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Heretics.

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Heretics

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL.
A Romance. Cloth, i2tno.

ORTHODOXY.

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW.

THE BALL AND THE CROSS.

HERETICS

BY

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

LONDON: JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY

MDCCCCXIX

THB- PUMPTOl
NORWOOD' MAS

• PRESS

• U'S- A

CONTENTS

Page

I. Introductory Remarks on the Im-
portance of Othodoxy . . . . II

II. On the Negative Spirit . . . . 25

III. On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and

Making the World Small . .' . 38

IV. Mr. Bernard Shaw 54

V. Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants . 68

VI. Christmas and the Esthetes . . 92

VII. Omar and the Sacred Vine . . . 102

VIII. The Mildness or the Yellow Press . 113

IX. The Moods of Mr. George Moore . 128

X. On Sandals and Simplicity . . . 135

- XI. Science and the Savages . . . .142

XII. Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson . 153

XIII. Celts and Celtophiles 171

Contents

Page

XIV. On Certain Modern Writers and

the Institution of the Family . 179

XV. On Smart Novelists and the

Smart Set 196

XVI. On Mr. McCabe and a Divine

Frivolity 216

XVII. On the Wit of Whistler . . .234

XVIII. The Fallacy of the Young Nation 247

XIX. Slum Novelists and the Slums . 267

XX. Concluding Remarks on the Im-
portance of Orthodoxy . . . 285

TO MY FATHER

HERE TICS

I — Introductory Remarks on the Importance
of Orthodoxy

NOTHING more strangely indicates
an enormous and silent evil of mod-
ern society than the extraordinary
use which is made nowadays of the
word "orthodox." In former days the heretic
was proud of not being a heretic. It was
the kingdoms of the world and the police
and the judges who were heretics. He was
orthodox. He had no pride in having re-
belled against them; they had rebelled against
him. The armies with their cruel security, the
kings with their cold faces, the decorous pro-
cesses of State, the reasonable processes of
law — all these like sheep had gone astray.
The man was proud of being orthodox, was
proud of being right. If he stood alone 'in
a howling wilderness he was more than a
man; he was a church. He was the centre
of the universe; it was round him that the
stars swung. All the tortures torn out of
forgotten hells could not make him admit that
he was heretical. But a few modern phrases

Heretics

have made him boast of it. He says, with a
conscious laugh, "I suppose I am very hereti-
cal," and looks round for applause. The
word "heresy" not only means no longer being
wrong; it practically means being clear-headed
and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not
only no longer means being right; it practically
means being wrong. All this can mean one
thing, and one thing only. It means that
people care less for whether they are philosophi-
cally right. For obviously a man ought to con-
fess himself crazy before he confesses himself
heretical. The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought
to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The dyna-
miter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, what-
ever else he is, at least he is orthodox.

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philoso-
pher to set fire to another philosopher in Smith-
field Market because they do not agree in their
theory of the universe. That was done very
frequently in the last decadence of the Middle
Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But
there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd
and unpractical than burning a man for his
philosophy. This is the habit of saying that
his philosophy does not matter, and this is done
universally in the twentieth century, in the
decadence of the great revolutionary period.

Introductory Remarks

General theories are everywhere contemned;
the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed
with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism
itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolu-
tion itself is too much of a system; liberty it-
self is too much of a restraint. We will have
no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put
the view in a perfect epigram: "The golden rule
is that there is no golden rule." We are more
and more to discuss details in art, politics, liter-
ature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters;
his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion
on all things does not matter. He may turn
over and explore a million objects, but he must
not find that strange object, the universe; for
if he does he will have a religion, and be lost.
Everything matters — except everything.

Examples are scarcely needed of this total
levity on the subject of cosmic philosophy.
Examples are scarcely needed to show that,
whatever else we think of as affecting practical
affairs, we do not think it matters whether a
man is a pessimist or an optimist, a Cartesian
or a Hegelian, a materialist or a spiritualist.
Let me, however, take a random instance. At
any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a
man say, "Life is not worth living." We re-
gard it as we regard the statement that it is

13

Heretics

a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly
have any serious effect on the man or on the
world. And yet if that utterance were really
believed, the world would stand on its head.
Murderers would be given medals for saving
men from life; firemen would be denounced
for keeping men from death; poisons would
be used as medicines; doctors would be called
in when people were well; the Royal Humane
Society would be rooted out like a horde of
assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether
the conversational pessimist will strengthen or
disorganize society; for we are convinced that
theories do not matter.

This was certainly not the idea of those
who introduced our freedom. When the old
Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies,
their idea was that religious and philosophical
discoveries might thus be made. Their view
was that cosmic truth was so important that
every one ought to bear independent testimony.
The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so
unimportant that it cannot matter what any
one says. The former freed inquiry as men
loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry as
men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eat-
ing. Never has there been so little discussion
about the nature of men as now, when, for the

Introductory Remarks

first time, any one can discuss it. The old re-
striction meant that only the orthodox were
allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty
means that nobody is allowed to discuss it.
Good taste, the last and vilest of human super-
stitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all
the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was
bad taste to be an avowed atheist. Then came
the Bradlaughites, the last religious men, the
last men who cared about God ; but they could
not alter it. It is still bad taste to be an avowed
atheist. But their agony has achieved just this
— that now it is equally bad taste to be an
avowed Christian. Emancipation has only
locked the saint in the same tower of silence as
the heresiarch. Then we talk about Lord
Anglesey and the weather, and call it the com-
plete liberty of all the creeds.

But there are some people, nevertheless —
and I am one of them — who think that the most
practical and important thing about a man is
still his view of the universe. We think that
for a landlady considering a lodger, it is im-
portant to know his income, but still more
important to know his philosophy. We think
that for a general about to fight an enemy, it
is important to know the enemy's numbers, but
still more important to know the enemy's phi-

*5

Heretics

losophy. We think the question is not whether
the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but
whether, in the long run, anything else affects
them. In the fifteenth century men cross-ex-
amined and tormented a man because he
preached some immoral attitude; in the nine-
teenth century we feted and flattered Oscar
Wilde because he preached such an attitude,
and then broke his heart in penal servitude be-
cause he carried it out. It may be a question
which of the two methods was the more cruel;
there can be no kind of question which was the
more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition
has not at least the disgrace of having produced
a society which made an idol of the very same
man for preaching the very same things which
it made him a convict for practising.

Now, in our time, philosophy or religion,
our theory, that is, about ultimate things, has
been driven out, more or less simultaneously,
from two fields which it used to occupy. Gen-
eral ideals used to dominate literature. They
have been driven out by the cry of "art for art's
sake." General ideals used to dominate poli-
tics. They have been driven out by the cry
of "efficiency," which may roughly be trans-
lated as "politics for politics' sake." Persist-
ently for the last twenty years the ideals of
16

Introductory Remarks

order or liberty have dwindled in our books;
the ambitions of wit and eloquence have
dwindled in our parliaments. Literature has
purposely become less political; politics have
purposely become less literary. General theories
of the relation of things have thus been extruded
from both; and we are in a position to ask,
"What have we gained or lost by this extrusion ?
Is literature better, is politics better, for having
discarded the moralist and the philosopher?"

When everything about a people is for the
time growing weak and ineffective, it begins
to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a
man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first
time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms
talk not about their processes, but about their
aims. There cannot be any better proof of
the physical efficiency of a man than that he
talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the
world. And there cannot be any better proof
of the practical efficiency of a nation than that
it talks constantly of a journey to the end of
the world, a journey to the Judgment Day and
the New Jerusalem. There can be no stronger
sign of a coarse material health than the ten-
dency to run after high and wild ideals; it is in
the first exuberance of infancy that we cry for
the moon. None of the strong men in the

17

Heretics

strong ages would have understood what you
meant by working for efficiency. Hildebrand
would have said that he was working not for
efficiency, but for the Catholic Church. Danton
would have said that he was working not for
efficiency, but for liberty, equality, and frater-
nity. Even if the ideal of such men were
simply the ideal of kicking a man downstairs,
they thought of the end like men, not of the
process like paralytics. They did not say,
"Efficiently elevating my right leg, using, you
will notice, the muscles of the thigh and calf,

which are in excellent order, I " Their

feeling was quite different. They were so
filled with the beautiful vision of the man lying
flat at the foot of the staircase that in that
ecstasy the rest followed in a flash. In prac-
tice, the habit of generalizing and idealizing
did not by any means mean worldly weakness.
The time of big theories was the time of big
results. In the era of sentiment and fine words,
at the end of the eighteenth century, men were
really robust and effective. The sentiment-
alists conquered Napoleon. The cynics could
not catch De Wet. A hundred years ago our
affairs for good or evil were wielded trium-
phantly by rhetoricians. Now our affairs are
hopelessly muddled by strong, silent men.
18

Introductory Remarks

And just as this repudiation of big words and
big visions has brought forth a race of small
men in politics, so it has brought forth a race
of small men in the arts. Our modern poli-
ticians claim the colossal license of Caesar and
the Superman, claim that they are too practical
to be pure and too patriotic to be moral; but
the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is
Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our new artistic
philosophers call for the same moral license,
for a freedom to wreck heaven and earth with
their energy; but the upshot of it all is that a
mediocrity is Poet Laureate. I do not say
that there are no stronger men than these; but
will any one say that there are any men stronger
than those men of old who were dominated by
their philosophy and steeped in their religion?
Whether bondage be better than freedom may
be discussed. But that their bondage came to
more than our freedom it will be difficult for
any one to deny.

The theory of the unmorality of art has
established itself firmly in the strictly artistic
classes. They are free to produce anything
they like. They are free to write a "Paradise
Lost" in which Satan shall conquer God.
They are free to write a "Divine Comedy" in
which heaven shall be under the floor of hell.

19

Heretics

And what have they done? Have they pro-
duced in their universality anything grander
or more beautiful than the things uttered by
the fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid
Puritan schoolmaster? We know that they
have produced only a few roundels. Milton
does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats
them at their own irreverence. In all their
little books of verse you will not find a finer
defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you
find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery
Christian felt it who described Faranata lifting
his head as in disdain of hell. And the reason
is very obvious. Blasphemy is an artistic effect,
because blasphemy depends upon a philosophi-
cal conviction. Blasphemy depends upon be-
lief, and is fading with it. If any one doubts
this, let him sit down seriously and try to think
blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think
his family will find him at the end of the day
in a state of some exhaustion.

Neither in the world of politics nor that of
literature, then, has the rejection of general
theories proved a success. It may be that
there have been many moonstruck and mis-
leading ideals that have from time to time per-
plexed mankind. But assuredly there has
been no ideal in practice so moonstruck and
20

Introductory Remarks

misleading as the ideal of practicality. Nothing
has lost so many opportunities as the oppor-
tunism of Lord Rosebery. He is, indeed, a
standing symbol of this epoch — the man who
is theoretically a practical man, and practically
more unpractical than any theorist. Nothing
in this universe is so unwise as that kind of
worship of worldly wisdom. A man who is
perpetually thinking of whether this race or that
race is strong, of whether this cause or that
cause is promising, is the man who will never
believe in anything long enough to make it
succeed. The opportunist politician is like
a man who should abandon billiards because
he was beaten at billiards, and abandon golf
because he was beaten at golf. There is nothing
which is so weak for working purposes as this
enormous importance attached to immediate
victory. There is nothing that fails like success.
And having discovered that opportunism
does fail, I have been induced to look at it
more largely, and in consequence to see that
it must fail. I perceive that it is far more
practical to begin at the beginning and discuss
theories. I see that the men who killed each
other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion
were far more sensible than the people who are
quarrelling about the Education Act. For the

21

Heretics

Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a
reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first
of all, what was really holy. But our modern
educationists are trying to bring about a re-
ligious liberty without attempting to settle
what is religion or what is liberty. If the old
priests forced a statement on mankind, at least
they previously took some trouble to make it
lucid. It has been left for the modern mobs
of Anglicans and Nonconformists to persecute
for a doctrine without even stating it.

For these reasons, and for many more, I for
one have come to believe in going back to
fundamentals. Such is the general idea of
this book. I wish to deal with my most dis-
tinguished contemporaries, not personally or in
a merely literary manner, but in relation to the
real body of doctrine which they teach. I am
not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a
vivid artist or a vigorous personality; I am con-
cerned with him as a Heretic — that is to say,
a man whose view of things has the hardihood
to differ from mine. I am not concerned with
Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant
and one of the most honest men alive; I am
concerned with him as a Heretic — that is to
say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid,
quite coherent, and quite wrong. I revert to

22

Introductory Remarks

the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth cen-
tury, inspired by the general hope of getting
something done.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in
the street about something, let us say a lamp-
post, which many influential persons desire to
pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the
spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon
the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner
of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider,
my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be
in itself good " At this point he is some-
what excusably knocked down. All the people
make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post
is down in ten minutes, and they go about con-
gratulating each other on their unmediaeval prac-
ticality. But as things go on they do not work
out so easily. Some people have pulled the
lamp-post down because they wanted the elec-
tric light; some because they wanted old iron;
some because they wanted darkness, because
their deeds were evil. Some thought it not
enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some
acted because they wanted to smash municipal
machinery; some because they wanted to smash
something. And there is war in the night, no
man knowing whom ' he strikes. So, gradually
and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next

2 3

Heretics

day, there comes back the conviction that the
monk was right after all, and that all depends
on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what
we might have discussed under the gas-lamp,
we now must discuss in the dark.

24

II — On the Negative Spirit

MUCH has been said, and said
truly, of the monkish morbidity,
of the hysteria which has often
gone with the visions of hermits
or nuns. But let us never forget that this
visionary religion is, in one sense, necessarily
more wholesome than our modern and reason-
able morality. It is more wholesome for this
reason, that it can contemplate the idea of suc-
cess or triumph in the hopeless fight towards
the ethical ideal, in what Stevenson called, with
his usual startling felicity, "the lost fight of
virtue." A modern morality, on the other
hand, can only point with absolute conviction
to the horrors that follow breaches of law; its
only certainty is a certainty of ill. It can only
point to imperfection. It has no perfection to
point to. But the monk meditating upon
Christ of Buddha has in his mind an image of
perfect health, a thing of clear colours and
clean air. He may contemplate this ideal
wholeness and happiness far more than he
ought; he may contemplate it to the neglect or
exclusion of essential things; he may contem-
plate it until he has become a dreamer or a

25

Heretics

driveller; but still it is wholeness and happiness
that he is contemplating. He may even go
mad; but he is going mad for the love of sanity.
But the modern student of ethics, even if he
remains sane, remains sane from an insane
dread of insanity.

The anchorite rolling on the stones in a
frenzy of submission is a healthier person funda-
mentally than many a sober man in a silk hat
who is walking down Cheapside. For many
such are good only through a withering knowl-
edge of evil. I am not at this moment claim-
ing for the devotee anything more than this
primary advantage, that though he may be
making himself personally weak and miserable,
he is still fixing his thoughts largely on gigantic
strength and happiness, on a strength that has
no limits, and a happiness that has no end.
Doubtless there are other objections which can
be urged without unreason against the influence
of gods and visions in morality, whether in the
cell or street. But this advantage the mystic
morality must always have — it is always
jollier. A young man may keep himself from
vice by continually thinking of disease. He
may keep himself from it also by continually
thinking of the Virgin Mary. There may be
question about which method is the more

26

On the Negative Spirit

reasonable, or even about which is the more
efficient. But surely there can be no question
about which is the more wholesome.

I remember a pamphlet by that able and
sincere secularist, Mr. G. W. Foote, which
contained a phrase sharply symbolizing and
dividing these two methods. The pamphlet
was called "Beer and Bible," those two very
noble things, all the nobler for a conjunction
which Mr. Foote, in his stern old Puritan way,
seemed to think sardonic, but which I confess
to thinking appropriate and charming. I have
not the work by me, but I remember that Mr.
Foote dismissed very contemptuously any at-
tempts to deal with the problem of strong drink
by religious offices or intercessions, and said
that a picture of a drunkard's liver would be
more efficacious in the matter of temperance
than any prayer or praise. In that picturesque
expression, it seems to me, is perfectly embodied
the incurable morbidity of modern ethics. In
that temple the lights are low, the crowds kneel,
the solemn anthems are uplifted. But that
upon the altar to which all men kneel is no
longer the perfect flesh, the body and substance
of the perfect man; it is still flesh, but it is dis-
eased. It is the drunkard's liver of the New
27

Heretics

Testament that is marred for us, which we take
in remembrance of him.

Now, it is this great gap in modern ethics,
the absence of vivid pictures of purity and
spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the
real objection felt by so many sane men to the
realistic literature of the nineteenth century.
If any ordinary man ever said that he was
horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or
Maupassant, or by the plain language in which
they are spoken of, that ordinary man was lying.
The average conversation of average men
throughout the whole of modern civilization in
every class or trade is such as Zola would never
dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing
thus of these things a new habit. On the con-
trary, it is the Victorian prudery and silence
which is new still, though it is already dying.
The tradition of calling a spade a spade starts
very early in our literature and comes down
very late. But the truth is that the ordinary
honest man, whatever vague account he may
have given of his feelings, was not either dis-
gusted or even annoyed at the candour of the
moderns. What disgusted him, and very justly,
was not the presence of a clear realism, but the
absence of a clear idealism. Strong and genuine
religious sentiment has never had any objection
28

On the Negative Spirit

to realism; on the contrary, religion was the
realistic thing, the brutal thing, the thing that
called names. This is the great difference
between some recent developments of Non-
conformity and the great Puritanism of the
seventeenth century. It was the whole point
of the Puritans that they cared nothing for
decency. Modern Nonconformist newspapers
distinguish themselves by suppressing precisely
those nouns and adjectives which the founders
of Nonconformity distinguished themselves by
flinging at kings and queens. But if it was a
chief claim of religion that it spoke plainly about
evil, it was the chief claim of all that it spoke
plainly about good. The thing which is re-
sented, and, as I think, rightly resented, in that
great modern literature of which Ibsen is typi-
cal, is that while the eye that can perceive what
are the wrong things increases in an uncanny
and devouring clarity, the eye which sees what
things are right is growing mistier and mistier
every moment, till it goes almost blind with
doubt. If we compare, let us say, the morality
of the "Divine Comedy" with the morality of
Ibsen's Ghosts, we shall see all that modern
ethics have really done. No one, I imagine,
will accuse the author of the "Inferno" of an
early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian

29

Heretics

optimism. But Dante describes three moral
instruments — Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell,
the vision of perfection, the vision of improve-
ment, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only
one — Hell. It is often said, and with perfect
truth, that no one could read a play like Ghosts
and remain indifferent to the necessity of an
ethical self-command. That is quite true, and
the same is to be said of the most monstrous
and material descriptions of the eternal fire.
It is quite certain that realists like Zola do in
one sense promote morality — they promote
it in the sense in which the hangman promotes
it, in the sense in which the devil promotes it.
But they only affect that small minority which
will accept any virtue as long as we do not ask
them for the virtue of courage. Most healthy
people dismiss these moral dangers as they
dismiss the possibility of bombs or microbes.
Modern realists are indeed Terrorists, like the
dynamiters; and they fail just as much in their
effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dyna-
miters are well-meaning people engaged in
the task, so obviously ultimately hopeless, of
using science to promote morality.

I do not wish the reader to confuse me for a
moment with those vague persons who imagine
that Ibsen is what they call a pessimist. There
3°

On the Negative Spirit

are plenty of wholesome people in Ibsen, plenty
of good people, plenty of happy people, plenty
of examples of men acting wisely and things
ending well. That is not my meaning. My
meaning is that Ibsen has throughout, and
does not disguise, a certain vagueness and a
changing attitude as well as a doubting attitude
towards what is really wisdom and virtue in
this life — a vagueness which contrasts very
remarkably with the decisiveness with which
he pounces on something which he perceives
to be a root of evil, some convention, some de-
ception some ignorance. We know that the
hero of Ghosts is mad, and we know why he is
mad. We do also know that Dr. Stockman is
sane; but we do not know why he is sane.
Ibsen does not profess to know how virtue and
happiness are brought about, in the sense that
he professes to know how our modern sexual
tragedies are brought about. Falsehood works
ruin in The Pillars of Society, but truth works
equal ruin in the The Wild Duck. There are no
cardinal virtues of Ibsenism. There is no ideal
man of Ibsen. All this is not only admitted,
but vaunted in the most valuable and thought-
ful of all the eulogies upon Ibsen, Mr. Bernard
Shaw's "Quintessence of Ibsenism." Mr. Shaw
sums up Ibsen's teaching in the phrase, "The

31

Heretics

golden rule is that there is no golden rule."
In his eyes this absence of an enduring and
positive ideal, this absence of a permanent key
to virtue, is the one great Ibsen merit. I am
not discussing now with any fulness whether
this is so or not. All I venture to point out,
with an increased firmness, is that this omission,
good or bad, does leave us face to face with the
problem of a human consciousness filled with
very definite images of evil, and with no definite
image of good. To us light must be hence-
forward the dark thing — the thing of which
we cannot speak. To us, as to Milton's devils
in Pandemonium, it is darkness that is visible.
The human race, according to religion, fell
once, and in falling gained the knowledge of
good and of evil. Now we have fallen a second
time, and only the knowledge of evil remains
to us.

A great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken
disappointment, has in our time fallen on our
Northern civilization. All previous ages have
sweated and been crucified in an attempt to
realize what is really the right life, what was
really the good man. A definite part of the
modern world has come beyond question to
the conclusion that there is no answer to these
questions, that the most that we can do is to

3 2

On the Negative Spirit

set up a few notice-boards at places of obvious
danger, to warn men, for instance, against
drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the
mere existence of their neighbours. Ibsen is
the first to return from the baffled hunt to bring
us the tidings of great failure.

Every one of the popular modern phrases and
ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem
of what is good. We are fond of talking about
"liberty;" that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to
avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of
talking about "progress;" that is a dodge to
avoid discussing what is good. We are fond
of talking about "education;" that is a dodge to
avoid discussing what is good. The modern
man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary
standards and embrace liberty." This is,
logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is
good, but let it be considered good not to
decide it." He says, "Away with your old
moral formulae; I am for progress." This,
logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what
is good; but let us settle whether we are getting
more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor
morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race,
but in education." This, clearly expressed,
means, "We cannot decide what is good, but
let us give it to our children."

33

Heretics

Mr. H. G. Wells, that exceedingly clear-
sighted man, has pointed out in a recent work
that this has happened in connection with
economic questions. The old economists, he
says, made generalizations, and they were (in
Mr. Wells's view) mostly wrong. But the new
economists, he says, seem to have lost the
power of making any generalizations at all.
And they cover this incapacity with a general
claim to be, in specific cases, regarded as
"experts," a claim "proper enough in a hair-
dresser or a fashionable physician, but indecent
in a philosopher or a man of science." But in
spite of the refreshing rationality with which
Mr. Wells has indicated this, it must also be
said that he himself has fallen into the same
enormous modern error. In the opening pages
of that excellent book "Mankind in the
Making," he dismisses the ideals of art, reli-
gion, abstract morality, and the rest, and says
that he is going to consider men in their chief
function, the function of parenthood. He is
going to discuss life as a "tissue of births."
He is not going to ask what will produce satis-
factory saints or satisfactory heroes, but what
will produce satisfactory fathers and mothers.
The whole is set forward so sensibly that it
is a few moments at least before the reader

34

On the Negative Spirit

realizes that it is another example of uncon-
scious shirking. What is the good of begetting
a man until we have settled what is the good of
being a man? You are merely handing on to
him a problem you dare not settle yourself. It
is as if a man were asked, "What is the use of
a hammer?" and answered, "To make ham-
mers;" and when asked, "And of those ham-
mers, what is the use?" answered, "To make
hammers again." Just as such a man would
be perpetually putting off the question of the
ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all
the rest of us are by these phrases successfully
putting off the question of the ultimate value of
the human life.

The case of the general talk of "progress" is,
indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated to-day
"progress" is simply a comparative of which
we have not settled the superlative. We meet
every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or
brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of
progress — that is to say, we meet every pro-
posal of getting something that we know about,
with an alternative proposal of getting a great
deal more of nobody knows what. Progress,
properly understood, has, indeed, a most digni-
fied and legitimate meaning. But as used in
opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous.

35

Heretics

So far from it being the truth that the ideal of
progress is to be set against that of ethical or
religious finality, the reverse is the truth. No-
body has any business to use the word "pro-
gress" unless he has a definite creed and a
cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be pro-
gressive without being doctrinal ; I might almost
say that nobody can be progressive without
being infallible — at any rate, without believing
in some infallibility. For progress by its very
name indicates a direction ; and the moment we
are in the least doubtful about the direction, we
become in the same degree doubtful about the
progress. Never perhaps since the beginning
of the world has there been an age that had less
right to use the word "progress" than we. In
the Catholic twelfth century, in the philosophic
eighteenth century, the direction may have been
a good or a bad one, men may have differed
more or less about how far they went, and in
what direction, but about the direction they did
in the main agree, and consequently they had
the genuine sensation of progress. But it is
precisely about the direction that we disagree.
Whether the future excellence lies in more law
or less law, in more liberty or less liberty;
whether property will be finally concentrated or
finally cut up; whether sexual passion will reach

36

On the Negative Spirit

its sanest in an almost virgin intellectualism or
in a full animal freedom ; whether we should love
everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with
Nietszche; — these are the things about which
we are actually fighting most. It is not merely
true that the age which has settled least what is
progress is this "progressive" age. It is, more-
over, true that the people who have settled least
what is progress are the most "progressive"
people in it. The ordinary mass, the men who
have never troubled about progress, might be
trusted perhaps to progress. The particular
individuals who talk about progress would
certainly fly to the four winds of heaven when
the pistol-shot started the race. I do not,
therefore, say that the word "progress" is un-
meaning; I say it is unmeaning without the
previous definition of a moral doctrine, and
that it can only be applied to groups of persons
who hold that doctrine in common. Progress
is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically
evident that it is illegitimate for us. It is a
sacred word, a word which could only rightly
be used by rigid believers and in the ages of
faith.

37

Ill — On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and making
the World Small

THERE is no such thing on earth as
an uninteresting subject; the only
thing that can exist is an uninter-
ested person. Nothing is more keenly
required than a defence of bores. When Byron
divided humanity into the bores and bored, he
omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist
entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the
bored, among whom he counted himself. The
bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn
happiness, may, in some sense, have proved
himself poetical. The bored has certainly
proved himself prosaic.

We might, no doubt, find it a nuisance to
count all the blades of grass or all the leaves
of the trees; but this would not be because of
our boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack
of boldness and gaiety. The bore would go
onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of
grass as splendid as the swords of an army.
The bore is stronger and more joyous than we
are; he is a demi-god — nay, he is a god. For
it is the gods who do not tire of the iteration

38

On Mr. Rudyard Kipling

of things; to them the nightfall is always new,
and the last rose as red as the first.

The sense that everything is poetical is a
thing solid and absolute; it is not a mere matter
of phraseology or persuasion. It is not merely
true, it is ascertainable. Men may be chal-
lenged to deny it; men may be challenged to
mention anything that is not a matter of poetry. •
I remember a long time ago a sensible sub-
editor coming up to me with a book in his
hand, called "Mr. Smith," or "The Smith
Family," or some such thing. He said, "Well,
you won't get any of your damned mysticism
out of this," or words to that effect. I am
happy to say that I undeceived him; but the
victory was too obvious and easy. In most
cases the name is unpoetical, although the fact
is poetical. In the case of Smith, the name is
so poetical that it must be an arduous and
heroic matter for the man to live up to it.
The name of Smith is the name of the one
trade that even kings respected, it could claim
half the glory of that arma virumque which all
epics acclaimed. The spirit of the smithy is
so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed
in a million poems, and every blacksmith is a
harmonious blacksmith.

Even the village children feel that in some

39

Heretics

dim way the smith is poetic, as the grocer and
the cobbler are riot poetic, when they feast on
the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the
cavern of that creative violence. The brute
repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of
man, the strongest of earthly metals, the
wierdest of earthly elements, the unconquer-
able iron subdued by its only conqueror, the
wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the
steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and
the whole legend of arms, all these things are
written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on
the visiting-card of Mr. Smith. Yet our
novelists call their hero "Aylmer Valence,"
which means nothing, or "Vernon Raymond,"
which means nothing, when it is in their power
to give him this sacred name of Smith — this
name made of iron and flame. It would be
very natural if a certain hauteur, a certain
carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip,
distinguished every one whose name is Smith.
Perhaps it does; I trust so. Whoever else
are parvenus, the Smiths are not parvenus.
From the darkest dawn of history this clan has
gone forth to battle; its trophies are on every
hand; its name is everywhere; it is older than
the nations, and its sign is the Hammer of
Thor.

40

On Mr. Rudyard Kipling

But as I also remarked, it is not quite the
usual case. It is common enough that common
things should be poetical; it is not so common
that common names should be poetical. In
most cases it is the name that is the obstacle.
A great many people talk as if this claim of ours,
that all things are poetical, were a mere literary
ingenuity, a play on words. Precisely the con-
trary is true. It is the idea that some things
are not poetical which is literary, which is a
mere product of words. The word "signal-
box" is unpoetical. But the thing signal-box
is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in
an agony of vigilance, light blood-red and sea-
green fires to keep other men from death.
That is the plain, genuine description of what
it is; the prose only comes in with what it is
called. The word "pillar-box" is unpoetical.
But the thing pillar-box is not unpoetical; it
is the place to which friends and lovers commit
their messages, conscious that when they have
done so they are sacred, and not to be touched,
not only by others, but even (religious touch!)
by themselves. That red turret is one of the
last of the temples. Posting a letter and getting
married are among the few things left that are
entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic
a thing must be irrevocable. We think a

41

Heretics

pillar-box prosaic, because there is no rhyme
to it. We think a pillar-box unpoetical, because
we have never seen it in a poem. But the
bold fact is entirely on the side of poetry. A
signal-box is only called a signal-box; it is a
house of life and death. A pillar-box is only
called a pillar-box; it is a sanctuary of human
words. If you think the name of "Smith"
prosaic, it is not because you are practical and
sensible; it is because you are too much affected
with literary refinements. The name shouts
poetry at you. If you think of it otherwise,
it is because you are steeped and sodden with
verbal reminiscences, because you remember
everything in Punch or Comic Cuts about Mr.
Smith being drunk or Mr. Smith being hen-
pecked. All these things were given to you
poetical. It is only by a long and elaborate
process of literary effort that you have made
them prosaic.

