  ways  remarkable.  The  ground- 
work of  it  is  powerful  and  bitter ;  in  style  it  approaches 
the  New  Comedy ;  but  it  is  interspersed  with  passages  and 
scenes  of  most  romantic  beauty  ;  and,  finally,  it  was  left 
at  the  poet's  death  half  finished.  One  could  imagine  that 
he  had  begun  it  in  Athens,  or  at  least  before  the  bitter  taste 
of  Athens  had  worn  off ;  that  he  tried  afterwards  to  change 
the  tone  of  it  to  something  kindlier  and  more  beautiful ; 
that  finally  he  threw  it  aside  and  began  a  quite  new  play 


78  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

in  a  different  style  to  express  the  new  spirit  that  he  had 
found. 

For  The  Bacchae  is  somehow  different  in  spirit  from  any 
of  his  other  works,  late  or  early.  The  old  poet  chose  a 
severely  traditional  subject,  the  primitive  ritual-play  of 
Dionysus  from  which  Greek  tragedy  is  said  to  have  sprung. 
The  young  god  born  of  Zeus  and  the  Theban  princess, 
Semele4,  travelling  through  the  world  to  announce  his  god- 
head, comes  to  his  own  people  of  Thebes,  and — his  own 
receive  him  not.  They  will  not  worship  him  simply  and 
willingly  ;  he  constrains  them  to  worship  him  with  the 
enthusiasm  of  madness.  The  King,  Pentheus,  insults  and 
imprisons  the  god,  spies  on  his  mystic  worship,  is  dis- 
covered by  the  frenzied  saints  and  torn  limb  from  limb, 
his  own  mother,  Agave1,  being  the  first  to  rend  him. 

Now  it  is  no  use  pretending  that  this  is  a  moral  and 
sympathetic  tale,  or  that  Euripides  palliates  the  atrocity 
of  it,  and  tries  to  justify  Dionysus.  Euripides  never  palliates 
things.  He  leaves  this  savage  story  as  savage  as  he  found 
it.  The  sympathy  of  the  audience  is  with  Dionysus  while 
he  is  persecuted  ;  doubtful  while  he  is  just  taking  his  venge- 
ance ;  utterly  against  him  at  the  end  of  the  play.  Note 
how  Agave1,  when  restored  to  her  right  mind,  refuses  even 
to  think  of  him  and  his  miserable  injured  pride : — 

AGAVE. 
Tis  Dionyse  hath  done  it.    Now  I  see. 

CADMUS. 
Ye  wronged  him  !     Ye  denied  his  deity. 

AGAVE. 
Show  me  the  body  of  the  son  I  love  1 

Note  how  Dionysus  is  left  answerless  when  Agav6  rebukes 
him  : — 

DIONYSUS. 
Ye  mocked  me  being  God.     This  is  your  wage. 

AGAVE. 
Should  God  be  like  a  proud  man  in  his  rage  ? 

DIONYSUS. 
'Tis  as  my  sire,  Zeus,  willed  it  long  ago. 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  79 

A  helpless,  fatalistic  answer,  abandoning  the  moral  stand- 
point. 

But  the  most  significant  point  against  Dionysus  is  the 
change  of  tone — the  conversion,  one  might  almost  call  it 
— of  his  own  inspired  Wild  Beasts,  the  Chorus  of  Asiatic 
Bacchanals,  after  the  return  of  Agave1  with  her  son's  severed 
head.  The  change  is  clearly  visible  in  that  marvellous 
scene  itself.  It  is  emphasized  in  the  sequel.  Those  wild 
singers,  who  raged  so  loudly  in  praises  of  the  god's  venge- 
ance before  they  saw  what  it  was,  fall,  when  once  they 
have  seen  it,  into  dead  silence.  True,  there  is  a  lacuna 
in  the  MS.  at  one  point,  so  it  is  possible  that  they  may 
have  spoken ;  but  as  the  play  stands,  their  Leader  speaks 
only  one  couplet  addressed  to  Cadmus,  whom  the  god 
has  wronged : — 

Lo,  I  weep  with  thee.     'Twas  but  due  reward 
God  sent  on  Pentheus  ;  but  for  thee  .  .  .  'tis  hard  I 

And  they  go  off  at  the  end  with  no  remark,  good  or  evil, 
about  their  triumphant  and  hateful  Dionysus,  uttering 
only  those  lines  of  brooding  resignation  with  which  Euripides 
closed  so  many  of  his  tragedies. 

Such  silence  in  such  a  situation  is  significant.  Euripides 
is,  as  usual,  critical  or  even  hostile  towards  the  moral  tone 
of  the  myth  that  he  celebrates.  There  is  nothing  in  that 
to  surprise  us. 

Some  critics  have  even  tried  to  imagine  that  Pentheus 
is  a  "  sympathetic  "  hero ;  that  he  is  right  in  his  crusade 
against  this  bad  god,  as  much  as  Hippolytus  was  right. 
But  the  case  will  not  bear  examination.  Euripides  might 
easily  have  made  Pentheus  "  sympathetic "  if  he  had 
chosen.  And  he  certainly  has  not  chosen.  No.  As 
regards  the  conflict  between  Dionysus  and  Pentheus, 
Euripides  has  merely  followed  a  method  very  usual  with 
him,  the  method,  for  instance,  of  the  Electra.  He  has 
given  a  careful  objective  representation  of  the  facts  as 
alleged  in  the  myth  :  "  If  the  story  is  true,"  he  says,  "  then 
it  must  have  been  like  this."  We  have  the  ordinary  hot- 
tempered  and  narrow-minded  tyrant — not  very  carefully 


80  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

studied,  by  the  way,  and  apparently  not  very  interesting 
to  the  poet ;  we  have  a  well-attested  god  and  suitable 
miracles ;  we  have  a  most  poignant  and  unshrinking 
picture  of  the  possibilities  of  religious  madness.  That  may 
be  taken  as  the  groundwork  of  the  play.  It  is  quite  pro- 
bable that  Euripides  had  seen  some  glimpses  of  Dionysus- 
worship  on  the  Macedonian  mountains  which  gave  a  fresh 
reality  in  his  mind  to  the  legends  of  ravening  and  wonder- 
working Maenads. 

But  when  all  this  is  admitted,  there  remains  a  fact  of 
cardinal  importance,  which  was  seen  by  the  older  critics, 
and  misled  them  so  greatly  that  modern  writers  are  often 
tempted  to  deny  its  existence.  There  is  in  The  Bacchae 
real  and  heartfelt  glorification  of  Dionysus. 

The  "  objectivity  "  is  not  kept  up.  Again  and  again 
in  the  lyrics  you  feel  that  the  Maenads  are  no  longer  merely 
observed  and  analysed.  The  poet  has  entered  into  them, 
and  they  into  him.  Again  and  again  the  words  that  fall 
from  the  lips  of  the  Chorus  or  its  Leader  are  not  the  words 
of  a  raving  Bacchante,  but  of  a  gentle  and  deeply  musing 
philosopher. 

Probably  all  dramatists  who  possess  strong  personal 
beliefs  yield  at  times  to  the  temptation  of  using  one  of 
their  characters  as  a  mouthpiece  for  their  own  feelings. 
And  the  Greek  Chorus,  a  half-dramatic,  half-lyrical  creation, 
both  was  and  was  felt  to  be  particularly  suitable  for  such 
use.  Of  course  a  writer  does  not — or  at  least  should  not — 
use  the  drama  to  express  his  mere  "  views  "  on  ordinary 
and  commonplace  questions,  to  announce  his  side  in  politics 
or  his  sect  in  religion.  But  it  is  a  method  wonderfully 
contrived  for  expressing  those  vaguer  faiths  and  aspirations 
which  a  man  feels  haunting  him  and  calling  to  him,  but 
which  he  cannot  state  in  plain  language  or  uphold  with  a 
full  acceptance  of  responsibility.  You  can  say  the  thing 
that  wishes  to  be  said  ;  you  "  give  it  its  chance  "  ;  you 
relieve  your  mind  of  it.  And  if  it  proves  to  be  all  nonsense, 
well,  it  is  not  you  that  said  it.  It  is  only  a  character  in 
one  of  your  plays. 

The  religion  of  Dionysus  as  Euripides  found  it,  already 
mysticized  and  made  spiritual,  half-reformed  and  half- 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  81 

petrified  in  sacerdotalism,  by  the  Orphic  movement,  was 
exactly  that  kind  of  mingled  mass  which  lends  itself  to 
dramatic  and  indirect  expression.  It  was  gross  as  it  stood  ; 
yet  it  could  be  so  easily  and  so  wonderfully  idealized  ! 
Euripides  seems  to  have  felt  a  peculiar  and  almost  enthusiastic 
interest  in  a  further  sublimation  of  its  doctrines,  a  philosophic 
or  prophet-like  interpretation  of  the  spirit  that  a  man  might 
see  in  it  if  he  would.  And  meantime  he  did  not  bind  him- 
self. He  let  his  Bacchanals  rave  from  time  to  time,  as 
they  were  bound  to  rave.  He  had  said  his  say,  and  he 
was  not  responsible  for  the  whole  of  Dionysus-worship 
nor  yet  of  Orphism. 

Dionysus,  as  Euripides  takes  him  from  the  current  con- 
ceptions of  his  day,  is  the  God  of  spring  and  youth  :  and 
thus  of  all  high  emotion,  inspiration,  intoxication.  He 
is  the  patron  of  poetry,  especially  of  dramatic  poetry. 
He  has  given  man  Wine,  which  is  his  Blood  and  a  religious 
symbol.  He  is  the  clean  New  Year,  uncontaminated  by 
the  decay  of  the  past,  and  as  such  he  purifies  from  Sin. 
It  is  unmeaning,  surely,  to  talk  of  a  "  merely  ritual " 
purification  as  opposed  to  something  real.  Ritual,  as  long 
as  it  fully  lives,  is  charged  with  spiritual  meaning,  and 
can  often  express  just  those  transcendent  things  which 
words  fail  to  utter — much  as  a  look  or  the  clasp  of  a  hand 
can  at  times  express  more  than  a  verbal  greeting.  Dionysus 
purified  as  spiritually  as  the  worshipper's  mind  required. 
And  he  gave  to  the  Purified  a  mystic  Joy,  surpassing  in 
intensity  that  of  man,  the  Joy  of  a  god  or  a  free  wild  animal. 
The  Bacchanals  in  this  play  worshipped  him  by  his  many 
names  (vv.  725  ff.)  : — 

"  lacchos,  Bromios,  Lord, 

God  of  God  born  "  ;  and  all  the  mountain  felt 
And  worshipped  with  them,  and  the  wild  things  knelt. 
And  ramped  and  gloried,  and  the  wilderness 
Was  filled  with  moving  voices  and  dim  stress. 

That  is  the  kind  of  god  he  celebrates. 

Euripides  had  lived  most  of  his  life  in  a  great  town, 
among  highly  educated  people ;  amid  restless  ambitions 
and  fierce  rivalries ;  amid  general  scepticism,  originally 
caused,  no  doubt,  in  most  cases,  by  higher  religious  aspira- 

6 


82  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

tions  than  those  of  the  common  man,  but  ending  largely 
in  arid  irreligion ;  in  an  ultra  political  community,  led  of 
late  years  by  the  kind  of  men  of  whom  Plato  said  that  if 
you  looked  into  the  soul  of  one  of  them  you  could  see  "  its 
bad  little  eye  glittering  with  sharpness "  ;  in  a  commu- 
nity now  hardened  to  the  condition  described  in  the  long 
passage  quoted  above  from  Thucydides.  Euripides  had 
lived  all  his  life  in  this  society ;  for  many  years  he  had 
led  it,  at  least  in  matters  of  art  and  intellect ;  for  many 
years  he  had  fought  with  it.  And  now  he  was  free 
from  it ! 

He  felt  like  a  hunted  animal  escaped  from  its  pursuers ; 
like  a  fawn  fled  to  the  forest,  says  one  lyric,  in  which  the 
personal  note  is  surely  audible  as  a  ringing  undertone 
(vv.  862  ff.)  I—- 
Oh, feet  of  a  fawn  to  the  greenwood  fled 

Alone  in  the  grass  and  the  loveliness, 
Leap  of  the  Hunted,  no  more  in  dread  .  .  . 

But  there  is  still  a  terror  in  the  distance  behind  him  ; 
he  must  go  onward  yet,  to  lonely  regions  where  no  voice 
of  either  man  or  hound  may  reach.  "  What  else  is  wisdom  ?  " 
he  asks,  in  a  marvellous  passage  : — 

What  else  is  wisdom  ?     What  of  man's  endeavour 
Or  God's  high  grace  so  lovely  and  so  great  ? 
To  stand  from  fear  set  free,  to  breathe  and  wait; 
To  hold  a  hand  uplifted  over  Hate ; 

And  shall  not  loveliness  be  loved  for  ever  ? 

He  was  escaped  and  happy ;  he  was  beyond  the  reach 
of  Hate.  Nay,  he  was  safe,  and  those  who  hated  him  were 
suffering.  A  judgment  seemed  to  be  upon  them,  these 
men  who  had  resolved  to  have  no  dealings  with  "  the  three 
deadly  enemies  of  empire,  Pity  and  the  Charm  of  Words 
and  the  Generosity  of  Strength  "  ;  who  lived,  as  Thucydides 
says  in  another  passage  (vi.  90),  in  dreams  of  wider  and 
wider  conquest,  the  conquest  of  Sicily,  of  South  Italy,  of 
Carthage  and  all  her  empire,  of  every  country  that  touched 
the  sea.  They  had  forgotten  the  essence  of  religion,  for- 


•    THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  88 

gotten  the  eternal  laws,  and  the  judgment  in  wait  for  those 
who  "  worship  the  Ruthless  Will  "  ;  who  dream — 

Dreams  of  the  proud  man,  making  great 

And  greater  ever 
Things  that  are  not  of  God. — (vv.  885  ff.) 

It  is  against  the  essential  irreligion  implied  in  these 
dreams  that  he  appeals  in  the  same  song : — 

And  is  thy  faith  so  much  to  give  ? 
Is  it  so  hard  a  thing  to  see, 
That  the  Spirit  of  God,  whate'er  it  be. 
The  Law  that  abides  and  falters  not,  ages  long, 
The  Eternal  and  Nature-born — these  things  be  strong  ? 

In  the  epode  of  the  same  chorus,  taking  the  ritual  words 
of  certain  old  Bacchic  hymns  and  slightly  changing  them, 
he  expresses  his  own  positive  doctrine  more  clearly : — 

Happy  he.  On  the  weary  sea, 

Who  hath  fled  the  tempest  and  won  the  haven ; 
Happy,  whoso  hath  risen,  free. 

Above  his  strivings  ! 

Men  strive  with  many  ambitions,  seethe  with  divers  hopes, 
mostly  conflicting,  mostly  of  inherent  worthlessness ;  even 
if  they  are  achieved,  no  one  is  a  whit  the  better. 

But  whoe'er  can  know,  As  the  long  days  go. 
That  to  live  is  happy,  hath  found  his  Heaven  I 

Could  not  the  wise  men  of  Athens  understand  what  a 
child  feels,  what  a  wild  beast  feels,  what  a  poet  feels, 
that  to  live — to  live  in  the  presence  of  Nature,  of  Dawn 
and  Sunset,  of  eternal  mysteries  and  discoveries  and  wonders 
—is  in  itself  a  joyous  thing  ? 

"  Love  thou  the  day  and  the  night,"  he  says  in  another 
place.  It  is  only  so  that  Life  can  be  made  what  it  really 
is,  a  Joy  :  by  loving  not  only  your  neighbour — he  is  so 
vivid  an  element  in  life  that,  unless  you  do  love  him,  he 


84  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

will  spoil  all  the  rest — but  the  actual  details  and  processes 
of  living.  Life  becomes  like  the  voyage  of  Dionysus  him- 
self over  magic  seas,  or  rather,  perhaps,  like  the  more 
chequered  voyage  of  Shelley's  lovers : — 

While  Night, 

And  Day,  and  Storm  and  Calm  pursue  their  flight, 
Our  ministers  across  the  boundless  sea, 
Treading  each  other's  heels  unheededly — 

the  alternations  and  pains  being  only  "  ministers  "  to  the 
great  composite  joy. 

It  seemed  to  Euripides,  in  that  favourite  metaphor  of 
•his,  which  was  always  a  little  more  than  a  metaphor,  that 
a  God  had  been  rejected  by  the  world  that  he  came  from. 
Those  haggard,  striving,  suspicious  men,  full  of  ambition 
and  the  pride  of  intellect,  almost  destitute,  of  emotion, 
unless  political  hatreds  can  be  called  emotion,  were  hurrying 
through  Life  in  the  presence  of  august  things  which  they 
never  recognized,  of  joy  and  beauty  which  they  never 
dreamed  of.  Thus  it  is  that  "  the  world's  wise  are  not 
wise  "  (v.  395).  The  poet  may  have  his  special  paradise, 
away  from  the  chosen  places  of  ordinary  men,  better  than 
the  sweetness  of  Cyprus  or  Paphos  : — 

The  high  still  dell  Where  the  Muses  dwell, 
Fairest  of  all  things  fair — 

it  is  there  that  he  will  find  the  things  truly  desired  of  his 
heart,  and  the  power  to  worship  in  peace  his  guiding  Fire 
of  inspiration.  But  Dionysus  gives  his  Wine  to  all  men, 
not  to  poets  alone.  Only  by  "  spurning  joy  "  can  men 
harden  his  heart  against  them.  For  the  rest — 

The  simple  nameless  herd  of  Humanity 

Hath  deeds  and  faith  that  are  truth  enough  for  me ! 

It  is  a  mysticism  which  includes  democracy  as  it  includes 
the  love  of  your  neighbour.  They  are  both  necessary  details 
in  the  inclusive  end.  It  implies  that  trust  in  the  "  simple 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  85 

man  "  which  is  so  characteristic  of  most  idealists  and  most 
reformers.  It  implies  the  doctrine  of  Equality — a  doctrine 
essentially  religious  and  mystical,  continually  disproved 
in  every  fresh  sense  in  which  it  can  be  formulated,  and  yet 
remaining  one  of  the  living  faiths  of  men. 

It  is  at  first  sight  strange,  this  belittling  of  "  the  Wise ' 
and  all  their  learning.  Euripides  had  been  all  his  life  the 
poet  militant  of  knowledge,  the  apostle  of  progress  and 
enlightenment.  Yet  there  is  no  real  contradiction.  It  is 
only  that  the  Wise  are  not  wise  enough,  that  the  Knowledge 
which  a  man  has  attained  is  such  a  poor  and  narrow  tiling 
compared  with  the  Knowledge  that  he  dreamed  of.  In 
one  difficult  and  beautiful  passage  Euripides  seems  x  to 
give  us  his  own  apology  (vv.  1005  ff.)  : — 

Knowledge,  we  are  not  foes  ! 

I  seek  thee  diligently  ; 
But  the  world  with  a  great  wind  blows. 

Shining,  and  not  from  thee ; 
Blowing  to  beautiful  things, 

On  amid  dark  and  light, 
Till  Life  through  the  trammellings 

Of  Laws  that  are  not  the  Right, 
Breaks,  clean  and  pure,  and  sings 

Glorying  to  God  in  the  height ! 

One  feels  grateful  for  that  voice  from  the  old  Euripides 
amid  the  strange  new  tones  of  The  Bacchae. 

It  is  not  for  us  to  consider  at  present  how  far  this  doctrine 
is  true,  nor  even  how  far  it  is  good  or  bad.  We  need  only 
see  what  the  essence  of  it  is.  That  the  end  of  life  is  not 
in  the  future,  not  in  external  objects,  not  a  thing  to  be 
won  by  success  or  good  fortune,  nor  to  be  deprived  of  by 
the  actions  of  others.  Live  according  to  Nature,  and  Life 
itself  is  happiness.  The  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  within 
you — here  and  now.  You  have  but  to  accept  it  and  live 
with  it — not  obscure  it  by  striving  and  hating  and  looking 
in  the  wrong  place. 

1  I  say  "  seems,"  because  the  reading  is  conjectural.  I  suggest  uivrvv 
(—"let  them  blow")  in  place  of  the  MS.  di«  TWV  The  passage  is 
generally  abandoned  as  hopelessly  corrupt 


86  THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES 

On  one  side  this  is  a  very  practical  and  lowly  doctrine — 
the  doctrine  of  contentment,  the  doctrine  of  making  things 
better  by  liking  and  helping  them.  On  the  other  side, 
it  is  an  appeal  to  the  almost  mystical  faith  of  the  poet  or 
artist  who  dwells  in  all  of  us.  Probably  most  people  have 
had  the  momentary  experience — it  may  come  to  one  on 
Swiss  mountains,  on  Surrey  commons,  in  crowded  streets, 
on  the  tops  of  omnibuses,  inside  London  houses — of  being, 
as  it  seems,  surrounded  by  an  incomprehensible  and  almost 
intolerable  vastness  of  beauty  and  delight  and  interest — 
if  only  one  could  grasp  it  or  enter  into  it !  That  is  just 
the  rub,  a  critic  may  say.  It  is  no  use  telling  all  the  world 
to  find  happiness  by  living  permanently  at  the  level  of 
these  fugitive  moments — moments  which  in  high  poets 
and  prophets  may  extend  to  days.  It  is  simpler  and 
quite  as  practical  to  advise  them  all  to  have  ten  thou- 
sand a  year. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  struggle  with  that  objection.  But 
it  is  worth  while  to  remark  in  closing  that  historically  the 
line  here  suggested  by  Euripides  was  followed  by  almost 
all  the  higher  minds  of  antiquity  and  early  Christianity. 
Excepting  Aristotle,  who  clung  characteristically  to  the 
concrete  city  and  the  dutiful  tax-paying  citizen,  all  the 
great  leaders  of  Greek  thought  turned  away  from  the  world 
and  took  refuge  in  the  Soul.  The  words  used  accidentally 
above — Live  according  to  Nature — formed  the  very  founda- 
tion of  moral  doctrine  not  only  for  the  Stoics,  but  for  all 
the  schools  of  philosophy.  The  Platonists  sought  for  the 
Good,  the  Stoics  for  Virtue,  the  Epicureans  for  Pleasure ; 
but  the  various  names  are  names  for  the  same  End ;  and 
it  is  always  an  End,  not  future,  but  existing — not  without 
or  afar,  but  inside  each  man's^self. 

The  old  devotion  to  Fifth  Century  Athens,  to  that  Princess 
of  Cities,  who  had  so  fearfully  fallen  and  dragged  her  lovers 
through  such  bloodstained  dust,  lived  on  with  a  kind  of 
fascination  as  a  symbol  in  the  minds  of  these  deeply  in- 
dividual philosophers  of  later  Hellenism  and  early  Christ- 
ianity. But  it  was  no  longer  a  city  on  earth  that  they 
sought,  not  one  to  be  served  by  military  conquests,  nor 
efficient  police,  nor  taxes  and  public  education.  It  was 


THE  BACCHAE  OF  EURIPIDES  87 

"  the  one  great  city  in  which  all  are  free,"  or  it  was  the 
city  of  Man's  Soul.  "  The  poet  has  said,"  writes  a  late  Stoic, 
who  had  an  exceptionally  large  and  difficult  city  of  his 
own  to  look  after,  "The  poet  has  said:  O  Beloved 
City  of  Cecrops:  canst  thou  not  say:  O  Beloved  City 
of  God?" 


IV 
THE    STOIC    PHILOSOPHY' 

I  FEEL  a  peculiar  pleasure  in  being  asked  to  give 
this  address  in  commemoration  of  Moncure  D. 
Conway.  I  knew  Mr.  Conway  but  slightly.  But 
when  I  was  a  boy  and  struggling  with  religious  difficulties 
his  books  were  among  those  which  brought  me  both  comfort 
and  liberation.  And  all  those  who  in  our  generation  are 
stirred  either  by  their  doubts  or  their  convictions  to  a 
consciousness  of  duties  not  yet  stamped  by  the  approval 
of  their  community,  may  well  recognize  him  as  one  of  their 
guiding  beacons.  His  character  is  written  large  in  the 
history  of  his  life.  Few  men  of  our  time  have  been  put 
so  clearly  to  the  test  and  so  unhesitatingly  sacrificed  their 
worldly  interests  to  their  consciences.  This  strain  of 
heroic  quality,  which  lay  beneath  Mr.  Conway's  unpre- 
tentious kindliness  and  easy  humour,  makes,  I  think,  the 
subject  of  my  address  this  evening  not  inappropriate  to 
his  memory. 

I  wish  in  this  lecture  to  give  in  rough  outline  some  account 
of  the  greatest  system  of  organized  thought  which  the  mind 
of  man  had  built  up  for  itself  in  the  Graeco-Roman  world 
before  the  coming  of  Christianity  with  its  inspired  book 
and  its  authoritative  revelation.  Stoicism  may  be  called 
either  a  philosophy  or  a  religion.  It  was  a  religion  in  its 
exalted  passion  ;  it  was  a  philosophy  inasmuch  as  it  made 
no  pretence  to  magical  powers  or  supernatural  knowledge. 
I  do  not  suggest  that  it  is  a  perfect  system,  with  no  errors 
of  fact  and  no  inconsistencies  of  theory.  It  is  certainly 

1  The  Moncure  Conway  Memorial  Lecture,  delivered  at  South  Place 
Institute,  March  16,  1915,  William  Archer  in  th«  chair.  Published 
separately  by  Watts  &  Co.,  23.  3d.  and  is.  6d, 


THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY  89 

no\  that  ;  and  I  do  not  know  of  any  system  that  is.  But  I 
believe  that  it  represents  a  way  of  looking  at  the  world 
and  the  practical  problems  of  life  which  possesses  still  a 
permanent  interest  for  the  human  race,  and  a  permanent 
powei  of  inspiration.  I  shall  approach  it,  therefore,  rather 
as  a  psychologist  than  as  a  philosopher  or  historian.  I 
shall  not  attempt  to  trace  the  growth  or  variation  of  Stoic 
doctrine  under  its  various  professors,  nor  yet  to  scrutinize 
the  logical  validity  of  its  arguments.  I  shall  merely  try 
as  best  I  can  to  make  intelligible  its  great  central  principles 
and  the  almost  irresistible  appeal  which  they  made  to  so 
many  of  the  best  minds  of  antiquity. 

From  this  point  of  view  I  will  begin  by  a  very  rough 
general  suggestion — viz.,  that  the  religions  known  to  history 
fall  into  two  broad  classes,  religions  which  are  suited  for 
times  of  good  government  and  religions  which  are  suited 
for  times  of  bad  government ;  religions  for  prosperity  or 
for  adversity,  religions  which  accept  the  world  or  which 
fly  from  the  world,  which  place  their  hopes  in  the  better- 
ment of  human  life  on  this  earth  or  which  look  away  from 
it  as  from  a  vale  of  tears.  By  "  the  world  "  in  this  con- 
nection, I  mean  the  ordinary  concrete  world,  the  well- 
known  companion  of  the  flesh  and  the  Devil ;  not  the 
universe.  For  some  of  the  religions  which  think  most 
meanly  of  the  world  they  know  have  a  profound  admiration 
for  all,  or  nearly  all,  those  parts  of  the  universe  where 
they  have  not  been. 

Now,  to  be  really  successful  in  the  struggle  for  existence, 
a  religion  must  suit  both  sets  of  circumstances.  A  religion 
which  fails  in  adversity,  which  deserts  you  just  when  the 
world  deserts  you,  would  be  a  very  poor  affair ;  on  the 
other  hand,  it  is  almost  equally  fatal  for  a  religion  to  collapse 
as  soon  as  it  is  successful.  Stoicism,  like  Christianity,  was 
primarily  a  religion  for  the  oppressed,  a  religion  of  defence 
and  defiance  ;  but,  like  Christianity  it  had  the  requisite 
power  of  adaptation.  Consistently  or  inconsistently,  it 
opened  its  wings  to  embrace  the  needs  both  of  success 
and  of  failure.  To  illustrate  what  I  mean — contrast  for 
a  moment  the  life  of  an  active,  practical,  philanthropic, 
modern  Bishop  with  that  of  an  anchorite  like  St.  Simeon 


90  THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY 

Stylites,  living  in  idleness  and  filth  on  the  top  of  a  large 
column  ;  or,  again,  contrast  the  Bishop's  ideals  with  those 
of  the  author  of  the  Apocalypse,  abandoning  himself  to 
visions  of  a  gorgeous  reversal  of  the  order  of  this  evil  world 
and  the  bloody  revenges  of  the  blessed.  All  three  are 
devout  Christians ;  but  the  Bishop  is  working  with  the 
world  of  men,  seeking  its  welfare  and  helping  its  practical 
needs  ;  the  other  two  are  rejecting  or  cursing  it.  In  some- 
what the  same  way  we  shall  find  that  our  chief  extant 
preachers  of  Stoicism  are,  the  one  a  lame  and  penniless  slave 
to  whom  worldly  success  is  as  nothing,  the  other  an  Emperor 
of  Rome,  keenly  interested  in  good  administration. 

The  founder  of  the  Stoic  school,  Zeno,  came  from  Cilicia 
to  Athens  about  the  year  320  B.C.,  and  opened  his  School 
about  306.  His  place  of  birth  is,  perhaps,  significant. 
He  was  a  Semite,  and  came  from  the  East.  The  Semite 
was  apt  in  his  religion  to  be  fierier  and  more  uncompromising 
than  the  Greek.  The  time  of  his  coming  is  certainly  sig- 
nificant. It  was  a  time  when  landmarks  had  collapsed, 
and  human  life  was  left,  as  it  seemed,  without  a  guide. 
The  average  man  in  Greece  of  the  fifth  century  B.C.  had 
two  main  guides  and  sanctions  for  his  conduct  of  life  : 
the  welfare  of  his  City  and  the  laws  and  traditions  of 
his  ancestors.  First  the  City,  and  next  the  traditional 
religion ;  and  in  the  fourth  century  both  of  these  had 
fallen.  Let  us  see  how. 

Devotion  to  the  City  or  Community  produced  a  religion 
of  public  service.  The  City  represented  a  high  ideal,  and 
it  represented  supreme  power.  By  320  B.C.  the  supreme 
power  had  been  overthrown.  Athens,  and  all  independent 
Greek  cities,  had  fallen  before  the  overwhelming  force  of 
the  great  military  monarchies  of  Alexander  and  his  generals. 
The  high  ideal  at  the  same  time  was  seen  to  be  narrow. 
The  community  to  which  a  man  should  devote  himself, 
if  he  should  devote  himself  at  all,  must  surely  be  something 
larger  than  one  of  these  walled  cities  set  upon  their  separate 
hills.  Thus  the  City,  as  a  guide  of  life,  had  proved  wanting. 
Now  when  the  Jews  lost  their  Holy  City  they  had  still, 
or  believed  that  they  had  still,  a  guide  left.  "  Zion  is 
taken  from  us,"  says  the  Book  of  Esdras ;  "  nothing  is 


THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY  91 

left  save  the  Holy  One  and  His  Law."  But  Greece  had 
no  such  Law.  The  Greek  religious  tradition  had  long 
since  been  riddled  with  criticism.  It  would  not  bear 
thinking  out,  and  the  Greeks  liked  to  think  things  out. 
The  traditional  religion  fell,  not  because  the  people  were 
degenerate.  Quite  the  contrary  ;  it  fell,  as  it  has  some- 
times fallen  elsewhere,  because  the  people  were  progressive. 
The  people  had  advanced,  and  the  traditional  religion 
had  not  kept  pace  with  them.  And  we  may  add  another 
consideration.  If  the  Gods  of  tradition  had  proved  them- 
selves capable  of  protecting  their  worshippers,  doubtless 
their  many  moral  and  intellectual  deficiencies  might  have 
been  overlooked.  But  they  had  not.  They  had  proved 
no  match  for  Alexander  and  the  Macedonian  phalanx. 

Thus  the  work  that  lay  before  the  generation  of  320  B.C. 
was  twofold.  They  had  to  rebuild  a  new  public  spirit, 
devoted  not  to  the  City,  but  to  something  greater ;  and 
they  had  to  rebuild  a  religion  or  philosophy  which  should 
be  a  safe  guide  in  the  threatening  chaos.  We  will  see  how 
Zeno  girded  himself  to  this  task. 

Two  questions  lay  before  him — how  to  live  and  what 
to  believe.  His  real  interest  was  in  the  first,  but  it  could 
not  be  answered  without  first  facing  the  second.  For  if 
we  do  not  in  the  least  know  what  is  true  or  untrue,  real 
or  unreal,  we  cannot  form  any  reliable  rules  about  conduct 
or  anything  else.  And,  as  it  happened,  the  Sceptical 
school  of  philosophy,  largely  helped  by  Plato,  had  lately 
been  active  in  denying  the  possibility  of  human  knowledge 
and  throwing  doubt  on  the  very  existence  of  reality. 
Their  arguments  were  extraordinarily  good,  and  many  of 
them  have  not  been  answered  yet ;  they  affect  both  the 
credibility  of  the  senses  and  the  supposed  laws  of  reasoning. 
The  Sceptics  showed  how  the  senses  are  notoriously  fallible 
and  contradictory,  and  how  the  laws  of  reasoning  lead  by 
equally  correct  processes  to  opposite  conclusions.  Many 
modern  philosophers,  from  Kant  to  Dr.  Schiller  and  Mr. 
Bertrand  Russell,  have  followed  respectfully  in  their  foot- 
steps. But  Zeno  had  no  patience  with  this  sort  of  thing. 
He  wanted  to  get  to  business. 

Also  he  was  a  born  fighter.     His  dealings  with  opponents 


92  THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY 

who  argued  against  him  always  remind  me  of  a  story  told 
of  the  Duke  of  Wellington  when  his  word  was  doubted 
by  a  subaltern.  The  Duke,  when  he  was  very  old  and 
incredibly  distinguished,  was  telling  how  once,  at  mess  in 
the  Peninsula,  his  servant  had  opened  a  bottle  of  port, 
and  inside  found  a  rat.  "  It  must  have  been  a  very  large 
bottle,"  remarked  the  subaltern.  The  Duke  fixed  him 
with  his  eye.  "  It  was  a  damned  small  bottle."  "  Oh," 
said  the  subaltern,  abashed  ;  "  then  no  doubt  it  was  a 
very  small  rat."  "  It  was  a  damned  large  rat,"  said  the 
Diike.  And  there  the  matter  has  rested  ever  since. 

Zeno  began  by  asserting  the  existence  of  the  real  world. 
"  What  do  you  mean  by  real  ?  "  asked  the  Sceptic.  "  I 
mean  solid  and  material.  I  mean  that  this  table  is  solid 
matter."  "  And  God,"  said  the  Sceptic,  "  and  the  soul  ? 
Are  they  solid  matter  ?  "  "  Perfectly  solid,"  says  Zeno  ; 
"  more  solid,  if  anything,  than  the  table."  "  And  virtue 
or  justice  or  the  Rule  of  Three  ;  also  solid  matter  ?  "  "Of 
course,"  said  Zeno  ;  "  quite  solid."  This  is  what  may 
be  called  "  high  doctrine,"  and  Zeno's  successors  eventually 
explained  that  their  master  did  not  really  mean  that  justice 
was  solid  matter,  but  that  it  was  a  sort  of  "  tension,"  or 
mutual  relation,  among  material  objects.  This  amend- 
ment saves  the  whole  situation.  But  it  is  well  to  remember 
the  uncompromising  materialism  from  which  the  Stoic 
system  started. 

Now  we  can  get  a  step  further.  If  the  world  is  real, 
how  do  we  know  about  it  ?  By  the  evidence  of  our  senses  ; 
for  the  sense-impression  (here  Stoics  and  Epicureans  both 
followed  the  fifth-century  physicists)  is  simply  the  imprint 
of  the  real  thing  upon  our  mind-stuff.  As  such  it  must 
be  true.  In  the  few  exceptional  cases  where  we  say  that 
"  our  senses  deceive  us  "  we  speak  incorrectly.  The  sense- 
impression  was  all  right ;  it  is  we  who  have  interpreted 
it  wrongly,  or  received  it  in  some  incomplete  way.  What 
we  need  in  each  case  is  a  "  comprehensive  sense-impression  " 
(KaraXyiTTiKr)  favraata) .  The  meaning  of  this  phrase  is 
not  quite  clear.  I  think  it  means  a  sense-impression  which 
"  grasps  "  its  object ;  but  it  may  be  one  which  "  grasps  " 
us,  or  which  we  "  grasp,"  so  that  we  cannot  doubt  it.  In 


THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY  98 

any  case,  when  we  get  the  real  imprint  of  the  object  upon 
our  senses,  then  this  imprint  is  of  necessity  true.  When 
the  Sceptics  talk  about  a  conjuror  making  "  our  senses 
deceive  us,"  or  when  they  object  that  a  straight  stick 
put  half  under  water  looks  as  if  it  were  bent  in  the  middle, 
they  are  talking  inexactly.  In  such  cases  the  impression 
is  perfectly  true ;  it  is  the  interpretation  that  may  go 
wrong.  Similarly,  when  they  argue  that  reasoning  is 
fallacious  because  men  habitually  make  mistakes  in  it, 
they  are  confusing  the  laws  of  reasoning  with  the  inexact 
use  which  people  make  of  them.  You  might  just  as  well 
say  that  twice  two  is  not  four,  or  that  7  x  7  is  not  49, 
because  people  often  make  mistakes  in  doing  arithmetic. 

Thus  we  obtain  a  world  which  is  in  the  first  place  real 
and  in  the  second  knowable.  Now  we  can  get  to  work 
on  our  real  philosophy,  our  doctrine  of  ethics  and  conduct. 
And  we  build  it  upon  a  very  simple  principle,  laid  down 
first  by  Zeno's  master,  Crates,  the  founder  of  the  Cynic 
School :  the  principle  that  Nothing  but  Goodness  is  Good. 
That  seems  plain  enough,  and  harmless  enough  ;  and  so 
does  its  corollary :  "  Nothing  but  badness  is  bad."  In 
the  case  of  any  concrete  object  which  you  call  "  good," 
it  seems  quite  clear  that  it  is  only  good  because  of  some 
goodness  in  it.  We,  perhaps,  should  not  express  the  matter 
in  quite  this  way,  but  we  should  scarcely  think  it  worth 
while  to  object  if  Zeno  chooses  to  phrase  it  so,  especially 
as  the  statement  itself  seems  little  better  than  a  truism. 

Now,  to  an  ancient  Greek  the  form  of  the  phrase  was 
quite  familiar.  He  was  accustomed  to  asking  "  What  is 
the  good  ?  "  It  was  to  him  the  central  problem  of  conduct. 
It  meant :  "  What  is  the  object  of  life,  or  the  element  in 
things  which  makes  them  worth  having  ?  "  Thus  the 
principle  will  mean  :  "  Nothing  is  worth  living  for  except 
goodness."  The  only  good  for  man  is  to  be  good.  And, 
as  we  might  expect,  when  Zeno  says  "  good  "  he  means 
good  in  an  ultimate  Day-of-Judgement  sense,  and  will  take 
no  half-measures.  The  principle  turns  out  to  be  not  nearly 
so  harmless  as  it  looked.  It  begins  by  making  a  clean 
sweep  of  the  ordinary  conventions.  You  remember  the 
eighteenth-century  lady's  epitaph  which  ends :  "  Bland, 


91  THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY 

passionate,  and  deeply  religious,  she  was  second  cousin  to 
the  Earl  of  Leitrim,  and  of  such  are  the  kingdom  of  heaven." 
One  doubts  whether,  when  the  critical  moment  came,  her 
relationships  would  really  prove  as  important  as  her  ex- 
ecutors hoped  ;  and  it  is  the  same  with  all  the  conventional 
goods  of  the  world  when  brought  before  the  bar  of  Zeno. 
Rank,  riches,  social  distinction,  health,  pleasure,  barriers 
of  race  or  nation — what  will  those  things  matter  before 
the  tribunal  of  ultimate  truth  ?  Not  a  jot.  Nothing 
but  goodness  is  good.  It  is  what  you  are  that  matters — 
what  you  yourself  are  ;  and  all  these  things  are  not  you. 
They  are  external ;  they  depend  not  on  you  alone,  but 
on  other  people.  The  thing  that  really  matters  depends 
on  you,  and  on  none  but  you.  From  this  there  flows  a 
very  important  and  surprising  conclusion.  You  possess 
already,  if  you  only  knew  it,  all  that  is  worth  desiring. 
The  good  is  yours  if  you  but  will  it.  You  need  fear  nothing. 
You  are  safe,  inviolable,  utterly  free.  A  wicked  man  or 
an  accident  can  cause  you  pain,  break  your  leg,  make 
you  ill ;  but  no  earthly  power  can  make  you  good  or  bad 
except  yourself,  and  to  be  good  or  bad  is  the  only  thing 
that  matters. 

At  this  point  common-sense  rebels.  The  plain  man 
says  to  Zeno:  "This  is  all  very  well;  but  we  know  as 
a  matter  of  fact  that  such  things  as  health,  pleasure, 
long  life,  fame,  etc.,  are  good :  we  all  like  them.  The 
reverse  are  bad;  we  hate  and  avoid  them.  All  sane, 
healthy  people  agree  in  judging  so."  Zeno's  answer  is 
interesting.  In  the  first  place,  he  says :  "  Yes ;  that 
is  what  most  people  say.  But  the  judges  who  give 
that  judgement  are  bribed.  Pleasure,  though  not  really 
good,  has  just  that  particular  power  of  bribing  the 
judges,  and  making  them  on  each  occasion  say  or  believe 
that  she  is  good.  The  Assyrian  king  Sardanapalus  thinks 
it  good  to  stay  in  his  harem,  feasting  and  merry-making, 
rather  than  suffer  hardship  in  governing  his  kingdom. 
He  swears  his  pleasure  is  good  ;  but  what  will  any  unbribed 
third  person  say  ?  Consider  the  judgements  of  history. 
Do  you  ever  find  that  history  praises  a  man  because  he 
was  healthy,  or  long-lived,  or  because  he  enjoyed  himself 


THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY  95 

a  great  deal  ?  History  never  thinks  of  such  things  ;  they 
are  valueless  and  disappear  from  the  world's  memory. 
The  thing  that  lives  is  a  man's  goodness,  his  great  deeds, 
his  virtue,  or  his  heroism." 

If  the  questioner  was  not  quite  satisfied,  Zeno  used 
another  argument.  He  would  bid  him  answer  honestly 
for  himself :  "  Would  you  yourself  really  like  to  be  rich 
and  corrupted  ?  To  have  abundance  of  pleasure  and  be 
a  worse  man  ?  "  And,  apparently,  when  Zeno's  eyes  were 
upon  you,  it  was  difficult  to  say  you  would.  Some  Stoics 
took  a  particular  instance.  When  Harmodius  and  Aris- 
togeiton,  the  liberators  of  Athens,  slew  the  tyrant  Hipparchus 
(which  is  always  taken  as  a  praiseworthy  act),  the  tyrant's 
friends  seized  a  certain  young  girl,  named  Leaina,  who  was 
the  mistress  of  Aristogeiton,  and  tortured  her  to  make 
her  divulge  the  names  of  the  conspirators.  And  under 
the  torture  the  girl  bit  out  her  tongue  and  died  without 
speaking  a  word.  Now,  in  her  previous  life  we  may  assume 
that  Leaina  had  had  a  good  deal  of  gaiety.  Which  would 
you  sooner  have  as  your  own — the  early  life  of  Leaina, 
which  was  full  of  pleasures,  or  the  last  hours  of  Leaina, 
which  were  full  of  agony  ?  And  with  a  Stoic's  eyes  upon 
them,  as  before,  people  found  it  hard  to  say  the  first.  They 
yielded  their  arms  and  confessed  that  goodness,  and  not 
any  kind  of  pleasure,  is  the  good. 

But  now  comes  an  important  question,  and  the  answer 
to  it,  I  will  venture  to  suggest,  just  redeems  Stoicism  from 
the  danger  of  becoming  one  of  those  inhuman  cast-iron 
systems  by  which  mankind  may  be  brow-beaten,  but  against 
which  it  secretly  rebels.  What  is  Goodness  ?  What  is  this 
thing  which  is  the  only  object  worth  living  for  ? 

Zeno  seems  to  have  been  a  little  impatient  of  the  question. 
We  know  quite  well.  There  are  the  four  cardinal  virtues, 
Courage,  Temperance,  Wisdom  and  Righteousness,  and 
their  derivatives.  Everybody  knows  what  Goodness  is, 
who  is  not  blinded  by  passion  or  desire.  Still,  the  school 
consented  to  analyse  it.  And  the  profound  common  sense 
and  reasonableness  of  average  Greek  thought  expressed 
the  answer  in  its  own  characteristic  way.  Let  us  see  in 


S6  THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY 

practice  what  we  mean  by  "  good."  Take  a  good  boot- 
maker, a  good  father,  a  good  musician,  a  good  horse,  a 
good  chisel ;  you  will  find  that  each  one  of  them  has  some 
function  to  perform,  some  special  work  to  do  ;  and  a  good 
one  does  the  work  well.  Goodness  is  performing  your 
function  well.  But  when  we  say  "  well "  we  are  still 
using  the  idea  of  goodness.  What  do  we  mean  by  doing 
it  "  well "  ?  Here  the  Greek  falls  back  on  a  scientific 
conception  which  had  great  influence  in  the  fifth  century 
B.C.,  and,  somewhat  transformed  and  differently  named, 
has  regained  it  in  our  own  days.  We  call  it  "  Evolution." 
The  Greeks  called  it  Phusis,  a  word  which  we  translate 
by  "  Nature,"  but  which  seems  to  mean  more  exactly 
"  growth,"  or  "  the  process  of  growth."  l  It  is  Phusis 
which  gradually  shapes  or  tries  to  shape  every  living  thing 
into  a  more  perfect  form.  It  shapes  the  seed,  by  infinite 
and  exact  gradations,  into  the  oak ;  the  blind  puppy 
into  the  good  hunting-dog ;  the  savage  tribe  into  the 
civilized  city.  If  you  analyse  this  process,  you  find  that 
Phusis  is  shaping  each  thing  towards  the  fulfilment  of  its 
own  function — that  is,  towards  the  good.  Of  course 
Phusis  sometimes  fails ;  some  of  the  blind  puppies  die ; 
some  of  the  seeds  never  take  root.  Again,  when  the  proper 
development  has  been  reached,  it  is  generally  followed  by 
decay  ;  that,  too,  seems  like  a  failure  in  the  work  of  Phusis. 
I  will  not  consider  these  objections  now  ;  they  would  take 
us  too  far  afield,  and  we  shall  need  a  word  about  them 
later.  Let  us  in  the  meantime  accept  this  conception  of 
a  force  very  like  that  which  most  of  us  assume  when  we 
speak  of  evolution ;  especially,  perhaps,  it  is  like  what 
Bergson  calls  La  Vie  or  L  Elan  Vital  at  the  back  of 
L'Evolution  Creatrice,  though  to  the  Greeks  it  seemed 
still  more  personal  and  vivid ;  a  force  which  is  present 
in  all  the  live  world,  and  is  always  making  things  grow 
towards  the  fulfilment  of  their  utmost  capacity.  We  see 
now  what  goodness  is ;  it  is  living  or  acting  according 
to  Phusis,  working  with  Phusis  in  her  eternal  effort  to- 
wards perfection.  You  will  notice,  of  course,  that  the 

1  See  a  paper  by  Professor  J.  L.  Myres,  "  The  Background  of  Gr««k 
Sci«act,"  Univfrsity  of  California  Chronicle,  xvi.  4. 


THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY  97 

phrase  means  a  good  deal  more  than  we  usually  mean  by 
living  "according  to  nature."  It  does  not  mean  "living 
simply,"  or  "  living  like  the  natural  man."  It  means 
living  according  to  the  spirit  which  makes  the  world 
grow  and  progress. 

This  Phusis  becomes  in  Stoicism  the  centre  of  much 
speculation  and  much  effort  at  imaginative  understanding. 
It  is  at  work  everywhere.  It  is  like  a  soul,  or  a  life-force, 
running  through  all  matter  as  the  "  soul  "  or  life  of  a  man 
runs  through  all  his  limbs.  It  is  the  soul  of  the  world. 
Now,  it  so  happened  that  in  Zeno's  time  the  natural  sciences 
had  made  a  great  advance,  especially  Astronomy,  Botany, 
and  Natural  History.  This  fact  had  made  people  familiar 
with  the  notion  of  natural  law.  Law  was  a  principle 
which  ran  through  all  the  movements  of  what  they  called 
the  Kosmos,  or  "  ordered  world."  Thus  Phusis,  the  life 
of  the  world,  is,  from  another  point  of  view,  the  Law  of 
Nature ;  it  is  the  great  chain  of  causation  by  which  all 
events  occur ;  for  the  Phusis  which  shapes  things  towards 
their  end  acts  always  by  the  laws  of  causation.  Phusis 
is  not  a  sort  of  arbitrary  personal  goddess,  upsetting  the 
natural  order ;  Phusis  is  the  natural  order,  and  nothing 
happens  without  a  cause. 

A  natural  law,  yet  a  natural  law  which  is  alive,  which 
is  itself  life.  It  becomes  indistinguishable  from  a  purpose, 
the  purpose  of  the  great  world-process.  It  is  like  a  fore- 
seeing, forethinking  power — Pronoia  ;  our  common  word 
"  Providence  "  is  the  Latin  translation  of  this  Pronoia, 
though  of  course  its  meaning  has  been  rubbed  down  and 
cheapened  in  the  process  of  the  ages.  As  a  principle  of 
providence  or  forethought  it  comes  to  be  regarded  as  God, 
the  nearest  approach  to  a  definite  personal  God  which  is 
admitted  by  the  austere  logic  of  Stoicism.  And,  since 
it  must  be  in  some  sense  material,  it  is  made  of  the  finest 
material  there  is  ;  it  is  made  of  fire,  not  ordinary  fire, 
but  what  they  called  intellectual  fire.  A  fire  which  is 
present  in  a  warm,  live  man,  and  not  in  a  cold,  dead 
man ;  a  fire  which  has  consciousness  and  life,  and  is 
not  subject  to  decay.  This  fire,  Phusis,  God,  is  in  all 
creation. 

7 


98  THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY 

We  are  led  to  a  very  definite  and  complete  Pantheism. 
The  Sceptic  begins  to  make  his  usual  objections.  "  God 
in  worms  ?  "  he  asks.  "  God  in  fleas  and  dung-beetles  ?  " 
And,  as  usual,  the  objector  is  made  to  feel  sorry  that  he 
spoke.  "  Why  not  ?  "  the  Stoic  answers  ;  "  cannot  an 
earthworm  serve  God  ?  Do  you  suppose  that  it  is  only 
a  general  who  is  a  good  soldier  ?  Cannot  the  lowest  private 
or  camp  attendant  fight  his  best  and  give  his  life  for  his 
cause  ?  Happy  are  you  if  you  are  serving  God,  and  carrying 
out  the  great  purpose  as  truly  as  such-and-such  an  earth- 
worm." That  is  the  conception.  All  the  world  is  working 
together.  It  is  all  one  living  whole,  with  one  soul  through 
it.  And,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  no  single  part  of  it  can  either 
rejoice  or  suffer  without  all  the  rest  being  affected.  The 
man  who  does  not  see  that  the  good  of  every  living  creature 
is  his  good,  the  hurt  of  every  living  creature  his  hurt,  is 
one  who  wilfully  makes  himself  a  kind  of  outlaw  or  exile  : 
he  is  blind,  or  a  fool.  So  we  are  led  up  to  the  great  doctrine 
of  the  later  Stoics,  the  Ev\n:aBeia.  ra>v  o\cov,  or  Sympathy 
of  the  Whole ;  a  grand  conception,  the  truth  of  which  is 
illustrated  in  the  ethical  world  by  the  feelings  of  good  men, 
and  in  the  world  of  natural  science.  .  .  .  We  moderns 
may  be  excused  for  feeling  a  little  surprise  ...  by  the 
fact  that  the  stars  twinkle.  It  is  because  they  are  so 
sorry  for  us :  as  well  they  may  be  ! 

Thus  Goodness  is  acting  according  to  Phusis,  in  harmony 
with  the  will  of  God.     But  here  comes  an  obvious  objection. 
If  God  is  all,  how  can  any  one  do  otherwise  ?     God  is  the 
omnipresent  Law ;    God  is  all  Nature ;    no  one  can  help 
being  in  harmony  with  him.     The  answer^ is_ that  God^  is 
injill  exce£t_in_jthe_ doings  of  bad  men.    For jnanjsjree. 
.  .  .  How   do   we   know  TihatT  ~Why,   by   a   kataleptike 
phantasia,  a  jcomprehensive__sense-impression  which  it_is 
impossible  ±o-Jce^ist?~~WKy  it  shouldjbej^  we  cannot  tell. 
"lacxTrnight  have  prefeire^^h^dnecFslavesTor  his  fellow- 
workers  ;  but,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  he  preferred  free  men."|i 
fl  Man's  soul,  being  actually  a  portion  of  the  divine  fire, 
'/has  the  same  freedom  that  God  himself  has.     He  can  act 
,  either  with  God  or  against  him,  though,  of  course,  when 
Hhe  acts  against  him  he  will  ultimately  be  overwhelmed. 


THE  STOIC   PHILOSOPHY  99 

Thus  Stoicibm  grapples  with  a  difficulty  which  no  religion)  f 
has  satisfactorily  solved. 

You  will  have  observed  that  by  now  we  have  worked 
out  two  quite  different  types  of  Stoic — one  who  defies  the 
world  and  one  who  works  with  the  world  ;  and,  as  in  Christ- 
ianity, both  types  are  equally  orthodox.  We  have  first 
the  scorner  of  all  earthly  things.  Nothing  but  goodness 
is  good  ;  nothing  but  badness  bad.  Pain,  pleasure,  health, 
sickness,  human  friendship  and  affection,  are  all  indifferent. 
The  truly  wise  man  possesses  his  soul  in  peace  ;  he  has  no 
desires  or  fears ;  he  communes  with  God.  He  always, 
with  all  his  force,  wills  the  will  of  God  ;  thus  everything 
that  befalls  him  is  a  fulfilment  of  his  own  will  and  good. 
A  type  closely  akin  to  the  early  Christian  ascetic  or  the 
Indian  saint. 

And  in  the  second  place  we  have  the  man  who,  while 
accepting  the  doctrine  that  only  goodness  is  good,  lays  stress 
upon  the  definition  of  goodness.  It  is  acting  according  to 
Phusis,  in  the  spirit  of  that  purpose  or  forethought  which, 
though  sometimes  failing,  is  working  always  unrestingly 
for  the  good  of  the  world,  and  which  needs  its  fellow-workers. 
/|God  is  helping  the  whole  world  ;  you  can  only  help  a  limited 
fraction  of  the  world.  But  you  can  try  to  work  in  the 
same  spirit.  There  were  certain  old  Greek  myths  which 
told  how  Heracles  and  other  heroes  had  passed  laborious 
lives  serving  and  helping  humanity,  and  in  the  end  became 
gods.  The  Stoics  used  such  myths  as  allegories.  That 
was  the  way  to  heaven  ;  that  was  how  a  man  may  at 
the  end  of  his  life  become  "  not  a  dead  body,  but  a  star." 
In  the  magnificent  phrase  which  Pliny  translates  from  a 
Greek  Stoic,  God  is  that,  and  nothing  but  that ;  man's 
true  God  is  the  helping  of  man  ;  Deus  est  mortali  iuvare 
mortalem. 

No  wonder  such  a  religion  appealed  to  kings  and  states- 
men and  Roman  governors.  Most  of  the  successors  of 
Alexander — we  may  say  most  of  the  principal  kings  in 
existence  in  the  generations  following  Zeno — professed 
themselves  Stoics.  The  most  famous  of  all  Stoics,  Marcus* 
Aurelius,  found  his  religion  not  only  in  meditation  and  reli- 


^7/7     **°' 

100  THE  STOIC   PHILOSOPHY 

irgious  exercises,  but  in  working  some  sixteen  hours  a  day 
//for  the  good  practical  government  of  the  Roman  Empire. 

Is  there  any  real  contradiction  or  inconsistency  between 
the  two  types  of  Stoic  virtue  ?  On  the  surface  certainly 
there  seems  to  be  ;  and  the  school  felt  it,  and  tried  in  a 
very  interesting  way  to  meet  it.  The  difficulty  is  this  :J\ 
what  is  the  good  of  working  for  the  welfare  of  humanity!! 
if  such  welfare  is  really  worthless  ?  Suppose,  by  great 
labour  and  skill,  you  succeed  in  reducing  the  death-rate 
of  a  plague-stricken  area ;  suppose  you  make  a  starving 
country-side  prosperous  ;  what  is  the  good  of  it  all  if  health 
and  riches  are  in  themselves  worthless,  and  not  a  whit 
better  than  disease  and  poverty  ? 

The  answer  is  clear  and  uncompromising.  A  good 
bootmaker  is  one  who  makes  good  boots  ;  a  good  shepherd 
is  one  who  keeps  his  sheep  well ;  and  even  though  good 
boots  are,  in  the  Day-of- Judgment  sense,  entirely  worth- 
less, and  fat  sheep  no  whit  better  than  starved  sheep,  yet 
the  good  bootmaker  or  good  shepherd  must  do  his  work 
well  or  he  will  cease  to  be  good.  To  be  good  he  must  1 1 
perform  his  function  ;  and  in  performing  that  function 
there  are  certain  things  that  he  must  "  prefer  "  to  others, 
even  though  they  are  not  really  "  good."  He  must  prefer 
a  healthy  sheep  or  a  well-made  boot  to  their  opposites. 
It  is  thus  that  Nature,  or  Phusis,  herself  works  when  she 
shapes  the  seed  into  the  tree,  or  the  blind  puppy  into  the 
good  hound.  The  perfection  of  the  tree  or  hound  is  in 
itself  indifferent,  a  thing  of  no  ultimate  value.  Yet  the 
goodness  of  Nature  lies  in  working  for  that  perfection. 

Life  becomes,  as  the  Stoics  more  than  once  tell  us,  like 
a  play  which  is  acted  or  a  game  played  with  counters. 
Viewed  from  outside,  the  counters  are  valueless ;    but  to 
those  engaged  in  the  game  their  importance  is  paramount. 
What  really  and  ultimately  matters  is  that  the  game  shall 
be  played  as  it  should  be  played.     God,  the  eternal  dramatist, 
has  cast  you  for  some  part  in  his  drama,  and  hands  youu 
the  role.     It  may  turn  out  that  you  are  cast  for  a  trium-  n 
phant  king  ;    it  may  be  for  a  slave  who  dies  of  torture.  I 
What  does  that  matter  to  the  good  actor  ?     He  can  play 
either  part ;   his  only  business  is  to  accept  the  role  given 


ii 


THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY  101 

him,  and  to  perform  it  well.  Similarly,  life  is  a  game  of 
counters.  Your  business  is  to  play  it  in  the  right  way. 
He  who  set  the  board  may  have  given  you  many  counters  ; 
he  may  have  given  you  few.  He  may  have  arranged  that, 
at  a  particular  point  in  the  game,  most  of  your  men  shall 
be  swept  accidentally  off  the  board.  You  will  lose  the? 
game ;  but  why  should  you  mind  that  ?  It  is  your  plafti 
that  matters,  not  the  score  that  you  happen  to  makef' 
He  is  not  a  fool  to  judge  you  by  your  mere  success  or 
failure.  Success  or  failure  is  a  thing  he  can  determine 
without  stirring  a  hand.  It  hardly  interests  him.  What 
interests  him  is  the  one  thing  which  he  cannot  determine — 
the  action  of  your  free  and  conscious  will. 

This  view  is  so  sublime  and  so  stirring  that  at  times  it 
almost  deadens  one's  power  of  criticism.  Let  us  see  how  it 
works  in  a  particular  case.  Suppose  your  friend  is  in 
sorrow  or  pain,  what  are  you  to  do  ?  In  the  first  place, 
you  may  sympathize — since  sympathy  runs  all  through 
the  universe,  and  if  the  stars  sympathize  surely  you  yourself 
may.  And  of  course  you  must  help.  That  is  part  of  your 
function.  Yet,  all  the  time,  while  you  are  helping  and 
sympathizing,  are  you  not  bound  to  remember  that  your 
friend's  pain  or  sorrow  does  not  really  matter  at  all  ?  He 
is  quite  mistaken  in  imagining  that  it  does.  Similarly,  if 
a  village  in  your  district  is  threatened  by  a  band  of  robbers, 
you  will  rush  off  with  soldiers  to  save  it ;  you  will  make 
every  effort,  you  will  give  your  life  if  necessary.  But 
suppose,  after  all,  you  arrive  too  late,  and  find  the  inhabi- 
tants with  their  throats  cut  and  the  village  in  ruins — why 
should  you  mind  ?  You  know  it  does  not  matter  a  straw 
whether  the  villagers'  throats  are  cut  or  not  cut ;  all  that 
matters  is  how  they  behaved  in  the  hour  of  death.  Mr. 
Bevan,  whose  studies  of  the  Stoics  and  Sceptics  form  a 
rare  compound  of  delicate  learning  and  historical  imagina- 
tion, says  that  the  attitude  of  the  Stoic  in  a  case  like  this 
is  like  that  of  a  messenger  boy  sent  to  deliver  a  parcel  to 
someone,  with  instructions  to  try  various  addresses  in 
order  to  find  him.  The  good  messenger  boy  will  go  duly 
to  all  the  addresses,  but  if  the  addressee  is  not  to  be  found 


102  THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY 

at  any  of  them,  what  does  that  matter  to  the  messenger 
boy  ?  He  has  done  his  duty,  and  the  parcel  itself  has  no 
interest  for  him.  He  may  return  and  say  he  is  sorry  that 
the  man  cannot  be  found  ;  but  his  sorrow  is  not  heartfelt. 
It  is  only  a  polite  pretence. 

The  comparison  is  a  little  hard  on  the  Stoics.  No  doubt 
they  are  embarrassed  at  this  point  between  the  claims 
of  high  logic  and  of  human  feeling.  But  they  meet  the 
embarrassment  bravely.  "  You  will  suffer  in  your  friend's 
suffering,"  says  Epictetus.  "  Of  course  you  will  suffer. 
I  do  not  say  that  you  must  not  even  groan  aloud.  Yet  in 
the  centre  of  your  being  do  not  groan  I  '  "EacoOev  /xeVroi  py 
arevagfls."  It  is  very  like  the  Christian  doctrine  of  resig- 
nation. Man  cannot  but  suffer  for  his  fellow-man  ;  yet  a 
Christian  is  told  to  accept  the  will  of  God  and  believe  that 
ultimately,  in  some  way  which  he  does  not  see,  the  Judge 
of  the  World  has  done  right. 

Finally,  what  is  to  be  the  end  after  this  life  of  Stoic 
virtue  ?  Many  religions,  after  basing  their  whole  theory 
of  conduct  on  stern  duty  and  self-sacrifice  and  contempt 
for  pleasure,  lapse  into  confessing  the  unreality  of  their 
professions  by  promising  the  faithful  as  a  reward  that 
they  shall  be  uncommonly  happy  in  the  next  world.  It 
was  not  that  they  really  disdained  pleasure ;  it  was  only 
that  they  speculated  for  a  higher  rate  of  interest  at  a  later 
date.  Notably,  Islam  is  open  to  that  criticism,  and  so 
is  a  great  deal  of  popular  Christianity.  Stoicism  is  not. 
It  maintains  its  ideal  unchanged. 

You  remember  that  we  touched,  in  passing,  the  problem 
of  decay.  Nature  shapes  things  towards  their  perfection, 
but  she  also  lets  them  fall  away  after  reaching  a  certain 
altitude.  She  fails  constantly,  though  she  reaches  higher 
and  higher  success.  In  the  end,  said  the  Stoic — and  he 
said  it  not  very  confidently,  as  a  suggestion  rather  than 
a  dogma — in  the  very  end,  perfection  should  be  reached, 
and  then  there  will  be  no  falling  back.  All  the  world  will 
have  been  wrought  up  to  the  level  of  the  divine  soul.  That 
soul  is  Fire  ;  and  into  that  Fire  we  shall  all  be  drawn, 
our  separate  existence  and  the  dross  of  our  earthly  nature 


THE  STOIC   PHILOSOPHY  103 

burnt  utterly  away.  Then  there  will  be  no  more  decay 
or  growth  ;  no  pleasure,  no  disturbance.  It  may  be  a 
moment  of  agony,  but  what  does  agony  matter  ?  It  will 
be  ecstasy  and  triumph,  the  soul  reaching  its  fiery  union 
with  God. 

The  doctrine,  fine  as  it  is,  seems  always  to  have  been 
regarded  as  partly  fanciful,  and  not  accepted  as  an  integral 
part  of  the  Stoic  creed.  Indeed,  many  Stoics  considered 
that  if  this  Absorption  in  Fire  should  occur,  it  could  not 
be  final.  For  the  essence  of  Goodness  is  to  do  something, 
to  labour,  to  achieve  some  end  ;  and  if  Goodness  is  to  exist 
the  world  process  must  begin  again.  God,  so  to  speak, 
cannot  be  good  unless  he  is  striving  and  helping.  Phusis 
must  be  moving  upward,  or  else  it  is  not  Phusis. 

Thus  Stoicism,  whatever  its  weaknesses,  fulfilled  the 
two  main  demands  that  man  makes  upon  his  religion : 
it  gave  him  armour  when  the  world  was  predominantly 
evil,  and  it  encouraged  him  forward  when  the  world  was 
predominantly  good.  It  afforded  guidance  both  for  the 
saint  and  the  public  servant.  And  in  developing  this  two- 
fold character  I  think  it  was  not  influenced  by  mere  incon- 
stancy. It  was  trying  to  meet  the  actual  truth  of  the  situa- 
tion. For  in  most  systems  it  seems  to  be  recognized  that 
in  the  Good  Life  there  is  both  an  element  of  outward  striving 
and  an  element  of  inward  peace.  There  are  things  which 
we  must  try  to  attain,  yet  it  is  not  really  the  attainment 
that  matters ;  it  is  the  seeking.  And,  consequently,  in 
some  sense,  the  real  victory  is  with  him  who  fought  best, 
not  with  the  man  who  happened  to  win.  For  beyond  all 
the  accidents  of  war,  beyond  the  noise  of  armies  and  groans 
of  the  dying,  there  is  the  presence  of  some  eternal.  Friend^ 
It  is  our  relation  to  Him  that  matters. 

"  A  Friend  behind  phenomena,"  I  owe  the  phrase  to 
Mr.  Bevan.  It  is  the  assumption  which  all  religions  make, 
and  sooner  or  later  all  philosophies.  The  main  criticism 
which  I  should  beTinclined  to  pass  on  Stoicism  would  lie 
here.  Starting  out  with  every  intention  of  facing  the 
problem  of  the  world  by  hard  thought  and  observation, 
resolutely  excluding  all  appeal  to  tradition  and  mere 


104  THE   STOIC   PHILOSOPHY 

mythology,  it  ends  by  making  this  tremendous  assumption, 
that  there  is  a  beneficent  purpose  in  the  world  and  that 
the  force  which  moves  nature  is  akin  to  ourselves.  If 
we  once  grant  that  postulate,  the  details  of  the  system  fall 
easily  into  place.  There  may  be  some  overstatement  about 
the  worthlessness  of  pleasure  and  worldly  goods  ;  though, 
after  all,  if  there  is  a  single  great  purpose  in  the  universe, 
and  that  purpose  good,  I  think  we  must  admit  that,  in 
comparison  with  it,  the  happiness  of  any  individual  at 
this  moment  dwindles  into  utter  insignificance.  The  good, 
and  not  any  pleasure  or  happiness,  is  what  matters.  If 
there  is  no  such  purpose,  well,  then  the  problem  must  all 
be  stated  afresh  from  the  beginning. 

A  second  criticism,  which  is  passed  by  modern  psycholo- 
gists on  the  Stoic  system,  is  more  searching  but  not  so 
dangerous.  The  language  of  Stoicism,  as  of  all  ancient 
philosophy,  was  based  on  a  rather  crude  psychology.  It 
was  over-intellectualized.  It  paid  too  much  attention  to 
fully  conscious  and  rational  processes,  and  too  little  attention 
to  the  enormously  larger  part  of  human  conduct  which  is 
below  the  level  of  consciousness.  It  saw  life  too  much 
as  a  series  of  separate  mental  acts,  and  not  sufficiently  as 
a  continuous,  ever-changing  stream.  Yet  a  very  little 
correction  of  statement  is  all  that  it  needs.  Stoicism  does 
not  really  make  reason  into  a  motive  force.  It  explains 
that  an  "  impulse,"  or  opptf,  of  physical  or  biological  origin 
rises  in  the  mind  prompting  to  some  action,  and  then 
Reason  gives  or  withholds  its  assent  (avyKardOeais).  There 
is  nothing  seriously  wrong  here. 

Other  criticisms,  based  on  the  unreality  of  the  ideal 
Wise  Man,  who  acts  without  desire  and  makes  no  errors, 
seem  to  me  of  smaller  importance.  They  depend  chiefly 
on  certain  idioms  or  habits  of  language,  which,  though 
not  really  exact,  convey  a  fairly  correct  meaning  to  those 
accustomed  to  them. 

But  the  assumption  of  the  Eternal  Purpose  stands  in 
a  different  category.  However  much  refined  away,  it 
remains  a  vast  assumption.  We  may  discard  what  Pro- 
fessor William  James  used  to  call  "  Monarchical  Deism  " 
or  our  own  claim  to  personal  immortality.  We  may  base 


THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY  105 

ourselves  on  Evolution,  whether  of  the  Darwinian  or  the 
Bergsonian  sort.  But  we  do  seem  to  find,  not  only  in  all 
religions,  but  in  practically  all  philosophies,  some  belief 
that  man  is  not  quite  alone  in  the  universe,  but  is  met 
in  his  endeavours  towards  the  good  by  some  external 
help  or  sympathy.  We  find  it  everywhere  in  the  unso- 
phisticated man.  We  find  it  in  the  unguarded  self-revela- 
tions of  the  most  severe  and  conscientious  Atheists.  Now, 
the  Stoics,  like  many  other  schools  of  thought,  drew  an 
argument  from  this  consensus  of  all  mankind.  It  was 
not  an  absolute  proof  of  the  existence  of  the  Gods  or  Provi- 
dence, but  it  was  a  strong  indication.  The  existence  of 
a  common  instinctive  belief  in  the  mind  of  man  gives  at 
least  a  presumption  that  there  must  be  a  good  cause  for 
that  belief. 

This  is  a  reasonable  position.  There  must  be  some  such 
cause.  But  it  does  not  follow  that  the  only  valid  cause  is 
the  truth  of  the  content  of  the  belief.  I  cannot  help  sus- 
pecting that  this  is  precisely  one  of  those  points  on  which 
Stoicism,  in  company  with  almost  all  philosophy  up  to 
the  present  time,  has  gone  astray  through  not  sufficiently 
realizing  its  dependence  on  the  human  mind  as  a  natural 
biological  product.  For  it  is  very  important  in  this  matter 
to  realize  that  the  so-called  belief  is  not  really  an  intellec- 
tual judgment  so  much  as  a  craving  of  the  whole  nature. 

It  is  only  of  very  late  years  that  psychologists  have 
begun  to  realize  the  enormous  dominion  of  those  forces 
in  man  of  which  he  is  normally  unconscious.  We  cannot 
escape  as  easily  as  these  brave  men  dreamed  from  the  grip 
of  the  blind  powers  beneath  the  threshold.  Indeed,  as 
I  see  philosophy  after  philosophy  falling  into  this  unproven 
belief  in  the  Friend  behind  phenomena,  as  I  find  that  I 
myself  cannot,  except  for  a  moment  and  by  an  effort, 
refrain  from  making  the  same  assumption,  it  seems  to  me 
that  perhaps  here  too  we  are  under  the  spell  of  a  very  old 
ineradicable  instinct.  We  are  gregarious  animals ;  our 
ancestors  have  been  such  for  countless  ages.  We  cannot 
help  looking  out  on  the  world  as  gregarious  animals  do  ; 
we  see  it  in  terms  of  humanity  and  of  fellowship.  Students 
of  animals  under  domestication  have  shown  us  how  the 


106  THE  STOIC  PHILOSOPHY 

habits  of  a  gregarious  creature,  taken  away  from  his  kind, 
are  shaped  in  a  thousand  details  by  reference  to  the  lost 
pack  which  is  no  longer  there — the  pack  which  a  dog  tries 
to  smell  his  way  back  to  all  the  time  he  is  out  walking,  the 
pack  he  calls  to  for  help  when  danger  threatens.  It  is 
a  strange  and  touching  thing,  this  eternal  hunger  of  the 
gregarious  animal  for  the  herd  of  friends  who  are  not  there. 
And  it  may  be,  it  may  very  possibly  be,  that,  in  the  matter 
of  this  Friend  behind  phenomena,  our  own  yearning  and 
our  own  almost  ineradicable  instinctive  conviction,  since 
they  are  certainly  not  founded  on  either  reason  or  observa- 
tion, are  in  origin  the  groping  of  a  lonely-souled  gregarious 
animal  to  find  its  herd  or  its  herd-leader  in  the  great  spaces 
between  the  stars. 
Still,  it  is  a  belief  very  difficult  to  get  rid  of. 

NOTE. 

Without  attempting  a  bibliography  of  Stoicism,  I  may  mention 
the  following  books  as  likely  to  be  useful  to  a  student :  (i)  Original 
Stoic  Literature.  Epictetus,  Discourses,  etc. ;  translated  by 
P.  E.  Matheson,  Oxford,  1915.  Marcus  Aurelius,  To  Himself; 
translated  by  J.  Jackson,  Oxford,  1906.  Stoicorum  Veterum  Frag- 
tnenta,  collected  by  Von  Arnim,  1903-1905.  (2)  Modern  Literature. 
Roman  Stoicism  (Cambridge,  1911),  by  E.  V.  Arnold  ;  a  very 
thorough  and  useful  piece  of  work.  Stoics  and  Sceptics,  by  Edwyn 
Bevan  (Oxford,  1913)  ;  slighter,  but  illuminating.  The  doctrine 
of  the  things  which  are  "  preferred "  (irporwu'fva),  though  not 
"  good,"  was,  I  think,  first  correctly  explained  by  H.  Gomperz, 
Lebensauffassung  der  Griechischen  Philosophic,  1904.  Professor 
Arnold's  book  contains  a  large  bibliography. 


V 
POESIS  AND  MIMESIS1 

A  DISTINGUISHED  woman  of  letters,  long  resident 
abroad,  came  lately  to  a  friend  of  mine  in  London 
and  explained  her  wish  to  learn  how  "the  young" 
in  England  were  now  thinking.  She  herself  had  always 
been  advanced  in  thought,  if  not  revolutionary,  and  was 
steeled  against  possible  shocks.  My  friend  dauntlessly 
collected  a  bevy  of  young  and  representative  lions,  and 
the  parties  met.  Unfortunately  I  know  only  the  barest 
outline  of  what  took  place.  The  elderly  revolutionary 
fixed  on  the  most  attractive  and  audacious-looking  of  the 
group  and  asked  him  what  author  had  now  most  influence 
with  the  rising  generation  of  intellectuals.  He  said  without 
hesitation,  "  Aristotle  "  ;  and  the  chief  reason  he  gave  for 
Aristotle's  supreme  value  was  that,  in  his  greatest  philo- 
sophical and  aesthetic  effects,  he  never  relied  on  the  element 
of  wonder.  I  believe  the  evening  was  not  on  the  whole 
a  success. 

However,  the  story  sent  me  back  to  the  first  chapter  of 
the  Poetics  as  a  subject  for  this  lecture,  which  your  kindness 
has  called  upon  me  to  deliver  in  memory  of  the  honoured 
and  beloved  name  of  Henry  Sidgwick.  I  always  felt,  if 
I  may  say  so,  the  presence  of  something  akin  to  Aristotle  in 
Professor  Sidgwick's  mind,  the  same  variety  of  interest  yet 
the  same  undistracted  and  unwavering  pursuit  of  what 
was  true,  and  I  think  also  the  same  high  disdain,  where 
truth  was  the  object  sought,  of  arousing  the  stimulant  of 
wonder. 

Aristotle,  as  we  all  know,  lays  it  down  at  the  very  opening 
of  his  work  that :  "  Epic  poetry  and  tragedy,  comedy 

1  The  Henry  Sidgwick  Lecture  for  19.20,  delivered  at  Cambridge,  1920. 

107 


108  POESIS   AND   MIMESIS 

'<  •  v  v 
also  and  dithyrambic  poetry,  and  the  music  of  the  flute 

and  the  lyre  in  most  of  their  forms,  are  all  in  their  general 
conception  modes  of  imitation."  The  statement,  I  venture 
to  think,  appears  to  most  English  readers  almost  meaning- 
less ;  and  so  far  as  it  has  any  meaning,  I  believe  most  of 
them  will  think  it  untrue.  And  both  impressions  will 
be  deepened  when  a  page  or  two  later  the  philosopher 
explains  that  "  tragedy  is  an  imitation  of  good  men  "  and 
comedy  "  of  bad  men." 

Let  us  try  the  experiment  which  is  so  frequently  helpful 
in  dealing  with  the  classics  when  they  puzzle  us  :  let  us 
be  literal  and  exact,  and  entirely  disregard  elegance.  And 
let  us  remember  to  begin  with  that  poein  means  "  to 
make  "  and  poesis  "  making."  The  passage  then  becomes  : 

"  Epos-making  and  the  making  of  tragedy,  also  comedy 
and  dithyramb-making  and  most  fluting  and  harping,  in 
their  general  conception,  are  as  a  matter  of  fact  (not  makings 
but)  imitations." 

The  thought  seems  to  me  to  become  much  clearer.  A  poet, 
or  maker,  who  makes  a  Sack  of  Troy  or  a  Marriage  of  Peleus 
does  not  make  a  real  Sack  or  a  real  Marriage,  he  makes  an 
imitation  Sack  or  Marriage,  just  as  a  painter  when  he 
"  paints  Pericles  "  does  not  make  a  real  Pericles  but  an 
imitation  or  picture  of  Pericles,  It  perhaps  troubles  us 
for  a  moment  when  Aristotle  says  the  painter  "  imitates 
Pericles  "  or  the  poet  "  imitates  the  Sack  of  Troy  "  in- 
stead of  saying  that  he  "  makes  imitations."  But  that  is 
a  mere  matter  of  idiom  :  a  maker  of  toy  soldiers  would 
be  said  in  Greek  "  to  imitate  soldiers  with  tin."  The 
point  is  that  the  artist  being  a  "  maker  "  does  make  some- 
thing, but  that  something  is  always  an  imitation. 

Let  me  illustrate  this  point  of  view  by  two  or  three  ex- 
amples. You  may  say  that  the  poet,  or  maker,  does  make 
one  perfectly  definite  and  real  thing  ;  he  makes  his  poem, 
or,  to  put  it  more  concretely,  his  verses.  Quite  true.  In 
Greek  you  can  say  equally  that  Homer  "  makes  hexameters  " 
or  "  makes  the  wrath  of  Achilles."  But  it  is  significant 
that  Aristotle  objects  to  what  he  calls  the  current  habit 


POESIS   AND   MIMESIS  109 

of  classing  poets  according  to  the  verses  they  make.  To 
call  them  "  hexameter-makers  "  or  "  iambic-makers  "  is 
a  shallow  and  unimportant  statement ;  they  must,  accord- 
ing to  him,  be  classed  as  "  makers  "  by  the  kind  of  thing 
they  imitate,  or  the  kind  of  imitation  they  make. 

Again,  why  does  Aristotle  repeatedly  and  emphatically 
say  that  the  most  imitative  of  all  Arts  is  Music,  and  (Pol. 
I34oa  18)  that  the  homoiomata  or  likenesses  produced  by 
music  are  most  exactly  like  the  originals,  for  example  the 
imitations  of  anger  or  mercy  or  courage  ?  It  seems  very 
odd  to  us  to  say  that  a  tune  is  more  like  anger  than  a  good 
portrait  of  Pericles  is  like  Pericles.  But  if  we  think  of  the 
musician  as  a  "  maker  "  making  imitation  "  anger  "  or 
imitation  "  love,"  surely  that  imitation  anger  or  love  which 
he  makes  in  a  sensitive  listener  is  most  extraordinarily 
like  the  real  emotion — more  closely  like  than  any  imitation 
produced  by  another  art  ?  Again,  following  this  clue  we 
can  see  why  Aristotle,  though  living  in  a  great  architectural 
age,  never  classes  architecture  among  the  imitative  arts 
which  with  him  are  equivalent  to  the  "  fine  arts."  The 
architect  makes  real  houses  or  real  temples ;  he  does  not 
make  imitations. 

I  hope  we  see  also  a  more  important  point :  that  it  is 
a  mere  error,  an  error  born  from  operating  with  imperfectly 
understood  texts,  when  critics  blame  Aristotle  for  not 
appreciating  the  "  creative  power  "  of  art.  So  far  from 
ignoring  it,  he  starts  with  it.  He  begins  by  calling  it  poesis, 
"  making  "  or  "  creation,"  and  then  goes  on  to  observe 
that  it  is  not  quite  like  ordinary  creation.  Nor  is  it.  It 
is  a  making  of  imitations. 

Let  us  follow  him  a  little  further.  What  objects  does 
his  poet  imitate  or  make  imitations  of  ?  "  Characters, 
emotions,  and  praxeis  " — how  shall  we  translate  the  last 
word  ?  Most  scholars  translate  "  actions,"  as  if  from  irparra), 
"  to  act."  But  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  Professor 
Margoliouth  is  right  in  taking  it  from  the  intransitive 
TTpdrra),  "  to  fare,"  though  in  that  case  we  have  no  exact 
noun  to  translate  it  by.  Poetry  shows  the  "  farings  "  of 
people,  how  they  fare  well  or  ill.  It  is  not  confined  to 
showing  "  actions." 


110  POESIS   AND  MIMESIS 

Poetry  differs  from  history  in  that  history  makes 
imitations  of  what  did  happen,  and  poetry  of  what 
might  happen.  Which  difference  makes  poetry  deeper 
and  more  philosophic  than  history.  And  lastly  there 
is  a  great  difference  between  tragedy,  epic  and  high 
poetry  on  the  one  hand,  and  comedy,  satire  and 
low  poetry  on  the  other,  that  "  makers "  in  the  high 
style  make  better  people  than  ourselves,  and  makers  in 
the  low  style  make  worse  people.  This  causes  a  difficulty 
to  some  readers.  They  do  not  admit  that  Milton's  Satan, 
Shakespeare's  Macbeth,  Aeschylus's  Clytemnestra  are 
"  better  "  than  the  average  man.  For  my  own  part  I 
feel  no  difficulty  in  regarding  them  all  as  my  betters.  If 
I  met  them  I  should  certainly  feel  small  and  respectful. 
But  it  seems  as  if  in  our  language  the  word  for  "  good  " 
had  become  more  sharply  moralized  than  its  Greek  equiva- 
lents, and  perhaps  one  ought  to  say  instead  of  "  better," 
"  higher  "  or  "  greater." 

Poetry,  then,  creates  a  sort  of  imitation  world,  a  world 
of  characters,  passions  and  "  ways  of  faring,"  which  may 
be  indefinitely  "  better  "  than  those  we  know,  as  well  as 
worse ;  its  details  need  not  be  imitations  of  any  particular 
things  that  ever  existed,  but  are  so  far  limited  by  the  existing 
world  that  they  ought  to  present  "  things  that  might 
exist  "  or,  as  Aristotle  explains  it  in  another  passage, "  things 
that  look  as  if  they  might  exist."  (We  might  add,  if  it 
were  necessary,  that  for  psychological  reasons  the  subjects 
of  poetry  must  be  in  some  sense  taken  from  the  real  world, 
because  there  is  no  other  place  from  which  to  take  them.) 
And  the  value  to  us  of  this  imitation  world  according  to 
Aristotle  is  simply  that  we  contemplate  it  with  delight ; 
though  almost  every  other  Greek  writer  lays  more  stress 
on  a  further  claim,  that  this  contemplation  makes  us 
better  men. 

If  I  have  made  clear  this  Aristotelian  conception  of 
poetry  I  should  like  to  compare  it  with  the  famous  claim 
made  by  Matthew  Arnold  in  his  Essay  on  the  Study  of 
Poetry,  published  in  1880  as  a  general  introduction  to 
Ward's  English  Poets.  He  there  argues  that  the  chief 
function  of  poetry  is  the  criticism  of  life. 


POESIS  AND  MIMESIS  111 

"  Our  religion,"  he  says,  "  parading  evidences  such  as 
those  on  which  the  popular  mind  relies  now  ;  our  philosophy, 
pluming  itself  on  its  reasonings  about  causation  and  finite  and 
infinite  being  :  what  are  they  but  the  shadows  and  dreams 
and  false  show  of  knowledge  ?  The  day  will  come  when  we 
shall  wonder  at  ourselves  for  having  trusted  to  them,  for 
having  taken  them  seriously ;  and  the  more  we  perceive 
their  hollowness,  the  more  we  shall  prize  the  '  breath  and 
finer  spirit  of  knowledge  offered  to  us  by  poetry.'  .  .  . 
'  More  and  more  mankind  will  discover  that  we  have  to 
turn  to  poetry  to  interpret  life  for  us,  to  console  us,  to  sus- 
tain us.' '  And  a  little  further  on,  "  The  consolation  and 
the  stay  will  be  of  power  in  proportion  to  the  power  of  the 
criticism  of  life." 

Poetry  as  the  creation  of  an  imitation  world  and  poetry  as 
the  criticism  of  life  :  how  are  the  two  conceptions  related 
to  one  another  ?  Are  they  contradictory  or  compatible  ? 
They  are  quite  compatible,  I  think.  They  differ  only 
in  their  points  of  emphasis  or  their  angle  of  vision.  For 
to  make  an  imitation  of  "  characters,  passions  and  ways 
of  faring  "  necessarily  implies  a  criticism  upon  life,  inas- 
much as  the  imitator  must  select  the  things  that  strike 
him  as  most  interesting  and  characteristic  and  must  say 
something  about  them.  The  chief  difference  between 
Aristotle  and  Matthew  Arnold  is  a  difference  about  the 
true  purpose  of  poetry,  and  curiously  enough  in  this  con- 
troversy almost  all  our  Greek  authorities  are  on  the  side 
of  Matthew  Arnold  and  almost  all  our  modern  critics 
loudly  agree  with  Aristotle.  Aristotle  says  the  aim  of 
poetry  is  to  give  delight ;  Arnold  says  it  is  to  help  us  to 
live  better.  I  will  not  dwell  on  this  difference.  It  too 
is  only  a  difference  of  emphasis,  for  Arnold  expressly  admits 
the  element  of  mere  delight  as  one  of  the  aims  of  poetry, 
and  Aristotle's  own  Hymn  to  Virtue  might  have  been 
written  to  illustrate  Arnold's  doctrine.  It  is  a  lyric  of 
considerable  beauty  and  charm,  but  the  whole  weight  of 
its  effort  is  in  the  direction  that  Arnold  requires.  It  seeks 
to  draw  from  the  world  of  poetry  help  for  mankind  in  the 
heavy  task  of  living.  If  I  had  to  suggest  in  a  few  words 
the  reason  why  Arnold  demands  so  much  from  poetry  and 


112  POESIS  AND  MIMESIS 

Aristotle  so  little,  I  would  point  out  that  the  modern  writer 
expressly  begins  by  saying  that  our  religion  and  philosophy 
have  failed  us,  and  therefore  we  must  go  to  Poetry  for 
the  things  which  they  have  promised  but  not  provided, 
while  Aristotle  was  remarkably  well  furnished  both  with 
Ethics  and  with  Metaphysics.     If  Aristotle  ever  felt  "  weary 
of  himself  and  sick  of  asking,"  he  never  thought  of  going 
to  Homer  and  Hesiod  for  his  answer.     He  went  to  them 
for    poetry    and    for    story-telling.     Arnold's    generation, 
being  poorly  off  for  religious  belief  and  almost  beggared  in 
philosophy,  tended  to  put  on  to  poetry  all  the  work  that 
ought  to  be  done  by  those  defaulting  Muses ;  while  on 
the  other  hand  Aristotle,  being  almost  destitute  of  prose 
fiction,  where  we  roll  and  roll  in  inexhaustible  and  stifling 
abundance,   makes  poetry  take  the  place  of  the  novel. 
The  result  is  that  Aristotle  treats  poetry  as  the  natural 
vehicle  for  story-telling,  while  we  are  always  demanding 
of  it  doctrines  about  psychology  and  the  art  of  life.    And 
consequently    we    are    establishing    a    new    conventional 
canon  of  what  is  poetical  and  what  not.     It  is  very  significant, 
for  instance,  that  when  Aristotle  wants  to  give  an  instance 
of  a  work  in  metre  which  is  so  essentially  prosaic  in  character 
that  it  cannot  be  called  poetry,  he  chooses  the  philosophic 
poem  of  Empedocles  ;  whereas  almost  every  English  reader 
who  comes  across  Empedocles  feels  his  breath  catch  at 
the  sheer  beauty  of  the  poetry.     On  the  other  hand  there 
were  probably  many  narrative  poems  which  entirely  pleased 
Aristotle  but  would  instantly  strike  a  modern  critic  as 
the  sort  of  thing  that  would  be  better  in  prose.     Every 
generation  has  its  blind  spots. 

Let  us  notice  how  the  elements  of  criticism  and  mimesis 
vary  in  degree  in  different  poems.  And  first  of  all  let  us 
consider  whether  a  perfectly  direct  practical  criticism  of 
life  can  be  poetry.  Some  people  deny  it,  but  I  think 
they  are  clearly  wrong.  It  has  certainly  been  felt  as  poetry 
in  past  ages.  The  Psalms  are  full  of  it.  So  are  the  Greek 
anthologies ;  and  the  passages  quoted  from  poets  in  anti- 
quity are  gnomce,  or  direct  criticisms  of  life,  more  often 
than  anything  else.  If  you  take  the  Essay  to  which  I 
have  referred  you  will  find  that  Matthew  Arnold  takes  a 


POESIS  AND  MIMESIS  113 

number  of  lines  from  Homer,  Milton,  Dante  and  Shakespeare 
as  typical  of  the  very  highest  poetry  and  capable  of  acting 
as  touchstones  of  criticism.  Nearly  all  of  them  are  direct 
criticisms  of  life,  and  suggestions  for  living.  But  let  us 
clinch  the  matter.  Take  one  of  the  greatest  and  best 
known  of  modern  sonnets : 


The  World  is  too  much  with  us  ;    late  and  soon, 
Getting  and  spending,  we  lay  waste  our  powers  : 
Little  we  see  in  nature  that  is  ours  ; 

We  have  given  our  hearts  away,  a  sordid  boon. 

This  sea  that  bares  her  bosom  to  the  moon, 
The  winds  that  will  be  howling  at  all  hours 
And  are  upgathered  now,  like  sleeping  flowers, 

For  this,  for  everything,  we  are  out  of  tune. 

It  moves  us  not.     Great  God,  I'd  rather  be 
A  Pagan,  suckled  in  a  creed  outworn, 

So  might  I,  standing  on  this  pleasant  lea. 

Have  glimpses  that  would  make  me  less  forlorn, 

Catch  sight  of  Proteus  rising  from  the  sea, 
Or  hear  old  Triton  blow  his  wreathdd  horn  ! 


Perfectly  direct  criticism  and  advice,  yet  undoubtedly 
poetry. — I  wonder  if  doubt  will  be  felt  about  another 
passage  of  criticism,  in  a  style  now  out  of  fashion  : 


Know  then  thyself,  presume  not  God  to  scan  : 
The  proper  study  of  mankind  is  man  ; 
Placed  on  this  isthmus  of  the  middle  state, 
A  being  darkly  wise  and  rudely  great, 
With  too  much  knowledge  for  the  sceptic  side, 
With  too  much  weakness  for  the  Stoic's  pride, 
He  hangs  between,  in  doubt  to  move  or  rest, 
In  doubt  to  deem  himself  a  God  or  beast, 
In  doubt  his  mind  or  body  to  prefer, 
Born  but  to  die,  and  reasoning  but  to  err ; 
Alike  in  ignorance,  his  nature  such, 
Whether  he  thinks  too  little  or  too  much  ; 
Chaos  of  thought  and  feeling  all  confused. 
Still  by  himself  abused — and  disabused, 
Created  half  to  rise  and  half  to  fall, 
Great  Lord  of  all  things,  yet  a  prey  to  all : 
Sole  judge  of  truth,  through  endless  error  hurled, 
The  glory,  jest,  and  riddle,  of  the  world  ! 
8 


114  POESIS  AND  MIMESIS 

Unless  we  are  to  interpret  the  word  "  poetry  "  in  some 
esoteric  sense  of  our  own,  I  do  not  see  how  we  can  doubt 
that  this  too  is  poetry.  If  people  now  are  bored  by  it,  or 
see  nothing  in  it,  I  do  not  think  I  should  draw  the  moral 
that  this  is  not  poetry ;  I  should  prefer  to  conclude,  with 
all  deference,  that  the  Lord  had  made  the  heart  of  this 
people  fat  and  made  their  ears  heavy,  and  shut  their  eyes 
lest  they  turn  again  and  be  healed.  However,  if  people 
do  reject  it  from  the  range  of  poetry,  it  will  not  be  because 
it  is  criticism.  It  is  criticism  just  as  much  as  the  Words- 
worth sonnet  and  no  more.  But  the  burden  of  its  criticism 
is  different.  Wordsworth  criticizes  life  for  not  being  more 
permeated  by  the  spiritual  imagination;  Pope  criticizes 
man  as  being  such  a  frail  thing,  contradictory  and  uncertain. 
Wordsworth's  remedy  is  to  live  with  more  imagination 
and  reverie ;  Pope's  remedy  is  prudence  and  moderation, 
Sophrosyne  and  MijSev  ayav,  that  rule  which  seemed  to  the 
ancients  to  lie  near  the  heart  of  poetry  and  to  most  people 
now  appears  only  suitable  to  prose. 

