.J I
^A ^00 k of Essays
By
G.K.CHESTERTON
LONDON
1910
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GEORGE BERNARD RUST
YOU ARE WELCOME TO BORROW IT
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Twelve Types
By G. K. CHESTERTON
LONDON
ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS
1910
Fifth Impression
These papers, with certain alterations
and additions, are reprinted with the
kind permission of the Editors of The
Daily News and The Speaker.
G. K. C.
Kensington.
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2007 with funding from
IVIicrosoft Corporation
http://www.archive.org/details/12typesch00chesuoft
CONTENTS
FAGB
Charlotte BRONTfi ivol<3rci dfc cidf
William Morris and his School . . 15 2. tube
The Optimism of Byron .... 31 pessimists* f^^
Pope and the Art of Satire ... 45 <ibrkltj wtsc
Francis r . dg^^ort \\ asecll
Rostand ypou »or»t l«s aJ'J'
Charles II. .,,.,. 93
Stevenson ...•.,, 107 not ml'enieJiU
Thomas Carlyle l2o^triottSTi>;^^
Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity . I39^«»e W ^l'^*'
Savonarola 167
The Position of Sir Walter Scott . i79Dl*n<5®vw^
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
Objection is often raised against realistic
biography because it reveals so much that
is important and even sacred about a man's
life. The real objection to it will rather
be found in the fact that it reveals about
a man the precise points which are unim-
portant. It reveals and asserts and insists
on exactly those things in a man's life of
which the man himself is wholly uncon-
scious ; his exact class in society, the cir-
cumstances of his ancestry, the place of
his present location. These are things
which do not, properly speaking, ever
A 1
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
arise before the human vision. They do
not occur to a man's mind; it may be
said, with almost equal truth, that they
do not occur in a man's life. A man no
more thinks about himself as the inhabitant
of the third house in a row of Brixton
villas than he thinks about himself as a
strange animal with two legs. What a
man's name was, what his income was,
whom he married, where he lived, these
are not sanctities ; they are irrelevancies.
A very strong case of this is the case
of the Brontes. The Bronte is in the
position of the mad lady in a country
village; her eccentricities form an endless
source of innocent conversation to that
exceedingly mild and bucolic circle, the
literary world. The truly glorious gossips
of literature, like Mr Augustine Birrell
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of col-
lecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and
sermons and side-lights and sticks and
straws which will go to make a Bronte
museum. They are the most personally
discussed of all Victorian authors, and the
limelight of biography has left few darkened
corners in the dark old Yorkshire house.
And yet the whole of this biographical
investigation, though natural and pictur-
esque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontes.
For the Bronte genius was above all things
deputed to assert the supreme unimport-
ance of externals. Up to that point truth
had always been conceived as existing more
or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte
Bronte electrified the world by showing
that an infinitely older and more elemental
truth could be conveyed by a novel in
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
which no person, good or bad, had any
manners at all. Her work represents the
first great assertion that the humdrum life
of modern civilisation is a disguise as
tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a
* bal masque.' She showed that abysses may
exist inside a governess and eternities in-
side a manufacturer; her heroine is the
commonplace spinster, with the dress of
merino and the soul of flame. It is signi-
ficant to notice that Charlotte Bronte,
following consciously or unconsciously the
great trend of her genius, was the first to
take away from the heroine not only the
artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and
fashion, but even the natural gold and
diamonds of physical beauty and grace.
Instinctively she felt that the whole of the
exterior must be made ugly that the whole
4:
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
of the interior might be made sublime.
She chose the ughest of women in the
ugliest of centuries, and revealed within
them all the hells and heavens of Dante.
It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately-
said that the externals of the Brontes* life,
though singularly picturesque in themselves,
matter less than the externals of almost any
other writers. It is interesting to know
whether Jane Austen had any knowledge
of the lives of the officers and women of
fashion whom she introduced into her
masterpieces. It is interesting to know
whether Dickens had ever seen a ship-
wreck or been inside a workhouse. For
in these authors much of the conviction
is conveyed, not always by adherence to
facts, but always by grasp of them. But
the whole aim and purport and meaning
6
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
of the work of the Brontes is that the
most futile thing in the whole universe is
fact. Such a story as *Jane Eyre' is in
itself so monstrous a fable that it ought
to be excluded from a book of fairy tales.
The characters do not do what they ought
to do, nor what they would do, nor, it
might be said, such is the insanity of the
atmosphere, not even what they intend to
do. The conduct of Rochester is so prim-
evally and superhumanly caddish that Bret
Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely
exaggerated it. * Then, resuming his usual
manner, he threw his boots at my head and
withdrew,' does perhaps reach to some-
thing resembling caricature. The scene in
which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy
has something in it which is really not to
be found in any other branch of art, except
6
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
at the end of the pantomime, where the
Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet,
despite this vast nightmare of illusion and
morbidity and ignorance of the world,
*Jane Eyre' is perhaps the truest book
that was ever written. Its essential truth
to life sometimes makes one catch one's
breath. For it is not true to manners,
which are constantly false, or to facts,
which are almost always false; it is true
to the only existing thing which is true,
emotion, the irreducible minimum, the in-
destructible germ. It would not matter
a single straw if a Bronte story were a
hundred times more moonstruck and im-
probable than *Jane Eyre,' or a hundred
times more moonstruck and improbable
than ' Wuthering Heights.' It would not
matter if George Read stood on his head,
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
and Mrs Read rode on a dragon, if Fairfax
Rochester had four eyes and St John Rivers
three legs, the story would still remain the
truest story in the world. The typical
Bronte character is, indeed, a kind of
monster. Everything in him except the
essential is dislocated. His hands are on
his legs and his feet on his arms, his nose
is above his eyes, but his heart is in the
right place.
The great and abiding truth for which
the Bronte cycle of fiction stands is a
certain most important truth about the
enduring spirit of youth, the truth of the
near kinship between terror and joy. The
Bronte heroine, dingily dressed, badly edu-
cated, hampered by a humiliating inex-
perience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet,
by the very fact of her solitude and her
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that
is possible to a human being, the delight
of expectation, the delight of an ardent
and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to
show how futile it is of humanity to sup-
pose that pleasure can be attained chiefly
by putting on evening dress every evening
and having a box at the theatre every first
night. It is not the man of pleasure who
has pleasure ; it is not the man of the
world who appreciates the world. The
man who has learnt to do all conventional
things perfectly has at the same time learnt
to do them prosaically. It is the awkward
man, whose evening dress does not fit him,
whose gloves will not go on, whose com-
pliments will not come off, who is really
full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He
is frightened enough of society actually to
9
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
enjoy his triumphs. He has that element
of fear which is one of the eternal ingredi-
ents of joy. This spirit is the central spirit
of the Bronte novel. It is the epic of the
exhilaration of the shy man. As such it
is of incalculable value in our time, of
which the curse is that it does not take
joy reverently because it does not take it
fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous
governess of Charlotte Bronte, with the
small outlook and the small creed, had
more commerce with the awful and ele-
mental forces which drive the world than
a legion of lawless minor poets. She ap-
proached the universe with real simplicity,
and, consequently, with real fear and
delight. She was, so to speak, shy before
the multitude of the stars, and in this she
had possessed herself of the only force
10
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
which can prevent enjoyment being as
black and barren as routine. The faculty
of being shy is the first and the most
delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The
fear of the Lord is the beginning of
pleasure.
Upon the whole, therefore, I think it
may justifiably be said that the dark wild
youth of the Brontes in their dark wild
Yorkshire home has been somewhat ex-
aggerated as a necessary factor in their
work and their conception. The emotions
with which they dealt were universal
emotions, emotions of the morning of
existence, the springtide joy and the spring-
tide terror. Every one of us as a boy
or girl has had some midnight dream of
nameless obstacle and unutterable menace,
in which there was, under whatever im-
11
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
becile forms, all the deadly stress and panic
of * Wuthering Heights.' Every one of us
has had a day-dream of our own potential
destiny not one atom more reasonable than
*Jane Eyre.' And the truth which the
Brontes came to tell us is the truth that
many waters cannot quench love, and that
suburban respectability cannot touch or
damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like
every other earthly city, is built upon a
volcano. Thousands of people go to and
fro in the wilderness of bricks and mortar,
earning mean wages, professing a mean
religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands
of women who have never found any ex-
pression for their exaltation or their tragedy
but to go on working harder and yet harder
at dull and automatic employments, at
scolding children or stitching shirts. But
12
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
out of all these silent ones one suddenly
became articulate, and spoke a resonant
testimony, and her name was Charlotte
Bronte. Spreading around us upon every
side to-day like a huge and radiating geo-
metrical figure are the endless branches of
the great city. There are times when we
are almost stricken crazy, as well we may
be, by the multiplicity of those appalling
perspectives, the frantic arithmetic of that
unthinkable population. But this thought
of ours is in truth nothing but a fancy.
There are no chains of houses; there are
no crowds of men. The colossal diagram
of streets and houses is an illusion, the
opium dream of a speculative builder.
Each of these men is supremely solitary
and supremely important to himself. Each
of these houses stands in the centre of the
13
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
world. There is no single house of all those
millions which has not seemed to some one
at some time the heart of all things and
the end of travel.
14
WILLIAM MORRIS AND
HIS SCHOOL
It is proper enough that the unveiling of
the bust of WiUiam Morris should approxi-
mate to a public festival, for while there
have been many men of genius in the Vic-
torian era more despotic than he, there have
been none so representative. He represents
not only that rapacious hunger for beauty
which has now for the first time become
a serious problem in the healthy life of
humanity, but he represents also that
honourable instinct for finding beauty in
common necessities of workmanship which
15
WILLIAM MORRIS
gives it a stronger and more bony structure.
The time has passed when it was con-
ceived to be irrelevant to describe William
Morris as a designer of wall-papers. If
Morris had been a hatter instead of a
decorator, we should have become gradu-
ally and painfully conscious of an improve-
ment in our hats. If he had been a tailor,
we should have suddenly found our frock-
coats trailing on the ground with the
grandeur of mediaeval raiment. If he had
been a shoemaker, we should have found,
with no little consternation, our shoes grad-
ually approximating to the antique sandal.
As a hairdresser, he would have invented
some massing of the hair worthy to be the
crown of Venus ; as an ironmonger, his
nails would have had some noble pattern,
fit to be the nails of the Cross.
16
AND HIS SCHOOL
The limitations of William Morris, what-
ever they were, were not the limitations of
common decoration. It is true that all his
work, even his literary work, was in some
sense decorative, had in some degree the
qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His
characters, his stories, his religious and
political views, had, in the most emphatic
sense, length and breadth without thickness.
He seemed really to believe that men could
enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no
account of the unexplored and explosive
possibilities of human nature, of the un-
nameable terrors, and the yet more unname-
able hopes. So long as a man was graceful
in every circumstance, so long as he had
the inspiring consciousness that the chest-
nut colour of his hair was relieved against
the blue forest a mile behind, he would
B 17
WILLIAM MORRIS
be serenely happy. So he would be, no
doubt, if he were really fitted for a de-
corative existence; if he were a piece of
exquisitely coloured cardboard.
But although Morris took little account
of the terrible solidity of human nature —
took little account, so to speak, of human
figures in the round, it is altogether unfair
to represent him as a mere aesthete. He
perceived a great public necessity and ful-
filled it heroically. The difficulty with
which he grappled was one so immense
that we shall have to be separated from it
by many centuries before we can really
judge of it. It was the problem of the
elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the
most self-conscious of centuries. Morris
at least saw the absurdity of the thing.
He felt that it was monstrous that the
18
AND HIS SCHOOL
modern man, who was pre-eminently cap-
able of realising the strangest and most
contradictory beauties, who could feel at
once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, and
the colossal calm of the Hellenic god,
should himself, by a farcical bathos, be
buried in a black coat, and hidden under
a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why
the harmless man who desired to be an
artist in raiment should be condemned to
be, at best, a black and white artist. It
is indeed difficult to account for the cling-
ing curse of ugliness which blights every-
thing brought forth by the most prosperous
of centuries. In all created nature there is
not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly
as a pillar-box. Its shape is the most
unmeaning of shapes, its height and thick-
ness just neutralising each other ; its colour
19
WILLIAM MORRIS
is the most repulsive of colours — a fat and
soulless red, a red without a touch of blood
or fire, like the scarlet of dead men's sins.
Yet there is no reason whatever why such
hideousness should possess an object full
of civic dignity, the treasure-house of a
thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand
souls. If the old Greeks had had such an
institution, we may be sure that it would
have been surmounted by the severe, but
graceful, figure of the god of letter- writing.
If the mediaeval Christians had possessed
it, it would have had a niche filled with
the golden aureole of St Rowland of the
Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands
at all our street-corners, disguising one of
the most beautiful of ideas under one of
the most preposterous of forms. It is
useless to deny that the miracles of science
20
AND HIS SCHOOL
have not been such an incentive to art
and imagination as were the miracles of
reUgion. If men in the twelfth century
had been told that the lightning had been
driven for leagues underground, and had
dragged at its destroying tail loads of
laughing human beings, and if they had
then been told that the people alluded to .
this pulverising potent chirpily as * The T 7
Twopenny Tube,' they would have called /
down the fire of Heaven on us as a race
of half-witted atheists. Probably they
would have been quite right.
This clear and fine perception of what
may be called the aesthetic element in
the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the
work of a great reformer; it requires a
fine effort of the imagination to see an
evil that surrounds us on every side. The
21
WILLIAM MORRIS
manner in which Morris carried out his
crusade may, considering the circumstances,
be called triumphant. Our carpets began
to bloom under our feet Uke the meadows
in spring, and our hitherto prosaic stools
and sofas seemed growing legs and arms
at their own wild will. An element of
freedom and rugged dignity came in with
plain and strong ornaments of copper and
iron. So delicate and universal has been
the revolution in domestic art that almost
every family in England has had its taste
cunningly and treacherously improved, and
if we look back at the early Victorian
drawing-rooms it is only to realise the
strange but essential truth that art, or
human decoration, has, nine times out of
ten in history, made things uglier than
they were before, from the 'coiiFure' of a
22
AND HIS SCHOOL
Papuan savage to the wall-paper of a
British merchant in 1830.
But great and beneficent as was the
fiesthetic revolution of Morris, there was a
very definite limit to it. It did not lie
only in the fact that his revolution was
in truth a reaction, though this was a
partial explanation of his partial failure.
When he was denouncing the dresses of
modern ladies, ' upholstered like arm-chairs
instead of being draped like women,' as he
forcibly expressed it, he would hold, up for
practical imitation the costumes and handi-
crafts of the Middle Ages. Further than
this retrogressive and imitative movement
he never seemed to go. Now, the men of
the time of Chaucer had many evil quali-
ties, but there was at least one exhibition
of moral weakness they did not give.
WILLIAM MORRIS
They would have laughed at the idea of
dressing themselves in the manner of the
bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting
themselves an aesthetic blue, after the cus-
tom of the ancient Britons. They would
not have called that a movement at all.
Whatever was beautiful in their dress or
manners sprang honestly and naturally out
of the life they led and preferred to lead.
And it may surely be maintained that
any real advance in the beauty of modern
dress must spring honestly and naturally
out of the life we lead and prefer to lead.
We are not altogether without hints and
hopes of such a change, in the growing
orthodoxy of rough and athletic costumes.
But if this cannot be, it will be no sub-
stitute or satisfaction to turn life into an
interminable historical fancy-dress ball.