Now, the first and fairest thing to say about
Rudyard Kipling is that he has borne a brilliant
part in thus recovering the lost provinces of
poetry. He has not been frightened by that
brutal materialistic air which clings only to
words; he has pierced through to the roman-
tic, imaginative matter of the things themselves.
He has perceived the significance and philos-
42

On Mr. Rudyard Kipling

ophy of steam and of slang. Steam may be,
if you like, a dirty by-product of science.
Slang may be, if you like, a dirty by-product
of language. But at least he has been among
the few who saw the divine parentage of these
things, and knew that where there is smoke
there is fire — that is, that wherever there is the
foulest of things, there also is the purest.
Above all, he has had something to say, a
definite view of things to utter, and that always
means that a man is fearless and faces every-
thing. For the moment we have a view of the
universe, we possess it.

Now, the message of Rudyard Kipling, that
upon which he has really concentrated, is the
only thing worth worrying about in him or in
any other man. He has often written bad
poetry, like Wordsworth. He has often said
silly things, like Plato. He has often given
way to mere political hysteria, like Gladstone.
But no one can reasonably doubt that he means
steadily and sincerely to say something, and
the only serious question is, What is that which
he has tried to say? Perhaps the best way of
stating this fairly will be to begin with that
element which has been most insisted by him-
self and by his opponents — I mean his interest
in militarism. But when we are seeking for the

43

Heretics

real merits of a man it is unwise to go to his
enemies, and much more foolish to go to
himself.

Now, Mr. Kipling is certainly wrong in his
worship of militarism, but his opponents are,
generally speaking, quite as wrong as he. The
evil of militarism is not that it shows certain
men to be fierce and haughty and excessively
^warlike. The evil of militarism is that it shows
most men to be tame and timid and excessively
peaceable. The professional soldier gains more
and more power as the general courage of a
community declines. Thus the Pretorian guard
became more and more important in Rome as
Rome became more and more luxurious and
feeble. The military man gains the civil power
in proportion as the civilian loses the military
virtues. And as it was in ancient Rome so it is
in contemporary Europe. There never was a
time when nations were more militarist. There
never was a time when men were less brave.
All ages and all epics have sung of arms and
the man; but we have effected simultaneously
the deterioration of the man and the fantastic
perfection of the arms. Militarism demon-
strated the decadence of Rome, and it demon-
strates the decadence of Prussia.

And unconsciously Mr. Kipling has proved

44

On Mr. Rudyard Kipling

this, and proved it admirably. For in so far as
his work is earnestly understood the military
trade does not by any means emerge as the
most important or attractive. He has not
written so well about soldiers as he has about
railway men or bridge builders, or even jour-
nalists. The fact is that what attracts Mr.
Kipling to militarism is not the idea of courage,
but the idea of discipline. There was far more
courage to the square mile in the Middle Ages,
when no king had a standing army, but every
man had a bow or sword. But the fascination
of the standing army upon Mr. Kipling is not
courage, which scarcely interests him, but dis-
cipline, which is, when all is said and done,
his primary theme. The modern army is not
a miracle of courage; it has not enough oppor-
tunities, owing to, the cowardice of everybody
else. But it is really a miracle of organization,
and that is the truly Kiplingite ideal. Kipling's
subject is not that valour which properly belongs
to war, but that interdependence and efficiency
which belongs quite as much to engineers, or
sailors, or mules, or railway engines. And
thus it is that when he writes of engineers, or
sailors, or mules, or steam-engines, he writes at
his best. The real poetry, the "true romance"
which Mr. Kipling has taught, is the romance

45

Heretics

of the division of labour and the discipline of
all the trades. He sings the arts of peace much
more accurately than the arts of war. And his
main contention is vital and valuable. Every-
thing is military in the sense that everything
depends upon obedience. There is no perfectly
epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irrespon-
sible place. Everywhere men have made the
way for us with sweat and submission. We
may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of
divine carelessness. But we are glad that the
net-maker did not make the hammock in a fit
of divine carelessness. We may jump upon a
child's rocking-horse for a joke. But we are
glad that the carpenter did not leave the legs of it
unglued for a joke. So far from having merely
preached that a soldier cleaning his side-arm is
to be adored because he is military, Kipling
at his best and clearest has preached that the
baker baking loaves and the tailor cutting coats
is as military as anybody.

Being devoted to this multitudinous vision
of duty, Mr. Kipling is naturally a cosmopolitan.
He happens to find his examples in the British
Empire, but almost any other empire would do
as well, or, indeed, any other highly civilized
country. That which he admires in the British
army he would find even more apparent in the
46

On Mr. Rudyard Kipling

German army; that which he desires in the
British police he would find flourishing in the
French police. The ideal of discipline is not
the whole of life, but it is spread over the whole
of the world. And the worship of it tends to
confirm in Mr. Kipling a certain note of worldly
wisdom, of the experience of the wanderer, which
is one of the genuine charms of his best work.
The great gap in his mind is what may be
roughly called the lack of patriotism — that is
to say, he lacks altogether the faculty of attach-
ing himself to any cause or community finally
and tragically; for all finality must be tragic.
He admires England, but he does not love her;
for we admire things with reasons, but love
them without reasons. He admires England
because she is strong, not because she is Eng-
lish. There is no harshness in saying this, for,
to do him justice, he avows it with his usual
picturesque candour. In a very interesting
poem, he says that —

"If England was what England seems "

— that is, weak and inefficient; if England were
not what (as he believes) she is — that is, power-
ful and practical —

"How quick we'd chuck l erl But she ain't! "

He admits, that is, that his devotion is the

47

Heretics

result of a criticism, and this is quite enough

to put it in another category altogether from

the patriotism of the Boers, whom he hounded

down in South Africa. In speaking of the

really patriotic peoples, such as the Irish, he

has some difficulty in keeping a shrill irritation

out of his language. The frame of mind which

he really describes with beauty and nobility is

the frame of mind of the cosmopolitan man who

has seen men and cities.

" For to admire and for to see,
For to be'old this world so wide."

He is a perfect master of that light melancholy
with which a man looks back on having been
the citizen of many communities, of that light
melancholy with which a man looks back on
having been the lover of many women. He is
the philanderer of the nations. But a man
may have learnt much about women in flirta-
tions, and still be ignorant of first love; a man
may have known as many lands as Ulysses,
and still be ignorant of patriotism.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling has asked in a cele-
brated epigram what they can know of England
who know England only. It is a far deeper
and sharper question to ask, "What can they
know of England who know only the world?"
for the world does not include England any
48

On Mr. Rudyprd Kipling

more than it includes the Church. The moment
we care for anything deeply, the world — that is,
all the other miscellaneous interests — becomes
our enemy. Christians showed it when they
talked of keeping one's self "unspotted from
the world;" but lovers talk of it just as much
when they talk of the "world well lost." Astro-
nomically speaking, I understand that England
is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose
that the Church was a part of the world, and
even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But
they all felt a certain truth — the truth that the
moment you love anything the world becomes
your foe. Thus Mr. Kipling does certainly
know the world; he is a man of the world,
with all the narrowness that belongs to those
imprisoned in that planet. He knows England
as an intelligent English gentleman knows
Venice. He has been to England a great
many times; he has stopped there for long
visits. But he does not belong to it, or to
any place; and the proof of it is this, that he
thinks of England as a place. The moment
we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes.
We live like a tree with the whole strength of
the universe.

The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world
than the peasant. He is always breathing an

49

Heretics

air of locality. London is a place, to be com-
pared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be
compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is
not a place, since there, at least, live men who
regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an
air of locality, but the winds of the world. The
man in the saloon steamer has seen all the
races of men, and he is thinking of the things
that divide men — diet, dress, decorum, rings
in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in
Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red
paint among the modern Britons. The man
in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all;
but he is thinking of the things that unite men
— hunger and babies, and the beauty of women,
and the promise or menace of the sky. Mr.
Kipling, with all his merits, is the globe-trotter;
he has not the patience to become part of any-
thing. So great and genuine a man is not to
be accused of a merely cynical cosmopolitanism;
still, his cosmopolitanism is his weakness. That
weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his
finest poems, "The Sestina of the Tramp
Royal," in which a man declares that he can
endure anything in the way of hunger or horror,
but not permanent presence in one place. In
this there is certainly danger. The more dead
and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels

On Mr. Rudyard Kipling

about; dust is like this and the thistle-down and
the High Commissioner in South Africa. Fer-
tile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy
fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile.
In the heated idleness of youth we were all
rather inclined to quarrel with the implication
of that proverb which says that a rolling stone
gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask,
"Who wants to gather moss, except silly old
ladies?" But for all that we begin to perceive
that the proverb is right* The rolling stone
rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling
stone is dead. The moss is silent because the
moss is alive.

The truth is that exploration and enlarge-
ment make the world smaller. The telegraph
and the steamboat make the world smaller.
The telescope makes the world smaller; it is
only the microscope that makes it larger.
Before long the world will be cloven with a
war between the telescopists and the micro-
scopists. The first study large things and live
in a small world; the second study small things
and live in a large world. It is inspiriting
without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round
the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or
China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is
not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of

Si

Heretics

rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with
strange virtues buried like treasures. If we
wish to understand them it must not be as
tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty
of children and the great patience of poets. To
conquer these places is to lose them. The
man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with
fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with
large ideas. His mind creates distance; the
motor-car stupidly destroys it. Moderns think
of the earth as a globe, as something one can
easily get round, the spirit of a schoolmistress.
This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually
made about Cecil Rhodes. His enemies say
that he may have had large ideas, but he was
a bad man. His friends say that he may have
been a bad man, but he certainly had large
ideas. The truth is that he was not a man
essentially bad, he was a man of much geniality
and many good intentions, but a man with
singularly small views. There is nothing large
about painting the map red ; it is an innocent
game for children. It is just as easy to think
in continents as to think in cobble-stones. The
difficulty comes in when we seek to know the
substance of either of them. Rhodes' prophe-
cies about the Boer resistance are an admirable
comment on how the "large ideas" prosper

52

On Mr. Rudyard Kipling

when it is not a question of thinking in conti-
nents, but of understanding a few two-legged
men. And under all this vast illusion of the
cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its
Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on
concerned with this tree or that temple, with
this harvest or that drinking-song, totally
uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it
watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly
with a smile of amusement, motor-car civiliza-
tion going its triumphant way, outstripping
time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing
nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the
solar system, only to find the sun cockney and
the stars suburban.

S3

IV — Mr. Bernard Shaw

IN the glad old days, before the rise of
modern morbidities, when genial old Ibsen
filled the world with wholesome joy, and
the kindly tales of the forgotten Emile
Zola kept our firesides merry and pure, it used
to be thought a disadvantage to be misunder-
stood. It may be doubted whether it is always
or even generally a disadvantage. The man
who is misunderstood has always this advan-
tage over his enemies, that they do not know
his weak point or his plan of campaign. They
go out against a bird with nets and against a
fish with arrows. There are several modern
examples of this situation. Mr. Chamberlain,
for instance, is a very good one. He constantly
eludes or vanquishes his opponents because his
real powers and deficiencies are quite different to
those with which he is credited, both by friends
and foes. His friends depict him as a strenuous
man of action; his opponents depict him as a
coarse man of business; when, as a fact, he is
neither one nor the other, but an admirable
romantic orator and romantic actor. He has
one power which is the soul of melodrama — the
54

Mr. Bernard Shaw

power of pretending, even when backed by a

huge majority, that he has his back to the wall.

For all mobs are so far chivalrous that their

heroes must make some show of misfortune —

that sort of hypocrisy is the homage that strength

pays to weakness. He talks foolishly and yet

very finely about his own city that has never

deserted him. He wears a flaming and fantastic

flower, like a decadent minor poet. As for his

bluffness and toughness and appeals to common

sense, all that is, of course, simply the first

trick of rhetoric. He fronts his audiences with

the venerable affectation of Mark Antony —

"I am no orator, as Brutus is;
But as you know me all, a plain blunt man."

It is the whole difference between the aim of
the orator and the aim of any other artist, such
as the poet or the sculptor. The aim of the
sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor;
the aim of the orator is to convince us that he
is not an orator. , Once let Mr. Chamberlain
be mistaken for a practical man, and his game is
won. He has only to compose a theme on
empire, and people will say that these plain men
say great things on great occasions. He has
only to drift in the large loose notions common
to all artists of the second rank, and people will
say that business men have the biggest ideals
55

Heretics

after all. All his schemes have ended in smoke ;
he has touched nothing that he did not confuse.
About his figure there is a Celtic pathos; like
the Gaels in Matthew Arnold's quotation, "he
went forth to battle, but he always fell." He is
a mountain of proposals, a mountain of failures;
but still a mountain. And a mountain is always
romantic.

There is another man in the modern world
who might be called the antithesis of Mr.
Chamberlain in every point, who is also a
standing monument of the advantage of being
misunderstood. Mr. Bernard Shaw is always
represented by those who disagree with him,
and, I fear, also (if such exist) by those who
agree with him, as a capering humorist, a
dazzling acrobat, a quick-change artist. It is
said that he cannot be taken seriously, that he
will defend anything or attack anything, that
he will do anything to startle and amuse. All
this is not only untrue, but it is, glaringly, the
opposite of the truth; it is as wild as to say
that Dickens had not the boisterous masculinity
of Jane Austen. The whole force and triumph
of Mr. Bernard Shaw lie in the fact that he is
a thoroughly consistent man. So far from his
power consisting in jumping through hoops or
standing on his head, his power consists in

S6

Mr. Bernard Shaw

holding his own fortress night and day. He
puts the Shaw test rapidly and rigorously to
everything that happens in heaven or earth.
His standard never varies. The thing which
weak-minded revolutionists and weak-minded
Conservatives really hate (and fear) in him, is
exactly this, that his scales, such as they are,
are held even, and that his law, such as it is, is
justiy enforced. You may attack his principles,
as I do; but I do not know of any instance in
which you can attack their application. If he
dislikes lawlessness, he dislikes the lawlessness
of Socialists as much as that of Individualists.
If he dislikes the fever of patriotism, he dislikes
it in Boers and Irishmen as well as in English-
men. If he dislikes the vows and bonds of
marriage, he dislikes still more the fiercer
bonds and wilder vows that are made by law-
less love. If he laughs at the authority of
priests, he laughs louder at the pomposity of
men of science. If he condemns the irresponsi-
bility of faith, he condemns with a sane con-
sistency the equal irresponsibility of art. He
has pleased all the bohemians by saying that
women are equal to men; but he has infuriated
them by suggesting that men are equal to
women. He is almost mechanically just; he
has something of the terrible quality of a

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Heretics

machine. The man who is really wild and
whirling, the man who is really fantastic and
incalculable, is not Mr. Shaw, but the average
Cabinet Minister. It is Sir Michael Hicks-
Beach who jumps through hoops. It is Sir
Henry Fowler who stands on his head. The
solid and respectable statesman of that type
does really leap from position to position; he
is really ready to defend anything or nothing;
he is really not to be taken seriously. I know
perfectly well what Mr. Bernard Shaw will be
saying thirty years hence; he will be saying
what he has always said. If thirty years hence
I meet Mr. Shaw, a reverent being with a silver
beard sweeping the earth, and say to him,
"One can never, of course, make a verbal
attack upon a lady," the patriarch will lift his
aged hand and fell me to the earth. We know,
I say, what Mr. Shaw will be saying thirty
years hence. But is there any one so darkly
read in stars and oracles that he will dare to
predict what Mr. Asquith will be saying thirty
years hence?

The truth is, that it is quite an error to sup-
pose that absence of definite convictions gives
the mind freedom and agility. A man who
believes something is ready and witty, because
he has all his weapons about him. he can
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Mr. Bernard Shaw

apply his test in an instant. The man engaged
in conflict with a man like Mr. Bernard Shaw
may fancy he has ten faces; similarly a man
engaged against a brilliant duellist may fancy
that the sword of his foe has turned to ten
swords in his hand. But this is not really
because the man is playing with ten swords, it
is because he is aiming very straight with one.
Moreover, a man with a definite belief always
appears bizarre, because he does not change
with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star,
and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope.
Millions of mild black-coated men call them-
selves sane and sensible merely because they
always catch the fashionable insanity, because
they are hurried into madness after madness
by the maelstrom of the world.

People accuse Mr. Shaw and many much
sillier persons of "proving that black is white."
But they never ask whether the current colour-
language is always correct. Ordinary sensible
phraseology sometimes calls black white, it
certainly calls yellow white and green white
and reddish-brown white. We call wine ' ' white
wine" which is as yellow as a Blue-coat boy's
legs. We call grapes "white grapes" which
are manifestly pale green. We give to the
European, whose complexion is a sort of pink

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Heretics

drab, the horrible title of a "white man" — a
picture more blood-curdling than any spectre in
Poe.

Now, it is undoubtedly true that if a man
asked a waiter in a restaurant for a bottle of
yellow wine and some greenish-yellow grapes,
the waiter would think him mad. It is un-
doubtedly true that if a Government official,
reporting on the Europeans in Burmah, said,
"There are only two thousand pinkish men
here," he would be accused of cracking jokes,
and kicked out of his post. But it is equally
obvious that both men would have come to
grief through telling the strict truth. That too
truthful man in the restaurant; that too truth-
ful man in Burmah, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. He
appears eccentric and grotesque because he will
not accept the general belief that white is yellow.
He has based all his brilliancy and solidity upon
the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth
is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must
of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have
made fiction to suit ourselves.

So much then a reasonable appreciation will
find in Mr. Shaw to be bracing and excellent.
He claims to see things as they are; and some
things, at any rate, he does see as they are,
which the whole of our civilization does not
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Mr. Bernard Shaw

see at all. But in Mr. Shaw's realism there is
something lacking, and that thing which is
lacking is serious.

Mr. Shaw's old and recognized philosophy
was that powerfully presented in "The Quin-
tessence of Ibsenism." It was, in brief, that
conservative ideals were bad, not because they
were conservative, but because they were ideals.
Every ideal prevented men from judging justly
the particular case; every moral generalization
oppressed the individual; the golden rule was
there was no golden rule. And the objection
to this is simply that it pretends to free men,
but really restrains them from doing the only
thing that men want to do. What is the good
of telling a community that it has every liberty
except the liberty to make laws? The liberty
to make laws is what constitutes a free people.
And what is the good of telling a man (or a
philosopher) that he has every liberty except
the liberty to make generalizations. Making
generalizations is what makes him a man.
In short, when Mr. Shaw forbids men to have
strict moral ideals, he is acting like one who
should forbid them to have children. The
saying that "the golden rule is that there is no
golden rule," can, indeed, be simply answered
by being turned round. That there is no
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Heretics

golden rule is itself a golden rule, or rather it
is much worse than a golden rule. It is an
iron rule; a fetter on the first movement of a
man.

But the sensation connected with Mr. Shaw
in recent years has been his sudden development
of the religion of the Superman. He who had
to all appearance mocked at the faiths in the
forgotten past discovered a new god in the un-
imaginable future. He who had laid all the
blame on ideals set up the most impossible
of all ideals, the ideal of a new creature. But
the truth, nevertheless, is that any one who
knows Mr. Shaw's mind adequately, and ad-
mires it properly, must have guessed all this
long ago.

For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never
seen things as they really are. If he had he
would have fallen on his knees before them.
He has always had a secret ideal that has
withered all the things of this world. He has
all the time been silently comparing humanity
with something that was not human, with a
monster from Mars, with the Wise Man of
the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the
Fabians, with Julius Caesar, with Siegfried, with
the Superman. Now, to have this inner and
merciless standard may be a very good thing,
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Mr. Bernard Shaw

or a very bad one, it may be excellent or un-
fortunate, but it is not seeing things as they
are. It is not seeing things as they are to think
first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and
then call every man a cripple for only having
two. It is not seeing things as they are to
start with a vision of Argus with his hundred
eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes
as if he had only one. And it is not seeing
things as they are to imagine a demi-god of
infinite mental clarity, who may or may not
appear in the latter days of the earth, and then
to see all men as idiots. And this is what Mr.
Shaw has always in some degree done. When
we really see men as they are, we do not criti-
cise, but worship; and very rightly. For a
monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous
thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull, and a
queer tenderness for this place or that baby, is
truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. It
is only the quite arbitrary and priggish habit of
comparison with something else which makes it
possible to be at our ease in front of him. A
sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and prac-
tical; the mere facts would make our knees
knock under as with religious fear. It is the
fact that every instant of conscious life is an
unimaginable prodigy. It is the fact that every

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Heretics

face in the street has the incredible unexpect-
edness of a fairy-tale. The thing which pre-
vents a man from realizing this is not any
clear-sightedness or experience, it is simply a
habit of pedantic and fastidious comparisons
between one thing and another. Mr. Shaw,
on the practical side perhaps the most humane
man alive, is in this sense inhumane. He has
even been infected to some extent with the
primary intellectual weakness of his new master,
Nietzsche, the strange notion that the greater
and stronger a man was the more he would
despise other things. The greater and stronger
a man is the more he would be inclined to pros-
trate himself before a periwinkle. That Mr.
Shaw keeps a lifted head and a contemptuous
face before the colossal panorama of empires
and civilizations, this does not in itself convince
one that he sees things as they are. I should
be most effectively convinced that he did if I
found him staring with religious astonishment
at his own feet. "What are those two beauti-
ful and industrious beings," I can imagine him
murmuring to himself, "whom I see every-
where, serving me I know not why? What
fairy godmother bade them come trotting out
of elfland when I was born ? What god of the
borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must
6 4

Mr. Bernard Shaw

I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run
away with me?"

The truth is, that all genuine appreciation
rests on a certain mystery of humility and
almost of darkness. The man who said,
"Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he
shall not be disappointed," put the eulogy
quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth
is, "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for
he shall be gloriously surprised." The man
who expects nothing sees redder roses than
common men can see, and greener grass, and
a more startling sun. Blessed is he that ex-
pecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities
and the mountains; blessed is the meek, for
he shall inherit the earth. Until we realize that
things might not be, we cannot realize that
things are. Until we see the background of
darkness we cannot admire the light as a single
and created thing. As soon as we have seen
that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden,
blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonen-
tity we underrate the victory of God, and can
realize none of the trophies of His ancient
war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth
that we know nothing until we know nothing.

Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect
in the greatness of Mr. Shaw, the only answer

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Heretics

to his claim to be a great man, that he is not
easily pleased. He is an almost solitary excep-
tion to the general and essential maxim, that
little things please great minds. , And from this
absence of that most uproarious of all things,
humility, comes incidentally the peculiar insist-
ence on the Superman. After belabouring a
great many people for a great many years for
being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered,
with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful
whether any existing human being with two
legs can be progressive at all. Having come to
doubt whether humanity can be combined with
progress, most people, easily pleased, would
have elected to abandon progress and remain
with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily
pleased, decides to throw over humanity with
all its limitations and go in for progress for its
own sake. If man, as we know him, is inca-
pable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw
asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for
a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse
had tried a rather bitter food for some years on
a baby, and on discovering that it was not
suitable, should not throw away the food and
ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of
window, and ask for a new baby. Mr. Shaw
cannot understand that the thing which is
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Mr. Bernard Shaw

valuable and lovable in our eyes is man — the
old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, fail-
ing, sensual, respectable man. And the things
that have been founded on this creature im-
mortally remain; the things that have been
founded on the fancy of the Superman have
died with the dying civilizations which alone
have given them birth. When Christ at a sym-
bolic moment was establishing His great society,
He chose for its corner-stone neither the bril-
liant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler,
a snob, a coward — in a word, a man. And
upon this rock He has built His Church, and
the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it.
All the empires and the kingdoms have failed,
because of this inherent and continual weak-
ness, that they were founded by strong men
and upon strong men. But this one thing, the
historic Christian Church, was founded on a
weak man, and for that reason it is indestruc-
tible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest
link.

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V — Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

WE ought to see far enough into a
hypocrite to see even his sincerity.
We ought to be interested in that
darkest and most real part of a
man in which dwell not the vices that he does
not display, but the virtues that he cannot.
And the more we approach the problems of
human history with this keen and piercing
charity, the smaller and smaller space we shall
allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind. The
hypocrites shall not deceive us into thinking
them saints; but, neither shall they deceive us
into thinking them hypocrites. And an in-
creasing number of cases will crowd into our
field of inquiry, cases in which there is really
no question of hypocrisy at all, cases in which
people were so ingenuous that they seemed
absurd, and so absurd that they seemed dis-
ingenuous.

There is one striking instance of an unfair
charge of hypocrisy. It is always urged against
the religious in the past, as a point of incon-
sistency and duplicity, that they combined a
profession of almost crawling humility with
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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

a keen struggle for earthly success and consider-
able triumph in attaining it. It is felt as a
piece of humbug that a man should be very
punctilious in calling himself a miserable sinner,
and also very punctilious in calling himself
King of France. But the truth is that there is
no more conscious inconsistency between the
humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a
Christian than there is between the humility of
a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth
is that there are no things for which men will
make such herculean efforts as the things of
which they know they are unworthy. There
never was a man in love who did not declare
that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he
was going to have his desire. And there never
was a man in love who did not declare also that
he ought not to have it. The whole secret of
the practical success of Christendom lies in the
Christian humility, however imperfectly ful-
filled. For with the removal of all question of
merit or payment, the soul is suddenly released
for incredible voyages. If we ask a sane man
how much he merits, his mind shrinks in-
stinctively and instantaneously. It is doubtful
whether he merits six feet of earth. But if you
ask him what he can conquer — he can conquer
the stars. Thus comes the thing called Ro-
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Heretics

mance, a purely Christian product. A man
cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn
dragons and hippogriffs. The mediaeval Europe
which asserted humility gained Romance; the
civilization which gained Romance has gained
the habitable globe. How different the Pagan
and Stoical feeling was from this has been
admirably expressed in a famous quotation.
Addison makes the great Stoic say —

" 'Tis not in mortals to command success;
But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it."

But the spirit of Romance and Christendom,
the spirit which is in every lover, the spirit
which has bestridden the earth with European
adventure, is quite opposite. 'Tis not in mor-
tals to deserve success. But we'll do more,
Sempronius; we'll obtain it.

And this gay humility, this holding of our-
selves lightly and yet ready for an infinity of
unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple
that every one has supposed that it must be
something quite sinister and mysterious. Hu-
mility is so practical a virtue that men think
it must be a vice. Humility is so successful
that it is mistaken for pride. It is mistaken
for it all the more easily because it generally
goes with a certain simple love of splendour
which amounts to vanity. Humility will al-

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ways, by preference, go clad in scarlet and
gold; pride in that which refuses to let gold
and scarlet impress it or please it too much.
In a word, the failure of this virtue actually
lies in its success; it is too successful as an
investment to be believed in as a virtue. Hu-
mility is not merely too good for this world;
it is too practical for this world; I had almost
said it is too worldly for this world.

The instance most quoted in our day is the
thing called the humility of the man of science;
and certainly it is a good instance as well as a
modern one. Men find it extremely difficult
to believe that a man who is obviously uproot-
ing mountains and dividing seas, tearing down
temples and stretching out hands to the stars,
is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks
to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby
and follow his harmless old nose. When a
man splits a grain of sand and the universe is
turned upside down in consequence, it is diffi-
cult to realize that to the man who did it, the
splitting of the grain is the great affair, and the
capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one. It
is hard to enter into the feelings of a man who
regards a new heaven and a new earth in the
light of a by-product. But undoubtedly it was
to this almost eerie innocence of the intellect

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Heretics

that the great men of the great scientific period,
which now appears to be closing, owed their
enormous power and triumph. If they had
brought the heavens down like a house of cards
their plea was not even that they had done it
on principle; their quite unanswerable plea was
that they had done it by accident. Whenever
there was in them the least touch of pride in
what they had done, there was a good ground
for attacking them; but so long as they were
wholly humble, they were wholly victorious.
There were possible answers to Huxley; there
was no answer possible to Darwin. He was
convincing because of his unconsciousness; one
might almost say because of his dulness. This
childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane
in the world of science. Men of science are
beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase
is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud
of their humility. They are beginning to be
aesthetic, like the rest of the world, beginning
to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to
talk of the creeds they imagine themselves to
have destroyed, of the discoveries that their
forbears made. Like the modern English,
they are beginning to be soft about their own
hardness. They are becoming conscious of their
own strength — that is, they are growing weaker.
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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

But one purely modern man has emerged in
the strictly modern decades who does carry into
our world the clear personal simplicity of the
old world of science. One man of genius we
have who is an artist, but who was a man of
science, and who seems to be marked above all
things with this great scientific humility. I
mean Mr. H. G. Wells. And in his case, as
in the others above spoken of, there must be
a great preliminary difficulty in convincing the
ordinary person that such a virtue is predicable
of such a man. Mr. Wells began his literary
work with violent visions — visions of the last
pangs of this planet; can it be that a man who
begins with violent visions is humble? He
went on to wilder and wilder stories about carv-
ing beasts into men and shooting angels like
birds. Is the man who shoots angels and carves
beasts into men humble? Since then he has
done something bolder than either of these blas-
phemies; he has prophesied the political future
of all men; prophesied it with aggressive author-
ity and a ringing decision of detail. Is the
prophet of the future of all men humble? It
will indeed be difficult, in the present condition
of current thought about such things as pride
and humility, to answer the query of how a
man can be humble who does such big things

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Heretics

and such bold things. For the only answer is
the answer which I gave at the beginning of
this essay. It is the humble man who does the
big things. It is the humble man who does
the bold things. It is the humble man who has
the sensational sights vouchsafed to him, and
this for three obvious reasons: first, that he
strains his eyes more than any other men to see
them; second, that he is more overwhelmed and
uplifted with them when they come ; third, that
he records them more exactly and sincerely and
with less adulteration from his more common-
place and more conceited everyday self. Ad-
ventures are to those to whom they are most
unexpected — that is, most romantic. Adven-
tures are to the shy: in this sense adventures
are to the unadventurous.