Next,  in  this  poetry  of  direct  criticism,  is  there  any 
imaginative  creation  ?  Do  these  two  poems,  in  Aristotle's 
phrase,  "  imitate  "  anything  at  all  ?  I  think  they  do. 
Pope's  man  is  a  real  picture.  We  can  ask,  "  Is  that  like 
the  men  we  know  ?  "  And  Wordsworth's  world,  and  his 
life  that  would  be  so  different  if  the  world  did  not  interrupt 
it,  are  imitations  in  the  Greek  sense.  Still  these  two 
poems  seem  to  give  a  maximum  of  criticism  and  a  minimum 
of  mimesis. 

Direct  criticism  is  one  pole  and  mere  mimesis  the  opposite 
pole;  poetry  ranges  from  one  to  the  other,  while  some  of 
the  greatest  poetry  combines  both.  Some  of  the  greatest 
creators  are  also  the  most  vehement  critics.  Among  the 
moderns  Shelley  in  his  larger  efforts  lives  habitually  in  a 
world  of  vision  and  can  scarcely  breathe  at  peace  except 
in  its  atmosphere ;  yet  he  is  always  bringing  it  into  com- 
petition with  the  real  world ;  insisting  that  it  is  in  fact 
what  this  actual  world  ought  to  be  and  is  trying  to  be,  and 
is,  perhaps,  even  now  on  the  verge  of  becoming.  Among 
the  ancients  Aeschylus  and  Euripides  are  both  magical 
creators  and  earnest  critics.  I  can  hardly  imagine  a  more 


POESIS  AND  MIMESIS  ^  115 

profound  criticism  of  life  than  the  Oresteia  or  one  more 
poignant  than  the  Trojan  Women.  Yet  both  move  in 
the  realms  of  inspired  lyrical  mimesis.  The  Homeric  poets 
make  a  world  extraordinarily  consistent  and  alive  ;  people 
may  differ  about  the  amount  of  deliberate  criticism  of 
this  world  which  it  contains,  but  for  my  own  part  I  agree 
with  the  common  Greek  opinion  that  it  is  a  great  deal. 
About  Milton  I  am  less  clear.  The  power  of  creative  mimesis 
is  tremendous ;  and  we  know  from  the  rest  of  Milton's 
work  that  he  was  a  copious  and  somewhat  opinionated 
critic.  But  my  own  feeling  is  that,  in  the  main,  his  imagined 
world  is  almost  nothing  to  him  but  a  place  of  beauty, 
a  sanctuary  and  an  escape.  Virgil  is  a  great  and  profound 
critic.  His  consummate  poetical  power  is  curiously  little 
dependent  on  any  gift  of  mere  mimesis.  If  we  seek  examples 
of  almost  unmixed  mimesis  we  shall  look  to  those  poets 
who  have  created  great  imitation  worlds  with  a  coherence 
and  a  character  of  their  own.  I  think  we  must  also  say, 
with  a  wide  range  of  territory  and  a  large  population. 
William  Morris  and  Spenser  and  Chaucer  among  modern 
English  writers  are  the  names  that  occur  at  once  ;  creators 
of  large  worlds  of  phantasy  with  very  little  element  of 
criticism,  except  that  which  is  implicit  in  every  act  of 
selection. 

But  the  type  and  prophet  of  this  uncritical  mimesis, 
I  would  almost  call  him  the  martyr  of  this  faith  ;  a  man 
who  seems  hardly  to  have  lived  at  all  except  in  the  world 
of  his  imagination  ;  who  tells  us  that  even  as  a  boy  he 
could  scarcely  speak  without  falling  into  verse ;  who  sprang 
straight  to  a  perfection  of  form  which  remained  the  un- 
challenged model  of  all  similar  poetry  for  centuries  after  ; 
who  poured  forth  his  imaginative  creations,  his  "  copies 
of  life,"  with  such  copiousness  that  the  poets  of  the  middle 
age  and  the  renaissance  went  to  him  as  to  an  inexhaustible 
quarry  from  which  to  build  their  houses  and  streets  and 
cities ;  a  man  of  unexampled  popularity  in  his  own  day 
and  of  almost  unexampled  influence  afterwards ;  Ovid 
is  one  towards  whom  the  present  generation  has  resolutely 
turned  its  blind  spot.  If  he  were  archaic,  or  uncouth,  or 
earnest,  or  nobly  striving  after  ideals  he  cannot  reach ; 


116  POESTS   AND   MIMESIS 

if  he  were  even  difficult  or  eccentric,  so  as  to  make  some 
claim  upon  us ;  we  should  doubtless  be  attracted  to  hi  m 
and  read  him  with  our  imaginations  alert.  But  he  does 
his  work  too  well,  he  asks  no  indulgence ;  he  is  neat  and 
swift  and  witty  and  does  not  need  our  help  ;  consequently 
we  have  no  use  for  him.  I  suspect  we  are  wrong.  "  My 
work  is  done,"  he  writes  at  the  end  of  the  Metamorphoses : 

My  work  is  done  :  which  not  the  All  Father's  ire 
Shall  sweep  to  nothingness,  not  steel,  nor  fire, 
Nor  eating  Time. — Come  when  thou  wilt,  O  Hour, 
Which  save  upon  my  body  hast  no  power, 
And  bring  to  its  end  this  frail  uncertainty 
That  men  call  life.     A  better  part  of  me 
Above  the  stars  eternal  shall,  like  flame, 
Live,  and  no  death  prevail  against  my  name. 

He  was  a  poet  utterly  in  love  with  poetry  :  not  perhaps 
with  the  soul  of  poetry — to  be  in  love  with  souls  is  a  feeble 
and  somewhat  morbid  condition — but  with  the  real  face 
and  voice  and  body  and  clothes  and  accessories  of  poetry. 
He  loved  the  actual  technique  of  the  verse,  but  of  that 
later.  He  loved  most  the  whole  world  of  mimesis  which 
he  made.  We  hear  that  he  was  apprenticed  to  the  law, 
but  wrote  verses  instead  of  speeches.  He  married  wives 
and  they  ran  away  or  died  and  he  married  others.  He  had 
a  daughter  and  adored  her,  and  taught  her  verses.  He 
was  always  in  love  and  never  with  anyone  in  particular. 
He  strikes  one  as  having  been  rather  innocent  and  almost 
entirely  useless  in  this  dull  world  which  he  had  not  made 
and  for  which  he  was  not  responsible,  while  he  moved 
triumphant  and  effective  through  his  own  inexhaustible 
realm  of  legend.  He  came  somehow  under  the  displeasure 
of  the  government,  and  by  a  peculiar  piece  of  cruelty  was 
sent  with  all  his  helpless  sweetness  and  sensuousness  and 
none  of  the  gifts  of  a  colonist,  to  live  in  exile  in  that  dreadful 
region 

Where  slow  Maeotis  crawls,  and  scarcely  flows 
The  frozen  Tanais  through  a  waste  of  snows. 

Where,  like   an  anodyne  for   a  gnawing  pain,  he  tried  to 
forget  himself  in  verses  and  yet  more  verses,  until  he  died. 


POESIS  AND  MIMESIS  117 

What  a  world  it  is  that  he  has  created  in  the  Metamor- 
phoses !  It  draws  its  denizens  from  all  the  boundless 
resources  of  Greek  mythology,  a  world  of  live  forests  and 
mountains  and  rivers,  in  whicE  every  plant  and  flower 
has  a  story,  and  nearly  always  a  love  story  ;  where  the 
moon  is  indeed  not  a  moon  but  an  orbed  maiden,  and  the 
Sunrise  weeps  because  she  is  still  young  and  her  beloved  is 
old  ;  and  the  stars  are  human  souls ;  and  the  Sun  sees 
human  virgins  in  the  depths  of  forests  and  almost  swoons 
at  their  beauty  and  pursues  them  ;  and  other  virgins,  who 
feel  in  the  same  way  about  him,  commit  great  sins  from 
jealousy  and  then  fling  themselves  on  the  ground  in  grief 
and  fix  their  eyes  on  him,  weeping  and  weeping  till  they 
waste  away  and  turn  into  flowers  ;  and  all  the  youths  and 
maidens  are  indescribably  beautiful  and  adventurous  and 
passionate,  though  not  well  brought  up,  and,  I  fear,  somewhat 
lacking  in  the  first  elements  of  self-control ;  and  they  all 
fall  in  love  with  each  other,  or,  failing  that,  with  fountains 
or  stars  or  trees  ;  and  are  always  met  by  enormous  obstacles, 
and  are  liable  to  commit  crimes  and  cause  tragedies,  but 
always  forgive  each  other,  or  else  die.  A  world  of  wonder- 
ful children  where  nobody  is  really  cross  or  wicked  except 
the  grown-ups ;  Juno,  for  instance,  and  people's  parents, 
and  of  course  a  certain  number  of  Furies  and  Witches. 
I  think  among  all  the  poets  who  take  rank  merely  as  story- 
tellers and  creators  of  mimic  worlds,  Ovid  still  stands 
supreme.  His  criticism  of  life  is  very  slight ;  it  is  the 
criticism  passed  by  a  child,  playing  alone  and  peopling  the 
summer  evening  with  delightful  shapes,  upon  the  stupid 
nurse  who  drags  it  off  to  bed.  And  that  too  is  a  criticism 
that  deserves  attention. 

We  have  spoken  of  one  side  of  Poetry  ;  the  side  particu- 
larly meant  by  Aristotle  when  he  says  that  poets  are  only 
makers  "  by  imitation "  ;  makers,  that  is,  of  imitation 
persons  and  imitation  worlds,  which  may  or  may  not  involve 
criticism  upon  our  existing  life.  He  dissented,  we  remember, 
from  the  view  of  those  who  thought  that  a  poet  was  princi- 
pally a  maker  because  he  made  verses.  But  after  all  there 
is  obviously  something  in  their  view,  and  in  a  later  part 
of  the  Poetics  Aristotle  pays  a  good  deal  of  attention  to 


118  POESIS  AND  MIMESIS 

them.  There  is  something  which  a  poet  really  makes 
as  much  as  a  weaver  makes  his  cloth.  He  makes 
the  actual  texture  of  his  verses.  He  makes  his  own 
poems. 

Here  again  we  find  our  vision  full  of  blind  spots.     Some 
people  would  say  our  ears  deaf  to  particular  qualities  of 
sound.     Of   course   we    can    all   see    that    poetical   style 
develops  and  decays  in  various  countries.     In  England  the 
eighteenth-century  poets  learnt  to  write  much   smoother 
heroic  couplets  than  Shakespeare  or  Ben  Jonson  could 
write,  while  they  lost  much  of  the  art  of  writing  blank 
verse ;    Dryden  in  the  Ode  on  St.  Cecilia's  Day  achieved 
effects  which  were  thought  remarkable  at  the  time  but 
would  have  argued  mere  incompetence  in  any  writer  later 
than  1820.     We  have  seen  many  changes  of  technique  in 
our  own  day.    That  is  all  obvious.     But  the  point  that 
I  wish  now  to  illustrate  is  the  extraordinary  diversity  of 
style  and  of  aim  which  results  naturally  from  the  use  of 
different  languages.     Words  are  the  bricks  or  stones  with 
which  you  build.    And  Latin  words,  Greek  words,  French 
words,  English  words,  have  to  be  used  in  very  different 
ways,  and  each  language  has  its  own  special  effects.     The 
English  can  do  trisyllabic  and  even  quadrisyllable  metres, 
it  seems  to  me,  incomparably  better  than  other  modern 
nations.    A  poem  like   Swinburne's  Dolores  is   probably 
impossible  in  any  European  language  but  its  own ;    still 
more  so  the  extraordinary  beauty  and  exactitude  of  "By 
the  waters  of  Babylon  we  sat  down  and  wept."     I  think 
the  cause  of  this  great  advantage  is  twofold ;    first,  we 
have  a  very  marked  and  clear  system  of  stress  accents, 
and  secondly,  our  culture  has  been  largely  in  the  hands  of 
people  who  knew  and  even  wrote  Latin  and  Greek  verse. 
French  has  no  system  of  stress  accents  except  the  slightly 
iambic  rhythm  which  pervades  every  sentence,  whatever 
the  words  may  be.     Consequently  French  is  almost  incap- 
able of  any  purely  metrical  beauty.     German  has  a  stress 
accent  like  ours,  but,  if  my  ear  is  to  be  trusted,  it  has  scarcely 
attempted  the  finest  lyrical  effects  of  English  verse.     On 
the  other  hand  we  cannot  approach  the  effects  produced 
in  French  verse  by  their  wonderful  diphthongs  and  nasals 


POESIS  AND  MIMESIS  119 

and  long  syllables.  Our  wretched  indeterminate  vowel, 
our  tendency  to  pronounce  clearly  only  one  syllable  in 
every  polysyllabic  word  or  word-group,  cuts  us  off  from 
such  effects  as 

Comme  c'est  triste  voir  s'enfuir  les  hirondelles  : 
or 

Puisque  j'ai  vu  tomber  dans  1'onde  de  ma  vie 
Une  feuille  de  rose  arrachee  i  tes  jours. 

A  language  wliich  talks  of  "  Jezebel "  as  "  Jezzuble  " 
cannot  produce  the  same  effects  as  one  which  says  "  Je-za- 
bel  "  with  each  syllable  distinct :  Et  venger  Athalie  Achab 
et  Jfoabel. 

But  the  point  which  I  wish  specially  to  illustrate  is,  I 
think,  another  of  our  blind  spots :  the  special  style  pro- 
duced in  Latin  poetry — it  is  less  marked  in  Greek — by  the 
necessities  of  the  language  and  the  metre.  I  assume  that 
to-day  nearly  all  intelligent  young  men  and  women  despise 
Latin  poetry  and  think  of  its  characteristics  as  somewhat 
odious  and  markedly  unpoetical.  And  I  would  begin 
by  recalling  that  all  through  the  middle  ages  and  the  re- 
naissance, down  to  the  later  part  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
Latin  poetry  was  the  central  type  and  model  of  all  poetry. 
When  you  spoke  of  poetry  you  meant  first  and  foremost 
the  Latin  poets.  It  gives  us  a  shock  when  Marlow  (whom 
we  respect)  in  the  most  tragic  moment  of  Dr.  Faustus 
makes  his  hero  quote  Ovid  (whom  we  despise),  and  we 
hardly  notice  the  passionate  beauty  of  the  Une — slightly 
altered — which  he  quotes  : — 

O  lente  lente  currite,  noctis  equi ! 

But  Marlow  was  doing  the  natural  thing.  Ovid  was  to 
him  what  he  was  to  his  predecessors  and  contemporaries 
and  followers.  It  is  we  who  are  odd. 

Let  me,  if  I  can,  try  to  describe  the  beauty  which  our 
ancestors  found  in  the  conventional  Latin  style.  It  is 
a  beauty  entirely  dependent  on  the  inflectional  character 
of  the  language ;  we  speakers  of  an  uninflected  language 


120  POESIS  AND   MIMESIS 

are  shut  off  from  it.  We  express  the  relations  of  our  words 
to  one  another  not  by  inflections  but  by  their  order  in  the 
sentence.  Consequently  we  are  tied  up  to  one  everlasting 
cast-iron  order  of  words,  and  all  those  innumerable  delicate 
beauties  which  Latin  and  Greek  find  in  the  order  of  their 
words  in  the  sentence  are  debarred  to  us.  The  difference 
is  heightened  by  the  respective  treatment  of  metre  in  ancient 
and  modern  tongues.  Their  metres  were  very  marked. 
They  were  a  delight  in  themselves  and  had  rules  which  a 
poet  never  broke.  Our  metres  are  mostly  inconspicuous : 
as  a  rule  they  are  only  types  to  which  we  approximate 
with  as  much  or  as  little  exactitude  as  we  find  convenient. 
Our  poetry  is  apt  to  slip  out  like  a  stream  of  wet  mud  or 
concrete  ;  theirs  was  built  and  fitted,  chip  by  chip,  block 
by  block,  of  hard  marble. 

Take  an  average  Ovidian  couplet  :  the  first  two  lines 
of  one  of  the  Heroides,  imaginary  letters  written  by 
legendary  damsels  to  absent  lovers.  This  is  Phyllis,  a 
princess  of  the  wild  Thracian  mountains,  writing  to 
Demophoon  of  Athens. 

Hospita,  Demophoon,  tua  te  Rhodopeia  Phyllis, 
Ultra  promissum  tempus  abesse  queror. 

"  I,  Phyllis  of  Rhodope',  O  Demophoon,  your  late 
hostess,  complain  that  you  are  absent  beyond  the  time 
promised."  That  I  flatter  myself  is  a  blameless  trans- 
lation. Not  a  single  iota  of  poetry  or  of  character  either 
is  left  in  it. 

Now  let  us  try  to  see  what  we  have  left  out,  and  to  conceive 
the  effect  of  the  order  of  the  words  in  Latin.  "  Hospita  " 
first :  it  is  the  feminine  of  "  stranger,"  "  strange  woman." 
Demophoon  opens  the  letter  and  the  first  word  is  "  The 
strange  woman."  What  strange  woman  will  it  be  ?  The 
next  word  is  merely  the  vocative  "  O  Demophoon  "  ;  then 
"  tua  te,"  "  thine  to  thee  "  or  strictly  "  thine  thee,"  the 
"  thee  "  being  object  to  the  verb.  Why  cannot  we  say, 
"  thine  to  thee  ?  "  Are  not  the  words  sudden  and  poignant  ? 
Then  follows  the  name,  Rhodopeia  Phyllis  ;  Phyllis,  "  She 
of  the  Phylla  or  waving  leaves,"  Rhodopeia,  from  the 
mountains  of  Rhodopc  ;  all  the  magic  of  old  Greek  romance 


POESIS  AND   MIMESIS  121 

and  much  of  the  music  comes  with  those  two  words.  The 
mountains  and  the  forest  leaves  and  she  who  is  his  own  : 
How  does  the  sentence  go  on  ?  Ultra  promissum — long 
syllable  after  long  syllable,  quite  naturally  and  not  with 
any  strain,  adding  to  the  words  "  beyond  the  promised 
time  "  a  slow  ache  and  a  sense  of  long  waiting.  Then 
simply  "  abesse  queror,"  "  you  are  absent,  and  I  complain." 

Hospita,  DemophoAn,  tua  te  RhodopSia  Phyllis, 
Ultra  promissum  tempus  abesse  queror. 

That  is  Poesis.  That  is  the  way  to  build  your  line  if  you 
work  in  an  inflected  language. 

It  seems  then  as  if  this  theory,  not  explicitly  Aristotle's 
but  implicit  in  his  language  and  based  upon  it,  will  practi- 
cally work  as  a  description  of  the  function  of  Poetry,  and 
of  the  other  arts  which  Aristotle  groups  with  poetry.  It 
is  Pofisis,  a  Making,  but  in  one  large  respect  the  Poe"sis 
is  Mimfisis,  so  that  poetry  is  Poesis  plus  Mimesis,  a  making 
or  manufacture  based  upon  an  imitation.  And  it  can  be 
judged  in  two  ways  :  either  by  the  skill  shown  in  the  making, 
the  beauty  of  texture,  the  quality  and  shape  of  the  stones 
chosen  and  the  way  in  which  they  are  laid  together  in  the 
architecture  ;  or  else  by  the  sort  of  things  which  the  poet 
has  selected  out  of  the  infinite  and  all-coloured  world  in 
order  to  make  his  imitation.  Of  course  the  two  proceed 
quickly  to  run  together  in  practice.  The  subject  of  any 
poem  is  very  hard  to  separate  from  its  style  ;  for  every 
change  of  a  word  or  phrase,  which  is  a  change  in  style, 
alters  in  some  degree  the  whole  mimesis,  which  is  the 
subject ;  and  suggestions  that  you  can  express  a  noble 
thought  in  ignoble  language  or  vice  versa  are  open  to  the 
same  difficulties  as  the  idea  that  you  can  express  a  clear 
thought  in  muddled  language  or  a  confused  thought  in 
lucid  language.  I  do  not  wish  to  raise  these  speculative 
questions.  But  I  do  venture  to  suggest  that  the  concep- 
tion of  Art  as  mimesis,  though  rejected  by  almost  all  recent 
critics,  has  a  justification  and  may  even  show  a  real  profun- 
dity of  insight.  Mimesis  is,  I  suspect,  not  only  an  essential 
clement  in  all  art,  but  also  our  greatest  weapon  both  for 
explaining  and  for  understanding  the  world. 


122  POESIS   AND  MIMESIS 

For  these  purposes  the  choice  lies  between  mimesis  and 
definition ;  on  the  one  hand  the  instinctive  comprehensive 
method  of  art,  the  attempt  to  understand  a  thing  by  making 
it,  to  learn  a  thing  by  doing  it,  and  on  the  other  the  more 
exact  but  much  narrower  method  of  intellectual  analysis, 
definition  and  proposition.  Each  has  its  proper  sphere. 
Mimesis  is  not  much  use  in  mathematics  or  scientific  dis- 
covery, except  in  the  form  of  diagrams.  But  if  a  mere 
"  grammaticus "  may  learn  by  looking  on  at  the  august 
battles  of  philosophers,  I  observe  that  some  of  these  are  now 
saying  that  the  greatest  advance  made  during  the  last  cen- 
tury has  been  the  discovery  that  there  are  degrees  in  truth. 
Others  of  course  maintain  that  any  given  proposition  is 
either  true  or  false  and  that  there  are  no  degrees  possible. 
It  is  not  a  bit  "  more  true  "  to  say  that  7  x  7  =  48  than 
to  say  that  it  equals  a  million.  Now  I  speak  under 
correction,  but  it  seems  probable  that  the  belief  in  degrees 
of  truth  implies  a  belief  in  mimesis  rather  than  definition 
or  assertion  as  the  best  method  for  expressing,  and  doubt- 
less also  for  reaching,  truth.  The  mimesis  is  never  exact ; 
it  is  always  more  or  less  adequate,  more  or  less  complete. 
It  is  essentially  a  thing  of  degrees.  And  its  advantage 
over  the  intellectual  method  of  definition  or  proposition 
is  merely  that  it  is  much  more  fruitful  and  solid  and  adequate 
and  easily  transmitted ;  its  disadvantage  that  it  is  more 
elusive,  deceptive  and  incapable  of  verification.  But  I 
think  it  is  true  of  all  art  and  of  all  human  conduct,  though 
not  true  of  purely  scientific  facts,  that  the  best  way  to 
understand  them  is  in  some  sense  or  other  to  go  and  do 
likewise. 

My  friend  and  colleague  Dr.  Geoffrey  Smith,  killed  on 
the  Somme,  held  a  view  about  human  progress  which  I 
wish  he  had  lived  to  express  with  the  exactitude  and  great 
knowledge  which  belonged  to  him.  It  was,  as  I  understood 
him,  that  in  the  biological  or  physiological  sense  Man  had 
not  made  any  advance  worth  speaking  of  since  the  earliest 
times  known  to  us ;  but  that  our  ancestors,  from  their 
arboreal  days  onward,  stood  out  from  all  other  animals 
by  their  extraordinary  power  of  mimesis.  When  they 
met  with  a  sort  of  conduct  which  they  liked,  they  had  the 


POESIS  AND  MIMESIS  123 

power  of  imitating  it,  and  of   course  also  the  power  of 
selecting  for  imitation  the  particular  elements  in  it  that 
appealed  to  them  most.     Sometimes  they  imitated  badly 
and  chose  the  wrong  things ;    sometimes  they  seem,  like 
our  poor  relations  in  the  Zoological  Gardens  to-day,  to 
have  imitated  without  any  coherent  plan  or  choice  at  all. 
But  on  the  whole  there  has  been  a  coherence  in  the  main 
stream  of  human  mimesis ;    we  have  imitated  the  things 
we  admired,  and  our  admirations  have  developed  further 
on  more  or  less  similar  lines.     We  have  formed  ideals,  and 
our  ideals  have  guided  us.     It  is  this  power  of  idealism, 
this  curious  power  of  seeing  what  we  like  or  admire  and 
then  trying  to  imitate  it ;  seeing  things  that  were  beautiful 
and  trying  to  make  others  like  them ;    seeing  things  that 
roused  interest  or  curiosity  and  trying  by  the  mimetic 
imagination   to  get  inside  them  and   understand  them  ; 
that  has  been  the  great  guiding  force  in  the  upward  move- 
ment of  humanity.     The  direction  we  take  depends  on 
the  things  we  choose  to  imitate ;   and  the  choice  depends 
on  the  sort  of  persons  we  really  are  :    and  what  we  are, 
again,  depends  on  what  we  choose  to  imitate.     By  mimesis 
we  make  both  ourselves  and  the  world.     The  whole  art  of 
behaviour,  or  conduct  itself,  is  a  poesis  which  is  also  a 
mimesis.    For  every  act  we  perform  is  a  new  thing  made, 
a  new  creation,  which  has  never  been  seen  on  earth  before  ; 
and  yet  each  one  is  an  imitation  of  some  model  and  an 
effort  after  some  aim.     And  thus  we  proceed,  so  far  as  our 
life  is  voluntary  and  not  mechanical,  towards  an  end  which 
can  never  be  attained  and  is  always  changing  as  we  change, 
but  which  is  in  its  essence  the  thing  which  at  each  successive 
moment  we  most  want  to  be.     We  cannot  define  it  more. 
"  Infinite  beauty  in  art,  infinite  understanding  in  know- 
ledge, infinite  righteousness  in  conduct "...  such  words 
all   ring   false   because   they  are   premature   or   obsolete 
attempts  to  define,  and  even  to  direct,  wants  that  are  often 
still  subconscious,  still  unformed,  still  secret,  and  which 
are  bearing  us  in  directions  and  towards  ends  of  aspiration 
which  will  doubtless  be  susceptible  of  analysis  and  classi- 
fication when  we  and  they  are  things  of  the  past,  but  which 
for  the  present  are  all  to  a  large  extent  experiment,  explora- 


124  POESIS  AND  MIMESIS 

tion,  and  even  mystery.  But  we  can  be  sure  with  Plato  that 
the  two  things  that  determine  the  way  of  life  for  each  one 
of  us  are,  as  he  puts  it,  "  The  road  of  our  longing  and  the 
quality  of  our  soul  "  (Laws  X.,  p.  904^.  That  is  our 
Mimesis  and  our  Poesis,  our  choice  of  subject  and  our 
execution. 


VI 
LITERATURE   AS    REVELATION' 

THE  first  time  I  met  Dr.  Spence  Watson  and  heard 
him  speak  was  at  a  great  meeting  in  the  St.  James's 
Hall,  London,  held  to  congratulate  the  Irish 
leader,  Parnell,  on  the  collapse  of  the  criminal  charges 
made  against  him  by  The  Times  newspaper.  Some  of  you 
will  remember  the  occasion.  The  charges  were  based  on 
certain  letters  which  The  Times  published  in  facsimile  and 
scattered  broadcast  over  England.  These  were  shown  to 
be  forgeries  which  The  Times  had  bought  at  a  very  high 
price ;  the  forger  himself,  a  man  called  Pigott,  was  dis- 
covered and  convicted ;  he  confessed  and  fled  and  blew 
his  brains  out.  The  whole  situation  was  intensely  dramatic 
— as  well  as  extremely  instructive.  The  meeting,  addressed 
by  Parnell  himself  and  by  two  famous  Newcastle  men, 
Dr.  Spence  Watson  and  Mr.  John  Morley,  was  one  of  the 
most  thrilling  I  have  ever  attended.  And  I  remember 
still  how  Dr.  Spence  Watson's  short  speech  ended  in  a 
ringing  call  of  "  God  save  Ireland." 

There  are  some  people  to  whom  politics  seem  a  kind  of 
magnificent  game,  a  game  of  much  skill  and  of  not  much 
scruple.  There  are  some  again  who  regard  political  life 
as  a  kind  of  arena  in  which  different  parties  and  different 
classes  and  different  trading  corporations  struggle  and 
intrigue  for  their  respective  interests.  But  to  those  two 
men  I  have  mentioned  politics  formed  neither  a  pleasant 
game  nor  an  exciting  intrigue,  far  less  an  indirect  way  of 
pursuing  your  own  interest.  To  them  politics  came  as 

1  The  Robert  Spence  Watson  Lecture,  delivered  to  the  Literary  and 
Philosophical  Society  of  Newcastle-upon-Tyne,  October  i,  1917. 

185 


126  LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION 

a  revelation  and  a  duty.  They  saw,  or  believed  they 
saw,  one  or  two  fundamental  truths  on  which  the  whole 
life  and  moral  of  the  nation  depended ;  and,  those  truths 
once  seen,  it  became  an  unquestioned  duty,  through  fair 
weather  or  foul,  through  good  report  or  evil  report,  to 
pursue  them  and  to  live  for  them.  I  always  felt  with 
Dr.  Spence  Watson  that  his  political  principles  had  much 
of  the  quality  of  a  religion.  They  threw  light  all  round 
them  upon  the  non-political  parts  of  life ;  and,  though 
he  was  a  vigorous  fighter,  I  believe  that,  like  most  good 
religions,  his  strong  principles  rather  increased  than  lessened 
his  general  human  charity. 

It  was  the  thought  of  Dr.   Spence  Watson's  attitude 
towards  politics  that  suggested  to  me  the  subject  of  this 
lecture.     For,  though  the  parallel  is  not  exact  in  detail, 
there  are  among  lovers  of  literature,  as  among  lovers  of 
politics,  some  who  like  it  for  all  sorts  of  other  reasons, 
and  some  who  demand  of  it  nothing  less  than  a  kind  of 
revelation.    Most  people  of  culture,  I  believe,  belong  to 
the  first  class.    They  like  literature  because  they  like  to 
be  amused,  or  because  the  technique  of  expression  interests 
them  and  rouses  their  strongest  faculties,  or  because  a 
book  stands  to   them   for   society  and  conversation,   or 
because  they  just  happen  to  like  the  smell  and  feel  of  a 
book  and  the  gentle  exercise  of  cutting  pages  with  a  paper- 
knife.     Or  they  like  to  study  the  varieties  of  human  nature 
as  shown  in  books,  and  to  amass  the  curious  information 
that  is  to  be  found  there.     Those  are  the  really  cultured 
people.     You  will  find  that  they  like  Lamb's  Essays  and 
Lavengro,   and   Burton's   Anatomy,   and   Evelyn's   Diary, 
and  the  Religio  Medici,  and  the  Literary  Supplement.    And 
the  other  class — to  which  I  certainly  belonged  all  through 
my  youth  and  perhaps  on  the  whole  still  belong — does  not 
really  much  like  the  process  of  reading,  but  reads  because 
it  wants  to  get  somewhere,  to  discover  something,  to  find 
a  light  which  will  somehow  illumine  for  them  either  some 
question  of  the  moment  or  the  great  riddles  of  existence. 
I  believe  this  is  the  spirit  In  which  most  people  in  their 
youth  read  books  ;  and,  considering  their  disappointments, 
it  is  remarkable,  and  perhaps  not  altogether  discreditable, 


LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION  127 

how  often  they  cling  to  this  hope  far  on  into  the  region  of 
grey  hairs  or  worse  than  grey  hairs. 

Now,  in  putting  before  you  the  case  for  these  over- 
sanguine  or  over-youthful  people,  I  believe,  as  I  have 
said,  that  I  shall  have  the  persons  of  culture  and  the  con- 
noisseurs against  me  ;  but  the  artists  and  writers  themselves 
will  be  really  on  my  side.  Almost  all  the  writers — and 
they  are  pretty  numerous — whom  I  have  known  intimately 
are,  I  believe,  subject  to  a  secret  sadness  when  they  are 
praised  for  being  amusing  or  entertaining  or  readable  or 
the  like.  What  really  delights  them,  especially  the  novelists 
and  writers  of  light  comedy,  is  to  be  treated  as  teachers 
and  profound  thinkers.  Nobody  is  quite  content  to  think 
that  the  serious  business  of  his  own  life  makes  merely  the 
fringe  and  pastime  of  other  people's.  There  is  a  well- 
known  story  of  an  essay  written  on  the  poet  Keats  by  a 
stern  young  Nonconformist  at  a  certain  university,  in 
which  he  said  that  after  all  the  important  question  to  ask 
was  whether  Keats  had  ever  saved  a  soul.  He  answered 
it,  I  regret  to  say,  in  the  negative,  and  condemned  Keats 
accordingly.  Now  this  essayist  is  generally  ridiculed  by 
persons  of  culture  for  having  set  up  for  the  poor  poet  a 
perfectly  absurd  and  irrelevant  test.  "  Keats,"  says  the 
man  of  culture,  "  was  no  more  trying  to  save  souls  than 
to  improve  railway  locomotives.  He  was  simply  trying 
to  write  beautiful  poetry,  which  is  an  entirely  different 
thing." 

Now  I  do  not  believe  that  the  man  of  culture  is  right. 
I  suspect  that  the  young  Nonconformist  was  perfectly  cor- 
rect in  the  test  he  applied  ;  that  a  really  great  poet  ought 
to  save  souls  and  does  save  souls ;  and,  furthermore,  that 
he  will  not  be  at  all  grateful  to  you  if  you  tell  him  that 
souls  are  not  his  business,  and  he  can  leave  them  to  the 
parson.  I  think,  if  the  essayist  went  wrong — and  if  he 
concluded  that  Keats  was  a  bad  poet  I  take  it  as  certain 
that  he  did  go  wrong — it  was  partly  that  he  took  the  saving 
of  a  soul  in  too  narrow  and  theological  a  sense,  and  partly 
that  he  had  not  really  sunk  himself  deep  enough  into 
Keats's  thought  to  know  whether  he  could  save  a  soul 
or  not.  That  is,  in  the  first  place  I  would  have  asked  him 


128  LITERATURE  AS   REVELATION 

to  consider  whether  it  is  not  in  some  sense  "  saving  a  soul  " 
to  enable  a  living  man  to  rise  up  above  himself  and  his 
personal  desires,  and  to  see  beauty  and  wonder  in  places 
where  hitherto  he  had  seen  nothing  ;  in  the  second  place, 
I  would  have  asked  him  whether,  before  condemning  Keats, 
he  had  really  considered  and  really  understood  what  Keats 
meant  when,  for  example,  in  the  climax  of  one  of  his 
greatest  poems,  he  sums  up  the  message  to  mankind  of 
the  Grecian  Urn  : 

"  Beauty  is  truth,  truth  beauty," — that  is  all 
Ye  know  on  earth,  and  all  ye  need  to  know. 

I  do  not  say  that  that  message  is  true.  I  do  not  myself 
fully  understand  what  Keats  meant  by  it.  But  I  am  sure 
that  to  him,  and  to  many  people  who  learnt  it  from  him, 
that  thought  has  come  as  a  revelation. 

Let  me  speak  of  another  case  in  my  own  experience. 
I  remember  when  I  was  a  boy  of  fifteen  in  Paris,  sitting 
down  on  a  bench  in  the  garden  of  the  Tuileries  with  a 
copy  of  Rousseau's  book  on  the  Contrat  Social,  which  I 
had  just  bought  for  twopence-halfpenny.  I  knew  it  was 
a  celebrated  book,  and  sat  down  in  a  sober  mood  to  read 
it,  partly  from  a  sense  of  duty.  And  the  first  sentence 
of  the  first  chapter  ran  :  "  Man  was  born  free,  and  he  is 
everywhere  in  chains." 

"  Man  was  born  free,  and  he  is  everywhere  in  chains." 
I  remember  the  thrill  with  which  I  read  and  re-read  those 
words.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  I  quite  misunderstood  their 
place  in  Rousseau's  argument.  But  so  did  other  people, 
and  I  can  realize  now  the  thrill  with  which,  when  they 
were  first  published,  they  ran  through  Europe,  awakening, 
unforgettable,  stirring  the  seeds  of  fire  that  blazed  out  in 
the  Great  Revolution. 

Take  a  third  instance,  the  passage  in  Milton's  great 
pamphlet  pleading  for  the  freedom  of  the  Press,  where 
Milton  seems  gradually,  with  increasing  intensity,  to  realize 
what  a  book  really  at  its  best  is,  something  greater  than 
a  living  man  :  how  to  kill  a  man  is,  of  course,  a  sin.  It  is 
to  slay  God's  image  ;  but  to  kill  a  good  book  is  to  kill 
the  very  essence  of  a  man's  thought,  "  to  slay  God's  image, 


LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION  129 

as  it  were,  in  the  eye."  For  the  particular  man  is  but 
human  and  will  in  any  case  die  before  long  ;  "  but  a  good 
book  is  the  precious  life-blood  of  a  master-spirit,  treasured 
up  for  a  life  beyond  life."  When  you  take  in  your  hand, 
some  of  the  great  immortal  books  of  the  past,  how  that 
sentence  comes  back  to  your  mind  and  illumines  them  ! 
My  thoughts  turn  naturally  to  some  of  those  Greek  tragedies 
on  which  I  especially  work  ;  the  Agamemnon  of  Aeschylus, 
say,  or  the  Trojan  Women  of  Euripides.  What  is  it,  that 
one  should  read  it  and  re-read  it  now,  two  thousand  odd 
years  after  it  was  written  ?  What  is  it,  that  it  should 
still  have  the  power  to  stir  one's  whole  being  ?  That  is 
the  answer :  it  is  simply  what  Milton  has  said,  nothing 
more  and  nothing  less,  "  the  precious  life-blood  of  a  master- 
spirit, treasured  up  for  a  life  beyond  life." 

I  have  taken  three  instances  of  the  kind  of  writing 
that  has  an  element  of  what  I  venture  to  call  "  revelation," 
but  before  going  further  I  will  stop  to  answer  some  criti- 
cisms about  them.  In  the  first  place,  the  person  of  culture, 
to  whom  we  were  a  little  disagreeable  at  the  beginning  of 
this  lecture,  will  interpose.  "  You  appear,"  he  will  say, 
"to  be  basing  your  admiration  of  Keats  on  the  truth  of 
one  exceedingly  obscure  and  questionable  proposition 
about  Beauty  being  the  same  as  Truth.  Personally,  I  do 
not  care  a  straw  whether  it  is  true  or  not ;  I  only  care 
whether  it  is  suitable  in  its  place  in  the  poem  ;  but  even 
supposing  it  is  true,  it  is  only  one  tiny  fragment  of  Keats's 
work.  What  about  all  the  rest  of  his  work,  which,  to  his 
credit  be  it  said,  contains  hardly  any  of  these  dogmatic 
sentences  which  you  choose  to  describe  as  revelation  ? 
Is  Keats's  greatness  to  rest  on  the  very  few  «fp|oph|the%ms  i 
about  life  which  his  work  contains — they  are  far  more 
numerous  and  probably  more  true  in  Martin  Tupper  or 
Ella  Wheeler  Wilcox — or  is  It  to  rest  frankly  on  the  sheer 
beauty  of  the  mass  of  his  work  ?  You  know  quite  well 
it  must  rest  on  the  latter." 

How  are  we  to  answer  this  ?  Well,  in  the  first  place 
we  must  explain  that  I  only  chose  those  isolated  sentences 
for  convenience'  sake.  It  was  easier  to  explain  what  I 
meant  by  revelation  if  I  could  find  it  expressed  in  a  single 

9 


180  LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION 

sentence.     But  as  a  rule  the  writers  who  have  most  of  the 

element  of  revelation  about  them  do  not  crystallize  their 

revelation  into  formulae.     It  is  something  that  radiates 

/  from  all  their  work,  as  in  practical  life  there  is  generally  jj 

^far  more  inspiration  radiating  from  the  example  of  a  man's  | 

:.  whole  activity  than  from  the  moral  precepts  that  he  happens1  ( 

•'  to  utter.     Shelley  is  simply  bursting  with  this  power  of  ) 

revelation.     To  a  man  who  has  once  read  himself  into  i 


ll 


i 


Shelley,  the  world  never  looks  the  same  again.     The  same  j 
''is  true  of  Goethe,  the  same  is  emphatically  true  of  certain. 
1  j  Greek  poets,  like  Aeschylus  and  Euripides.     But  it  would 
I  be  hard  to  select  any  particular  sentences  from  their  works 
i  as  summing  up  the  essence  of  their  doctrine.     Even  Tolstoy, 
who  has  this  power  of  revelation  to  an  extraordinary  degree, 
and  who  was  always  trying,  trying  consciously  and  in- 
tensely, to  put  into  clear  words  the  message  that  was 
I  i  burning  inside  him,  even  Tolstoy  never  really  gets  it  ex- 
1 'pressed.     He  lays  down,  in  his  religious  books,  lots  and 
!  lots  of  rules,  some  of  them  sensible,  some  of  them  less  so,, 
some  of  them  hopelessly  dogmatic  and  inhuman,  many 
Ijoi  them  thrilling  and  magnificent,  but  never,  never  getting 
near  to  the  full  expression  of  the  main  truth  he  had  dis- 
covered about  the  world  and  was  trying  to  teach.     The 
message  of  Keats,  whatever  it  is,  lies  in  all  Keats,  though, 
iby  accident  a  great  part  of  it  may  be  summed  up  in  a 
particular  sentence.     The  message  of  Plato  is  in  all  Plato, 
i  'the  message  of  Tolstoy  in  all  Tolstoy.     There  is  a  beautiful 
j  (passage  in  Kenan's  Life  of  Jesus  where  he  points  out  that 
I  when  Jesus  Himself  was  asked  what  His  doctrine  was,' 
(what    exact    dogmatic    truth    He    had    to    declare,    He4 
could  give  no  direct  answer.     He  certainly  could  not  pro- 
duce a  series  of  doctrinal  texts  ;  He  could  only  say  "  Follow 

e."     The  message  a  man  has  to  give  radiates  from  him  ;  || 
t  is  never  summed  up  in  a  sentence  or  two. 

So,  if  we  go  back  to  Keats  and  the  person  of  culture, 
we  will  say  to  him  not  in  the  least  that  the  greatness  of 
Keats  depends  on  the  truth  or  importance  of  one  or  two 
statements  he  made  ;  but  that  it  does  depend  very  greatly 
on  a  certain  intense  power  of  vision  and  feeling  which  runs 
through  the  whole  of  his  work  and  which  happens  to  express 


LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION  181 

itself  almost  in  the  form  of  a  religious  dogma  in  one  or  two 
places — say  in  the  opening  passage  of  Endymion  and  the 
last  stanza  of  the  Ode  to  a  Grecian  Urn.iii 

Now  let  me  notice  another  curious  thing  about  these 
revelations  in  literature.  They  are  never  statements  of 
fact.  They  are  never  accurately  measured.  I  am  not 
sure  that  you  might  not  safely  go  further  and  say  they 
are  never  really  discoveries ;  they  are  nearly  all  of  them 
as  old  as  the  hills,  or  at  least  as  old  as  the  Greek  philosophers 
and  the  Book  of  Job.  Their  value  is  not  in  conveying 
a  new  piece  of  information  ;  their  value  lies  in  their  power 
of  suddenly  directing  your  attention,  and  the  whole  focus 
of  your  will  and  imagination,  towards  a  particular  part  of 
life.  "  Man  was  born  free,  and  he  is  everywhere  in  chains." 
That  is  only  true  to  a  limited  extent ;  and  so  far  as  it  is 
true  it  is  not  in  the  least  new.  Everybody  knew  it,  as  a 
bare  fact.  But  Rousseau  expressed  it  more  vividly,  per- 
haps felt  it  more  keenly,  believed  it  to  be  more  important, 
than  other  people  had.  What  is  more,  he  meant  to 
draw  conclusions  from  it ;  and  I  think  what  thrills  one 
especially  in  reading  or  thinking  of  the  words  is  the  thought 
of  those  conclusions  that  are  to  be  drawn.  They  are  not 
denned  ;  they  are  left  vague  ;  that  makes  them  all  the  more 
tremendous. 

Think  of  life  as  a  vast  picture  gallery,  or  museum ;  or 
better,  perhaps,  as  a  vast  engineering  workshop.  It  is  all 
those  things,  among  others.  Then  think  of  oneself  walking 
through  it.  You  know  how  the  average  man  walks  through 
a  museum  or  a  workshop  when  he  knows  nothing  particular 
about  it.  You  try  hard  to  be  intelligent ;  failing  in  that, 
you  try  to  conceal  your  lack  of  intelligence.  You  would 
like  to  be  interested,  but  you  do  not  know  what  is  interesting 
and  what  is  not.  Some  of  the  specimens  strike  you  as 
pretty ;  some  of  the  engines  seem  to  you  very  powerful ; 
you  are  dazzled  and  amused  by  the  blaze  of  the  fires,  you 
are  secretly  interested  in  the  men  and  wish  you  could  talk 
to  them.  But  in  the  main  you  come  out  at  the  other 
end  tired  and  lather  dispirited  and  having  got  remarkably 
little  out  of  it.  That  is  the  way  a  stupid  and  uneducated 
man,  with  no  cne  to  help  him,  goes  through  life. 


132  LITERATURE  AS   REVELATION 

Next,  suppose  you  go  through  the  same  museum,  or 
the  same  workshop,  with  a  thoroughly  competent  guide. 
In  the  museum  he  knows  what  all  the  specimens  are,  which 
are  rare  and  which  ordinary,  and  why  they  are  interesting  ; 
he  makes  you  look  at  things ;  makes  you  understand 
things  ;  makes  you  see  a  hundred  details,  every  one  of  them 
significant,  that  you  would  never  have  noticed  by  yourself. 
In  the  workshop,  he  shows  how  the  various  machines 
work,  tells  how  they  were  invented  and  what  difference 
their  invention  made ;  he  takes  you  to  see  a  particularly 
skilled  workman  and  makes  you  realize  where  his  skill 
comes  in ;  he  makes  you  feel  the  cleverness  and  the  beauty 
of  the  machinery.  That  is  like  going  through  life  with 
the  help  and  guidance  of  a  proper  average  educator,  what 
one  calls  a  person  of  culture. 