24
AND HIS SCHOOL
But the limitation of Morris's work lay
deeper than this. We may best suggest
it by a method after his own heart. Of
all the various works he performed, none,
perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly
valuable as his great protest for the fables
and superstitions of mankind. He has the
supreme credit of showing that the fairy-
tales contain the deepest truth of the earth,
the real record of men's feeling for things.
Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack may
not have climbed up so tall a beanstalk,
or killed so tall a giant ; but it is not such
things that make a story false; it is a far
different class of things that makes every
modern book of history as false as the
father of lies ; ingenuity, self-consciousness,
hypocritical impartiality. It appears to us
that of all the fairy-tales none contains so
25
WILLIAM MORRIS
vital a moral truth as the old story, exist-
ing in many forms, of Beauty and the
Beast. There is written, with all the
authority of a human scripture, the eternal
and essential truth that until we love a
thing in all its ugliness we cannot make
it beautiful. This was the weak point in
William Morris as a reformer: that he
sought to reform modern life, and that he
hated modern life, instead of loving it.
Modern London is indeed a beast, big
enough and black enough to be the beast
in Apocalypse, blazing with a million eyes,
and roaring with a million voices. But
unless the poet can love this fabulous mon-
ster as he is, can feel with some generous
excitement his massive and mysterious * joie-
de-vivre,' the vast scale of his iron anatomy
and the beating of his thunderous heart,
26
AND HIS SCHOOL
he cannot and will not change the beast
into the fairy prince. Morris's disadvan-
tage was that he was not honestly a child
of the nineteenth century: he could not
understand its fascination, and consequently
he could not really develop it. An abiding
testimony to his tremendous personal in-
fluence in the aesthetic world is the vitality
and recurrence of the Arts and Crafts
Exhibitions, which are steeped in his per-
sonality like a chapel in that of a saint.
If we look round at the exhibits in one of
these aesthetic shows, we shall be struck by
the large mass of modern objects that the
decorative school leaves untouched. There
is a noble instinct for giving the right touch
of beauty to common and necessary things,
but the things that are so touched are the
ancient things, the things that always to
27
WILLIAM MORRIS
some extent commended themselves to the
lover of beauty. There are beautiful gates,
beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful
chairs, beautiful reading-desks. But there
are no modern things made beautiful.
There are no beautiful lamp-posts, beautiful
letter - boxes, beautiful engines, beautiful
bicycles. The spirit of William Morris
has not seized hold of the century and
made its humblest necessities beautiful.
And this was because, with all his healthi-
ness and energy, he had not the supreme
courage to face the ugliness of things;
Beauty shrank from the Beast and the
fairy-tale had a different ending.
But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest
claim to the name of a great reformer : that
he left his work incomplete. There is,
perhaps, no better proof that a man is a
28
AND HIS SCHOOL
mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant,
than that his work is done perfectly. A
man like Morris draws attention to needs
he cannot supply. In after-years we may
have perhaps a newer and more daring Arts
and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not
decorate the armour of the twelfth century
but the machinery of the twentieth. A
lamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted
iron, fit to hold the sanctity of fire. A
pillar-box shall be carved with figures em-
blematical of the secrets of comradeship
and the silence and honour of the State.
Railway signals, of all earthly things the
most poetical, the coloured stars of life and
death, shall be lamps of green and crimson
worthy of their terrible and faithful service.
But if ever this gradual and genuine move-
ment of our time towards beauty — not
29
WILLIAM MORRIS
backwards, but forwards — does truly come
about, Morris will be the first prophet of
it. Poet of the childhood of nations, crafts-
man in the new honesties of art, prophet
of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded
enthusiasm will be remembered when human
life has once more assumed flamboyant
colours and proved that this painful green-
ish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which
we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists,
not of the greyness of death, but the grey-
ness of dawn.
ao
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
Everything is against our appreciating
the spirit and the age of Byron. The
age that has just passed from us is always
like a dream when we wake in the
morning, a thing incredible and centuries
away. And the world of Byron seems a
sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman
world, where men were romantic in whiskers,
ladies lived, apparently, in bowers, and
the very word has the sound of a piece
of stage scenery. Roses and nightingales
recur in their poetry with the monotonous
elegance of a wall-paper pattern. The
31
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
whole is like a revel of dead men, a
revel with splendid vesture and half-witted
faces.
But the more shrewdly and earnestly we
study the histories of men, the less ready
shall we be to make use of the word
'artificial.' Nothing in the world has
ever been artificial. Many customs, many
dresses, many works of art are branded
with artificiality because they exhibit vanity
and self-consciousness : as if vanity were
not a deep and elemental thing, like love
and hate and the fear of death. Vanity
may be found in darkling deserts, in the
hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl
around him. It may be good or evil, but
assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a
voice out of the abyss.
The remarkable fact is, however, and it
32
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
bears strongly on the present position of
Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to
us, when it is remote and the product of
some other age or spirit, we think it not
savage or terrible, but merely artificial.
There are many instances of this : a fair
one is the case of tropical plants and birds.
When we see some of the monstrous and
flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equa-
torial woods, we do not feel that they are
conflagrations of nature ; silent explosions
of her frightful energy. We simply find
it hard to believe that they are not wax
flowers grown under a glass case. When
we see some of the tropic birds, with their
tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we
do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce
humour of Creation. We almost believe
that they are toys out of a child's play-box,
0 33
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
artificially carved and artificially coloured.
So it is with the great convulsion of Nature
which was known as Byronism. The volcano
is not an extinct volcano now ; it is the
dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains
not of a natural but of an artificial fire.
But Byron and Byronism were something
immeasurably greater than anything that is
represented by such a view as this: their
real value and meaning are indeed little
understood. The first of the mistakes
about Byron lies in the fact that he is
treated as a pessimist. True, he treated
himself as such, but a critic can hardly
have even a slight knowledge of Byron
without knowing that he had the smallest
amount of knowledge of himself that ever
fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The
real character of what is known as Byron's
34
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
pessimism is better worth study than any
real pessimism could ever be.
It is the standing peculiarity of this
curious world of ours that almost every-
thing in it has been extolled enthusiastically
and invariably extolled to the disadvantage
of everything else.
One after another almost every one of
the phenomena of the universe has been
declared to be alone capable of making
life worth living. Books, love, business,
religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private
emotion, money, simplicity, mysticism, hard
work, a life close to nature, a life close to
Belgrave Square are every one of them
passionately maintained by somebody to
be so good that they redeem the evil of
an otherwise indefensible world. Thus
while the world is almost always condemned
35
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
in summary, it is always justified, and in-
deed extolled, in detail after detail.
Existence has been praised and absolved
by a chorus of pessimists. The work of
giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were,
divided ingeniously among them. Schopen-
hauer is told off as a kind of librarian in
the House of God, to sing the praises of
the austere pleasures of the mind. Carlyle,
as steward, undertakes the working depart-
ment and eulogises a life of labour in the
fields. Omar Khayyam is established in
the cellar and swears that it is the only
room in the house. Even the blackest of
pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the
precise moment that he has written some
shameless and terrible indictment of Crea-
tion, his one pang of joy in the achievement
joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with
36
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
the scent of the wild flower and the song
of the bird.
Now Byron had a sensational popularity,
and that popularity was, as far as words
and explanations go, founded upon his
pessimism. He was adored by an over-
whelming majority, almost every individual
of which despised the majority of mankind.
But when we come to regard the matter
a little more deeply we tend in some degree
to cease to believe in this popularity of the
pessimist. The popularity of pure and
unadulterated pessimism is an oddity ; it
is almost a contradiction in terms. Men
would no more receive the news of the
failure of existence or of the harmonious
hostility of the stars with ardour or popular
rejoicing than they would light bonfires
for the arrival of cholera or dance a break-
37
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
down when they were condemned to be
hanged. When the pessimist is popular
it must always be not because he shows
all things to be bad, but because he shows
some things to be good. Men can only
join in a chorus of praise even if it is the
praise of denunciation. The man who is
popular must be optimistic about some-
thing even if he is only optimistic about
pessimism. And this was emphatically the
case with Byron and the Byronists. Their
real popularity was founded not upon the
fact that they blamed everything, but upon
the fact that they praised something. They
heaped curses upon man, but they used
man merely as a foil. The things they
wished to praise by comparison were the
energies of Nature. Man was to them
what talk and fashion were to Carlyle,
38
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
what philosophical and religious quarrels
were to Omar, what the whole race after
practical happiness was to Schopenhauer,
the thing which must be censured in order
that somebody else may be exalted. It
was merely a recognition of the fact that
one cannot write in white chalk except
on a blackboard.
Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seri-
ously that Byron's love of the desolate
and inhuman in nature was the mark of
vital scepticism and depression. When a
young man can elect deliberately to walk
alone in winter by the side of the shatter-
ing sea, when he takes pleasure in storms
and stricken peaks, and the lawless melan-
choly of the older earth, we may deduce
with the certainty of logic that he is very
young and very happy. There is a certain
39
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
darkness which we see in wine when seen
in shadow; we see it again in the night
that has just buried a gorgeous sunset.
The wine seems black, and yet at the
same time powerfully and almost impos-
sibly red ; the sky seems black, and yet at
the same time to be only too dense a
blend of purple and green. Such was the
darkness which lay around the Byronie
school. Darkness with them was only too
dense a purple. They would prefer the
sullen hostility of the earth because amid
all the cold and darkness their own hearts
were flaming like their own firesides.
Matters are very different with the more
modern school of doubt and lamentation.
The last movement of pessimism is perhaps
expressed in Mr Aubrey Beardsley's alle-
gorical designs. Here we have to deal
40
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
with a pessimism which tends naturally not
towards the oldest elements of the cosmos,
but towards the last and most fantastic
fripperies of artificial life. Byronism tended
towards the desert; the new pessimism
towards the restaurant. Byronism was a
revolt against artificiality; the new pes-
simism is a revolt in its favour. The
Byronic young man had an affectation of
sincerity ; the decadent, going a step deeper
into the avenues of the unreal, has posi-
tively an affectation of affectation. And
it is by their fopperies and their frivolities
that we know that their sinister philosophy
is sincere ; in their lights and garlands and
ribbons we read their indwelling despair.
It was so, indeed, with Byron himself;
his really bitter moments were his frivolous
moments. He went on year after year
41
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
calling down fire upon mankind, summon-
ing the deluge and the destructive sea and
all the ultimate energies of nature to sweep
away the cities of the spawn of man. But
through all this his sub- conscious mind was
not that of a despairer; on the contrary,
there is something of a kind of lawless
faith in thus parleying with such immense
and immemorial brutalities. It was not
until the time in which he wrote 'Don
Juan ' that he really lost this inward warmth
and geniality, and a sudden shout of hilari-
ous laughter announced to the world that
Lord Byron had really become a pessimist.
One of the best tests in the world of
what a poet really means is his metre.
He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics,
but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody.
And all the time that Byron's language
42
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
is of horror and emptiness, his metre is a
bounding 'pas de quatre.' He may arraign
existence on the most deadly charges, he
may condemn it with the most desolating
verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that
on some walk in a spring morning when
all the limbs are swinging and all the
blood alive in the body, the lips may be
caught repeating :
* Oh, there's not a joy the world can give
like that it takes away,
When the glow of early youth declines
in beauty's dull decay ;
'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush
that fades so fast.
But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere
youth itself be past.'
That automatic recitation is the answer to
the whole pessimism of Byron.
43
THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON
The truth is that Byron was one of a
class who may be called the unconscious
optimists, who are very often, indeed, the
most uncompromising conscious pessimists,
because the exuberance of their nature
demands for an adversary a dragon as big
as the world. But the whole of his essential
and unconscious being was spirited and
confident, and that unconscious being, long
disguised and buried under emotional arti-
fices, suddenly sprang into prominence in
the face of a cold, hard, political necessity.
In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and
at the time that he was dying, he began
to live. He heard suddenly the call of
that buried and sub-conscious happiness
which is in all of us, and which may
emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass
of a meadow or the spears of the enemy.
4A
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
The general critical theory common in this
and the last century is that it was very
easy for the imitators of Pope to write
English poetry. The classical couplet was
a thing that anyone could do. So far as
that goes, one may justifiably answer by
asking anyone to try. It may be easier
really to have wit, than really, in the bold-
est and most enduring sense, to have im-
agination. But it is immeasurably easier
to pretend to have imagination than to
pretend to have wit. A man may indulge
in a sham rhapsody, because it may be
45
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
the triumph of a rhapsody to be unintel-
ligible. But a man cannot indulge in a
sham joke, because it is the ruin of a joke
to be unintelligible. A man may pretend
to be a poet: he can no more pretend to
be a wit than he can pretend to bring
rabbits out of a hat without having learnt
to be a conjurer. Therefore, it may be
submitted, there was a certain discipline
in the old antithetical couplet of Pope and
his followers. If it did not permit of the
great liberty of wisdom used by the
minority of great geniuses, neither did it
permit of the great liberty of folly which
is used by the majority of small writers.
A prophet could not be a poet in those
days, perhaps, but at least a fool could not
be a poet. If we take, for the sake of
example, such a line as Pope's
46
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
' Damn with faint praise, assent with civil
leer,'
the test is comparatively simple. A great
poet would not have written such a line,
perhaps. But a minor poet could not.
Supposing that a lyric poet of the new
school really had to deal with such an idea
as that expressed in Pope's line about
Man?
* A being darkly wise and rudely great.'
Is it really so certain that he would go
deeper into the matter than that old anti-
thetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt
whether he would really be any wiser or
weirder or more imaginative or more pro-
found. The one thing that he would really
be, would be longer. Instead of writing
*A being darkly wise and rudely great,'
the contemporary poet, in his elaborately
47
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
ornamented book of verses, would produce
something like the following : —
* A creature
Of feature
More dark, more dark, more dark than
skies,
Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise :
Darkly wise as a formless fate
And if he be great
If he be great, then rudely great.
Rudely great as a plough that plies.
And darkly wise, and darkly wise.'
Have we really learnt to think more
broadly ? Or have we only learnt to spread
our thoughts thinner? I have a dark
suspicion that a modern poet might manu-
facture an admirable lyric out of almost
every line of Pope.
There is, of course, an idea in our time
48
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
that the very antithesis of the typical line
of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall
have occasion more than once to point out
that nothing in the world has ever been
artificial. But certainly antithesis is not
artificial. An element of paradox runs
through the whole of existence itself. It
begins in the realm of ultimate physics and
metaphysics, in the two facts that we cannot
imagine a space that is infinite, and that we
cannot imagine a space that is finite. It runs
through the inmost complications of divin-
ity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ
in the wilderness was truly pure, unless we
also conceive that he desired to sin. It
runs, in the same manner, through all the
minor matters of morals, so that we cannot
imagine courage existing except in con-
junction with fear, or magnanimity existing
D 49
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
except in conjunction with some temptation
to meanness. If Pope and his followers
caught this echo of natural irrationality,
they were not any the more artificial. Their
antitheses were fully in harmony with ex-
istence, which is itself a contradiction in
terms.
Pope was really a great poet ; he was the
last great poet of civilisation. Immediately
after the fall of him and his school come
Burns and Byron, and the reaction towards
the savage and the elemental. But to
Pope civilisation was still an exciting ex-
periment. Its perruques and ruffles were
to him what feathers and bangles are to
a South Sea Islander — the real romance of
civilisation. And in all the forms of art
which peculiarly belong to civilisation, he
was supreme. In one especially he was
50
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
supreme — the great and civilised art of
satire. And in this we have fallen away
utterly.