Now, this arresting mental humility in Mr.
H. G. Wells may be, like a great many other
things that are vital and vivid, difficult to illus-
trate by examples, but if I were asked for an
example of it, I should have no difficulty about
which example to begin with. The most inter-
esting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he
is the only one of his many brilliant contem-
poraries who has not stopped growing. One
can lie awake at night and hear him grow.
Of this growth the most evident manifestation
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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

is indeed a gradual change of opinions; but it
is no mere change of opinions. It is not a
perpetual leaping from one position to another
like that of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite
continuous advance along a quite solid road
in a quite definable direction. But the chief
proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and
vanity is the fact that it has been upon the
whole in advance from more startling opinions
to more humdrum opinions. It has been even
in some sense an advance from unconventional
opinions to conventional opinions. This fact
fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be
no poseur. Mr. Wells once held that the upper
classes and the lower classes would be so much
differentiated in the future that one class would
eat the other. Certainly no paradoxical char-
latan who had once found arguments for so
startling a view would ever have deserted it
except for something yet more startling. Mr.
Wells has deserted it in favour of the blameless
belief that both classes will be ultimately sub-
ordinated or assimilated to a sort of scientific
middle class, a class of engineers. He has
abandoned the sensational theory with the same
honourable gravity and simplicity with which
he adopted it. Then he thought it was true;
now he thinks it is not true. He has come to

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the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can
come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view
is the right one. It is only the last and wildest
kind of courage that can stand on a tower before
ten thousand people and tell them that twice
two is four.

Mr. H. G. Wells exists at present in a gay
and exhilarating progress of conservativism.
He is finding out more and more that conven-
tions, though silent, are alive. As good an
example as any of this humility and sanity of
his may be found in his change of view on
the subject of science and marriage. He once
held, I believe, the opinion which some singular
sociologists still hold, that human creatures
could successfully be paired and bred after the
manner of dogs or horses. He no longer holds
that view. Not only does he no longer hold
that view, but he has written about it in "Man-
kind in the Making" with such smashing sense
and humour, that I find it difficult to believe
that anybody else can hold it either. It is true
that his chief objection to the proposal is that it
is physically impossible, which seems to me a
very slight objection, and almost negligible
compared with the others. The one objection
to scientific marriage which is worthy of final
attention is simply that such a thing could only
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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

be imposed on unthinkable slaves and cowards.
I do not know whether the scientific marriage-
mongers are right (as they say) or wrong (as
Mr. Wells says) in saying that medical super-
vision would produce strong and healthy men.
I am only certain that if it did, the first act of
the strong and healthy men would be to smash
the medical supervision.

The mistake of all that medical talk lies in
the very fact that it connects the idea of health
with the idea of care. What has health to do
with care? Health has to do with carelessness.
In special and abnormal cases it is necessary to
have care. When we are peculiarly unhealthy
it may be necessary to be careful in order to be
healthy. But even then we are only trying to
be healthy in order to be careless. If we are
doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick
men, and they ought to be told to be careful.
But when we are sociologists we are addressing
the normal man, we are addressing humanity.
And humanity ought to be told to be reckless-
ness itself. For all the fundamental functions
of a healthy man ought emphatically to be per-
formed with pleasure and for pleasure; they
emphatically ought not to be performed with
precaution or for precaution. A man ought to
eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy,

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Heretics

and emphatically not because he has a body to
sustain. A man ought to take exercise not
because he is too fat, but because he loves foils
or horses or high mountains, and loves them
for their own sake. And a man ought to marry
because he has fallen in love, and emphatically
not because the world requires to be populated.
The food will really renovate his tissues as long
as he is not thinking about his tissues. The
exercise will really get him into training so long
as he is thinking about something else. And
the marriage will really stand some chance of
producing a generous-blooded generation if it
had its origin in its own natural and generous
excitement. It is the first law of health that
our necessities should not be accepted as neces-
sities; they should be accepted as luxuries.
Let us, then, be careful about the small things,
such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything
that can be managed with care. But in the
name of all sanity, let us be careless about
the important things, such as marriage, or
the fountain of our very life will fail.

Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough
of the narrower scientific outlook to see that
there are some things which actually ought not
to be scientific. He is still slightly affected
with the great scientific fallacy; I mean the

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habit of beginning not with the human soul,
which is the first thing a man learns about,
but with some such thing as protoplasm, which
is about the last. The one defect in his splendid
mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently
allow for the stuff or material of men. In his
new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief
point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original
sin. If he had begun with the human soul —
that is, if he had begun on himself — he would
have found original sin almost the first thing
to be believed in. He would have found, to
put the matter shortly, that a permanent pos-
sibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact
of having a self, and not from any accidents
of education or ill-treatment. And the weak-
ness of all Utopias is this, that they take the
greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be
overcome, and then give an elaborate account
of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They
first assume that no man will want more than
his share, and then are very ingenious in ex-
plaining whether his share will be delivered by
motor-car or balloon. And an even stronger
example of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human
psychology can be found in his cosmopolitan-
ism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic
boundaries. He says in his innocent way that

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Utopia must be a world-state, or else people
might make war on it. It does not seem to
occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it
were a world-state we should still make war
on it to the end of the world. For if we admit
that there must be varieties in art or opinion
what sense is there in thinking there will not
be varieties in government? The fact is very
simple. Unless you are going deliberately to
prevent a thing being good, you cannot prevent
it being worth fighting for. It is impossible to
prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, be-
cause it is impossible to prevent a possible
conflict between ideals. If there were no
longer our modern strife between nations,
there would only be a strife between Utopias.
For the highest thing does not tend to union
only; the highest thing tends also to differentia-
tion. You can often get men to fight for the
union; but you can never prevent them from
fighting also for the differentiation. This va-
riety in the highest thing is the meaning of the
fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of the
great European civilization. It is also, inci-
dentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the
Trinity.

But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells's
philosophy is a somewhat deeper one, one that
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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

he expresses in a very entertaining manner in
the introductory part of the new Utopia. His
philosophy in some sense amounts to a denial
of the possibility of philosophy itself. At least,
he maintains that there are no secure and re-
liable ideas upon which we can rest with a final
mental satisfaction. It will be both clearer,
however, and more amusing to quote Mr. Wells
himself.

He says, "Nothing endures, nothing is pre-
cise and certain (except the mind of a pedant).
. . . Being indeed! — there is no being, but a
universal becoming of individualities, and Plato
turned his back on truth when he turned to-
wards his museum of specific ideals." Mr.
Wells says, again, "There is no abiding thing
in what we know. We change from weaker to
stronger lights, and each more powerful light
pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and
reveals fresh and different opacities below."
Now, when Mr. Wells says things like this, I
speak with all respect when I say that he does
not observe an evident mental distinction. It
cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in
what we know. For if that were so we should
not know it all and should not call it knowledge.
Our mental state may be very different from
that of somebody else some thousands of years

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back; but it cannot be entirely different, or
else we should not be conscious of a difference.
Mr. Wells must surely realize the first and sim-
plest of the paradoxes that sit by the springs
of truth. He must surely see that the fact of
two things being different implies that they are
similar. The hare and the tortoise may differ
in the quality of swiftness, but they must agree
in the quality of motion. The swiftest hare
cannot be swifter than an isosceles triangle or
the idea of pinkness. When we say the hare
moves faster, we say that the tortoise moves.
And when we say of a thing that it moves, we
say, without need of other words, that there
are things that do not move. And even in the
act of saying that things change, we say that
there is something unchangeable.

But certainly the best example of Mr. Wells's
fallacy can be found in the example which he
himself chooses. It is quite true that we see a
dim light which, compared with a darker thing,
is light, but which, compared with a stronger
light, is darkness. But the quality of light
remains the same thing, or else we should not
call it a stronger light or recognize it as such.
If the character of light were not fixed in the
mind, we should be quite as likely to call a
denser shadow a stronger light, or vice versd.
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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

If the character of light became even for an
instant unfixed, if it became even by a hair's-
breadth doubtful, if, for example, there crept
into our idea of light some vague idea of blue-
ness, then in that flash we have become doubtful
whether the new light has more light or less.
In brief, the progress may be as varying as a
cloud, but the direction must be as rigid as a
French road. North and South are relative in
the sense that I am North of Bournemouth and
South of Spitzbergen. But if there be any
doubt of the position of the North Pole, there
is in equal degree a doubt of whether I am
South of Spitzbergen at all. The absolute idea
of light may be practically unattainable. We
may not be able to procure pure light. We may
not be able to get to the North Pole. But
because the North Pole is unattainable, it does
not follow that it is indefinable. And it is only
because the North Pole is not indefinable that
we can make a satisfactory map of Brighton and
Worthing.

In other words, Plato turned his face to
truth, but his back on Mr. H. G. Wells, when
he turned to his museum of specified ideals.
It is precisely here that Plato shows his sense.
It is not true that everything changes; the
things that change are all the manifest and

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Heretics

material things. There is something that does
not change; and that is precisely the abstract
quality, the invisible idea. Mr. Wells says
truly enough, that a thing which we have seen
in one connection as dark we may see in another
connection as light. But the thing common to
both incidents is the mere idea of light — which
we have not seen at all. Mr. Wells might
grow taller and taller for unending aeons till
his head was higher than the loneliest star.
I can imagine his writing a good novel about
it. In that case he would see the trees first
as tall things and then as short things; he
would see the clouds first as high and then as
low. But there would remain with him through
the ages in that starry loneliness the idea of
tallness; he would have in the awful spaces for
companion and comfort the definite conception
that he was growing taller and not (for instance)
growing fatter.

And now it comes to my mind that Mr.
H. G. Wells actually has written a very delight-
ful romance about men growing as tall as trees;
and that here, again, he seems to me to have
been a victim of this vague relativism. "The
Food of the Gods" is, like Mr. Bernard Shaw's
play, in essence a study of the Superman idea.
And it lies, I think, even through the veil of

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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

a half-pantomimic allegory, open to the same
intellectual attack. We cannot be expected to
have any regard for a great creature if he does
not in any manner conform to our standards.
For unless he passes our standard of greatness
we cannot even call him great. Nietszche
summed up all that v is interesting in the Super-
man idea when he said, "Man is a thing which
has to be surpassed." But the very word
"surpass" implies the existence of a standard
common to us and the thing surpassing us.
If the Superman is more manly than men are,
of course they will ultimately deify him, even
if they happen to kill him first. But if he is
simply more supermanly, they may be quite
indifferent to him as they would be to another
seemingly aimless monstrosity. He must sub-
mit to our test even in order to overawe us.
Mere force or size even is a standard; but that
alone will never make men think a man their
superior. Giants, as in the wise old fairy-tales,
are vermin. Supermen, if not good men, are
vermin.

"The Food of the Gods" is the tale of "Jack
the Giant-Killer" told from the point of view
of the giant. This has not, I think, been done
before in literature; but I have little doubt that
the psychological substance of it existed in fact.

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I have little doubt that the giant whom Jack
killed did regard himself as the Superman. It
is likely enough that he considered Jack a
narrow and parochial person who wished to
frustrate a great forward movement of the life-
force. If (as not unfrequently was the case)
he happened to have two heads, he would point
out the elementary maxim which declares them
to be better than one. He would enlarge on
the subtle modernity of such an equipment,
enabling a giant to look at a subject from two
points of view, or to correct himself with
promptitude. But Jack was the champion of
the enduring human standards, of the principle
of one man one head and one man one con-
science, of the single head and the single heart
and the single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed
by the question of whether the giant was a par-
ticularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know
was whether he was a good giant — that is, a
giant who was any good to us. What were the
giant's religious views; what his views on politics
and the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of
children — or fond of them only in a dark and
sinister sense? To use a fine phrase for emo-
tional sanity, was his heart in the right place?
Jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword
in order to find out.

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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

The old and correct story of Jack the Giant-
Killer is simply the whole story of man; if it
were understood we should need no Bibles or
histories. But the modern world in particular
does not seem to understand it at all. The
modern world, like Mr. Wells, is on the side
of the giants; the safest place, and therefore the
meanest and the most prosaic. The modern
world, when it praises its little Caesars, talks
of being strong and brave : but it does not seem
to see the eternal paradox involved in the con-
junction of these ideas. The strong cannot be
brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet
again, in practice, only those who can be brave
can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.
The only way in which a giant could really
keep himself in trainuig against the inevitable
Jack would be by continually fighting other
giants ten times as big as himself. That is
by ceasing to be a giant and becoming a Jack.
Thus that sympathy with the small or the
defeated as such, with which we Liberals and
Nationalists have been often reproached, is not
a useless sentimentalism at all, as Mr. Wells
and his friends fancy. It is the first law of
practical courage. To be in the weakest camp
is to be in the strongest school. Nor can I
imagine anything that would do humanity more

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Heretics

good than the advent of a race of Supermen, for
them to fight little dragons. If the Superman
is better than we, of course we need not fight
him; but in that case, why not call him the
Saint? But if he is merely stronger (whether
physically, mentally, or morally stronger, I do
not care a farthing), then he ought to have to
reckon with us at least for all the strength we
have. It we are weaker than he, that is no
reason why we should be weaker than ourselves.
If we are not tall enough to touch the giant's
knees, that is no reason why we should become
shorter by falling on our own. But that is
at bottom the meaning of all modern hero-
worship and celebration of the Strong Man,
the Caesar, the Superman. That he may be
something more than man, we must be some-
thing less.

Doubtless there is an older and better hero-
worship than this. But the old hero was a
being who, like Achilles, was more human than
humanity itself. Nietzsche's Superman is cold
and friendless. Achilles is so foolishly fond of
his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony
of his bereavement. Mr. Shaw's sad Caesar
says in his desolate pride, "He who has never
hoped can never despair." The Man-God of
old answers from his awful hill, "Was ever
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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

sorrow like unto my sorrow?" A great man
is not a man so strong that he feels less than
other men; he is a man so strong that he feels
more. And when Nietszche says, "A new com-
mandment I give to you, 'be hard,'" he is
really saying, "A new commandment I give to
you, 'be dead.'" Sensibility is the definition
of life.

I recur for a last word to Jack the Giant-
Killer. I have dwelt on this matter of Mr.
Wells and the giants, not because it is specially
prominent in his mind; I know that the Super-
man does not bulk so large in his cosmos as
in that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have dwelt on
it for the opposite reason; because this heresy
of immoral hero-worship has taken, I think, a
slighter hold of him, and may perhaps still be
prevented from perverting one of the best
thinkers of the day. In the course of "The
New Utopia" Mr. Wells makes more than one
admiring allusion to Mr. W. E. Henley. That
clever and unhappy man lived in admiration of
a vague violence, and was always going back to
rude old tales and rude old ballads, to strong
and primitive literatures, to find the praise of
strength and the justification of tryanny. But
he could not find it. It is not there. The
primitive literature is shown in the tale of Jack

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Heretics

the Giant-Killer. The strong old literature is
all in praise of the weak. The rude old tales
are as tender to minorities as any modern
political idealist. The rude old ballads are as
sentimentally concerned for the under-dog as
the Aborigines Protection Society. When men
were tough and raw, when they lived amid
hard knocks and hard laws, when they knew
what fighting really was, they had only two
kinds of songs. The first was a rejoicing that
the weak had conquered the strong, the second
a lamentation that the strong had, for once in a
way, conquered the weak. For this defiance of
the statu quo, this constant effort to alter the
existing balance, this premature challenge to
the powerful, is the whole nature and inmost
secret of the psychological adventure which is
called man. It is his strength to disdain
strength. The forlorn hope is not only a real
hope, it is the only real hope of mankind. In
the coarsest ballads of the greenwood men are
admired most when they defy, not only the
king, but what is more to the point, the hero.
The moment Robin Hood becomes a sort of
Superman, that moment the chivalrous chron-
icler shows us Robin thrashed by a poor tinker
whom he thought to thrust aside. And the
chivalrous chronicler makes Robin Hood re-
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Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants

ceive the thrashing in a glow of admiration.
This magnanimity is not a product of modern
humanitarianism; it is not a product of any-
thing to do with peace. This magnanimity is
merely one of the lost arts of war. The Henley-
ites call for a sturdy and fighting England, and
they go back to the fierce old stories of the
sturdy and fighting English. And the thing
that they find written across that fierce old
literature everywhere, is " the policy of Majuba."

VI — Christmas and the Msthetes

THE world is round, so round that the
schools of optimism and pessimism
have been arguing from the begin-
ning whether it is the right way up.
The difficulty does not arise so much from the
mere fact that good and evil are mingled in
roughly equal proportions; it arises chiefly from
the fact that men always differ about what parts
are good and what evil. Hence the difficulty
which besets "undenominational religions."
They profess to include what is beautiful in all
creeds, but they appear to many to have col-
lected all that is dull in them. All the colours
mixed together in purity ought to make a per-
fect white. Mixed together on any human
paint-box, they make a thing like mud, and a
thing very like many new religions. Such a
blend is often something much worse than any
one creed taken separately, even the creed of
the Thugs. The error arises from the difficulty
of detecting what is really the good part and
what is really the bad part of any given religion.
And this pathos falls rather heavily on those
persons who have the misfortune to think of
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Christmas and the Msthetes

some religion or other, that the parts commonly
counted good are bad, and the parts commonly
counted bad are good.

It is tragic to admire and honestly admire a
human group, but to admire it in a photographic
negative. It is difficult to congratulate all their
whites on being black and all their blacks on
their whiteness. This will often happen to us
in connection with human religions. Take two
institutions which bear witness to the religious
energy of the nineteenth century. Take the
Salvation Army and the philosophy of Auguste
Comte.

The usual verdict of educated people on the
Salvation Army is expressed in some such words
as these: "I have no doubt they do a great
deal of good, but they do it in a vulgar and
profane style; their aims are excellent, but their
methods are wrong." To me, unfortunately,
the precise reverse of this appears to be the
truth. I do not know whether the aims of
the Salvation Army are excellent, but I am
quite sure their methods are admirable. Then-
methods are the methods of all intense and
hearty religions; they are popular like all relig-
ion, military like all religion, public and sen-
sational like all religion. They are not reverent
any more than Roman Catholics are reverent,

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Heretics

for reverence in the sad and delicate meaning
of the term reverence is a thing only possible
to infidels. That beautiful twilight you will
find in Euripides, in Renan, in Matthew Arnold;
but in men who believe you will not find it —
you will find only laughter and war. A man
cannot pay that kind of reverence to truth
solid as marble; they can only be reverent
towards a beautiful lie. And the Salvation
Army, though their voice has broken out in
a mean environment and an ugly shape, are
really the old voice of glad and angry faith,
hot as the riots of Dionysus, wild as the gar-
goyles of Catholicism, not to be mistaken for
a philosophy. Professor Huxley, in one of his
clever phrases, called the Salvation Army
"corybantic Christianity." Huxley was the
last and noblest of those Stoics who have never
understood the Cross. If he had understood
Christianity he would have known that there
never has been, and never can be, any Chris-
tianity that is not corybantic.

And there is this difference between the mat-
ter of aims and the matter of methods, that to
judge of the aims of a thing like the Salvation
Army is very difficult, to judge of their ritual
and atmosphere very easy. No one, perhaps,
but a sociologist can see whether General

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Booth's housing scheme is right. But any
healthy person can see that banging brass
cymbals together must be right. A page of
statistics, a plan of model dwellings, anything
which is rational, is always difficult for the lay
mind. But the thing which is irrational any
one can understand. That is why religion came
so early into the world and spread so far, while
science came so late into the world and has not
spread at all. History unanimously attests the
fact that it is only mysticism which stands
the smallest chance of being understanded of the
people. Common sense has to be kept as an
esoteric secret in the dark temple of culture.
And so while the philanthropy of the Salva-
tionists and its genuineness may be a reasonable
matter for the discussion of the doctors, there
can be no doubt about the genuineness of their
brass bands, for a brass band is purely spiritual,
and seeks only to quicken the internal life.
The object of philanthropy is to do good; the
object of religion is to be good, if only for a
moment, amid a crash of brass.

And the same antithesis exists about another
modern religion — I mean the religion of Comte,
generally known as Positivism, or the worship
of humanity. Such men as Mr. Frederic Har-
rison, that brilliant and chivalrous philosopher,

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Heretics

who still, by his mere personality, speaks for the
creed, would tell us that he offers us the philos-
ophy of Comte, but not all Comte's fantastic
proposals for pontiffs and ceremonials, the new
calendar, the new holidays and saints' days.
He does not mean that we should dress our-
selves up as priests of humanity or let off fire-
works because it is Milton's birthday. To the
solid English Comtist all this appears, he con-
fesses, to be a little absurd. To me it appears
the only sensible part of Comtism. As a
philosophy it is unsatisfactory. It is evidently
impossible to worship humanity, just as it is
impossible to worship the Savile Club; both
are excellent institutions to which we may
happen to belong. But we perceive clearly
that the Savile Club did not make the stars
and does not fill the universe. And it is surely
unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the
Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism,
and then to ask men to worship a being who
is ninety million persons in one God, neither con-
founding the persons nor dividing the substance.
But if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient,
the folly of Comte was wisdom. In an- age of
dusty modernity, when beauty was thought of
as something barbaric and ugliness as some-
thing sensible, he alone saw that men must
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Christmas and the Msthetes

always have the sacredness of mummery. He
saw that while the brutes have all the useful
things, the things that are truly human are the
useless ones. He saw the falsehood of that
almost universal notion of to-day, the notion
that rites and forms are something artificial,
additional, and corrupt. Ritual is really much
older than thought; it is much simpler and much
wilder than thought. A feeling touching the
nature of things does not only make men feel
that there are certain proper things to say; it
makes them feel that there are certain proper
things to do. The more agreeable of these
consist of dancing, building temples, and shout-
ing very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing
green carnations and burning other philosophers
alive. But everywhere the religious dance came
before the religious hymn, and man was a rit-
ualist before he could speak. If Comtism had
spread the world would have been converted,
not by the Comtist philosophy, but by the Com-
tist calendar. By discouraging what they con-
ceive to be the weakness of their master, the
English Positivists have broken the strength of
their religion. A man who has faith must be
prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a
fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to
toil and die for his convictions when he is not

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Heretics

even ready to wear a wreath round his head for
them. I myself, to take a corpus vile, am very
certain that I would not read the works of
Comte through for any consideration whatever.
But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest
enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.

That splendid effort failed, and nothing in
the style of it has succeeded. There has been
no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy.
Men are still in black for the death of God.
When Christianity was heavily bombarded in
the last century upon no point was it more per-
sistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that
of its alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley
and Swinburne and all their armies have passed
again and again over the ground, but they have
not altered it. They have not set up a single
new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment
to rally to. They have not given a name or a
new occasion of. gaiety. Mr. Swinburne does
not hang up his stocking on the eve of the
birthday of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer
does not sing carols descriptive of the infancy
of Ibsen outside people's doors in the snow.
In the round of our rational and mournful year
one festival remains out of all those ancient
gaieties that once covered the whole earth.
Christmas remains to remind us of those ages,
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Christmas and the Msthetes

whether Pagan or Christian, when the many
acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In
all the winter in our woods there is no tree in
glow but the holly.

The strange truth about the matter is told in
the very word "holiday." A bank holiday
means presumably a day which bankers regard
as holy^ A half-holiday means, I suppose, a
day on which a schoolboy is only partially holy.
It is hard to see at first sight why so human a
thing as leisure and larkiness should always
have a religious origin. Rationally there ap-
pears no reason why we should not sing and
give each other presents in honour of anything
— the birth of Michael Angelo or the opening
of Euston Station. But it does not work. As
a fact, men only become greedily and gloriously
material about something spiritualistic. Take
away the Nicene Creed and similar things, and
you do some strange wrong to the sellers of
sausages. Take away the strange beauty of the
saints, and what has remained to us is the far
stranger ugliness of Wandsworth. Take away
the supernatural, and what remains is the un-
natural.

And now I have to touch upon a very sad
matter. There are in the modern world an
admirable class of persons who really make

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Heretics

protest on behalf of that antiqua pulchritudo of
which Augustine spoke, who do long for the
old feasts and formalities of the childhood of
the world. William Morris and his followers
showed how much brighter were the dark ages
than the age of Manchester. Mr. W. B. Yeats
frames his steps in prehistoric dances, but no
man knows and joins his voice to forgotten
choruses that no one but he can hear. Mr.
George Moore collects every fragment of Irish
paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic
Church has left or possibly her wisdom pre-
served. There are innumerable persons with
eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the
return of the maypole or the Olympian games.
But there is about these people a haunting and
alarming something which suggests that it is
just possible that they do not keep Christmas.
It is painful to regard human nature in such a
light, but it seems somehow possible that Mr.
George Moore does not wave his spoon and
shout when the pudding is set alight. It is
even possible that Mr. W. B. Yeats never pulls
crackers. If so, where is the sense of all their
dreams of festive traditions? Here is a solid
and ancient festive tradition still plying a roar-
ing trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar.
If this is so, let them be very certain of this,

IOO

Christmas and the ^Esthetes

that they are the kind of people who in the
time of the maypole would have thought the
maypole vulgar; who in the time of the Can-
terbury pilgrimage would have thought the
Canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the time
of the Olympian games would have thought
the Olympian games vulgar. Nor can there be
any reasonable doubt that they were vulgar.
Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we
mean coarseness of speech, rowdiness of be-
haviour, gossip, horseplay, and some heavy
drinking, vulgarity there always was wherever
there was joy, wherever there was faith in the
gods. Wherever you have belief you will have
hilarity, wherever you have hilarity you will
have some dangers. And as creed and mythol-
ogy produce this gross and vigorous life, so in
its turn this gross and vigorous life will always
produce creed and mythology. If we ever get
the English back on to the English land they
will become again a religious people, if all goes
well, a superstitious people. The absence from
modern life of both the higher and lower forms
of faith is largely due to a divorce from nature
and the trees and clouds. If we have no more
turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of
turnips.

IOI

VII — Omar and the Sacred Vine

ANEW morality has burst upon us
with some violence in connection
with the problem of strong drink;
and enthusiasts in the matter range
from the man who is violently thrown out at
12.30, to the lady who smashes American bars
with an axe. In these discussions it is almost
always felt that one very wise and moderate
position is to say that wine or such stuff should
only be drunk as a medicine. With this I
should venture to disagree with a peculiar
ferocity. The one genuinely dangerous and
immoral way of drinking wine is to drink it as
a medicine. And for this reason. If a man
drinks wine in order to obtain pleasure, he is
trying to obtain something exceptional, some-
thing he does not expect every hour of the day,
something which, unless he is a little insane,
he will not try to get every hour of the day.
But if a man drinks wine in order to obtain
health, he is trying to get something natural;
something, that is, that he ought not to be
without; something that he may find it difficult
to reconcile himself to being without. The
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Omar and the Sacred Vine

man may not be seduced who has seen the
ecstasy of being ecstatic; it is more dazzling
to catch a glimpse of the ecstasy of being ordi-
nary. If there were a magic ointment, and we
took it to a strong man, and said, "This will
enable you to jump off the Monument," doubt-
less he would jump off the Monument,' but he
would not jump off the Monument all day long
to the delight of the City. But if we took it
to a blind man, saying, "This will enable you
to see," he would be under a heavier tempta-
tion. It would be hard for him not to rub it
on his eyes whenever he heard the hoof of a
noble horse or the birds singing at daybreak.
It is easy to deny one's self festivity; it is diffi-
cult to deny one's self normality. Hence
comes the fact which every doctor knows,
that it is often perilous to give alcohol to the
sick even when they need it. I need hardly
say that I do not mean that I think the giving
of alcohol to the sick for stimulus is neces-
sarily unjustifiable. But I do mean that
giving it to the healthy for fun is the proper
use of it, and a great deal more consistent with
health.

The sound rule in the matter would appear
to be like many other sound rules — a paradox.
Drink because you are happy, but never because
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Heretics

you are miserable. Never drink when you are
wretched without it, or you will be like the
grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink
when you would be happy without it, and you
will be like the laughing peasant of Italy.
Never drink because you need it, for this is
rational drinking, and the way to death and
hell. But drink because you do not need it,
for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient
health of the world.

For more than thirty years the shadow and
glory of a great Eastern figure has lain upon
our English literature. Fitzgerald's translation
of Omar Khayyam concentrated into an im-
mortal poignancy all the dark and drifting
hedonism of our time. Of the literary splen-
dour of that work it would be merely banal to
speak; in few other of the books of men has
there been anything so combining the gay
pugnacity of an epigram with the vague sadness
of a song. But of its philosophical, ethical,
and religious influence, which has been almost
as great as its brilliancy, I should like to say
a word, and that word, I confess, one of un-
compromising hostility. There are a great
nvany things which might be said against the
spirit of the Rubaiyat, and against its pro-
digious influence. But one matter of indict-
104

Omar and the Sacred Vine

ment towers ominously above the rest — a
genuine disgrace to it, a genuine calamity to
us. This is the terrible blow that this great
poem has struck against sociability and the
joy of life. Some one called Omar "the sad,
glad old Persian." Sad he is; glad he is not,
in any sense of the word whatever. He has
been a worse foe to gladness than the Puritans.
A pensive and graceful Oriental lies under
the rose-tree with his wine-pot and his scroll of
poems. It may seem strange that any one's
thoughts should, at the moment of regarding
him, fly back to the dark bedside where the
doctor doles out brandy. It may seem stranger
still that they should go back to the grey wastrel
shaking with gin in Houndsditch. But a great
philosophical unity links the three in an evil
bond. Omar Khayyam's wine-bibbing is bad,
not because it is wine-bibbing. It is bad, and
very bad, because it is medical wine-bibbing.
It is the drinking of a man who drinks because
he is not happy. His is the wine that shuts
out the universe, not the wine that reveals it.
It is not poetical drinking, which is joyous and
instinctive; it is rational drinking, which is as
prosaic as an investment, as unsavoury as a
dose of camomile. Whole heavens above it,
from the point of view of sentiment, though

i°5

Heretics

not of style, rises the splendour of some old
English drinking-song —

"Then pass the bowl, my comrades all,
And let the zider vlow."

For this song was caught up by happy men to
express the worth of truly worthy things, of
brotherhood and garrulity, and the brief and
kindly leisure of the poor. Of course, the great
part of the more stolid reproaches directed
against the Omarite morality are as false and
babyish as such reproaches usually are. One
critic, whose work I have read, had the in-
credible foolishness to call Omar an atheist
and a materialist. It is almost impossible for
an Oriental to be either; the East understands
metaphysics too well for that. Of course, the
real objection which a philosophical Christian
would bring against the religion of Omar, is
not that he gives no place to God, it is that
he gives too much place to God. His is that
terrible theism which can imagine nothing else
but deity, and which denies altogether the out-
lines of human personality and human will.

" The ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that tossed you down into the field,
He knows about it all — he knows — he knows."

1 06

Omar and the Sacred Vine

A Christian thinker, such as Augustine or
Dante, would object to this because it ignores
free-will, which is the valour and dignity of the
soul. The quarrel of the highest Christianity
with this scepticism is not in the least that the
scepticism denies the existence of God; it is
that it denies the existence of man.