Now  thirdly,  suppose  on  the  day  of  your  visit  the  ordinary 
guide  is  not  available.  Instead  you  are  taken  by  a  man 
who  is  not  a  regular  guide  to  the  institution  but  is  working, 
so  they  tell  you,  at  certain  parts  of  it.  And  you  find  very 
likely  as  you  go  with  him  that  there  are  large  parts  that 
he  does  not  know  or  at  least  has  nothing  to  say  about,  but 
when  you  get  to  his  particular  subject  he  tells  you  not 
only  what  the  other  guide  told,  but  also  various  things 
which  the  other  guide  thought  not  worth  mentioning, 
but  which,  as  now  explained  to  you,  seem  searching  and 
deep  and  new ;  and  you  gradually  realize  that  you  are 
talking  to  a  man  who  has  made,  or  is  on  the  point  of  making, 
a  great  discovery.  In  the  museum  he  takes  specimens 
that  seemed  to  have  nothing  to  do  with  each  other  and 
shows  that  when  you  put  them  together  there  comes  a 
sudden  flood  of  suggestion,  a  stream  of  questions  never 
yet  asked,  but  when  once  asked  sure  to  find  an  answer. 
And  you  go  away  not  so  much  filled  with  knowledge,  but 
all  alive  with  interest  and  the  sense  of  movement ;  feeling 
that  your  feet  have  been  set  on  a  road  into  the  future. 
You  have  seen  some  one  thing  or  set  of  things  with  an 
intensity  that  has  revealed  what  was  before  unsuspected 
and  made,  as  it  were,  an  illumination  in  one  part  of  life. 
That,  I  think,  is  like  going  through  under  the  guidance 
of  the  sort  of  literature  that  gives  inspiration. 


LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION  133 

The  great  difference,  intellectually  speaking,  between  one 
man  and  another  is  simply  the  number  of  things  they  can 
see  in  a  given  cubic  yard  of  world.  Do  you  remember 
Huxley's  famous  lecture  on  A  Piece  of  Chalk,  delivered  to 
the  working  men  of  Norwich  in  1868,  and  how  the  piece 
of  chalk  told  him  secrets  of  the  infinite  past,  secrets  of  the 
unfathomed  depths  of  the  sea  ?  The  same  thing  happens 
with  a  book.  I  remember  once  picking  up  a  copy  of 
Macbeth  belonging  to  the  great  Shakespearian  scholar, 
Andrew  Bradley,  and  reading  casually  his  pencilled  notes 
in  the  margin.  The  scene  was  one  which  I  knew  by  heart 
and  thought  I  understood  ;  but  his  notes  showed  me  that 
I  had  missed  about  half  a  dozen  points  on  every  page. 
It  seems  to  me  that  the  writers  who  have  the  power  of 
revelation  are  just  those  who,  in  some  particular  part  of 
life,  have  seen  or  felt  considerably  more  than  the  average 
run  of  intelligent  human  beings.  It  is  this  specific  power 
of  seeing  or  feeling  more  things  to  the  cubic  yard  in  some 
part  of  the  world  that  makes  a  writer's  work  really  inspiring. 

To  have  felt  and  seen  more  than  other  people  in  some 
particular  region  of  life :  does  that  give  us  any  sort  of 
guarantee  that  the  Judgments  which  a  man  passes  are 
likely  to  be  true  ?  Not  in  the  least.  Suppose  a  man  has 
seen  and  experienced  some  particular  corner  of,  say,  the 
Battle  of  the  Somme  and  can  give  you  a  thrilling  and  terrific 
account  of  it,  that  is  no  particular  reason  for  expecting 
that  his  views  about  the  war  as  a  whole  will  be  true.  It 
is  on  the  whole  likely  that  he  will  see  things  in  a  wrong 
proportion.  The  point  in  his  favour  is  only  that  he  does 
really  know  something,  and,  whatever  his  general  views 
are,  he  can  help  you  to  know  something.  I  will  confess 
my  own  private  belief,  which  I  do  not  wish  anyone  to 
share,  that  of  all  the  books  and  all  the  famous  sayings 
that  have  come  as  a  revelation  to  human  beings,  not  one 
is  strictly  true  or  has  any  chance  of  being  true.  Nor,  if 
you  press  me,  do  I  really  think  it  is  their  business  to  be 
strictly  true.  They  are  not  meant  to  be  statements  of 
fact.  They  are  cries  of  distress,  calls  of  encouragement, 
signals  flashing  in  the  darkness  ;  they  seem  to  be  statements 
in  the  indicative  mood,  but  they  are  really  in  the  imperative 


134  LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION 

or  the  optative — the  moods  of  command  or  prayer  or 
longing ;  they  often  make  their  effect  not  by  what  they 
say  but  by  the  tone  in  which  they  say  it,  or  even  by  the 
things  they  leave  unsaid. 

Do  you  remember  Garibaldi's  speech  to  his  men  when  his 
defence  of  Rome  had  proved  fruitless,  and  the  question 
was  whether  to  make  terms  with  the  Austrians  or  to  follow 
him  ?  "  Let  those  who  wish  to  continue  the  War  against 
the  stranger  come  with  me.  I  offer  neither  pay  nor  quarters 
nor  provisions.  I  offer  hunger,  thirst,  forced  marches, 
battles  and  death."  *  The  force  of  that  appeal  was  in 
what  he  did  not  say.  He  obviously  offered  them  something 
else  too ;  something  so  glorious  that  as  a  matter  of  fact 
most  of  them  followed  him ;  but  he  did  not  mention  it. 

Sometimes  the  word  of  revelation  is  a  metaphor ;  the 
speaker  knows  he  cannot  attain  exact  truth,  he  can  only, 
as  it  were,  signal  in  the  direction  of  it.  There  is  a  wonderful 
story  in  a  little-read  Saxon  historian,  who  wrote  in  Latin, 
the  Venerable  Bede,  about  the  conversion  of  the  Saxons 
to  Christianity.  The  King  was  debating  whether  or  no 
to  accept  the  new  religion,  and  consulted  his  counsellors. 
And  one  old  Pagan  warrior  said  :  "Do  you  remember 
how  last  midwinter  King  Edwin  held  festival  in  the  great 
hall,  with  brands  burning  and  two  huge  fires  on  the  hearths, 
while  outside  there  was  storm  and  utter  darkness  ?  And 
the  windows  by  the  roof  being  open,  a  bird  flew  suddenly 
from  the  darkness  outside  into  the  warm  and  lighted  place 
and  out  on  the  other  side  into  the  outer  darkness.  Like 
that  bird  is  the  life  of  man."  a 

Or  what  again  shall  we  say  of  the  following  ?  ,  A  message 
sent  many  years  ago  by  the  famous  Russian  revolutionary, 
Katherine  Breshkovsky — the  grandmother  of  the  Revolu- 
tion as  she  is  called  ;  a  message  smuggled  out  of  prison 
and  sent  to  her  friends  and  followers  bidding  them  not  to 
despair  or  to  think  that  nothing  was  being  accomplished. 
"  Day  and  night  we  labour ;  instead  of  meat,  drink  and 
sleep  we  have  dreams  of  Freedom.  It  is  youth  calling  to 
youth  through  prison"walls~lmd  across  the  world  "  It 

1  Garibaldi's  Defence  of  Rome,  G.  M.  Trevelyan,  p.  231. 
*  Bede's  Chronicle,  Bk.  2,  cap.   14. 


LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION  135 

seems  like  a  series  of  statements,  statements  which  it  is 
hard  to  describe  as  either  true  or  not  true.  Yet  I  doubt 
if  it  is  really  a  statement ;  it  is  more  like  a  call  in  the  night. 

Or  take  the  saying  of  one  of  the  ancient  rabbis  after  the 
fall  of  Jerusalem,  when  the  heathen  had  conquered  the 
holy  places  and  to  a  pious  Jew  the  very  roots  of  life  seemed 
to  be  cut :  "  Zion  is  taken  from  us  ;  nothing  is  left  save 
the  Holy  One  and  His  Law."  Nothing  is  left  save  the 
Holy  One  and  His  Law.  Does  it  not  seem  at  the  same 
time  to  say  two  things :  that  nothing  is  left,  and  that 
everything  is  left  that  really  matters  ?  All  is  lost,  and 
nothing  that  matters  is  lost.  The  message  has  just  that 
quality  of  self-contradiction  which  shows  that  it  is  not 
saying  all  it  means,  that  it  is  pointing  to  something  beyond 
itself,  calling  the  hearer's  attention  not  to  a  fact  but  to  a 
mystery. 

Or  take  one  of  the  greatest  and  simplest  of  all  these 
burning  words,  the  word  of  a  Greek  philosopher  of  a  late 
and  decadent  period,  who  has  nevertheless  made  a  great 
stir  in  the  world  :  "  Though  I  speak  with  the  tongues  of 
men  and  of  angels,  and  have  not  charity,  I  am  but  a  sounding 
brass  or  a  tinkling  cymbal.  Though  I  give  my  body  to 
be  burned,  and  have  not  charity,  it  profiteth  me  nothing." 
Who  can  analyse  that  into  a  statement  of  fact  ? 

By  now,  I  think,  we  have  reached  a  point  where  we  can 
formulate  a  further  conclusion  about  these  words  of  in- 
spiration or  revelation.  They  never  are  concerned  with 
direct  scientific  fact  or  even  with  that  part  of  experience 
which  is  capable  of  being  expressed  in  exact  statement. 
They  are  concerned  not  with  that  part  of  our  voyage  which 
is  already  down  in  the  Admiralty  charts.  They  are  con- 
cernecLwith  the  part^  that  is  uncharted  ;  the  part  fhaTTs 
beyond  the  mist,  whither  no  one  has  travelled,  or  at  least 
whence  no  one  has  brought  back  a  clear  account.  They 
are  all  in  the  nature  of  the  guess  that  goes  before  scientific 
knowledge ;  the  impassioned  counsel  of  one  who  feels 
strongly  but  cannot,  in  the  nature  of  things,  prove  his 
case.  This  fact  explains  three  things  about  them  :  their 
emotional  value,  their  importance,  and  their  weakness. 
Their  weakness  is  that  they  are  never  exactly  true,  because 


136  LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION 

they  are  never  based  on  exact  knowledge.  Their  impor- 
tance is  that  they  are  dealing  with  the  part  of  the  journey 
that  is  just  ahead  of  us,  the  hidden  ground  beyond  the 
next  ridge  which  matters  to  us  now  more  than  all  the 
rest  of  the  road.  Their  emotional  value  is  intense  just 
because  they  are  speaking  of  the  thing  we  most  long  to 
know,  and  in  which  the  edge  of  the  emotion  is  not  dulled 
by  exact  calculations.  A  good  Moslem  believes  in  Moham- 
med far  more  passionately  than  any  one  believes  in  the 
multiplication  table.  That  is  just  because  in  the  case  of 
the  multiplication  table  he  knows  and  is  done  with  it ; 
in  the  case  of  Mohammed  he  does  not  know,  and  makes 
up  for  his  lack  of  knowledge  by  passionate  feeling. 

The  same  consideration  explains  why  young  people  in 
each  generation  are  so  specially  fond  of  the  writers  who 
have  this  quality  of  revelation  about  them.  Young  people, 
if  they  are  normally  ambitious  and  full  of  vitality,  as  one 
expects  them  to  be,  are  always  on  the  look  out  for  a  revela- 
tion. For  purely  physical  or  biological  reasons,  they  are 
hopeful ;  they  expect  that  the  time  coming,  which  will  be 
their  own  time,  is  sure  to  be  much  better  than  the  present, 
in  which  they  hardly  count,  or  the  past,  in  which  they  did 
not  count  at  all.  (It  is  amusing  to  note  in  passing  that, 
when  there  is  a  difference  of  opinion  between  young  and 
old,  each  tends  to  reject  the  other  for  the  same  reason— 
because  he  seems  to  represent  the  superseded  past.  The 
young  man  listens  impatiently  to  the  old,  thinking :  Yes, 
of  course  ;  that  is  what  they  thought  when  people  wore 
whiskers,  in  the  time  of  Queen  Victoria.  And  the  old 
man  listens  impatiently  to  the  young,  thinking  :  Yes,  of 
course ;  that  is  just  the  sort  of  nonsense  I  used  to  talk 
when  my  whiskers  were  just  sprouting,  in  the  reign  of 
Queen  Victoria.)  I  am  inclined  to  think  in  general  that 
the  typical  attitude  of  a  young  man — a  fairly  modest  and 
reasonable  young  man — towards  his  elders  Is  to  feel  that 
they  evidently  know  a  great  deal  and  have  read  a  sur- 
prising quantity  of  books,  but  how  strangely  they  have 
contrived  to  miss  the  one  thing  that  matters  !  And  the 
one  thing  that  matters,  where  will  he  find  it  ?  Clearly 
in  some  teacher  whom  his  elders  have  not  heard,  or  have 


LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION  187 

not  listened  to.  It  may  be  a  personal  acquaintance  whose 
conversation  inspires  him.  It  may  be  a  new  writer  with  a 
message,  or  an  older  writer  whom  his  elders  might  have 
read  but  did  not.  It  may  even  be  some  quite  ancient 
writer,  in  whom  a  new  message  has  been  discovered.  There 
are  two  requirements  only  for  the  prophet — or  rather  for 
entrance  to  the  competition  for  rank  as  a  prophet.  You 
must  have  been  neglected  by  the  last  generation,  and 
you  must  have  the  prophetic  style.  You  must  have  some 
strong  conviction,  however  vague  and  however  dispro- 
portionate, about  those  parts  of  life  which  are  imperfectly 
charted  and  immediately  interesting,  and  you  must  re- 
present something  unknown  or  at  least  untaught  by  our 
uncles  and  our  schoolmasters. 

I  do  not  think  that  there  has  been  any  general  failure 
in  Europe,  or  indeed  in  America,  to  appreciate  what  I 
have  called  the  literature  of  revelation.  Quite  the  contrary. 
The  last  century  has  been  particularly  fruitful  in  that  sort 
of  writing,  both  the  genuine  sort  and  the  various  popular 
imitations.  The  demand  has  been  enormous  and  has 
naturally  created  a  supply.  The  demand  has  been  un- 
critical and  the  supply  consequently  indiscriminate. 

If  you  ask  the  cause  why  this  demand  and  supply  have 
been  so  great  of  late  years,  as  compared  for  example  with 
the  eighteenth  century,  when  there  was  probably  more 
actual  originality  of  thought,  I  would  suggest  two  main 
causes.  First,  the  spread  of  education  and  the  rise  of 
democracy.  The  reading  public,  formerly  very  restricted, 
has  been  constantly  reinforced  by  new  social  classes  with 
new  demands  and  new  expectations.  Secondly,  the  change 
in  our  treatment  of  the  young,  the  much  greater  stress 
laid  on  encouragement  and  the  general  avoidance  of  re- 
pression in  education.  We  have  trained — or  at  least 
permitted — the  young  to  be  far  more  self-confident  and 
adventurous,  and  naturally  they  have  gone  forth  in  quest 
of  new  Ideas  and  new  prophets.  One  should  also  notice 
that,  apart  from  any  change  in  quality,  the  mere  size  of 
the  present  reading  public  has  had  an  effect  on  literature. 
In  old  days  a  book  in  order  to  succeed  had  to  please  a 
majority  of  its  readers.  Now  it  need  not.  It  is  calculated 


138  LITERATURE  AS   REVELATION 

that  if  an  English  writer  of  the  present  day  was  hated  and 
despised  or  utterly  ignored  by  90  per  cent,  of  his  possible 
readers  in  the  English-speaking  world,  tolerated  but  not 
read  or  bought  by  another  5  per  cent.,  rather  liked  but 
still  not  bought  by  2\  per  cent.,  and  bought  by  only  the 
remaining  2\,  his  circulation  would  be  something  hitherto 
unparalleled  and  he  would  be  one  of  the  richest  and  most 
brutally  successful  men  in  the  country.  It  is  exactly  like 
a  picture  in  a  too  large  gallery  competing  with  several 
thousand  other  pictures ;  it  must  shriek  or  it  will  not 
be  seen.  Such  a  situation  obviously  encourages  such 
qualities  as  over-statement,  paradox,  violence,  and  the 
search  for  novelty  at  any  price.  Novelty  is  not  revelation  ; 
not  in  the  least.  But  sometimes  people  confound  them. 

I  remember  my  predecessor  at  Oxford,  Professor  Bywater, 
telling  me  how,  when  he  and  his  friends  were  students, 
they  had  two  great  prophets,  "  John  "  and  "  Thomas." 
On  every  important  question  the  thing  was  first  to  find 
out  what  John  said  and  what  Thomas  said.  (John's 
surname,  as  you  may  have  guessed,  was  Ruskin,  and 
Thomas's,  Carlyle.)  My  own  generation  at  College  thought 
little  of  John  and  detested  Thomas.  But  the  demand  for 
prophets  has  continued  and  increased. 

The  general  movement  of  thought  and  society  in  Europe 
has  been,  of  course,  towards  democracy  and  emancipation. 
And  the  most  successful  prophets  have  naturally  been  on 
the  revolutionary  side. 

First  came  the  great  revolutionaries  of  1848,  Victor 
Hugo  and  Mazzini,  and  their  disciples,  such  as  Swinburne 
and  Browning.  Then  came  the  less  political  revolution- 
aries, aiming  at  the  dethronement  not  of  kings,  but  of 
more  internal  and  spiritual  potentates.  Ibsen  and  the 
dethronement  of  all  convention ;  Dostoievsky  and  the 
dethronement  of  human  reason  ;  Strindberg  and  the  de- 
thronement of  love ;  Tolstoy  and  the  dethronement  of 
all  the  glories  of  the  world,  all  pleasure,  all  desire,  save 
the  search  for  truth  and  the  love  of  Christ ;  Nietzsche 
and  the  dethronement  of  good  and  evil,  and  of  all  that  was 
not  mere  vitality  and  force.  I  will  not  speak  of  my  own 
English  contemporaries ;  and  among  the  European  writers 


LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION  139 

I  mention  only  the  best,  or  at  least  the  most  conspicuous ; 
but  behind  these,  in  every  country  of  the  world,  are  scores 
of  less  influential  prophets,  journalists,  accidental  celebrities, 
deliberate  boomsters  and  stray  impostors ;  cliques  with 
new  theories  of  poetry,  new  theories  of  painting,  new 
theories  of  morals,  education,  diet,  cookery,  clothing ; 
theories  how  to  live  without  hats,  or  without  boots,  or 
without  washing,  or  without  self-denial  or  without  work. 

I  suppose  we  have  at  the  present  day  an  extraordinary 
harvest  of  false  prophets.  I  doubt  if  the  Court  of  Ahab 
in  its  flower  could  compete  with  us.  There  was  a  certain 
degree  of  truth  in  a  queer  reactionary  book  written  by  one 
Max  Nordau  in  the  early  nineties,  and  dedicated  to  the 
German  Emperor.  It  was  called  Degeneration ;  and  it 
argued  that,  if  ever  a  new  book  or  new  theory  had  a  startling 
success,  it  meant  that  the  author  probably  suffered  from 
some  very  slight  but  widespread  form  of  mental  disease. 
He  was  slightly  mad  in  a  particular  way ;  and  all  the 
people  throughout  the  world  who  were  mad  in  the  same 
way  were  perfectly  delighted  with  him.  If  he  had  real 
luck  his  fellow-sufferers  might  amount  to  millions. 

There  is  a  fragment  of  truth  in  that  theory,  no  doubt. 
And  no  doubt  at  any  moment  most  of  our  hot  gospellers 
and  speakers  of  revelation  will,  if  severely  tested,  prove 
to  be  false.  It  is  certainly  true  that,  as  the  generations 
pass,  the  fashionable  teachers  are  all  or  almost  all  rejected, 
one  after  another. 

They  are  thrust 

Like  foolish  prophets  forth  ;  their  words  to  scorn 
Are  scattered  and  their  mouths  are  stopped  with  dust. 

And  others  take  their  place  to  form  new  sects  of  followers 
and  to  share  sooner  or  later  in  the  same  fall. 

Ought  that  to  discourage  us  ?  Why  no  ;  because  we 
have  all  the  time  left  out  of  account  most  of  the  silent 
factors  in  the  situation.  We  have  forgotten  especially 
the  enormous  and  almost  incredible  number  of  decent 
honest  men  and  women  who  are  on  the  whole  working 
well  and  making  for  progress ;  we  have  forgotten  the 
considerable  number  of  fine  workers  or  writers,  men  with 


140  LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION 

intellectual  or  moral  greatness  in  them,  who  do  not  advertise. 
When  I  am  disposed,  as  I  suppose  all  of  us  sometimes  are, 
to  despair  of  modern  civilization  and  to  think  that  the 
world  has  gone  mad,  I  always  counteract  the  impression 
in  one  way.  I  turn  from  contemplating  vast  masses  of 
life,  which  one  cannot  fully  survey  and  cannot  possibly 
divide  into  elements  and  add  up  into  totals,  and  take  some 
one  particular  branch  of  human  activity.  Ask  the  various 
specialists  and  they  will  generally  tell  you  that,  though 
the  world  as  a  whole  is  very  likely  going  to  the  dogs,  the 
particular  part  they  know  about  has  improved.  Ask  the 
engineer ;  he  will  tell  you  of  the  enormous  advance  made 
in  engineering ;  the  schoolmaster,  he  may  complain  that 
education  does  not  advance  faster,  but  he  has  no  doubt 
that  it  is  advancing ;  the  doctor,  he  thinks  the  world  is 
in  a  very  poor  state  because  it  does  not  attend  sufficiently 
to  medical  men,  but  medicine  itself  is  improving  hand  over 
hand ;  the  sociologist  or  social  reformer,  he  will  denounce 
the  present  state  of  things  as  heartily  as  any  one  could 
wish,  but  he  will  generally  admit  that  in  detail  everything 
that  has  been  worked  at  has  been  made  rather  better. 

And  after  all,  if  most  of  our  pilots  in  these  strange 
waters  sooner  or  later  turn  out  mistaken  and  have  to 
be  left  behind  or  even  thrown  overboard,  why  should 
any  reasonable  person  be  surprised  at  that  ?  It  is 
all  in  the  bargain.  It  is  all  in  the  ordinary  bargain 
that  man  perforce  makes  with  life.  There  is  no  finality. 
There  is  no  full  and  exact  statement,  even  about  those 
parts  of  experience  which  are  already  reduced  to  order 
and  marked  down  on  the  charts.  And  meantime  Man  is 
moving  always,  every  hour,  forth  into  the  uncharted  ; 
into  the  region,  not  of  knowledge  and  certainty,  but  of 
experiment,  and  guesswork,  and  daring  and  wisdom.  I 
believe  with  all  my  heart  in  human  progress.  But  progress 
is  not  an  advance  along  a  straight  path ;  it  is  the  groping 
of  people  with  darkness  ahead  of  them  and  light  behind  ; 
the  questing  this  way  and  that  of  men  climbing  an  unknown 
precipice  ;  the  search  for  good  paths  through  an  unexplored 
bog,  where  the  best  way  of  advance  is  no  doubt  generally 
discovered  by  guides  who  have  studied  the  ways  and 


LITERATURE  AS  REVELATION  141 

habits  of  bogs  but  may  sometimes  be  hit  upon  by  a  child. 
And  the  popular  prophets,  the  speakers  of  burning  words, 
are  generally  those  who  at  least  believe  that  they  have 
seen  some  path,  and  cry  to  us  some  advice  that  seems  to 
them  the  one  thing  most  needed  at  the  moment. 

At  the  moment  their  words  seem  to  be  of  extreme  im- 
portance ;  and  when  the  moment  has  passed,  as  a  rule, 
their  advice  has  passed  too.  Only  there  still  remain — and 
this  is  perhaps  the  greatest  difference,  next  to  differences 
in  sincerity,  between  the  various  breeds  of  prophet — there 
still  remain  some  whose  words  seem  to  apply  not  only  to 
the  moment  for  which  they  spoke  them  but  to  the  permanent 
or  constantly  recurrent  needs  of  humanity.  These  are 
the  men  for  whom  we  scholars  seek  in  the  literature  of 
diverse  and  widely  removed  ages.  They  are  the  people  who 
have  felt  most  profoundly  and  expressed  most  poignantly 
those  facts  about  life  which  are  always  important  and 
always  easily  overlooked,  those  visions  and  aspirations 
in  which  the  human  race  is  always  afresh  finding  its  calm 
in  the  midst  of  storm,  its  "  deliverance  from  the  body  of 
this  death "  ;  and  their  words  stay  with  us  as  some- 
thing more  than  literature,  more  than  mere  art  of  writing 
or  pleasant  help  for  the  passing  of  leisure  hours  :  "  tiiej 
precious  life-blood  of  a  jpastei  -spirit,  treasured  up  for  a  I 
|  (life  beyond 


VII 


THE    SOUL   AS    IT   IS,  AND    HOW 
TO    DEAL    WITH    IT1 


IN  Tolstoy's  novel,  The  Cossacks,  there  is  a  scene  where 
a  man  swimming  is  shot  dead  and  drifts  to  the  shore, 
while  his  slayer  swims  over  the  flooded  river  to  get 
him   and   crouches  down   exhausted  at  his  side.     There 
the  two  lie,  looking  almost  the  same.     But  one  is  full  of 
a  turmoil  of  desires  and  aspirations,  mingled  feelings  of 
pride  and  misery ;  and  the  other  is  dead.     And  the  only 
sign  of  difference  is  a  light  steam  rising  from  the  body 
of  the  living  man. 

So  small  a  sign,  and  yet  all  the  difference  that  can  be  ! 
A  distinguished  anthropologist,  Dr.  Elliot  Smith,  has 
suggested  to  us  the  kind  of  speculation  that  would  go  on 
in  the  mind  of  a  primitive  man  if  he  found  a  dead  body 
preserved,  as  it  might  be,  for  instance,  in  the  dry  Egyptian 
sand — the  phenomenon  that  led  up  to  the  practice  of 
embalmment.  What  is  wrong  with  that  body  in  the  sand  ? 
What  is  it  that  it  lacks  ?  First  of  all,  it  does  not  breathe. 
There  is  no  breath  in  it ;  that  strikes  our  Egyptian ;  so 
he  gives  it  breath  as  best  he  can,  burning  incense  under  its 
nostrils,  so  that  the  breath  may  enter  in,  warm  like  the 
breath  of  the  living,  and  fragrant  to  correct  the  smell  of  the 
corpse.  Again,  it  is  all  dry,  there  is  no  blood  in  it :  and  our 
Egyptian  knows  that  the  blood  is  the  life,  because  he  has 
seen  wounded  men  die  as  their  blood  ebbed  away.  So  he 
pours  libations  of  blood  into  the  grave,  that  the  dead  may 
get  their  life  again.  Some  of  us  will  remember  the  weird 

1  Reprinted  from  the  Hibbert  Journal,  January  1918. 

142 


THE  SOUL  AS  IT  IS  148 

passage  in  the  Eleventh  Book  of  the  Odyssey,  where  Odysseus 
sees  the  ghosts  of  the  departed,  like  puffs  of  wind  made 
visible,  as  it  were  ;  ifn>xn  Ka*  eiSwAoi',  "  a  breath  and  an 
image,"  and  no  more ;  with  no  life  nor  power  of  thought 
till  they  have  drunk  the  blood  that  he  has  poured  out 
for  them. 

If  you  start  thus  from  the  dead  body,  it  seems  as  if 
the  life  or  soul  lay  in  some  breath  or  spirit  that  has  departed. 
Most  of  our  words  for  the  soul  show  that  origin.  The  word 
"  soul "  itself  is  of  doubtful  derivation  ;  but  "  ghost  " 
means  "  breath,"  "  spirit "  means  breath.  In  Latin 
spiritus  and  animus  and  anima  are  simply  breath  or  wind  ; 
in  Greek  fox?)  *s  wmd,  and  m/ev/xa  breath,  and  dvftos  smoke 
or  vapour.  All  the  words  are  metaphors ;  naturally  and 
inevitably  so.  For  whenever  mankind  notices  a  new  fact 
and  wants  to  find  a  name  for  it,  he  must  needs  search  about 
for  something  like  it  among  the  facts  he  already  knows  and 
has  names  for.  The  new  fact  does  not  come  with  a  name 
ready  written  upon  it. 

The  word  "life,"  oddly  enough,  means  "body."  I 
think  that  conies  from  another  line  of  thought,  in  which 
mankind,  when  trying  to  express  the  thing  we  call  soul 
or  life,  started  not  from  the  dead  body  but  from  a  dream- 
image  or  phantom.  A  dream-image,  a  shape  seen  in 
hallucination,  a  reflection  in  water  or  a  looking-glass  :  what 
is  wrong  with  them,  and  how  are  they  lacking  in  the  life  of 
the  living  ?  Why,  they  are  like  those  ghosts  in  Homer. 
There  is  "  a  breath  and  an  image,"  but  no  heart  or  blood 
or  solidity.  They  are  not  real.  If  they  could  drink  of  blood 
and  grow  solid,  if  they  could  get  themselves  a  body,  that 
would  be  life. 

Another  mode  of  thought  which  started  from  the  dream- 
image  conceived  that  that  image  itself  was  the  soul  or 
life  ;  that  it  moved  out  of  the  body  in  sleep,  and  sometimes 
in  waking  time  ;  moved  out  and  drifted  far  away  at  its  will 
and  pleasure,  with  always  the  possible  danger  of  losing  its 
way  and  not  being  able  to  return  to  the  body.  That  mode 
of  thought  explains  the  curious  pictures  in  ancient  times  of 
the  soul  as  a  little  human  being,  sometimes  with  wings  and 
sometimes  without,  who  lives  inside  the  ordinary  body  and 


144  THE  SOUL  AS   IT  IS 

keeps  it  alive.  There  is  a  common  phrase  in  Homer  describ- 
ing death  :  "  the  life  left  the  bones."  The  word  for  life  there 
is  thumos,  the  word  that  means  smoke  or  vapour ;  but 
the  old  vase-paintings  which  depict  that  kind  of  death 
show  not  a  smoke  but  a  beautiful  little  winged  human 
figure  springing  out  from  the  body  as  it  falls,  and  rising 
heavenward. 

II 

What  does  all  this  amount  to  ?  What  conclusion  can 
we  draw  from  these  stumbling  efforts  of  instinctive  man  to 
describe  or  name  or  depict  this  thing  within  us,  which  no 
man  has  ever  seen  or  heard  or  touched,  and  yet  which  makes 
the  greatest  of  all  differences,  the  difference  between  the 
living  and  the  dead  ? 

I  think  we  can  conclude  just  thus  much,  that  there  is 
something  really  there,  and  that  man's  powers  of  thought 
and  language,  trained  as  they  are  on  the  experience  of  the 
material  world,  have  been  unable  to  define  or  comprehend 
it.  Our  modern  phraseology  is  practically  all  derived  from 
the  Greeks,  and  the  Greeks  went  on  using  metaphors  to 
the  end.  If  the  indescribable  thing  was  not  a  breath  or 
a  wind,  then  it  was  a  spark  of  fire ;  but  not  ordinary  fire, 
which  destroys  and  perishes ;  rather  the  celestial  fire  of 
which  the  stars  are  made,  the  stars  which  neither  consume 
nor  are  consumed.  Or  is  it  a  fragment,  as  it  were,  of  God 
Himself  prisoned  in  our  earthly  material,  imperfect  because 
fragmentary,  yet  in  some  way  akin  to  the  Most  High  ?  No 
need  to  trouble  with  further  attempts  at  such  description  ; 
the  main  result  that  remains  from  these  broken  speculations, 
on  which  the  world  has  been  living  ever  since,  is  the  profound 
conviction  of  Greek  philosophy  that  man,  in  some  unexplained 
way,  consists  of  two  parts,  of  which  one  is  living  and  one 
dead.  "  What  art  thou  ?  "  said  the  Emperor  Marcus 
Aurelius  to  himself.  "  A  little  soul  carrying  a  corpse." 

Plato,  the  earliest  author  who  discusses  and  supports 

'  with  argument  the  great  doctrine  that  the  soul  is  immortal — 

that  the  soul  is  life,  and  therefore  cannot  die — is  fond  of 

metaphors  about  the  soul.     He  is  unconsciously  founding 


THE  SOUL  AS   IT  IS  145 

a  new  science,  that  "  science  of  the  soul "  which  we  call 
psychology.  His  first  division  of  the  soul  is  a  very  fruitful 
and  interesting  one.  How  is  it  that  the  soul  shows  itself  in 
action  ?  In  other  words,  how  is  it  that  a  man  shows  he 
is  really  alive  ?  There  are  three  ways,  says  Plato,  desire 
and  anger  and  reason  ;  or — since  it  is  hard  to  get  words 
simple  and  large  enough  to  express  the  Greek,  by  Lusting, 
Fighting  and  Thinking.  There  are  things  it  craves  for,  and 
things  it  hates  and  rejects  ;  but  above  the  craving  and  re- 
jecting there  is  a  power  of  judging,  of  distinguishing  between 
good  and  evil  and  shaping  its  own  course.  This  power, 
which  he  calls  reason  and  we  moderns  mostly  call  "  will," 
is  the  very  soul  itself.  The  lusting  and  fighting,  though 
they  may  serve  the  soul,  and  are  forms  of  life,  are  mere 
functions  of  the  live  body.  A  man's  soul,  he  says  in  another 
fine  passage,  is  like  a  charioteer  upon  a  chariot  with  two 
horses.  One  of  the  horses  is  sluggish,  lazy,  tending  always 
downward ;  the  other  fierce,  but  of  generous  nature  and 
full  of  courage ;  and  the  man  who  drives  them  has  to 
master  the  two  of  them,  keep  them  abreast,  and  above  all 
choose  for  himself  the  path  he  means  them  to  take.  The 
charioteer  is  the  real  soul. 

"A  little  soul  carrying  a  corpse":  what  is  there  wrong 
about  that  description,  or  rather,  what  would  be  wrong 
with  it  if  it  were  ever  meant  to  be  literally  and  exactly 
true  ?  It  is  that  it  separates  the  body  and  soul  too  sharply. 
That  is  the  mistake  in  all  these  primitive  conceptions  with 
which  we  have  been  dealing,  and  consequently  in  a  great 
deal  of  our  own  current  language,  which  of  course  is  de- 
scended, as  all  language  is,  from  the  philosophy  of  earlier 
times.  If  you  have  a  lump  of  hot  iron,  the  thought  of 
primitive  man  will  probably  regard  it  as  made  up  of  two 
separate  things,  heat  and  a  lump  of  iron.  Just  as  we 
have  certain  pictures  by  savages — and  I  believe  also  by 
children — in  which  an  angry  man  is  shown  by  drawing  first 
a  man,  and  second  his  anger,  seated  inside  him  or  sticking 
out  of  his  head.  Just  as  in  primitive  poetry  a  man 
constantly  holds  conversations  with  his  own  heart  or  his 
own  thought,  as  if  it  were  a  separate  thing.  It  was  another 
Greek  philosopher,  Aristotle,  who  cleared  that  matter  up. 

10 


146  THE   SOUL  AS   IT  IS 

You  meet  angry  men,  not  first  anger  and  then  men  ;  you 
meet  live  persons,  not  first  a  life  or  soul  and  then  a  body 
which  it  is  carrying  about.  But  with  that  passing  caution 
against  possible  misunderstanding  we  shall  find  it  simpler 
to  use  the  ordinary  language,  and  speak  as  if  the  body  and 
the  breath  or  soul  inside  it  were  entirely  different  things. 

"  A  little  soul  carrying  a  corpse  "  :  the  modern  writer 
who  has  made  that  old  Stoic  phrase  most  clear  to  the 
average  reader  is,  I  think,  M.  Bergson.  To  him  man  consists 
of  a  body  which  is  so  much  matter,  governed  by  the  law 
of  gravitation  and  all  the  other  laws  of  dead  matter,  governed 
also  by  the  laws  of  biology  or  animate  matter  ;  and  a  soul 
or  will — Plato's  charioteer — which  is  free  and  moves  of 
itself.  How  the  will  can  be  free,  of  course,  is  one  of  those 
problems  which  no  one  can  satisfactorily  explain.  It  seems 
impossible  to  understand  how  it  can  be  free ;  yet  almost 
more  impossible  to  imagine  that  it  is  not  free.  It  is  an  old 
problem,  perhaps  an  eternal  one.  But  M.  Bergson's  special 
contribution  to  it,  if  I  understand  him  aright,  is  this. 

The  body  is  of  course  subject  to  mechanical  and  bio- 
logical law.  Throw  it  up  in  the  air,  it  will  fall  down  again. 
Hit  it  hard  enough,  it  will  break.  Starve  it,  and  it  will 
suffer  and  die.  And  the  exact  strain  necessary  in  each  case 
can,  within  limits,  be  calculated.  Furthermore,  for  much 
the  greater  part  of  life  the  will — that  is,  the  man  himself — 
acts  automatically,  like  a  machine.  He  is  given  bad  coffee 
for  breakfast,  and  he  gets  cross.  He  sees  his  omnibus 
just  going,  and  he  runs.  He  sees  in  one  advertisement  that 
X's  boot  polish  is  the  best,  and  on  another  that  Y's  boot 
polish  is  the  best,  and  he  accepts  both  statements.  He 
does  not  criticize  or  assert  himself.  He  follows  steadily 
the  line  of  least  resistance.  The  charioteer  is  asleep,  and 
the  two  horses  jog  along  without  waking  him. 

But,  says  M.  Bergson,  you  will  sometimes  find  that  when 
you  expect  him  to  follow  the  line  of  least  resistance  he 
just  does  not.  The  charioteer  awakes.  He  can  resist, 
he  can  choose ;  he  is  after  all  a  live  and  free  thing  in  the 
midst  of  a  dead  world,  capable  of  acting  against  the  pressure 
of  matter,  against  pain,  and  against  his  own  desires. 

Whether  this  doctrine  is  exactly  true  or  not,  I  do  not 


THE  SOUL  AS   IT   IS  147 

pretend  to  judge  ;  but  it  certainly  is  fruitful.  It  is  just  what 
one  feels  in  one's  ordinary  experience  :  a  constant  tendency 
to  behave  like  dead  matter,  to  fall  into  habits,  to  become 
by  slow  degrees — as  the  ancients  put  it — "  a  chained  slave." 
You  are  chained  by  your  own  standard  of  comfort ;  by  your 
conception  of  what  is  necessary  for  you  ;  by  your  meal-times 
and  the  conventions  you  live  among ;  by  the  things  that 
you  always  say  or  always  do  or  always  have.  Bergson  has 
for  middle-aged  men  added  a  new  terror  to  life.  He  makes 
you  watch  yourself  becoming  mechanical ;  moving  in  con- 
formity to  outside  stimulus  ;  growing  more  and  more  depen- 
dent on  your  surroundings — as  if  the  little  soul  carrying 
the  corpse  had  found  it  too  heavy  and  was  letting  it  lie,  or 
perhaps  roll,  while  the  soul  itself  fell  half  asleep.  Fortunately 
from  time  to  time  it  wakes,  and  when  it  does  wake  its  strength 
is  amazing.  A  friend  of  mine  wrote  to  me  from  amid  the 
heaviest  fighting  on  the  Somme,  describing  the  strange 
impression  he  received  from  that  awful  experience  of  the 
utter  difference  between  man's  soul  and  body  ;  the  body  is 
so  weak  and  frail  a  stuff,  so  easily  broken,  scattered,  torn  to 
rags,  or  trodden  indistinguishably  into  mire ;  and  the  soul 
so  resolute,  so  untouched  and  unconquerable. 


Ill 

Untouched  and  unconquerable :  those,  I  think,  were 
my  friend's  words,  and  that  was  the  impression  which  he 
received.  The  German  shells  and  bombs  and  bullets  tore 
men's  bodies  to  pieces  without  any  trouble,  but  they  could 
not  touch  the  men's  souls  or  change  their  will.  I  do  not 
wonder  that  he  received  that  impression.  Yet,  is  the 
impression  absolutely  true  ?  Can  we  really,  without  qualifica- 
tion, believe  the  common,  comfortable  doctrine  that  perse- 
cution always  fails,  that  the  blood  of  martyrs  is  always 
the  seed  of  the  Church,  that  the  soul  is  really  unconquerable  ? 
The  average  man  does  not  believe  it,  much  less  the  ordinary 
tyrant.  In  every  country  he  treats  such  doctrines  as  mere 
sentiment,  and  is  perfectly  confident  that  if  you  give  him 
a  free  hand  with  rifle,  bayonet  and  cat-o'-nine-tails  he  can 


148  THE  SOUL  AS   IT  IS 

stamp  out  any  inconvenient  doctrine  which  puts  its  trust 
in  nothing  more  substantial  than  the  soul  of  man.  And 
I  fear  the  tyrant  is  not  always  wrong.  Why  are  there  no 
Protestants  in  Spain  ?  Not  because  of  the  persuasiveness 
of  Spanish  theology,  but  because  the  Spanish  Inquisition 
did  its  work.  Why  are  there  no  descendants  of  the  Albi- 
genses  in  France  ?  Because  they  were  massacred. 

No.  We  must  not  delude  ourselves  into  believing  that 
the  path  of  the  human  soul  or  conscience  when  protesting 
against  the  world  is  a  safe  path,  or  a  path  that  must  in  the 
end  lead  to  victory.  It  is  neither.  It  leads  for  certain 
through  suffering  and  humiliation  ;  and  it  may  also,  it  may 
ultimately,  end  in  defeat.  There  is  no  certainty  for  the 
protesting  soul  anywhere ;  except  the  certainty  of  a  great 
uncertainty,  of  a  great  battle  of  unknown  issue,  in  which 
the  odds  are  by  no  means  as  they  appear.  The  big  battalions 
of  the  world  on  one  side,  and  the  one  little  soul  or  group  of 
souls  on  the  other — they  are  not  so  unevenly  matched  after 
all.  The  little  soul  starts  indeed  with  one  great  handicap 
against  it — it  has  first  to  carry  its  own  corpse,  and  then 
fight.  But  if  it  can  do  that,  if  it  can  get  comparatively  free 
from  that  burden  and  those  entangling  chains,  get  rid  of 
desire  and  ambition,  and  hatred  and  even  anger,  and  think 
of  nothing  but  what  it  wills  as  right,  then  it  is,  I  will  not 
say  unconquerable,  but  one  of  the  most  formidable  fighting 
forces  that  exist  upon  this  earth. 

The  doctrine  that  the  persecutor  is  always  defeated  and 
the  martyr  always  triumphant  is,  I  think,  little  more  than 
mere  comfort-seeking,  a  by-form  of  the  common  vulgar 
worship  of  success.  We  can  give  great  strings  of  names 
belonging  to  the  martyrs  who  were  successful,  who,  whether 
living  or  dead,  eventually  won  their  causes,  and  are 
honoured  with  books  and  statues  by  a  grateful  posterity. 
But  what  of  the  martyrs  who  have  failed — who  beat  against 
iron  bars,  and  suffered  and  were  conquered,  who  appealed 
from  unjust  judges  and  found  no  listeners,  who  died  deserted 
and  disapproved  by  their  own  people,  and  have  left  behind 
them  no  name  or  memorial  ?  How  many  Belgians,  and 
Serbs,  and  Poles,  how  many  brave  followers  of  Liebknecht 
in  Germany  itself,  have  been  murdered  in  silence  for  obeying 


THE  SOUL  AS   IT  IS  149 

their  consciences,  and  their  memory  perhaps  blasted  by  a 
false  official  statement,  so  that  even  their  example  does  not 
live  ?  In  ancient  Athens  there  was,  beside  the  ordinary 
altars  of  worship,  an  altar  to  the  Unknown  God.  There 
ought  to  be  in  our  hearts,  whenever  we  think  with  worship 
and  gratitude  of  the  great  men  who  have  been  deliverers 
or  helpers  of  the  human  race,  an  altar  to  the  unknown  martyrs 
who  have  suffered  for  the  right  and  failed. 


IV 

But  let  us  stop  a  moment.  When  the  soul  of  man  thus 
stands  up  against  the  world,  is  it  necessarily  always  in 
the  right  ?  Because  a  man  holds  a  belief  so  firmly  that  he 
will  submit  to  prison  and  death  rather  than  forswear  it, 
does  it  follow  that  the  belief  is  true  ?  Obviously  not  in 
the  least.  In  every  great  moral  conflict  of  history  you  have 
had  martyrs  on  both  sides.  Christians  and  Pagans,  Arians 
and  Trinitarians,  Catholics  and  Protestants,  have  killed 
each  other  and  died  themselves  for  their  respective  beliefs, 
and  more  particularly  for  those  particular  parts  of  them 
which  most  directly  contradicted  the  beliefs  of  the  other 
side.  Martyrs  are  not  always  right.  Indeed,  I  am  not 
sure  that  if  you  took  the  whole  faith  for  which  a  particular 
martyr  suffers — the  whole  mass  of  passionate  beliefs  by 
which  he  is  really  at  the  time  actuated — I  am  not  sure 
you  would  not  find  that  martyrs  were  almost  always 
considerably  wrong.  A  man  does  not  usually  reach  the 
point  where  he  is  willing  to  die  for  a  cause  without  getting 
his  passions  strongly  interwoven  with  his  beliefs ;  and 
when  a  belief  is  mixed  with  passion,  as  we  all  know,  it  is 
almost  certain  to  deviate  from  truth.  If  you  ever  wish, 
as  we  all  sometimes  do,  to  punish  someone  who  differs 
from  you,  and  to  go  on  punishing  him  till  he  agrees  with 
you,  it  is  no  good  arguing  that  your  victim  is  not  a  martyr 
because  he  is  wrong  or  even  wicked  in  his  beliefs  ;  a  great 
many  martyrs  have  been  wrong,  and  their  persecutors 
have  always  thought  them  both  wrong  and  wicked.  It  is 
still  more  irrelevant  to  condemn  the  martyr  for  being 


150  THE  SOUL  AS  IT  IS 

inconsistent :  for  two  reasons.  First,  there  is  no  person 
known  to  history,  neither  priest  nor  philosopher,  nor  states- 
man, nor  even  mathematician,  who  has  yet  succeeded  in 
building  a  complete  theory  of  life  which  has  no  inconsistencies 
in  it.  The  best  we  can  do  is  to  be  consistent  in  some  little 
corner  of  life,  or  in  dealing  with  some  immediate  practical 
problem.  And  further,  it  would  be  absurd  to  say  that  a 
man  must  not  take  any  step  until  he  had  made  sure  that  the 
whole  of  his  life  was  consistent  with  it.  If  a  man  wants  to 
behave  in  some  respect  better  than  he  has  behaved  before, 
it  is  practically  certain  that  the  new  and  better  part  of 
his  life  will  not  be  consistent  with  all  the  other  parts  of 
it  which  he  is  not  attending  to.  To  reproach  such  a  man 
for  inconsistency  is  equivalent  to  asking  him  to  remain 
always  at  the  lowest  level  of  which  he  is  capable — though 
as  a  matter  of  fact  he  would  not  attain  consistency 
even  then. 