We have had a great revival in our time
of the cult of violence and hostility. Mr
Henley and his young men have an infinite
number of furious epithets with which to
overwhelm any one who differs from them.
It is not a placid or untroubled position
to be Mr Henley's enemy, though we know
that it is certainly safer than to be his friend.
And yet, despite all this, these people pro-
duce no satire. Political and social satire is
a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It
may be worth while to make some attempt
to point out a reason for this.
It may seem a singular observation to
say that we are not generous enough to
write great satire. This, however, is ap-
51
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
proximately a very accurate way of de-
scribing the case. To write great satire,
to attack a man so that he feels the attack
and half acknowledges its justice, it is
necessary to have a certain intellectual
magnanimity which realises the merits of
the opponent as well as his defects. This
is, indeed, only another way of putting the
simple truth that in ordei* to attack an
army we must know not only its weak
points, but also its strong points. England
in the present season and spirit fails in
satire for the same simple reason that it
fails in war: it despises the enemy. In
matters of battle and conquest we have
got firmly rooted in our minds the idea
(an idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam)
that we can best trample on a people by
ignoring all the particular merits which
52
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
give them a chance of trampling upon us.
It has become a breach of etiquette to
praise the enemy ; whereas when the enemy
is strong every honest scout ought to praise
the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish
an army without having a full account of
its strength. It is impossible to satirise a
man without having a full account of his
virtues. It is too much the custom in
politics to describe a political opponent as
utterly inhumane, as utterly careless of his
country, as utterly cynical, which no man
ever was since the beginning of the world.
This kind of invective may often have
a great superficial success : it may hit
the mood of the moment; it may raise
excitement and applause; it may impress
millions. But there is one man among
all those millions whom it does not impress,
53
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
whom it hardly even touches ; that is the
man against whom it is directed. The
one person for whom the whole satire has
been written in vain is the man whom it
is the whole object of the institution of
satire to reach. He knows that such a
description of him is not true. He knows
that he is not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly
self-seeking, or utterly barbarous and re-
vengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary
man, and that he can count as many kindly
memories, as many humane instincts, as
many hours of decent work and responsi-
bility as any other ordinary man. But
behind all this he has his real weaknesses,
the real ironies of his soul : behind all these
ordinary merits lie the mean compromises,
the craven silences, the sullen vanities, the
secret brutalities, the unmanly visions of
54
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
revenge. It is to these that satire should
reach if it is to touch the man at whom it
is aimed. And to reach these it must pass
and salute a whole army of virtues.
If we turn to the great English satirists
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
for example, we find that they had this
rough but firm grasp of the size and
strength, the value and the best points of
their adversary. Dryden, before hewing
Ahitophel in pieces, gives a splendid and
spirited account of the insane valour and
inspired cunning of the
* daring pilot in extremity,'
who was more untrustworthy in calm than
in storm, and
* Steered too near the rocks to boast
his wit.'
The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and
55
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
picturesque version of the great Shaftesbury.
It would, in many ways, serve as a very
sound and picturesque account of Lord
Randolph Churchill. But here comes in
very pointedly the difference between our
modern attempts at satire and the ancient
achievement of it. The opponents of Lord
Randolph Churchill, both Liberal and Con-
servative, did not satirise him nobly and
honestly, as one of those great wits to
madness near allied. They represented
him as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent
upstart whose impudence supplied the lack
of policy and character. Churchill had
grave and even gross faults, a certain coarse-
ness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness,
a certain lack of magnanimity, a certain
peculiar patrician vulgarity. But he was
a much larger man than satire depicted
56
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
him, and therefore the satire could not and
did not overwhehn him. And here we
have the cause of the faihire of contem-
porary satire, that it has no magnanimity,
that is to say, no patience. It cannot
endure to be told that its opponent has
his strong points, just as Mr Chamberlain
could not endure to be told that the
Boers had a regular army. It can be con-
tent with nothing except persuading itself
that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly
stupid — that is, that he is what he is not
and what nobody else is. If we take any
prominent politician of the day — such, for
example, as Sir William Harcourt — we
shall find that this is the point in which
all party invective fails. The Tory satire
at the expense of Sir William Harcourt is
always desperately endeavouring to represent
57
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
that he is inept, that he makes a fool of
himself, that he is disagreeable and disgrace-
ful and untrustworthy. The defect of all
this is that we all know that it is untrue.
Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt
is not inept, but is almost the ablest Par-
liamentarian now alive. Everyone knows
that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful,
but a gentleman of the old school who is
on excellent social terms with his antagon-
ists. Everyone knows that he is not un-
trustworthy, but a man of unimpeachable
honour who is much trusted. Above all,
he knows it himself, and is therefore affected
by the satire exactly as any one of us would
be if we were accused of being black or of
keeping a shop for the receiving of stolen
goods. We might be angry at the libel,
but not at the satire ; for a man is angry
58
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
at a libel because it is false, but at a satire
because it is true.
Mr Henley and his young men are very
fond of invective and satire : if they wish
to know the reason of their failure in these
things, they need only turn to the opening
of Pope's superb attack upon Addison.
The Henleyite's idea of satirising a man
is to express a violent contempt for him,
and by the heat of this to persuade others
and himself that the man is contemptible.
I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr
Gladstone by one of the young anarchic
Tories, which began by asserting that Mr
Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If
these people would, as I have said, go
quietly and read Pope's 'Atticus,' they
would see how a great satirist approaches
a great enemy :
59
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
* Peace to all such ! But were there one
whose fires
True genius kindles, and fair fame in-
spires,
Blest with each talent, and each art to
please.
And born to write, converse, and live
with ease.
Should such a man '
And then follows the torrent of that terrible
criticism. Pope was not such a fool as to
try to make out that Addison was a fool.
He knew that Addison was not a fool, and
he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred,
in Pope's case, had become so great and, I
was almost going to say, so pure, that it
illuminated all things, as love illuminates
all things. He said what was really wrong
with Addison ; and in calm and clear and
60
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
everlasting colours he painted the picture
of the evil of the literary temperament :
' Bear like the Turk, no brother near the
throne,
View him with scornful, yet with jealous
eyes.
And hate for arts that caused himself to
rise.
• •••••
Like Cato give his little Senate laws.
And sit attentive to his own applause.
While wits and templars every sentence
raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise.'
This is the kind of thing which really goes
to the mark at which it aims. It is pene-
trated with sorrow and a kind of reverence,
and it is addressed directly to a man. This
is no mock-tournament to gain the applause
61
POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE
of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the
lonely seashore.
In current political materialism there is
everywhere the assumption that, without
understanding anything of his case or his
merits, we can benefit a man practically.
Without understanding his case and his
merits, we cannot even hurt him.
62
FRANCIS
Asceticism is a thing which in its very
nature, we tend in these days to misunder-
stand. Asceticism, in the religious sense,
is the repudiation of the great mass of
human joys because of the supreme joy ful-
ness of the one joy, the religious joy. But
asceticism is not in the least confined to
religious asceticism: there is scientific as-
ceticism which asserts that truth is alone
satisfying : there is aesthetic asceticism which
asserts that art is alone satisfying: there
is amatory asceticism which asserts that
love is alone satisfying. There is even
63
FRANCIS
epicurean asceticism, which asserts that
beer and skittles are alone satisfying.
Wherever the manner of praising anything
involves the statement that the speaker
could live with that thing alone, there lies
the germ and essence of asceticism. When
William Morris, for example, says that
*love is enough,' it is obvious that he
asserts in those words that art, science,
politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages,
concerts, gloves, walking - sticks, door-
knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and
any other things one may choose to tabulate
are unnecessary. When Omar Khayyam
says:
* A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow.
64
FRANCIS
It is clear that he speaks fully as much
ascetically as he does aesthetically. He
makes a list of things and says that he
wants no more. The same thing was done
by a mediaeval monk. Examples might,
of course, be multiplied a hundred -fold.
One of the most genuinely poetical of our
younger poets says, as the one thing certain,
that
' From quiet home and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends —
There's nothing worth the wear of winning
.But laughter and the love of friends.'
Here we have a perfect example of the
main important fact, that all true joy ex-
presses itself in terms of asceticism.
But if in any case it should happen that
a class or a generation lose the sense of
the peculiar kind of joy which is being
E 65
FRANCIS
Celebrated, they immediately begin to call
the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and self-
destroying. The most formidable liberal
philosophers have called the monks melan-
choly because they denied themselves the
pleasures of liberty and marriage. They
might as well call the trippers on a Bank
Holiday melancholy because they deny
themselves, as a rule, the pleasures of silence
and meditation. A simpler and stronger
example is, however, to hand. If ever it
should happen that the system of English
athletics should vanish from the public
schools and the universities, if science
should supply some new and non-competi-
tive manner of perfecting the physique, if
public ethics swung round to an attitude
of absolute contempt and indifference to-
wards the feeling called sport, then it is
66
FRANCIS
easy to see what would happen. Future
historians would simply state that in the
dark days of Queen Victoria young men
at Oxford and Cambridge were subjected to
a horrible sort of religious torture. They
were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules,
to indulge in wine or tobacco during certain
arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before
certain brutal fights and festivals. Bigots
insisted on their rising at unearthly hours
and running violently around fields for no
object. Many men ruined their health in
these dens of superstition, many died there.
All this is perfectly true and irrefutable.
Athleticism in England is an asceticism, as
much as the monastic rules. Men have
over-strained themselves and killed them-
selves through English athleticism. There
is one difference and one only : we do feel
FRANCIS
the love of sport ; we do not feel the love
of religious offices. We see only the price
in the one case and only the purchase in
the other.
The only question that remains is what
was the joy of the old Christian ascetics
of which their asceticism was merely the
purchasing price. The mere possibility of
the query is an extraordinary example of
the way in which we miss the main points
of human history. We are looking at
humanity too close, and see only the details
and not the vast and dominant features.
We look at the rise of Christianity, and
conceive it as a rise of self-abnegation and
almost of pessimism. It does not occur to
us that the mere assertion that this raging
and confounding universe is governed by
justice and mercy is a piece of staggering
68
FRANCIS
optimism fit to set all men capering. The
detail over which these monks went mad
with joy was the universe itself; the only
thing really worthy of enj oy ment. The white
daylight shone over all the world, the end-
less forests stood up in their order. The
lightning awoke and the tree fell and the
sea gathered into mountains and the ship
went down, and all these disconnected and
meaningless and terrible objects were all
part of one dark and fearful conspiracy of
goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.
That this scheme of Nature was not accurate
or well founded is perfectly tenable, but
surely it is not tenable that it was not
optimistic. We insist, however, upon
treating this matter tail foremost. We
insist that the ascetics were pessimists be-
cause they gave up threescore years and
FRANCIS
ten for an eternity of happiness. We for-
get that the bare proposition of an eternity
of happiness is by its very nature ten thou-
sand times more optimistic than ten thou-
sand pagan saturnaUas.
Mr Adderley's life of Francis of Assisi
does not, of course, bring this out ; nor does
it fully bring out the character of Francis.
It has rather the tone of a devotional
book. A devotional book is an excellent
thing, but we do not look in it for the
portrait of a man, for the same reason that
we do not look in a love-sonnet for the
portrait of a woman, because men in such
conditions of mind not only apply all virtues
to their idol, but all virtues in equal quan-
tities. There is no outline, because the
artist cannot bear to put in a black line.
This blaze of benediction, this conflict
70
FRANCIS
between lights, has its place in poetry, not
in biography. The successful examples of
it may be found, for instance, in the more
idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is
sometimes almost indecipherable, for the
poet draws in silver upon white.
It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley
should see Francis primarily as the founder
of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this
was only one, perhaps a minor one, of the
things that he was ; we suspect that one
of the minor things that Christ did was
to found Christianity. But the vast practi-
cal work of Francis is assuredly not to be
ignored, for this amazingly unworldly and
almost maddening simple-minded infant
was one of the most consistently successful
men that ever fought with this bitter world.
It is the custom to say that the secret of
71
FRANCIS
such men is their profound belief in them-
selves, and this is true, but not all the
truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums
are thronged with men who believe in
themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to
say that the secret of his success was his
profound belief in other people, and it is
the lack of this that has commonly been
the curse of these obscure Napoleons.
Francis always assumed that everyone must
be just as anxious about their common
relative, the water-rat, as he was. He
planned a visit to the Emperor to draw
his attention to the needs of 'his little
sisters the larks.' He used to talk to any
thieves and robbers he met about their
misfortune in being unable to give rein to
their desire for holiness. It was an innocent
habit, and doubtless the robbers often ' got
72
FRANCIS
round him,' as the phrase goes. Quite as
often, however, they discovered that he
had *got round' them, and discovered the
other side, the side of secret nobility.
Conceiving of St Francis as primarily
the founder of the Franciscan Order, Mr
Adderley opens his narrative with an admir-
able sketch of the history of Monasticism
in Europe, which is certainly the best thing
in the book. He distinguishes clearly and
fairly between the Manichsean ideal that
underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism
and the ideal of self-discipline which never
wholly vanished from the Christian form.
But he does not throw any light on what
must be for the outsider the absorbing
problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the
excellent reason that not being an outsider
he does not find it a problem at all.
73
FRANCIS
To most people, however, there is a
fascinating inconsistency in the position of
St Francis. He expressed in loftier and
bolder language than any earthly thinker
the conception that laughter is as divine
as tears. He called his monks the mounte-
banks of God. He never forgot to take
pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him,
or a drop of water as it fell from his finger :
he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of
men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded
his whole polity on the negation of what
we think the most imperious necessities ;
in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience, he denied to himself and those
he loved most, property, love, and liberty.
Why was it that the most large-hearted
and poetic spirits in that age found their
most congenial atmosphere in these awful
74
FRANCIS
renunciations? Why did he who loved
where all men were blind, seek to blind
himself where all men loved? Why was
he a monk, and not a troubadour ? These
questions are far too large to be answered
fully here, but in any life of Francis they
ought at least to have been asked ; we have
a suspicion that if they were answered we
should suddenly find that much of the
enigma of this sullen time of ours was
answered also. So it was with the monks.
The two great parties in human affairs are ,
only the party which sees life black against
white, and the party which sees it white
against black, the party which macerates
and blackens itself with sacrifice because
the background is full of the blaze of an
universal mercy, and the party which crowns
itself with flowers and lights itself with
75
FRANCIS
bridal torches because it stands against a
black curtain of incalculable night. The
revellers are old, and the monks are young.
It was the monks who were [the spend-
thrifts of happiness, and we who are its
misers.
Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Ad-
derley's book, the clear and tranquil life
of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate
effect on the genius of Francis. He was
primarily a poet. The perfection of his
literary instinct is shown in his naming the
fire * brother,' and the water * sister,' in the
quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal
in the sermon to the fishes 'that they
alone were saved in the Flood.' In the
amazingly minute and graphic dramatisa-
tion of the life, disappointments and ex-
cuses of any shrub or beast that he
76
FRANCIS
happened to be addressing, his genius has
a curious resemblance to that of Burns.
But if he avoided the weakness of Bums'
verses to animals, the occasional morbidity,
bombast and moralisation on himself, the
credit is surely due to a cleaner and more
transparent life.