In this cult of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker
the Rubaiyat stands first in our time; but it
does not stand alone. Many of the most bril-
liant intellects of our time have urged us to the
same self-conscious snatching at a rare delight.
Walter Pater said that we were all under sen-
tence of death, and the only course was to
enjoy exquisite moments simply for those mo-
ments' sake. The same lesson was taught by
the very powerful and very desolate philosophy
of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion;
but the carpe diem religion is not the religion
of happy people, but of very unhappy people.
Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while
it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose
which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the
sense of immortality; the very splendour of
youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch
its legs in. In all great comic literature, in
"Tristram Shandy" or "Pickwick," there is
this sense of space and incorruptibility; we feel
107

Heretics

the characters are deathless people in an endless
tale.

It is true enough, of course, that a pungent
happiness comes chiefly in certain passing
moments; but it is not true that we should
think of them as passing, or enjoy them simply
"for those moments' sake." To do this is to
rationalize the happiness, and therefore to de-
stroy it. Happiness is a mystery like religion,
and should never be rationalized. Suppose a
man experiences a really splendid moment of
pleasure. I do not mean sbmething connected
with a bit of enamel, I mean something with
a violent happiness in it — an almost painful
happiness. A man may have, for instance, a
moment of ecstasy in first love, or a moment of
victory in battle. The lover enjoys the mo-
ment, but precisely not for the moment's sake.
He enjoys it for the woman's sake, or his own
sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not
for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the
sake of the flag. The cause which the flag
stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love
may be calf-love, and last a week. But the
patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover
thinks of his love as something that cannot end.
These moments are filled with eternity; these
moments are joyful because they do not seem
ioS

Omar and the Sacred Vine

momentary. Once look at them as moments
after Pater's manner, and they become as cold
as Pater and his style. Man cannot love
mortal things. He can only love immortal
things for an instant.

Pater's mistake is revealed in his most famous
phrase. He asks us to burn with a hard, gem-
like flame. Flames are never hard and never
gem-like — they cannot be handled or arranged.
So human emotions are never hard and never
gem-like; they are always dangerous, like flames,
to touch or even to examine. There is only
one way in which our passions can become
hard and gem-like, and that is by becoming as
cold as gems. No blow then has ever been
struck at the natural loves and laughter of men
so sterilizing as this carpe diem of the aesthetes.
For any kind of pleasure a totally different
spirit is required; a certain shyness, a certain
indeterminate hope, a certain boyish expecta-
tion. Purity and simplicity are essential to
passions — yes, even to evil passions. Even
vice demands a sort of virginity.

Omar's (or Fitzgerald's) effect upon the other
world we may let go, his hand upon this world
has been heavy and paralyzing. The Puritans,
as I have said, are far jollier than he. The
new ascetics who follow Thoreau or Tolstoy
109

Heretics

are much livelier company; for, though the
surrender of strong drink and such luxuries
may strike us as an idle negation, it may leave
a man with innumerable natural pleasures, and,
above all, with man's natural power of happi-
ness. Thoreau could enjoy the sunrise without
a cup of coffee. If Tolstoy cannot admire
marriage, at least he is healthy enough to
admire mud. Nature can be enjoyed without
even the most natural luxuries. A good bush
needs no wine. But neither nature nor wine
nor anything else can be enjoyed if we have the
wrong attitude towards happiness, and Omar
(or Fitzgerald) did have the wrong attitude
towards happiness. He and those he has in-
fluenced do not see that if we are to be truly gay,
we must believe that there is some eternal gaiety
in the nature of things. We cannot enjoy
thoroughly even a pas-de-quatre at a subscrip-
tion dance unless we believe that the stars are
dancing to the same tune. No one can be really
hilarious but the serious man. "Wine," says
the Scripture, "maketh glad the heart of man,"
but only of the man who has a heart. The
thing called high spirits is possible only to the
spiritual. Ultimately a man cannot rejoice in
anything except the nature of things. Ulti-
mately a man can enjoy nothing except religion,
no

Omar and the Sacred Vine

Once in the world's history men did believe
that the stars were dancing to the tune of their
temples, and they danced as men have never
danced since. With this old pagan eudae-
monism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as
little to do as he has with any Christian variety.
He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint.
Dionysus and his church was grounded on a
serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman.
Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a
sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not
a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes
it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts
because life is not joyful; he revels because he
is not glad. "Drink," he says, "for you know
not whence you come nor why. Drink, for
you know not when you go nor where. Drink,
because the stars are cruel and the world as idle
as a humming-top. Drink, because there is
nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting
for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a
base equality and an evil peace." So he stands
offering us the cup in his hand. And at the
high altar of Christianity stands another figure,
in whose hand also is the cup of the vine.
"Drink," he says, "for the whole world is as
red as this wine, with the crimson of the love
and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets
in

Heretics

are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-
cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new
testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I
know of whence you come and why. Drink,
for I know of when you go and where."

113

VIII — The Mildness of the Yellow Press

THERE is a great deal of protest
made from one quarter or another
nowadays against the influence of
that new journalism which is asso-
ciated with the names of Sir Alfred Harmsworth
and Mr. Pearson. But almost everybody who
attacks it attacks on the ground that it is very
sensational, very violent and vulgar and start-
ling. I am speaking in no affected contrariety,
but in the simplicity of a genuine personal im-
pression, when I say that this journalism offends
as being not sensational or violent enough.
The real vice is not that it is startling, but that
it is quite insupportably tame. The whole
object is to keep carefully along a certain level
of the expected and the commonplace; it may
be low, but it must take care also to be flat.
Never by any chance in it is there any of that
real plebeian pungency which can be heard
from the ordinary cabman in the ordinary
street. We have heard of a certain standard
of decorum which demands that things should
be funny without being vulgar, but the standard
of this decorum demands that if things are
vulgar they shall be vulgar without being funny.

"3

Heretics

This journalism does not merely fail to exag-
gerate life — it positively underrates it; and it
has to do so because it is intended for the
faint and languid recreation of men whom the
fierceness of modem life has fatigued. This
press is not the yellow press at all; it is the
drab press. Sir Alfred Harmsworth must not
address to the tired clerk any observation more
witty than the tired clerk might be able to
address to Sir Alfred Harmsworth. It must
not expose anybody (anybody who is powerful,
that is), it must not offend anybody, it must
not even please anybody, too much. A general
vague idea that in spite of all this, our yellow
press is sensational, arises from such external
accidents as large type or lurid headlines. It
is quite true that these editors print everything
they possibly can in large capital letters. But
they do this, not because it is startling, but
because it is soothing. To people wholly
weary or partly drunk in a dimly lighted train,
it is a simplification and a comfort to have
things presented in this vast and obvious man-
ner. The editors use this gigantic alphabet in
dealing with their readers, for exactly the same
reason that parents and governesses use a simi-
lar gigantic alphabet in teaching children to
spell. The nursery authorities do not use an
114

The Mildness of the Yellow Press

A as big as a horseshoe in order to make the
child jump; on the contrary, they use it to put
the child at his ease, to make things smoother
and more evident. Of the same character is
the dim and quiet dame school which Sir Alfred
Harmsworth and Mr. Pearson keep. All their
sentiments are spelling-book sentiments — that
is to say, they are sentiments with which the
pupil is already respectfully familiar. All
their wildest posters are leaves torn from a
copy-book.

Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in
France, in Ireland, and in America, we have no
trace in this country. When a journalist in
Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a
thrill worth talking about. He denounces
a leading Irish member for corruption, or he
charges the whole police system with a wicked
and definite conspiracy. When a French jour-
nalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he
discovers, let us say, that the President of the
Republic has murdered three wives. Our yel-
low journalists invent quite as unscrupulously
as this; their moral condition is, as regards*
careful veracity, about the same. But it is
their mental calibre which happens to be such
that they can only invent calm and even reas-
suring things. The fictitious version of the mas-

"5

Heretics

sacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious,
but it was not interesting, except to those who
had private reasons for terror or sorrow. It
was not connected with any bold and suggestive
view of the Chinese situation. It revealed only
a vague idea that nothing could be impressive
except a great deal of blood. Real sensation-
alism, of which I happen to be very fond, may
be either moral or immoral. But even when it
is most immoral, it requires moral courage.
For it is one of the most dangerous things on
earth genuinely to surprise anybody. If you
make any sentient creature jump, you render it
by no means improbable that it will jump on
you. But the leaders of this movement have no
moral courage or immoral courage; their whole
method consists in saying, with large and elabo-
rate emphasis, the things which everybody else
says casually, and without remembering what
they have said. When they brace themselves
up to attack anything, they never reach the
point of attacking anything which is large and
real, and would resound with the shock. They
do not attack the army as men do in France,
or the judges as men do in Ireland, or the
democracy itself as men did in England a
hundred years ago. They attack something
like the War Office — something, that is, which
116

The Mildness of the Yellow Press

everybody attacks and nobody bothers to de-
fend, something which is an old joke in fourth-
rate comic papers. Just as a man shows he
has a weak voice by straining it to shout, so
they show the hopelessly unsensational nature
of their minds when they really try to be sen-
sational. With the whole world full of big and
dubious institutions, with the whole wickedness
of civilization staring them in the face, their
idea of being bold and bright is to attack the
War Office. They might as well start a cam-
paign against the weather, or form a secret
society in order to make jokes about mothers-
in-law. Nor is it only from the point of view
of particular amateurs of the sensational such
as myself, that it is permissible to say, in the
words of Cowper's Alexander ! Selkirk, that
"their tameness is shocking to me." The
whole modern world is pining for a genuinely
sensational journalism. This has been dis-
covered by that very able and honest journalist,
Mr. Blatchford, who started his campaign
against Christianity, warned on all sides, I
believe, that it would ruin his paper, but who
continued from an honourable sense of intellec-
tual responsibility. He discovered, however,
that while he had undoubtedly shocked his
readers, he had also greatly advanced his news-
117

Heretics

paper. It was bought — first, by all the people
who agreed with him and wanted to read it; and
secondly, by all the people who disagreed with
him, and wanted to write him letters. Those
letters were voluminous (I helped, I am glad to
say, to swell their volume), and they were gen-
erally inserted with a generous fulness. Thus
was accidentally discovered (like the steam-
engine) the great journalistic maxim — that if
an editor can only make people angry enough,
they will write half his newspaper for him for
nothing.

Some hold that such papers as these are
scarcely the proper objects of so serious a con-
sideration; but that can scarcely be maintained
from a political or ethical point of view. In
this problem of the mildness and tameness of
the Harmsworth mind there is mirrored the
outlines of a much larger problem which is akin
to it.

The Harmsworthian journalist begins with a
worship of success and violence, and ends in
sheer timidity and mediocrity. But he is not
alone in this, nor does he come by this fate
merely because he happens personally to be
stupid. Every man, however brave, who be-
gins by worshipping violence, must end in mere
timidity. Every man, however wise, who be-
118

The Mildness of the Yellow Press

gins by worshipping success, must end in mere
mediocrity. This strange and paradoxical fate
is involved, not in the individual, but in the
philosophy, in the point of view. It is not the
folly of the man which brings about this neces-
sary fall; it is his wisdom. The worship of
success is the only one out of all possible wor-
ships of which this is true, that its followers are
foredoomed to become slaves and cowards. A
man may be a hero for the sake of Mrs. Gallup's
ciphers or for the sake of human sacrifice, but
not for the sake of success. For obviously a
man may choose to fail because he loves Mrs.
Gallup or human sacrifice; but he cannot choose
to fail because he loves success. When the test
of triumph is men's test of everything, they
never endure long enough to triumph at all.
As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is
a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when
everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a
strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues,
it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.

It was through this fatal paradox in the
nature of things that all these modern adven-
turers come at last to a sort of tedium and
acquiescence. They desired strength; and to
them to desire strength was to admire strength;
to admire strength was simply to admire the
119

Heretics

statu quo. They thought that he who wished
to be strong ought to respect the strong. They
did not realize the obvious verity that he who
wishes to be strong must despise the strong.
They sought to be everything, to have the
whole force of the cosmos behind them, to have
an energy that would drive the stars. But they
did not realize the two great facts — first, that
in the attempt to be everything the first and
most difficult step is to be something; second,
that the moment a man is something, he is
essentially defying everything. The lower ani-
mals, say the men of science, fought their way
up with a blind selfishness. If this be so, the
only real moral of it is that our unselfishness,
if it is to triumph, must be equally blind. The
mammoth did not put his head on one side and
wonder whether mammoths were a little out of
date. Mammoths were at least as much up to
date as that individual mammoth could make
them. The greal elk did not say, ' ' Cloven hoofs
are very much worn now." He polished his
own weapons for his own use. But in the
reasoning animal there has arisen a more
horrible danger, that he may fail through per-
ceiving his own failure. When modern sociol-
ogists talk of the necessity of accommodating
one's self to the trend of the time, they forget
iao

The Mildness of the Yellow Press

that the trend of the time at its best consists
entirely of people who will not accommodate
themselves to anything. At its worst it consists
of many millions of frightened creatures all
accommodating themselves to a trend that is
not there. And that is becoming more and
more the situation of modern England. Every
man speaks of public opinion, and means by
public opinion, public opinion minus his opin-
ion. Every man makes his contribution nega-
tive under the erroneous impression that the
next man's contribution is positive. Every man
surrenders his fancy to a general tone which is
itself a surrender. And over all the heartless
and fatuous unity spreads this new and weari-
some and platitudinous press, incapable of
invention, incapable of audacity, capable only
of a servility all the more contemptible because
it is not even a servility to the strong. But all
who begin with force and conquest will end in
this.

The chief characteristic of the "New Jour-
nalism" is simply that it is bad journalism. It
is beyond all comparison the most shapeless,
careless, and colourless work done in our day.

I read yesterday a sentence which should be
written in letters of gold and adamant; it is the
very motto of the new philosophy of Empire.

121

Heretics

I found it (as the reader has already eagerly
guessed) in Pearson's Magazine, while I was
communing (soul to soul) with Mr. C. Arthur
Pearson, whose first and suppressed name I am
afraid is Chilperic. It occurred in an article
on the American Presidential Election. This
is the sentence, and every one should read it
carefully, and roll it on the tongue, till all the
honey be tasted.

"A little sound common sense often goes
further with an audience of American working-
men than much high-flown argument. A
speaker who, as he brought forward his points,
hammered nails into a board, won hundreds
of votes for his side at the last Presidential
Election."

I do not wish to soil this perfect thing with
comment; the words of Mercury are harsh after
the songs of Apollo. But just think for a
moment of the mind, the strange inscrutable
mind, of the man who wrote that, of the editor
who approved it, of the people who are prob-
ably impressed by it, of the incredible American
working-man, of whom, for all I know, it may
be true. Think what their notion of "common
sense" must be! It is delightful to realize that
you and I are now able to win thousands of
votes should we ever be engaged in a Presiden-

122

The Mildness of the Yellow Press

tial Election, by doing something of this kind.
For I suppose the nails and the board are not
essential to the exhibition of "common sense;"
there may be variations. We may read —

"A little common sense impresses American
working-men more than high-flown argument.
A speaker who, as he made his points, pulled
buttons off his waistcoat, won thousands of
votes for his side." Or, "Sound common
sense tells better in America than high-flown
argument. Thus Senator Budge, who threw
his false teeth in the air every time he made an
epigram, won the solid approval of American
working-men." Or again, "The sound com-
mon sense of a gentleman from Earlswood,
who stuck straws in his hair during the pro-
gress of his speech, assured the victory of Mr.
Roosevelt."

There are many other elements in this article
on which I should love to linger. But the
matter which I wish to point out is that in that
sentence is perfectly revealed the whole truth
of what our Chamberlainites, hustlers, bustlers,
Empire-builders, and strong, silent men, really
mean by "common sense." They mean knock-
ing, with deafening noise and dramatic effect,
meaningless bits of iron into a useless bit of
wood.

123

Heretics

A man goes on to an American platform and
behaves like a mountebank fool with a board
and a hammer; well, I do not blame him; I
might even admire him. He may be a dashing
and quite decent strategist. He may be a fine
romantic actor, like Burke flinging the dagger
on the floor. He may even (for all I know)
be -a sublime mystic, profoundly impressed with
the ancient meaning of the divine trade of the
Carpenter, and offering to the people a parable
in the form of a ceremony. All I wish to
indicate is the abyss of mental confusion in
which such wild ritualism can be called "sound
common sense." And it is in that abyss of
mental confusion, and in that alone, that the
new Imperialism lives and moves and has its
being. The whole glory and greatness of Mr.
Chamberlain consists' in this: that if a man hits
the right nail on the head nobody cares where
he hits it to or what it does. They care about
the noise of the hammer, not about the silent
grip of the nail. Before and throughout the
African war, Mr. Chamberlain was always
knocking in nails, with ringing decisiveness.
But when we ask, "But what have these nails
held together? Where is your carpentry?
Where are your contented Outlanders? Where
is your free South Africa? Where is your
124

The Mildness of the Yejlow Press

British prestige ? What have your nails done ? ' '
then what answer is there? We must go back
(with an affectionate sigh) to our Pearson for
the answer to the question of what the nails
have done: "The speaker who hammered nails
into a board won thousands of votes."

Now the whole of this passage is admirably
characteristic of the new journalism which Mr.
Pearson represents, the new journalism which
has just purchased the Standard. To take one
instance out of hundreds, the incomparable man
with the board and nails is described in the
Pearson's article as calling out (as he smote the
symbolic nail), "Lie number one. Nailed to
the Mast ! Nailed to the Mast ! " In the whole
office there was apparently no compositor or
office-boy to point out that we speak of lies
being nailed to the counter, and not to the
mast. Nobody in the office knew that Pearson's
Magazine was falling into a stale Irish bull,
which must be as old as St. Patrick. This is
the real and essential tragedy of the sale of the
Standard. It is not merely that journalism is
victorious over literature. It is that bad jour-
nalism is victorious over good journalism.

It is not that one article which we consider
costly and beautiful is being ousted by another
kind of article which we consider common or

"5

Heretics

unclean. It is that of the same article a worse
quality is preferred to a better. If you like
popular journalism (as I do), you will know that
Pearson's Magazine is poor and weak popular
journalism. You will know it as certainly as
you know bad butter. You will know as cer-
tainly that it is poor popular journalism as you
know that the Strand, in the great days of
Sherlock Holmes, was good popular journalism.
Mr. Pearson has been a monument of this
enormous banality. About everything he says
and does there is something infinitely weak-
minded. He clamours for home trades and
employs foreign ones to print his paper. When
this glaring fact is pointed out, he does not say
that the thing was an oversight, like a sane man.
He cuts it off with scissors, like a child of three.
His very cunning is infantile. And like a child
of three, he does not cut it quite off. In all
human records I doubt if there is such an
example of a profound simplicity in deception.
This is the sort of intelligence which now sits
in the seat of the sane and honourable old Tory
journalism. If it were really the triumph of
the tropical exuberance of the Yankee press, it
would be vulgar, but still tropical. But it is
not. We are delivered over to the bramble,
126

The Mildness of the Yellow Press

and from the meanest of the shrubs comes the
fire upon the cedars of Lebanon.

The only question now is how much longer
the fiction will endure that journalists of this
order represent public opinion. It may be
doubted whether any honest and serious Tariff
Reformer would for a moment maintain that
there was any majority for Tariff Reform in
the country comparable to the ludicrous pre-
ponderance which money has given it among
the great dailies. The only inference is that
for purposes of real public opinion the press is
now a mere plutocratic oligarchy. Doubtless
the public buys the wares of these men, for
one reason or another. But there is no more
reason to suppose that the public admires their
politics than that the public admires the delicate
philosophy of Mr. Crosse or the darker and
sterner creed of Mr. Blackwell. If these men
are merely tradesmen, there is nothing to say
except that there are plenty like them in the
Battersea Park Road, and many much better.
But if they make any sort of attempt to be
politicians, we can only point out to them that
they are not as yet even good journalists.

127

IX — The Moods of Mr. George Moore

MR. GEORGE MOORE began his
literary career by writing his per-
sonal confessions; nor is there any
harm in this if he had not con-
tinued them for the remainder of his life. He
is a man of genuinely forcible mind and of
great command over a kind of rhetorical and
fugitive conviction which excites and pleases.
He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty.
He has admired all the most admirable modern
eccentrics until they could stand it no longer.
Everything he writes, it is to be fully admitted,
has a genuine mental power. His account of
his reason for leaving the Roman Catholic
Church is possibly the most admirable tribute
to that communion which has been written of
late years. For the fact of the matter is, that
the weakness which has rendered barren the
many brilliancies of Mr. Moore is actually
that weakness which the Roman Catholic
Church is at its best in combating. Mr.
Moore hates Catholicism because it breaks up
the house of looking-glasses in which he lives.
Mr. Moore does not dislike so much being
128

The Moods of Mr. George Moore

asked to believe in the spiritual existence of
miracles or sacraments, but he does funda-
mentally dislike being asked to believe in the
actual existence of other people. Like his
master Pater and all the aesthetes, his real
quarrel with life is that it is not a dream that
can be moulded by the dreamer. It is not the
dogma of the reality of the other world that
troubles him, but the dogma of the reality of
this world.

The truth is that the tradition of Christianity
(which is still the only coherent ethic of Europe)
rests on two or three paradoxes or mysteries
which can easily be impugned in argument and
as easily justified in life. One of them, for
instance, is the paradox of hope or faith — that
the more hopeless is the situation the more
hopeful must be the man. Stevenson under-
stood this, and consequently Mr. Moore cannot
understand Stevenson. Another is the paradox
of charity or chivalry that the weaker a thing
is the more it should be respected, that the
more indefensible a thing is the more it should
appeal to us for a certain kind of defence.
Thackeray understood this, and therefore Mr.
Moore does not understand Thackeray. Now,
one of these very practical and working myste-
ries in the Christian tradition, and one which
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Heretics

the Roman Catholic Church, as I say, has done
her best work in singling out, is the conception
of the sinfulness of pride. Pride is a weakness
in the character; it dries up laughter, it dries
up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy.
The Christian tradition understands this; there-
fore Mr. Moore does not understand the
Christian tradition.

For the truth is much stranger even than it
appears in the formal doctrine of the sin of
pride. It is not only true that humility is a
much wiser and more vigorous thing than pride.
It is also true that vanity is a much wiser and
more vigorous thing than pride. Vanity is
social — it is almost a kind of comradeship ;
pride is solitary and uncivilized. Vanity is
active; it desires the applause of infinite multi-
tudes; pride is passive, desiring only the ap-
plause of one person, which it already has.
Vanity is humorous, and can enjoy the joke
even of itself; pride is dull, and cannot even
smile. And the whole of this difference is the
difference between Stevenson and Mr. George
Moore, who, as he informs us, has "brushed
Stevenson aside." I do not know where he has
been brushed to, but wherever it is I fancy he is
having a good time, because he had the wisdom
to be vain, and not proud. Stevenson had a
130

The Moods of Mr. George Moore

windy vanity; Mr. Moore has a dusty egoism.
Hence Stevenson could amuse himself as well
as us with his vanity; while the richest effects
of Mr. Moore's absurdity are hidden from his
eyes.

If we compare this solemn folly with the
happy folly with which Stevenson belauds his
own books and berates his own critics, we shall
not find it difficult to guess why it is that
Stevenson at least found a final philosophy of
some sort to live by, while Mr. Moore is always
walking the world looking for a new one.
Stevenson had found that the secret of life lies
in laughter and humility. Self is the gorgon.
Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and
lives. Pride studies it for itself and is turned
to stone.

It is necessary to dwell on this defect in Mr.
Moore, because it is really the weakness of
work which is not without its strength. Mr.
Moore's egoism is not merely a moral weak-
ness, it is a very constant and influential aesthetic
weakness as well. We should really be much
more interested in Mr. Moore if he were not
quite so interested in himself. We feel as if we
were being shown through a gallery of really
fine pictures, into each of which, by some use-
less and discordant convention, the artist had

131

Heretics

represented the same figure in the same attitude.
"The Grand Canal with a distant view of Mr.
Moore," "Effect of Mr. Moore through a
Scotch Mist," "Mr. Moore by Firelight,"
"Ruins of Mr. Moore by Moonlight," and so
on, seems to be the endless series. He would
no doubt reply that in such a book as this he
intended to reveal himself. But the answer is
that in such a book as this he does not succeed.
One of the thousand objections to the sin of
pride lies precisely in this, that self-conscious-
ness of necessity destroys self-revelation. A
man who thinks a great deal about himself will
try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excel-
lence at all points, will try to be an encyclo-
paedia of culture, and his own real personality
will be lost in that false universalism. Thinking
about himself will lead to trying to be the
universe; trying to be the universe will lead to
ceasing to be anything. If, on the other hand,
a man is sensible enough to think only about
the universe; he will think about it in his own
individual way. He will keep virgin the secret
of God; he will see the grass as no other man
can see it, and look at a sun that no man has
ever known. This fact is very practically
brought out in Mr. Moore's "Confessions."
In reading them we do not feel the presence
132

The Moods of Mr. George Moore

of a clean-cut personality like that of Thackeray
and Matthew Arnold. We only read a number
of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions
which might be uttered by any clever person,
but which we are called upon to admire specifi-
cally, because they are uttered by Mr. Moore.
He is the only thread that connects Catholicism
and Protestantism, realism and mysticism — he
or rather his name. He is profoundly absorbed
even in views he no longer holds, and he expects
us to be. And he intrudes the capital "I" even
where it need not be intruded — even where it
weakens the force of a plain statement. Where
another man would say, "It is a fine day," Mr.
Moore says, "Seen through my temperament,
the day appeared fine." Where another man
would say, "Milton has obviously a fine style,"
Mr. Moore would say, "As a stylist Milton had
always impressed me." The Nemesis of this
self-centred spirit is that of being totally in-
effectual. Mr. Moore has started many inter-
esting crusades, but he has abandoned them
before his disciples could begin. Even when
he is on the side of the truth he is as fickle as
the children of falsehood. Even when he has
found reality he cannot find rest. One Irish
quality he has which no Irishman was ever
without — pugnacity; and that is certainly a

Heretics

great virtue, especially in the present age. But
he has not the tenacity of conviction which goes
with the fighting spirit in a man like Bernard
Shaw. His weakness of introspection and
selfishness in all their glory cannot prevent
him fighting; but they will always prevent him
winning.

134

X — On Sandals and Simplicity

THE great misfortune of the modern
English is not at all that they are
more boastful than other people
(they are not); it is that they are
boastful about those particular things which
nobody can boast of without losing them. A
Frenchman can be proud of being bold and
logical, and still remain bold and logical. A
German can be proud of being reflective and
orderly, and still remain reflective and orderly.
But an Englishman cannot be proud of being
simple and direct, and still remain simple and
direct. In the matter of these strange virtues,
to know them is to kill them. A man may be
conscious of being heroic or conscious of being
divine, but he cannot (in spite of all the Anglo-
Saxon poets) be conscious of being uncon-
scious.

Now, I do not think that it can be honestly
denied that some portion of this impossibility
attaches to a class very different in their own
opinion, at least, to the school of Anglo-Saxon-
ism. I mean that school of the simple life,
commonly associated with Tolstoy. If a per-

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Heretics

petual talk about one's own robustness leads
to being less robust, it is even more true that a
perpetual talking about one's own simplicity
leads to being less simple. One great com-
plaint, I think, must stand against the modern
upholders of the simple life — the simple life in
all its varied forms, from vegetarianism to the
honourable consistency of the Doukhobors.
This complaint against them stands, that they
would make us simple in the unimportant things,
but complex in the important things. They
would make us simple in the things that do not
matter — that is, in diet, in costume, in eti-
quette, in economic system. But they would
make us complex in the things that do matter —
in philosophy, in loyalty, in spiritual acceptance,
and spiritual rejection. It does not so very
much matter whether a man eats a grilled
tomato or a plain tomato; it does very much
matter whether he eats a plain tomato with a
grilled mind. The only kind of simplicity
worth, preserving is the simplicity of the heart,
the simplicity which accepts and enjoys. There
may be a reasonable doubt as to what system
preserves this; there can surely be no doubt that
a system of simplicity destroys it. There is more
simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse
than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.
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On Sandals and Simplicity

The chief error of these people is to be found
in the very phrase to which they are most
attached — "plain living and high thinking."
These people do not stand in need of, will not
be improved by, plain living and high thinking.
They stand in need of the contrary. They
would be improved by high living and plain
thinking. A little high living (I say, having a
full sense of responsibility, a little high living)
would teach them the force and meaning of the
human festivities, of the banquet that has gone
on from the beginning of the world. It would
teach them the historic fact that the artificial is,
if anything, older than the natural. It would
teach them that the loving-cup is as old as any
hunger. It would teach them that ritualism is
older than any religion. And a little plain
thinking would teach them how harsh and
fanciful are the mass of their own ethics, how
very civilized and very complicated must be
the brain of the Tolstoyan who really believes
it to be evil to love one's country and wicked to
strike a blow.

A man approaches, wearing sandals and sim-
ple raiment, a raw tomato held firmly in his
right hand, and says, "The affections of family
and country alike are hindrances to the fuller
development of human love;" but the plain

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Heretics

thinker will only answer him, with a wonder
not untinged with admiration, "What a great
deal of trouble you must have taken in order
to feel like that." High living will reject the
tomato. Plain thinking will equally decisively
reject the idea of the invariable sinfulness of
war. High living will convince us that nothing
is more materialistic than to despise a pleasure
as purely material. And plain thinking will
convince us that nothing is more materialistic
than to reserve our horror chiefly for material
wounds.

The only simplicity that matters is the sim-
plicity of the heart. If that be gone, it can be
brought back by no turnips or cellular clothing;
but only by tears and terror and the fires that
are not quenched. If that remain, it matters
very little if a few Early Victorian armchairs
remain along with it. Let us put a complex
entree into a simple old gentleman; let us not
put a simple entrie into a complex old gentleman.
So long as human society will leave my spiritual
inside alone, I will allow it, with a comparative
submission, to work its wild will with my
physical interior. I will submit to cigars. I
will meekly embrace a bottle of Burgundy.
I will humble myself to a hansom cab. If only
by this means I may preserve to myself the

138

On Sandals and Simplicity

virginity of the spirit, which enjoys with aston-
ishment and fear. I do not say that these are
the only methods of preserving it. I incline to
the belief that there are others. But I will
have nothing to do with simplicity which lacks
the fear, the astonishment, and the joy alike.
I will have nothing to do with the devilish
vision of a child who is too simple to like toys.
The child is, indeed, in these, and many other
matters, the best guide. And in nothing is the
child so righteously childlike, in nothing does
he exhibit more accurately the sounder order of
simplicity, than in the fact that he sees every-
thing with a simple pleasure, even the complex
things. The false type of naturalness harps
always on the distinction between the natural
and the artificial. The higher kind of natural-
ness ignores that distinction. To the child the
tree and the lamp-post are as natural and as
artificial as each other; or rather, neither of
them are natural but both supernatural. For
both are splendid and unexplained. The flower
with which God crowns the one, and the flame
with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the
other, are equally of the gold of fairy-tales. In
the middle of the wildest fields the most rustic
child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines.
And the only spiritual or philosophical objection

139

Heretics

to steam-engines is not that men pay for them
or work at them, or make them very ugly, or
even that men are killed by them; but merely
that men do not play at them. The evil is that
the childish poetry of clockwork does not re-
main. The wrong is not that engines are too
much admired, but that they are not admired
enough. The sin is not that engines are
mechanical, but that men are mechanical.