You  must  not  be  surprised  then  at  a  martyr  being  wrong, 
and  you  must  not  dream  of  expecting  him  to  be  in  all  of 
his  beliefs  consistent. 

What  can  you  expect  of  him,  then  ?  I  think  all  you  can 
expect  is  sincerity  of  belief  and  purity  of  motive.  If  he  is 
a  fool,  if  he  is  prejudiced,  if  he  is  muddle-headed,  if  he  is 
misled,  if  he  is  exasperating,  even  if  he  has  certain  grave 
faults  of  character  in  other  respects,  he  can  still  be  a  martyr, 
and  be  entitled  to  a  martyr's  reward.  But  if  he  is  insincere, 
if  he  is  lying  ;  if,  when  professing  to  suffer  for  the  right  and 
the  truth,  he  is  really  seeking  his  own  advantage,  and  saying 
things  which  he  does  not  believe,  then  he  is  done  for  ;  there 
is  nothing  more  to  be  said  about  him  ;  he  is  not  a  martyr, 
but  a  mere  ordinary  humbug.  And  no  doubt  one  of  the 
troubles  of  a  Government  which  has  to  deal  with  people 
who  of  set  purpose  and  principle  defy  a  particular  law,  is 
to  make  out  which  are  martyrs  and  which  humbugs.  And 
this  is  a  matter  of  more  consequence  than  may  at  first  appear. 
For  it  is  a  very  dangerous  thing  to  allow  people  by  mere 
cunning  and  obstinacy  and  self-advertisement  in  breaking 
the  law  to  rise  into  public  fame  and  to  undermine  that 
fabric  of  mutual  agreement  which  holds  society  together  ; 
a  nation  in  which  any  well-organized  rebels  could  safely 


THE  SOUL  AS   IT   IS  151 

defy  the  law  would  soon  almost  cease  to  be  a  free  nation. 
And,  on  the  other  hand,  a  nation  in  which  the  Government 
seems  to  be  forcing  men  into  sin  against  their  conscience, 
so  that  good  people  instinctively  respect  the  prisoner  and 
condemn  the  judge,  has  already  ceased  to  be  a  free  nation 
You  remember  the  old  words  of  Gamaliel :  "  Lest  haply 
ye  be  found  to  be  fighting  against  God."     It  is  a  serious \\ 
thing  for  any  organ  of  material  power  to  be  found  fighting  j  \ 
against  the  human  soul. 


Let  me  take  a  present-day  instance  of  this  battle  between 
a  soul  and  a  Government,  a  very  curious  instance,  because 
it  is  almost  impossible  without  more  knowledge  than  most 
people  in  England  possess  to  say  who  was  wrong  and  who 
right. 

About  the  year  1889  a  young  Indian  student,  called 
Mohandar  Karamchand  Gandhi,  came  to  England  to  study 
law.  He  was  rich  and  clever,  of  a  cultivated  family,  gentle 
and  modest  in  his  manner.  He  dressed  and  behaved  like 
other  people.  There  was  nothing  particular  about  him 
to  show  that  he  had  already  taken  a  Jain  vow  to  abstain 
from  wine,  from  flesh,  and  from  sexual  intercourse.  He 
took  his  degrees  and  became  a  successful  lawyer  in  Bombay, 
but  he  cared  more  for  religion  than  law.  Gradually  his 
asceticism  increased.  He  gave  away  all  his  money  to  good 
causes  except  the  meagrest  allowance.  He  took  vows  of 
poverty.  He  ceased  to  practise  at  the  law  because  his 
religion — a  mysticism  which  seems  to  be  as  closely  related 
to  Christianity  as  it  is  to  any  traditional  Indian  religion — 
forbade  him  to  take  part  in  a  system  wliich  tried  to  do 
right  by  violence.  When  I  met  him  in  England,  in  1914, 
he  ate,  I  believe,  only  rice,  and  drank  only  water,  and  slept 
on  the  floor  ;  and  his  wife,  who  seemed  to  be  his  companion 
in  everything,  lived  in  the  same  way.  His  conversation 
was  that  of  a  cultivated  and  well-read  man  with  a  certain 
indefinable  suggestion  of  saintliness.  His  patriotism, 
which  was  combined  with  an  enthusiastic  support  of  England 
against  Germany,  is  interwoven  with  his  religion,  and  aims 


152  THE  SOUL  AS   IT  IS 

at  the  moral  regeneration  of  India  on  the  lines  of  Indian 
thought,  with  no  barriers  between  one  Indian  and  another, 
and  to  the  exclusion  as  far  as  possible  of  the  influence  of 
the  West,  with  its  industrial  slavery,  its  material  civilization, 
its  money-worship  and  its  wars.  (I  am  merely  stating  this 
view,  of  course,  not  either  criticizing  it  or  suggesting  that 
it  is  right.) 

Oriental  peoples,  perhaps  owing  to  causes  connected  with 
their  form  of  civilization,  are  apt  to  be  enormously  influenced 
by  great  saintliness  of  character  when  they  see  it.  Like 
all  great  masses  of  ignorant  people,  however,  they  need 
some  very  plain  and  simple  test  to  assure  them  that  their 
hero  is  really  a  saint  and  not  a  humbug,  and  the  test  they 
habitually  apply  is  that  of  self-denial.  Take  vows  of 
poverty,  live  on  rice  and  water,  and  they  will  listen  to  your 
preaching,  as  several  of  our  missionaries  have  found ; 
come  to  them  eating  and  drinking  and  dressed  in  expensive 
European  clothes — and  they  feel  differently.  It  is  far  from 
a  perfect  test,  but  there  is  something  in  it.  At  any  rate 
I  am  told  that  Gandhi's  influence  in  India  is  now  enormous, 
almost  equal  to  that  of  his  friend  the  late  Mr.  Gokhale. 

And  now  for  the  battle.  In  South  Africa  there  are  some 
150,000  Indians,  chiefly  in  Natal ;  and  the  South  African 
Government,  feeling  that  the  colour  question  in  its  territories 
was  quite  sufficiently  difficult  already,  determined  to  prevent 
the  immigration  of  any  more  Indians,  and  if  possible  to 
expel  those  who  were  already  there.  This  last  could  not  be 
done.  It  would  have  violated  a  treaty ;  it  was  opposed 
by  Natal,  where  much  of  the  industry  depended  on  Indian 
labour ;  and  it  was  objected  to  by  the  Indian  Government 
and  the  Home  Government.  Then  began  a  long  struggle. 
The  whites  of  South  Africa  determined  to  make  life  in 
South  Africa  undesirable,  if  not  for  all  Indians,  at  least  for 
all  Indians  above  the  coolie  class.  Indians  were  specially 
taxed,  were  made  to  register  in  a  degrading  way ;  they 
were  classed  with  negroes ;  their  thumb-prints  were  taken 
by  the  police  as  if  they  were  criminals.  If,  owing  to  the 
scruples  of  the  Government,  the  law  was  in  any  case  too 
lenient,  patriotic  mobs  undertook  to  remedy  the  defect. 
Quite  early  in  the  struggle  the  Indians  in  South  Africa  asked 


V  THE  SOUL  AS  IT  IS  158 

Mr.  Gandhi  to  come  and  help  them.  He  came  as  a  barrister 
in  1893  ;  he  was  forbidden  to  plead.  He  proved  his  right  to 
plead  ;  he  won  his  case  against  the  Asiatic  Exclusion  Act  on 
grounds  of  constitutional  law,  and  returned  to  India.  The 
relief  which  the  Indians  had  expected  was  riot  realized. 
Gandhi  came  again  in  1895.  He  was  mobbed  and  nearly 
killed  at  Durban.  I  will  not  tell  in  detail  how  he  settled 
down  eventually  in  South  Africa  as  a  leader  and  counsellor 
to  his  people  ;  how  he  founded  a  settlement  in  the  country 
outside  Durban,  where  the  workers  should  live  directly  on 
the  land,  and  all  be  bound  by  a  vow  of  poverty.  For  many 
years  he  was  engaged  in  constant  passive  resistance  to 
the  Government  and  constant  efforts  to  raise  and  ennoble 
the  inward  life  of  the  Indian  Community.  But  he  was  unlike 
other  strikers  or  resisters  in  this :  that  mostly  the  resister 
takes  advantage  of  any  difficulty  of  the  Government  in  order 
to  press  his  claim  the  harder,  whereas  Gandhi,  when  the 
Government  was  in  any  dangerous  difficulty,  always 
relaxed  his  resistance  and  offered  his  help.  In  1899  came 
the  Boer  War  ;  Gandhi  immediately  organized  an  Indian 
Red  Cross  unit.  There  was  a  popular  movement  for 
refusing  it  and  treating  it  as  seditious.  But  it  was 
needed.  The  soldiers  wanted  it.  And  it  served  through 
the  war,  and  was  mentioned  in  despatches,  and 
thanked  publicly  for  its  skilful  work  and  courage 
under  fire.  In  1904  there  was  an  outbreak  of  plague  in 
Johannesburg,  and  Gandhi  had  a  private  hospital  opened 
before  the  public  authorities  had  begun  to  act.  In  1906 
there  was  a  Native  rebellion  in  Natal :  Gandhi  raised  and 
personally  led  a  corps  of  stretcher-bearers,  whose  work  seems 
to  have  proved  particularly  dangerous  and  painful.  Gandhi 
was  thanked  by  the  Governor  in  Natal — and  shortly  after- 
wards thrown  into  jail  in  Johannesburg.  Lastly,  in  1913, 
when  he  was  being  repeatedly  imprisoned,  among  criminals 
of  the  lowest  class,  and  his  followers  were  in  Jail  to  the  number 
of  2,500,  in  the  very  midst  of  the  general  strike  of  Indians 
in  the  Transvaal  and  Natal  there  occurred  the  sudden  and 
revolutionary  railway  strike  which  endangered  for  the  time 
the  very  existence  of  organized  society  in  South  Africa. 
From  the  ordinary  agitator's  point  of  view  the  game  was  in 


154  THE   SOUL  AS  IT  IS 

Gandhi's  hands.  He  had  only  to  strike  his  hardest.  In- 
stead, he  gave  orders  for  his  people  to  resume  work  till  the 
Government  should  be  safe  again.  I  cannot  say  how  often 
he  was  imprisoned,  how  often  mobbed  and  assaulted,  or 
what  pains  were  taken  to  mortify  and  humiliate  him  in 
public.  But  by  1913  the  Indian  case  had  been  taken  up 
by  Lord  Hardinge  and  the  Government  of  India.  An 
Imperial  Commission  reported  in  his  favour  on  most  of 
the  points  at  issue,  and  an  Act  was  passed  .according  to 
the  Commission's  recommendations,  entitled  the  Indian 
Relief  Act. 

My  sketch  is  very  imperfect ;  but  the  story  forms  an 
extraordinary  illustration  of  a  contest  which  was  won,  or 
practically  won,  by  a  policy  of  doing  no  wrong,  committing 
no  violence,  but  simply  enduring  all  the  punishment  the 
other  side  could  inflict  until  they  became  weary  and  ashamed 
of  punishing.  A  battle  of  the  unaided  human  soul  against 
overwhelming  material  force,  and  it  ends  by  the  units  of 
material  force  gradually  deserting  their  own  banners  and 
coming  round  to  the  side  of  the  soul ! 

Persons  in  power  should  be  very  careful  how  they  deal 

j  with  a  man  who  cares  nothing  for  sensual  pleasure,  nothing 

;  for  riches,  nothing  for  comfort  or  praise  or  promotion, 

but  is  simply  determined  to  do  what  he  believes  to  be  right. 

He  is  a  dangerous  and  uncomfortable  enemy — because  his 

body,  which  you  can  always  conquer,  gives  you  so  little 

purchase  upon  his  soul. 

VI 

In  Gandhi's  case  the  solution  of  the  strife  between  him 
and  the  Government  was  particularly  difficult,  because  he 
was  not  content  to  be  let  alone.  He  thought  it  his  duty, 
God  helping  him,  to  compel  a  Government  backed  by  the 
vast  majority  of  the  nation  to  change  their  policy.  And 
no  Government  could  yield,  or  ought  to  yield,  to  such 
coercion.  The  best  it  could  do  was  probably  somewhere 
near  that  which,  by  the  advice  of  General  Smuts,  it  even- 
tually did  propose  to  do  :  to  purge  its  policy  as  far  as 
possible  of  all  elements  which  were  not  essential  to  its  own 


THE   SOUL  AS   IT  IS  155 

conviction  and  which  did  particular  violence  to  the  convic- 
tions of  others. 

In  the  next  case  I  wish  to  lay  before  you  the  issue  is  much 
simpler.  It  is  the  case  of  the  persecution  of  an  Englishman 
of  saintly  life,  Mr.  Stephen  Hobhouse.  I  say  deliberately 
of  saintly  life,  and  I  say  no  more ;  not  for  a  moment  that 
his  views  are  right,  or  his  theory  of  life  socially  convenient, 
or  his  example  one  that  should  be  followed.  As  we  have 
noticed  before,  it  often  happens  that  the  saints  are  wrong 
and  the  children  of  this  world  right ;  but  they  are  not  often 
right  when  they  begin  treating  the  saints  as  criminals. 

Stephen  Hobhouse  was  the  son  of  rich  parents ;  he  was  a 
scholar  of  Eton,  afterwards  an  undergraduate  at  Balliol ;  he 
won  First  Class  Honours  in  Moderations,  and  Second  Class 
Honours  in  Greats,  after  which  he  obtained  a  post  in  the 
Board  of  Education.  He  was  rich  and  well  connected  ;  he 
was  clever  and  successful,  and  had  every  prospect  of  a  bril- 
liant career.  But  from  early  life  he  had  a  conscience  more 
exacting  than  the  consciences  of  most  of  us.  He  was  religious 
with  a  touch  of  mysticism.  He  wanted  to  follow  Christ. 
He  eventually  formulated  the  goal  at  which  he  aimed  as 
"  self-identification  with  the  oppressed."  To  help  the  poor 
and  suffering  was  not  enough ;  he  must  be  one  with  the 
poor  and  suffering.  He  could  not  do  this  as  a  rich  man. 
So  he  began  by  renouncing  his  position  as  heir  to  his  father's 
estate  and  stripping  himself  of  the  prospect  of  inherited 
wealth.  He  had  already  joined  the  Quakers,  and  was  an 
occasional  speaker  in  their  meeting-house.  (They  have  no 
ordained  ministers.)  He  went  with  his  wife,  who  shares 
his  religion,  to  a  workman's  flat  in  East  London,  where  the 
two  continued  to  live  as  friends  and  neighbours  to  all  about 
them,  ministering  to  those  in  need  and  seeking  "  self- 
identification  with  the  oppressed."  Their  life,  I  need  hardly 
say,  was  reduced  to  the  most  drastic  simplicity.  Let  me 
give  one  small  illustration. 

A  friend  of  mine  calling  on  Mrs.  Hobhouse  the  other  day 
noticed  a  clothes-line  hanging  across  the  room  and  asked 
some  question  about  it.  It  appeared  that  when  they  first 
moved  into  the  flat,  living  of  course  without  a  servant, 
Mrs.  Hobhouse  sent  her  washing  out  to  a  laundry.  The 


156  THE  SOUL  AS  IT  IS 

work  of  suddenly  living  without  a  servant  was,  for  two 
delicately  nurtured  people,  hard  enough.  But  they  noticed 
that  the  families  living  round  them  did  not  send  their 
washing  out ;  they  did  it  at  home  in  the  living-room. 
"  Self-identification  with  the  oppressed  "  pointed  the  road 
clearly,  and  they  tied  the  clothes-line  across  the  living- 
room  and  did  the  washing  at  home. 

Stephen  had  adopted  the  Tolstoyan  view  of  war  when 
he  was  an  undergraduate  at  Oxford  and  resigned  from  the 
volunteers.  He  had  been  a  Quaker,  and  a  Quaker  of  the 
strictest  sort,  for  five  years  before  1914.  He  knew  by  ex- 
perience what  war  was ;  for  during  the  war  in  the  Balkans, 
having  previously  resigned  his  post  in  the  Board  of  Educa- 
tion, he  had  gone  to  Constantinople  to  nurse  the  refugees 
of  various  nations  who  were  lying,  largely  untended,  in 
the  mosques  and  outlying  cemeteries  of  the  city.  Of  his 
work  there  I  know  only  by  hearsay,  but  the  stories  of  it  have 
a  certain  unmistakable  note,  deeds  and  religious  organiza- 
tions clash  against  one  another ;  but  true  saintliness,  the 
quality  of  the  soul  that  has  really  mastered  the  corpse 
it  carries,  is  much  the  same  in  all  religions,  and  breaks  the 
barriers  of  creeds.  Stephen's  interpreter,  a  pious  Moslem, 
who  was  accustomed  probably  to  think  of  all  Christians  as 
dogs,  felt  the  spirit  that  radiated  from  this  Christian. 
He  joined  him  in  prayer,  and  consented  at  a  time  of  danger 
to  give  up  the  revolver  he  was  carrying. 

The  present  war  came  and  was  followed  by  conscription, 
embodied  in  an  Act  which  allowed  complete  exemption  to 
those  who  on  conscientious  grounds,  however  mistaken, 
refused  to  take  part  in  slaying  their  fellow-men.  If  con- 
scription was  necessarj',  as  I  am  inclined  to  think  it  was, 
that  was  a  generous  Act,  and  one  worthy  of  the  traditions 
of  English  tolerance.  It  was  well  known  that  Stephen,  as  a 
strict  Quaker,  considered  it  a  sin  to  partake  in  war,  and 
there  was  not  the  smallest  glimmer  of  a  doubt  to  be  cast 
on  the  sincerity  of  his  objection. 

By  an  act  of  angry  and  uncomprehending  injustice  his 
tribunal  disallowed  his  conscientious  objection  and  sent 
him  to  serve  with  the  Friends'  Ambulance  Unit.  This 
order  he  could  not  accept  on  two  grounds  :  the  Unit  was 


THE  SOUL  AS   IT  IS  157 

now  auxiliary  to  the  Army,  so  that  even  as  a  free  agent  he 
would  not  have  joined  it ;  and  in  any  case  he  would  not 
accept  an  order  that  made  him  a  conscript.  He  did  not 
appeal  against  the  sentence,  because  many  of  his  friends 
and  fellow-Quakers  were  already  being  sent  to  prison,  and 
"  self -identification  with  the  oppressed  "  forbade  his  desert- 
ing them.  He  refused  to  obey  military  orders.  He  was 
court-mart ialled  and  sentenced  to  various  military  punish- 
ments, culminating  in  112  days'  hard  labour.  When 
that  was  over  he  was  taken  out  and  the  order  repeated  ; 
of  course  he  still  disobeyed,  and  is  now  I  undergoing  two 
years'  hard  labour.  The  renewed  sentences  bring  with 
them  conditions  more  severe  tkan  those  of  continuous 
penal  servitude. 

And  one  point  more.  Every  one  interested  in  prison 
reform  knows  that  one  of  the  most  severe  strains  upon  human 
nature  involved  in  prison  life  is  the  eternal  silence — one 
of  the  most  severe  and,  many  people  hold,  the  most  cor- 
rupting and  injurious  to  mind  and  character  next  to  solitary 
confinement  itself.  In  every  prison  the  rule  of  silence  is 
apt  to  be  somehow  evaded.  It  is  a  thing  which  human 
nature  in  the  long  run  will  not  bear,  and  by  hook  or  by 
crook,  by  sundry  unedifying  artifices,  the  prisoners  do 
manage  to  snatch  a  few  words  of  conversation  with  one 
another  from  day  to  day.  Stephen  at  first  did  talk  by  these 
secret  methods,  then  he  decided  that  it  was  wrong.  He 
writes  to  his  wife :  '  The  very  night  of  your  last  visit  I 
was  smitten  with  a  sense  of  shame  for  the  habits  of  con- 
cealment verging  on  deception  which  this  life  seems  to 
force  on  all  of  us.  For  a  fortnight  I  wrestled  day  and  night 
with  this  feeling.  ...  It  seemed  so  hard  to  give  up  the 
only  outward  ways  of  expressing  love."  He  confessed  to 
the  governor  that  he  had  been  breaking  the  rule  of  silence, 
and  refused  to  promise  to  obey  it  in  the  future.  And  the 
result  is  that,  in  order  to  make  sure  he  does  not  break  that 
rule,  and  at  the  same  time  to  avoid  the  constant  repetition 
of  special  punishments,  this  man  is  in  solitary  confinement 
for  the  indefinite  future. 

I  believe  in  this  case  that  the  Government  has  broken 

1  August  1918. 


158  THE  SOUL  AS   IT  IS 

the  law.  I  am  clear  that  the  original  sentence  of  the 
tribunal  was  wrong.  But  for  the  moment  I  am  dealing 
with  another  aspect  of  this  case.  Apart  from  the  lightness 
or  wrongness  of  the  prisoner's  views  about  war,  apart  from 
the  technical  legality  or  illegality  of  the  Government's 
action,  you  have  here  a  deliberate  conflict  between  the 
massed  power  of  Government  and  the  soul  of  one  righteous 
man.  There  are  about  a  thousand  men  in  the  same 
position. 

I  do  not  know  who  will  win.  I  make  no  prophecy.  It 
is  quite  easy  for  a  huge  engine  like  the  War  Office  to  crush 
any  one  man's  body,  to  destroy  his  reason  by  perpetual 
solitude,  or  put  an  end  to  his  life.  But  I  do  not  think  that 
a  Government  which  sets  out  to  prosecute  its  saints  is  a 
wise  or  a  generous  Government ;  I  do  not  think  a  nation 
which  cannot  live  in  peace  with  its  saints  is  a  very  healthy 
or  high-minded  nation.1 

VII 

I  have  not  attempted  to  answer  the  question  with  which 
we  started,  to  define  what  the  soul  is  or  what  life  is,  or 
where  the  difference  comes  between  the  mere  physical 
life  that  makes  a  man  move  his  limbs  and  desire  his  food, 
and  the  soul  itself  or  central  guiding  principle,  which 
the  ancients  called  reason  and  the  moderns  think  of  as  will. 
The  question  is  perhaps  still  beyond  human  powers  of 
analysis.  I  have  only  tried  to  consider  with  the  help  of 
examples  the  actual  working  of  the  soul  in  shaping  a  man's 
life,  and  sometimes  bringing  him  into  conflict  not  only  with 
his  own  apparent  interest,  but  with  the  general  stream  of 
will  in  the  society  around  him.  And  I  have  tried,  first,  to 
suggest  that  a  wise  ruler  will  be  very  circumspect,  a  con- 
scientious ruler  will  be  very  tender,  before  challenging  the 
lowliest  of  human  souls  to  battle  on  the  soul's  own  ground, 
or  setting  about  the  task  of  compelling  the  humblest  of 
his  subjects  by  torment  and  violence  to  do  that  which  he 
definitely  believes  to  be  wrong.  So  much  for  action  between 
man  and  man.  And  secondly,  within  our  own  hearts,  I 
1  Stephen  Hobhouse  was  unconditionally  released  soon  after  this. 


THE  SOUL  AS  IT  IS  159 

would  say  that  the  main  lesson  to  each  man  of  us  is  to  see 
that  his  own  soul  does  not  die.  It  will  sometimes  stagger 
under  the  weight  of  the  corpse  it  carries  ;  that  is  inevitable. 
Only  let  it  not  fall  into  the  power  of  the  corpse.  The  weight 
of  dead  matter  seems,  at  times  like  the  present,  to  increase 
upon  us.  Our  whole  being  is  dulled.  We  do  more  and 
more  things  because  we  are  driven,  fewer  and  fewer  because 
we  choose  them  and  love  them ;  we  cease  even  to  suffer 
as  we  should  suffer,  or  to  pity  as  we  should  pity.  In  our 
own  great  war  we  tend  to  forget  what  we  ourselves  owe  to 
the  higher  causes  for  which  our  friends  have  died  as  martyrs, 
to  forget  because  the  deaths  are  by  now  so  common  and 
the  martyrdom  has  lasted  so  long.  We  tend  to  shrink 
from  the  higher  emotions  because  they  are  difficult,  to  sink 
into  the  round  of  lower  and  more  commonplace  emotions 
because  they  make  less  disturbance  in  our  daily  business. 
The  power  of  death  is  abroad  over  the  world.  It  has  taken 
lives  innumerable,  and  better  lives  than  ours.  Let  those 
of  us  whose  bodily  life  is  still  spared  make  sure  that  the 
soul  within  us  shall  not  die. 


VIII 

NATIONAL     IDEALS;     CONSCIOUS    AND 
UNCONSCIOUS  • 

IF  I  had  one  remark  and  one  only  to  make  about 
National  Ideals,  it  would  be  this  :  that  the  conscious 
and  professed  ideals  are  as  straws  in  the  wind ; 
the  unconscious  or  concealed  ideals  are  the  real  forces  that 
govern  mankind.  Some  philosopher,  I  think  it  was  Herbart, 
has  compared  the  unconscious  part  of  human  character 
to  the  submerged  part  of  an  iceberg  at  sea.  The  great 
bulk  of  the  iceberg  is  under  water,  invisible  and  unnotice- 
able  :  what  we  call  the  iceberg  is  only  the  cluster  of  towers 
and  pinnacles  that  reach  up  into  the  light.  The  great 
bulk  of  human  character  lies  below  the  water-line  of  con- 
sciousness. We  breathe,  digest,  preserve  our  balance, 
without  thinking  of  it :  we  seek  what  we  like  and  shun  what 
we  dislike  without  thinking  of  it :  we  devise  the  ways  of 
getting  or  of  shunning,  we  plot,  scheme,  flatter,  slander, 
bribe  and  threaten — without  thinking  of  it,  without  know- 
ing it,  without  reason  or  conscience  having  a  hearing  on 
the  subject. 

The  awakened,  reasonable,  conscious  Man  is  the  top- 
most tower  of  the  whole  great  structure.  But  it  is  the 
instinctive  and  unconscious  Man  that  supplies  both  the 
mass  and  the  momentum.  It  is  this  submerged  self,  this 
self  which,  to  use  the  mediaeval  phrase  "  slumbers  beneath 
the  threshold,"  that  counts  for  most  in  the  movements  of 
masses  and  of  nations.  The  instinctive  man  is  not,  of 
course,  necessarily  wicked ;  he  is  the  source  of  good  as 
well  as  of  evil,  of  love  as  well  as  of  hate.  But  it  is  well 
to  observe  him  :  for  if  ever  you  cease  to  observe  him, 
he  will  deceive  you. 

1  The  International  Journal  of  Ethics,  October  1900. 
160 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  161 

It  must  have  struck  every  student  of  History  who  at 
the  same  time  cares  about  contemporary  politics,   that 
there  is  one  strange  discrepancy  between  the  record  of 
politics  in  the  past  and  his  own  consciousness  of  politics 
in  the  present.    When  he  thinks  over  his  political  views, 
makes  a  speech  or  argues,  he  is  constantly  appealing  to 
ideals,    such    as    Justice,    Liberty,    Christian    principles, 
patriotism,  and  he  believes  that  these  ideals  guide  both 
him  and  his  party.    When  he  reads  a  good  history,  he  will 
find  the  differences  of  parties  and  of  nations  expressed 
almost    exclusively  by  divergences   of  interest.    The  in- 
terests of  France  clashing  with  the  interests  of  Austria ; 
the  interests  of  the  landed  classes,  the  interests  of  the 
manufacturers,   the  interests  of  the  Church — these  come 
in  history  not  as  occasional  factors  in  the  life  of  nations 
habitually  guided  by  Justice,  Liberty  and  the  rest  of  it : 
they  come  as  permanent  factors,  as  the  main  roots  of  action. 
It  gives  one  a  shock,  this  apparent  cynicism  of  History. 
But  the  facts  bear  it  out ;  and  more,  our  own  instinctive 
comments  show  that  we  expected  it.     From  the  beginning 
of  the  world  till  now  it  has  been  the  same  :   farmers  have 
always  wanted  corn  to  be  dear  ;  manufacturers  have  wanted 
labour  to  be   cheap ;    slave-owners  have  always  thought 
well  of  slavery  ;  liquor  sellers  have  always  admired  an  in- 
creased consumption  of  liquor ;    aristocracies  have  always 
approved   of   their   own   privileges ;     leather-sellers   have 
always  held  that  more  articles  should  be  made  of  leather. 
The  slave-owner  produces  a  number  of  arguments  explain- 
ing that  slavery  is  a  blessing  to  all  concerned  in  it.     The 
farmer  writes  pamphlets  and   books  to  show  that   Free 
Trade  in  corn  will  wreck  the  bases  of  society.     "  These," 
says  the  one,  "  are  the  reasons  why  I  object  to  emancipa- 
tion."    "  Those,"  says  the  other,  "  are  the  considerations 
that  make  me  a  protectionist." 

History  turns  an  amused  glance  at  their  reasons  and 
observes,  "  The  slave-owners  naturally  resisted  emancipa- 
tion. The  farmers  were,  of  course,  protectionists."  And 
we  are  not  in  the  least  surprised  at  her  tone.  If  we  find 
a  slave-owning  emancipationist  or  a  farmer  who  believes 
that  eren  if  he  loses  by  it,  poor  men  ought  to  have  cheap 

11 


162  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

bread,  we  either  suspect  his  motives  or  we  frankly 
admire  him  as  a  noble  and  exceptional  man.  Fortu- 
nately, amid  the  clash  of  interests,  such  men  have 
often  very  great  power.  They  act  with  the  disinterested 
classes,  and  the  disinterested  classes  can  often  save  a 
country. 

Still  the  unconscious  ideals  are  what  mainly  guide  man- 
kind. And  among  the  unconscious  ideals  there  is  one 
especially  that  is  vast  and  permanent :  the  very  centre 
of  the  Ego  is  stirred  by  it :  the  ideal  of  the  man's  own 
prosperity,  success,  expansion.  "  I  love  the  thing  that 
makes  me  great  and  rich  and  admired.  I  hate  the  thing 
that  pulls  me  down  and  makes  me  small  and  of  no  account." 
And  if  you  argue  to  me  that  the  first  thing  is  bad  and  the 
second  good,  do  you  suppose  that  the  quivering  centre  of 
ambitious  life  within  me  will  not  cry  in  passionate  denial : 
"  No,  the  thing  that  hurts  me  is  bad,  cruel,  treacherous : 
the  thing  that  soothes  and  helps  me  is  good."  Do  you 
suppose  it  will  not  reach  out  its  feelers  north,  south,  east 
and  west  for  weapons  to  help  it  and  arguments  to  slay 
your  arguments  ? 

Self-interest — in  no  high  philosophical  sense,  but  in  its 
ordinary  acceptation — is  a  vast  factor  in  private,  in  every- 
day life.  But  in  private  life  it  is  strongly  and  vividly 
counteracted  by  social  and  moral  forces  which  are  almost 
powerless  in  politics.  A  farmer  who  could  let  his  own 
labourer  starve  to  death  before  his  eyes  rather  than  part 
with  a  slice  of  bread  would  be  a  monster.  Men  are  pre- 
vented from  doing  such  things  by  all  kinds  of  natural 
instincts.  But  the  landed  classes  who  caused  thousands 
to  die  of  famine  in  1842  and  1846,  in  order  to  keep  up  their 
incomes,  were  very  good  people  indeed.  Is  that  not  a 
fair  way  of  putting  it  ?  I  think  it  is.  True,  they  did  not 
say  they  supported  the  Corn  Laws  in  order  to  keep  up  their 
income  :  they  said  it  was  because  they  believed  in  certain 
arguments.  But  why  did  they  believe  these  arguments  ? 
Why  did  all  farmers  enthusiastically  believe  all  arguments — 
whether  they  understood  them  or  not — that  tended  one 
way,  while  all  starving  artisans  believed  the  contrary  argu- 
ments ?  The  farmers  believed  their  arguments  because 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  1C8 

they  wanted  good  incomes :    the  artisans  believed  theirs 
because  they  valued  cheap  bread. 

Mere  straightforward  self-interest,  then,  takes  us  a  very 
long  way  in  the  explanation  of  politics.  But  obviously 
not  the  whole  way.  There  are  other  instinctive  elements. 
There  is  especially  one  other ;  this  same  growing  and 
aspiring  centre  of  life  within  us,  the  thing  that  in  a  baby 
or  in  Alexander  the  Great  claims  the  whole  world  as  its 
own,  has  other  claims  than  the  merely  physical.  When 
it  has  grasped  all  it  can  hold  or  hope  for,  when  it  is  for  the 
moment  wearied  with  self-assertion,  it  likes  to  be  stroked 
and  praised,  it  likes  to  reflect  upon  its  nobleness,  justice 
and  generosity.  Consider  the  fowls  of  the  air.  A  very 
pretty  small  bird,  the  Great  Tit,  when  hungry,  will  lift  up 
its  beak,  split  open  its  brother's  head  and  proceed  to  eat 
his  brains.  It  might  then  be  satisfied,  think  you  ?  Not 
at  all !  It  has  a  moral  nature,  you  must  please  to  remember, 
which  demands  to  be  satisfied  as  well  as  the  physical. 
When  it  has  finished  its  brother's  brains,  it  first  gets  very 
angry  and  pecks  the  dead  body  ;  then  it  flies  off  to  a  tree 
and  exults.  What  is  it  angry  with  and  why  does  it  exult  ? 
It  is  angry  with  the  profound  wickedness  of  that  brother, 
in  consequence  of  which  it  was  obliged  to  kill  him  :  it 
exults  in  the  thought  of  its  own  courage,  firmness,  justice, 
moderation,  generosity  and  domestic  sweetness.  That 
song  is  its  equivalent — poor  innocent  thing — of  a  patriotic 
leading  article  in  the  Kreuz  Zeitung  or  the  Daily  Telegraph 
or  the  Petit  Journal. 

Human  nature  cries  aloud  for  self-approval :  it  winces 
and  shudders  at  the  first  touch  of  self-reproach  or  self- 
contempt.  There  are  obviously  two  ways  of  avoiding  self- 
reproach.  The  tiresome  and  precarious  way  of  not  doing 
what  you  suspect  to  be  wrong  or  contemptible  :  and  the 
bold  and  comparatively  safe  way  of  always  admiring 
whatever  you  yourself  happen  to  do.  With  the  bird  above 
mentioned,  this  course  seems  to  be  easy :  he  can  admire 
himself  all  alone.  Man,  weakened  by  his  increased  self- 
consciousness,  has  not  only  to  praise  himself,  but  must  get 
others  to  praise  him :  must  persuade  them,  argue  with 
them,  cajole  them,  bribe  them,  frighten  them,  till  at  last, 


164  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

amid  the  applause  of  all  his  immediate  friends  and  associates, 
his  sensitive  and  anxious  soul  can  rest  in  peace.  Hence 
comes  hypocrisy,  the  deep  unconscious  hypocrisy  that 
governs  nations  and  satisfies  man's  craving  for  praise. 

"  This  noble  spectacle,"  to  quote  the  phrase  of  a  famous 
general  about  war,  "  has,  after  all,  an  unpleasant  side  to 
it."  "  Never  forget,"  said  a  Greek  sophist  to  a  Greek  tyrant, 
"  never  forget  to  slander  those  you  have  wronged."  He 
need  not  have  said  it.  There  was  a  silent  and  eternal 
sophist,  one  may  be  sure,  below  the  threshold  of  conscious- 
ness, who  could  be  trusted  to  teach  that  tyrant,  and  every 
tyrant,  to  slander  those  whom  he  had  wronged  or  meant 
to  wrong.  "  If  they  are  good  men,"  his  heart  cried  within 
him,  "  I  must  be  bad  !  And  that  I  will  never  be  !  They 
are  not  good  men  :  they  are  vile  and  wicked,  and  they 
hurt  me  ;  and  I  wish  I  could  kill  them  over  again  !  "  The 
whole  vast  force  of  the  unconscious  self  will,  we  may  be 
sure,  be  exerted  before  all  else  in  these  three  directions  : 
he  will  insist  on  his  own  satisfaction  :  he  will  insist  on 
his  own  goodness,  and  he  will  slander  restlessly  and  ruth- 
lessly those  who  make  him  feel  sore. 

Progress,  moral  advance,  the  upward  movement  of 
humanity  consists  mainly  in  the  constant  subjugation 
and  direction  of  the  unconscious  self  by  the  conscious. 
On  the  one  hand  we  gain  more  power  of  knowing  ourselves  : 
on  the  other  hand  the  unconscious  beast  below  the  threshold 
itself  becomes  changed ;  our  actual  instincts  become  a 
little  civilized.  This  is  obvious :  it  is  generally  taken  for 
granted.  What  is  not  taken  for  granted  is  the  extreme 
precariousness  and  superficiality  of  the  process.  If  you 
scratch  a  Russian,  it  is  said,  you  find  a  Tartar.  And  I 
dare  say  if  you  scratch  any  civilized  European  pretty  deep, 
you  will  find  something  much  the  same.  Nay,  sometimes 
when  the  deeps  of  primitive  passion  are  stirred,  you  may 
look  deeper  still,  and  get  glimpses  of  that  wonderful  creature 
on  whom  our  being  is  based,  the  great  Ape  that  differed 
from  other  apes  by  its  upright  posture,  its  intelligence,  its 
ambition,  its  exquisite  sensitiveness  to  suffering,  and  by 
the  fact  that  alone  of  the  ape  tribe  it  was  a  ravening  beast 
of  prey. 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  165 

It  pains  us,  of  course,  to  be  reminded  of  the  beast's  exist- 
ence. A  certain  shock  was  felt  the  other  day  in  the  House 
of  Commons  when  a  Cabinet  Minister  l  drew  a  distinction 
between  Honourable  Members  and  Honourable  Men.  Yet 
no  one  can  possibly  deny  that  it  is  a  real  distinction. 
O'Connell  in  1838  said  it  was  "  horrible  to  think  that  a 
body  of  gentlemen— men  who  ranked  high  in  society,  who 
were  themselves  the  administrators  of  the  law,  and  who 
ought,  therefore,  to  be  above  all  suspicion — should  be 
perjuring  themselves  in  the  (Election)  committees  of  the 
House  of  Commons."  Now  as  a  matter  of  fact  they  were 
perjuring  themselves.  It  was  well  known.  The  leader 
of  the  Opposition  knew  it.  The  Government  admitted  it. 
The  Law  Officers  of  the  Crown  had  remarked  upon  it. 
But  the  political  instincts  of  the  Great  British  nation  ob- 
jected utterly  to  having  such  a  thing  mentioned  in  public — 
especially  by  an  Irishman.  O'Connell  was  condemned, 
reprimanded  and  very  nearly  sent  to  Newgate.  It  is  the 
first  maxim  of  Parliamentary  debate,  as  it  is  the  first 
maxim  of  decent  society,  that  the  existence  of  the  beast 
within  us  should  be  concealed.  It  is  the  first  necessity 
of  all  honest  striving  for  self-improvement,  as  it  is  of  all 
true  philosophic  study,  to  remember  that  the  beast  is  there. 

We  are  remaining  below  ground  a  very  long  time ;  yet 
once  more,  before  we  emerge  above  the  threshold  into  full 
consciousness,  let  us  consider  one  great  semi-conscious 
clash  of  different  ideals  and  differently  constituted  minds. 
On  the  one  side  we  find  the  moderate  and  sensible  states- 
men, Liberal  or  Conservative,  the  Peels,  Liverpools,  Cannings, 
Palmerstons — I  wish  to  avoid  for  obvious  reasons  the 
politicians  of  the  present  day — on  the  other  side  you  have 
a  class  that  is  difficult  to  name ;  The  Times,  when  wishing 
to  be  lenient,  would  call  them  extremists  and  faddists  or 
"  mere  intellectuals."  But  these  qualities  are  not  suffi- 
ciently distinctive.  They  are,  in  the  main,  the  people  who 
think  for  themselves  and  lack  the  spirit  of  the  herd.  The 
former  are  the  stuff  of  which  Cabinet  Ministers  are  made  ; 
they  are  sagacious,  moderate,  statesmanlike  :  they  com- 

»  Mr.  Joseph  Chamberlain. 


1«6  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

mand  the  attention  of  the  House  of  Commons.  They  know 
what  is  possible  and  what  not.  They  understand  the 
conditions  of  free  government  in  a  nation  consisting  of 
many  millions  :  they  know  that  he  who  wishes  to  govern 
must  persuade  a  majority  of  the  many  millions  to  agree 
with  him,  and  consequently  must  never  depart  too  far 
from  their  beliefs.  They  run  their  heads  against  no  stone 
walls.  They  never  touch  a  new  cause  until  it  is  becoming 
popular.  They  never  fight  for  an  old  one  when  the  battle 
is  certain  to  be  lost.  They  tend  on  the  whole  to  avoid 
ruining  their  country  ;  they  flourish  under  constitutional 
governments  and  they  are  especially  prolific  and  prominent 
in  England. 

Members  of  the  other  class  may  be  brilliant,  they  may 
be  conscientious,  well-informed,  honourable ;  but  they 
are  not  statesmen,  and  they  are  distrusted  by  the  House  of 
Commons.  They  do  not  study  what  is  possible.  They  are 
lacking  in  the  gregarious  instincts  and  get  "  out  of  touch  " 
with  their  fellow-men.  They  press  for  what  they  personally 
believe  ;  and  they  do  not  carry  their  Bills.  You  find 
them  urging  new  causes  that  nobody  will  listen  to  ;  defend- 
ing desperately  old  causes  that  are  known  to  be  hopeless. 
It  is  only  in  such  moments  that  you  notice  these  people 
at  all ;  for  as  long  as  the  old  cause  was  defensible,  our 
statesmen  of  the  first  class  were  defending  it ;  as  soon  as 
the  new  cause  is  likely  to  prevail,  our  statesmen  will  take 
it  up  and  carry  it  to  a  glorious  issue,  while  its  faddist  author 
will  be  reduced  to  his  normal  obscurity. 

Let  me  illustrate  what  I  mean.  The  most  characteristic 
English  statesman,  perhaps  the  greatest  statesman,  of  the 
last  hundred  years,  was  Sir  Robert  Peel.  The  good  work 
he  did  was  prodigious.  He  carried  Catholic  Emancipation 
and  Free  Trade ;  he  reformed  the  Currency,  the  Banking 
System  and  the  Criminal  Code.  It  is  a  most  magnificent 
record  doubtless ;  but  let  us  examine  where  the  magni- 
ficence lies. 

Everybody  knows  that  when  he  carried  Catholic  Emanci- 
pation he  had  been  put  in  office  as  an  anti-Catholic ;  just 
before  he  carried  Free  Trade  he  was  the  leader  of  the 
Protectionists.  I  do  not  wish  to  accuse  him  of  inconsistency 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  167 

or  dishonesty.  All  sensible  men  are  inconsistent ;  and  as 
for  honesty — it  is  too  difficult  a  quality  to  define.  What 
I  am  aiming  at  is  the  actual  political  process  by  which 
these  reforms  were  carried. 

In  the  year  1800  a  Mr.  Boyd  proposed  the  reform  of  the 
currency  by  a  gradual  return  to  cash  payments.  Various 
economists  supported  him.  Eleven  years  afterwards  Horner 
proposed  the  measure  in  the  House  of  Commons  and  was 
defeated.  Nineteen  years  afterwards,  the  conditions  being 
in  all  essentials  unchanged,  a  large  number  of  people  had 
begun  to  understand  what  the  economists  had  been  telling 
them  all  that  time.  The  Liverpool  Government  appointed 
a  committee  with  Peel  as  chairman  to  consider  the  question, 
and  Peel  covered  his  name  with  glory  by  reporting  in 
favour  of  Horner's  proposal.  Up  to  that  time  he  had 
opposed  it. 

The  case  of  the  Criminal  Code  is  the  most  instructive  of 
all.  The  old  English  code,  as  we  all  know,  was  exceptionally 
savage  and  exceptionally  imbecile.  A  man  could  be  hanged 
for  picking  a  pocket ;  hanged  for  stealing  five  shillings 
from  a  shop ;  hanged  for  stealing  a  fish,  for  robbing  a  rabbit- 
warren,  for  injuring  Westminster  Bridge,  for  cutting  a 
hop-vine,  for  wounding  a  cow,  for  maliciously  cutting  a 
piece  of  serge,  or  for  charitably  harbouring  a  smuggler ; 
and  for  some  two  hundred  other  offences.  (Of  course  in 
practice  the  extreme  sentences  were  seldom  or  never  passed.) 
Bentham  began  his  attack  on  this  system  about  1776. 
In  1808  the  first  bill  to  deal  with  the  subject  was  brought 
into  the  House  of  Commons  by  Romilly.  He  was  opposed 
by  the  Government  and  defeated.  He  renewed  his  attempt 
in  1810,  in  1811,  in  1812,  in  1813.  Then,  discouraged, 
he  waited  three  years.  He  tried  again  in  1816  ;  again 
in  1818.  Then  he  died.  (It  is  very  important  that  inno- 
vators should  not  have  too  much  encouragement !)  Sir 
James  Mackintosh  took  up  the  cause.  He  succeeded  in 
getting  a  committee  of  inquiry  appointed  in  1819  ;  then 
he  worked  on  year  after  year  till  1823.  Several  of  the 
smaller  bills  had  passed  the  House  of  Commons  during 
this  time,  but  were  thrown  out  by  the  Lords.  In  1822 
Mackintosh  obtained  a  decisive  majority  in  favour  of  a 


168  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

complete  revision  of  the  law.  Now  comes  the  statesman's 
moment ;  observe  what  he  does.  The  Government  realized 
that  opposition  to  the  reform  was  no  longer  safe.  They 
had  to  give  way.  And  they  realized  at  the  same  moment 
that  really,  now  one  came  to  think  of  it,  they  had  never 
had  any  particular  objection  to  the  measure  at  all.  At 
the  same  time  it  was  not  desirable  that  an  opponent  like 
Mackintosh  should  have  the  credit  of  passing  it.  Peel 
rallied  his  supporters  ;  promised  a  bill  of  his  own  ;  trium- 
phantly defeated  Mackintosh's  resolutions.  Then  he  pro- 
ceeded to  earn  the  gratitude  of  posterity  and  the  name  of 
a  wise  and  liberal  statesman  by  accepting  at  one  swoop 
practically  all  the  Criminal  Law  Reforms  that  he  had  been 
opposing  for  the  last  fifteen  years,  though  the  change  was 
not  really  effective  till  after  the  Reform  Bill  of  1832. 