The general attitude of St Francis, like
that of his Master, embodied a kind of
terrible common-sense. The famous re-
mark of the Caterpillar in * Alice in Won-
derland ' — * Why not ? ' impresses us as his
general motto. He could not see why
he should not be on good terms with all
things. The pomp of war and ambition,
the great empire of the Middle Ages and
all its fellows begin to look tawdry and
top-heavy, under the rationality of that
innocent stare. His questions were blasting
77
FRANCIS
and devastating, like the questions of a
child. He would not have been afraid
even of the nightmares of cosmogony, for
he had no fear in him. To him the world
was small, not because he had any views
as to its size, but for the reason that
gossiping ladies find it small, because so
many relatives were to be found in it. If
you had taken him to the loneliest star
that the madness of an astronomer can
conceive, he would have only beheld in it
the features of a new friend.
78
ROSTAND
When * Cyrano de Bergerac ' was published,
it bore the subordinate title of a heroic
comedy. We have no tradition in English
literature which would justify us in calling
a comedy heroic, though there was once
a poet who called a comedy divine. By
the current modern conception, the hero
has his place in a tragedy, and the one
kind of strength which is systematically
denied to him is the strength to succeed.
That the power of a man's spirit might pos-
sibly go to the length of turning a tragedy
into a comedy is not admitted; neverthe-
79
ROSTAND
less, almost all the primitive legends of the
world are comedies, not only in the sense
that they have a happy ending, but in the
sense that they are based upon a certain
optimistic assumption that the hero is
destined to be the destroyer of the mon-
ster. Singularly enough, this modern idea
of the essential disastrous character of life,
when seriously considered, connects itself
with a hyper-eesthetic view of tragedy and
comedy which is largely due to the in-
fluence of modern France, from which the
great heroic comedies of Monsieur Rostand
have come. The French genius has an
instinct for remedying its own evil work,
and France gives always the best cure for
'Frenchiness.' The idea of comedy which
is held in England by the school which
pays most attention to the technical nice-
80
ROSTAND
ties of art is a view which renders such
an idea as that of heroic comedy quite
impossible. The fundamental conception in
the minds of the majority of our younger
writers is that comedy is, ' par excellence,'
a fragile thing. It is conceived to be a
conventional world of the most absolutely
delicate and gimcrack description. Such
stories as Mr Max Beerbohm's * Happy
Hypocrite' are conceptions which would
vanish or fall into utter nonsense if viewed
by one single degree too seriously. But
great comedy, the comedy of Shakespeare
or Sterne, not only can be, but must be,
taken seriously. There is nothing to which
a man must give himself up with more
faith and self-abandonment than to genuine
laughter. In such comedies one laughs
with the heroes and not at them. The
F 81
ROSTAND
humour which steeps the stories of Fal-
stafF and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and
philosophic humour, a geniality which goes
down to the depths. It is not superficial
reading, it is not even, strictly speaking,
light reading. Our sympathies are as much
committed to the characters as if they
were the predestined victims in a Greek
tragedy. The modern writer of comedies
may be said to boast of the brittleness of
his characters. He seems always on the
eve of knocking his puppets to pieces.
When John Oliver Hobbes wrote for the
first time a comedy of serious emotions,
she named it, with a thinly-disguised con-
tempt for her own work, 'A Sentimental
Comedy.' The ground of this conception
of the artificiality of comedy is a pro-
found pessimism. Life in the eyes of these
82
ROSTAND
mournful buffoons is itself an utterly tragic
thing; comedy must be as hollow as a
grinning mask. It is a refuge from the
world, and not even, properly speaking,
a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet
of shining ice over the eternal waters of
bitterness.
* Cyrano de Bergerac ' came to us as the
new decoration of an old truth, that merri-
ment was one of the world's natural
flowers, and not one of its exotics. The
gigantesque levity, the flamboyant elo-
quence, the Rabelaisian puns and digres-
sions were seen to be once more what
they had been in Rabelais, the mere out-
bursts of a human sympathy and bravado
as old and solid as the stars. The human
spirit demanded wit as headlong and
haughty as its will. All was expressed in
83
ROSTAND
the words of Cyrano at his highest moment
of happiness. 'II me faut des geants.'
An essential aspect of this question of
heroic comedy is the question of drama
in rhyme. There is nothing that affords
so easy a point of attack for the dramatic
reahst as the conduct of a play in verse.
According to his canons, it is indeed
absurd to represent a number of characters
facing some terrible crisis in their lives
by capping rhymes like a party playing
* bouts rim^s.* In his eyes it must appear
somewhat ridiculous that two enemies
taunting each other with insupportable
insults should obligingly provide each other
with metrical spacing and neat and con-
venient rhymes. But the whole of this
view rests finally upon the fact that few
persons, if any, to-day understand what is
84
ROSTAND
meant by a poetical play. It is a singular
thing that those poetical plays which are
now written in England by the most
advanced students of the drama follow
exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and
use verse and rhyme for the adornment
of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme
has a supreme appropriateness for the
treatment of the higher comedy. The
land of heroic comedy is, as it were, a
paradise of lovers, in which it is not
difficult to imagine that men could talk
poetry all day long. It is far more con-
ceivable that men's speech should flower
naturally into these harmonious forms,
when they are filled with the essential
spirit of youth, than when they are sitting
gloomily in the presence of immemorial
destiny. The great error consists in sup-
85
ROSTAND
posing that poetry is an unnatural form
of language. We should all like to speak
poetry at the moment when we truly live,
and if we do not speak it, it is because we
have an impediment in our speech. It is
not song that is the narrow or artificial
thing, it is conversation that is a broken
and stammering attempt at song. When
we see men in a spiritual extravaganza,
like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in
rhyme, it is not our language disguised
or distorted, but our language rounded
and made whole. Rhymes answer each
other as the sexes in flowers and in
humanity answer each other. Men do
not speak so, it is true. Even when they
are inspired or in love they talk inanities.
But the poetic comedy does not misrepre-
sent the speech one half so much, as the
ROSTAND
speech misrepresents the soul. Monsieur
Rostand showed even more than his usual
insight when he called ' Cyrano de Ber-
gerac' a comedy, despite the fact that,
strictly speaking, it ends with disappoint-
ment and death. The essence of tragedy
is a spiritual breakdown or decline, and
in the great French play the spiritual
sentiment mounts unceasingly until the
last line. It is not the facts themselves,
but our feeling about them, that makes
tragedy and comedy, and death is more
joyful in Rostand than life in Maeter-
linck. The same apparent contradiction
holds good in the case of the drama of
^L'Aiglon.' Although the hero is a
weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a
premature death and a personal disillusion-
ment, yet, in spite of this theme, which
87
t /
ROSTAND
might have been chosen for its depressing
qualities, the unconquerable psean of the
praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety
of the poet's song swells so high that at
the end it seems to drown all the weak
voices of the characters in one crashing
chorus of great things and great men. A
multitude of mottoes might be taken from
the play to indicate and illustrate, not
only its own spirit, but much of the spirit
of modern life. When in the vision of
the field of Wagram the horrible voices
of the wounded cry out, 'Les corbeaux,
les corbeaux,' the Duke, overwhelmed
with a nightmare of hideous trivialities,
cries out, 'Ou, ou sont les aigles?' That
antithesis might stand alone as an in-
vocation at the beginning of the twentieth
century to the spirit of heroic comedy.
ROSTAND
When an ex-General of Napoleon is
asked his reason for having betrayed the
Emperor he replies, *La fatigue,' and at
that a veteran private of the Great Army-
rushes forward, and crying passionately,
* Et nous ? ' pours out a terrible descrip-
tion of the life lived by the common
soldier. To-day when pessimism is almost
as much a symbol of wealth and fashion
as jewels or cigars, when the pampered
heirs of the ages can sum up life in few
other words but 'la fatigue,' there might
surely come a cry from the vast mass of
common humanity from the beginning * et
nous?' It is this potentiality for enthu-
siasm among the mass of men that makes
the function of comedy at once common
and sublime. Shakespeare's *Much Ado
about Nothing * is a great comedy, because
ROSTAND
behind it is the whole pressure of that
love of love which is the youth of the
world, which is common to all the young,
especially to those who swear they will die
bachelors and old maids. ' Love's Labour's
Lost' is filled with the same energy, and
there it falls even more definitely into
the scope of our subject since it is a
comedy in rhyme in which all men speak
lyrically as naturally as the birds sing in
pairing time. What the love of love is to
the Shakespearian comedies, that other and
more mysterious human passion, the love of
death, is to 'L'Aiglon.' Whether we shall
ever have in England a new tradition of
poetic comedy it is difficult at present to
say, but we shall assuredly never have it
until we realise that comedy is built upon
everlasting foundations in the nature of
90
ROSTAND
things, that it is not a thing too light to
capture, but too deep to plumb. Monsieur
Rostand, in his description of the Battle of
Wagram, does not shrink from bringing
about the Duke's ears the frightful voices of
actual battle, of men torn by crows, and
suffocated with blood, but when the Duke,
terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks
them for their final word, they all cry to-
gether, 'Vive TEmpereur ! ' Monsieur Ros-
tand, perhaps, did not know that he was
writing an allegory. To me that field of
Wagram is the field of the modern war
of literature. We hear nothing but the
voices of pain ; the whole is one phono-
graph of horror. It is right that we should
hear these things, it is right that not one
of them should be silenced ; but these
cries of distress are not in life as they are
91
ROSTAND
in modern art the only voices, they are
the voices of men, but not the voice of
man. When questioned finally and seri-
ously as to their conception of their destiny,
men have from the beginning of time
answered in a thousand philosophies and
religions with a single voice and in a
sense most sacred and tremendous, *Vive
TEmpereur.'
92
CHARLES II
There are a great many bonds which still
connect us with Charles II., one of the idlest
men of one of the idlest epochs. Among
other things Charles II. represented one
thing which is very rare and very satisfying ;
he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scep-
ticism both in its advantages and disad-
vantages is greatly misunderstood in our
time. There is a curious idea abroad that
scepticism has some connection with such
theories as materialism and atheism and
secularism. This is of course a mistake;
the true sceptic has nothing to do with
93
CHARLES II
these theories simply because they are
theories. The true sceptic is as much a
spiritualist as he is a materialist. He thinks
that the savage dancing round an African
idol stands quite as good a chance of being
right as Darwin. He thinks that mysticism
is every bit as rational as rationalism. He
has indeed the most profound doubts as
to whether St Matthew wrote his own
gospel. But he has quite equally profound
doubts as to whether the tree he is looking
at is a tree and not a rhinoceros.
This is the real meaning of that mystery
which appears so prominently in the lives
of great sceptics, which appears with special
prominence in the life of Charles II. I
mean their constant oscillation between
atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman
Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed
94
CHARLES II
and formidable system, but so is atheism.
Atheism is indeed the most daring of all
dogmas, more daring than the vision of a
palpable day of judgment. For it is the
assertion of a universal negative; for a
man to say that there is no God in the
universe is like saying that there are no
insects in any of the stars.
Thus it was with that wholesome and
systematic sceptic, Charles II. When
he took the Sacrament according to the
forms of the Roman Church in his
last hour he was acting consistently as
a philosopher. The wafer might not be
God ; similarly it might not be a wafer.
To the genuine and poetical sceptic the
whole world is incredible, with its bulbous
mountains and its fantastic trees. The
whole order of things is as outrageous as
95
CHARLES II
any miracle which could presume to violate
it. Transubstantiation might be a dream,
but if it was, it was assuredly a dream
within a dream. Charles II. sought to
guard himself against hell fire because he
could not think hell itself more fantastic
than the world as it was revealed by science.
The priest crept up the staircase, the doors
were closed, the few of the faithful who
were present hushed themselves respectfully,
and so, with every circumstance of secrecy
and sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the
prayers poured out, was consummated the
last great act of logical unbelief.
The problem of Charles II. consists in
this, that he has scarcely a moral virtue to
his name, and yet he attracts us morally.
We feel that some of the virtues have
been dropped out in the lists made by all
96
CHARLES II
the saints and sages, and that Charles II.
was pre-eminently successful in these wild
and unmentionable virtues. The real truth
of this matter and the real relation of
Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth
somewhat more exhaustive study.
It is a commonplace that the Restoration
movement can only be understood when
considered as a reaction against Puritanism.
But it is insufficiently realised that the
tyranny which half frustrated all the good
work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar
kind. It was not the fire of Puritanism,
the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of
a restraint, which passed away; that still
burns in the heart of England, only to be
quenched by the final overwhelming sea.
But it is seldom remembered that the
Puritans were in their day emphatically
G 97
CHARLES II
intellectual bullies, that they relied swagger-
ingly on the logical necessity of Calvinism,
that they bound omnipotence itself in the
chains of syllogism. The Puritans fell,
through the damning fact that they had a
complete theory of life, through the eternal
paradox that a satisfactory explanation can
never satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical
Romans, like the logical French Jacobins,
like the logical English utilitarians, they
taught the lesson that men's wants have
always been right and their arguments
always wrong. Reason is always a kind
of brute force ; those who appeal to the
head rather than the heart, however pallid
and polite, are necessarily men of violence.
We speak of * touching ' sl man's heart, but
we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
The tyranny of the Puritans over the bodies
CHARLES II
of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes,
bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively
a trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny
of aggressive reason over the cowed and
demoralised human spirit. Their brooding
and raving can be forgiven, can in truth
be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity
on fire ; hatred can be genial, madness can
be homely. The Puritans fell, not because
they were fanatics, but because they were
rationalists.
When we consider these things, when we
remember that Puritanism, which means
in our day a moral and almost tempera-
mental attitude, meant in that day a
singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall
comprehend a little more the grain of good
that lay in the vulgarity and triviality of
the Restoration. The Restoration, of which
CHARLES II
Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in
part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed
parts of human nature, the parts that are
left over, and will always be left over, by
every rationalistic system of life. This
does not merely account for the revolt of
the vices and of that empty recklessness
and horseplay which is sometimes more
irritating than any vice. It accounts also
for the return of the virtue of politeness,
for that also is a nameless thing ignored by
logical codes. Politeness has indeed about
it something mystical; like religion, it is
everywhere understood and nowhere de-
fined. Charles is not entirely to be despised
because, as the type of this movement, he let
himself float upon this new tide of politeness.
There was some moral and social value in
his perfection in little things. He could
100
CHARLES II
not keep the Ten Commandments, but he
kept the ten thousand commandments.
His name is unconnected with any great
acts of duty or sacrifice, but it is con-
nected with a great many of those acts
of magnanimous poUteness, of a kind of
dramatic dehcacy, which lie on the dim
borderland between morality and art.
* Charles II.,' said Thackeray, with un-
erring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a
snob.' Unlike George IV. he was a
gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who
obeys strange statutes, not to be found in
any moral text-book, and practises strange
virtues nameless from the beginning of
the world.
So much may be said and should be
said for the Restoration, that it was the
revolt of something human, if only the
101
CHARLES II
debris of human nature. But more cannot
be said. It was emphatically a fall and
not an ascent, a recoil and not an advance,
a sudden weakness and not a sudden
strength. That the bow of human nature
was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too
far, that it overstrained the soul by stretch-
ing it to the height of an almost horrible
idealism, makes the collapse of the Re-
storation infinitely more excusable, but it
does not make it any the less a collapse.