In this matter, then, as in all the other matters
treated in this book, our main conclusion is that
it is a fundamental point of view, a philosophy
or religion which is needed, and not any change
in habit or social routine. The things we need
most for immediate practical purposes are all
abstractions. We need a right view of the
human lot, a right view of the human society;
and if we were living eagerly and angrily in the
enthusiasm of those things, we should, ipso facto,
be living simply in the genuine and spiritual
sense. Desire and danger make every one
simple. And to those who talk to us with
interfering eloquence about Jaeger and the
pores of the skin, and about Plasmon and the
coats of the stomach, at them shall only be
hurled the words that are hurled at fops and
gluttons, "Take no thought what ye shall eat
or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall
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Our Sandals and Simplicity

be clothed. For after all these things do the
Gentiles seek. But seek first the kingdom of
God and His righteousness, and all these things
shall be added unto you." Those amazing
words are not only extraordinarily good, prac-
tical politics; they are also superlatively good
hygiene. The one supreme way of making all
those processes go right, the processes of health,
and strength, and grace, and beauty, the one
and only way of making certain of their accu-
racy, is to think about something else. If a
man is bent on climbing into the seventh heaven,
he may be quite easy about the pores of his
skin. If he harnesses his waggon to a star, the
process will have a most satisfactory effect upon
the coats of his stomach. For the thing called
"taking thought," the thing for which the best
modern word is "rationalizing," is in its nature,
inapplicable to all plain and urgent things.
Men take thought and ponder rationalistically,
touching remote things — things that only theo-
retically matter, such as the transit of Venus.
But only at their peril can men rationalize
about so practical a matter as health.

141

XI — Science and the Savages

A PERMANENT disadvantage of the
study of folk-lore and kindred sub-
jects is that the man of science can
hardly be in the nature of things
very frequently a man of the world. He is a
student of nature; he is scarcely ever a student
of human nature. And even where this diffi-
culty is overcome, and he is in some sense a
student of human nature, this is only a very
faint beginning of the painful progress towards
being human. For the study of primitive race
and religion stands apart in one important
respect from all, or nearly all, the ordinary
scientific studies. A man can understand as-
tronomy only by being an astronomer; he can
understand entomology only by being an ento-
mologist (or, perhaps, an insect); but he can
understand a great deal of anthropology merely
by being a man. He is himself the animal
which he studies. Hence arises the fact which
strikes the eye everywhere in the records of
ethnology and folk-lore — the fact that the
same frigid and detached spirit which leads to
success in the study of astronomy or botany
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Science and the Savages

leads to disaster in the study of mythology or
human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a
man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is
not necessary to cease to be a man in order to
do justice to men. That same suppression of
sympathies, that same waving away of intui-
tions or guess-work which make a man preter-
naturally clever in dealing with the stomach of
a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid
in dealing with the heart of man. He is making
himself inhuman in order to understand hu-
manity. An ignorance of the other world is
boasted by many men of science; but in this
matter their defect arises, not from ignorance of
the other world, but from ignorance of this
world. For the secrets about which anthro-
pologists concern themselves can be best learnt,
not from books or voyages, but from the ordi-
nary commerce of man with man. The secret
of why some savage tribe worships monkeys or
the moon is not to be found even by travelling
among those savages and taking down then-
answers in a note-book, although the cleverest
man may pursue this course. The answer to
the riddle is in England; it is in London; nay, it
is in his own heart. When a man has discovered
why men in Bond Street wear black hats he will
at the same moment have discovered why men

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Heretics

in Timbuctoo wear red feathers. The mystery
in the heart of some savage war-dance should
not be studied in books of scientific travel; it
should be studied at a subscription ball. If a
man desires to find out the origins of religions,
let him not go to the Sandwich Islands; let him
go to church. If a man wishes to know the
origin of human society, to know what society,
philosophically speaking, really is, let him not
go into the British Museum; let him go into
society.

This total misunderstanding of the real nature
of ceremonial gives rise to the most awkward
and dehumanized versions of the conduct of
men in rude lands or ages. The man of science,
not realizing that ceremonial is essentially a
thing which is done without a reason, has to
find a reason for every sort of ceremonial, and,
as might be supposed, the reason is generally
a very absurd one — absurd because it origi-
nates not in the simple mind of the barbarian,
but in the sophisticated mind of the professor.
The learned man will say, for instance, "The
natives of Mumbojumbo Land believe that the
dead man can eat, and will require food upon
his journey to the other world. This is attested
by the fact that they place food in the grave,
and that any family not complying with this

144

Science and the Savages

rite is the object of the anger of the priests
and the tribe." To any one acquainted with
humanity this way of talking is topsy-turvy.
It is like saying, "The English in the twentieth
century believed that a dead man could smell.
This is attested by the fact that they always
covered his grave with lilies, violets, or other
flowers. Some priestly and tribal terrors were
evidently attached to the neglect of this action,
as we have records of several old ladies who
were very much disturbed in mind because
their wreaths had not arrived in time for the
funeral." It may be of course that savages put
food with a dead man because they think that a
dead man can eat, or weapons with a dead man
because they think that a dead man can fight.
But personally I do not believe that they think
anything of the kind. I believe they put food
or weapons on the dead for the same reason
that we put flowers, because it is an exceedingly
natural and obvious thing to do. We do not
understand, it is true, the emotion which makes
us think it obvious and natural; but that is
because, like all the important emotions of
human existence, it is essentially irrational.
We do not understand the savage for the same
reason that the savage does not understand
himself. And the savage does not understand

145

Heretics

himself for the same reason that we do not
understand ourselves either.

The obvious truth is that the moment any
matter has passed through the human mind it
is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes
of science. It has become a thing incurably
mysterious and infinite; this mortal has put on
immortality. Even what we call our material
desires are spiritual, because they are human.
Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how
much of it is phosphorus and how much is
protein; but science cannot analyse any man's
wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it
is hunger, how much custom, how much ner-
vous fancy, how much a haunting love of the
beautiful. The man's desire for the pork-chop
remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his
desire for heaven. All attempts, therefore, at
a science of any human things, at a science of
history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociol-
ogy, are by their nature not merely hopeless,
but crazy. You can no more be certain in
economic history that a man's desire for money
was merely a desire for money than you can be
certain in hagiology that a saint's desire for
God was merely a desire for God. And this
kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of
the study is an absolutely final blow to anything
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Science and the Savages

in the nature of a science. Men can construct
a science with very few instruments, or with
very plain instruments; but no one on earth
could construct a science with unreliable instru-
ments. A man might work out the whole of
mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not
with a handful of clay which was always falling
apart into new fragments, and falling together
into new combinations. A man might measure
heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a
growing reed.

As one of the enormous follies of folk-lore, let
us take the case of the transmigration of stories,
and the alleged unity of their source. Story
after story the scientific mythologists have cut
out of its place in history, and pinned side by
side with similar stories in their museum of
fables. The process is industrious, it is fasci-
nating, and the whole of it rests on one of the
plainest fallacies in the world. That a story
has been told all over the place at some time or
other, not only does not prove that it never
really happened; it does not even faintly indi-
cate or make slightly more probable that it
never happened. That a large number of, fish-
ermen have falsely asserted that they have
caught a pike two feet long, does not in the
least affect the question of whether any one ever

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Heretics

really did so. That numberless journalists
announce a Franco-German war merely for
money is no evidence one way or the other upon
the dark question of whether such a war ever
occurred. Doubtless in a few hundred years
the innumerable Franco-German wars that did
not happen will have cleared the scientific mind
of any belief in the legendary war of '70 which
did. But that will be because if folk-lore stu-
dents remain at all, their nature will be un-
changed; and their services to folk-lore will be
still as they are at present, greater than they
know. For in truth these men do something
far more godlike than studying legends; they
create them.

There are two kinds of stories which the
scientists say cannot be true, because everybody
tells them. The first class consists of the stories
which are told everywhere, because they are
somewhat odd or clever; there is nothing in the
world to prevent their having happened to
somebody as an adventure any more than there
is anything to prevent their having occurred, as
they certainly did occur, to somebody as an
idea. But they are not likely to have happened
to many people. The second class of their
"myths" consist of the stories that are told
everywhere for the simple reason that they hap-
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Science and the Savages

pen everywhere. Of the first class, for instance,
we might take such an example as the story of
William Tell, now generally ranked among
legends upon the sole ground that it is found in
the tales of other peoples. Now, it is obvious
that this was told everywhere because whether
true or fictitious it is what is called "a good
story;" it is odd, exciting, and it has a climax.
But to suggest that some such eccentric incident
can never have happened in the whole history
of archery, or that it did not happen to any
particular person of whom it is told, is stark
impudence. The idea of shooting at a mark
attached to some valuable or beloved person is
an idea doubtless that might easily have oc-
curred to any inventive poet. But it is also an
idea that might easily occur to any boastful
archer. It might be one of the fantastic caprices
of some story-teller. It might equally well be
one of the fantastic caprices of some tyrant.
It might occur first in real life and afterwards
occur in legends. Or it might just as well occur
first in legends and afterwards occur m real
life. If no apple has ever been shot off a boy's
head from the beginning of the world, it may
be done to-morrow morning, and by somebody
who has never heard of William Tell.
This type of tale, indeed, may be pretty fairly
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Heretics

paralleled with the ordinary anecdote terminat-
ing in a repartee or an Irish bull. Such a retort
as the famous " Je ne vois pas la necessity" we
have all seen attributed to Talleyrand, to Vol-
taire, to Henri Quatre, to an anonymous judge,
and so on. But this variety does not in any
way make it more likely that the thing was
never said at all. It is highly likely that it was
really said by somebody unknown. It is highly
likely that it was really said by Talleyrand. In
any case, it is not any more difficult to believe
that the mot might have occurred to a man in
conversation than to a man writing memoirs.
It might have occurred to any of the men I
have mentioned.' But there is this point of
distinction about it, that it is not likely to have
occurred to all of them. And this is where the
first class of so-called myth differs from the
second to which I have previously referred.
For there is a second class of incident found to
be common to the stories of five or six heroes,
say to Sigurd, to Hercules, to Rustem, to the
Cid, and so on. And the peculiarity of this
myth is that not only is it highly reasonable to
imagine that it really happened to one hero,
but it is highly reasonable to imagine that it
really happened to all of them. Such a story,
for instance, is that of a great man having his

Science and the Savages

strength swayed or thwarted by the mysterious
weakness of a woman. The anecdotal story,
the story of William Tell, is as I have said, pop-
ular, because it is peculiar. But this 1 kind of
story, the story of Samson and Delilah, of
Arthur and Guinevere, is obviously popular
because it is not peculiar. It is popular as
good, quiet fiction is popular, because it tells
the truth about people. If the ruin of Samson
by a woman, and the ruin of Hercules by a
woman, have a common legendary origin, it is
gratifying to know that we can also explain, as
a fable, the ruin of Nelson by a woman and the
ruin of Parnell by a woman. And, indeed, I
have no doubt whatever that, some centuries
hence, the students of folk-lore will refuse alto-
gether to believe that Elizabeth Barrett eloped
with Robert Browning, and will prove their
point up to the hilt by the unquestionable fact
that the whole fiction of the period was full of
such elopements from end to end.

Possibly the most pathetic of all the delusions
of the modern students of primitive belief is
the notion they have about the thing they call
anthropomorphism. They believe that primi-
tive men attributed phenomena to a god in
human form in order to explain them, because
his mind in its sullen limitation could not reach

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Heretics

any further than his own clownish existence.
The thunder was called the voice of a man, the
lightning the eyes of a man, because by this
explanation they were made more reasonable
and comfortable. The final cure for all this
kind of philosophy is to walk down a lane at
night. Any one who does so will discover very
quickly that men pictured something semi-
human at the back of all things, not because
such a thought was natural, but because it was
supernatural; not because it made things more
comprehensible, but because it made them a
hundred times more incomprehensible and
mysterious. For a man walking down a lane
at night can see the conspicuous fact that as
long as nature keeps to her own course, she
has no power with us at all. As long as a tree
is a tree, it is a top-heavy monster with a
hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only
one leg. But so long as a tree is a tree, it
does not frighten us at all. It begins to be
something alien, to be something strange, only
when it looks like ourselves. When a tree
really looks like a man our knees knock under
us. And when the whole universe looks like
a man we fall on our faces.

152

XII — Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

OF the New Paganism (or neo-Pagan-
ism), as it was preached flamboy-
antly by Mr. Swinburne or delicately
by Walter Pater, there is no neces-
sity to take any very grave account, except as
a thing which left behind it incomparable exer-
cises in the English language. The New Pagan-
ism is no longer new, and it never at any time
bore the smallest resemblance to Paganism.
The ideas about the ancient civilization which
it has left loose in the public mind are certainly
extraordinary enough. The term "pagan" is
continually used in fiction and light literature
as meaning a man without any religion, whereas
a pagan was generally a man with about half a
dozen. The pagans, according to this notion,
were continually crowning themselves with
flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible
state, whereas, if there were two things that the
best pagan civilization did honestly believe in,
they were a rather too rigid dignity and a much
too rigid responsibility. Pagans are depicted
as above all things inebriate and lawless,
whereas they were above all things reasonable

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Heretics

and respectable. They are praised as disobe-
dient when they had only one great virtue —
civic obedience. They are envied and admired
as shamelessly happy when they had only one
great sin — despair.

Mr. Lowes Dickinson, the most pregnant
and provocative of recent writers on this and
similar subjects, is far too solid a man to have
fallen into this old error of the mere anarchy
of Paganism. In order to make hay of that
Hellenic enthusiasm which has as its ideal mere
appetite and egotism, it is not necessary to
know much philosophy, but merely to know a
little Greek. Mr. Lowes Dickinson knows a
great deal of philosophy, and also a greal deal
of Greek, and his error, if error he has, is not
that of the crude hedonist. But the contrast'
which he offers between Christianity and Pagan-
ism in the matter of moral ideals — a contrast
which he states very ably in a paper called
"How long halt ye?" which appeared in the
Independent Review — does, I think, contain an
error of a deeper kind. According to him, the
ideal of Paganism was not, indeed, a mere
frenzy of lust and liberty and caprice, but was
an ideal of full and satisfied humanity. Ac-
cording to him, the ideal of Christianity was
the ideal of asceticism. When I say that I

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Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

think this idea wholly wrong as a matter of
philosophy and history, I am not talking for
the moment about any ideal Christianity of my
own, or even of any primitive Christianity un-
defiled by after events. I am not, like so many
modern Christian idealists, basing my case upon
certain things which Christ said. Neither am
I, like so many other Christian idealists, basing
my case upon certain things that Christ forgot
to say. I take historic Christianity with all its
sins upon its head; I take it, as I would take
Jacobinism, or Mormonism, or any other mixed
or unpleasing human product, and I say that
the meaning of its action was not to be found
in asceticism. I say that its point of departure
from Paganism was not asceticism. I say that
its point of difference with the modern world
was not asceticism. I say that St. Simeon
Stylites had not his main inspiration in asceti-
cism. I say that the main Christian impulse
cannot be described as asceticism, even in the
ascetics.

Let me set about making the matter clear.
There is one broad fact about the relations of
Christianity and Paganism which is so simple
that many will smile at it, but which is so
important that all moderns forget it. The
primary fact about Christianity and Paganism

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Heretics

is that one came after the other. Mr. Lowes
Dickinson speaks of them as if they were
parallel ideals — even speaks as if Paganism
were the newer of the two, and the more fitted
for a new age. He suggests that the Pagan
ideal will be the ultimate good of man; but if
that is so, we must at least ask with more
curiosity than he allows for, why it was that
man actually found his ultimate good on earth
under the stars, and threw it away again. It
is this extraordinary enigma to which I propose
to attempt an answer.

There is only one thing in the modern world
that has been face to face with Paganism; there
is only one thing in the modern world which in
that sense knows anything about Paganism: and
that is Christianity. That fact is really the
weak point in the whole of that hedonistic neo-
Paganism of which I have spoken. All that
genuinely remains of the ancient hymns or the
ancient dances of Europe, all that has honestly
come to us from the festivals of Phoebus or
Pan, is to be found in the festivals of the Chris-
tian Church. If any one wants to hold the
end of a chain which really goes back to the
heathen mysteries, he had better take hold of
a festoon of flowers at Easter or a string of
sausages at Christmas. Everything else in the
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Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

modern world is of Christian origin, even every-
thing that seems most anti-Christian. The
French Revolution is of Christian origin. The
newspaper is of Christian origin. The anar-
chists are of Christian origin. Physical science
is of Christian origin. The attack on Chris-
tianity is of Christian origin. There is one
thing, and one thing only, in existence at the
present day which can in any sense accurately
be said to be of pagan origin, and that is
Christianity.

The real difference between Paganism and
Christianity is perfectly summed up in the
difference between the pagan, or natural, vir-
tues, and those three virtues of Christianity
which the Church of Rome calls virtues of grace.
The pagan, or rational, virtues are such things
as justice and temperance, and Christianity has
adopted them. The three mystical virtues
which Christianity has not adopted, but in-
vented, are faith, hope, and charity. Now
much easy and foolish Christian rhetoric could
easily be poured out upon those three words,
but I desire to confine myself to the two facts
which are evident about them. The first evi-
dent fact (in marked contrast to the delusion of
the dancing pagan) — the first evident fact, I
say, is that the pagan virtues, such as justice

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and temperance, are the sad virtues, and that
the mystical virtues of faith, hope, and charity
are the gay and exuberant virtues. And the
second evident fact, which is even more evident,
is the fact that the pagan virtues are the reason-
able virtues, and that the Christian virtues of
faith, hope, and charity are in their essence as
unreasonable as they can be.

As the word "unreasonable" is open to mis-
understanding, the matter may be more accu-
rately put by saying that each one of these
Christian or mystical virtues involves a paradox
in its own nature, and that this is not true of
any of the typically pagan or rationalist virtues.
Justice consists in finding out a certain thing
due to a certain man and giving it to him.
Temperance consists in finding out the proper
limit of a particular indulgence and adhering to
that. But charity means pardoning what is
unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope
means hoping when things are hopeless, or it
is no virtue at all. And faith means believing
the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

It is somewhat amusing, indeed, to notice the
difference between the fate of these three para-
doxes in the fashion of the modern mind.
Charity is a fashionable virtue in our time; it
is lit up by the gigantic firelight of Dickens.

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Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

Hope is a fashionable virtue to-day; our at-
tention has been arrested for it by the sudden
and silver trumpet of Stevenson. But faith is
unfashionable, and it is customary on every
side to cast against it the fact that it is a para-
dox. Everybody mockingly repeats the famous
childish definition that faith is "the power of
believing that which we know to be untrue."
Yet it is not one atom more paradoxical than
hope or charity. Charity is the power of de-
fending that which we know to be indefensible.
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circum-
stances which we know to be desperate. It is
true that there is a state of hope which belongs
to bright prospects and the morning; but that
is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope
exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is
true that there is a thing crudely called charity,
which means charity to the deserving poor; but
charity to the deserving is not charity at all,
but justice. It is the undeserving who require
it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or
exists wholly for them. For practical purposes
it is at the hopeless moment that we require
the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not
exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment
Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be
reasonable it begins to be useful.

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Now the old pagan world went perfectly
straightforward until it discovered that going
straightforward is an enormous mistake. It
was nobly and beautifully reasonable, and dis-
covered in its death-pang this lasting and
valuable truth, a heritage for the ages, that
reasonableness will not do. The pagan age
was truly an Eden or golden age, in this essen-
tial sense, that it is not to be recovered. And
it is not to be recovered in this sense again
that, while we are certainly jollier than the
pagans, and much more right than the pagans,
there is not one of us who can, by the utmost
stretch of energy, be so sensible as the pagans.
That naked innocence of the intellect cannot
be recovered by any man after Christianity;
and for this excellent reason, that every man
after Christianity knows it to be misleading.
Let me take an example, the first that occurs to
the mind, of this impossible plainness in the
pagan point of view. The greatest tribute to
Christianity in the modern world is Tennyson's
"Ulysses." The poet reads into the story of
Ulysses the conception of an incurable desire to
wander. But the real Ulysses does not desire
to wander at all. He desires to get home. He
displays his heroic and unconquerable qualities
in resisting the misfortunes which baulk him;
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Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

but that is all. There is no love of adventure
for its own sake; that is a Christian product.
There is no love of Penelope for her own sake;
that is a Christian product. Everything in that
old world would appear to have been clean and
obvious. A good man was a good man; a bad
man was a bad man. For this reason they had
no charity; for charity is a reverent agnosticism
towards the complexity of the soul. For this
reason they had no such thing as the art of
fiction, the novel; for the novel is a creation of
the mystical idea of charity. For them a pleas-
ant landscape was pleasant, and an unpleasant
landscape unpleasant. Hence they had no idea
of romance; for romance consists in thinking
a thing more delightful because it is dangerous;
it is a Christian idea. In a word, we cannot
reconstruct or even imagine the beautiful and
astonishing pagan world. It was a world in
which common sense was really common.

My general meaning touching the three
virtues of which I have spoken will now, I
hope, be sufficiently clear. They are all three
paradoxical, they are all three practical, and
they are all three paradoxical because they are
practical. It is the stress of ultimate need, and
a terrible knowledge of things as they are, which
led men to set up these riddles, and to die for
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Heretics

them. Whatever may be the meaning of the
contradiction, it is the fact that the only kind of
hope that is of any use in a battle is a hope that
denies arithmetic. Whatever may be the mean-
ing of the contradiction, it is the fact that the
only kind of charity which any weak spirit wants,
or which any generous spirit feels, is the charity
which forgives the sins that are like scarlet.
Whatever may be the meaning of faith, it must
always mean a certainty about something we
cannot prove. Thus, for instance, we believe
by faith' in the existence of other people.

But there is another Christian virtue, a virtue
far more obviously and historically connected
with Christianity, which will illustrate even
better the connection between paradox and
practical necessity. This virtue cannot be
questioned in its capacity as a historical symbol;
certainly Mr. Lowes Dickinson will not ques-
tion it. It has been the boast of hundreds of
the champions of Christianity. It has been the
taunt of hundreds of the opponents of Chris-
tianity. It is, in essence, the basis of Mr.
Lowes Dickinson's whole distinction between
Christianity and Paganism. I mean, of course,
the virtue of humility. I admit, of course, most
readily, that a great deal of false Eastern hu-
mility (that is, of strictly ascetic humility) mixed
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Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

itself with the main stream of European Chris-
tianity. We must not forget that when we
speak of Christianity we are speaking of a
whole continent for about a thousand years.
But of this virtue even more than of the other
three, I would maintain the general proposition
adopted above. Civilization discovered Chris-
tian humility for the same urgent reason that
it discovered faith and charity — that is, be-
cause Christian civilization had to discover it
or die.

The great psychological discovery of Pagan-
ism, which turned it into Christianity, can be
expressed with some accuracy in one phrase.
The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to
enjoy himself. By the end of his civilization
he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy
himself and continue to enjoy anything else.
Mr. Lowes Dickinson has pointed out in words
too excellent to need any further elucidation,
the absurd shallowness of those who imagine
that the pagan enjoyed himself only in a ma-
terialistic sense. Of course, he enjoyed himself,
not only intellectually even, he enjoyed himself
morally, he enjoyed himself spiritually. But it
was himself that he was enjoying; on the face
of it, a very natural thing to do. Now, the
psychological discovery is merely this, that
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whereas it had been supposed that the fullest
possible enjoyment is to be found by extending
our ego to infinity, the truth is that the fullest
possible enjoyment is to be found by reducing
our ego to zero.

Humility is the thing which is for ever re-
newing the earth and the stars. It is humility,
and not duty, which preserves the stars from
wrong, from the unpardonable wrong of casual
resignation; it is through humility that the most
ancient heavens for us are fresh and strong.
The curse that came before history has laid on
us all a tendency to be weary of wonders. If
we saw the sun for the first time it would be
the most fearful and beautiful of meteors. Now
that we see it for the hundredth time we call it,
in the hideous and blasphemous phrase of
Wordsworth, "the light of common day." We
are inclined to increase our claims. We are
inclined to demand six suns, to demand a blue
sun, to demand a green sun. Humility is per-
petually putting us back in the primal darkness.
There all light is lightning, startling and instan-
taneous. Until we understand that original
dark, in which we have neither sight nor expec-
tation, we can give no hearty and childlike
praise to the splendid sensationalism of things.
The terms "pessimism" and "optimism," like
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Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

most modern terms, are unmeaning. But if
they can be used in any vague sense as meaning
something, we may say that in this great fact
pessimism is the very basis of optimism. The
man who destroys himself creates the universe.
To the humble man, and to the humble man
alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble
man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is
really a sea. When he looks at all the faces in
the street, he does not only realize that men are
alive, he realizes with a dramatic pleasure that
they are not dead.

I have not spoken of another aspect of the
discovery of humility as a psychological neces-
sity, because it is more commonly insisted on,
and is in itself more obvious. But it is equally
clear that humility is a permanent necessity as
a condition of effort and self-examination. It
is one of the deadly fallacies of Jingo politics
that a nation is stronger for despising other
nations. As a matter of fact, the strongest
nations are those, like Prussia or Japan, which
began from very mean beginnings, but have not
been too proud to sit at the feet of the foreigner
and learn everything from him. Almost every
obvious and direct victory has been the victory
of the plagiarist. This is, indeed, only a very
paltry by-product of humility, but it is a pro-

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duct of humility, and, therefore, it is successful.
Prussia had no Christian humility in its internal
arrangements; hence its internal arrangements
were miserable. But it had enough Christian
humility slavishly to copy France (even down
to Frederick the Great's poetry), and that which
it had the humility to copy it had ultimately the
honour to conquer. The case of the Japanese
is even more obvious; their only Christian and
their only beautiful quality is that they have
humbled themselves to be exalted. All this
aspect of humility, however, as connected with
the matter of effort and striving for a standard
set above us, I dismiss as having been suffi-
ciently pointed out by almost all idealistic
writers.

It may be worth while, however, to point
out the interesting disparity in the matter of
humility between the modern notion of the
strong man and the actual records of strong
men. Carlyle objected to the statement that
no man could be a hero to his valet. Every
sympathy can be extended towards him in the
matter if he merely or mainly meant that the
phrase was a disparagement of hero-worship.
Hero-worship is certainly a generous and human
impulse; the hero may be faulty, but the wor-
ship can hardly be. It may be that no man
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Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

would be a hero to his valet. But any man
would be a valet to his hero. But in truth both
the proverb itself and Carlyle's stricture upon
it ignore the most essential matter at issue.
The ultimate psychological truth is not that no
man is a hero to his valet. The ultimate
psychological truth, the foundation of Chris-
tianity, is that no man is a hero to himself.
Cromwell, according to Carlyle, was a strong
man. According to Cromwell, he was a weak
one.

The weak point in the whole of Carlyle's
case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most
celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were
mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and
more reverent realism, says that they are all
fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the
doctrine of original sin. It may also be de-
scribed as the doctrine of the equality of men.
But the essential point of it is merely this, that
whatever primary and far-reaching moral dan-
gers affect any man, affect all men. All men
can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be
heroes, if inspired. And this doctrine does
away altogether with Carlyle's pathetic belief
(or any one else's pathetic belief) in "the wise
few." There are no wise few. Every aris-
tocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all
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Heretics

essential points, exactly like a small mob. Every
oligarchy is merely a knot of men in the street —
that is to say, it is very jolly, but not infallible.
And no oligarchies in the world's history have
ever come off so badly in practical affairs as
the very proud oligarchies — the oligarchy of
Poland, the oligarchy of Venice. And the
armies that have most swiftly and suddenly
broken their enemies in pieces have been the
religious armies — the Moslem Armies, for in-
stance, or the Puritan Armies. And a religious
army may, by its nature, be defined as an army
in which every man is taught not to exalt but
to abase himself. Many modern Englishmen
talk of themselves as the sturdy descendants of
their sturdy Puritan fathers. As a fact, they
would run away from a cow. If you asked one
of their Puritan fathers, if you asked Bunyan,
for instance, whether he was sturdy, he would
have answered, with tears, that he was as weak
as water. And because of this he would have
borne tortures. And this virtue of humility,
while being practical enough to win battles,
will always be paradoxical enough to puzzle
pedants. It is at one with the virtue of charity
in this respect. Every generous person will
admit that the one kind of sin which charity
should cover is the sin which is inexcusable.
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Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

And every generous person will equally agree
that the one kind of pride which is wholly
damnable is the pride of the man who has
something to be proud of. The pride which,
proportionally speaking, does not hurt the char-
acter, is the pride in things which reflect no
credit on the person at all. Thus it does a
man no harm to be proud of his country, and
comparatively little harm to be proud of his
remote ancestors. It does him more harm to
be proud of having made money, because in
that he has a little more reason for pride. It
does him more harm still to be proud of what
is nobler than money — intellect. And it does
him most harm of all to value himself for the
most valuable thing on earth — goodness. The
man who is proud of what is really creditable
to him is the Pharisee, the man whom Christ
Himself could not forbear to strike.

My objection to Mr. Lowes Dickinson and
the reassertors of the pagan ideal is, then, this.
I accuse them of ignoring definite human dis-
coveries in the moral world, discoveries as defi-
nite, though not as material, as the discovery
of the circulation of the blood. We cannot
go back to an ideal of reason and sanity. For
mankind has discovered that reason does not
lead to sanity. We cannot go back to an ideal
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Heretics

of pride and enjoyment. For mankind has
discovered that pride does not lead to enjoy-
ment. I do not know by what extraordinary
mental accident modern writers so constantly
connect the idea of progress with the idea of
independent thinking. Progress is obviously
the antithesis of independent thinking. For
under independent or individualistic thinking,
every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in
all probability, just as far as his father before
him. But if there really be anything of the
nature of progress, it must mean, above all
things, the careful study and assumption of the
whole of the past. I accuse Mr. Lowes Dickin-
son and his school of reaction in the only real
sense. If he likes, let him ignore these great
historic mysteries — the mystery of charity, the
mystery of chivalry, the mystery of faith. If
he likes, let him ignore the plough or the
printing-press. But if we do revive and pursue
the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-
completion we shall end — where Paganism
ended. I do not mean that we shall end in
destruction. I mean that we shall end in
Christianity.