Do  not  suppose  that  I  am  hinting  at  dishonesty  on  the 
part  of  Peel.  He  was  remarkably  honest.  When  he 
said  he  had  changed  his  mind,  he  had  really  changed  it. 
And  when  he  changed  his  mind,  he  generally  confessed 
that  he  had.  What  I  want  to  know  is :  what  was  it  that 
made  Peel  great,  and  led  the  House  of  Commons  to  honour 
and  to  trust  him — to  trust  him  as  they  never  trusted  Mackin- 
tosh, as  they  would  never  have  dreamed  of  trusting  Romilly, 
much  less  poor  Bentham  ?  Was  it,  perhaps,  that  the 
statesman  was  a  practical  man,  and  the  Reformers  un- 
practical idealists  ?  Not  in  the  least.  There  is  nothing 
unpractical  in  showing  what  ought  to  be  done  to  improve 
the  Currency  and  the  Criminal  Law  :  and  nothing  practical 
in  refusing  to  do  it  when  you  are  told  how.  Horner  and 
Romilly  and  Mackintosh  were  the  practical  men  :  Peel 
the  unpractical.  Was  it  any  question  of  prudence  and 
compromise  ?  Was  it  that  Peel  himself  desired  the  Reforms, 
but  understood  those  difficulties  and  dangers  which  the 
Reformers  failed  to  see?  Not  in  the  least.  He  frankly 
disliked  and  feared  the  Reforms,  and  never  pretended 
anything  else. 

You  might  suppose  again  that  the  reason  lay  merely 
in  the  fact  that  the  philosophers  and  faddists  were  "  before 
their  time."  That  implies  some  such  account  of  the  matter 
as  this.  Bentham  saw  a  certain  truth  before  any  one  else 


\ 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  169 


t*at  we  know  of.  It  took  over  twenty  years  for  that  truth 
to  oenetrate  the  quickest  minds  in  the  nation  and  eventually 
reach  the  doors  of  the  House  of  Commons.  By  that  time 
Rominy  understood  it,  and  probably  Mackintosh.  They 
then  proceeded  patiently  to  explain  it  to  Peel  and  others. 
They  explained  persistently  for  thirteen  years,  and  then 
Peel  began  to  understand,  and  so  did  the  majority  of  the 
House  of  Commons.  Some  had  understood  it  more  rapidly, 
in  five  or  ten  years.  They  were  flighty  and  tinged  with 
faddism.  Others  never  saw  it  at  all ;  they  were  a  little 
stupid  and  fossilized.  But  Peel's  was  a  mind  of  exactly 
the  right  degree  of  density ;  he  was  just  sufficiently  slow 
without  being  absolutely  impervious  to  reason.  If  he  had 
understood  it  in  ten  years,  he  would  have  been  abandoned 
by  his  powerful  friends.  If  he  had  not  understood  it  for 
sixteen  years  he  would  have  been  defeated  by  the  Whigs. 
As  it  was,  he  took  just  thirteen  years,  and  that  was  exactly 
the  right  time. 

"  How  splendid,"  said  the  House  of  Commons  to  itself, 
"  to  have  a  leader  whose  mind  moves  so  precisely  at  the 
right  rate  of  speed.  What  wisdom  !  What  solidity !  " 

This,  no  doubt,  is  all  true.  But  there  is  something  more 
subtle  in  the  matter  than  mere  difference  of  time.  It  is 
a  question  of  instinct.  Doubtless  all  the  rational  arguments 
in  favour  of  Catholic  Emancipation,  of  Free  Trade  and  of 
Reform  which  Peel  had  heard  repeated  for  so  many  years, 
did  in  course  of  time  begin  to  affect  him.  But  the  decisive 
moment  in  each  case  came,  not  from  his  reason,  but  from 
his  gregarious  instincts.  The  majority  of  the  House  or  the 
nation  was  at  last  definitely  veering  round  in  the  new 
direction.  The  great  bell-wether  felt  the  inarticulate  stir- 
rings of  the  flock  and  strode  suddenly  forward.  And  the 
self  beneath  the  threshold  in  the  House  of  Commons  had 
confidence  in  the  self  below  the  threshold  in  Peel.  Instinct 
cried  out  to  instinct  and  was  at  once  understood.  "  I 
want  the  same  things  as  you  :  I  hate  the  same  things  as 
you.  I  am  the  stronger  and  subtler ;  follow  me !  "  Peel 
stated  his  reasons,  of  course,  in  an  elaborate  speech,  and 
said  that  the  reasons  had  convinced  him.  People  voted 
with  him  and  said  that  the  reasons  had  convinced  them, 


170  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

But  the  reasons  had  very  little  to  do  with  it.  Men  like 
Bentham  or  like  Bishop  Berkeley  might  be  convinced  by 
reasons.  The  instinctive  Man  distrusts  and  despises  such 
persons.  After  all,  there  are  generally  mistakes  in  any 
long  chain  of  reasoning.  And  then  where  are  you  ?  If  a 
man  is  liable  to  be  convinced  by  mere  rational  arguments, 
and  follow  them  out  consistently,  there  is  no  saying  what 
may  happen  to  him  to-morrow.  He  may  be  an  Anarchist 
or  an  Atheist.  He  may  be  harmless  like  Berkeley  or 
pernicious  like  Robespierre.  "  In  any  case,"  cries  instinct, 
"  he  is  foreign  and  incomprehensible.  He  is  not  a  member 
of  my  tribe.  He  does  not  like  what  I  like  and  hate  what 
I  hate.  He  may  be  wanting  something  that  I  do  not  under- 
stand ;  something  horrible,  which  would  hurt  me.  Let 
nobody  trust  him  !  " 

The  classes  who  followed  Peel  felt  that  his  instincts  were 
theirs  ;  that  was  why  they  trusted  him. 

So  far  we  have  contrasted  Peel  with  the  Reformers. 
The  same  lesson  conies  out  if  we  contrast  him  with  the 
consistent  Tories.  Croker  retired  from  public  life  rather 
than  be  soiled  by  the  contamination  of  a  reformed  Parlia- 
ment and  a  purified  corporation.  Newcastle  disobliged  his 
leader  and  disobeyed  his  king  rather  than  cease  righting 
against  a  measure  he  believed  to  be  wrong.  The  learned 
and  kindly  old  Lord  Eldon,  balked  of  his  right  to  hang 
gipsies,  to  persecute  Dissenters  and  Roman  Catholics, 
and  to  send  his  political  opponents  to  Botany  Bay,  still 
fought  on  for  every  single  privilege  or  corruption  or  abomina- 
tion that  his  soul  loved ;  the  majority  might  sweep  past 
him,  but  a  majority  does  not  make  wrong  right ;  nor 
are  the  sentiments  that  were  once  applauded  by  a  whole 
House  of  Commons  necessarily  ridiculous  now,  because 
they  are  only  advanced  by  one  tottering  old  gentleman, 
courageous  and  alone. 

The  advantage  of  Eldon  or  Romilly  over  Peel  is  that 
each  had  a  real  thing  to  say.  They  believed  in  something 
definite,  and  no  gregarious  instincts  or  political  necessities 
could  drive  them  out  of  believing  what  they  believed 
If  one  of  them  was  wrong,  the  other  was  very  likely  right. 
But  Peel  could  never  be  right.  Was  it  that  he  had  con- 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  171 

tradictory  beliefs,  or  was  it  perhaps  that  he  had  no  belief 
at  all,  only  the  statesman's  instinct  for  the  right  Parlia- 
mentary move,  which  seems,  in  some  statesmen,  to  take 
the  place  of  real  convictions,  just  as  in  Thackeray's  supposed 
anatomy  of  George  IV,  "  waistcoats  and  then  more  waist- 
coats "  took  the  place  of  a  heart  ? 

On  the  other  hand,  a  government  of  Eldons  would 
certainly  have  led  to  revolution ;  and  Romilly  could  not 
carry  his  reforms.  Peel  carried  Romilly's  reforms,  and 
averted  Eldon's  revolution.  That  is  the  sort  of  place 
the  world  is! 

In  the  eyes  of  a  philosopher  the  statesman  is  very  deficient 
in  reasoning  power.  In  the  eyes  of  the  moralist  he  has  an 
elastic  and  callous  conscience.  In  the  eyes  of  the  religious 
man  he  has  no  soul.  The  thing  that  he  has,  and  he  alone, 
is  the  power  of  drawing  his  flock  after  him,  the  technique 
of  persuading  parliaments  and  nations. 

We  have  hitherto  been  considering  our  Unconscious 
Ideals,  and  the  conditions,  often  arduous  and  even  ruinous, 
which  they  impose  upon  national  progress  or  well-being. 
I  should  like  to  use  the  brief  remainder  of  this  paper  in 
considering  two,  especially,  of  the  ideals  which  we  consciously 
profess. 

Our  two  great  political  parties  adopted,  after  the  Great 
Reform  Bill,  the  names  Liberal  and  Conservative,  respec- 
tively, both  of  them  most  engaging  names.  Now  it  is 
not  for  a  moment  desirable  to  analyse  what  these  parties 
really  are,  except  for  one  remark  in  passing.  The  Liberal 
party  has  since  the  last  century  professed  to  be  two  things 
— progressive  and  democratic.  The  two  things  have 
gone  together  with  us,  because  the  progress  of  the  country 
since  1815  has  been  in  a  democratic  direction.  But,  of 
course,  progress  need  not  be  democratic.  In  the  east  of 
Europe  at  the  present  day  it  is  aristocratic  ;  in  Servia  and 
Greece  and  to  some  extent  in  Russia  the  Progressives  or 
Liberals  are  in  direct  opposition  to  the  Democrats  (in 
Servia  called  Radicals),  who  represent  the  artisans  and 
peasants  and  object  to  new-fangled  ways. 

That  is  a  digression.     But,  dismissing  any  consideration 


172  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

of  what  the  two  parties  really  are,  let  us  make  out  the 
ideals  which  by  their  self-given  party-names  they  claim  to 
represent.  The  basis  of  conservatism  is  not  to  lose  what 
we  have  laboriously  acquired ;  to  safeguard  as  a  precious 
thing  our  Constitution,  our  national  character,  our  social 
organization.  That  is  to  say,  the  basis  of  conservatism 
is  a  great  appreciation  of  the  results  of  progress  in  the 
past,  and  a  fear  of  losing  the  ground  that  we  have  gained, 
by  any  mistakes  or  acts  of  rashness.  What  is  the  basis 
of  Liberalism  ?  Exactly  the  same,  with  a  slight  difference 
of  emphasis.  The  Conservative  says,  "  We  have  progressed 
through  the  ages  to  a  very  high,  though  perhaps  imperfect, 
condition  ;  let  us  be  careful  not  to  lose  what  we  have  won." 
The  Liberal  replies  :  "  We  have  progressed  through  the 
ages  to  a  very  high,  though  certainly  imperfect,  condition  ; 
let  us  proceed  further  in  the  same  direction." 

There  is  no  direct  contradiction  here.  Nay,  there  is 
real  agreement  about  nine-tenths  of  the  subject,  and  only 
a  difference  of  emphasis  about  the  other  tenth.  The  Con- 
servative is  ready  to  progress  if  only  you  will  be  cautious. 
The  Liberal  is  ready  to  be  cautious  if  only  you  will  jog  ori. 
This  fundamental  basis  of  agreement  is  one  of  the  causes 
why  English  party  politics  have  been  on  the  one  hand  so 
sane  and  successful,  and  on  the  other  hand  so  seldom 
thrilling  to  the  imagination.  There  was  so  much  agreement 
that  the  two  parties  could  always  understand  one  another 
and  make  tolerable  compromises.  There  was  so  much 
agreement  that  politics  often  looked  more  like  a  game 
between  Ins  and  Outs  than  a  serious  contest  between 
believers  in  opposing  principles. 

But,  after  all,  what  opposition  of  principle  is  possible  ? 
Both  parties  represent  different  stages  of  the  same  Ideals, 
the  Ideals  of  Progress  and  Order.  What  party  represents 
the  opposite  ?  Is  it  the  Radicals  ?  "  WTe  have  both  a 
Conservative  Government  and  a  Conservative  Opposition," 
exclaimed  Grote  in  1838,  and  shook  the  dust  of  Westminster 
from  his  feet.  Yet  Grote,  a  typical  Radical,  was  not  essen- 
tially opposed  in  his  principles  to  Lord  John  Russell,  or 
even  to  Peel.  He  was  bolder,  perhaps  more  far-seeing, 
but  his  aims  were  not  different. 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  178 

The  opposite  ideal  to  that  of  Liberal  and  Conservative 
is  represented  by  the  man  who  is  prepared  to  say  :  "  We 
have  progressed  through  the  ages  to  a  state  that  is  worse 
than  our  first  state  !  We  must  shatter  this  bad  social  order 
to  pieces  and  go  back  to  simplicity."  Most  of  us  have  not 
much  patience  with  this  sort  of  man.  "  Back  to  simplicity  !  " 
we  answer  him.  "  What  exactly  is  your  model  of  simple 
life  :  the  Red  Indian,  or  the  Negro,  or  the  divers  royalties 
of  the  Cannibal  Islands  ?  "  "  Not  any  of  them,"  the 
Revolutionist  may  reply  :  "  intellect  and  moral  nature  do 
not  depend  on  a  complicated  social  system.  Thoreau 
and  Emerson  and  Tolstoy  and  Walt  Whitman  and  Rousseau 
and  Plato  and  Epicurus  did  not  become  debased  in  mind 
because  they  turned  their  backs  on  civilization  and  tried 
to  return  to  simplicity.  If  modern  man  ever  breaks  through 
his  prison  of  convention  and  capitalism  and  wins  his  way 
back  to  simple  life,  he  will  bring  to  it  the  powers  of  intellect 
and  character  that  he  now  possesses.  He  will  not  forthwith 
believe  in  Mumbo  Jumbo  or  execute  his  wife  for  witchcraft 
whenever  he  has  rheumatism.  But  suppose  we  accept 
your  challenge,"  our  Revolutionist  may  continue  :  "  suppose 
in  destroying  this  present  social  fabric  we  fell  at  once  to 
the  level  of  the  savage,  what  then  ?  We  know  all  you 
say  about  the  horrors  that  are  incidental  to  savage  life, — 
especially  when  the  White  Man's  helmet  has  once  appeared 
above  the  horizon.  But  we  remember  what  you  perhaps 
forget,  that  almost  all  travellers,  except  those  sent  out 
for  purposes  of  annexation,  from  Herodotus  and  Tacitus 
to  Mungo  Park  and  Livingstone  and  Selwyn,  have  with 
one  voice  dwelt  upon  the  light-heartedness  and  the  personal 
dignity  of  the  normal  life  of  uncivilized  man.  The  normal 
life  of  the  poor  of  Europe  is  not  light-hearted  and  dignified, 
nor  yet  that  of  the  rich.  There  are  more  and  more  things 
without  which  we  are  miserable,  and  with  which  we  are 
not  a  whit  happier.  There  are  more  and  more  possi- 
bilities of  human  suffering  to  be  endured ;  more  and 
more  screens  to  hide  the  sight  of  the  suffering  from  the 
authors  of  it.  We  civilized  men  are  caught  in  a  great 
trap  ;  we  mean  no  harm,  but  our  every  movement  may 
bring  torment  to  some  fellow-man.  We  buy  this  teapot 


174  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

rather  than  that,  prefer  one  box  of  matches  to  another ; 
we  cease  to  buy  some  old  article  of  commerce  because 
there  is  a  new  one  we  like  better ;  and  the  result  is  that 
great  numbers  of  men,  women  and  children  whom  we 
have  never  seen  or  heard  of  are  forced  by  other  people, 
equally  unknown  to  us,  to  work  themselves  into  diseases, 
to  become  prostitutes  or  thieves,  to  starve  for  want  of 
work,  or  at  best  to  maintain  a  stunted  life  by  incessant  and 
meaningless  drudgery.  It  is  no  one's  fault.  It  is  only 
Order  and  Progress. 

"  Again,  in  a  simple  society  people  had  at  least  a  chance 
of  enjoying  their  daily  work.  Under  Order  and  Progress 
every  worker  as  a  normal  thing  is  engaged  in  doing  work 
which  he  cannot  possibly  enjoy,  but  has  to  do,  ultimately, 
because  he  would  starve  if  he  did  not.  He  spends  his 
day  watching  a  machine  make  an  enormous  number  of 
fractions  of  a  pin  all  alike;  or  in  adding  up  columns  and 
columns  of  pounds,  shillings  and  pence  which  do  not  belong 
to  him  ;  or  in  teaching  people  whom  he  does  not  wish  to 
teach  and  who  would  prefer  not  to  be  taught ;  or  in  a  thou- 
sand other  ways,  but  always,  except  in  a  few  odd  cases, 
he  spends  his  days  in  doing  something  he  does  not  want 
to  do  because  he  is  paid  to  do  it.  Nay,  there  is  another 
thing,"  this  captious  rhetorician  will  continue  :  "  the  man 
is  not  only  doing  what  he  does  not  like,  but  is  generally 
doing  things  or  making  things  that  nobody  else  likes.  No 
one  is  a  whit  happier  for  those  millions  and  billions  of 
pinheads  ;  nor  for  being  taught  things  he  does  not  want 
to  know ;  nor  for  having  all  the  machine-made  furniture 
and  clothes  and  foreign  foods  and  newspapers  and  cheap 
cigars.  It  supports  a  large  population  ?  Of  course  it 
does.  And  is  it  better  for  a  country  to  be  supporting  forty 
million  discontented  and  degraded  human  beings  than  to 
have  only  four  million  '  light-hearted  and  dignified  '  ?  " 

Revolution  has  few  adherents  in  Europe,  fewest  of  all 
in  England.  We  are  a  prosperous  nation,  a  prudent  nation  ; 
and  perhaps  live  in  more  widespread  comfort  than  any 
nation  in  history.  If  we  are  essentially  less  happy  than 
simpler  societies,  which  is  possible,  we  are  not  likely  to 
see  it.  The  very  essence  of  the  trap  of  material  civilization 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  175 

is  that  the  animal  caught  cannot  draw  back,  but  must  go 
further  and  further  in.  If  you  compare  Sir  Gorgius  Midas 
with  the  wildest  Gaelic-speaking  gillie  of  his  remotest  shoot- 
ing-box, you  may  strongly  suspect  that  in  every  true 
sense  of  the  words  the  master  is  poorer,  lower,  stupider, 
unhappier  and  worse  than  his  man.  But  you  may  be 
absolutely  sure  that  Sir  Gorgius  will  not  consent  to  change 
places  with  him. 

And  in  the  second  place,  it  is  probably  also  true  that, 
of  all  the  great  writers  who  have  preached  a  return  to 
simplicity,  from  Diogenes  to  Tolstoy,  not  one  has  really 
shown  us  any  road  that  leads  there.1 

If  there  is  one  ideal  more  than  another  characteristic 
of  this  century  in  Europe  it  is  what  we  may  crudely  describe 
by  the  one  word  Philanthropy.  Philanthropy  is  not  only 
a  vaunted  motive  like  fairness,  impartiality,  desire  for 
justice  and  the  like  :  it  is  a  really  active  force.  Now  of 
course,  in  saying  that  philanthropy  as  a  professed  public 
force  is  new  and  characteristic  of  this  century,  one  does 
not  for  a  moment  mean  that  the  thing  itself  is  new.  It  is 
based  on  primeval  instincts  :  the  being  below  the  threshold 
himself  is  full  of  sympathy :  he  is  a  member  of  a  herd  : 
and  men  have  cared  for  their  suffering  fellow-men  ever 
since  human  society  began.  The  really  remarkable  thing 
about  modern  philanthropy  is,  I  venture  to  think,  that  it 
has  become  secular  and  motiveless.  Both  in  antiquity 
and  in  the  Middle  Ages  there  was  a  great  deal  of  charity 
in  various  forms ;  but  it  was  all  associated  with  religion 
or  patriotism  or  the  like,  and  its  apparent  unselfishness 
and  "  irrationality  "  explained  away.  It  is  one  of  the 
strongest  characteristics  of  human  nature  to  try  earnestly, 
by  hook  or  by  crook,  to  explain  its  own  unselfish  actions — 
as  well  as  its  selfish  or  malignant  actions — by  some  so-called 
rational  theory.  It  is  a  great  advance  in  self-consciousness 
that  we  have,  in  private  life  at  least,  accustomed  ourselves 
to  the  idea  that  it  is  quite  natural  for  a  man  strongly  to 

1  Of  course  this  argument  would  be  very  differently  phrased  if  written 
in  1921,  after  the  bloody  failures  of  so  many  revolutions:  but  I  leave 
the  passage  as  it  stood  in  1900. 


176  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

dislike  the  notion  of  other  men  suffering  pain,  and  gladly 
to  pay  money  or  take  trouble  to  prevent  their  doing  so. 

It  is  then  an  ideal  held,  and  largely  acted  upon,  by  many 
people,  to  keep  looking  out  always  for  extreme  cases  of 
human  suffering  and  to  spend  their  lives  in  alleviating 
them.  It  is  perhaps  the  noblest,  perhaps  also  the  most 
fruitful,  ideal  now  acting  in  public  life.  It  is  so  powerful 
that  it  is  often  attacked ;  constantly  of  course  counter- 
feited. Its  dangers  are  the  dangers  of  all  generous  emotion, 
lack  of  knowledge  and  lack  of  discretion.  For  instance, 
one  particular  form  of  this  spirit  has  lately  been  prominent, 
the  desire  for  active  crusades  in  relief  of  distressed  or 
oppressed  communities  under  foreign  governments.  It  is 
by  no  means  a  thing  to  sneer  at,  this  generous  enthusiasm. 
There  is  vastly  more  danger  to  humanity  from  lack  of 
sympathy  than  from  excess  of  sympathy ;  and  if  these 
movements  are  sometimes  to  be  condemned,  it  must  be 
not  for  caring  too  much  about  the  oppressed  people,  but 
for  not  caring  sufficiently  about  something  else.  It  is  not 
the  too  vivid  imagination ;  it  is  the  lack  of  imagination, 
here  as  elsewhere,  now  as  always,  that  makes  mischief. 
However,  I  have  noted  down  a  list — probably  incomplete 
— of  those  nations  which  I  have  seen  condemned  in  English 
newspapers  during  the  last  few  years,  as  deserving  for 
various  reasons  an  immediate  crusade  against  them.  These 
nations  are  Turkey,  Greece,  Venezuela,  the  Afghans,  Italy, 
Spain,  the  Cubans,  the  Chinese,  Morocco,  the  Kafirs, 
Russia,  France,  Germany  and  the  United  States  of  America ! 
It  is  perhaps  due  to  oversight  that  I  have  found  no  one 
just  at  present  who  wishes  to  make  war  on  Austria.  The 
rage  felt  by  divers  persons  was  in  some  cases  mere  patriotic 
"  Hooliganism  "  :  in  most  cases,  I  should  say,  it  was  a 
really  generous  emotional  force  backed  by  masses  of  false 
information.  It  is  so  easy  to  get  false  information  about 
any  foreign  Power ;  we  get  reams  of  it  every  day  about 
France ;  and  so  enormously  difficult  to  get  true  information 
or  even  the  preliminary  knowledge  that  makes  true  informa- 
tion valuable.  For  instance,  one  of  the  chief  causes  of 
the  proposed  crusades  against  the  French  has  been  that 
we  did  not  know  the  system  on  which  evidence  is  given  in 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  177 

a  French  court.  Our  English  system  is  to  give  the  witness 
as  little  scope  as  possible  ;  to  allow  him  merely  to  answer 
direct  and  strictly  relevant  questions  from  a  friendly 
lawyer,  and  then  to  let  loose  a  hostile  lawyer  to  confound 
him.  The  French  plan  is  to  encourage  the  witness  to  say 
all  that  is  in  his  mind,  to  draw  him  out  and  not  to 
frighten  him ;  and  to  have  all  questions  asked  by  the  mouth 
of  the  impartial  President  of  the  Tribunal.  I  have  no 
power  of  comparing  the  effectiveness  and  fairness  of  the 
two  systems ;  but  in  every  single  French  trial  that  is 
reported  in  England  at  any  length,  several  of  our  news- 
papers go  into  hysterics  because  the  witnesses  are  not 
examined  by  counsel.  And  when  English  trials  are 
reported  in  France,  my  French  friends  tell  me,  there  is 
equal  indignation,  first  because  the  questions  are  asked  by 
people  who  are  not  impartial,  and  secondly — this  is  an 
odd  point — because  the  Judge  and  not  the  counsel  for 
the  defence  has  the  last  word  before  the  jury  retire. 

This  rather  commonplace  fact  is  one  reason  why  crusading 
philanthropy  is  so  often  the  cause  of  harm ;  another  is 
that  philanthropy  alone  cannot  start  a  crusade.  It  is 
only  when  the  crusade  coincides  with  the  material  interest 
of  some  influential  group  of  people  that  it  can  be  carried 
out.  If  financiers  and  officials  disapprove,  it  is  powerless. 
Let  us  look  at  this  point  closer.  The  passion  of  philanthropy, 
the  hatred  of  oppression,  provides  throughout  the  country  a 
great  mass  of  people  ready  to  take  fire  rapidly  at  a  tale  of 
wrong ;  ready  also,  one  must  confess,  to  believe  the  tale 
of  wrong  without  much  sifting  of  evidence.  This  is  danger- 
ous, but  it  might  not  do  much  harm  except  for  one 
circumstance.  Who  is  it  who  have  the  power  of  telling 
these  tales  of  wrong  and  so  stirring  up  the  country  ?  Who 
can  criticize  or  expose  such  stories  if  they  are  false  ? 
Obviously  the  newspapers — the  newspapers  which  sup- 
port opposite  political  parties  or  are  the  property  of  rival 
capitalists.  It  is  often  a  fortunate  thing  that  rival 
capitalists  are  apt  to  hate  one  another  I  As  long  as  this 
opposition  goes  steadily  on,  newspapers  exercise  a  great 
deal  of  mutual  criticism  and  bring  out,  both  intentionally 
and  unintentionally,  a  vast  quantity  of  trustworthy  in- 

12 


178  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

formation.  But  if  ever  the  party  system  fails,  or  if  ever 
the  handful  of  men  who  own  all  the  great  Dailies  happen 
to  coincide  in  their  interests  or  their  prejudices,  then 
Heaven  help  the  nation  that  is  dependent  upon  them  for 
its  facts  ! 

Even  in  the  most  favourable  circumstances,  when  pro- 
prietors and  wire-pullers  slumber  and  no  sinister  influences 
are  at  work,  how  far  in  general  is  a  newspaper  calculated 
to  keep  a  nation  reasonable  or  informed  of  the  truth  ? 
About  as  well  as  loose  cannon  on  a  ship's  deck  are  calculated 
to  serve  the  ship  for  ballast.  When  the  ship  is  steady  all 
is  well.  At  the  first  heel  to  port,  the  cannon  charge  at  the 
port  bulwarks  :  if  she  veers  to  starboard,  back  to  starboard 
run  the  guns. 

Consider  the  essence  of  what  a  newspaper  is.  It  is  a 
great  financial  concern,  with  say  £250,000  of  capital,  de- 
pending for  its  very  life  on  its  advertisements,  while  its 
advertisements  depend  on  its  circulation.  It  is  bound 
every  morning  to  say  things  that  please  some  500,000 
people  (or  more,  if  possible),  and  if  it  fails  to  please  them 
it  dies  !  What  a  tremendous  undertaking  that  is !  To 
please  500,000  different  people  every  morning :  and  to 
please  them,  too,  better  than  any  other  paper  at  the  same 
price.  It  is  difficult  to  conceive  how  the  thing  is  done. 
Only  one  part  of  it  appears  obvious  :  that  if  you  are  lucky 
enough  to  see  some  subtle  prejudice,  some  wave  of  unreason- 
ing passion  growing  and  spreading  among  the  public  that 
you  appeal  to,  then  your  chance  has  come ;  you  know 
what  your  public  will  like  to  read.  But  if  you  miss  that 
chance,  if  you  try  to  correct  their  passions  and  contradict 
their  errors — why  who  will  pay  you  money  for  the  pleasure 
of  being  corrected  and  contradicted  every  day  at  his  break- 
fast ? 

From  The  Times  and  the  Journal  des  Ddbats  to  the  Libre 
Parole  and  Daily  Mail  the  conditions  of  financial  life  for 
a  newspaper  are  essentially  the  same.  Let  us  analyse  a 
favourable  instance.  The  Times  is  an  English  paper  cost- 
ing 3d.  ;  the  Journal  des  Ddbats,  a  French  paper  costing 
2d.  Only  rich  people,  as  a  rule,  will  pay  3d.  or  2d.  for  a 
daily  paper.  So,  as  the  Journal  des  Debats  has  to  please 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  179 

rich  French  people  The  Times  is  bound  to  please  rich  English 
people.  It  must  confirm  their  faith  in  their  own  good 
qualities,  it  must  praise  the  statesmen  that  they  admire. 
It  must  find  arguments  to  support  what  rich  English  people 
think,  and  to  bring  to  pass  what  rich  English  people  want. 
It  must  hurt  the  feelings  and  damage  the  reputations  of 
rich  English  people's  opponents,  it  must  delay  or  prevent 
the  Reforms  which  might  make  rich  English  people  less 
rich.  Besides  this,  of  course,  the  man  who  pays  3d.  for 
his  newspaper  will  expect  an  exceptionally  good  newspaper. 
It  must  have  a  special  abundance  of  information,  of  two 
sorts  :  accurate  information  on  the  things  where  its  public 
will  be  pleased  with  bonafide  knowledge  :  carefully  doctored 
information  where  the  naked  facts  are  damaging  or  unpalat- 
able. There  must  be  correspondents  and  a  complete  organ- 
ization all  over  the  world,  to  publish  those  facts  which 
rich  English  people  would  on  the  whole  like  published,  to 
conceal,  twist  or  ignore  the  facts  which  rich  English  people 
do  not  care  to  be  told. 

On  the  other  hand,  living  as  it  does  in  great  publicity,  and 
appealing  to  a  highly  educated  class,  it  must  be  in  general 
a  well-written  and  well-behaved  journal ;  and  it  ought 
never  to  be  so  grossly  inaccurate  or  unfair  or  inconsistent 
as  to  create  an  obvious  and  damaging  scandal  or  to  shock 
the  feelings  of  its  own  partisans.  The  man  who  writes 
is,  of  course,  every  bit  as  good  and  as  conscientious  as  the 
man  who  makes  boots  or  who  preaches  sermons.  But 
the  newspaper  is  different  from  the  journalist.  The  man 
has  his  own  beliefs  and  his  sense  of  honour  :  he  can  remain 
silent  when  he  will,  can  feel  shame,  can  face  unpopularity 
or  money  loss.  But  the  Thing  has  no  beliefs  nor  sense  of 
honour,  and  if  it  does  not  make  money  it  dies.  If  Brown's 
views,  as  printed  yesterday,  gave  displeasure ;  let  Jones's 
opposite  views  be  printed  to-morrow.  The  paper  will 
not  turn  pink  because  it  has  changed  ! 

You  can  think  of  exceptions  to  all  these  sayings.  One 
knows  of  newspapers  that  have  preached  unpopular  causes, 
that  have  taken  their  readers  to  task  and  made  them  face 
unpleasant  facts,  that  have  been  willing  to  lose  money  and 
to  endure  persecution.  That  is  only  to  say — and  this  is 


180  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

the  thought  that  I  fain  would  close  with — that  in  the  teeth 
of  all  material  opposition,  in  defiance  of  all  the  subterranean 
influences  of  instinct  there  are  men  who  work  and  suffer 
for  things  they  believe  to  be  good.  They  may  be  right  in 
their  beliefs  and  they  may  be  wrong.  It  is  absurd  to  say 
that  the  world  is  wicked,  and  that  those  against  the  world 
are  sure  to  be  right.  "  When  in  temper  and  where  his  own 
interest  was  not  concerned,"  it  was  said  of  a  famous  Lord 
Chief  Justice,  "  When  in  temper  and  where  his  own  interest 
was  not  concerned,  my  Lord  Jeffreys  became  the  Bench  with 
uncommon  dignity."  Much  the  same  compliment  can  be 
paid  to  the  public  voice  of  masses  of  men.  If  they  know 
the  main  facts  and  are  disinterested,  the  verdict  of  the 
majority  will  be  just.  But  on  nearly  all  questions  that  stir 
men's  hearts  or  try  their  mettle,  questions  where  a  class 
judges  between  itself  and  another  class,  still  more  where  a 
nation  judges  between  itself  and  another  nation,  in  such 
tribunals  we  must  not  look  for  a  disinterested  verdict. 
One  of  the  litigants  is  absent ;  the  court  is  crowded  with 
counsel  denouncing  him  :  and  the  voices  under  the  threshold 
are  bitter  and  tyrannous  and  strong.  The  voices  are  a 
little  nobler  in  the  case  of  a  nation  than  they  are  in  the  case 
of  a  man  :  in  the  case  of  a  nation  struggling  for  its  freedom 
or  claiming  only  such  rights  as  are  compatible  with  the  same 
rights  in  other  nations,  the  voices  may  be  almost  entirely 
noble.  At  the  worst  they  say  "  we  "  instead  of  "  /,"  and 
that  is  a  great  difference.  But  that  very  advantage  makes 
them  more  dangerous,  plausible  and  reckless  in  their  essential 
claims.  The  man  whose  self-consciousness  could  be  on 
the  alert  against  his  own  selfish  instincts,  has  often  no 
suspicion  of  the  injustice  of  his  national  instincts.  In 
every  nation  of  Europe  from  England  and  France  to  Russia 
and  Turkey,  in  almost  every  nation  in  the  world  from  the 
Americans  to  the  Chinese  and  the  Finns,  the  same  whisper 
from  below  the  threshold  sounds  incessantly  in  men's  ears. 
"  We  are  the  pick  and  flower  of  nations  :  the  only  nation 
that  is  really  generous  and  brave  and  just.  We  are  above 
all  things  qualified  for  governing  others  :  we  know  how 
to  keep  them  exactly  in  their  place  without  weakness  and 
without  cruelty.  Other  nations  may  have  fine  characteristics 


NATIONAL  IDEALS  181 

but  we  only  are  normal  and  exactly  right.  Other  nations 
boast  and  are  aggressive,  we  are  modest  and  claim  only 
what  is  our  barest  due,  though  we  cannot  help  seeing  our 
own  general  superiority,  and  every  unprejudiced  observer 
admits  that  our  territories  ought  to  be  enlarged.  We  are 
above  all  things  reasonable.  The  excellence  of  our  rule 
abroad  is  proved  in  black  and  white  by  the  books  of  our 
explorers,  our  missionaries,  our  administrators  and  our 
soldiers,  who  all  agree  that  our  yoke  is  a  pure  blessing  to 
those  who  bear  it.  It  is  only  envious  faddists  and  lying 
foreigners  who  dare  to  dispute  the  fact."  Expansionists, 
Nationalists,  Chauvinists,  Irredentists,  Pan-slavists,  German 
Colonials, — how  absurd  they  seem  to  us  in  every  country 
but  our  own.  Yet  in  every  country  they  form,  backed  by 
the  undercurrents  of  national  life,  a  strong  and  persistent 
force,  valuable  if  controlled,  dangerous  if  gratified,  and 
fraught  with  all  the  elements  of  explosion  when  other 
danger  is  in  the  air. 

There  is  also — not  perhaps  in  every  country,  but  in 
most  countries  of  Europe,  a  small  party  which  does  not 
believe  in  the  supra-normal  rights  of  its  own  countrymen, 
which  values  goodwill  more  than  glory,  and  judges  of 
national  honour  by  standards  approaching  those  by  which 
it  judges  of  personal  honour  ;  which  believes  in  international 
morality,  in  the  co-operation  of  nations  for  mutual  help, 
in  the  ultimate  Fraternity  of  Mankind. 

A  poor  and  despised  class  these  in  every  community — 
dreamers,  sentimentalists,  doctrinaires,  hypocrites,  traitors, 
"  friends  of  every  country  but  their  own  "—they  have  at 
least  one  advantage  over  the  ultra-patriots.  It  is  an  old 
rule  of  logic  that  "  truth  by  truth  is  never  contradicted." 
But  the  "  patriots  "  of  one  country  by  the  "  patriots  "  of 
every  other  are  contradicted  always  in  every  item  of  their 
creed.  Those  who  are  called  "  friends  of  every  country 
but  their  own  "  are  at  least  friends  of  almost  all  humanity, 
and  in  practice  are  often  the  best  friends  of  their  own  country 
also.  And  they  agree  with  one  another.  In  every  country 
of  Europe  they  are  pleading  on  the  whole  for  the  same 
causes  and  upholding  the  authority  of  the  same  tribunal — 


182  NATIONAL  IDEALS 

the  disinterested  judgment  of  each  man's  conscience  in  the 
first  place  ;  and,  as  a  Court  of  Appeal,  whenever  it  is  attain- 
able, not  the  voice  of  one  class,  not  the  voice  of  one  nation, 
but  the  disinterested  verdict  of  civilized  Humanity. 

Few  in  each  separate  country,  they  are  many  in  all 
countries  taken  together.  And  they  will  need  that  thought 
to  comfort  them ;  for  in  their  own  homes  they  will  have 
little  popular  support  or  official  recompense.  They  will 
need  often  to  search  their  hearts  and  to  steel  their  courage  ; 
and  often  to  remember  that  famous  statesmen  and  writers 
and  preachers  are  not  necessarily  blessed  when  all  men 
speak  well  of  them ;  for  so  did  their  fathers  to  the  false 
prophets.1 

«  See  Preface,  p.  7. 


IX 
ORBIS    TERRESTRIS 


ALL  those  of  us  who  have  listened  to  the  voices  of  the 
great  philosophers  of  antiquity  are  familiar  with 
their  famous  conception  of  the  universe  as  One 
Great  City  of  Gods  and  Men.  That  conception  became 
the  formative  principle  of  most  of  the  higher  thought  of 
the  Roman  Empire.  It  lay  at  the  centre  of  their  ethics, 
interpreting  the  duty  of  man  towards  all  creation  as  identical 
with  the  duty  of  a  patriotic  citizen  towards  the  city  or 
country  in  whose  love  and  service  he  lives.  At  the  centre 
of  their  religion,  inasmuch  as  God  was  the  King  and  Founder 
of  this  City,  and  His  will  both  the  cause  of  its  being  and  the 
force  which  guided  it  towards  its  good.  At  the  centre  of 
their  political  theory,  since  the  good  governor  was  he  who, 
losing  all  thought  of  his  own  special  interests,  made  himself 
the  instrument  of  the  divine  world-purpose,  the  "  minister 
of  the  providence  of  God,"  VTrovpyos  rfjs  Betas  irpovotas.  It 
held  the  educated  world  at  the  time  of  the  beginnings  of 
Christianity,  and  for  the  most  part  passed  without  much 
change  into  the  shell  of  the  new  religion,  at  least  on  its 
more  philosophic  side.  The  greater  number  of  our  common 
religious  metaphors  are  apparently  derived  from  it  :  for 
instance,  the  use  of  '  high  '  and  '  low  '  in  a  meta- 
phorical sense,  of  '  Providence,'  '  Free  Will/  '  conscience/ 
'  humanity/  '  compassion/  and  the  like. 

For  this  great  ethical  conception  was  accompanied,  as 
most  philosophies  are,  by  a  certain  orthodox  or  generally 
accepted  theory  of  the  physical  universe.  And  Mr.  Edwyn 

1  A  Lecture  delivered  to  the  Geographical  Association,  1920. 

163 


184  ORBIS  TERRESTRIS 

Bevan  (Stoics  and  Sceptics,  pp.  109-118)  has  pointed  out 
how  beautifully  the  two  theories  fitted  one  another.  We 
should  probably  say  that,  speaking  roughly,  the  moral 
theory  was  true,  whereas  the  physical  theory  was  demon- 
strably  false.  But  all  the  same  they  fitted. 

It  was  a  delightfully  clear  and  definite  and  intellectually 
manageable  universe  which  formed  the  One  Great  City. 
The  earth  was  the  physical  centre,  and  man  was  the  moral 
centre,  directly  related  to  God  inasmuch  as  his  soul  was  an 
effluence  or  emanation  of  God.  The  planets  went  round 
and  round,  on  courses  which  were  mathematically  worked 
out  on  a  highly  complicated  hypothesis  with  an  extremely 
small  margin  of  error.  The  primitive  conceptions  of  "  up  " 
and  "  down  "  had  not  been  disturbed :  Heaven  was  up 
above.  You  could  see  it  shining  on  a  clear  night,  the 
place  where  the  pure  souls,  purged  of  grossness  and  therefore 
naturally  grown  lighter,  have  risen  to  the  height  which 
corresponded  with  their  specific  gravity,  and  pass  their 
age-long  beatitude  in  contemplating  the  orbits  of  the  stars, 
hearing  the  inexpressible  music  of  the  spheres  in  their 
courses,  and  enjoying  the  infinite  beauty  of  God  and  the 
works  of  His  creative  thought.  For  God  and  His  love 
was  in  all  the  material  world,  though  perhaps  not  equally 
in  every  part ;  all  the  Kosmos  was  alive  and  sentient  and 
united  in  its  service  of  Him  ;  and  no  evil  could  befall  any 
one  remote  living  creature  but  it  vibrated  through  the 
whole  ;  and  the  blessed  ones  were  sad  and  the  stars  shivered 
in  "  compassio,"  or  aufiTrafleia,  with  the  suffering  of  the 
smallest  and  meanest  of  their  brethren.  Such  a  universe 
was,  in  the  old  phrase,  evavvoTrrov — capable  of  being  seen 
all  together,  or  contemplated  as  one.  And  in  such  a  world 
it  was  comparatively  easy  for  man  to  see  his  own  place 
and  his  neighbour's  place,  to  realize  their  common  duty, 
and  to  contemplate  with  confidence  rather  than  terror 
the  before  and  after  of  his  conscious  life. 

"  It  was  not  the  triumph  of  Christianity,"  says  Mr. 
Bevan,  "  which  was  fatal  to  this  view  of  the  world,"  which 
he  connects  especially  with  the  name  of  Posidonius. 
"  Perhaps  indeed  the  view  never  had  more  splendid  expres- 
sion than  in  the  great  Christian  poem  which  came  from 


ORBIS  TERRESTRIS  185 

the  heart  of  mediaeval  Italy.  What  was  fatal  to  it  was  the 
triumph  of  Copernicus.  Man,  if  he  limited  his  view  to  the 
material  world,  was  once  more  a  mote  in  an  unfathomable 
universe.  'Le  silence  tternel  de  ces  espaces  infinies  m'effraie.' 
It  was  a  few  generations  after  Copernicus  that  Pascal 
wrote  that.  For  centuries  man  had  held  in  his  hands  a 
certain  chart  of  the  world  which  gave  him  assurance  and 
comfort.  And  now  that  chart  was  discovered  to  be  no 
good." 

I  will  not  attempt  to  follow  the  terrific  consequences 
which,  from  the  point  of  view  of  a  mediaeval  Christian 
or  an  ancient  Stoic,  flowed  from  the  disestablishment  of 
this  anthropocentric  universe.  If  Copernicus  and  Galileo 
were  right,  Man  was  not  the  centre  of  things,  not  the  child 
or  effluence  of  God  ;  he  was  a  species  which  had  done  well 
in  a  local  struggle  with  other  species  :  his  history,  as  Mr. 
Balfour  has  phrased  it,  "a  brief  and  discreditable  episode 
in  the  life  of  one  of  the  meaner  planets."  He  was  an  item 
of  little  account  in  the  whole.  That  was  not  Heaven  which 
he  saw  on  the  clear  nights.  It  was  a  bottomless  void. 
There  was  no  higher  and  lower,  there  was  no  up  and  down. 
And  in  the  vast  scheme  of  biological  evolution,  where  it 
was  possible  to  descry  what  elements  of  conduct  made 
for  success  and  survival,  they  certainly  did  not  seem  to  be, 
on  the  face  of  it,  those  recommended  by  the  sages  or  the 
saints.  I  will  not  develop  this  line  of  thought  or  even 
criticize  it,  except  to  suggest  that  the  really  surprising 
thing  seems  to  be  that  so  utter  a  revolution  in  fundamental 
beliefs  made  so  little  difference,  if  any,  in  human  conduct. 


§2. 

The  thought  which  I  do  wish  to  pursue  is  quite  a  different 
one.  I  trust  it  will  not  appear  merely  fanciful.  If  we 
turn  from  a  contemplation  of  the  universe  to  that  of  the 
earth,  and  content  ourselves  with  that  limited  though 
extensive  field  of  knowledge,  I  am  inclined  to  suggest 
that  within  recent  times  a  process  has  taken  place  in  our 
attitude  towards  the  earth  which  is  the  exact  opposite 


186  ORBIS  TERRESTRIS 

to  that  which  I  have  described  in  our  ancestors'  attitude 
towards  the  whole  universe.  Of  course  their  belief  was 
erroneous,  and  ours,  we  hope,  is  based  on  real  knowledge. 
But,  apart  from  that,  I  think  it  is  fair  to  say  that,  while 
our  ancestors  were  through  scientific  discovery  deprived 
of  their  well-charted  intelligible  and  righteous  anthropo- 
centric  universe,  and  cast  out  naked  into  a  blinding  immen- 
sity, in  the  course  of  the  last  few  generations  civilized  man 
has  passed  through  a  reverse  process  with  respect  to  the 
Earth.  The  earth  has  become  comparatively  small, 
limited,  well  ascertained  and,  I  may  almost  say,  rational. 
Man  is  no  longer  a  wanderer  on  the  face  of  a  globe  full  of 
unknown  and  unimagined  spaces,  inhabited  by  strange  and 
unintelligible  beings  with  whom  he  has  nothing  in  common 
and  who  may  unexpectedly  destroy  him.  He  is  at  home 
in  the  earth,  as  the  old  Stoic  imagined  himself  to  be  at 
home  in  the  universe.  Our  claim  is  a  more  modest  one ; 
but  it  looks  as  if,  amid  many  failures  and  drawbacks,  we 
were  really  accomplishing  it.  We  have  explored  not  the 
whole  surface  of  the  globe,  but  at  least  so  much  of  it  that 
we  can  be  certain  that  there  are  no  very  great  surprises 
awaiting  us ;  nothing,  for  instance,  greater  than  the  sur- 
prises produced  by  Sir  Aurel  Stein  from  Eastern  Turkestan. 
We  know  the  stuff  the  earth  is  made  of,  its  various  strata, 
their  qualities  and  their  comparative  age,  we  see  the  rivers 
and  the  mountain  ranges  in  terms  of  intelligible  processes. 
We  are  beginning  to  understand  the  type  of  human  being 
likely  to  be  turned  out  by  a  particular  environment,  and 
the  sort  of  social  customs  and  ways  of  behaviour  that  it 
produces.  Our  geography  reaches  at  one  end  to  geology 
and  at  the  other  to  social  anthropology.  To  use  Aristotle's 
word  again,  we  tread  an  Earth  which  is  CVOVVOTTTOV,  capable 
of  being  conceived  as  one  whole.  We  members  of  the 
modern  civilized  world  cannot  indeed,  like  the  ancient 
Stoic,  imagine  ourselves  an  integral  element  in  the  life  of 
the  stars,  so  that  our  soul  is  of  the  same  fire  that  makes 
them  shine,  while  its  suffering  flecks  them  with  darkness ; 
but  we  can,  and  I  think  do,  regard  ourselves  as  acting  over 
large  parts  of  the  earth  as  "  tnrovpyoi  rfjs  Oeias  irpovolas," 
ministers  of  the  Divine  Providence,  and  I  hope  that  we 


ORBIS  TERRESTRIS  187 

can  at  the  same  time  begin  to  say  in  a  clearer  sense  than 
was  possible  to  the  ancients,  Homo  sum,  nihil  humani  a 
me  alienum  puto. 