Nothing can efface the essential distinction
that Puritanism was one of the world's
great efforts after the discovery of the true
order, whereas it was the essence of the
Restoration that it involved no effort at
all. It is true that the Restoration was
not, as has been widely assumed, the most
immoral epoch of our history. Its vices
102
CHARLES II
cannot compare for a moment in this re-
spect with the monstrous tragedies and
almost suffocating secrecies and villainies
of the Court of James I. But the dram-
drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia
of Charles II. seem at once more human
and more detestable than the passions and
poisons of the Renaissance, much in the
same way that a monkey appears inevitably
more human and more detestable than a
tiger. Compared with the Renaissance,
there is something Cockney about the
Restoration. Not only was it too indolejit
for great morality, it was too indolent even
for great art. It lacked that seriousness
which is needed even for the pursuit of
pleasure, that discipline which is essential
even to a game of lawn tennis. It would
have appeared to Charles II.'s poets quite
103
CHARLES II
as arduous to write ' Paradise Lost ' as to
regain Paradise.
All old and vigorous languages abound
in images and metaphors, which, though
lightly and casually used, are in truth poems
in themselves, and poems of a high and
striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so
terribly significant as the phrase ' killing
time.' It is a tremendous and poetical
image, the image of a kind of cosmic
parricide. There is on the earth a race
of revellers who do, under all their exuber-
ance, fundamentally regard time as an
enemy. Of these were Charles II. and
the men of the Restoration. Whatever
may have been their merits, and as we
have said we think that they had merits,
they can never have a place among the
great representatives of the joy of life, for
104
CHARLES II
they belonged to those lower epicureans
who kill time, as opposed to those higher
epicureans who make time live.
Of a people in this temper Charles II,
was the natural and rightful head. He
may have been a pantomime King, but he
was a King, and with all his geniality he
let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed,
the aimless flaneur that he has been repre-
sented. He was a patient and cunning
politician, who disguised his wisdom under
so perfect a mask of folly that he not only
deceived his allies and opponents, but has
deceived almost all the historians that have
come after him. But if Charles was, as
he emphatically was, the only Stuart who
really achieved despotism, it was greatly
due to the temper of the nation and
the age. Despotism is the easiest of
105
CHARLES II
all governments, at any rate for the
governed.
It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is
the despot who is the slave. Men in a
state of decadence employ professionals to
fight for them, professionals to dance for
them, and a professional to rule them.
Almost all the faces in the portraits of
that time look, as it were, like masks put
on artificially with the perruque. A strange
unreality broods over the period. Dis-
tracted as we are with civic mysteries and
problems, we can afford to rejoice. Our
tears are less desolate than their laughter,
our restraints are larger than their liberty.
106
STEVENSON *
A RECENT incident has finally convinced
us that Stevenson was, as we suspected, a
great man. We knew from recent books
that we have noticed, from the scorn of
* Ephemera Critica ' and Mr George Moore,
that Stevenson had the first essential quali-
fication of a great man : that of being mis-
understood by his opponents. But from
the book which Messrs Chatto k Windus
have issued, in the same binding as Steven-
son's works, * Robert Louis Stevenson,' by
Mr H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that he
♦ * Robert Louis Stevenson : A Life Study in Criticism.*
By H. Bellyse Baildon. Chatto & Windus.
107
STEVENSON
has the other essential qualification, that
of being misunderstood by his admirers.
Mr Baildon has many interesting things
to tell us about Stevenson himself, whom
he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms
by any means valueless. That upon the
plays, especially ' Beau Austin,' is remark-
ably thoughtful and true. But it is a very
singular fact, and goes far, as we say, to
prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable
quality which belongs to the great, that
this admiring student of Stevenson can
number and marshal all the master's work
and distribute praise and blame with de-
cision and even severity, without ever
thinking for a moment of the principles
of art and ethics which would have struck
us as the very thing that Stevenson nearly
killed himself to express.
108
STEVENSON
Mr Baildon, for example, is perpetually
lecturing Stevenson for his * pessimism ' ;
surely a strange charge against the man
who has done more than any modern artist
to make men ashamed of their shame of
life. But he complains that, in * The Master
of Ballantrae' and 'Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde,' Stevenson gives evil a final victory
over good. Now if there was one point
that Stevenson more constantly and pas-
sionately emphasised than any other it was
that we must worship good for its own
value and beauty, without any reference
whatever to victory or failure in space and
time. * Whatever we are intended to do,'
he said, *we are not intended to succeed.'
That the stars in their courses fight against
virtue, that humanity is in its nature a
forlorn hope, this was the very spirit that
109
STEVENSON
through the whole of Stevenson's work
sounded a trumpet to all the brave. The
story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but
could anyone stand beside the grave of
that sodden monomaniac and not respect
him? It is strange that men should see
sublime inspiration in the ruins of an old
church and see none in the ruins of a man.
The author has most extraordinary ideas
about Stevenson's tales of blood and spoil ;
he appears to think that they prove Steven-
son to have had (we use Mr Baildon's own
phrase) a kind of 'homicidal mania.' 'He
(Stevenson) arrives pretty much at the
paradox that one can hardly be better
employed than in taking life.' Mr Baildon
might as well say that Dr Conan Doyle
delights in committing inexplicable crimes,
that Mr Clark Russell is a notorious pirate,
110
STEVENSON
and that Mr Wilkie Collins thought that
one could hardly be better employed than
in stealing moonstones and falsifying mar-
riage registers. But Mr Baildon is scarcely
alone in this error : few people have under-
stood properly the goriness of Stevenson.
Stevenson was essentially the robust school-
boy who draws skeletons and gibbets in
his Latin grammar. It was not that he
took pleasure in death, but that he took
pleasure in life, in every muscular and
emphatic action of life, even if it were an
action that took the life of another.
Let us suppose that one gentleman throws
a knife at another gentleman and pins him
to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to
remark that there are in this transaction
two somewhat varying personal points of
view. The point of view of the man
111
STEVENSON
pinned is the tragic and moral point of
view, and this Stevenson showed clearly
that he understood in such stories as ' The
Master of Ballantrae' and *Weir of Her-
miston.' But there is another view of the
matter — that in which the whole act is an
abrupt and brilliant explosion of bodily
vitality, like breaking a rock with a blow
of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred
gate. This is the standpoint of romance,
and it is the soul of ' Treasure Island ' and
*The Wrecker.' It was not, indeed, that
Stevenson loved men less, but that he loved
clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth,
in the devouring universalism of his soul,
a positive love for inanimate objects such
as has not been known since St Francis
called the sun brother and the well sister.
We feel that he was actully in love with
112
STEVENSON
the wooden crutch that Silver sent hurtling
in the sunhght, with the box that Billy
Bones left at the 'Admiral Benbow,' with
the knife that Wicks drove through his
own hand and the table. There is always
in his work a certain clean-cut angularity
which makes us remember that he was
fond of cutting wood with an axe.
Stevenson's new biographer, ^ however,
cannot make any allowance for this deep-
rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He
is always imputing something to Stevenson
as a crime which Stevenson really professed
as an object. He says of that glorious riot
of horror, * The Destroying Angel,' in * The
Dynamiter,' that it is ' highly fantastic and
putting a strain on our credulity.' This
is rather like describing the travels of
Baron Munchausen as ' unconvincing.' The
H 113
STEVENSON
whole story of * The Dynamiter ' is a kind
of humorous nightmare, and even in that
story *The Destroying Angel' is supposed
to be an extravagant lie made up on the
spur of the moment. It is a dream within
a dream, and to accuse it of improbability
is like accusing the sky of being blue. But
Mr Baildon, whether from hasty reading
or natural difference of taste, cannot in the
least comprehend the rich and romantic
irony of Stevenson's London stories. He
actually says of that portentous monument
of humour, Prince Florizel of Bohemia,
that, * though evidently admired by his
creator, he is to me on the whole rather
an irritating presence.' From this we are
almost driven to believe (though desperately
and against our will) that Mr Baildon thinks
that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously,
114
STEVENSON
as if he were a man in real life. For our-
selves, Prince Florizel is almost our favourite
character in fiction ; but we willingly add
the proviso that if we met him in real life
we should kill him.
The fact is, that the whole mass of
Stevenson's spiritual and intellectual virtues
have been partly frustrated by one addi-
tional virtue — that of artistic dexterity.
If he had chalked up his great message on
a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and
straggling letters, it would have startled
men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his
light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-
book hand that everyone supposed they
must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered
from his versatility, not, as is loosely said,
by not doing every department well enough,
but by doing every department too well.
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STEVENSON
As child, cockney, pirate, or Puritan, his
disguises were so good that most people
could not see the same man under all. It
is an unjust fact that if a man can play
the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black
boots just tolerably, he is called an Admir-
able Crichton, but if he does all three
thoroughly well, he is apt to be regarded,
in the several departments, as a common
fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common
boot-black. This is what has happened
in the case of Stevenson. If 'Dr Jekyll,'
'The Master of Ballantrae,' *The Child's
Garden of Verses,' and * Across the Plains '
had been each of them one shade less
perfectly done than they were, everyone
would have seen that they were all parts
of the same message; but by succeeding
in the proverbial miracle of being in five
116
STEVENSON
places at once, he has naturally convinced
others that he was five different people.
But the real message of Stevenson was
as simple as that of Mahomet, as moral
as that of Dante, as confident as that
of Whitman, and as practical as that of
James Watt.
The conception which unites the whole
varied work of Stevenson was that romance,
or the vision of the possibilities of things,
was far more important than mere occur-
rences: that one was the soul of our life,
the other the body, and that the soul was
the precious thing. The germ of all his
stories lies in the idea that every landscape
or scrap of scenery has a soul: and that
soul is a story. Standing before a stunted
orchard with a broken stone wall, we may
know as a mere fact that no one has been
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STEVENSON
through it but an elderly female cook.
But everything exists in the human soul:
that orchard grows in our own brain, and
there it is the shrine and theatre of some
strange chance between a girl and a ragged
poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands
for the conception that ideas are the real
incidents: that our fancies are our adven-
tures. To think of a cow with wings is
essentially to have met one. And this is
the reason for his wide diversities of nar-
rative: he had to make one story as rich
as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary
monolith: for the story was the soul, or
rather the meaning, of the bodily vision.
It is quite inappropriate to judge *The
Teller of Tales' (as the Samoans called
him) by the particular novels he wrote,
as one would judge Mr George Moore by
118
STEVENSON
* Esther Waters.' These novels were only
the two or three of his souFs adventures
that he happened to tell. But he died
with a thousand stories in his heart.
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THOMAS CARLYLE
There are two main moral necessities for
the work of a great man: the first is that
he should believe in the truth of his
message ; the second is that he should
believe in the acceptability of his message.
It was the whole tragedy of Carlyle that
he had the first and not the second.
The ordinary capital, however, which is
made out of Carlyle's alleged gloom is a
very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults,
both as a man and as a writer, but the
attempt to explain his gospel in terms of
his ' liver ' is merely pitiful. If indigestion
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THOMAS CARLYLE
invariably resulted in a 'Sartor Resartus,'
it would be a vastly more tolerable thing
than it is. Diseases do not turn into
poems ; even the decadent really writes
with the healthy part of his organism.
If Carlyle's private faults and literary
virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he
is only in the situation of every man ; for
every one of us it is surely very difficult
to say precisely where our honest opinions
end and our personal predilections begin.
But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as
a mere savage egotist cannot arise from
anything but a pure inabiUty to grasp
Carlyle's gospel. *Ruskin,' says a critic,
' did, all the same, verily believe in God ;
Carlyle believed only in himself.' This
is certainly a distinction between the author
he has understood and the author he has
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THOMAS CARLYLE
not understood. Carlyle believed in him
self, but he could not have believed in
himself more than Ruskin did ; they both
believed in God, because they felt that if
everything else fell into wrack and ruin,
themselves were permanent witnesses to
God. Where they both failed was not in
belief in God or in belief in themselves ;
they failed in belief in other people. It
is not enough for a prophet to believe
in his message ; he must believe in its
acceptability. Christ, St Francis, Bunyan,
Wesley, Mr Gladstone, Walt Whitman,
men of indescribable variety, were all alike
in a certain faculty of treating the average
man as their equal, of trusting to his
reason and good feeling without fear and
without condescension. It was this sim-
plicity of confidence, not only in God,
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THOMAS CARLYLE
but in the image of God, that was lacking
in Carlyle.
But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's
religious sentiment must absolutely fall to
the ground. The profound security of
Carlyle's sense of the unity of the Cosmos
is Uke that of a Hebrew prophet ; and it
has the same expression that it had in the
Hebrew prophets — humour. A man must
be very full of faith to jest about his
divinity. No Neo-Pagan delicately suggest-
ing a revival of Dionysius, no vague, half-
converted Theosophist groping towards a
recognition of Buddha, would ever think
of cracking jokes on the matter. But to
the Hebrew prophets their religion was so
solid a thing, like a mountain or a mam-
moth, that the irony of its contact with
trivial and fleeting matters struck them
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THOMAS CARLYLE
like a blow. So it was with Carlyle. His
supreme contribution, both to philosophy
and literature, was his sense of the sarcasm
of eternity. Other writers had seen the
hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone
saw the humour of them. Other writers
had seen that there could be something
elemental and eternal in a song or statute,
he alone saw that there could be something
elemental and eternal in a joke. No one
who ever read it will forget the passage,
full of dark and agnostic gratification, in
which he narrates that some Court chronicler
described Louis XV. as 'falling asleep in
the Lord.' 'Enough for us that he did
fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night,
under what keeping we ask not, he at
least will never, through unending ages,
insult the face of the sun any more . . .
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THOMAS CARLYLE
and we go on, if not to better forms of
beastliness, at least to fresher ones.'
The supreme value of Carlyle to English
literature was that he was the founder of
modern irrationalism ; a movement fully
as important as modern rationalism. A
great deal is said in these days about
the value or valuelessness of logic. In
the main, indeed, logic is not a productive
tool so much as a weapon for defence. A
man building up an intellectual system has
to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in
one hand and the trowel in the other. The
imagination, the constructive quality, is the
trowel, and argument is the sword. A
wide experience of actual intellectual affairs
will lead most people to the conclusion
that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon
wherewith to exterminate logicians.
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THOMAS CARLYLE
But though this may be true enough in
practice, it scarcely clears up the position
of logic in human affairs. Logic is a
machine of the mind, and if it is used
honestly it ought to bring out an honest
conclusion. When people say that you
can prove anything by logic, they are not
using words in a fair sense. What they
mean is that you can prove anything by
bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude
of the soul of man there is an extraordinary
tendency to use the name for an organ,
when what is meant is the abuse or decay
of that organ. Thus we speak of a man
suffering from 'nerves,' which is about as
sensible as talking about a man suffering
from ten fingers. We speak of 'liver'
and 'digestion' when we mean the failure
of liver and the absence of digestion. And
126
THOMAS CARLYLE
in the same manner we speak of the
dangers of logic, when what we really
mean is the danger of fallacy.
But the real point about the limitation
of logic and the partial overthrow of logic
by writers like Carlyle is deeper and some-
what different. The fault of the great
mass of logicians is not that they bring
out a false result, or, in other words, are
not logicians at all. Their fault is that by
an inevitable psychological habit they tend
to forget that there are two parts of a
logical process — the first the choosing of
an assumption, and the second the arguing
upon it ; and humanity, if it devotes itself
too persistently to the study of sound
reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose
the faculty of sound assumption. It is
astonishing how constantly one may hear
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THOMAS CARLYLE
from rational and even rationalistic persons
such a phrase as *He did not prove the
very thing with which he started,' or ' The
whole of his case rested upon a pure
assumption/ two peculiarities which may
be found by the curious in the works of
Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how con-
stantly one hears rationalists arguing upon
some deep topic, apparently without troub-
ling about the deep assumptions involved,
having lost their sense, as it were, of the
real colour and character of a man's assump-
tion. For instance, two men will argue
about whether patriotism is a good thing
and never discover until the end, if at all,
that the cosmopolitan is basing his whole
case upon the idea that man should, if he
can, become as God, with equal sympathies
and no prejudices, while the nationalist
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THOMAS CARLYLE
denies any such duty at the very start, and
regards man as an animal who has prefer-
ences, as a bird has feathers.