I70

XIII — Celts and Celtophiles

SCIENCE in the modern world has many
uses; its chief use, however, is to pro-
vide long words to cover the errors of
the rich. The word "kleptomania" is
a vulgar example of what I mean. It is on a
par with that strange theory, always advanced
when a wealthy or prominent person is in the
dock, that exposure is more of a punishment
for the rich than for the poor. Of course, the
very reverse is the truth. Exposure is more of
a punishment for the poor than for the rich.
The richer a man is the easier it is for him to be
a tramp. The richer a man is the easier it is
for him to be popular and generally respected
in the Cannibal Islands. But the poorer a man
is the more likely it is that he will have to use
his past life whenever he wants to get a bed for
the night. Honour is a luxury for aristocrats,
but it is a necessity for hall-porters. This is a
secondary matter, but it is an example of the
general proposition I offer — the proposition
that an enormous amount of modern ingenuity
is expended on finding defences for the inde-
fensible conduct of the powerful. As I have
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Heretics

said above, these defences generally exhibit
themselves most emphatically in the form of
appeals to physical science. And of all the
forms in which science, or pseudo-science, has
come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there
is none so singular as the singular invention of
the theory of races.

When a wealthy nation like the English dis-
covers the perfectly patent fact that it is making
a ludicrous mess of the government of a poorer
nation like the Irish, it pauses for a moment in
consternation, and then begins to talk about
Celts and Teutons. As far as I can understand
the theory, the Irish are Celts and the English
are Teutons. Of course, the Irish are not Celts
any more than the English are Teutons. I
have not followed the ethnological discussion
with much energy, but the last scientific con-
clusion which I read inclined on the whole to
the summary that the English were mainly
Celtic and the Irish mainly Teutonic. But no
man alive, with even the glimmering of a real
scientific sense, would ever dream of applying
the terms "Celtic" or "Teutonic" to either of
them in any positive or useful sense.

That sort of thing must be left to people who
talk about the Anglo-Saxon race, and extend
the expression to America. How much of the
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Celts and Celtophiles

blood of the Angles and Saxons (whoever they
were) there remains in our mixed British, Ro-
man, German, Dane, Norman, and Picard
stock is a matter only interesting to wild anti-
quaries. And how much of that diluted blood
can possibly remain in that roaring whirlpool
of America into which a cataract of Swedes,
Jews, Germans, Irishmen, and Italians is per-
petually pouring, is a matter only interesting
to lunatics. It would have been wiser for the
English governing class to have called upon
some other god. All other gods, however weak
and warring, at least boast of being constant.
But science boasts of being in a flux for ever;
boasts of being unstable as water.

And England and the English governing
class never did call on this absurd deity of race
until it seemed, for an instant, that they had
no other god to call on. All the most genuine
Englishmen in history would have yawned or
laughed in your face if you had begun to talk
about Anglo-Saxons. If you had attempted to
substitute the ideal of race for the ideal of
nationality, I really do not like to think what
they would have said. I certainly should not
like to have been the officer of Nelson who
suddenly discovered his French blood on the
eve of Trafalgar. I should not like to have

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been the Norfolk or Suffolk gentleman who
had to expound to Admiral Blake by what
demonstrable ties of genealogy he was irrevoc-
ably bound to the Dutch. The truth of the
whole matter is very simple. Nationality ex-
ists, and has nothing in the world to do with
race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a
secret society; it is a product of the human soul
and will; it is a spiritual product. And there
are men in the modern world who would think
anything and do anything rather than admit
that anything could be a spiritual product.

A nation, however, as it confronts the modern
world, is a purely spiritual product. Some-
times it has been born in independence, like
Scotland. Sometimes it has been born in
dependence, in subjugation, like Ireland. Some-
times it is a large thing cohering out of many
smaller things, like Italy. Sometimes it is a
small thing breaking away from larger things,
like Poland. But in each and every case its
quality is purely spiritual, or, if you will, purely
psychological. It is a moment when five men
become a sixth man. Every one knows it who
has ever founded a club. It is a moment when
five places become one place. Every one must
know it who has ever had to repel an invasion.
Mr. Timothy Healy, the most serious intellect

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in the present House of Commons, summed up
nationality to perfection when he simply called
it something for which people will die. As he
excellently said in reply to Lord Hugh Cecil,
"No one, not even the noble lord, would die for
the meridian of Greenwich." And that is the
great tribute to its purely psychological char-
acter. It is idle to ask why Greenwich should
not cohere in this spiritual manner while Athens
or Sparta did. It is like asking why a man
falls in love with one woman and not with
another.

Now, of this great spiritual coherence, in-
dependent of external circumstances, or of race,
or of any obvious physical thing, Ireland is the
most remarkable example. Rome conquered
nations, but Ireland has conquered races. The
Norman has gone there and become Irish, the
Scotchman has gone there and become Irish,
the Spaniard has gone there and become Irish,
even the bitter soldier of Cromwell has gone
there and become Irish. Ireland, which did
not exist even politically, has been stronger than
all the races that existed scientifically. The
purest Germanic blood, the purest Norman
blood, the purest blood of the passionate Scotch
patriot, has not been so attractive as a nation
without a flag. Ireland, unrecognized and op-

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pressed, has easily absorbed races, as such trifles
are easily absorbed. She has easily disposed of
physical science, as such superstitions are easily
disposed of. Nationality in its weakness has
been stronger than ethnology in its strength.
Five triumphant races have been absorbed,
have been defeated by a defeated nationality.

This being the true and strange glory of
Ireland, it is impossible to hear without im-
patience of the attempt so constantly made
among her modern sympathizers to talk about
Celts and Celticism. Who were the Celts?
I defy anybody to say. Who are the Irish ? I
defy any one to be indifferent, or to pretend not
to know. Mr. W. B. Yeats, the great Irish
genius who has appeared in our time, shows
his own admirable penetration in discarding
altogether the argument from a Celtic race.
But he does not wholly escape, and his followers
hardly ever escape, the general objection to the
Celtic argument. The tendency of that argu-
ment is to represent the Irish or the Celts as
a strange and separate race, as a tribe of eccen-
trics in the modern world immersed in dim
legends and fruitless dreams. Its tendency is
to exhibit the Irish as odd, because they see the
fairies. Its trend is to make the Irish seem
weird and wild because they sing old songs and
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join in strange dances. But this is quite an
error; indeed, it is the opposite of the truth.
It is the English who are odd because they do
not see the fairies. It is the inhabitants of
Kensington who are weird and wild because
they do not sing old songs and join in strange
dances. In all this the Irish are not in the
least strange and separate, are not in the least
Celtic, as the word is commonly and popularly
used. In all this the Irish are simply an ordi-
nary sensible nation, living the life of any other
ordinary and sensible nation which has not
been either sodden with smoke or oppressed
by money-lenders, or otherwise corrupted with
wealth and science. There is nothing Celtic
about having legends. It is merely human.
The Germans, who are (I suppose) Teutonic,
have hundreds of legends, wherever it happens
that the Germans are human. There is nothing
Celtic about loving poetry; the English loved
poetry more, perhaps, than any other people
before they came under the shadow of the
chimney-pot and the shadow of the chimney-
pot hat. It is not Ireland which is mad and
mystic; it is Manchester which is mad and
mystic, which is incredible, which is a wild
exception among human things. Ireland has
no need to play the silly game of the science
177

Heretics

of races; Ireland has no need to pretend to be
a tribe of visionaries apart. In the matter of
visions, Ireland is more than a nation, it is a
model nation.

178

XIV — On Certain Modern Writers and the
Institution of the Family

THE family may fairly be considered,
one would think, an ultimate human
institution. Every one would admit
that it has been the main cell and
central unit of almost all societies hitherto,
except, indeed, such societies as that of Lace-
daemon, which went in for "efficiency," and has,
therefore, perished, and left not a trace behind.
Christianity, even enormous as was its revolu-
tion, did not alter this ancient and savage
sanctity; it merely reversed it. It did not deny
the trinity of father, mother, and child. It
merely read it backwards, making it run child,
mother, father. This it called, not the family,
but the Holy Family, for many things are made
holy by being turned upside down. But some
sages of our own decadence ha\ 2 n.ade a serious
attack on the family. They have impugned it,
as I think wrongly; and its defenders have de
fended it, and defended it wrongly. The com-
mon defence of the family is that, amid the
stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful,
pleasant, and at one. But there is another
179

Heretics

defence of the family which is possible, and
to me evident; this defence is that the family is
not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays
of the advantages of the small community.
We are told that we must go in for large empires
and large ideas. There is one advantage, how-
ever, in the small state, the city, or the village,
which only the wilfully blind can overlook.
The man who lives in a small community lives
in a much larger world. He knows much more
of the fierce varieties and uncompromising di-
vergences of men. The reason is obvious. In
a large community we can choose our com-
panions. In a small community our compan-
ions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive
and highly civilized societies groups come into
existence founded upon what is called sympathy,
and shut out the real world more sharply than
the gates of a monastery. There is nothing
really narrow about the clan; the thing which
is really narrc w is the clique. The men of the
clan live together because they all wear the
same tartan or are all descended from the same
sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine
luck of things, there will always be more colours
than in any tartan. But the men of the clique
live together because they have the same kind
180

On the Institution of the Family

of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of
spiritual coherence and contentment, like that
which exists in hell. A big society exists in
order to form cliques. A big society is a society
for the promotion of narrowness. It is a ma-
chinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary
and sensitive individual from all experience of
the bitter and bracing human compromises.
It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a so-
ciety for the prevention of Christian knowledge.
We can see this change, for instance, in the
modern transformation of the thing called a
club. When London was smaller, and the parts
of London more self-contained and parochial,
the club was what it still is in villages, the
opposite of what it is now in great cities. Then
the club was valued as a place where a man
could be sociable. Now the club is valued as a
place where a man can be unsociable. The
more the enlargement and elaboration of our
civilization goes on the more the club ceases to
be a place where a man can have a noisy argu-
ment, and becomes more and more a place
where a man can have what is somewhat fan-
tastically called a quiet chop. Its aim is to
make a man comfortable, and to make a man
comfortable is to make him the opposite of
sociable. Sociability, like all good things, is
181

Heretics

full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations.
The club tends to produce the most degraded
of all combinations — the luxurious anchorite,
the man who combines the self-indulgence of
Lucullus with the insane loneliness of St.
Simeon Stylites.

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up
in the street in which we live, we should step
suddenly into a much larger and much wilder
world than we have ever known. And it is
the whole effort of the typically modern person
to escape from the street in which he lives.
First he invents modern hygiene and goes to
Margate. Then he invents modem culture and
goes to Florence. Then he invents modern
imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo. He "goes
to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pre-
tends to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a
camel. And in all this he is still essentially
fleeing from the street in which he was born;
and of this flight he is always ready with his
own explanation. He says he is fleeing from
his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is
really fleeing from his street because it is a
great deal too exciting. It is exciting because
it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive.
He can visit Venice because to him the Vene-
tians are only Venetians; the people in his own
182

On the Institution of the Family

street are men. He can stare at the Chinese
because for him the Chinese are a passive thing
to be stared at; if he stares at the old lady in
the next garden, she becomes active. He is
forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating
society of his equals — of free men, perverse,
personal, deliberately different from himself.
The street in Brixton is too glowing and over-
powering. He has to soothe and quiet himself
among tigers and vultures, camels and croco-
diles. These creatures are indeed very different
from himself. But they do not put their shape
or colour or custom into a decisive intellectual
competition with his own. They do not seek
to destroy his principles and assert their own;
the stranger monsters of the suburban street do
seek to do this. The camel does not contort
his features into a fine sneer because Mr.
Robinson has not got a hump; the cultured
gentleman at No. 5 does exhibit a sneer because
Robinson has not got a dado. The vulture
will not roar with laughter because a man does
not fly; but the major at No. 9 will roar with
laughter because a man does not smoke. The
complaint we commonly have to make of our
neighbours is that they will not, as we express
it, mind their own business. We do not really
mean that they will not mind their own business.
183

Heretics

If our neighbours did not mind their own busi-
ness they would be asked abruptly for their rent,
and would rapidly cease to be our neighbours.
What we really mean when we say that they
cannot mind their own business is something
much deeper. We do not dislike them because
they have so little force and fire that they cannot
be interested in themselves. We dislike them
because they have so much force and fire that
they can be interested in us as well. What we
dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the
narrowness of their horizon, but their superb
tendency to broaden it. And all aversions to
ordinary humanity have this general character.
They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is
pretended), but to its energy. The misan-
thropes pretend that they despise humanity for
its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate
it for its strength.

Of course, this shrinking from the brutal
vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a
perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long
as it does not pretend to any point of supe-
riority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or
aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie
that its inherent weakness has in justice to be
pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most par-
donable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable
184

On the Institution of the Family

of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most
prominently this pretentious claim of the fas-
tidious, has a description somewhere — a very
powerful description in the purely literary sense
— of the disgust and disdain which consume
him at the sight of the common people with
their common faces, their common voices, and
their common minds. As I have said, this
attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it
as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about
it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak.
When he makes us feel that he cannot endure
the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the
overpowering omnipresence which belongs to
the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody
who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in
a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated
mankind when he was less than a man. Every
man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding
fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating
smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible
lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask
us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy
of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong
wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It
is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

We make our friends; we make our enemies;
but God makes our next-door neighbour.

i8S

Heretics

Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless
terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars,
as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is
Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is
why the old religions and the old scriptural
language showed so sharp a wisdom when they
spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but
one's duty towards one's neighbour. The duty
towards humanity may often take the form of
some choice which is personal or even pleasur-
able. That duty may be a hobby; it may even
be a dissipation. We may work in the East
End because we are peculiarly fitted to work
in the East End, or because we think we are;
we may fight for the cause of international
peace because we are very fond of fighting.
The most monstrous martyrdom, the most re-
pulsive experience, may be the result of choice
or a kind of taste. We may be so made as to
be particularly fond of lunatics or specially
interested in leprosy. We may love negroes
because they are black or German Socialists
because they are pedantic. But we have to
love our neighbour because he is there — a much
more alarming reason for a much more serious
operation. He is the sample of humanity which
is actually given us. Precisely because he may
1S6

On the Institution of the Family

be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol
because he is an accident.

Doubtless men flee from small environments
into lands that are very deadly. But this is
natural enough; for they are not fleeing from
death. They are fleeing from life. And this
principle applies to ring within ring of the social
system of humanity. It is perfectly reasonable
that men should seek for some particular variety
of the human type, so long as they are seeking
for that variety of the human type, and not for
mere human variety. It is quite proper that a
British diplomatist should seek the society of
Japanese generals, if what he wants is Japanese
generals. But if what he wants is people differ-
ent from himself, he had much better stop at
home and discuss religion with the housemaid.
It is quite reasonable that the village genius
should come up to conquer London if what he
wants is to conquer London. But if he wants
to conquer something fundamentally and sym-
bolically hostile and also very strong, he had
much better remain where he is and have a
row with the rector. The man in the suburbarf
street is quite right if he goes to Ramsgate for
the sake of Ramsgate — a difficult thing to
imagine. But if, as he expresses it, he goes to
Ramsgate "for a change," then he would have
187

Heretics

a much more romantic and even melodramatic
change if he jumped over the wall into his
neighbour's garden. The consequences would
be bracing in a sense far beyond the possibilities
of Ramsgate hygiene.

Now, exactly as this principle applies to
the empire, to the nation within the empire, to the
city within the nation, to the street within the
city, so it applies to the home within the street.
The institution of the family is to be com-
mended for precisely the same reasons that the
institution of the nation, or the institution of
the city, are in this matter to be commended.
It is a good thing for a man to live in a family
for the same reason that it is a good thing for
a man to be besieged in a city. It is a good
thing for a man to live in a family m the same
sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing
for a man to be snowed up in a street. They
all force him to realize that life is not a thing
from outside, but a thing from inside. Above
all, they all insist upon the fact that life, if it
be a truly stimulating and fascinating life, is a
thing which, of its nature, exists in spite of
ourselves. The modern writers who have sug-
gested, in a more or less open manner, that the
family is a bad institution, have generally con-
fined themselves to suggesting, with much

18S

On the Institution of the Family

sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps
the family is not always very congenial. Of
course the family is a good institution because
it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely
because it contains so many divergencies and
varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like
a little kingdom, and, like most other little
kingdoms, is generally in a state of something
resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our
brother George is not interested in our religious
difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero
Restaurant, that the family has some of the
bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is
precisely because our uncle Henry does not
approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister
Sarah that the family is like humanity. The
men and women who, for good reasons and
bad, revolt against the family, are, for good
reasons and bad, simply revolting against man-
kind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like
mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind
Our youngest brother is mischievous, like man-
kind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he
is old, like the world.

Those who wish, rightly or wrongly, to step
out of all this, do definitely wish to step into a
narrower world. They are dismayed and ter-
rified by the largeness and variety of the family.
189

Heretics

Sarah wishes to find a world wholly consisting
of private theatricals; George wishes to think
the Trocadero a cosmos. I do not say, for a
moment, that the flight to this narrower life
may not be the right thing for the individual,
any more than I say the same thing about
flight into a monastery. But I do say that
anything is bad and artificial which tends to
make these people succumb to the strange delu-
sion that they are stepping into a world which
is actually larger and more varied than then-
own. The best way that a man could test his
readiness to encounter the common variety of
mankind would be to climb down a chimney
into any house at random, and get on as well
as possible with the people inside. And that
is essentially what each one of us did on the
day that he was born.

This is, indeed, the sublime and special
romance of the family. It is romantic because
it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is
everything that its enemies call it. It is ro-
mantic because it is arbitrary. It is romantic
because it is there. So long as you have groups
of men chosen rationally, you have some special
or sectarian atmosphere. It is when you have
groups of men chosen irrationally that you have
men. The element of adventure begins to
i go

On the Institution of the Family

exist; for an adventure is, by its nature, a thing
that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us,
not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has
been often regarded as the supreme adventure,
the supreme romantic accident. In so much as
there is in it something outside ourselves, some-
thing of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very
true. Love does take us and transfigure and
torture us. It does break our hearts with an
unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty
of music. But in so far as we have certainly
something to do with the matter; in so far as
we are in some sense prepared to fall in love
and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we
do to some extent choose and to some extent
even judge — in all this falling in love is not
truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all.
In this degree the supreme adventure is not
falling in love. The supreme adventure is
being bom. There we do walk suddenly into
a splendid and startling trap. There we do see
something of which we have not dreamed before.
Our father and mother do lie in wait for us
and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush.
Our uncle is a surprise. OUi. aunt is, in the
beautiful common expression, a bolt from the
blue. When we step into the family, by the act
of being born, we do step into a world which
191

Heretics

is incalculable, into a world which has its own
strange laws, into a world which could do with-
out us, into a world that we have not made.
In other words, when we step into the family
we step into a fairy-tale.

This colour as of a fantastic narrative ought
to cling to the family and to our relations with
it throughout life. Romance is the deepest
thing in life; romance is deeper even than
reality. For even if reality could be proved to
be misleading, it still could not be proved to
be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the
facts are false, they are still very strange. And
this strangeness of life, this unexpected and
even perverse element of things as they fall
out, remains incurably interesting. The cir-
cumstances we can regulate may become tame
or pessimistic; but the "circumstances over
which we have no control" remain god-like to
those who, like Mr. Micawber, can call on
them and renew their strength. People wonder
why the novel is the most popular form of
literature; people wonder why it is read more
than books of science or books of metaphysics.
The reason is very simple; it is merely that
the novel is more true than they are. Life
may sometimes legitimately appear as a book
of science. Life may sometimes appear, and
192

On the Institution of the Family

with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of
metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our
existence may cease to be a song; it may cease
even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence
may not be an intelligible justice, or even a
recognizable wrong. But our existence is still
a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset
is written, "to be continued in our next." If
we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a
philosophical and exact deduction, and be cer-
tain that we are finishing it right. With the
adequate brain-power we could finish any
scientific discovery, and be certain that we were
finishing it right. But not with the most
gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest
or silliest story, and be certain that we were
finishing it right. That is because a story has
behind it, not merely intellect which is partly
mechanical, but will, which is in its essence
divine. The narrative writer can send his hero
to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but
.one. He can do it by the same divine caprice
whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows
himself, and to hell afterwards if he chooses.
And the same civilization, the chivalric Euro-
pean civilization which asserted freewill in the
thirteenth century, produced the thing called
"fiction" in the eighteenth. When Thomas

193

Heretics

Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man,
he created all the bad novels in the circulating
libraries.

But in order that life should be a story or
romance to us, it is necessary that a great part
of it, at any rate, should be settled for us with-
out our permission. If we wish life to be a
system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish
it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may
often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be
written by somebody else which we like very
little. But we should like it still less if the
author came before the curtain every hour or
so, and forced on us the whole trouble of in-
venting the next act. A man has control over
many things in his life; he has control over
enough things to be the hero of a novel. But
if he had control over everything, there would
be so much hero that there would be no novel.
And the reason why the lives of the rich are at
bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that
they can choose the events. They are dull
because they are omnipotent. They fail to feel
adventures because they can make the adven-
tures. The thing which keeps life romantic
and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of
these great plain limitations which force all
of us to meet the things we do not like or do

194

On the Institution of the Family

not expect. It is vain for the supercilious
moderns to talk of being in uncongenial sur-
roundings. To be in a romance is to be in
uncongenial surroundings. To be born into
this earth is to be born into uncongenial sur-
roundings, hence to be born into a romance.
Of all these great limitations and frameworks
which fashion and create the poetry and variety
of life, the family is the most definite and im-
portant. Hence it is misunderstood by the
moderns, who imagine that romance would exist
most perfectly in a complete state of what they
call liberty. They think that if a man makes
a gesture it would be a startling and romantic
matter that the sun should fall from the
sky. But the startling and romantic thing
about the sun is that it does not fall from the
sky. They are seeking under every shape and
form a world where there are no limitations —
that is, a world where there are no outlines;
that is, a world where there are no shapes.
There is nothing baser than that infinity.
They say they wish to be as strong as the uni-
verse, but they really wish the whole universe
as weak as themselves.

i95

XV — On Smart Novelists and the Smart
Set

IN one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable
to read bad literature than good literature.
Good literature may tell us the mind of
one man; but bad literature may tell us
the mind of many men. A good novel tells us
the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells
us the truth about its author. It does much
more than that, it tells us the truth about its
readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all
the more the more cynical and immoral be the
motive of its manufacture. The more dis-
honest a book is as a book the more honest it
is as a public document. A sincere novel ex-
hibits the simplicity of one particular man; an
insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of man-
kind. The pedantic decisions and definable
readjustments of man may be found in scrolls
and statute books and scriptures; but men's
basic assumptions and everlasting energies are
to be found in penny dreadfuls and halfpenny
novelettes. Thus a man, like many men of
real culture in our day, might learn from good
literature nothing except the power to appre-
196

Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

date good literature. But from bad literature
he might learn to govern empires and look over
the map of mankind. ""' --.,._

There is one rather interesting example of
this state of things in which the weaker litera-
ture is really the stronger and the stronger the
weaker. It is the case of what may be called,
for the sake of an approximate description,
the literature of aristocracy; or, if you prefer
the description, the literature of snobbishness.
Now, if any one wishes to find a really effective
and comprehensible and permanent case for
aristocracy well and sincerely stated, let him
read, not the modern philosophical conserva-
tives, not even Nietzsche, let him read the Bow
Bells Novelettes. Of the case of Nietzsche I
am confessedly more doubtful. Nietzsche and
the Bow Bells Novelettes have both obviously
the same fundamental character; they both
worship the tall man with curling moustaches
and herculean bodily power, and they both
worship him in a manner which is somewhat
feminine and hysterical. Even here, however,
the Novelette easily maintains its philosophical
superiority, because it does attribute to the
strong man those virtues which do commonly
belong to him, such virtues as laziness and kind-
liness and a rather reckless benevolence, and a
197

Heretics

great dislike of hurting the weak. Nietzsche,
on the other hand, attributes to the strong man
that scorn against weakness which only exists
among invalids. It is not, however, of the
secondary merits of the great German philoso-
pher, but of the primary merits of the Bow
Bells Novelettes, that it is my present affair to
speak. The picture of aristocracy in the popu-
lar sentimental novelette seems to me very
satisfactory as a permanent political and philo-
sophical guide. It may be inaccurate about
details such as the title by which a baronet is
addressed or the width of a mountain chasm
which a baronet can conveniently leap, but it
is not a bad description of the general idea and
intention of aristocracy as they exist in human
affairs. The essential dream of aristocracy is
magnificence and valour; and if the Family
Herald Supplement sometimes distorts or exag-
gerates these things, at least, it does not fall
short in them. It never errs by making the
mountain chasm too narrow or the title of the
baronet insufficiently impressive. But above
this sane reliable old literature of snobbishness
there has arisen in our time another kind of
literature of snobbishness which, with its much
higher pretensions, seems to me worthy of very
much less respect. Incidentally (if that mat-
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Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

ters), it is much better literature. But it is
immeasurably worse philosophy, immeasurably
worse ethics and politics, immeasurably worse
vital rendering of aristocracy and humanity as
they really are. From such books as those of
which I wish now to speak we can discover
what a clever man can do with the idea of
aristocracy. But from the Family Herald Sup-
plement literature we can learn what the idea
of aristocracy can do with a man who is not
clever. And when we know that we know
English history.

This new aristocratic fiction must have caught
the attention of everybody who has read the
best fiction for the last fifteen years. It is that
genuine or alleged literature of the Smart Set
which represents that set as distinguished, not
only by smart dresses, but by smart sayings.
To the bad baronet, to the good baronet, to
the romantic and misunderstood baronet who
is supposed to be a bad baronet, but is a good
baronet, this school has added a conception
undreamed of in the former years — the con-
ception of an amusing baronet. The aristocrat
is not merely to be taller than mortal men and
stronger and handsomer, he is also to be more
witty. He is the long man with the short epi-
gram. Many eminent, and deservedly eminent,
199

Heretics

modern novelists must accept some responsi-
bility for having supported this worst form of
snobbishness — an intellectual snobbishness.
The talented author of "Dodo" is responsible
for having in some sense created the fashion as
a fashion. Mr. Hichens, in the "Green Car-
nation," reaffirmed the strange idea that young
noblemen talk well; though his case had some
vague biographical foundation, and in conse-
quence an excuse. Mrs. Craigie is considerably
guilty in the matter, although, or rather because,
she has combined the aristocratic note with a
note of some moral and even religious sincerity.
When you are saving a man's soul, even in a
novel, it is indecent to mention that he is a
gentleman. Nor can blame in this matter be
altogether removed from a man of much greater
ability, and a man who has proved his possession
of the highest of human instinct, the romantic
instinct — I mean Mr. Anthony Hope. In a
galloping, impossible melodrama like "The
Prisoner of Zenda," the blood of kings formed
an excellent fantastic thread or theme. But the
blood of kings is not a thing that can be taken
seriously. And when, for example, Mr. Hope
devotes so much serious and sympathetic study
to the man called Tristram of Blent, a man who
throughout burning boyhood thought of nothing
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Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

but a silly old estate, we feel even in Mr. Hope
the hint of this excessive concern about the
oligarchic idea. It is hard for any ordinary
person to feel so much interest in a young man
whose whole aim is to own the house of Blent
at the time when every other young man is
owning the stars.

Mr. Hope, however, is a very mild case, and
in him there is not only an element of romance,
but also a fine element of irony which warns us
against taking all this elegance too seriously.
Above all, he shows his sense in not making
his noblemen so incredibly equipped with im-
promptu repartee. This habit of insisting on
the wit of the wealthier classes is the last and
most servile of all the servilities. It is, as I
have said, immeasurably more contemptible
than the snobbishness of the novelette which
describes the nobleman as smiling like an Apollo
or riding a mad elephant. These may be exag-
gerations of beauty and courage, but beauty and
courage are the unconscious ideals of aristocrats,
even of stupid aristocrats.

The nobleman of the novelette may not be
sketched with any very close or conscientious
attention to the daily habits of noblemen. But
he is something more important than a reality;
he is a practical ideal. The gentleman of fiction
20 1

Heretics

may not copy the gentleman of real life; but
the gentleman of real life is copying the gentle-
man of fiction. He may not be particularly
good-looking, but he would rather be good-
looking than anything else; he may not have
ridden on a mad elephant, but he rides a pony
as far as possible with an air as if he had.
And, upon the whole, the upper class not only
especially desire these qualities of beauty and
courage, but in some degree, at any rate, espe-
cially possess them. Thus there is nothing
really mean or sycophantic about the popular
literature which makes all its marquises seven
feet high. It is snobbish, but it is not servile.
Its exaggeration is based on an exuberant and
honest admiration; its honest admiration is
based upon something which is in some degree,
at any rate, really there. The English lower
classes do not fear the English upper classes in
the least; nobody could. They simply and
freely and sentimentally worship them. The
strength of the aristocracy is not in the aristoc-
racy at all; it is in the slums. It is not in the
House of Lords; it is not in the Civil Service;
it is not in the Government offices; it is not even
in the huge and disproportionate monopoly of
the English land. It is in a certain spirit. It
is in the fact that when a navvy wishes to praise
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Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

a man, it comes readily to his tongue to say
that he has behaved like a gentleman. From a
democratic point of view he might as well say
that he had behaved like a viscount. The
oligarchic character of the modern English com-
monwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies,
on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does
not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the
poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing
kindness of the poor to the rich.