Of  course,  in  pursuing  this  line  of  thought,  I  do  not 
forget  that  I  am  for  the  moment  talking  of  mankind  as  if 
it  consisted  of  philosophers  or  intellectuals  or  geographers. 
I  do  not  forget  that  the  earth  is  full  of  what  Nietzsche  calls 
"  backward-thinking  men  "  and  of  men  in  whose  life  thought 
plays  altogether  a  negligible  part.  They  are  the  majority. 
It  may  be  that  they  govern  us  in  real  life ;  but  we  need 
not  let  them  interrupt  our  thoughts. 

We  are  becoming  at  home  in  the  world.  If  you  look 
back  in  history  you  find  at  every  epoch  or  in  every  society 
that  there  is  a  sort  of  precinct  within  which  the  world  is 
understood  or  at  least  understandable,  and  outside  of 
which  rage  the  unknown  heathen.  There  is  the  Hellenic 
world,  within  which  there  are  doubtless  many  wicked  and 
hateful  persons,  but  still  they  are  Hellenes  and  have  customs 
upon  which  you  can  calculate.  Their  speech  may  be  unin- 
telligible to  you,  but  at  least  it  is  a  proper  language.  Out- 
side are  the  barbaroi  making  noises  like  birds,  and  capable 
of  anything.  Many  of  them,  no  doubt,  very  wise  and 
virtuous,  but  somehow  not  ever  people  that  you  can  be 
at  home  with.  A  philosopher  like  Plato  tries  to  humanize 
the  usages  of  war  ;  a  publicist  like  Isocrates  tries  to  establish 
a  general  international  concord.  But  both  of  them  stop 
at  the  limits  of  the  Hellenic  world,  and  know  that,  for 
practical  purposes,  it  is  no  good  talking  about  such  things 
with  barbarians.  To  the  men  of  the  Middle  Ages  the 
precinct  was  Christendom ;  within  reigned,  ideally  at 
least,  though  subject  to  infinite  allowances  for  the  difficulties 
of  real  life,  the  law  of  Christ ;  outside  were  Jews  and  infidels, 
whose  ways  no  one  could  understand  or  wished  to  under- 
stand. And  we  know  that  at  the  present  day  a  Neapolitan 
who  is  rebuked  for  cruelty  to  animals  defends  himself  at 
once  on  the  ground  that  Non  sono  Cristiani  ...  a  point  on 
which  the  northern  nations  as  a  rule  do  not  agree  with  them. 

Of  course  it  would  be  absurd  to  pretend  that  there  was 
only  one  precinct  with  a  sharp  edge,  outside  which  were  only 
the  rejected.  There  were  always  no  doubt  several :  nowa- 


188  ORBIS  TERRESTRIS 

days  there  are  very  many  precincts  indeed,  which  shade 
insensibly  one  into  another.  But  this  multiplication  of 
minor  precincts,  I  think,  is  the  way  in  which  the  original 
primitive  barrier  breaks  down.  Not  so  very  long  ago  a 
man  in  England  who  trespassed  outside  the  bounds  of  his 
native  village  had  to  blow  a  horn  as  he  went  to  give  fair 
warning,  unless  he  wished  to  be  killed  at  sight.  As  that 
sharp  barrier  breaks  and  a  man  obtains  knowledge  of  the 
next  village,  the  next  county,  then  of  people  who  speak  a 
different  language,  wear  different  clothes,  have  a  different 
religion  or  a  different  colour  to  their  skin,  there  may  remain 
plenty-  of  conscious  differences  and  repugnances,  but — 
with  thoughtful  men  at  least — there  will  not  come  a  definite 
line  beyond  which  are  outlaws,  between  whom  and  your- 
self there  are  no  human  bonds  and  no  moral  obligation. 

The  essential  mark  of  the  foreigner  as  such,  of  the  barbaros, 
of  the  heathen,  is  a  difference  which  is  not  understood  and 
does  not  explain  itself.  I  remember,  as  a  boy,  loathing  a 
certain  man,  a  Frenchman,  who  had  a  particular  kind  of 
pouch  under  his  eyes.  It  seemed  to  me  to  connote  some 
indescribable  wickedness.  Then  some  one  told  me  that 
it  was  a  swelling  of  the  lacrymal  gland  produced  by  exposure 
to  a  tropical  sun ;  and  I  loathed  him  no  more.  Why 
does  an  "  uncircumcized  Philistine  "  seem  such  a  sinister 
being  ?  Why  in  Campbell's  mention  of 

The  whiskered  Pandour  and  the  fierce  Hussar, 

does  it  seem  at  least  as  reprehensible  of  the  Pandour  to 
be  whiskered  as  it  is  of  the  Hussar  to  be  fierce,  if  not  more 
so  ?  Why  in  general  is  it  some  superficial  and  harmless 
characteristic  that  is  generally  in  literature  seized  upon 
in  a  foreigner  as  a  ground  for  shuddering  at  him  ?  It  is, 
I  think,  that  by  a  process  of  unconscious  reasoning  you 
feel  that  he  is  doing  something  that  you  would  not  do  without 
a  very  strong  motive,  and  that  his  motive  is  unknown. 
With  increased  knowledge  of  the  world  we  get  to  see  the 
reasons  for  the  differences  of  custom,  and  they  cease  to  be 
so  upsetting.  It  is  the  same  with  physical  characteristics. 
Europeans  are  often  conscious  of  the  smell  of  negroes,  and 


ORBIS  TERRESTRIS  189 

dislike  negroes  accordingly.  But  a  very  little  anthropology 
teaches  us  that  all  human  beings  smell ;  we  may  find,  as  a 
friend  of  mine  did,  that  a  Japanese  waiting  maid  is  apt  to 
fall  in  a  faint  at  the  smell  of  a  number  of  Europeans  and 
Americans  sitting  at  dinner.  That  alters  the  state  of  the 
case.  When  knowledge  and  understanding  come  in, 
the  peculiar  sense  of  horror  connected  with  the  unknown 
vanishes. 

Observe,  it  is  not  a  question  of  hating  and  loving.  All 
really  vigorous  hatred  is  directed  towards  your  neighbours, 
relatives  and  rivals,  whom  you  know  and  constantly  rub 
against ;  and  the  same  is  true  of  vigorous  affection.  We  are 
considering  now  merely  the  question  of  a  precinct  within 
which  the  moral  law  holds,  and  an  outer  darkness  in  which 
it  does  not.  The  case  is  put  very  clearly  in  an  interesting 
passage  of  the  philosopher  Porphyry,  who  bases  all  duty 
and  righteousness  on  the  Logos — the  Word  or  Reason — and 
deduces  quite  directly  that  a  man  has  a  complete  system 
of  duties  towards  all  beings  which  share  in  the  Logos,  but 
no  duty  at  all,  and  no  power  of  being  just  or  unjust,  towards 
those  which  do  not.  It  is  that  fence  which,  I  think,  our 
increase  of  geographical  knowledge  has,  I  will  not  say, 
merely  broken  down,  but,  as  far  as  human  beings  are  con- 
cerned, removed  off  the  edges  of  the  map  of  the  world. 


§3- 

At  this  point  a  critic  may  point  out  certain  facts  which 
seem  to  give  to  my  reasoning  the  lie  direct.  At  the  present 
moment  there  are  more  precincts  or  ring  fences  set  up  in 
the  world,  with  fellow  creatures  inside  and  mere  vermin 
outside,  then  there  have  been  for  a  great  many  centuries. 
In  mere  pig-headed  bestial  rejection  of  the  foreigner,  this 
country  and  most  others  have  of  late  sometimes  sunk  to 
a  point  of  degradation  which  would  tempt  our  more  enlight- 
ened grandfathers  to  disown  us  if  they  knew  of  it.  That 
may  be  true  enough.  It  is,  of  course,  due  to  the  war. 
The  strain  of  being  allies  in  a  long  war  is  generally  more 
than  human  nature  can  support.  And  though  the  contrary 


190  ORBIS  TERRESTRIS 

strain  of  being  official  enemies  tends,  in  the  actual  fighter, 
to  produce  a  reaction  of  kindliness,  still  the  sufferings 
and  cruelties  of  this  last  war  were  so  far  beyond  common 
anticipation  that  they  have  left  a  legacy  of  hate  behind 
them.  This  condition,  I  would  say,  is  altogether  excep- 
tional and  will  pass. 

Yet  that  answer  to  my  supposed  critic  is  not  sufficient. 
For  the  fact  is  that  inter-racial  contempt  and  dislike  were 
on  the  whole  growing  and  not  diminishing  in  the  century 
or  century  and  a  half  before  the  war. 

Think  of  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds'  noble  picture  of  the  Prince 
of  Otaheite,  now  in  the  National  Gallery,  and  compare  it 
with  our  current  conception  of  a  South  Sea  Islander  to-day. 
Think  of  the  romance  and  majesty  with  which  the  mediaeval 
travellers  endow  the  rulers  of  Cathay  or  the  Indies,  and  the 
respect  almost  amounting  to  awe  with  which  they  speak 
of  Arabian  science.  Think  of  the  romantic  poems  written 
in  the  eighteenth  century  about  African  princes  treacher- 
ously enslaved.  Or,  to  take  one  specific  contrast,  consider  on 
the  one  hand  the  eloquent  pages  about  Africa  in  Condorcet's 
famous  little  book,  Esquisse  du  Progres  de  V Esprit  Humain, 
written  in  the  midst  of  the  French  Revolution.  Condorcet 
has  been  discussing  the  infinite  obstacles  put  in  the  way  of 
human  progress  by  the  complicated  inheritances  of  old 
societies,  in  which  prejudice  and  injustice  are  so  deeply 
rooted  that  they  cannot  be  removed  without  a  dangerous 
surgical  operation.  He  expatiates  on  the  great  possibilities 
of  advance  that  there  would  be  if  statesmen  or  educators 
with  the  enlightenment  of  the  revolutionary  age  in  their 
minds  were  to  set  to  work  upon  an  unspoiled  people  in  a 
state  of  nature.  And  there,  he  says,  is  Africa  waiting  ! 
Let  all  the  nations  of  Europe  recognize  their  joint  responsi- 
bility. Let  them  take  Africa  "  as  a  sacred  trust  for  civiliza- 
tion " — the  phrase  is  not  his,  but  it  exactly  expresses  his 
idea — and  see  what  heights  the  backward  but  unspoilt 
natives  can  attain.  He  believes  that  it  can  and  will  be  done. 
All  that  is  necessary  is  firmly  to  exclude  from  Africa  the 
speculator,  the  trader,  the  soldier,  and — I  fear  he  also 
added — the  priest. 

That  is  one  side  of  the  contrast ;  the  other  is  the  history 


ORBIS  TERRESTRIS  191 

of  Africa  as  it  has  really  been  since  Condorcet's  day.  It 
is  described  for  instance  in  Mr.  Leonard  Woolf's  History 
of  Empire  and  Commerce  in  Africa  ;  and  Mr.  Woolf ,  I  should 
say,  was  a  man  who  almost  entirely  agreed  with  Condorcet's 
general  views.  If  ever  one  were  tempted  to  accept  Mr. 
Balfour's  description  of  the  life-history  of  the  human  race 
as  "  a  brief  and  discreditable  episode  in  the  life  of  one  of 
the  meaner  planets,"  it  would  be  when  one  reads  of  the 
dealings  of  the  white  races  with  the  coloured  races. 

How  shall  we  sum  up  the  process  and  explain  this  puzzling 
and  reactionary  change  that  seems  to  have  taken  place  ? 
I  think  in  the  Middle  Ages  there  was  no  clear  superiority 
in  the  strength  and  material  resources  of  the  Western  nations 
as  compared  with  the  Eastern.  In  science,  indeed,  the  Arabs 
were  definitely  our  superiors.  When  it  came  to  a  fight 
the  power  of  the  West  was  by  no  means  certain  of  victory. 
Even  in  the  sixteenth  century  it  is  not  certain  who  would 
have  won  the  fight  if  it  had  come.  There  was  an  embassy 
in  the  time  of  Elizabeth  led  by  Sir  Thomas  Rowe  to  the 
Court  of  the  Great  Mogul,  and  we  possess  Rowe's  account 
of  it.  I  think  it  would  be  true  to  say  that  the  Elizabethan 
is  struck  by  the  strangeness  of  the  Mogul  culture,  and 
deplores  its  lack  of  Christian  doctrine,  but  he  treats  it 
consistently  with  respect,  and  the  respect  seems  to  be 
largely  due  to  the  formidable  military  power  at  the  disposal 
of  the  Great  Mogul.  It  reminds  a  classical  scholar  of  that 
other  embassy  to  an  earlier  Mogul  potentate,  Attila,  the 
Hun,  described  in  the  famous  fragments  of  the  Byzantine 
Priscus,  and  epitomized  in  the  34th  chapter  of  Gibbon. 
Priscus  despised  the  Huns  as  barbarians  ;  he  put  them 
outside  the  pale  as  heathens.  He  loathed  them  for  their 
devastating  cruelty.  But  one  can  see  an  element  of  awe 
tinging  his  curiosity,  and  eventually  a  deep  involuntary 
reverence  for  his  terrific  entertainer. 

What  was  it  that  chiefly  altered  the  balance  between 
West  and  East,  between  the  white  Christian  European 
culture  and  that  of  the  East,  of  the  coloured  people,  of  the 
Moslem  and  the  Pagan,  of  Asia  and  Africa  ?  Roughly 
speaking,  it  was  mechanical  invention  and  the  industrial 
revolution.  The  wars  of  the  last  half  of  the  eighteenth 


192  ORBIS  TERRESTRIS 

century  had  a  great  effect.  They  showed  how  easily  troops 
with  Western  arms  could  beat  those  without.  And  by  the 
end  of  the  nineteenth  it  is  taken  for  granted  that  white 
troops  with  artillery  and  machine  guns  can  deal  with  ten 
times  their  number  of  coloured  troops  who  have  not  had 
access  to  the  arsenals  of  the  West.  That  is  obvious  ;  but 
I  think  it  would  probably  be  true  to  conjecture  that  an 
economic  change  had  also  taken  place  as  powerful  in  its 
effect  as  the  change  in  military  efficiency.  Certainly  in 
the  eighteenth  century  and  earlier  it  was  a  common  ex- 
perience for  Western  imaginations  to  be  dazzled  by  the 
riches  of  the  East.  And  we  know  how  the  first  generation 
or  two  of  Nabobs,  heavy  with  the  spoils  of  the  pagoda 
tree,  upset  the  course  of  politics  in  England.  Whereas 
at  present  it  is  the  English  or  American  traveller  who  dazzles 
the  Eastern  peoples  with  his  rich  apparatus  and  his  power 
of  drawing  cheques.  The  wealth  which  imposes  upon  the 
imagination  is  not  in  the  East,  but  as  far  west  as  London, 
or  even  as  New  York  or  Chicago.  This  change  of  propor- 
tion has  been  brought  about  chiefly  by  a  process  of  adding 
to  one  side  while  leaving  the  other  alone.  But  there  has 
been  also  a  definite  depression  of  the  trade  of  the  East. 
We  hear  little  of  it,  for  obvious  reasons.  But  here  and 
there  we  find  small  pieces  of  evidence.  Dr.  E.  D.  Clarke, 
a  Scotch  physician,  who  published  his  travels  in  the  Near 
East  in  1801,  mentions  his  visit  to  a  large  village  called 
Ampelaki  on  Mount  Olympus,  which  was  a  centre  for  the 
making  and  dyeing  of  Turkey  Red.  It  used  to  do  a  thriving 
trade  with  Central  Europe,  but  when  he  passed  through 
business  had  almost  ceased.  The  local  handworkers  had 
been  hopelessly  undercut  by  the  machines  of  Lancashire. 
There  must  have  been  a  very  widespread  impoverishment 
of  the  non-European  centres  of  culture  from  causes  of 
this  sort. 

The  White  Man  of  the  late  nineteenth  century  had  reached, 
except  in  a  few  places,  a  position  of  absolutely  towering 
superiority  over  the  coloured  man.  A  white  man  with  a 
machine  gun  or  a  bombing  aeroplane  cannot  be  expected 
to  take  quite  seriously  the  most  strong  and  skilful  swords- 
man of  Asia,  so  long  as  he  has  nothing  but  his  sword.  And 


ORBIS  TERRESTRIS  193 

a  member  of  a  big  English  or  American  firm,  with  vast 
credits  at  his  command,  cannot  help  smiling  at  dignified 
Eastern  or  African  elders  whose  whole  fortune  would  not 
buy  the  contents  of  the  smallest  suit-case  which  he  takes 
for  week-ends.  And  he  feels  justified  in  his  consciousness 
of  superiority,  because  after  all  the  people  are  not  Christians, 
and  have  no  bathrooms  or  trains. 

It  is  no  longer  a  case  of  fighting ;  not  of  hard  fighting 
nor  yet  of  easy  fighting.  It  is  a  case  of  eating.  It  some- 
times seems  as  if  the  West,  like  some  enormous  Saurian, 
some  alligator  of  antediluvian  magnitude,  had  fixed  its 
gaze  upon  the  coloured  civilizations  in  various  parts  of 
Africa  and  the  East,  till  its  slow  brain  gradually  rose  to 
the  conception  that  it  was  hungry  and  they  were  good  to 
eat.  Then  the  great  masticators  set  to  their  work.  Of 
course,  in  saying  this  I  am  leaving  out  of  account  a  very 
important  element  in  the  intercourse  of  West  and  East, 
or  of  white  man  and  coloured.  I  am  leaving  out  the  work 
of  missionaries,  the  work  of  independent  philanthropists, 
and,  most  important  of  all,  the  work  of  good  Government 
servants.  These  last  have  often  been  in  the  full  Stoic  sense 
"  Ministers  of  the  Divine  Pronoia."  They  have  always 
checked  and  modified  this  process ;  sometimes  they  have 
completely  transformed  it.  I  am  thinking  for  the  moment 
of  the  process  as  it  would  be  if  these  influences  of  conscience 
and  reason  were  not  working,  or  as  it  has  been  in  places 
where  they  were  not  brought  into  play. 


§4. 

Now  I  realize  that,  as  the  President,  even  the  very  tem- 
porary and  unworthy  president,  of  a  learned  society,  I 
ought  at  this  point  to  say  that  I  will  not  speculate  about 
the  future.  But,  unfortunately,  that  is  just  what  I  want 
to  do.  I  cannot  help  doing  it,  and  I  must  merely  ask  you 
to  excuse  me  until  you  obtain  a  more  prudent  president. 
The  question  is  which  of  these  two  contrary  tendencies 
which  I  have  described,  both  greatly  strengthened  by 
recent  events,  is  going  chiefly  to  prevail  ?  The  one  is  the 

18 


194  ORBIS   TERRESTRIS 

economic  exploitation  of  the  helpless  territories  and  nations 
by  the  strong  ones,  a  process  which  has  enormous  historical 
impetus  behind  it  and  is  at  this  particular  moment  stimu- 
lated by  the  exceptional  economic  hunger  of  the  European 
world ;  the  other  is  that  consciousness  of  the  Earth  as 
One  Great  City,  and  that  acceptance  of  duty  towards  our 
fellow-man  which,  if  my  opening  observations  were  justified, 
may  now  be  normally  expected  of  a  civilized  and  educated 
man.  This  latter  conception  is  well  on  its  way  to  be  an 
integral  part  of  British  public  opinion,  though  of  course 
in  particular  people  its  intensity  will  vary  with  their  power 
of  imagination,  and  its  geographical  limits  perhaps  with 
their  degree  of  knowledge.  I  have  not  the  smallest  doubt 
that  for  some  time  there  will  be  an  attempt  to  run  the  two 
together.  The  determined  money-hunter,  who  forms  such 
an  immensely  powerful  element  in  modern  civilization, 
knows  very  well  how  to  gild  with  moral  and  religious 
phrases  the  projects  that  promise  the  largest  dividends. 
But  that  attempt  cannot  last.  The  conflict  is  too  sharp 
between  the  two  principles.  Indeed  the  lists  are  already 
set  and  the  issue  joined. 

Out  of  that  strange  chaos  of  passions  which  possessed 
the  world  at  the  close  of  the  Great  War,  producing  at  the 
same  time  and  through  the  same  human  agents  the  blockade 
of  the  ex-enemy  Powers  in  time  of  peace  and  the  Covenant 
of  the  League  of  Nations,  the  most  startling  object  which 
emerged  was  Article  XXII  of  the  Covenant,  the  Article 
on  Mandates.  It  reminds  me  of  a  phrase  used  by  Byzantine 
bishops,  in  an  excess  of  humility,  to  describe  themselves 
as  elevated  to  their  Bishoprics,  not  by  Divine  Providence, 
but  "  by  divine  inadvertence."  There  must  have  been 
a  good  deal  of  inadvertence,  I  will  not  say  in  heaven,  but 
perhaps  on  the  earth  and  under  the  earth,  when  Article  XXII 
slipped  through  the  Peace  Conference.  At  a  moment  when 
the  appetite  of  our  great  Saurian  was  whetted  to  the 
utmost,  when  the  prey  lay  ready  before  it  to  be  devoured, 
Article  XXII  swept  in  like  the  Harpies,  and  seemed  to 
snatch  the  food  out  of  its  jaws. 

An  agreement  which  might  have  been  drawn  up  by  the 
most  wholehearted  idealists  in  Great  Britain,  which  might 


ORBIS   TERRESTRIS  195 

have  been  drafted  in  Exeter  Hall  and  corrected  by  the 
Aborigines'  Protection  Society,  which  would  not  at  that 
time  have  had  a  ghost  of  a  chance  of  passing  into  law 
in  any  British,  French,  German,  Italian,  or  American 
Parliament,  has  been  signed  by  the  representatives  of 
forty-eight  nations,  and  is  part,  we  may  almost  say,  of  the 
statute  law  of  the  world.  Of  course  it  directly  affects  only 
the  new  territories  transferred  in  consequence  of  the  war. 
It  will  act  on  the  other  territories  only  by  way  of  example. 
But  in  the  new  territories  the  idea  of  possession  is  definitely 
abolished  and  that  of  trusteeship  substituted ;  the  well- 
being  and  even  the  development  of  the  native  races  is 
recognized  as  a  "  sacred  trust  for  civilization."  The 
Mandatory  is  debarred  from  making  personal  gain  out 
of  his  trust.  Not  only  the  slave  trade,  but  even  the  arms 
traffic  and  the  liquor  traffic  are  forbidden  ;  the  military 
training  of  the  natives,  except  for  local  police  purposes, 
is  forbidden.  And,  by  another  clause,  even  the  trade  and 
commerce  of  the  territories  must  be  open  on  equal  terms 
to  all  members  of  the  League,  which  will  probably  include, 
if  not  the  whole  world,  at  least  the  principal  trade  rivals 
of  the  Mandatory.  And,  to  clinch  the  matter,  an  annual 
report  must  be  sent  in  to  the  League  of  Nations  to  show 
how  each  Mandatory  is  carrying  out  his  trust,  and  sub- 
mitted to  the  scrutiny  of  a  special  Mandates  Committee 
of  the  League. 

Will  this  wonderful  Article  be  sincerely  and  honestly 
carried  out  by  all  the  Mandatory  Powers  ?  Well,  probably 
not  quite.  The  interested  parties  will  exercise  overpower- 
ing pressure  to  prevent  anything  of  the  sort.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  the  Great  Powers,  while  remaining  firmly  in  military 
possession  of  the  territories,  have  spent  the  last  two  years 
in  refusing  to  accept  any  draft  Mandates  proposed  to  them. 
The  League,  disheartened,  at  last  asked  them  to  draw  up 
their  own  Mandates  and  submit  them  to  it  for  approval. 
This  also  they  refused.  And  the  League  eventually  asked 
them  to  draw  up  their  own  Mandates  and  act  upon  them, 
without  submitting  them  to  anybody,  subject  only  to  the 
Annual  Report.  This  they  accepted,  but  did  not  carry 
out.  By  the  time  the  Assembly  met,  no  draft  mandates 


196  ORBIS  TERRESTRIS 

were  ready.  Then  came  an  unanswerable  protest  from 
America  ;  a  protest  equally  unanswerable  from  Germany ; 
an  indignant  series  of  letters  from  the  Mandates  Sub- 
Committee  of  the  Assembly.  And  eventually  Great 
Britain  produced  two  Mandates,  for  Palestine  and  Mesopo- 
tamia, and  France  one,  for  Syria  .  .  .  which  were  laid  before 
the  Committee  with  the  express  stipulation  that  no  public 
comment  should  be  made  upon  them  !  Perhaps  they  are 
not  documents  of  which  their  authors  are  proud.  The 
public  will  know  all  about  them  in  time.  And  then  the 
fight  will  come. 

The  interesting  point  of  the  situation  is  that  the  protest 
on  behalf  of  the  natives  is  no  longer  left  to  small  and  unpopu- 
lar bodies,  chiefly  in  England,  consisting  of  a  few  missionaries 
and  Quakers  and  ex-officials  and  stray  philanthropists. 
It  is  definitely  taken  up  by  the  Assembly  of  the  League, 
which  has  not  only  passed  a  severe  censure  on  the  conduct 
of  the  Great  Powers,  but  has  laid  down  unanimously  two 
principles  which  the  Powers  were  and  are  specially  seeking 
to  evade :  that  no  Mandatory  may  use  its  position  to  acquire 
monopolies  and  special  economic  advantages,  and  that 
no  Mandatory  may  increase  its  own  military  strength 
by  means  of  its  mandated  populations.  The  reports  have 
to  be  sent  in  to  the  League  before  next  September. 

There  are  the  lists  set.  There  is  the  fight  that  is  coming  ; 
and  I  hope  it  will  be  a  handsome  one.  I  once  in  Australia 
lived  in  the  house  of  a  man  who  kept  a  bulldog,  and  who 
received  a  present  of  a  small  native  bear.  I  was  present 
at  the  scene  of  their  introduction  to  one  another.  The 
owner  explained  carefully  that  they  must  be  friends.  He 
stroked  them  together,  he  gave  them  food  together,  he 
took  them  together  for  exercise  in  the  garden.  And  all 
went  well.  The  bulldog  had  a  high  sense  of  obedience 
and  duty.  But  at  the  end,  when  it  retired  to  its  basket, 
it  gazed  miserably  and  long  at  the  bear,  with  tears  running 
in  streams  down  its  cheeks.  It  was  so  very  hard  not  to 
kill  him  and  eat  him.  That  is  how  our  Saurian  will  feel 
if  the  better  elements  in  the  Great  Powers,  backed  by  all 
the  disinterested  opinion  in  the  rest  of  the  world,  succeed 
ultimately  in  imposing  their  will,  like  a  bond  of  conscience, 


ORBIS  TERRESTRIS  197 

on  the  forces  of  uncontrolled  and  irresponsible  covetousness 
which  otherwise  will  plunder  the  world. 


§5- 

For  the  Geographer  the  interesting  point  is  that  not 
merely  are  the  Great  Powers,  by  means  of  their  increased 
geographical  discoveries,  able  to  make,  and  indeed  forced 
to  make,  decisions  about  the  whole  Orbis  Terrarum.  The 
Orbis  Terranim  itself  is  meeting  in  committee,  and  has 
enough  mutual  knowledge  among  its  parts  to  be  able  to 
make  at  least  a  beginning  of  deciding  about  its  own  future. 
It  is  not  merely  that  you  and  I  can,  in  contemplation, 
survey  the  world  from  China  to  Peru.  China  and  Peru 
are  both  members  of  the  Assembly  of  the  League,  and  have 
shown  themselves  useful  members. 

There  is  a  motive  for  which  I  do  not  know  the  exact 
psychological  name — let  us  call  it  professional  interest — 
which  is  very  powerful  in  human  affairs.  It  is  the  motive 
which  makes  a  man  or  a  committee  interested  in  the  success 
of  the  job  at  which  they  are  working.  If  once  a  man 
becomes  a  detective,  he  will  be  eager  to  track  down  law- 
breakers. He  may  start  with  no  ill-will  whatever  against 
the  particular  breach  of  the  law  concerned,  or  indeed  against 
any  breach  of  the  law,  but  he  will  soon  be  working  keenly 
at  his  chase.  It  is  a  common  experience  in  municipal 
and  other  bodies,  that  a  man  who  is  dangerously  energetic 
in  spending  money  if  he  is  on  a  spending  committee,  will 
often  be  a  ferocious  economizer  if  he  is  put  in  charge  of 
the  accounts.  If  I  remember  rightly,  there  is  a  letter  of 
Sir  Robert  Peel's  describing  what  anguish  it  was  to  him  to 
see  badly  managed  a  department  which  he  had  organized, 
or  knew  how  to  organize,  well.  Now,  I  venture  to  say 
that  no  one  can  read  the  debates  in  the  recent  Assembly 
of  the  League  at  Geneva  without  realizing  that  we  have 
there — for  the  first  time  in  history — a  representative  assembly 
of  able  men  drawn  from  all  quarters  of  the  globe  united 
by  a  professional  interest  in  the  welfare,  concord,  and  wise 
guidance  of  the  world  as  a  whole.  Some  few  individuals 


198  ORBIS  TERRESTRIS 

may  have  seemed  to  have  a  subcurrent  of  national  feeling 
which  they  never  forgot ;  but  for  the  most  part,  the  persons 
speaking  about  typhus,  or  the  arms  traffic,  or  the  traffic 
in  women  and  children,  or  the  prevention  of  various  wars, 
really  had  their  minds  devoted  to  the  thing  they  were  talking 
about.  They  were  really  thinking  internationally.  They 
were  genuinely  interested  in  the  public  good  of  the  world. 
And  this,  not  because  they  were  all  more  high-minded  men 
than  are  normally  elected  to  national  parliaments,  but 
because  the  common  good  of  the  world  was  the  business  on 
which  they  were  employed,  and  had  set  up  in  them  the  normal 
stimulus  of  professional  interest.  The  same  phenomena 
can  be  detected,  though  not  in  such  glaring  colours,  in  the 
ordinary  work  of  the  Secretariate.  We  have  there,  set  up 
in  the  heart  of  Europe,  a  large  body  of  able  men,  drawn 
from  all  nations,  but  united  by  the  fascination  of  a  common 
cause  and  a  common  professional  interest,  which  is  the 
securing  of  co-operation  between  the  nations  and  the  main- 
tenance not  only  of  peace  but  of  goodwill. 

All  causes  which  depend  for  their  success  on  the  continuous 
operation  of  lofty  motives  are  foredoomed  to  failure.  Good 
government  consists  largely  in  so  arranging  matters  that 
the  great  serried  masses  of  ordinary  everyday  motives 
reinforce  the  good  ones.  In  a  well-governed  society  a 
certain  decent  level  of  social  behaviour  is  generally  main- 
tained because  things  are  deliberately  so  arranged  that  it 
is  easier  to  maintain  it  than  not,  except  when  the  pressure 
of  passion  or  temptation  to  the  square  inch  is  unusually 
great. 

Now  if  the  future  treatment  of  Africa  and  the  East 
were  merely  dependent  on  a  struggle  between  two  forces, 
the  desire  of  the  exploiter  to  exploit  and  the  desire  of  dis- 
interested third  parties,  on  ideal  grounds,  that  he  should 
not  do  so,  the  outlook  would  not  be  doubtful.  The  first 
is  a  full-blooded  and  intense  passion,  and  the  second  a 
pale  and  ineffective  one.  But  the  struggle  is  not  going 
to  be  so  simple  as  that.  Political  and  moral  contests  are 
not  to  be  worked  out  as  a  mere  parallelogram  of  forces. 
Or  if  they  are,  we  must  allow  for  such  an  infinite  number 
of  forces,  pushing,  pulling,  inhibiting,  suggesting,  appealing 


ORBIS    TERRESTRIS  199 

to  so  many  different  elements  in  human  nature,  that  the 
parallelogram  becomes  too  complicated  to  construct.  Now 
it  seems  to  me  that,  under  its  present  constitution,  the 
League  has  succeeded  to  a  remarkable  degree  in  mobilizing 
for  the  cause  of  justice  and  good  government  a  very  strong 
phalanx  of  ordinary  work-a-day  motives,  of  the  kind  that 
rule  an  ordinary  man  in  daily  life.  It  has  its  secretariate 
permanently  sitting  and  professionally  devoted  to  the 
cause  in  question.  It  has  the  Assembly,  which  is  led  by 
every  motive  of  professional  interest  and  amour  propre, 
to  see  that  it  is  not  made  a  fool  of,  and  that  the  principles 
of  the  Covenant,  of  which  it  is  the  supreme  guardian,  are 
carried  out.  And  many  a  Government  which  has  hitherto 
been  worried  by  strong  private  interests  into  conniving, 
against  its  better  instincts,  in  various  methods  of  semi- 
slavery  or  expropriation  or  industrial  exploitation  of  its 
subject  peoples,  will  in  future  find  itself  turned  in  the  opposite 
direction  by  the  still  greater  and  more  searching  worry 
of  having  to  explain  under  cross-examination  before  the 
eyes  of  an  unsympathetic  commission  representing  fifty 
nations  why  it  has  omitted  to  perform  various  duties  to 
which  it  was  pledged,  and  why  it  has  done  various  discredit- 
able things  which  it  had  solemnly  promised  not  to  do.  The 
world  has  not  yet  sounded  or  measured  the  immense  power 
of  mere  publicity.  I  do  not  mean  advertisement  in  news- 
papers ;  I  mean  the  mere  knowledge  that  your  actions  are 
to  be  known  and  discussed,  and  particularly  that  you  will 
have  to  answer  questions  about  them  face  to  face  with  your 
questioner.  Publicity  is  the  only  new  weapon  which  the 
League  possesses,  but  if  properly  used  it  may  well  prove 
to  be  about  the  most  powerful  weapon  that  exists  in  human 
affairs. 

On  the  whole  I  think  it  looks  as  if  we  were  moving  in 
the  direction  of  realizing  upon  the  earth  something  like  the 
One  Great  City  of  Gods  and  Men.  It  will  have,  like  other 
cities,  its  bad  citizens  as  well  as  its  good.  But  with  the 
progress  of  knowledge,  assisted  by  certain  special  lessons 
which  have  been  lately  learned  at  considerable  cost,  I  think 
it  will  become  within  a  measurable  time  almost  impossible 
for  a  decent  and  intelligent  statesman  to  profess  absolute 


200  ORBIS  TERRESTRIS 

indifference  to  the  welfare  or  suffering  of  other  parts  of 
the  human  race.  To  prove  the  point,  one  need  only  read 
the  report  of  the  recent  International  Financial  Conference 
summoned  at  Brussels  by  the  League  of  Nations,  in  which 
a  number  of  bankers  and  business  men  and  financial 
experts  representing  many  different  nations  lay  down,  for 
practical  reasons,  a  theory  of  international  duty  and  a 
scheme  of  international  co-operation  which,  ten  years 
ago,  would  have  been  thought  extreme  in  a  club  of  radical 
idealists.  I  think  we  shall  achieve  some  approach  to  the 
One  Great  City :  that  is,  I  think  that  some  consciousness 
of  ultimate  solidarity  among  the  peoples  of  the  earth  has 
really  begun  to  penetrate  the  minds  of  ordinary  practical 
politicians ;  and  secondly,  that  a  sense  of  the  moral  duty 
of  the  strong  and  advanced  nations  to  help  the-  weak  and 
backward,  instead  of  being  confined  to  disconnected  groups 
of  unimportant  people  in  various  countries,  is  now  definitely 
and  comprehensively  recognized  in  a  great  public  treaty, 
to  which  all  the  most  interested  Governments  have  attached 
their  signatures,  and  will  be  regularly  supported  and  asserted 
by  the  greatest  existing  organ  of  international  opinion. 

Let  us  not  look  to  force.  Force  is  against  us  :  and  there 
is  no  sillier  spectacle  than  the  sight  of  the  weak  appealing 
to  force  against  the  strong.  We  have  no  force.  We  have 
only  the  power  of  putting  facts  and  questions  before  the 
public  opinion  of  the  world.  Then  the  world,  that  is  to 
say,  chiefly,  the  electorates  of  the  great  nations,  will  be 
able  to  say  whether  they  wish  their  Governments  to  do 
justly  or  unjustly,  to  be  world-plunderers  or  world-builders. 

I  have  read  in  the  last  few  days  two  documents.  One 
was  the  Report  of  a  Commission  on  the  territory  which 
used  to  be  German  New  Guinea,  and  which  is  now  mandated 
to  the  Australian  Commonwealth.  There  were  two  reports ; 
one  signed  by  a  majority  of  the  commissioners,  showing 
how  the  natives  could  be  made  to  work,  and  the  territory 
developed  like  an  estate,  and  the  profits  all  diverted  to 
Australian  firms ;  the  other,  signed  by  the  Chairman, 
showing  how  very  differently  the  colony  must  be  adminis- 
tered if  it  was  desired  to  fulfil  the  spirit  of  Article  XXII 
of  the  Covenant  and  the  best  traditions  of  Australian 


ORBIS  TERRESTRIS  201 

policy.     I  cannot  guess  which  side  will  win.*    But  at  least 
the  lists  are  set. 

The  other  document  was  the  Report  of  Committee  6  of 
the  Assembly  of  the  League,  the  Committee  which  deals 
with  Mandates,  its  correspondence  with  the  Council,  and 
its  remarks  upon  the  conduct  pursued  hitherto  by  certain 
great  Powers. 

There,  too,  the  lists  are  set.  At  present  no  doubt  the 
forces  of  reaction  are  far  the  stronger  ;  but  they  are  uneasy 
and  alarmed.  They  do  not  like  dishonouring  their  signa- 
tures in  public.  They  do  not  like  the  remarks  of  outsiders, 
such  as  Germany  and  America.  They  do  not  like  the  thought 
of  facing  the  Assembly  or  any  Commission  which  represents 
the  Assembly's  point  of  view  with  duties  obviously  unper- 
formed and  promises  broken.  Yet  sooner  or  later  the 
Assembly  must  be  faced. 

I  make  no  prophecy  about  the  issue.  I  do  not  even  feel 
sure  that  on  the  particular  point  about  which  the  first 
battle  will  rage  the  great  exploiting  Powers  will  certainly 
be  in  the  wrong  and  the  idealist  critics  in  the  right.  But 
I  do  think  we  may  expect  to  see,  in  a  very  few  years,  a 
political  conflict  of  extraordinary  interest  and  world- wide 
range,  which  will  outwardly  take  the  form  of  a  lawyer's 
or  politician's  discussion  as  to  the  exact  meaning  and 
application  of  Articles  VIII,  XXII,  and  XXIII  of  the 
Covenant,  but  will  really  raise  the  problem  whether  all 
mankind  are  to  be  citizens  of  the  One  Great  City,  or 
whether  some  are  still  animals  ferae  naturae,  which  may 
legitimately  be  hunted  for  their  skins. 
1  The  majority  won. 


X 
SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER  • 

IN  an  old  novel,  still  famous  and  once  widely  popular, 
the  writer,  oppressed  with  the  burden  of  evil  in  the 
world,  gives  to  her  heroine  the  name  Consuelo,  "  Con- 
solation," and  makes  her  half-mad  hero  u  descendant  of 
a  strange  sect.  He  is  one  of  those  Bohemian  Lollards  who, 
despairing  of  any  sympathy  from  God,  threw  themselves 
into  the  protecting  arms  of  their  fellow-outcast,  fellow- 
sufferer,  fellow-victim  of  persecution  and  slander,  the 
Devil.  Their  word  of  salutation  was  :  "  The  Injured  One 
give  you  greeting,"  or  "  The  Injured  One  give  you  blessing." 
And  they  made  of  the  Injured  One  a  figure  rather  resembling 
the  suffering  Christ,  a  champion  of  the  poor  and  lowly, 
a  Being  more  than  persecuted,  more  than  crucified,  but 
differing  from  Christ  inasmuch  as  he  was  no  friend  of 
Pope,  priest  or  Emperor,  and  therefore  presumably  no 
friend  of  God  ;  he  was  still  un conquered  and  unreconciled. 
If  the  belief  seems  to  us  bizarre  or  even  depraved,  it  can 
only  be  for  a  moment.  The  clue  to  it  is  that  it  is  a  belief 
of  the  persecuted  and  helpless,  who  know  their  own  inno- 
cence and  deduce  the  wickedness  of  their  rulers.  To  these 
pious  and  simple  mountain  peasants,  followers  first  of  John 
Huss  and  Zyska,  and  then  of  leaders  more  ignorant  and 
fiery,  the  world  became  gradually  a  place  dominated  by 
enemies.  Every  person  in  authority  met  them  with  rack 
and  sword,  cursed  their  religious  leaders  as  emissaries  of 
the  Devil,  and  punished  them  for  all  the  things  which  they 
considered  holy.  The  earth  was  the  Lord's,  and  the  Pope 
and  Emperor  were  the  vicegerents  of  God  upon  the  earth. 

1  The  Adamson  Lecture,  delivered  at  Manchester  University,  October 
1919. 

202 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER     208 

So  they  were  told  ;  and  in  time  they  accepted  the  state- 
ment. That  was  the  division  of  the  world.  On  one  side 
God,  Pope  and  Emperor  and  the  army  of  persecutors ;  on 
the  other  themselves,  downtrodden  and  poor,  their  saintly 
leaders  hunted  like  beasts,  and,  above  all,  their  eternal 
comforter  and  fellow-rebel,  that  exiled  Star  of  the  Morning, 
cast  into  darkness  and  torment  like  his  innocent  children. 
Let  them  be  true  to  him,  and  surely  his  day  must  come  ! 
Satanism  in  this  sense  is  perfectly  intelligible,  and  may 
be  strongly  sympathetic.  We  need  pay  no  attention  to 
the  mere  name  of  Satan  or  Lucifer ;  the  name  is  a  mytho- 
logical accident.  The  essence  of  the  belief  is  that  the 
World  Order  is  evil  and  a  lie  ;  goodness  and  truth  are 
persecuted  rebels.  In  other  forms  the  belief  has  been  held 
by  many  Christian  saints  and  martyrs,  and  notably  by 
the  author  of  the  Apocalypse.  But  we  should  notice  that 
it  is  diametrically  opposed  to  the  teaching  of  almost  all 
the  great  moral  philosophers.  Plato,  Aristotle  and  the 
Stoics,  St.  Augustine  and  Thomas  Aquinas,  Kant  and 
J.  S.  Mill,  and  Comte  and  T.  H.  Green,  all  argue  or  assume 
that  there  exists  in  some  sense  a  Cosmos  or  Divine  Order ; 
that  what  is  good  is  in  harmony  with  this  Order,  and  what 
is  bad  is  in  discord  against  it.  I  notice  that  one  of  the 
Gnostic  schools  in  Hippolytus  the  Church  Father  (vii.  28) 
actually  defines  Satan  as  "  The  spirit  who  works  against 
the  Cosmic  Powers  "  ;  the  rebel  or  protestant  who  counter- 
acts the  will  of  the  whole,  and  tries  to  thwart  the  com- 
munity of  which  he  is  a  member.  Ancient  philosophers 
are  particularly  strong  on  this  conception  of  evil,  and  on 
the  corresponding  conception  of  human  goodness  as  being 
the  quality  of  a  good  citizen.  The  world  or  the  universe 
is  one  community,  or,  as  they  call  it,  one  city ;  all  men, 
or  perhaps  all  living  things,  are  citizens  of  that  city,  and 
human  goodness  consists  in  living  for  its  good.  God's 
providence  or  foresight  consists  in  providing  the  future 
Good  of  the  Universe ;  and  it  is  our  business  to  be  to  the 
best  of  our  powers  v-novpyoi  rfjs  Oeias  irpovoias,  servants 
or  ministers  of  the  divine  foresight.  Thus  goodness  becomes 
identical  with  loyalty,  or  with  what  some  of  the  persecuted 
Christians  called  Twmj,  faithfulness.  There  is  an  army 


204     SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD   ORDER 

of  God,  and  there  is  an  enemy.    And  the  essential  sin  is 
rebellion  or  treason. 

Loyalty  is  thus  the  central  and  typical  virtue ;  but 
loyalty  to  what  ?  So  far  we  can  only  say  it  is  loyalty  to 
the  Cosmic  Process,  or  the  Purpose  of  God,  or  the  good 
of  the  whole,  as  representing  that  purpose.  But  in  practice, 
for  the  ordinary  human  being  who  has  no  oddities  or  idio- 
syncrasies of  belief,  this  central  virtue  takes  the  form  of 
loyalty  towards  the  most  important  active  whole  of  which 
he  is  a  member. 

In  practice,  the  good  of  any  large  society  is  accepted  as 
sufficiently  near  to  the  Good  of  the  Universe  to  justify  a 
man's  devotion  to  it.  A  man  whose  life  was  really  devoted 
to  the  welfare  of  New  York,  assuming,  of  course,  that  his 
idea  of  the  welfare  of  New  York  was  reasonably  adequate 
and  sensible,  would  certainly  count  as  a  good  man.  It  is 
speculatively  possible  that  the  good  of  the  universe  may 
demand  the  misery  and  degradation  of  the  inhabitants  of 
New  York,  but  it  is  one  of  those  possibilities  which  need 
not,  in  ordinary  opinion,  be  taken  seriously.  A  fortiori, 
a  man  who  really  devoted  his  life  to  the  welfare  of  all  the 
inhabitants  of  America  or  of  the  British  Empire,  or  all 
the  inhabitants  of  the  German  Empire,  or,  still  more,  the 
inhabitants  of  the  ancient  Roman  Empire,  would  be  accepted 
as  a  good  man  leading  a  good  life  by  all  but  the  eccentric 
or  prejudiced.  If  a  person  of  this  type  is  blamed — such 
as  Cecil  Rhodes  or  Bismarck,  or  William  II  or  Augustus — 
there  is  always  an  implication  that  his  conception  of  what 
constituted  the  welfare  of  his  whole  was  wrong.  He 
professed,  and  perhaps  thought,  that  he  was  promoting 
the  welfare  of  his  great  society,  whereas  he  was  really  doing 
something  quite  different :  inflaming  its  ambitions,  or 
flattering  its  vices,  or  the  like. 