Thus it was with Carlyle : he startled
men by attacking not arguments but as-
sumptions. He simply brushed aside all
the matters which the men of the nine-
teenth century held to be incontrovertible,
and appealed directly to the very different
class of matters which they knew to be
true. He induced men to study less the
truth of their reasoning, and more the truth
of the assumptions upon which they
reasoned. Even where his view was not
the highest truth, it was always a refreshing
and beneficent heresy. He denied every
one of the postulates upon which the age
of reason based itself. He denied the
I 129
THOMAS CARLYLE
theory of progress which assumed that we
must be better off than the people of the
twelfth century. Whether we were better
than the people of the twelfth century
according to him depended entirely upon
whether we chose or deserved to be.
He denied every type and species of
prop or association or support which threw
the responsibility upon civilisation or society,
or anything but the individual conscience.
He has often been called a prophet. The
real ground of the truth of this phrase is
often neglected. Since the last era of
purely religious literature, the era of English
Puritanism, there has been no writer in
whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.
Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a
mystic, and mysticism was with him, as
with all its genuine professors, only a tran-
130
THOMAS CARLYLE
scendent form of common-sense. Mysticism
and common-sense alike consist in a sense
of the dominance of certain truths and
tendencies which cannot be formally de-
monstrated or even formally named. Mys-
ticism and common-sense are alike appeals
to realities that we all know to be real, but
which have no place in argument except
as postulates. Carlyle's work did consist
in breaking through formulae, old and new,
to these old and silent and ironical sanities.
Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred
times over, he maintained/ they could not
alter the fact that every man and woman
does choose a king and repudiate all the
pride of citizenship for the exultation of
humility. If inequality of this kind was
a weakness, it was a weakness bound up
with the very strength of the universe.
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THOMAS CARLYLE
About hero worship, indeed, few critics have
done the smallest justice to Carlyle. Misled
by those hasty and choleric passages in which
he sometimes expressed a preference for
mere violence, passages which were a great
deal more connected with his temperament
than with his philosophy, they have finally
imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory
of hero worship was a theory of terrified
submission to stern and arrogant men. As
a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane
about some questions, but he is never in-
humane about hero worship. His view is
not that human nature is so vulgar and
silly a thing that it must be guided and
driven ; it is, on the contrary, that human
nature is so chivalrous and fundamentally
magnanimous a thing that even the mean-
est have it in them to love a leader more
132
THOMAS CARLYLE
than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to
rebellion. When he speaks of this trait
in human nature Carlyle's tone invariably
softens. We feel that for the moment he
is kindled with admiration of mankind,
and almost reaches the verge of Chris-
tianity. Whatever else was acid and
captious about Carlyle's utterances, his
hero worship was not only humane, it was
almost optimistic. He admired great men
primarily, and perhaps correctly, because
he thought that they were more human
than other men. The evil side of the
influence of Carlyle and his religion of
hero worship did not consist in the emo-
tional worship of valour and success ; that
was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part
of all healthy children. Where Carlyle
really did harm was in the fact that he,
133
THOMAS CARLYLE
more than any modern man, is responsible
for the increase of that modern habit of
what is vulgarly called * Going the whole
hog.* Often in matters of passion and
conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog.
This remarkable modern craze for making
one's philosophy, religion, politics, and
temper all of a piece, of seeking in all
incidents for opportunities to assert and
reassert some favourite mental attitude, is
a thing which existed comparatively little
in other centuries. Solomon and Horace,
Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists
when they were melancholy, and optimists
when they were happy. But the optimist
of to-day seems obliged to prove that gout
and unrequited love make him dance with
joy, and the pessimist of to-day to prove
that sunshine and a good supper convulse
134:
THOMAS CARLYLE
him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle
was strongly possessed with this mania
for spiritual consistency. He wished to
take the same view of the wars of the
angels and of the paltriest riot at Donny-
brook Fair. It was this species of insane
logic which led him into his chief errors,
never his natural enthusiasms. Let us take
an example. Carlyle's defence of slavery is
a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak alike in
argument and in moral instinct. The truth
is, that he only took it up from the passion
for applying everywhere his paradoxical
defence of aristocracy. He blundered, of
course, because he did not see that slavery
has nothing in the world to do with aris-
tocracy, that it is, indeed, almost its
opposite. The defence which Carlyle and
all its thoughtful defenders have made for
135
THOMAS CARLYLE
aristocracy was that a few persons could
more rapidly and firmly decide public
affairs in the interests of the people. But
slavery is not even supposed to be a
government for the good of the governed.
It is a possession of the governed avowedly
for the good of the governors. Aristocracy
uses the strong for the service of the weak ;
slavery uses the weak for the service of
the strong. It is no derogation to man as
a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly beUeved
he was, that he should be ruled and guided
for his own good like a child — for a child
who is always ruled and guided we regard
as the very type of spiritual existence. But
it is a derogation and an absolute contra-
diction to that human spirituality in which
Carlyle believed, that a man should be
owned like a tool for someone else's good, as
136
THOMAS CARLYLE
if he had no personal destiny in the Cosmos.
We draw attention to this particular error
of Carlyle's because we think that it is a
curious example of the waste and unclean
places into which that remarkable animal,
*the whole hog/ more than once led him.
In this respect Carlyle has had unques-
tionably long and an unquestionably bad
influence. The whole of that recent political
ethic which conceives that if we only go
far enough we may finish a thing for once
and all, that being strong consists chiefly
in being deliberately deaf and blind, owes
a great deal of its complete sway to his
example. Out of him flows most of the
philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern
times the supreme maniac of this moon-
struck consistency. Though Nietzsche and
Carlyle were in reality profoundly different,
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THOMAS CARLYLE
Carlyle being a stiff-necked peasant and
Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat, they
were alike in this one quality of which we
speak, the strange and pitiful audacity with
which they applied their single ethical test
to everything in heaven and earth. The
disciple of Nietzsche, indeed, embraces im-
morality like an austere and difficult faith.
He urges himself to lust and cruelty with
the same tremulous enthusiasm with which
a Christian urges himself to purity and
patience ; he struggles as a monk struggles
with bestial visions and temptations with
the ancient necessities of honour and justice
and compassion. To this madhouse, it can
hardly be denied, has Carlyle's intellectual
courage brought many at last.
138
TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF
SIMPLICITY
The whole world is certainly heading for
a great simplicity, not deliberately, but
rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion
of false innocence, like that of the French
aristocrats before the Revolution, who built
an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peas-
antry for the enormous expenditure which
is needed in order to live the simple life
of peasants. The simplicity towards which
the world is driving is the necessary out-
come of all our systems and speculations
and of our deep and continuous contem-
139
TOLSTOY AND THE
plation of things. For the universe is like
everything in it ; we have to look at it
repeatedly and habitually before we see it.
It is only when we have seen it for the
hundredth time that we see it for the
first time. The more consistently things
are contemplated, the more they tend to
unify themselves and therefore to simplify
themselves. The simplification of anything
is always sensational. Thus monotheism
is the most sensational of things : it is as
if we gazed long at a design full of dis-
connected objects, and, suddenly, with a
stunning thrill, they came together into
a huge and staring face.
Few people will dispute that all the
typical movements of our time are upon
this road towards simplification. Each
system seeks to be more fundamental than
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CULT OF SIMPLICITY
the other ; each seeks, in the literal sense,
to undermine the other. In art, for ex-
ample, the old conception of man, classic
as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been
attacked by the realist, who asserts that
man, as a fact of natural history, is a
creature with colourless hair and a freckled
face. Then comes the Impressionist, going
yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical
eye, which alone is certain, man is a
creature with purple hair and a grey face.
Then comes the Symbolist, and says that
to his soul, which alone is certain, man is
a creature with green hair and a blue
face. And all the great writers of our
time represent in one form or another this
attempt to re-establish communication with
the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more
roughly and fallaciously expressed, to return
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TOLSTOY AND THE
to nature. Some think that the return to
nature consists in drinking no wine ; some
think that it consists in drinking a great
deal more than is good for them. Some
think that the return to nature is achieved
by beating swords into ploughshares ; some
think it is achieved by turning plough-
shares into very ineffectual British War
Office bayonets. It is natural, according
to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people
with gunpowder and himself with gin. It
is natural, according to the humanitarian
revolutionist, to kill other people with
dynamite and himself with vegetarianism.
It would be too obviously Philistine a
sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the
claim of either of these persons to be
obeying the voice of nature is interesting
when we consider that they require huge
142
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
volumes of paradoxical argument to per-
suade themselves or anyone else of the
truth of their conclusions. But the giants
of our time are undoubtedly alike in that
they approach by very different roads this
conception of the return to simplicity.
Ibsen returns to nature by the angular
exterior of fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal
tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to
nature by seeing how much he can accept,
Tolstoy by seeing how much he can reject.
Now, this heroic desire to return to
nature is, of course, in some respects,
rather like the heroic desire of a kitten
to return to its own tail. A tail is a
simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in
curve and soothing in texture; but it is
certainly one of the minor but character-
istic qualities of a tail that it should hang
143
TOLSTOY AND THE
behind. It is impossible to deny that it
would in some degree lose its character
if attached to any other part of the ana-
tomy. Now, nature is like a tail in the
sense that it is vitally important if it is
to discharge its real duty that it should
be always behind. To imagine that we
can see nature, especially our own nature,
face to face is a folly; it is even a blas-
phemy. It is like the conduct of a cat
in some mad fairy-tale, who should set
out on his travels with the firm conviction
that he would find his tail growing like
a tree in the meadows at the end of the
world. And the actual effect of the travels
of the philosopher in search of nature when
seen from the outside looks Very like the
gyrations of the tail-pursuing kitten, ex-
hibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity,
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
much cry and very little tail. The grandeur
of nature is that she is omnipotent and
unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most
when we think that she is heeding us least.
*Thou art a God that hidest Thyself,'
said the Hebrew poet. It may be said
with all reverence that it is behind a man's
back that the spirit of nature hides.
It is this consideration that lends a cer-
tain air of futility even to all the inspired
simplicities and thunderous veracities of
Tolstoy. We feel that a man cannot make
himself simple merely by warring on com-
plexity ; we feel, indeed, in our saner
moments that a man cannot make himself
simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity
may well be far more intrinsically ornate
than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal
of the pomp and sumptuousness of the
K 145
TOLSTOY AND THE
world's history was simple in the truest
sense. It was born of an almost babyish
receptiveness ; it was the work of men
who had eyes to wonder and men who
had ears to hear.
*King Solomon brought merchant men
Because of his desire
With peacocks, apes and ivory,
From Tarshish unto Tyre.'
But this proceeding was not a part of the
wisdom of Solomon ; it was a part of his
folly — I had almost said of his innocence,
Tolstoy, we feel, would not be content
with hurling satire and denunciation at
'Solomon in all his glory.' With fierce
and unimpeachable logic he would go a
step further. He would spend days and
nights in the meadows stripping the shame-
146
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
less crimson coronals off the lilies of the
field.
The new collection of 'Tales from Tolstoy/
translated and edited by Mr R. Nisbet Bain,
is calculated to draw particular attention
to this ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy's
work. In one sense, and that the deepest
sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a
genuine and noble appeal to simplicity.
The narrow notion that an artist may not
teach is pretty well exploded by now. But
the truth of the matter is, that an artist
teaches far more by his mere background
and properties, his landscape, his costume,
his idiom and technique — all the part of
his work, in short, of which he is probably
entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate
and pompous moral dicta which he fondly
imagines to be his opinions. The real
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TOLSTOY AND THE
distinction between the ethics of high art
and the ethics of manufactured and didactic
art lies in the simple fact that the bad
fable has a moral, while the good fable is
a moral. And the real moral of Tolstoy
comes out constantly in these stories, the
great moral which lies at the heart of all
his work, of which he is probably uncon-
scious, and of which it is quite likely that
he would vehemently disapprove. The
curious cold white light of morning that
shines over all the tales, the folklore sim-
plicity with which ' a man or a woman '
are spoken of without further identification,
the love — one might almost say the lust —
for the qualities of brute materials, the
hardness of wood, and the softness of mud,
the ingrained belief in a certain ancient
kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of
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CULT OF SIMPLICITY
the race of man — these influences are truly-
moral. When we put beside them the
trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the
didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene
purity, shouting for an inhuman peace,
hacking up human life into small sins with
a chopper, sneering at men, women, and
children out of respect to humanity, com-
bining in one chaos of contradictions an
unmanly Puritan and an uncivilised prig,
then, indeed, we scarcely know whither
Tolstoy has vanished. We know not what
to do with this small and noisy moralist
who is inhabiting one corner of a great and
good man.
It is difficult in every case to reconcile
Tolstoy the great artist with Tolstoy the
almost venomous reformer. It is difficult
to believe that a man who draws in such
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TOLSTOY AND THE
noble outlines the dignity of the daily life
of humanity regards as evil that divine act
of procreation by which that dignity is
renewed from age to age. It is difficult to
believe that a man who has painted with
so frightful an honesty the heartrending
emptiness of the life of the poor can really
grudge them every one of their pitiful
pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It
is difficult to believe that a poet in prose
who has so powerfully exhibited the earth-
born air of man, the essential kinship of a
human being, with the landscape in which
he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as
that which attaches a man to his own
ancestors and his own land. It is difficult
to believe that the man who feels so poig-
nantly the detestable insolence of oppression
would not actually, if he had the chance,
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CULT OF SIMPLICITY
lay the oppressor flat with his fist. All,
however, arises from the search after a false
simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so
express it, more natural than it is natural
to be. It would not only be more human,
it would be more humble of us to be con-
tent to be complex. The truest kinship
with humanity would lie in doing as
humanity has always done, accepting with
a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which
we are called, the star of our happiness, and
the fortunes of the land of our birth.
The work of Tolstoy has another and
more special significance. It represents the
re-assertion of a certain awful common-sense
which characterised the most extreme utter-
ances of Christ. It is true that we cannot
turn the cheek to the smiter ; it is true that
we cannot give our cloak to the robber;
151
TOLSTOY AND THE
civilisation is too complicated, too vain-
glorious, too emotional. The robber would
brag, and we should blush ; in other words,
the robber and we are alike sentimentalists.
The command of Christ is impossible, but
it is not insane ; it is rather sanity preached
to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world
was suddenly stricken with a sense of
humour it would find itself mechanically
fulfilling the Sermon on the Mount. It is
not the plain facts of the world which stand
in the way of that consummation, but its
passions of vanity and self-advertisement
and morbid sensibility. It is true that we
cannot turn the cheek to the smiter, and
the sole and sufficient reason is that we
have not the pluck. Tolstoy and his fol-
lowers have shown that they have the pluck,
and even if we think they are mistaken,
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CULT OF SIMPLICITY
by this sign they conquer. Their theory
has the strength of an utterly consistent
thing. It represents that doctrine of mild-
ness and non-resistance which is the last
and most audacious of all the forms of
resistance to every existing authority. It
is the great strike of the Quakers which
is more formidable than many sanguinary
revolutions. If human beings could only
succeed in achieving a real passive resistance
they would be strong with the appalling
strength of inanimate things, they would
be calm with the maddening calm of oak
or iron, which conquer without vengeance
and are conquered without humiUation.