The snobbishness of bad literature, then, is
not servile; but the snobbishness of good liter-
ature is servile. The old-fashioned halfpenny
romance where the duchesses sparkled with
diamonds was not servile; but the new romance
where they sparkle with epigrams is servile.
For in thus attributing a special and startling
degree of intellect and conversational or con-
troversial power to the upper classes, we are
attributing something which is not especially
their virtue or even especially their aim. We
are, in the words of Disraeli (who, being a
genius and not a gentleman, has perhaps pri-
marily to answer for the introduction of this
method of nattering the gentry), we are per-
forming the essential function of flattery which
is flattering the people for the qualities they
have not got. Praise may be gigantic and
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Heretics

insane without having any quality of flattery
so long as it is praise of something that is
noticeably in existence. A man may say that a
giraffe's head strikes the stars, or that a whale
fills the German Ocean, and still be only in a
rather excited state about a favourite animal.
But when he begins to congratulate the giraffe
on his feathers, and the whale on the elegance
of his legs, we find ourselves confronted with
that social element which we call flattery. The
middle and lower orders of London can sin-
cerely, though not perhaps safely, admire the
health and grace of the English aristocracy.
And this for the very simple reason that the
aristocrats are, upon the whole, more healthy
and graceful than the poor. But they cannot
honestly admire the wit of the aristocrats. And
this for the simple reason that the aristocrats
are not more witty than the poor, but a very
great deal less so. A man does not hear, as in
the smart novels, these gems of verbal felicity
dropped between diplomatists at dinner. Where
he really does hear them is between two omni-
bus conductors in a block in Holborn. The
witty peer whose impromptus fill the books of
Mrs. Craigie or Miss Fowler, would, as a
matter of fact, be torn to shreds in the art of
conversation by the first boot-black he had the
304

Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

misfortune to fall foul of. The poor are merely
sentimental, and very excusably sentimental, if
they praise the gentleman for having a ready
hand and ready money. But they are strictly
slaves and sycophants if they praise him for
having a ready tongue. For that they have
far more themselves.

The element of oligarchical sentiment in
these novels, however, has, I think, another
and subtler aspect, an aspect more difficult to
understand and more worth understanding.
The modern gentleman, particularly the modern
English gentleman, has become so central and
important in these books, and through them in
the whole of our current literature and our
current mode of thought, that certain qualities
of his, whether original or recent, essential or
accidental, have altered the quality of our
English comedy. In particular, that stoical
ideal, absurdly supposed to be the English
ideal, has stiffened and chilled us. It is not
the English ideal; but it is to some extent the
aristocratic ideal; or it may be only the ideal
of aristocracy in its autumn or decay. The
gentleman is a Stoic because he is a sort of
savage, because he is filled with a great elemen-
tal fear that some stranger will speak to him.
That is why a third-class carriage is a commu-
205

Heretics

nity, while a first-class carriage is a place of
wild hermits. But this matter, which is diffi-
cult, I may be permitted to approach in a more
circuitous way.

The haunting element of ineffectualness
which runs through so much of the witty and
epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the
last eight or ten years, which runs through such
works of a real though varying ingenuity as
"Dodo," or "Concerning Isabel Carnaby," or
even "Some Emotions and a Moral," may be
expressed in various ways, but to most of us
I think it will ultimately amount to the same
thing. This new frivolity is inadequate because
there is in it no strong sense of an unuttered
joy. The men and women who exchange the
repartees may not only be hating each other,
but hating even themselves. Any one of them
might be bankrupt that day, or sentenced to be
shot the next. They are joking, not because
they are merry, but because they are not; out
of the emptiness of the heart the mouth speaketh.
Even when they talk pure nonsense it is a care-
ful nonsense — a nonsense of which they are
economical, or, to use the perfect expression of
Mr. W. S. Gilbert in "Patience," it is such
"precious nonsense." Even when they become
light-headed they do not become light-hearted.
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Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

All those who have read anything of the ration-
alism of the moderns know that their Reason
is a sad thing. But even their unreason is sad.
The causes of this incapacity are also not
very difficult to indicate. The chief of all, of
course, is that miserable fear of being senti-
mental, which is the meanest of all the modern
terrors — meaner even than the terror which
produces hygiene. Everywhere the robust and
uproarious humour has come from the men
who were capable not merely of sentimentalism,
but a very silly sentimentalism. There has
been no humour so robust or uproarious as that
of the sentimentalist Steele or the sentimentalist
Sterne or the sentimentalist Dickens. These
creatures who wept like women were the crea-
tures who laughed like men. It is true that
the humour of Micawber is good literature and
that the pathos of little Nell is bad. But the
kind of man who had the courage to write so
badly in the one case is the kind of man who
would have the courage to write so well in the
other. The same unconsciousness, the same
violent innocence, the same gigantesque scale of
action which brought the Napoleon of Comedy
his Jena brought him also his Moscow. And
herein is especially shown the frigid and feeble
limitations of our modem wits. They make
207

Heretics

violent efforts, they make heroic and almost
pathetic efforts, but they cannot really write
badly. There are moments when we almost
think that they are achieving the effect, but our
hope shrivels to nothing the moment we com-
pare their little failures with the enormous
imbecilities of Byron or Shakespeare.

For a hearty laugh it is necessary to have
touched the heart. I do not know why touch-
ing the heart should always be connected only
with the idea of touching it to compassion or a
sense of distress. The heart can be touched
to joy and triumph; the heart can be touched to
amusement. But all our comedians are tragic
comedians. These later fashionable writers are
so pessimistic in bone and marrow that they
never seem able to imagine the heart having
any concern with mirth. When they speak of
the heart, they always mean the pangs and
disappointments of the emotional life. When
they say that a man's heart is in the right place,
they mean, apparently, that it is in his boots.
Our ethical societies understand fellowship, but
they do not understand good fellowship. Sim-
ilarly, our wits understand talk, but not what
Dr. Johnson called a good talk. In order to
have, like Dr. Johnson, a good talk, it is em-
phatically necessary to be, like Dr. Johnson,
208

Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

a good man — to have friendship and honour
and an abysmal tenderness. Above all, it is
necessary to be openly and indecently humane,
to confess with fulness all the primary pities and
fears of Adam. Johnson was a clear-headed
humorous man, and therefore he did not mind
talking seriously about religion. Johnson was
a brave man, one of the bravest that ever
walked, and therefore he did not mind avowing
to any one his consuming fear of death.

The idea that there is something English in
the repression of one's feelings is one of those
ideas which no Englishman ever heard of until
England began to be governed exclusively by
Scotchmen, Americans, and Jews. At the best,
the idea is a generalization from the Duke of
Wellington — who was an Irishman. At the
worst, it is a part of that silly Teutonism which
knows as little about England as it does about
anthropology, but which is always talking about
Vikings. As a matter of fact, the Vikings did
not repress their feelings in the least. They
cried like babies and kissed each other like
girls; in short, they acted in that respect like
Achilles and all strong heroes the children of
the gods. And though the English nationality
has probably not much more to do with the
Vikings than the French nationality or the Irish
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Heretics

nationality, the English have certainly been the
children of the Vikings in the matter of tears
and kisses. It is not merely true that all the
most typically English men of letters, like
Shakespeare and Dickens, Richardson and
Thackeray, were sentimentalists. It is also
true that all the most typically English men of
action were sentimentalists, if possible, more
sentimental. In the great Elizabethan age,
when the English nation was finally hammered
out, in the great eighteenth century when the
British Empire was being built up everywhere,
where in all these times, where was this sym-
bolic stoical Englishman who dresses in drab
and black and represses his feelings ? Were all
the Elizabethan palladins and pirates like that ?
Were any of them like that? Was Grenville
concealing his emotions when he broke wine-
glasses to pieces with his teeth and bit them till
the blood poured down ? Was Essex restraining
his excitement when he threw his hat into the
sea? Did Raleigh think it sensible to answer
the Spanish guns only, as Stevenson says, with
a flourish of insulting trumpets? Did Sydney
ever miss an opportunity of making a theatrical
remark in the whole course of his life and death ?
Were even the Puritans Stoics? The English
Puritans repressed a good deal, but even they

310

Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

were too English to repress their feelings. It
was by a great miracle of genius assuredly that
Carlyle contrived to admire simultaneously
two things so irreconcilably opposed as silence
and Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was the very
reverse of a strong, silent man. Cromwell was
always talking, when he was not crying. No-
body, I suppose, will accuse the author of
"Grace Abounding" of being ashamed of his
feelings. Milton, indeed, it might be possible
to represent as a Stoic; in some sense he was a
Stoic, just as he was a prig and a polygamist
and several other unpleasant and heathen
things. But when we have passed that great
and desolate name, which may really be counted
an exception, we find the tradition of English
emotionalism immediately resumed and un-
brokenly continuous. Whatever may have been
the moral beauty of the passions of Etheridge
and Dorset, Sedley and Buckingham, they
cannot be accused of the fault of fastidiously
concealing them. Charles the Second was very
popular with the English because, like all the
jolly English kings, he displayed his passions.
William the Dutchman was very unpopular
with the English because, not being an English-
man, he did hide his emotions. He was, in
fact, precisely the ideal Englishman of our

311

Heretics

modern theory; and precisely for that reason
all the real Englishmen loathed him like lep-
rosy. With the rise of the great England of
the eighteenth century, we find this open and
emotional tone still maintained in letters and
politics, in arts and in arms. Perhaps the only
quality which was possessed in common by
the great Fielding and the great Richardson
was that neither of them hid their feelings.
Swift, indeed, was hard and logical, because
Swift was Irish. And when we pass to the
soldiers and the rulers, the patriots and the
empire-builders of the eighteenth century, we
find, as I have said, that they were, if possible,
more romantic than the romancers, more poeti-
cal than the poets. Chatham, who showed the
world all his strength, showed the House of
Commons all his weakness. Wolfe walked
about the room with a drawn sword calling
himself Caesar and Hannibal, and went to death
with poetry in his mouth. Clive was a man of
the same type as Cromwell or Bunyan, or, for
the matter of that, Johnson — that is, he was a
strong, sensible man with a kind of running
spring of hysteria and melancholy in him. Like
Johnson, he was all the more healthy because
he was morbid. The tales of all the admirals
and adventurers of that England are full of

213

Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

braggadocio, of sentimentality, of splendid affec-
tation. But it is scarcely necessary to multiply
examples of the essentially romantic Englishman
when one example towers above them all. Mr.
Rudyard Kipling has said complacently of the
English, "We do not fall on the neck and kiss
when we come together." It is true that this
ancient and universal custom has vanished
with the modern weakening of England. Syd-
ney would have thought nothing of kissing
Spenser. But I willingly concede that Mr.
Broderick would not be likely to kiss Mr.
Arnold-Foster, if that be any proof of the
increased manliness and military greatness of
England. But the Englishman who does not
show his feelings has not altogether given up
the power of seeing something English in the
great sea-hero of the Napoleonic war. You
cannot break the legend of Nelson. And across
the sunset of that glory is written in flaming
letters for ever the great English sentiment,
"Kiss me, Hardy."

This ideal of self-repression, then, is, whatever
else it is, not English. It is, perhaps, somewhat
Oriental, it is slightly Prussian, but in the main
it does not come, I think, from any racial or
national source. It is, as I have said, in some
sense aristocratic; it comes not from a people,
213

Heretics

but from a class. Even aristocracy, I think,
was not quite so stoical in the days when it was
really strong. But whether this unemotional
ideal be the genuine tradition of the gentleman,
or only one of the inventions of the modern
gentleman (who may be called the decayed
gentleman), it certainly has something to do
with the unemotional quality in these society
novels. From representing aristocrats as people
who suppressed their feelings, it has been an
easy step to representing aristocrats as people
who had no feelings to suppress. Thus the
modern oligarchist has made a virtue for the
oligarchy of the hardness as well as the bright-
ness of the diamond. Like a sonneteer ad-
dressing his lady in the seventeenth century, he
seems to use the word "cold" almost as a
eulogium, and the word "heartless" as a kind
of compliment. Of course, in people so incu-
rably kind-hearted and babyish as are the Eng-
lish gentry, it would be impossible to create
anything that can be called positive cruelty; so
in these books they exhibit a sort of negative
cruelty. They cannot be cruel in acts, but they
can be so in words. All this means one thing,
and one thing only. It means that the living
and invigorating ideal of England must be
looked for in the masses; it must be looked for
214

Smart Novelists and the Smart Set

where Dickens found it — Dickens, among
whose glories it was to be a humorist, to be a
sentimentalist, to be an optimist, to be a poor
man, to be an Englishman, but the greatest of
whose glories was that he saw all mankind in
its amazing and tropical luxuriance, and did
not even notice the aristocracy; Dickens, the
greatest of whose glories was that he could not
describe a gentleman.

MS

XVI — On Mr. McCabe and a Divine
Frivolity

A CRITIC once remonstrated with me
saying, with an air of indignant
reasonableness, "If you must make
jokes, at least you need not make
them on such serious subjects." I replied with
a natural simplicity and wonder, "About what
other subjects can one make jokes except
serious subjects?" It is quite useless to talk
about profane jesting. All jesting is in its
nature profane, in the sense that it must be
the sudden realization that something which
thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after
all. If a joke is not a joke about religion or
morals, it is a joke about police-magistrates or
scientific professors or undergraduates dressed
up as Queen Victoria. And people joke about
the police-magistrate more than they joke about
the Pope, not because the police-magistrate is a
more frivolous subject, but, on the contrary,
because the police-magistrate is a more serious
subject than the Pope. The Bishop of Rome
has no jurisdiction in this realm of England;
whereas the police-magistrate may bring his
solemnity to bear quite suddenly upon us.
216

Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

Men make jokes about old scientific professors,
even more than they make them about bishops
— not because science is lighter than religion,
but because science is always by its nature more
solemn and austere than religion. It is not I;
it is not even a particular class of journalists or
jesters who make jokes about the matters which
are of most awful import; it is the whole human
race. If there is one thing more than another
which any one will admit who has the smallest
knowledge of the world, it is that men are
always speaking gravely and earnestly and with
the utmost possible care about the things that
are not important, but always talking frivo-
lously about the things that are. Men talk for
hours with the faces of a college of cardinals
about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats,
01 party politics. But all the most grave and
dreadful things in the world are the oldest jokes
in the world — being married; being hanged.

One gentleman, however, Mr. McCabe, has
in this matter made to me something that
almost amounts to a personal appeal; and as he
happens to be a man for whose sincerity and
intellectual virtue I have a high respect, I do
not feel inclined to let it pass without some
attempt to satisfy my critic in the matter. Mr.
McCabe devotes a considerable part of the last
217

Heretics

essay in the collection called "Christianity and"
Rationalism on Trial" to an objection, not to
my thesis, but to my method, and a very friendly
and dignified appeal to me to alter it. I am
much inclined to defend myself in this matter
out of mere respect for Mr. McCabe, and still
more so out of mere respect for the truth which
is, I think, in danger by his error, not only in
this question, but in others. In order that
there may be no injustice done in the matter,
I will quote Mr. McCabe himself. " But before
I follow Mr. Chesterton in some detail, I would
make a general observation on his method.
He is as serious as I am in his ultimate purpose,
and I respect him for that. He knows, as I do,
that humanity stands at a solemn parting of
the ways. Towards some unknown goal it
presses through the ages, impelled by an over-
mastering desire of happiness. To-day it hesi-
tates, light-heartedly enough, but every serious
thinker knows how momentous the decision
may be. It is, apparently, deserting the path
of religion and entering upon the path of secu-
larism. Will it lose itself in quagmires of sen-
suality down this new path, and pant and toil
through years of civic and industrial anarchy,
only to learn it had lost the road, and must
return to religion? Or will it find that at last
318

Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

it is leaving the mists and the quagmires behind
it; that it is ascending the slope of the hill so
long dimly discerned ahead, and making straight
for the long-sought Utopia ? This is the drama
of our time, and every man and every woman
should understand it.

"Mr. Chesterton understands it. Further,
he gives us credit for understanding it. He has
nothing of that paltry meanness or strange den-
sity of so many of his colleagues, who put us
down as aimless iconoclasts or moral anarchists.
He admits that we are waging a thankless war
for what we take to be Truth and Progress.
He is doing the same. But why, in the name
of all that is reasonable, should we, when we
are agreed on the momentousness of the issue
either way, forthwith desert serious methods of
conducting the controversy? Why, when the
vital need of our time is to induce men and
women to collect their thoughts occasionally,
and be men and women — nay, to remember
that they are really gods that hold the destinies
of humanity on their knees— -why should we
think that this kaleidoscopic play of phrases is
inopportune? The ballets of the Alhambra,
and the fireworks of the Crystal Palace, and
Mr. Chesterton's Daily News articles, have
their place in life. But how a serious social
219

Heretics

student can think of curing the thoughtless-
ness of our generation by strained paradoxes;
of giving people a sane grasp of social problems
by literary sleight-of-hand; of settling impor-
tant questions by a reckless shower of rocket-
metaphors and inaccurate 'facts,' and the sub-
stitution of imagination for judgment, I cannot
see."

I quote this passage with a particular pleasure,
because Mr. McCabe certainly cannot put too
strongly the degree to which I give him and
his school credit for their complete sincerity
and responsibility of philosophical attitude. I
am quite certain that they mean every word
they say. I also mean every word I say. But
why is it that Mr. McCabe has some sort of
mysterious hesitation about admitting that I
mean every word I say; why is it that he, is
not quite as certain of my mental responsibility
as I am of his mental responsibility? If we
attempt to answer the question directly and
well, we shall, I think, have come to the root of
the matter by the shortest cut.

Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious
but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks
that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny
is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing
else. The question of whether a man expresses
220

Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

himself in a grotesque or laughable phraseol-
ogy, or in a stately and restrained phraseology,
is not a question of motive or of moral state, it
is a question of instinctive language and self-
expression. Whether a man chooses to tell the
truth in long sentences or short jokes is a prob-
lem analogous to whether he chooses to tell
the truth in French or German. Whether a
man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely
is merely like the question of whether he
preaches it in prose or verse. The question of
whether Swift was funny in his irony is quite
another sort of question to the question of
whether Swift was serious in his pessimism.
Surely even Mr. McCabe would not maintain
that the more funny "Gulliver" is in its method
the less it can be sincere in its object. The
truth is, as I have said, that in this sense the
two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing
whatever to do with each other, they are no
more comparable than black and triangular.
Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere. Mr.
George Robey is funny and not sincere. Mr.
McCabe is sincere and not funny. The average
Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.

In short, Mr. McCabe is under the influence
of a primary fallacy which I have found very
common in men of the clerical type. Numbers

221

Heretics

of clergymen have from time to time reproached
me for making jokes about religion; and they
have almost always invoked the authority of
that very sensible commandment which says,
"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord
thy God in vain." Of course, I pointed out
that I was not in any conceivable sense taking
the name in vain. To take a thing and make
a joke out of it is not to take it in vain. It is,
on the contrary, to take it and use it for an un-
commonly good object. To use a thing in vain
means to use it without use. But a joke may
be exceedingly useful ; it may contain the whole
earthly sense, not to mention the whole heavenly
sense, of a situation. And those who find in
the Bible the commandment can find in the
Bible any number of the jokes. In the same
book in which God's name is fenced from being
taken in vain, God himself overwhelms Job
with a torrent of terrible levities. The same
book which says that God's name must not be
taken vainly, talks easily and carelessly about
God laughing and God winking. Evidently it
is not here that we have to look for genuine
examples of what is meant by a vain use of the
name. And it is not very difficult to see where
we have really to look for it. The people (as
I tactfully pointed out to them) who really take

Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

the name of the Lord in vain are the clergymen
themselves. The thing which is fundamentally
and really frivolous is not a careless joke. The
thing which is fundamentally and really friv-
olous is a careless solemnity. If Mr. McCabe
really wishes to know what sort of guarantee of
reality and solidity is afforded by the mere act
of what is called talking seriously, let him
spend a happy Sunday in going the round of the
pulpits. Or, better still, let him drop in at
the House of Commons or the House of Lords.
Even Mr. McCabe would admit that these men
are solemn — more solemn than I am. And
even Mr. McCabe, I think, would admit that
these men are frivolous — more frivolous than
I am. 'Why should Mr. McCabe be so eloquent
about the danger arising from fantastic and
paradoxical writers? Why should he be so
ardent in desiring grave and verbose writers?
There are not so very many fantastic and
paradoxical writers. But there are a gigantic
number of grave and verbose writers; and it is
by the efforts of the grave and verbose writers
that everything that Mr. McCabe detests (and
everything that I detest, for that matter) is
kept in existence and energy. How can it have
come about that a man as intelligent as Mr.
McCabe can think that paradox and jesting
223

Heretics

stop the way? It is solemnity that is stopping
the way in every department of modern effort.
It is his own favourite "serious methods;" it is
his own favourite "momentousness;" it is his
own favourite "judgment" which stops the
way everywhere. Every man who has ever
headed a deputation to a minister knows this.
Every man who has ever written a letter to the
Times knows it. Every rich man who wishes
to stop the mouths of the poor talks about
"momentousness." Every Cabinet minister
who has not got an answer suddenly develops
a "judgment." Every sweater who uses vile
methods recommends "serious methods." • I
said a moment ago that sincerity had nothing
to do with solemnity, but I confess that I am
not so certain that I was right. In the modern
world, at any rate, I am not so sure that I was
right. In the modern world solemnity is the
direct enemy of sincerity. In the modern world
sincerity is almost always on one side, and
solemnity almost always on the other. The
only answer possible to the fierce and glad
attack of sincerity is the miserable answer of
solemnity. Let Mr. McCabe, or any one else
who is much concerned that we should be grave
in order to be sincere, simply imagine the scene
in some government office in which Mr. Bernard
224

Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

Shaw should head a Socialist deputation to Mr.
Austen Chamberlain. On which side would be
the solemnity ? And on which the sincerity ?

I am, indeed, delighted to discover that Mr.
McCabe reckons Mr. Shaw along with me in
his system of condemnation of frivolity. He
said once, I believe, that he always wanted Mr.
Shaw to label his paragraphs serious or comic.
I do not know which paragraphs of Mr. Shaw
are paragraphs to be labelled serious; but surely
there can be no doubt that this paragraph of
Mr. McCabe's is one to be labelled comic. He
also says, in the article I am now discussing,
that Mr. Shaw has the reputation of deliberately
saying everything which his hearers do not
expect him to say. I need not labour the
inconclusiveness and weakness of this, because
it has already been dealt with in my remarks
on Mr. Bernard Shaw. Suffice it to say here
that the only serious reason which I can imagine
inducing any one person to listen to any other
is, that the first person looks to the second
person with an ardent faith and a fixed atten-
tion, expecting him to say what he does not
expect him to say. It may be a paradox, but
that is because paradoxes are true. It may not
be rational, but that is because rationalism is
wrong. But clearly it is quite true that when-
225

Heretics

ever we go to hear a prophet or teacher we may
or may not expect wit, we may or may not
expect eloquence, but we do expect what we
do not expect. We may not expect the true,
we may not even expect the wise, but we do
expect the unexpected. If we do not expect
the unexpected, why do we go there at all? If
we expect the expected, why do we not sit at
home and expect it by ourselves? If Mr.
McCabe means merely this about Mr. Shaw,
that he always has some unexpected appplica-
tion of his doctrine to give to those who listen
to him, what he says is quite true, and to say it
is only to say that Mr. Shaw is an original man.
But if he means that Mr. Shaw has ever pro-
fessed or preached any doctrine but one, and
that his own, then what he says is not true. It
is not my business to defend Mr. Shaw; as has
been seen already, I disagree with him alto-
gether. But I do not mind, on his behalf,
offering in this matter a flat defiance to all his
ordinary opponents, such as Mr. McCabe. I
defy Mr. McCabe, or anybody else, to mention
one single instance in which Mr. Shaw has, for
the sake of wit or novelty, taken up any position
which was not directly deducible from the body
of his doctrine as elsewhere expressed. I have
been, I am happy to say, a tolerably close stu-
226

Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

dent of Mr. Shaw's utterances, and I request
Mr. McCabe, if he will not believe that I mean
anything else, to believe that I mean this
challenge.

All this, however, is a parenthesis. The
thing with which I am here immediately con-
cerned is Mr. McCabe's appeal to me not to be
so frivolous. Let me return to the actual text
of that appeal. There are, of course, a great
many things that I might say about it in detail.
But I may start with saying that Mr. McCabe
is in error in supposing that the danger which
I anticipate from the disappearance of religion
is the increase of sensuality. On the contrary,
I should be inclined to anticipate a decrease in
sensuality, because I anticipate a decrease in
life. I do not think that under modern West-
ern materialism we should have anarchy. I
doubt whether we should have enough indi-
vidual valour and spirit even to have liberty.
It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose
that our objection to scepticism is that it re-
moves the discipline from life. Our objection
to scepticism is that it removes the motive power.
Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere
restraint. Materialism itself is the great re-
straint. The McCabe school advocates a polit-
ical liberty, but it denies spiritual liberty. That
227

Heretics

is, it abolishes the laws which could be broken,
and substitutes laws that cannot. And that is
the real slavery.

The truth is that the scientific civilization in
which Mr. McCabe believes has one rather
particular defect; it is perpetually tending to
destroy that democracy or power of the ordi-
nary man in which Mr. McCabe also believes.
Science means specialism, and specialism means
oligarchy. If you once establish the habit of
trusting particular men to produce particular
results in physics or astronomy, you leave the
door open for the equally natural demand that
you should trust particular men to do particular
things in government and the coercing of men.
If you feel it to be reasonable that one beetle
should be the only study of one man, and that
one man the only student of that one beetle, it
is surely a very harmless consequence to go on
to say that politics should be the only study of
one man, and that one man the only student
of politics. As I have pointed out elsewhere in
this book, the expert is more aristocratic than
the aristocrat, because the aristocrat is only the
man who lives well, while the expert is the man
who knows better. But if we look at the
progress of our scientific civilization we see a
gradual increase everywhere of the specialist
228

Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

over the popular function. Once men sang
together round a table in chorus; now one man
sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can
sing better. If scientific civilization goes on
(which is most improbable) only one man will
laugh, because he can laugh better than the
rest.

I do not know that I can express this more
shortly than by taking as a text the single sen-
tence of Mr. McCabe, which runs as follows:
"The ballets of the Alhambra and the fireworks
of the Crystal Palace and Mr. Chesterton's
Daily News articles have their places in life."
I wish that my articles had as noble a place as
either of the other two things mentioned. But
let us ask ourselves (in a spirit of love, as Mr.
Chadband would say), what are the ballets of
the Alhambra? The ballets of the Alhambra
are institutions in which a particular selected
row of persons in pink go through an operation
known as dancing. Now, in all common-
wealths dominated by a religion — in the
Christian commonwealths of the Middle Ages
and in many rude societies — this habit of
dancing was a common habit with everybody,
and was not necessarily confined to a profes-
sional class. A person could dance without
being a dancer; a person could dance without
229

Heretics

being a specialist; a person could dance with-
out being pink. And, in proportion as Mr.
McCabe's scientific civilization advances — •
that is, in proportion as religious civilization
(or real civilization) decays — the more and
more "well trained," the more and more pink,
become the people who do dance, and the more
and more numerous become the people who
don't. Mr. McCabe may recognize an example
of what I mean in the gradual discrediting in
society of the ancient European waltz or dance
with partners, and the substitution of that
horrible and degrading oriental interlude which
is known as skirt-dancing. That is the whole
essence of decadence, the effacement of five
people who do a thing for fun by one person
who does it for money. Now it follows, there-
fore, that when Mr. McCabe says that the
ballets of the Alhambra and my articles "have
their place in life," it ought to be pointed out
to him that he is doing his best to create a world
in which dancing, properly speaking, will have
no place in life at all. He is, indeed, trying to
create a world in which there will be no life for
dancing to have a place in. The very fact that
Mr. McCabe thinks of dancing as a thing be-
longing to some hired women at the Alhambra
is an illustration of the same principle by which
230

Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

he is able to think of religion as a thing belong-
ing to some hired men in white neckties. Both
these things are things which should not be
done for us, but by us. If Mr. McCabe were
really religious he would be happy. If he were
really happy he would dance.

Briefly, we may put the matter in this way.
The main point of modern life is not that the
Alhambra ballet has its place in life. The main
point, the main enormous tragedy of modern
life, is that Mr. McCabe has not his place in
the Alhambra ballet. The joy of changing and
graceful posture, the joy of suiting the swing of
music to the swing of limbs, the joy of whirling
drapery, the joy of standing on one leg, — all
these should belong by rights to Mr. McCabe
and to me; in short, to the ordinary healthy
citizen. Probably we should not consent to go
through these evolutions. But that is because
we are miserable moderns and rationalists. We
do not merely love ourselves more than we love
duty; we actually love ourselves more than we
love joy.

When, therefore, Mr. McCabe says that he
gives the Alhambra dances (and my articles)
their place in life, I think we are justified in
pointing out that by the very nature of the
case of his philosophy and of his favourite
231

Heretics

civilization he gives them a very inadequate
place. For (if I may pursue the too flattering
parallel)' Mr. McCabe thinks of the Alhambra
and of my articles as two very odd and absurd
things, which some special people do (probably
for money) in order to amuse him. But if he
had ever felt himself the ancient, sublime, ele-
mental, human instinct to dance, he would have
discovered that dancing is not a frivolous thing
at all, but a very serious thing. He would have
discovered that it is the one grave and chaste
and decent method of expressing a certain class
of emotions. And similarly, if he had ever had,
as Mr. Shaw and I have had, the impulse to
what he calls paradox, he would have discovered
that paradox again is not a frivolous thing, but
a very serious thing. He would have found
that paradox simply means a certain defiant
joy which belongs to belief. I should regard
any civilization which was without a universal
habit of uproarious dancing as being, from the
full human point of view, a defective civiliza-
tion. And I should regard any mind which
had not got the habit in one form or another
of uproarious thinking as being, from the full
human point of view, a defective mind. It is
vain for Mr. McCabe to say that a ballet is a
part of him. He should be part of a ballet,
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Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity

or else he is only part of a man. It is in vain
for him to say that he is "not quarrelling with
the importation of humour into the contro-
versy." He ought himself to be importing
humour into every controversy; for unless a
man is in part a humorist, he is only in part a
man. To sum up the whole matter very simply,
if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity
into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer,
because frivolity is a part of the nature of man.
If he asks me why I introduce what he calls
paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I an-
swer, because all philosophical problems tend to
become paradoxical. If he objects to my treat-
ing of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot.
And I say that the Universe as I see it, at any
rate, is very much more like the fireworks at
the Crystal Palace than it is like his own
philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is
a tense and secret festivity — like preparations
for Guy Fawkes' day. Eternity is the eve of
something. I never look up at the stars without
feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy's
rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.