The  point  of  interest  comes  when  one  of  these  vast  wholes 
begins  to  identify  its  own  good  with  something  which 
incidentally  involves  the  evil  of  another  whole,  whether 
small  or  great.  We  most  of  us,  for  instance,  look  upon 
the  late  German  Empire  as  an  organization  so  hostile  to 
humanity  as  a  whole  that  it  had  to  be  destroyed.  But  it 
is  worth  noting  that  in  any  of  these  great  organizations  far 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER     205 

the  greater  expenditure  of  time  and  energy  is  devoted  to 
the  good  of  its  members,  to  such  ends  as  education,  trans- 
port, industry,  agriculture,  government  and  the  adminis- 
tration of  justice;  and  the  evil  it  does,  even  when  it  is 
enormous,  is  mostly  either  unconscious  or  else  accidental. 
The  clearest,  and  perhaps  the  most  tragic,  case  is  that  of 
the  Roman  Empire. 

If  we  try  to  enter  into  the  mind  of  a  good  Roman  official, 
like  Pliny,  for  instance,  as  shown  in  his  letters  to  Trajan, 
he  seems  to  feel  that  the  service  of  Rome  was  for  him  the 
nearest  approach  possible  to  the  service  of  God,  or  the 
helping  of  the  human  race  as  a  whole.  Rome,  he  would 
say,  had  doubtless  her  imperfections ;  and  not  all  Roman 
proconsuls  were  worthy  of  their  high  calling.  But,  when 
all  deductions  were  made,  the  Roman  Empire  meant  peace 
throughout  the  known  world  ;  it  meant  decent  and  fairly 
disinterested  government ;  it  protected  honest  men  from 
thieves  and  robbers  ;  it  punished  wrongdoers  ;  it  gave  effec- 
tive help  to  towns  wrecked  by  blizzards  or  earthquakes, 
or  to  provinces  where  the  crops  had  failed.  It  spread 
education  and  civilized  habits ;  it  put  down  the  worst 
practices  of  savage  superstition.  And,  if  any  improvement 
in  the  practice  of  governing  human  beings  could  be  pointed 
out,  on  the  whole  a  good  Roman  governor  was  willing  to 
consider  it.  If  Pliny  had  been  asked  what  was  the  greatest 
calamity  that  could  befall  the  human  race,  he  would 
probably  have  answered,  "  The  overthrow  of  the  Roman 
Empire  "  ;  and  it  would  have  been  hard  to  contradict  him. 
One  might  have  argued  that,  in  nation  after  nation,  Rome 
had  crushed  a  native  art  and  culture,  and  put  in  its  place 
a  very  dull  and  mechanical  civilization,  with  little  life,  or 
beauty,  or  power  of  growth  ;  that  it  took  the  heart  out  of 
the  local  religions,  and  put  in  their  place  a  dead  official 
ceremonial.  But  such  arguments  would  have  been  met 
with  an  incredulous  smile,  as  similar  arguments  are  met 
nowadays.  Pliny  would  answer,  very  justly,  that  if  the 
various  subject  nations  all  preferred  Roman  culture  to 
their  own,  surely  that  must  be  because  Roman  culture 
was  obviously  superior.  If  they  accepted  the  Roman 
official  religion,  it  must  be  for  the  same  reason.  As  a 


206     SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER 

matter  of  fact,  he  would  add,  the  religion  of  Roma  Dea, 
the  acceptance  of  the  spirit  of  the  Roman  Empire  as  some- 
thing to  be  regarded  with  awe  and  love  and  worship,  was 
the  nearest  approach  to  a  truly  philosophical  religion  that 
uncultured  men  could  assimilate  ;  and,  after  all,  Rome  never 
suppressed  or  injured  any  local  religion  that  was  not  criminal 
in  its  practices.  All  that  Rome  asked  was  the  recognition 
of  a  common  brotherhood,  a  common  loyalty,  expressed 
in  the  simplest  and  most  human  way,  by  an  offering  of 
incense  and  prayer  at  the  altar  of  Roma  Dea,  Rome  the 
Divine  Mother,  or  sometimes  at  that  of  the  existing  head 
of  the  State. 

And  then,  as  we  know,  certain  odd  people  would  not 
do  it.  It  seems  curious  that  so  simple  a  point  of  difference 
could  not  be  got  over.  I  do  not  see  why  Jews  or  Christians 
need  have  refused  to  pray  for  the  welfare  of  Rome,  pro- 
vided they  did  so  at  their  own  altars,  nor  why  the  magis- 
trates should  have  made  a  difficulty  about  the  particular 
altar  used.  But  evidently  the  affair  was  badly  managed 
at  the  beginning.  And  by  the  time  we  have  any  detailed 
evidence  we  find  the  Christians  uttering  curses  and  incan- 
tations against  the  Empire  in  place  of  prayers,  and  the 
Roman  working  classes  trying  by  pogroms  to  stamp  out 
such  incredible  wickedness.  When  people  met  secretly 
and  prayed  to  an  alien  and  hostile  God  to  do  ill  to  the 
whole  Empire ;  when  they  called  our  holy  Mother  Rome  a 
harlot  riding  on  a  wild  beast  and  drunken  with  the  blood 
of  the  saints ;  when  they  saw  visions  and  uttered  incanta- 
tions fraught  with  the  most  appalling  afflictions  upon 
mankind  that  any  mind  can  conceive,  seals  and  bowls  of 
poisoned  blood,  and  Riders  upon  strange  horses,  who 
should  eventually  trample  the  whole  Roman  world  beneath 
their  feet  until  the  blood  of  that  wine-pressing  should  wash 
the  horses'  bridles,  while  the  Christians  receive  rich  rewards 
and  sing  for  joy — by  that  time  the  average  working  man 
or  peasant  began  to  look  about  him  for  clubs  and  stones, 
and  the  worried  magistrate  to  decide  that  this  new  Jewish 
sect  must  be  registered  as  an  illegal  society. 

The  mental  attitude  of  the  Book  of  Revelation  is  almost 
exactly  like  that  of  the  persecuted  Bohemian  sectaries  in 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER     207 

Consuelo.  The  world  and  the  rulers  of  the  world  are 
absolutely  evil — not  faulty  men  who  make  mistakes,  but 
evil  powers,  hating  all  that  is  good  and  acting  on  earth 
as  the  representatives  of  evil  gods :  the  earthly  Cosmos  is 
evil,  and  all  that  the  righteous  can  desire  is  its  utter  de- 
struction. This  conception  that  the  World  Order  may  be 
definitely  evil  was,  of  course,  not  a  new  one.  Four  hundred 
years  earlier,  Athens  had  thrilled  at  Plato's  conception 
of  the  ideal  Righteous  Man,  who,  coming  to  an  unrighteous 
world,  suffers  every  affliction,  is  bound  and  scourged  and  has 
his  eyes  burnt  out,  and  at  last  is  impaled  or  crucified,  and 
yet  is,  on  the  whole,  happy — i.e.  he  is  a  man  you  would 
like  to  be — because  of  his  righteousness.  Greek  mythology 
itself  possessed  the  traditional  character  of  a  divine  rebel, 
Prometheus,  who,  for  love  of  man,  had  defied  the  cruel 
Power  which  rules  the  world.  The  late  and  mystical  Greek 
philosophers  who  were  the  founders  of  Gnosticism  are 
eloquent  on  the  badness  of  this  world,  and  the  malignity 
of  the  Powers  who  created  it  or  who  rule  it.  Such  a  view 
of  the  world  as  evil  is,  I  think,  seldom  of  any  value  as 
philosophy,  but  always  of  interest  to  the  psychologist  and 
the  historian.  When  widespread,  it  is  the  result  of  some 
special  and  widespread  unhappiness,  either  defeat  and 
persecution  or  else  of  extraordinarily  bad  government.  In 
isolated  cases  it  may  come  merely  from  some  sensitive 
idealism  which  pitches  its  hopes  too  high  for  human  life 
to  satisfy.  It  is  the  belief  sometimes  of  the  anchorite  or 
the  mystic ;  but  normally  it  is  the  cry  of  the  persecuted, 
the  refugee,  the  sufferer  of  things  past  endurance,  the  victim 
of  those  Governments  which  are  the  enemies  of  their  own 
people.  It  is  never,  I  think,  the  belief  of  the  good  governor, 
the  efficient  public  servant,  or  even  the  successful  mechanic 
or  man  of  business.  But  of  that  later :  the  point  which 
I  wish  to  lay  stress  on  at  this  moment  is  a  different  one. 
It  is  that,  unless  I  am  mistaken,  in  every  single  case  the 
man  who  believes  that  the  order  in  which  he  lives  is  evil 
provides  himself,  either  in  this  life  or  the  next,  with  another 
order  in  which  all  is  redeemed. 

The  writer  of  the  Apocalypse  looks  forward,  after  the 
utter  destruction  of  the  hostile  order  of  Rome,  to  a  mil- 


208     SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER 

lennium  upon  earth,  in  which  all  the  posts  of  authority 
are  occupied  by  the  faithful.  Plato's  righteous  man, 
though  in  discord  with  the  society  which  tortures  him,  is 
in  harmony  all  the  time  with  the  true  nature  of  things. 
Prometheus  himself  ultimately  gains  his  point,  and  is 
reconciled  to  Zeus.  The  overpowering  strength  of  this 
impulse  in  the  persecuted,  or  unhappy,  to  project  out  of 
their  own  desires  an  imaginary  order  in  which  the  injustices 
of  the  present  order  are  corrected,  a  special  Heaven  in 
which  the  righteous  are  consoled,  together  with  a  special 
Hell  in  which  the  enemies  of  the  righteous  meet  their 
deserts,  is  illustrated  vividly  in  the  apocalyptic  literature 
of  all  persecuted  faiths,  both  Christian  and  pagan.  Per- 
secution always  generates  vivid  descriptions  of  Hell,  the 
projection  of  righteous  revenge  unsatisfied.  One  of  the 
most  pathetic  and  amiable  of  these  attempts  to  justify 
by  imagination  that  which  cannot  be  justified  by  the 
evidence  is  the  theoretic  optimism  of  the  Neo-Platonic  and 
Neo-Pythagorean  communities.  They  had  not  suffered 
much.  They  did  not  revel  in  visions  of  revenge  or  recom- 
pense :  they  merely  argued  in  vacuo.  Their  fundamental 
doctrine  was  that  the  Cosmos,  the  Universe,  was  good. 
If  it  was  not  good  all  their  system  reeled  into  ruins.  But 
the  world,  as  they  actually  saw  it  and  lived  in  it,  seemed 
to  them  a  mere  mass  of  gross  matter,  rolling  in  error  and 
delusion,  and  wisdom  could  only  be  attained  by  abstention 
from  it.  How  can  these  positions  be  reconciled  ?  By  a 
method  so  simple  that  it  leaves  one  almost  awed  at  the 
childlike  power  of  living  in  dreams  by  which  the  human 
mind  protects  itself  against  the  thorns  of  life.  "  True," 
said  these  philosophers,  "all  of  the  world  that  we  see  is 
bad,  all  steeped  in  matter  and  in  error.  But  what  about 
the  parts  we  do  not  see  ?  If  you  could  once  get  above 
the  moon  you  would  find  it  absolutely  different.  All 
those  parts  of  the  Universe  about  which  we  have  no  infor- 
mation are  so  extraordinarily  and  infinitely  good,  that  the 
badness  of  the  parts  we  do  happen  to  know  sinks  into 
insignificance."  It  is  as  though  a  judge  had  to  try  a  number 
of  accused  people,  of  whom  some  could  not  be  caught ;  all 
those  who  were  brought  into  court  were  found  guilty  of 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER     209 

various  crimes,  but  the  judge  has  such  a  strong  inward 
conviction  of  the  saintliness  of  those  whom  the  police  could 
not  lay  hands  upon  that  he  acquits  the  whole  gang,  and  they 
leave  the  court  without  a  stain  on  their  character. 

Quite  absurd,  I  venture  to  say.  And  yet  I  think  it  is 
in  essentials  what  I  believe  myself,  and  what  we  all  believe. 
And  I  very  much  doubt  whether  human  beings  can  go 
on  living  without  some  such  belief.  It  is  a  matter  of 
human  psychology.  But  perhaps  we  do  wrong  in  using 
the  words  "  good  "  and  "  bad  "  ;  we  really  mean  "  friend 
or  enemy,"  on  our  side  or  against  us.  The  division  between 
"  friend  "  and  "  enemy  "  goes  far  deeper  down  into  human 
nature  than  that  between  good  and  bad.  If  you  read  the 
sort  of  literature  that  I  have  been  treating,  the  ancient 
apocryphal  or  pagan  apocalypses  and  descriptions  of  Hell, 
you  will  not  find  on  the  whole  that  Hell  is  primarily  the 
place  for  people  who  do  not  come  up  to  the  received  moral 
standard  ;  it  is  the  place  for  the  enemy.  It  is  the  place 
for  him  who  now  persecutes  us,  robs  us,  hangs  us,  burns 
us,  makes  us  fight  with  wild  beasts,  and  laughs  the  while. 
Let  him  wait  and  he  will  be  made  to  laugh  on  the  other 
side  of  his  mouth  !  And  if  a  third  person  explains  that  a 
particular  enemy  is  a  decent  and  sober  person,  a  good 
husband  and  father,  the  statement  is  almost  irrelevant, 
as  well  as  almost  unbelievable.  You  may  hate  a  man 
because  he  is  wicked  ;  or  you  may  think  him  wicked  because 
you  hate  him.  You  may  love  a  man  because  you  think 
him  good,  or  you  may  feel  him  to  be,  with  all  his  faults, 
a  splendid  fellow  because  he  likes  you.  But  in  either  case 
the  psychological  ground  fact  is  not  a  moral  judgment, 
good  or  bad,  but  an  instinctive  gesture,  Friend  or  Enemy. 

And  as  soon  as  we  see  this,  we  see  also  how  it  is  almost 
impossible  not  to  believe  that  ultimately  in  the  real  battle 
of  life  the  Cosmos  is  with  us.  You  cannot  belong  whole- 
heartedly to  the  Labour  Party,  or  the  Jesuits,  as  the  case 
may  be,  without  believing  that  God  is  on  the  side  of  the 
Labour  Party  or  the  Jesuits.  You  cannot  belong  to  Islam 
without  believing  that  God  is  on  the  side  of  Islam.  In 
the  main,  whatever  majority  may  be  against  you  now, 
and  however  hostile  you  may  find  the  present  World  Order, 

14 


210     SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER 

you  cannot  help  believing  in  your  heart  that  there  is  a  better 
order  which  is  on  your  side,  and  perhaps  even  that,  as  they 
say  in  melodrama,  "  a  time  will  come.  ..." 

We  all  know,  on  Dr.  Johnson's  authority,  that  the  Devil 
was  the  first  Whig.  But  the  above  argument  enables  us 
to  see  the  difference  between  him  and,  let  us  say,  the  Whigs 
of  later  history.  The  Whig,  while  condemning  and  working 
against  the  existing  order  in  some  particular,  is  always 
consciously  trying  to  institute  another  order  which  he 
regards  as  better.  And  through  all  the  series,  Whig,  Liberal, 
Radical,  Revolutionary,  the  same  remains  true ;  the  only 
difference  is  that  at  each  stage  the  ideal  new  order  is 
increasingly  remote  from  the  existing  order.  But  the  Devil, 
unless  I  do  him  a  wrong,  is  not  trying  to  substitute  another 
order  which  he  prefers ;  he  is  merely  injuring,  marring, 
acting  as  an  enemy — avrLTTpdrrtav  rots  /COCT/LU/COI?.  And  here, 
perhaps,  we  get  to  the  first  result  of  this  long  argument : 
That  goodness  is  the  same  thing  as  harmony  with  or  loyalty 
to  the  World  Order ;  but  that,  since  the  true  World  Order 
does  not  yet  exist,  Opposition  to  the  present  order  is  at 
times  right,  provided  that  the  opposition  really  aims  at 
the  attainment  of  a  fuller  or  better  order.  Theoretically 
this  seems  sound.  And  I  think,  even  in  practice,  the  rule 
has  a  certain  value,  though  of  course  it  does  not,  any  more 
than  any  other  political  rule,  provide  us  with  an  infallible 
test  of  the  good  or  evil,  the  sane  or  insane.  It  is  rare  to 
find  any  political  lunatic  so  extreme  as  specifically  to 
admit  that  he  wishes  to  destroy  and  never  rebuild,  to  make 
the  present  world  worse  than  it  is,  with  no  intention  even 
at  the  back  of  his  mind,  ever  to  "  remould  it  nearer  to  the 
heart's  desire."  Yet  a  certain  type  of  revolutionary  does 
for  all  practical  purposes  take  a  position  that  is  almost 
equivalent  to  this. 

I  once  in  my  youth  met  the  celebrated  Nihilist,  Bakunin, 
the  unsuccessful  Lenin  of  his  day,  who  was  credited  with 
the  doctrine  that  every  act  of  destruction  or  violence  is 
good  ;  because  either  it  does  good  directly,  by  destroying 
a  person  or  thing  which  is  objectionable,  or  else  it  does 
good  indirectly  by  making  an  already  intolerable  world 
worse  than  before,  and  so  bringing  the  Social  Revolution 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER     211 

nearer.    Since  he  and  his  followers  had  no  constructive 

scheme  for  this  so-called  Social  Revolution,  the  theory  is 

for  practical  purposes  indistinguishable  from  true  Satanism 

or  hatred  of  the  world.    One  of  the  deductions  made  from 

it  was  that,  in  the  ordinary  workaday  business  of  political 

assassinations,  it  was  far  more  desirable  to  murder  innocent 

and  even  good  persons  than  guilty  or  wicked  ones.    For 

two  reasons ;  the  wicked  were  some  use,  if  left  alive,  in 

furthering  the  Revolution,  and,  also,  to  kill  the  wicked 

implied  no  really  valuable  criticism  of  the  existing  social 

order.     If  you  kill  an  unjust  judge,  you  may  be  understood 

to  mean  merely  that  you  think  judges  ought  to  be  just. 

But  if  you  go  out  of  your  way  to  kill  a  just  judge,  it  is  clear 

that  you  object  to  judges  altogether.     If  a  son  kills  a  bad 

father,  the  act,  though  meritorious  in  its  humble  way,  does 

not  take  us  much  further.    But  if  he  kills  a  good  father, 

it  cuts  at  the  root  of  all  that  pestilent  system  of  family 

affection  and  loving  kindness  and  gratitude  on  which  the 

present  world  is  largely  based. 

Let  us  become  sane  again  and  see  where  we  are.  What 
do  we  most  of  us,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  think  about  the 
existing  World  Order  ?  I  am  thinking  of  all  ordinary 
sensible  people,  whatever  their  politics,  excluding  only 
those  who  are  prejudiced  against  the  world  by  some  in- 
tolerable private  wrong,  or  in  its  favour  by  some  sudden 
and  delightful  success.  Strictly  speaking,  the  world  as  a 
whole  cannot  be  called  good  or  bad,  any  more  than  the 
spectrum  as  a  whole  can  be  called  light  or  dark.  The 
world  contains  all  the  things  we  call  good  and  all  that 
we  call  bad  :  and  since  by  the  laws  of  language  you  call 
things  bad  if  they  are  worse  than  you  expect,  and  good 
if  they  are  better  than  you  expect,  and  your  expectation 
itself  is  formed  by  your  experience,  you  cannot  apply  any 
word  of  blame  or  praise  to  the  whole.  But  when  people 
speak  of  the  world  or  the  existing  order,  they  are  of  course 
thinking  of  the  part  in  which  they  are  most  interested  : 
and  that,  for  various  reasons,  is  usually  the  part  that 
depends  on  human  society  and  human  effort.  And  I 
shall  feel  a  little  disappointed  if  every  one  of  my  readers 
does  not  agree  with  me  in  thinking  that  on  the  whole, 


212      SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER 

and  allowing  for  exceptions,  when  people  try  to  do  some- 
thing, and  pay  attention,  they  come  nearer  to  doing  it 
than  if  they  did  not  try  at  all.  Normally,  therefore,  that 
systematic  organization  of  human  effort  which  we  call  a 
civilized  society,  does  on  the  whole  succeed  in  being  a  good 
thing,  just  as  the  Roman  Empire  did.  Doctors,  on  the 
whole,  prolong  human  life  rather  than  shorten  it.  Lawyers 
and  judges,  on  the  whole,  bring  about  more  justice  than 
injustice.  Even  in  a  department  of  life  so  very  imperfectly 
civilized  as  economics,  on  the  whole,  if  you  know  of  a  young 
man  who  is  hard-working,  intelligent  and  honest,  you  do 
expect  him  to  get  on  better  than  one  who  is  lazy,  stupid 
and  a  thief.  This  lands  us  in  the  belief,  which  any  minute 
study  of  social  history  corroborates  in  letters  of  blood, 
that  almost  any  Government  is  better  than  no  government, 
and  almost  any  law  better  than  no  law.  And  I  think 
we  may  safely  go  further.  If  we  take  any  of  those  cases 
where  a  civilized  society  obviously  shows  itself  evil,  where 
it  rewards  vice  and  punishes  virtue,  produces  misery  and 
slays  happiness  ;  when  it  appoints  unjust  tribunals,  when 
it  bribes  witnesses  to  tell  lies,  when  it  treats  its  own  members 
or  subjects  as  enemies  and  tries  to  injure  them  instead 
of  serving  them  ;  when  it  does  these  things  it  is  not  really 
carrying  out  its  principles,  but  failing.  It  is  not  a  machine 
meant  for  doing  these  bad  things ;  it  is  a  very  imperfectly 
designed  machine  for  doing  just  the  opposite,  at  any  rate 
inside  its  own  boundaries. 

If  we  accept  this  position,  we  see  that  the  organized 
life  of  mankind  is  on  the  whole  organized  for  good,  and 
that  the  great  pilgrimage  of  the  spirit  of  man  from  the 
beginnings  of  history  onward  has  been  on  the  whole  not 
only  a  movement  from  ignorance  to  knowledge,  from  col- 
lective impotence  to  collective  power,  from  poverty  of 
life  to  richness  of  life,  but  also  in  some  profound  sense  a 
pilgrimage  from  lower  to  higher.  And  it  will  follow,  in 
spite  of  constant  lapses  and  false  routes,  which  have  to  be 
corrected,  that  the  road  of  progress  is  in  the  main  a  road 
onward  in  the  same  general  direction  ;  that  the  better 
order  which  a  reformer  wishes  to  substitute  for  the  present 
order  must  be  a  fuller  realization  of  the  spirit  of  the  existing 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER     213 

order  itself.  This  belief  does  not  rule  out  changes  which 
many  people  would  call  extreme  or  revolutionary  ;  to  the 
eye  of  the  historian  most  revolutions  are  little  more  than 
a  ruffling  of  the  surface  of  life.  But  it  does  mean  that  a 
change  which  violates  the  consciences  of  men,  a  change 
which  aims  at  less  justice  and  more  violence,  at  more 
hatred  and  less  friendliness,  at  more  cruelty  and  less  free- 
dom, has  the  probabilities  heavily  against  its  ultimate 
success. 

The  instinct  of  the  average  man  is  apt  to  be  shrewdly 
right  on  this  point.  We  do  instinctively  judge  men  and 
movements,  not  by  the  amount  of  suffering  or  bloodshed 
they  cause,  but  by  the  quality  of  human  behaviour  which 
they  represent.  For  a  general  to  cause  a  thousand  deaths 
by  an  unsuccessful  attack  is  a  much  slighter  disturbance 
of  the  World  Order  than  if,  for  example,  he  were  to  cause 
one  innocent  man  to  be  condemned  to  death  by  forging 
false  documents.  The  first  would  be  a  disaster  and  perhaps 
deserving  of  blame  ;  the  second  would  imply  a  shattering 
of  the  very  foundations  on  which  the  World  Order  rests. 

We  seem  to  be  led  to  a  profound  and  almost  a  complacent 
conservatism,  but  I  think  there  has  been  one  flaw  in  this 
justification  of  ordinary  organized  societies.  It  is  the 
same  as  lurked  in  Pliny's  arguments  above,  justifying 
Roma  Dea  to  the  rebellious  Christian  or  Jew.  It  justifies 
them  so  far  as  they  really  represent,  however  imperfectly, 
the  World  Order  ;  so  far  as  they  are  organizations  for  justice 
and  freedom.  That  is,  the  argument  applies  only  to  the 
action  of  the  organized  society  within  its  own  borders, 
and  utterly  fails  to  touch  the  relation  of  the  state  or  society 
to  those  outside.  On  the  inside  a  state  is  an  organization 
for  good  government  and  mutual  help ;  and  it  has  a 
machinery,  elaborate  and  well  thought  out,  by  which  it 
can  improve  its  powers  and  correct  its  errors.  And  only 
in  cases  of  extreme  failure  are  its  own  members  its  enemies. 
But  towards  other  states  or  societies  it  is  something  utterly 
different  ;  just  as  a  tigress  to  her  own  cubs  is  a  clever  and 
delightful  mother,  but  to  strangers  nothing  of  the  kind. 
Seen  from  the  outside,  a  state  is  mainly  a  fighting  power, 
organized  for  the  use  of  force.  It  is  represented  by  diplo- 


214      SATANISM  AND  THE   WORLD   ORDER 

macy  in  its  better  moments  and  by  war  in  its  worse.  And 
towards  subject  societies,  if  it  has  them,  its  relation  is 
ambiguous  ;  in  favourable  conditions,  they  are  members 
of  the  whole  and  in  accord  with  it ;  in  unfavourable  con- 
ditions, they  approach  more  and  more  nearly  to  rebels 
and  half-conquered  enemies.  The  relation  of  empires  to 
subject  communities  is,  in  fact,  the  great  seed-ground  for 
those  states  of  mind  which  I  have  grouped  under  the  name 
of  Satanism. 

An  appalling  literature  of  hatred  is  in  existence,  dating 
at  least  from  the  eighth  century  B.C.,  in  which  unwilling 
subjects  have  sung  and  exulted  over  the  downfall  of  the 
various  great  empires,  or  at  least  poured  out  the  delirious, 
though  often  beautiful,  visions  of  their  long-deferred  hope. 
The  Burden  of  Nineveh,  the  Burden  of  Tyre,  the  Burden  of 
Babylon  :  these  are  recorded  in  some  of  the  finest  poetry 
of  the  world.  The  Fall  of  Rome,  the  rise  of  her  own  vile 
sons  against  her,  the  plunging  of  the  Scarlet  Woman  in 
the  lake  of  eternal  torture  and  the  slaying  of  the  three- 
quarters  of  mankind  who  bowed  down  to  her,  form  one 
of  the  most  eloquent  and  imaginative  parts  of  the  canonical 
Apocalypse.  The  cry  of  oppressed  peoples  against  the  Turk 
and  the  Russian  is  written  in  many  languages  and  renewed 
in  many  centuries.  What  makes  this  sort  of  literature  so 
appalling  is,  first,  that  it  is  inspired  by  hatred ;  and  next 
that  the  hatred  is  at  least  in  part  just ;  and  thirdly,  the 
knowledge  that  we  ourselves  are  now  sitting  in  the  throne 
once  occupied  by  the  objects  of  these  execrations.  Perhaps 
most  of  us  are  so  accustomed  to  think  of  Babylon  and 
Nineveh  and  Tyre,  and  even  Rome,  as  seats  of  mere  tyranny 
and  corruption,  that  we  miss  the  real  meaning  and  warning 
of  their  history.  These  imperial  cities  mostly  rose  to 
empire  not  because  of  their  faults,  but  because  of  their 
virtues ;  because  they  were  strong  and  competent  and 
trustworthy,  and,  within  their  borders  and  among  their 
own  people,  were  mostly  models  of  effective  justice.  And 
we  think  of  them  as  mere  types  of  corruption  !  The  hate 
they  inspired  among  their  subjects  has  so  utterly  swamped, 
in  the  memory  of  mankind,  the  benefits  of  their  good 
government,  or  the  contented  and  peaceful  lives  which 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER      215 

they  made  possible  to  their  own  peoples.  It  is  an 
awe-inspiring  thought  for  us  who  now  sit  in  their 
place. 

The  spirit  that  I  have  called  Satanism,  the  spirit  of 
unmixed  hatred  towards  the  existing  World  Order,  the 
spirit  which  rejoices  in  any  widespread  disaster  which  is 
also  a  disaster  to  the  world's  rulers,  is  perhaps  more  rife 
to-day  than  it  has  been  for  over  a  thousand  years.  It  is 
felt  to  some  extent  against  all  ordered  Governments,  but 
chiefly  against  all  imperial  Governments  ;  and  it  is  directed 
more  widely  and  intensely  against  Great  Britain  than 
against  any  other  Power.  I  think  we  may  add  that,  while 
everywhere  dangerous,  it  is  capable  of  more  profound 
world-wreckage  by  its  action  against  us  than  by  any  other 
form  that  it  is  now  taking.  A  few  years  ago  probably 
the  most  prosperous  and  contented  and  certainly  in  many 
ways  the  most  advanced  region  of  the  whole  world  was 
Central  Europe.  As  a  result  of  the  War  and  the  policy 
of  the  victors  after  the  War,  Central  Europe  is  now  an 
economic  wreck,  and  large  parts  of  it  a  prey  to  famine. 
A  vast  volume  of  hatred,  just  and  unjust,  partly  social, 
partly  nationalist,  partly  the  mere  reaction  of  intolerable 
misery,  is  rolling  up  there  against  what  they  call  the 
Hungerherren,  or  Hunger-Lords.  The  millions  of  Russia 
are  torn  by  civil  war ;  but  one  side  thinks  of  us  as  the 
people  who,  taking  no  risks  ourselves,  sent  tanks  and 
poison-gas  to  destroy  masses  of  helpless  peasants;  and 
the  other  side  thinks  of  us  as  the  foreigners  who  encouraged 
them  to  make  civil  war  and  then  deserted  them.  All 
through  the  Turkish  Empire,  through  great  parts  of  Persia 
and  Afghanistan,  from  one  end  of  the  Moslem  world  to 
the  other,  there  are  Mullahs,  holy  men,  seeing  visions 
and  uttering  oracles  about  the  downfall  of  another  Scarlet 
Woman  who  has  filled  the  world  with  the  wine  of  her 
abominations,  and  who  is  our  own  Roma  Dea,  our  British 
Commonwealth,  whom  we  look  upon  as  the  great  agent 
of  peace  and  freedom  for  mankind.  Scattered  among  our 
own  fellow-subjects  in  India  the  same  prophecies  are 
current ;  they  are  ringing  through  Egypt.  Men  in  many 
parts  of  the  world — some  even  as  close  to  us  as  Ireland — 


216      SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER 

are  daily  giving  up  their  lives  to  the  sacred  cause  of  hatred, 
even  a  hopeless  hatred,  against  us,  and  the  World  Order 
which  we  embody.  I  have  read  lately  two  long  memoranda 
about  Africa,  written  independently  by  two  people  of  great 
experience,  but  of  utterly  different  political  opinions  and 
habits  of  thought ;  both  agreed  that  symptoms  in  Africa 
pointed  towards  a  movement  of  union  among  all  the  native 
races  against  their  white  governors  ;  and  both  agreed  that, 
apart  from  particular  oppressions  and  grievances,  the 
uniting  forces  were  the  two  great  religions,  Christianity 
and  Islam,  because  both  religions  taught  a  doctrine  utterly 
at  variance  with  the  whole  method  and  spirit  of  the  Euro- 
pean dominion — the  doctrine  that  men  are  immortal  beings 
and  their  souls  equal  in  the  sight  of  God. 

This  state  of  things  is  in  part  the  creation  of  the  War. 
In  part  it  consists  of  previously  latent  tendencies  brought 
out  and  made  conspicuous  by  the  War.  In  part  the  War 
has  suggested  to  susceptible  minds  its  own  primitive  method, 
the  method  of  healing  all  wrong  by  killing  or  hitting  some- 
body. And  for  us  British  in  particular,  the  War  has  left 
us,  or  revealed  us,  as  the  supreme  type  and  example  of  the 
determination  of  the  white  man  to  rule  men  of  all  other 
breeds,  on  the  ground  that  he  is  their  superior.  Here 
and  there  peoples  who  have  experience  know  that  the 
British  are  better  masters  than  most ;  but  masters  they 
are,  and  masters  are  apt  to  be  hated. 

There  is  a  memorable  chapter  in  Thucydides,  beginning 
with  the  words  :  Not  now  for  the  first  time  have  I  seen  that 
it  is  impossible  for  a  Democracy  to  govern  an  Empire.  It 
may  not  be  impossible,  but  it  is  extraordinarily  difficult. 
It  is  so  difficult  to  assert — in  uncritical  and  unmeasured 
language — the  sanctity  of  freedom  at  home,  and  systemati- 
cally to  modify  or  regulate  freedom  abroad.  It  is  so  difficult 
to  make  the  government  at  home  constantly  more  sym- 
pathetic, more  humane,  more  scrupulous  in  avoiding  the 
infliction  of  injustice  or  even  inconvenience  upon  the 
governed  British  voters  at  home,  and  to  tolerate  the  sort 
of  incident  that — especially  in  the  atmosphere  of  war — is 
apt  to  occur  in  the  government  of  voteless  subjects  abroad. 
When  I  read  letters  from  friends  of  my  own  who  are  engaged 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER     217 

in  this  work  of  world-government,  I  sometimes  feel  that  it 
brings  out  in  good  men  a  disinterested  heroism,  a  sort  of 
inspired  and  indefatigable  kindness,  which  is  equalled  by 
no  other  profession.  And  I  think  that  many  English 
people,  knowing  as  they  do  the  immense  extent  of  hard 
work,  high  training  and  noble  intention,  on  which  our 
particular  share  in  the  World  Order  is  based,  feel  it  an 
almost  insane  thing  that  our  subjects  should  ever  hate  us. 
Yet  we  must  understand  if  we  are  to  govern.  And  it  is 
not  hard  to  understand.  We  have  seen  lately  in  Amritsar 
a  situation  arising  between  governors  and  governed  so 
acutely  hostile  that  a  British  officer,  apparently  a  good 
soldier,  thought  it  right  to  shoot  down  without  warning 
some  hundreds  of  unarmed  men.  In  Mesopotamia,  since 
the  War,  it  is  said  that  certain  villages  which  did  not  pay 
their  taxes,  and  were  thought  to  be  setting  a  bad  example, 
were  actually  bombed  from  the  air  at  night,  when  all  the 
population  was  crowded  together  in  the  enclosures.1  In 
Ceylon,  in  1915,  large  numbers  of  innocent  people  were 
either  shot  or  flogged,  and  many  more  imprisoned,  owing 
to  a  panic  in  the  Government.  In  Ireland  prisoners  have 
been  tortured  to  obtain  evidence  and,  it  is  alleged,  inno- 
cent men  murdered  to  suppress  it.  In  Rhodesia  a  few 
weeks  ago  a  boy  of  sixteen,  who  shot  a  native  dead  for 
fun,  was  let  off  with  eight  strokes  of  the  birch. 

I  wish  to  pass  no  harsh  judgement  on  the  men  who  did 
any  of  these  things.  I  give  full  value  to  the  argument 
that  those  of  us  who  sit  at  home  in  safety  have  no  right 
to  pour  denunciation  on  the  errors  of  overworked  and  over- 
strained men  in  crises  of  great  peril  and  difficulty.  I 
mention  these  incidents  only  to  illustrate  how  natural  it 
is  for  imperial  races  to  be  hated.  The  people  who  suffer 
such  things  as  these  do  not  excuse  them,  and  do  not  forget 
them.  The  stories  are  repeated,  and  do  not  lose  in  the 
telling.  And  many  a  boy  and  girl  in  the  East  will  think 

1  I  am  happy  to  say  that  the  accuracy  of  this  report  about  Meso- 
potamia is  denied  by  the  officials  concerned  ;  in  particular  it  seems 
clear  that  the  bombing  was  done  by  day,  not  by  night.  I  there- 
fore withdraw  my  own  statement  unreservedly,  and  have  only 
allowed  it  to  stand  in  the  text  because  to  omit  it  silently  might 
not  seem  a  sufficiently  explicit  withdrawal. 


218     SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER 

of  the  English  simply  and  solely  as  the  unbelievers  who 
habitually  flog  and  shoot  good  people,  just  as  the  Jews 
felt  about  the  Romans,  or  the  Manichaeans  about  the 
Orthodox.  Now  my  own  view  is  that  all  these  actions  in 
their  different  degrees  were  wrong ;  all  were  blunders ; 
also,  all  were  really  exceptional  and  not  typical ;  and, 
further,  that  no  action  like  them,  or  remotely  approaching 
them,  is  normally  necessary  for  the  maintenance  of  the 
Empire.  I  am  too  confirmed  a  Liberal  to  take  the  opposite 
view.  But  suppose  we  had  to  take  it.  Suppose  we  were 
convinced  by  argument  that  all  these  actions  were  wise 
and  necessary,  and  that  violence  and  injustice  of  this  sort 
are  part  of  the  natural  machinery  by  which  Empire  is 
maintained  ;  that  the  rule  of  the  white  man  over  the  coloured 
man,  the  Christian  over  the  "  heathen,"  the  civilized  over 
the  uncivilized,  cannot  be  carried  on  except  at  the  cost  of 
these  bloody  incidents  and  the  world-wide  passion  of 
hatred  which  they  involve,  I  think  the  conclusion  would 
be  inevitable,  not  that  such  acts  were  right — for  they 
cannot  be  right — but  simply  that  humanity  will  not  for 
very  long  endure  the  continuance  of  this  form  of  World 
Order. 

William  Morris  used  to  say  that  no  man  was  good  enough 
to  be  another  man's  master.  If  that  were  true  of  indi- 
viduals, it  would,  as  great  authorities  have  pointed  out, 
be  much  more  true  of  nations.  No  nation  certainly  is  as 
trustworthy  as  its  own  best  men.  But  I  do  not  think  it 
is  true,  unless,  indeed,  you  imply  in  the  word  "  master  " 
some  uncontrolled  despotism.  Surely  there  is  something 
wrong  in  that  whole  conception  of  human  life  which  implies 
that  each  man  should  be  a  masterless,  unattached  and 
independent  being.  It  would  be  almost  truer  to  say  that 
no  man  is  happy  until  he  has  a  master,  or  at  least  a  leader, 
to  admire  and  serve  and  follow.  That  is  the  way  in  which 
all  societies  naturally  organize  themselves,  from  boys  at 
school  to  political  parties  and  social  groups.  As  far  as  I 
can  see,  it  is  the  only  principle  on  which  brotherhood  can 
be  based  among  beings  who  differ  so  widely  as  human 
beings  do  in  intellect,  in  will  power  or  in  strength.  I  do 
not  think  it  is  true  that  no  nation  is  good  enough  in  this 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER     219 

qualified  sense  to  be  another's  master.  The  World  Order 
does  imply  leaders  and  led,  governors  and  governed ;  in 
extreme  cases  it  does  imply  the  use  of  force.  It  does 
involve,  amid  a  great  mass  of  other  feelings,  the  risk  of  a 
certain  amount  of  anger,  and  even  hatred,  from  the  governed 
against  the  governor.  A  World  Order  which  shirked  all 
unpopularity  would  be  an  absurdity. 

I  sometimes  think,  in  comparing  the  ancient  world  with 
the  modern,  that  one  of  the  greatest  distinguishing 
characteristics  of  modern  civilization  is  an  unconscious 
hypocrisy.  The  ancients  shock  us  by  their  callousness ; 
I  think  we  should  sometimes  startle  them  by  the  contrast 
between  our  very  human  conduct  and  our  absolutely 
angelic  professions.  If  you  ask  me  what  possible  remedy 
I  see,  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  British  Commonwealth, 
against  these  evils  I  have  described,  I  would  answer  simply 
that  we  must  first  think  carefully  what  our  principles  are, 
and  not  overstate  them  ;  next,  we  must  sincerely  carry  them 
out.  These  principles  are  not  unknown  things.  They 
have  been  laid  down  by  the  great  men  of  the  last  century, 
by  Cobden  and  Macaulay  and  John  Stuart  Mill,  even  to 
a  great  extent  by  Lord  Salisbury  and  Gladstone.  We  hold 
our  Empire  as  a  trust  for  the  governed,  not  as  an  estate 
to  be  exploited.  We  govern  backward  races  that  they 
may  be  able  to  govern  themselves ;  we  do  not  hold  them 
down  for  our  own  profit,  nor  in  order  to  use  them  as  food 
for  cannon.  Above  all,  in  our  government  and  our  admin- 
istration of  justice,  we  try  to  act  without  fear  or  favour, 
treating  the  poor  man  with  as  much  respect  as  the  rich 
man,  the  coloured  man  as  the  white,  the  alien  as  the 
Englishman.  We  have  had  the  principles  laid  down  again 
and  again  ;  they  are  all  embodied  in  the  Covenant  of  the 
League  of  Nations,  which  we  have  signed,  and  which  is  on 
sale  everywhere  for  a  penny. 

It  was  a  belief  of  the  ancient  Greeks  that  when  a  man 
had  shed  kindred  blood  he  had  to  be  purified  ;  and  until 
he  was  purified  the  bloodstain  worked  like  a  seed  of  madness 
within  him,  and  his  thoughts  could  never  rest  in  peace  or 
truth.  The  blood,  I  fear,  is  still  upon  the  hands  of  all 
of  us,  and  some  of  the  madness  still  in  our  veins.  The 


first  thing  we  must  do  is  to  get  back  to  our  pre-war  standard. 
Then,  from  that  basis,  we  must  rise  higher. 

The  War  has  filled  not  only  Russia,  but  most  of  Eastern 
Europe  and  Western  Asia  with  the  spirit  that  I  have  called 
Satanism  ;  the  spirit  which  hates  the  World  Order  wherever 
it  exists  and  seeks  to  vent  its  hate  without  further  plan. 
That  is  wrong.     But  this  spirit  would  not  have  got  abroad  ; 
it  would  not  have  broken  loose  and  grown  like  seed  and 
spread  like  pestilence,   had  not  the  World   Order  itself 
betrayed  itself  and  been  false  to  its  principles,  and  acted 
towards  enemies  and  subjects  in  ways  which  seem  to  them 
what  the  ways  of  Nero  or  Domitian  seemed  to  St.  John  on 
Patmos.     I  do  not  know  whether  it  is  possible  for  a  nation 
to  repent.     Penitence  in  a  nation,  as  a  rule,  means  nothing 
but  giving  a  majority  to  a  different  political  party.     But 
I  think  it  is  possible  for  individual  human  beings,  even 
for  millions  of  them.     I  see  few  signs  so  far  of  a  change  of 
heart  in  the  public  action  of  any  nation  in  the  world  ;  few 
signs  of  any  rise  in  the  standard  of  public  life,  and  a  great 
many  signs  of  its  lowering.     Some  actions  of  great  blindness 
and  wickedness,  the  sort  of  actions  which  leave  one  won- 
dering whether  modern  civilization  has  any  spiritual  content 
at  all  to  differentiate  us  from  savages,  have  been  done, 
not  during  the  War,  but  since  the  War  was  over.     Yet  I 
am  convinced  that,  though  it  has  not  yet  prevailed  in 
places  of  power,  there  is  a  real  desire  for  change  of  heart 
in  the  minds  of  millions.     This  desire  is  an  enthusiasm, 
and  is  exposed  to  all  the  dangers  of  enthusiasm.     It  is  often 
ignorant ;  it  is  touched  with  folly  and  misplaced  passion 
and  injustice.     It  is  even  exploited  by  interested  persons. 
These  are  serious  faults,  and  must  be  guarded  against ; 
but  I  believe  the  desire  for  a  change  of  heart  is  a  genuine 
longing,  and,  furthermore,  I  believe  firmly  that  unless  the 
World  Order  is  affected  by  this  change  of  heart,  the  World 
Order  is  doomed.     Unless  it  abstains  utterly  from  war 
and  the  causes  of  war,  the  next  great  war  will  destroy  it. 
Unless  it  can  seek  earnestly  the  spirit  of  brotherhood  and 
sobriety  at  home,  Bolshevism  will  destroy  it.     Unless  it 
can  keep  its  rule  over  subject  peoples  quite  free  from  the 
spirit  of  commercial  exploitation  and  the  spirit  of  slavery, 


SATANISM  AND  THE  WORLD  ORDER     221 

and  make  it  like  the  rule  of  a  good  citizen  over  his  fellows, 
it  will  be  shattered  by  the  widespread  hatred  of  those  whom 
it  rules. 

The  present  World  Order,   if  it   survives  the   present 
economic  crisis,   has  a  wonderful   opportunity,   such   an 
opportunity  as  has  never  been  granted  to  any  previous 
order  in  the  history  of  recorded  time.     Our  material  wealth, 
our  organization,  our  store  of  knowledge,  our  engines  of 
locomotion   and    destruction,    are   utterly   unprecedented, 
and  surpass  even  our  own  understanding.     Furthermore, 
on  the  whole,  we  know  what  we  ought  to  do.     We  have, 
what  no  previous  Empire  or  collection  of  ruling  states 
ever  had,  clear  schemes  set  before  us  of  the  road  ahead 
which  will  lead  out  of  these  dangers  into  regions  of  safety  ; 
the  League  of  Nations,  with  the  spirit  which  it  implies  ; 
the  reconcilement  and  economic  reintegration  of  European 
society  ;  and  the  system  of  Mandate  for  the  administration 
of  backward  territories.     We  have  the  power,  and  we  know 
the  course.    Almost  every  element  necessary  to  success 
has  been  put  into  the  hands  of  those  now  governing  the 
world  except,  as  an  old  Stoic  would  say,  the  things  that 
we  must  provide  ourselves.     We  have  been  given  every- 
thing, except,  it  would  seem,  the  resolute  and  sincere  will. 
Just  at  present  that  seems  lacking ;  the  peoples  blame 
their  rulers  for  the  lack  of  it,  and  the  rulers  explain  that 
they  dare  not  offend  their  peoples.     It  may  be  recovered. 
We  have  had  it  in  the  past  in  abundance,  and  we  probably 
have  the  material  for  it  even  now.     If  not,  if  for  any  reason 
the  great  democracies  permanently  prefer  to  follow  low 
motives  and  to  be  governed  by  inferior  men,  it  looks  as  if 
not  the  British  Empire  only,  but  the  whole  World  Order 
established  by  the  end  of  the  War  and  summarized  roughly 
in  the  League  of  Nations,  may  pass  from  history  under 
the  same  fatal  sentence  as  the  great  empires  of  the  past — 
that  the  world  which  it  ruled  hated  it  and  risked  all  to 
compass  its  overthrow. 


Printed  in  Great  Britain  by 

UNWIN    BROTHERS,    LIMITED 
WOK1.NG   AND   LONDON 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY,  LOS  ANGELES 

COLLEGE  LIBRARY 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


»•• 


Book  Slip-25m-9,'59(A4772s4)4280 


L  005  732  875  9 


Library 

PR 
6025 
M96e 
1922 


A  001  185399  1