The theory of Christian duty enunciated
by them is that we should never conquer
by force, but always, if we can, conquer
by persuasion. In their mythology St
153
TOLSTOY AND THE
George did not conquer the dragon : he
tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave
it a saucer of milk. According to them,
a course of consistent kindness to Nero
would have turned him into something only
faintly represented by Alfred the Great.
In fact, the policy recommended by this
school for dealing with the bovine stupidity
and bovine fury of this world is accurately
summed up in the celebrated verse of Mr
Edward Lear:
* There was an old man who said, " How
Shall I flee from this terrible cow ?
I will sit on a stile and continue to smile,
Till I soften the heart of this cow." '
Their confidence in human nature is
really honourable and magnificent ; it takes
the form of refusing to believe the over-
154
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
whelming majority of mankind, even when
they set out to explain their own motives.
But although most of us would in all
probability tend at first sight to consider
this new sect of Christians as little less out-
rageous than some brawling and absurd
sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall
into a singular error in doing so. The
Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we come
to consider it, one of the most thrilling
and dramatic incidents in our modern
civilisation. It represents a tribute to the
Christian religion more sensational than the
breaking of seals or the falling of stars.
From the point of view of a rationalist,
the whole world is rendered almost irra-
tional by the single phenomenon of Christian
Socialism. It turns the scientific universe
topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially pos-
155
TOLSTOY AND THE
sible that the key of all social evolution
may be found in the dusty casket of some
discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to
consider this phenomenon as it really is.
The religion of Christ has, like many true
things, been disproved an extraordinary
number of times. It was disproved by the
Neo-Platonist philosophers at the very
moment when it was first starting forth
upon its startling and universal career. It
was disproved again by many of the sceptics
of the Renaissance only a few years before
its second and supremely striking embodi-
ment, the religion of Puritanism, was about
to triumph over many kings, and civilise
many continents. We all agree that these
schools of negation were only interludes in
its history; but we all believe naturally
and inevitably that the negation of our
156
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
own day is really a breaking up of the
theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a
Ragnorak, a twilight of the gods. The
man of the nineteenth century, like a school-
boy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and
depression are symbols of the end of the
world. In our day the great irreligionists
who did nothing but dethrone God and
drive angels before them have been out-
stripped, distanced, and made to look
orthodox and humdrum. A newer race
of sceptics has found something infinitely
more exciting to do than nailing down the
lids upon a million coffins, and the body
upon a single cross. They have disputed
not only the elementary creeds, but the
elementary laws of mankind, property,
patriotism, civil obedience. They have
arraigned civilisation as openly as the
157
TOLSTOY AND THE
materialists have arraigned theology ; they
have damned all the philosophers even
lower than they have damned the saints.
Thousands of modern men move quietly
and conventionally among their fellows
while holding views of national limitation
or landed property that would have made
Voltaire shudder like a nun listening to
blasphemies. And the last and wildest
phase of this saturnalia of scepticism, the
school that goes furthest among thousands
who go so far, the school that denies the
moral validity of those ideals of courage or
obedience which are recognised even among
pirates, this school bases itself upon the
literal words of Christ, like Dr Watts or
Messrs Moody and Sankey. Never in the
whole history of the world was such a
tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of
168
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
an ancient creed. Compared with this, it
would be a small thing if the Red Sea
were cloven asunder, or the sun did stand
still at mid-day. We are faced with the
phenomenon that a set of revolutionists
whose contempt for all the ideals of family
and nation would evoke horror in a thieves'
kitchen, who can rid themselves of those
elementary instincts of the man and the
gentleman which cling to the very bones
of our civilisation, cannot rid themselves
of the influence of two or three remote
Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt Greek.
The fact, when realised, has about it some-
thing stunning and hypnotic. The most
convinced rationalist is in its presence sud-
denly stricken with a strange and ancient
vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmo-
gonies of this age as dreams going the way
159
TOLSTOY AND THE
of a thousand forgotten heresies, and be-
lieves for a moment that the dark sayings
handed down through eighteen centuries
may, indeed, contain in themselves the
revolutions of which we have only begun
to dream.
This value which we have above sug-
gested, unquestionably belongs to the
Tolstoians, who may roughly be described
as the new Quakers. With their strange
optimism, and their almost appalling logical
courage, they offer a tribute to Christianity
which no orthodoxies could offer. It can-
not but be remarkable to watch a revolu-
tion in which both the rulers and the
rebels march under the same symbol. But
the actual theory of non-resistance itself,
with all its kindred theories, is not, I
think, characterised by that intellectual
160
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
obviousness and necessity which its sup-
porters claim for it. A pamphlet before
us shows us an extraordinary number of
statements about the New Testament, of
which the accuracy is by no means so
striking as the confidence. To begin with,
we must protest against a habit of quoting
and paraphrasing at the same time. When
a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let
him state first of all what He said, not
what the man thinks He would have said
if he had expressed Himself more clearly.
Here is an instance of question and answer :
Q. *How did our Master Himself sum
up the law in a few words ? '
A. *Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even
as your Father; your Father in the spirit
world is merciful, is perfect.'
There is nothing in this, perhaps, which
L 161
TOLSTOY AND THE
Christ might not have said except the
abominable metaphysical modernism of
•the spirit world'; but to say that it is
recorded that He did say it, is like saying
it is recorded that He preferred palm trees
to sycamores. It is a simple and unadul-
terated untruth. The author should know
that these words have meant a thousand
things to a thousand people, and that if
more ancient sects had paraphrased them
as cheerfully as he, he would never have
had the text upon which he founds his
theory. In a pamphlet in which plain
printed words cannot be left alone, it is
not surprising if there are mis-statements
upon larger matters. Here is a statement
clearly and philosophically laid down which
we can only content ourselves with flatly
denying : ' The fifth rule of our Lord is
162
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
that we should take special pains to culti-
vate the same kind of regard for people of
foreign countries, and for those generally
who do not belong to us, or even have an
antipathy to us, which we already enter-
tain towards our own people, and those
who are in sympathy with us/ I should
very much like to know where in the whole
of the New Testament the author finds
this violent, unnatural, and immoral pro-
position. Christ did not have the same
kind of regard for one person as for another.
We are specifically told that there were
certain persons whom He specially loved.
It is most improbable that He thought of
other nations as He thought of His own.
The sight of His national city moved Him
to tears, and the highest compliment He
paid was, 'Behold an Israelite indeed.'
163
TOLSTOY AND THE
The author has simply confused two en-
tirely distinct things. Christ commanded
us to have love for all men, but even if
we had equal love for all men, to speak
of having the same love for all men
is merely bewildering nonsense. If we
love a man at all, the impression he pro-
duces on us must be vitally different
to the impression produced by another
man whom we love. To speak of having
the same kind of regard for both is
about as sensible as asking a man whether
he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards.
Christ did not love humanity; He never
said He loved humanity: He loved men.
Neither He nor anyone else can love hu-
manity; it is like loving a gigantic centi-
pede. And the reason that the Tolstoians
can even endure to think of an equally
164
CULT OF SIMPLICITY
distributed affection is that their love of
humanity is a logical love, a love into
which they are coerced by their own
theories, a love which would be an insult
to a tom-cat.
But the greatest error of all lies in the
mere act of cutting up the teaching of
the New Testament into five rules. It
precisely and ingeniously misses the most
dominant characteristic of the teaching —
its absolute spontaneity. The abyss be-
tween Christ and all His modern inter-
preters is that we have no record that He
ever wrote a word, except with His finger
in the sand. The whole is the history of
one continuous and sublime conversation.
Thousands of rules have been deduced
from it before these Tolstoian rules were
made, and thousands will be deduced
165
TOLSTOY
afterwards. It was not for any pompous
proclamation, it was not for any elaborate
output of printed volumes; it was for a
few splendid and idle words that the cross
was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped,
and the sun was darkened at noonday.
160
SAVONAROLA
Savonarola is a man whom we shall
probably never understand until we know
what horror may lie at the heart of civilisa-
tion. This we shall not know until we
are civilised. It may be hoped, in one
sense, that we may never understand
Savonarola.
The great deliverers of men have, for
the most part, saved them from calamities
which we all recognise as evil, from calami-
ties which are the ancient enemies of
humanity. The great law - givers saved
us from anarchy: the great physicians
167
SAVONAROLA
saved us from pestilence : the great re-
formers saved us from starvation. But
there is a huge and bottomless evil com-
pared with which all these are flea-bites,
the most desolating curse that can fall
upon men or nations, and it has no name,
except we call it satisfaction. Savonarola
did not save men from anarchy, but from
order; not from pestilence, but from
paralysis ; not from starvation, but from
luxury. Men like Savonarola are the wit-
nesses to the tremendous psychological fact
at the back of all our brains, but for which
no name has ever been found, that ease
is the worst enemy of happiness, and
civilisation potentially the end of man.
For I fancy that Savonarola's thrilling
challenge to the luxury of his day went
far deeper than the mere question of
168
SAVONAROLA
sin. The modern rationalistic admirers
of Savonarola, from George Eliot down-
wards, dwell, truly enough, upon the sound
ethical justification of Savonarola's anger,
upon the hideous and extravagant char-
acter of the crimes which polluted the
palaces of the Renaissance. But they need
not be so anxious to show that Savonarola
was no ascetic, that he merely picked out
the black specks of wickedness with the
priggish enlightenment of a member of
an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate
the civilisation of his time, and not merely
its sins ; and that is precisely where he
was infinitely more profound than a modern
moralist. He saw that the actual crimes
were not the only evils ; that stolen jewels
and poisoned wine and obscene pictures
were merely the symptoms; that the dis-
169
SAVONAROLA
ease was the complete dependence upon
jewels and wine and pictures. This is a
thing constantly forgotten in judging of
ascetics and Puritans in old times. A
denunciation of harmless sports did not
always mean an ignorant hatred of what
no one but a narrow moralist would call
harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceed-
ingly enlightened hatred of what no one
but a narrow moralist would call harmless.
Ascetics are sometimes more advanced than
the average man, as well as less.
Such, at least, was the hatred in the
heart of Savonarola. He was making war
against no trivial human sins, but against
godless and thankless quiescence, against
getting used to happiness, the mystic sin
by which all creation fell. He was preach-
ing that severity which is the sign-manual
170
SAVONAROLA
of youth and hope. He was preaching
that alertness, that clean agility and
vigilance, which is as necessary to gain
pleasure as to gain holiness, as indis-
pensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic
has truly pointed out that Savonarola
could not have been fundamentally anti-
aesthetic, since he had such friends as
Michael Angelo, Botticelli, and Luca della
Robbia. The fact is that this purification
and austerity are even more necessary for
the appreciation of life and laughter than
for anjrthing else. To let no bird fly past
unnoticed, to spell patiently the stones
and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse
of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure,
and an education in gratitude.
The civilisation which surrounded Savon-
arola on every side was a civilisation which
171
SAVONAROLA
had already taken the wrong turn, the
turn that leads to endless inventions and
no discoveries, in which new things grow
old with confounding rapidity, but in which
no old things ever grow new. The mon-
strosity of the crimes of the Renaissance
was not a mark of imagination ; it was
a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss
of imagination. It is only when a man
has really ceased to see a horse as it is,
that he invents a centaur, only when he
can no longer be surprised at an ox, that
he worships the devil. Diablerie is the
stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the
dram-drinking of the artist. Savonarola
addressed himself to the hardest of all
earthly tasks, that of making men turn
back and wonder at the simplicities they
had learnt to ignore. It is strange that
172
SAVONAROLA
the most unpopular of all doctrines is the
doctrine which declares the common life
divine. Democracy, of which Savonarola
was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of
gospels ; there is nothing that so terrifies
men as the decree that they are all kings.
Christianity, in Savonarola's mind, identical
with democracy, is the hardest of gospels ;
there is nothing that so strikes men with
fear as the saying that they are all the sons
of God.
Savonarola and his republic fell. The
drug of despotism was administered to the
people, and they forgot what they had
been. There are some at the present day
who have so strange a respect for art and
letters, and for mere men of genius, that
they conceive the reign of the Medici to
be an improvement on that of the great
173
SAVONAROLA
Florentine republican. It is such men as
these and their civilisation that we have
at the present day to fear. We are sur-
rounded on many sides by the same
symptoms as those which awoke the un-
quenchable wrath of Savonarola — a hedon-
ism that is more sick of happiness than an
invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that
seeks the assistance of crime since it has
exhausted nature. In many modern works
we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly
Renaissance sense of the beauty of blood,
and poetry of murder. The bankrupt and
depraved imagination does not see that
a living man is far more dramatic than a
dead one. Along with this, as in the
time of the Medici, goes the falling back
into the arms of despotism, the hunger
for the strong man which is unknown
174.
SAVONAROLA
among strong men. The masterful hero
is worshipped as he is worshipped by the
readers of the * Bow Bells Novelettes,' and
for the same reason — a profound sense of
personal weakness. That tendency to de-
volve our duties descends on us, which
is the soul of slavery, alike whether for
its menial tasks it employs serfs or em-
perors. Against all this the great clerical
repubHcan stands in everlasting protest,
preferring his failure to his rival's success.
The issue is still between him and Lorenzo,
between the responsibilities of liberty and
the licence of slavery, between the perils of
truth and the security of silence, between
the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure.
The supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent
are assuredly among us, men for whom
even nations and empires only exist to
175
SAVONAROLA
satisfy the moment, men to whom the
last hot hour of summer is better than a
sharp and wintry spring. They have an
art, a literature, a political philosophy,
which are all alike valued for their im-
mediate effect upon the taste, not for
what they promise of the destiny of the
spirit. Their statuettes and sonnets are
rounded and perfect, while 'Macbeth' is
in comparison a fragment, and the Moses
of Michael Angelo a hint. Their cam-
paigns and battles are always called trium-
phant, while Caesar and Cromwell wept
for many humiliations. And the end of
it all is the hell of no resistance, the hell
of an unfathomable softness, until the
whole nature recoils into madness and the
chamber of civilisation is no longer merely
a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.
176
SAVONAROLA
This last and worst of human miseries
Savonarola saw afar off, and bent his whole
gigantic energies to turning the chariot into
another course. Few men understood his
object ; some called him a madman, some
a charlatan, some an enemy of human joy.
They would not even have understood if
he had told them, if he had said that he
was saving them from a calamity of con-
tentment which should be the end of joys
and sorrows alike. But there are those
to-day who feel the same silent danger,
and who bend themselves to the same
silent resistance. They also are supposed
to be contending for some trivial political
scruple.
Mr M'Hardy says, in defending Savon-
arola, that the number of fine works of
art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities
M 177
SAVONAROLA
has been much exaggerated. I confess
that I hope the pile contained stacks of
incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice
made that one real moment more real.
Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's
friend Michael Angelo would have piled all
his own statues one on top of the other,
and burnt them to ashes, if only he had
been certain that the glow transfiguring
the sky was the dawn of a younger and
wiser world.
178
THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER
SCOTT
Walter Scott is a writer who should
just now be re-emerging into his own
high place in letters, for unquestionably
the recent, though now dwindling, schools
of severely technical and sesthetic criticism
have been uiifavourable to him. He was
a chaotic and unequal writer, and if there
is one thing in which artists have im-
proved since his time, it is in consistency
and equality. It would perhaps be un-
kind to inquire whether the level of the
modern man of letters, as compared with
179
THE POSITION OF
Scott, is due to the absence of valleys or
the absence of mountains. But in any
case, we have learnt in our day to arrange
our literary effects carefully, and the only
point in which we fall short of Scott is
in the incidental misfortune that we have
nothing particular to arrange.
It is said that Scott is neglected by
modern readers ; if so, the matter could be
more appropriately described by saying that
modern readers are neglected by Provi-
dence. The ground of this neglect, in so
far as it exists, must be found, I suppose,
in the general sentiment that, like the
beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it
is surely a peculiar thing that in literature
alone a house should be despised because
it is too large, or a host impugned be-
cause he is too generous. If romance be
180
SIR WALTER SCOTT
really a pleasure, it is difficult to under-
stand the modern reader's consuming desire
to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure,
it is difficult to understand his desire to
have it at all. Mere size, it seems to me,
cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in
some disproportion. If some of Scott's
stories are dull and dilatory, it is not be-
cause they are giants but because they are
hunchbacks or cripples. Scott was very-
far indeed from being a perfect writer, but
I do not think that it can be shown that
the large and elaborate plan on which his
stories are built was by any means an
imperfection. He arranged his endless
prefaces, and his colossal introductions just
as an architect plans great gates and long
approaches to a really large house. He
did not share the latter-day desire to get
181
THE POSITION OF
quickly through a story. He enjoyed
narrative as a sensation; he did not wish
to swallow a story like a pill that it
should do him good afterwards. He de-
sired to taste it like a glass of port, that
it might do him good at the time. The
reader sits late at his banquets. His
characters have that air of immortality
which belongs to those of Dumas and
Dfckens. We should not be surprised to
meet them in any number of sequels.
Scott, in his heart of hearts, probably would
have liked to write an endless story without
either beginning or close.
Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore,
mysterious man. He will never be under-
stood until Romance is understood, and
that will be only when Time, Man, and
Eternity are understood. To say that Scott
182
SIR WALTER SCOTT
had more than any other man that ever
lived a sense of the romantic seems, in
these days, a slight and superficial tribute.
The whole modern theory arises from one
fundamental mistake — the idea that ro-
mance is in some viray a plaything with
life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing
upon the outside. No genuine criticism
of romance will ever arise until we have
grasped the fact that romance lies not
upon the outside of life but absolutely in
the centre of it. The centre of every
man's existence is a dream. Death, dis-
ease, insanity, are merely material acci-
dents, like toothache or a twisted ankle.
That these brutal forces always besiege and
often capture the citadel does not prove
that they are the citadel. The boast of
the realist (applying what the reviewers
183
THE POSITION OF
call his scalpel) is that he cuts into the
heart of life ; but he makes a very shallow
incision if he only reaches as deep as
habits and calamities and sins. Deeper
than all these lies a man's vision of him-
self, as swaggering and sentimental as a
penny novelette. The literature of can-
dour unearths innumerable weaknesses and
elements of lawlessness which is called
romance. It perceives superificial habits
like murder and dipsomania, but it does
not perceive the deepest of sins — the sin
of vanity — vanity which is the mother of
all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin
that is not shared with any boon com-
panion, or whispered to any priest.
In estimating, therefore, the ground of
Scott's pre-eminence in romance we must
absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that
184
SIR WALTER SCOTT
romance or adventure are merely material-
istic things involved in the tangle of a
plot or the multiplicity of drawn swords.
We must remember that it is, like tragedy
or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for
some dark and elemental reason which we
can never understand, this state of the
soul is evoked in us by the sight of cer-
tain places or the contemplation of certain
human crises, by a stream rushing under
a heavy and covered wooden bridge, or
by a man plunging a knife or sword
into tough timber. In the selection of
these situations which catch the spirit of
romance as in a net, Scott has never been
equalled or even approached. His finest
scenes eflfect us like fragments of a hilari-
ous dream. They have the same quality
which is often possessed by those nocturnal
185
THE POSITION OF
comedies — that of seeming more human
than our waking life — even while they are
less possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his
daughter and the old beggar crouching in
a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the
tide closes around them, are actually in the
coldest and bitterest of practical situations.
Yet the whole incident has a quality that
can only be called boyish. It is warmed
with all the colours of an incredible sun-
set. Rob Roy trapped in the Tolbooth,
and confronted with Bailie Nicol Jarvie,
draws no sword, leaps from no window,
affects none of the dazzling external acts
upon which contemporary romance depends,
yet that plain and humorous dialogue is
full of the essential philosophy of romance
which is an almost equal betting upon man
and destiny. Perhaps the most profoundly
186
SIR WALTER SCOTT
thrilling of all Scott's situations is that in
which the family of Colonel Mannering are
waiting for the carriage which may or may
not arrive by night to bring an unknown
man into a princely possession. Yet almost
the whole of that thrilling scene consists
of a ridiculous conversation about food, and
flirtation between a frivolous old lawyer and
a fashionable girl. We can say nothing
about what makes these scenes, except that
the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that
here the wind blows strong.
It is in this quality of what may be
called spiritual adventurousness that Scott
stands at so different an elevation to the
whole of the contemporary crop of roman-
cers who have followed the leadership of
Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great
and inspiriting revival of romance in our
187
THE POSITION OF
time, but it is partly frustrated in almost
every ease by this rooted conception that
romance consists in the vast multiplication
of incidents and the violent acceleration
of narrative. The heroes of Mr Stanley
Weyman scarcely ever have their swords
out of their hands ; the deeper presence of
romance is far better felt when the sword
is at the hip ready for innumerable adven-
tures too terrible to be pictured. The
Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time
to eat his supper except in the act of
leaping from a window or whilst his other
hand is employed in lunging with a rapier.
In Scott's heroes, on the other hand, there
is no characteristic so typical or so worthy
of honour as their disposition to linger
over their meals. The conviviality of the
Clerk of Copmanhurst or of Mr Pleydell,
188
SIR WALTER SCOTT
and the thoroughly solid things they are
described as eating, is one of the most
perfect of Scott's poetic touches. In short,
Mr Stanley Weyman is filled with the con-
viction that the sole essence of romance
is to move with insatiable rapidity from
incident to incident. In the truer romance
of Scott there is more of the sentiment
of * Oh 1 still delay, thou art so fair ' ;
more of a certain patriarchal enjoyment
of things as they are — of the sword by
the side and the wine-cup in the hand.
Romance, indeed, does not consist by any
means so much in experiencing adventures
as in being ready for them. How little the
actual boy cares for incidents in compari-
son to tools and weapons may be tested
by the fact that the most popular story
of adventure is concerned with a man who
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THE POSITION OF
lived for years on a desert island with two
guns and a sword, which he never had to
use on an enemy.
Closely connected with this is one of the
charges most commonly brought against
Scott, particularly in his own day — the
charge of a fanciful and monotonous in-
sistence upon the details of armour and
costume. The critic in the ' Edinburgh Re-
view ' said indignantly that he could toler-
ate a somewhat detailed description of the
apparel of Marmion, but when it came to
an equally detailed account of the apparel
of his pages and yeomen the mind could
bear it no longer. The only thing to be
said about that critic is that he had never
been a little boy. He foolishly imagined
that Scott valued the plume and dagger of
Marmion for Marmion's sake. Not being
190
SIR WALTER SCOTT
himself romantic, he could not understand
that Scott valued the plume because it was
a plume, and the dagger because it was a
dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons
with a manual materialistic love, as one
loves the softness of fur or the coolness
of marble. One of the profound philo-
sophical truths which are almost confined
to infants is this love of things, not for
their use or origin, but for their own
inherent characteristics, the child's love of
the toughness of wood, the wetness of
water, the magnificent soapiness of soap.
So it was with Scott, who had so much
of the child in him. Human beings were
perhaps the principal characters in his
stories, but they were certainly not the
only characters. A battle-axe was a per-
son of importance, a castle had a character
191
THE POSITION OF
and ways of its own. A church bell had
a word to say in the matter. Like a true
child, he almost ignored the distinction
between the animate and inanimate. A
two-handed sword might be carried only
by a menial in a procession, but it was
something important and immeasurably
fascinating — it was a two-handed sword.
There is one quality which is supreme
and continuous in Scott which is little
appreciated at present. One of the values
we have really lost in recent fiction is the
value of eloquence. The modern literary
artist is compounded of almost every man
except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and
Scott are certainly alike in this, that they
could both, if literature had failed, have
earned a living as professional demagogues.
The feudal heroes in the ' Waverley Novels '
192
SIR WALTER SCOTT
retort upon each other with a passionate
dignity, haughty and yet singularly human,
which can hardly be paralleled in political
eloquence except in * Julius Cagsar.* With
a certain fiery impartiality which stirs the
blood, Scott distributes his noble orations
equally among saints and villains. He may
deny a villain every virtue or triumph, but
he cannot endure to deny him a telling
word ; he will ruin a man, but he will
not silence him. In truth, one of Scott's
most splendid traits is his difficulty, or
rather incapacity, for despising any of his
characters. He did not scorn the most
revolting miscreant as the realist of to-day
commonly scorns his own hero. Though
his soul may be in rags, every man of
Scott can speak like a king.
This quality, as I have said, is sadly to
N 193
THE POSITION OF
seek in the fiction of the passing hour.
The realist would, of course, repudiate the
bare idea of putting a bold and brilliant
tongue in every man's head, but even where
the moment of the story naturally demands
eloquence the eloquence seems frozen in
the tap. Take any contemporary work of
fiction and turn to the scene where the
young Socialist denounces the millionaire,
and then compare the stilted sociological
lecture given by that self-sacrificing bore
with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's
declaration of himself, or Athelstane's de-
fiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of
human passion upon which high words and
great phrases are the resplendent foam is
just now at a low ebb. We have even
gone the length of congratulating ourselves
because we can see the mud and the
194
SIR WALTER SCOTT
monsters at the bottom. In politics there
is not a single man whose position is due
to eloquence in the first degree; its place
is taken by repartees and rejoinders purely
intellectual, like those of an omnibus con-
ductor. In discussing questions like the
farm-burning in South Africa no critic of
the war uses his material as Burke or Grat-
tan (perhaps exaggeratively) would have
used it — the speaker is content with facts
and expositions of facts. In another age
he might have risen and hurled that great
song in prose, perfect as prose and yet
rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilees
hurled at EUangowan, at the rulers of
Britain : ' Ride your ways, Laird of EUan-
gowan ; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram
— this day have ye quenched seven smok-
ing hearths. See if the fire in your ain
195
THE POSITION OF
parlour burns the blyther for that. Ye
have riven the thack of seven cottar houses.
Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster
for that. Ye may stable your stirks in
the sheilings of Dern-eleugh. See that the
hare does not couch on the hearthstane
of EUangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey
Bertram.'
The reason is, of course, that these men
are afraid of bombast and Scott was not.
A man will not reach eloquence if he is
afraid of bombast, just as a man will not
jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch.
As the object of all eloquence is to find
the least common denominator of men's
souls, to fall just within the natural com-
prehension, it cannot obviously have any
chance with a literary ambition which aims
at falling just outside it. It is quite right
196
SIR WALTER SCOTT
to invent subtle analyses and detached
criticisms, but it is unreasonable to expect
them to be punctuated with roars of popu-
lar applause. It is possible to conceive of
a mob shouting any central and simple
sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible
to think of a mob shouting a distinction
in terms. In the matter of eloquence, the
whole question is one of the immediate
effect of greatness, such as is produced
even by fine bombast. It is absurd to
call it merely superficial ; here there is no
question of superficiality ; we might as well
call a stone that strikes us between the
eyes merely superficial. The very word
'superficial' is founded on a fundamental
mistake about life, the idea that second
thoughts are best. The superficial impres-
sion of the world is by far the deepest.
197
THE POSITION OF
What we really feel, naturally and casually,
about the look of skies and trees and the
face of friends, that and that alone will
almost certainly remain our vital philosophy
to our dying day.
Scott's bombast, therefore, will always
be stirring to anyone who approaches it,
as he should approach all literature, as a
little child. We could easily excuse the
contemporary critic for not admiring melo-
dramas and adventure stories^ and Punch
and Judy, if he would admit that it was
a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibili-
ties. Beyond all question, it marks a lack
of literary instinct to be unable to simplify
one's mind at the first signal of the ad-
vance of romance. 'You do me wrong,'
said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca.
* Many a law, many a commandment have I
198
Sm WALTER SCOTT
broken, but my word, never.' *Die,' cries
Balfour of Burley to the villain in * Old
Mortality.' *Die, hoping nothing, believ-
ing nothing ' 'And fearing nothing,'
replies the other. This is the old and
honourable fine art of bragging, as it was
practised by the great worthies of antiquity.
The man who cannot appreciate it goes
along with the man who cannot appreciate
beef or claret or a game with children or
a brass band. They are afraid of mak-
ing fools of themselves, and are unaware
that that transformation has already been
triumphantly effected.
Scott is separated, then, from much of the
later conception of fiction by this quality
of eloquence. The whole of the best and
finest work of the modern novelist (such
as the work of Mr Henry James) is prim-
199
THE POSITION OF
arily concerned with that dehcate and fas-
cinating speech which burrows deeper and
deeper Uke a mole ; but we have wholly for-
gotten that speech which mounts higher and
higher like a wave and falls in a crashing
peroration. Perhaps the most thoroughly
brilliant and typical man of this decade is
Mr Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play
of ' Candida ' it is clearly a part of the
character of the Socialist clergyman that
he should be eloquent, but he is not elo-
quent, because the whole ' G. B. S.' con-
dition of mind renders impossible that poetic
simplicity which eloquence requires. Scott
takes his heroes and villains seriously, which
is, after all, the way that heroes and villains
take themselves — especially villains. It is
the custom to call these old romantic poses
artificial ; but the word artificial is the last
200
SIR WALTER SCOTT
and silliest evasion of criticism. There was
never anything in the world that was really
artificial. It had some motive or ideal be-
hind it, and generally a much better one
than we think.
Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is
not very necessary to speak, for faults are
generally and easily pointed out, while there
is yet no adequate valuation of the varieties
and contrasts of virtue. We have com-
piled a complete botanical classification of
the weeds in the poetical garden, but the
flowers still flourish neglected and name-
less. It is true, for example, that Scott
had an incomparably stiff and pedantic way
of dealing with his heroines: he made a
lively girl of eighteen refuse an offer in
the language of Dr Johnson. To him, as
to most men of his time, woman was not
201
THE POSITION OF
an individual, but an institution — a toast
that was drunk some time after that of
Church and King. But it is far better to
consider the difference rather as a special
merit, in that he stood for all those clean
and bracing shocks of incident which are
untouched by passion or weakness, for a
certain breezy bachelorhood, which is almost
essential to the literature of adventure.
With all his faults, and all his triumphs,
he stands for the great mass of natural
manliness which must be absorbed into art
unless art is to be a mere luxury and
freak. An appreciation of Scott might be
made almost a test of decadence. If ever
we lose touch with this one most reckless
and defective writer, it will be a proof to
us that we have erected round ourselves a
false cosmos, a world of lying and horrible
202
SIR WALTER SCOTT
perfection, leaving outside of it Walter
Scott and that strange old world which is
as confused and as indefensible and as in-
spiring and as healthy as he.
203
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