233

XVII — On the Wit of Whistler

THAT capable and ingenious writer,
Mr. Arthur Symons, has included in
a book of essays recently published,
I believe, an apologia for "London
Nights," in which he says that morality should
be wholly subordinated to art in criticism, and
he uses the somewhat singular argument that
art or the worship of beauty is the same in all
ages, while morality differs in every period and
in every respect. He appears to defy his critics
or his readers to mention any permanent feature
or quality in ethics. This is surely a very
curious example of that extravagant bias against
morality which makes so many ultra-modern
aesthetes as morbid and fanatical as any Eastern
hermit. Unquestionably it is a very common
phrase of modern intellectualism to say that
the morality of one age can be entirely different
to the morality of another. And like a great
many other phrases of modern intellectualism,
it means literally nothing at all. If the two
moralities are entirely different, why do you
call them both moralities? It is as if a man
said, "Camels in various places are totally
234

On the Wit of Whistler

diverse; some have six legs, some have none,
some have scales, some have feathers, some
have horns, some have wings, some are green,
some are triangular. There is no point which
they have in common." The ordinary man of
sense would reply, "Then what makes you call
them all camels? What do you mean by a
camel ? How do you know a camel when you
see one?" Of course, there is a permanent
substance of morality, as much as there is a
permanent substance of art; to say that is only
to say that morality is morality, and that art
is art. An ideal art critic would, no doubt,
see the enduring beauty under every school;
equally an ideal moralist would see the enduring
ethic under every code. But practically some
of the best Englishmen that ever lived could
see nothing but filth and idolatry in the starry
piety of the Brahmin. And it is equally true
that practically the greatest group of artists
that the world has ever seen, the giants of the
Renaissance, could see nothing but barbarism
in the ethereal energy of Gothic.

This bias against morality among the modern
aesthetes is a thing very much paraded. And
yet it is not really a bias against morality; it is
a bias against other people's morality. It is
generally founded on a very definite moral

235

Heretics

preference for a certain sort of life, pagan,
plausible, humane. The modern aesthete, wish-
ing us to believe that he values beauty more
than conduct, reads Mallarme, and drinks
absinthe in a tavern. But this is not only his
favourite kind of beauty; it is also his favourite
kind of conduct. If he really wished us to
believe that he cared for beauty only, he ought
to go to nothing but Wesleyan school treats,
and paint the sunlight in the hair of the Wes-
leyan babies. He ought to read nothing but
very eloquent theological sermons by old-fash-
ioned Presbyterian divines. Here the lack of
all possible moral sympathy would prove that
his interest was purely verbal or pictorial, as it
is ; in all the books he reads and writes he clings
to the skirts of his own morality and his own
immorality. The champion of I'art pour I'art
is always denouncing Ruskin for his moralizing.
If he were really a champion of I'art pour Part,
he would be always insisting on Ruskin for his
style.

The doctrine of the distinction between art
and morality owes a great part of its success
to art and morality being hopelessly mixed up
in the persons and performances of its greatest
exponents. Of this lucky contradiction the
very incarnation was Whistler. No man ever
236

On the Wit of Whistler

preached the impersonality of art so well; no
man ever preached the impersonality of art so
personally. For him pictures had nothing to
do with the problems of character; but for all
his fiercest admirers his character was, as a
matter of fact, far more interesting than his
pictures. He gloried in standing as an artist
apart from right and wrong. But he succeeded
by talking from morning till night about his
rights and about his wrongs. His talents were
many, his virtues, it must be confessed, not
many, beyond that kindness to tried friends,
on which many of his biographers insist, but
which surely is a quality of all sane men, of
pirates and pickpockets; beyond this, his out-
standing virtues limit themselves chiefly to two
admirable ones — courage and an abstract love
of good work. Yet I fancy he won at last more
by those two virtues than by all his talents.
A man must be something of a moralist if he
is to preach, even if he is to preach unmorality.
Professor Walter Raleigh, in his "In Memo-
riam: James McNeill Whistler," insists, truly
enough, on the strong streak of an eccentric
honesty in matters strictly pictorial, which ran
through his complex and slightly confused char-
acter. "He would destroy any of his works
rather than leave a careless or inexpressive

2 37

Heretics

touch within the limits of the frame. He would
begin again a hundred times over rather than
attempt by patching to make his work seem
better than it was."

No one will blame Professor Raleigh, who
had to read a sort of funeral oration over
Whistler at the opening of the Memorial Ex-
hibition, if, finding himself in that position, he
confined himself mostly to the merits and the
stronger qualities of his subject. We should
naturally go to some other type of composition
for a proper consideration of the weaknesses of
Whistler. But these must never be omitted
from our view of him. Indeed, the truth is
that it was not so much a question of the weak-
nesses of Whistler as of the intrinsic and pri-
mary weakness of Whistler. He was one of
those people who live up to their emotional
incomes, who are always taut and tingling with
vanity. Hence he had no strength to spare;
hence he had no kindness, no geniality; for
geniality is almost definable as strength to spare.
He had no god-like carelessness; he never forgot
himself; his whole life was, to use his own
expression, an arrangement. He went in for
"the art of living" — a miserable trick. In a
word, he was a great artist; but emphatically
not a great man. In this connection I must
238

On the Wit of Whistler

differ strongly with Professor Raleigh upon
what is, from a superficial literary point of view,
one of his most effective points. He compares
Whistler's laughter to the laughter of another
man who was a great man as well as a great
artist. "His attitude to the public was exactly
the attitude taken up by Robert Browning, who
suffered as long a period of neglect and mistake,
in those lines of 'The Ring and the Book' —

" ' Well, British Public, ye who like me not,

(God love you!) and will have your proper laugh
At the dark question; laugh it! I'd laugh first.'"

"Mr. Whistler," adds Professor Raleigh,
"always laughed first." The truth is, I believe,
that Whistler never laughed at all. There was
no laughter in his nature; because there was
no thoughtlessness and self-abandonment, no
humility. I cannot understand anybody read-
ing "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" and
thinking that there is any laughter in the wit.
His wit is a torture to him. He twists himself
into arabesques of verbal felicity; he is full of
a fierce carefulness; he is inspired with the
complete seriousness of sincere malice. He
hurts himself to hurt his opponent. Browning
did laugh, because Browning did not care;
Browning did not care, because Browning was

239

Heretics

a great man. And when Browning said in
brackets to the simple, sensible people who did
not like his books, " God love you!" he was not
sneering in the least. He was laughing — that
is to say, he meant exactly what he said.

There are three distinct classes of great
satirists who are also great men — that is to
say, three classes of men who can laugh at
something without losing their souls. The
satirist of the first type is the man who, first of
all, enjoys himself, and then enjoys his enemies.
In this sense he loves his enemy, and by a
kind of exaggeration of Christianity he loves
his enemy the more the more he becomes an
enemy. Ke has a sort of overwhelming and
aggressive happiness in his assertion of anger;
his curse is as human as a benediction. Of this
type of satire the great example is Rabelais.
This is the first typical example of satire, the
satire which is voluble, which is violent, which
is indecent, but which is not malicious. The
satire of Whistler was not this. He was never
in any of his controversies simply happy; the
proof of it is that he never talked absolute
nonsense. There is a second type of mind
which produces satire with the quality of great-
ness. That is embodied in the satirist whose
passions are released and let go by some intol-
240

On the Wit of Whistler

erable sense of wrong. He is maddened by the
sense of men being maddened; his tongue be-
comes an unruly member, and testifies against
all mankind. Such a man was Swift, in whom
the saeva indignatio was a bitterness to others,
because it was a bitterness to himself. Such a
satirist Whistler was not. He did not laugh
because he was happy, like Rabelais. But
neither did he laugh because he was unhappy,
like Swift.

The third type of great satire is that in which
the satirist is enabled to rise superior to his
victim in the only serious sense which supe-
riority can bear, in that of pitying the sinner and
respecting the man even while he satirises both.
Such an achievement can be found in a thing
like Pope's "Atticus," a poem in which the
satirist feels that he is satirising the weaknesses
which belong specially to literary genius. Con-
sequently he takes a pleasure in pointing out
his enemy's strength before he points out his
weakness. That is, perhaps, the highest and
most honourable form of satire. That is not
the satire of Whistler. He is not full of a
great sorrow for the wrong done to human
nature; for him the wrong is altogether done to
himself.

He was not a great personality, because he
241

Heretics

thought so much about himself. And the case
is stronger even than that. He was sometimes
not even a great artist, because he thought so
much about art. Any man with a vital knowl-
edge of the human psychology ought to have
the most profound suspicion of anybody who
claims to be an artist, and talks a great deal
about art. Art is a right and human thing,
like walking or saying one's prayers; but the
moment it begins to be talked about very
solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the
thing has come into a congestion and a kind of
difficulty.

The artistic temperament is a disease that
afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises
from men not having sufficient power of ex-
pression to utter and get rid of the element of
art in their being. It is healthful to every sane
man to utter the art within him; it is essential
to every sane man to get rid of the art within
him at all costs. Artists of a large and whole-
some vitality get rid of their art easily, as they
breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists
of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and
produces a definite pain, which is called the
artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists
are able to be ordinary men — men like Shake-
speare or Browning. There are many real trag-
242

On the Wit of Whistler

edies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of
vanity or violence or fear. But the great tragedy
of the artistic temperament is that it cannot
produce any art.

Whistler could produce art; and in so far he
was a great man. But he could not forget art;
and in so far he was only a man with the
artistic temperament. There can be no stronger
manifestation of the man who is a really great
artist than the fact that he can dismiss the sub-
ject of art; that he can, upon due occasion, wish
art at the bottom of the sea. Similarly, we
should always be much more inclined to trust
a solicitor who did not talk about conveyancing
over the nuts and wine. What we really desire
of any man conducting any business is that the
full force of an ordinary man should be put
into that particular study. We do not desire
that the full force of that study should be put
into an ordinary man. We do not in the least
wish that our particular law-suit should pour
its energy into our barrister's games with his
children, or rides on his bicycle, or medite ions
on the morning star. But we do, as a matter
of fact, desire that his games with his children,
and his rides on his bicycle, and his meditations
on the morning star should pour something of
their energy into our law-suit. We do desire

243

Heretics

that if he has gained any especial lung devel-
opment from the bicycle, or any bright and
pleasing metaphors from the morning star, that
they should be placed at our disposal in that
particular forensic controversy. In a word, we
are very glad that he is an ordinary man, since
that may help him to be an exceptional lawyer.

Whistler never ceased to be an artist. As
Mr. Max Beerbohm pointed out in one of his
extraordinarily sensible and sincere critiques,
Whistler really regarded Whistler as his greatest
work of art. The white lock, the single eye-
glass, the remarkable hat — these were much
dearer to him than any nocturnes or arrange-
ments that he ever threw off. He could throw
off the nocturnes; for some mysterious reason
he could not throw off the hat. He never threw
off from himself that disproportionate accumu-
lation of aestheticism which is the burden of the
amateur.

It need hardly be said that this is the real
explanation of the thing which has puzzled so
many dilettante critics, the problem of the ex-
treme ordinariness of the behaviour of so many
great geniuses in history. Their behaviour was
so ordinary that it was not recorded; hence it
was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious.
Hence people say that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.
244

On the Wit of Whistler

The modern artistic temperament cannot under-
stand how a man who could write such lyrics
as Shakespeare wrote, could be as keen as
Shakespeare was on business transactions in a
little town in Warwickshire. The explanation
is simple enough; it is that Shakespeare had a
real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so
got rid of the impulse and went about his busi-
ness. Being an artist did not prevent him from
being an ordinary man, any more than being
a sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner
prevented him from being an ordinary man.

All very great teachers and leaders have had
this habit of assuming their point of view to be
one which was human and casual, one which
would readily appeal to every passing man. If
a man is genuinely superior to his fellows the
first thing that he believes in is the equality of
man. We can see this, for instance, in that
strange and innocent rationality with which
Christ addressed any motley crowd that hap-
pened to stand about Him. "What man of
you having a hundred sheep, and losing one,
would not leave the ninety and nine in the
wilderness, and go after that which was lost?"
Or, again, "What man of you if his son ask for
bread will he give him a stone, or if he ask for
a fish will he give him a serpent ? " This plain-

245

Heretics

ness, this almost prosaic camaraderie, is the note
of all very great minds.

To very great minds the things on which
men agree are so immeasurably more important
than the things on which they differ, that the
latter, for all practical purposes, disappear.
They have too much in them of an ancient
laughter even to endure to discuss the difference
between the hats of two men who were both
born of a woman, or between the subtly varied
cultures of two men who have both to die.
The first-rate great man is equal with other
men, like Shakespeare. The second-rate great
man is on his knees to other men, like Whitman.
The third-rate great man is superior to other
men, like Whistler.

346

XVIII — The Fallacy of the Young Nation

TO say that a man is an idealist is
merely to say that he is a man; but,
nevertheless, it might be possible to
effect some valid distinction between
one kind of idealist and another. One possible
distinction, for instance, could be effected by
saying that humanity is divided into conscious
idealists and unconscious idealists. In a similar
way, humanity is divided into conscious ritual-
ists and unconscious ritualists. The curious
thing is, in that example as in others, that it is
the conscious ritualism which is comparatively
simple, the unconscious ritual which is really
heavy and complicated. The ritual which is
comparatively rude and straightforward is the
ritual which people call "ritualistic." It con-
sists of plain things like bread and wine and
fire, and men falling on their faces. But the
ritual which is really complex, and many col-
oured, and elaborate, and needlessly formal, is
the ritual which people enact without knowing
it. It consists not of plain things like wine
and fire, but of really peculiar, and local, and
exceptional, and ingenious things — things like
door-mats, and door-knockers, and electric bells,
247

Heretics

and silk hats, and white ties, and shiny cards,
and confetti. The truth is that the modern
man scarcely ever gets back to very old and
simple things except when he is performing
some religious mummery. The modern man
can hardly get away from ritual except by en-
tering a ritualistic church. In the case of these
old and mystical formalities we can at least say
that the ritual is not mere ritual; that the sym-
bols employed are in most cases symbols which
belong to a primary human poetry. The most
ferocious opponent of the Christian ceremonials
must admit that if Catholicism had not insti-
tuted the bread and wine, somebody else would
most probably have done so. Any one with a
poetical instinct will admit that to the ordinary
human instinct bread symbolizes something
which cannot very easily be symbolized other-
wise; that wine, to the ordinary human instinct,
symbolizes something which cannot very easily
be symbolized otherwise. But white ties in the
evening are ritual, and nothing else but ritual.
No one would pretend that white ties in the
evening are primary and poetical. Nobody
would maintain that the ordinary human in-
stinct would in any age or country tend to
symbolize the idea of evening by a white necktie.
Rather, the ordinary human instinct would, I
248

The Fallacy of the Young Nation

imagine, tend to symbolize evening by cravats
with some of the colours of the sunset, not white
neckties, but tawny or crimson neckties — neck-
ties of purple or olive, or some darkened gold.
Mr. J. A. Kensit, for example, is under the im-
pression that he is not a ritualist. But the daily
life of Mr. J. A. Kensit, like that of any ordinary
modern man, is, as a matter of fact, one con-
tinual and compressed catalogue of mystical
mummery and flummery. To take one instance
out of an inevitable hundred: I imagine that
Mr. Kensit takes off his hat to a lady; and what
can be more solemn and absurd, considered in
the abstract, than symbolizing the existence of
the other sex by taking off a portion of your
clothing and waving it in the air? This, I
repeat, is not a natural and primitive symbol, like
fire or food. A man might just as well have to
take off his waistcoat to a lady ; and if a man, by
the social ritual of his civilization, had to take off
his waistcoat to a lady, every chivalrous and
sensible man would take off his waistcoat to a
lady. In short, Mr. Kensit, and those- who agree
with him, may think, and quite sincerely think,
that men give too much incense and ceremonial
to their adoration of the other world. But no-
body thinks that he can give too much incense
and ceremonial to the adoration of this world.
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Heretics

All men, then, are ritualists, but are either
conscious or unconscious ritualists. The con-
scious ritualists are generally satisfied with a few
very simple and elementary signs; the uncon-
scious ritualists are not satisfied with anything
short of the whole of human life, being almost
insanely ritualistic. The first is called a rit-
ualist because he invents and remembers one
rite; the other is called an anti-ritualist because
he obeys and forgets a thousand. And a some-
what similar distinction to this which I have
drawn with some unavoidable length, between
the conscious ritualist and the unconscious rit-
ualist, exists between the conscious idealist and
the unconscious idealist. It is idle to inveigh
against cynics and materialists — there are no
cynics, there are no materialists. Every man
is idealistic; only it so often happens that he
has the wrong ideal. Every man is incurably
sentimental; but, unfortunately, it is so often a
false sentiment. When we talk, for instance,
of some unscrupulous commercial figure, and
say that he would do anything for money, we
use quite an inaccurate expression, and we
slander him very much. He would not do
anything for money. He would do some things
for money; he would sell his soul for money,
for instance; and, as Mirabeau humorously said,
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The Fallacy of the Young Nation

he would be quite wise "to take money for
muck." He would oppress humanity for money;
but then it happens that humanity and the soul
are not things that he believes in; they are not
his ideals. But he has his own dim and delicate
ideals; and he would not violate these for
money. He would not drink out of the soup-
tureen, for money. He would not wear his
coat-tails in front, for money. He would not
spread a report that he had softening of the
brain, for money. In the actual practice of
life we find, in the matter of ideals, exactly
what we have already found in the matter of
ritual. We find that while there is a perfectly
genuine danger of fanaticism from the men who
have unworldly ideals, the permanent and urgent
danger of fanaticism is from the men who have
worldly ideals.

People who say that an ideal is a dangerous
thing, that it deludes and intoxicates, are per-
fectly right. But the ideal which intoxicates
most is the least idealistic kind of ideal. The
ideal which intoxicates least is the very ideal
ideal; that sobers us suddenly, as all heights
and precipices and great distances do. Granted
that it is a great evil to mistake a cloud for a
cape; still, the cloud, which can be most easily
mistaken for a cape, is the cloud that is nearest

251

Heretics

the earth. Similarly, we may grant that it may
be dangerous to mistake an ideal for something
practical. But we shall still point out that, in
this respect, the most dangerous ideal of all is
the ideal which looks a little practical. It is
difficult to attain a high ideal; consequently, it
is almost impossible to persuade ourselves that
we have attained it. But it is easy to attain a
low ideal; consequently, it is easier still to per-
suade ourselves that we have attained it when
we have done nothing of the kind. To take a
random example. It might be called a high
ambition to wish to be an archangel; the man
who entertained such an ideal would very pos-
sibly exhibit asceticism, or even frenzy, but not,
I think, delusion. He would not think he was
an archangel, and go about flapping his hands
under the impression that they were wings.
But suppose that a sane man had a low ideal;
suppose he wished to be a gentleman. Any one
who knows the world knows that in nine weeks
he would have persuaded himself that he was a
gentleman; and this being manifestly not the
case, the result will be very real and practical
dislocations and calamities in social life. It is
not the wild ideals which wreck the practical
world; it is the tame ideals.
The matter may, perhaps, be illustrated by
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The Fallacy of the Young Nation

a parallel from our modern politics. When
men tell us that the old Liberal politicians of
the type of Gladstone cared only for ideals, of
course, they are talking nonsense — they cared
for a great many other things, including votes.
And when men tell us that modern politicians
of the type of Mr. Chamberlain or, in another
way, Lord Rosebery, care only for votes or for
material interest, then again they are talking
nonsense — these men care for ideals like all
other men. But the real distinction which may
be drawn is this, that to the older politician the
ideal was an ideal, and nothing else. To the
new politician his dream is not only a good
dream, it is a reality. The old politician would
have said, "It would be a good thing if there
were a Republican Federation dominating the
world." But the modern politician does not
say, "It would be a good thing if there were a
British Imperialism dominating the world." He
says, "It is a good thing that there is a British
Imperialism dominating the world;" whereas
clearly there is nothing of the kind. The old
Liberal would say "There ought to be a good
Irish government in Ireland." But the ordinary
modern Unionist does not say, "There ought
to be a good English government in Ireland."
He says, "There is a good English government
253

Heretics

in Ireland;" which is absurd. In short, the
modern politicians seem to think that a man
becomes practical merely by making assertions
entirely about practical things. Apparently, a
delusion does not matter as long as it is a
materialistic delusion. Instinctively most of us
feel that, as a practical matter, even the con-
trary is true. I certainly would much rather
share my apartments with a gentleman who
thought he was God than with a gentleman who
thought he was a grasshopper. To be continu-
ally haunted by practical images and practical
problems, to be constantly thinking of things
as actual, as urgent, as in process of completion
— these things do not prove a man to be prac-
tical; these things, indeed, are among the most
ordinary signs of a lunatic. That our modern
statesmen are materialistic is nothing against
their being also morbid. Seeing angels in a
vision may make a man a supernaturalist to
excess. But merely seeing snakes in delirium
tremens does not make him a naturalist.

And when we come actually to examine the
main stock notions of our modern practical
politicians, we find that those main stock
notions are mainly delusions. A great many
instances might be given of the fact. We might
take, for example, the case of that strange class

254

The Fallacy of the Young Nation

of notions which underlie the word "union,"
and all the eulogies heaped upon it. Of course,
union is no more a good thing in itself than
separation is a good thing in itself. To have a
party in favour of union and a party in favour
of separation, is as absurd as to have a party in
favour of going upstairs and a party in favour
of going downstairs. The question is not
whether we go up or down stairs, but where
we are going to, and what we are going for?
Union is strength; union is also weakness. It
is a good thing to harness two horses to a cart;
but it is not a good thing to try and turn two
hansom cabs into one four-wheeler. Turning
ten nations into one empire may happen to be
as feasible as turning ten shillings into one
half-sovereign. Also it may happen to be as
preposterous as turning ten terriers into one
mastiff. The question in all cases is not a
question of union or absence of union, but of
identity or absence of identity. Owing to cer-
tain historical and moral causes, two nations
may be so united as upon the whole to help
each other. Thus England and Scotland pass
their time in paying each other compliments;
but their energies and atmospheres run distinct
and parallel, . and consequently do not clash.
Scotland continues to be educated and Calvin-

255

Heretics

istic; England continues to be uneducated and
happy. But owing to certain other moral and '
certain other political causes, two nations may
be so united as only to hamper each other;
their lines do clash and do not run parallel.
Thus, for instance, England and Ireland are
so united that the Irish can sometimes rule
England, but can never rule Ireland. The edu-
cational systems, including the last Education
Act, are here, as in the case of Scotland, a very
good test of the matter. The overwhelming
majority of Irishmen believe in a strict Catholi-
cism; the overwhelming majority of Englishmen
believe in a vague Protestantism. The Irish
party in the Parliament of Union is just large
enough to prevent the English education being
indefinitely Protestant, and just small enough
to prevent the Irish education being definitely
Catholic. Here we have a state of things which
no man in his senses would ever dream of
wishing to continue if he had not been bewitched
by the sentimentalism of the mere word "union."
This example of union, however, is not the
example which I propose to take of the in-
grained futility and deception underlying all the
assumptions of the modern practical politician.
I wish to speak especially of another and much
more general delusion. It pervades the minds
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The Fallacy of the Young Nation

and speeches of all the practical men of all
parties; and it is a childish blunder built upon
a single false metaphor. I refer to the universal
modern talk about young nations and new
nations; about America being young, about
New Zealand being new. The whole thing is
a trick of words. America is not young, New
Zealand is not new. It is a very discussable
question whether they are not both much older
than England or Ireland.

Of course we may use the metaphor of youth
about America or the colonies, if we use it
strictly as implying only a recent origin. But
if we use it (as we do use it) as implying vigour,
or vivacity, or crudity, or inexperience, or hope,
or a long life before them, or any of the romantic
attributes of youth, then it is surely as clear as
daylight that we are duped by a stale figure of
speech. We can easily see the matter clearly
by applying it to any other institution parallel
to the institution of an independent nationality.
If a club called "The Milk and Soda League"
(let us say) was set up yesterday, as I have no
doubt it was, then, of course, "The Milk and
Soda League" is a young club in the sense that
it was set up yesterday, but in no other sense.
It may consist entirely of moribund old gentle-
men. It may be moribund itself. We may

2 57

Heretics

call it a young club, in the light of the fact that
it was founded yesterday. We may also call
it a very old club in the light of the fact that it
will most probably go bankrupt to-morrow.
All this appears very obvious when we put it in
this form. Any one who adopted the young-
community delusion with regard to a bank or a
butcher's shop would be sent to an asylum.
But the whole modern political notion that
America and -the colonies must be very vigorous
because they are very new, rests upon no better
foundation. That America was founded long
after England does not make it even in the
faintest degree more probable that America will
not perish a long time before England. That
England existed before her colonies does not
make it any the less likely that she will exist
after her colonies. And when we look at the
actual history of the world, we find that great
European nations almost invariably have sur-
vived the vitality of their colonies. When we
look at the actual history of the world, we find
that if there is a thing that is bom old and dies
young, it is a colony. The Greek colonies went
to pieces long before the Greek civilization.
The Spanish colonies have gone to pieces long
before the nation of Spain — nor does there
seem to be any reason to doubt the possibility
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The Fallacy of the Young Nation

or even the probability of the conclusion that
the colonial civilization, which owes its origin
to England, will be much briefer and much less
vigorous than the civilization of England itself.
The English nation will still be going the way
of all European nations when the Anglo-Saxon
race has gone the way of all fads. Now, of
course, the interesting question is, have we, in
the case of America and the colonies, any real
evidence of a moral and intellectual youth as
opposed to the indisputable triviality of a merely
chronological youth? Consciously or uncon-
sciously, we know that we have no such evi-
dence, and consciously or unconsciously, there-
fore, we proceed to make it up. Of this pure
and placid invention, a good example, for in
stance, can be found in a recent poem of Mr.
Rudyard Kipling's. Speaking of the English
people and the South African War, Mr. Kipling
says that "we fawned en the younger nations
for the men that could shoot and ride." Some
people considered this sentence insulting. All
that I am concerned with at present is the
evident fact that it is not true. The colonies
provided very useful volunteer troops, but they
did not provide the best troops, nor achieve
the most successful exploits. The best work
in the war on the English side was done, as
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Heretics

might have been expected, by the best English
regiments. The men who could shoot and ride
were not the enthusiastic corn merchants from
Melbourne, any more than they were the en-
thusiastic clerks from Cheapside. The men
who could shoot and ride were the men who
had been taught to shoot and ride in the dis-
cipline of the standing army of a great Euro-
pean power. Of course, the colonials are as
brave and athletic as any other average white
men. Of course, they acquitted themselves
with reasonable credit. All I have here to
indicate is that, for the purposes of this theory
of the new nation, it is necessary to maintain
that the colonial forces were more useful or
more heroic than the gunners at Colenso or the
Fighting Fifth. And of this contention there
is not, and never has been, one stick or straw
of evidence.

A similar attempt is made, and with even less
success, to represent the literature of the colonies
as something fresh and vigorous and important.
The imperialist magazines are constantly spring-
ing upon us some genius from Queensland or
Canada, through whom we are expected to
smell the odours of the bush or the prairie.
As a matter of fact, any one who is even slightly
interested in literature as such (and I, for one,
260

The Fallacy of the Young Nation

confess that I am only slightly interested in
literature as such), will freely admit that the
stories of these geniuses smell of nothing but
printer's ink, and that not of first-rate quality.
By a great effort of Imperial imagination the
generous English people reads into these works
a force and a novelty. But the force and the
novelty are not in the new writers; the force
and the novelty are in the ancient heart of the
English. Anybody who studies them impar-
tially will know that the first-rate writers of
the colonies are not even particularly novel in
their note and atmosphere, are not only not
producing a new kind of good literature, but are
not even in any particular sense producing a
new kind of bad literature. The first-rate
writers of the new countries are really almost
exactly like the second-rate writers of the old
countries. Of course they do' feel the mystery
of the wilderness, the mystery of the bush, for
all simple and honest men feel this in Mel-
bourne, or Margate, or South St. Pancras. But
when they write most sincerely and most suc-
cessfully, it is not with a background of the
mystery of the bush, but with a background,
expressed or assumed, of our own romantic
cockney civilization. What really moves their
souls with a kindly terror is not the mystery of
261

Heretics

the wilderness, but the Mystery of a Hansom
Cab.

Of course there are some exceptions to this
generalization. The one really arresting ex-
ception is Olive Schreiner, and she is quite as
certainly an exception that proves the rule.
Olive Schreiner is a fierce, brilliant, and realistic
novelist; but she is all this precisely because
she is not English at all. Her tribal kinship is
with the country of Teniers and Maarten Maar-
tens — that is, with a country of realists. Her
literary kinship is with the pessimistic fiction of
the continent; with the novelists whose very
pity is cruel. Olive Schreiner is the one English
colonial who is not conventional, for the simple
reason that South Africa is the one English
colony which is not English, and probably never
will be. And, of course, there are individual
exceptions in a minor way. I remember in par-
ticular some Australian tales by Mr. Mcllwain
which were really able and effective, and which,
for that reason, I suppose, are not presented to
the public with blasts of a trumpet. But my
general contention, if put before any one with
a love of letters, will not be disputed if it is
understood. It is not the truth that the colonial
civilization as a whole is giving us, or shows
any signs of giving us, a literature which will
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The Fallacy of the Young Nation

startle and renovate our own. It may be a
very good thing for us to have an affectionate
illusion in the matter; that is quite another
affair. The colonies may have given England
a new emotion; I only say that they have not
given the world a new book.

Touching these English colonies, I do not
wish to be misunderstood. I do not say of
them or of America that they have not a future,
or that they will not be great nations. I merely
deny the whole established modern expression
about them. I deny that they are "destined"
to a future. I deny that they are "destined"
to be great nations. I deny (of course) that
any human thing is destined to be anything.
All the absurd physical metaphors, such as
youth and age, living and dying, are, when ap
plied to nations, but pseudo-scientific attempts
to conceal from men the awful liberty of their
lonely souls.

In the case of America, indeed, a warning to
this effect is instant and essential. America,
of course, like every other human thing, can in
spiritual sense live or die as much as it chooses.
But at the present moment the matter which
America has very seriously to consider is not
how near it is to its birth and beginning, but
how near it may be to its end. It is only a
263

Heretics

verbal question whether the American civiliza-
tion is young; it may become a very practical
and urgent question whether it is dying. When
once we have cast aside, as we inevitably have
after a moment's thought, the fanciful physical
metaphor involved in the word "youth," what
serious evidence have we that America is a fresh
force and not a stale one ? It has a great many
people, like China; it has a great deal of money,
like defeated Carthage or dying Venice. It is
full of bustle and excitability, like Athens after
its ruin, and all the Greek cities in their decline.
It is fond of new things; but the old are always
fond of new things. Young men read chron-
icles, but old men read newspapers. It admires
strength and good looks; it admires a big and
barbaric beauty in its women, for instance; but
so did Rome when the Goth was at the gates.
All these are things quite compatible with fun-
damental tedium and decay. There are three
main shapes or symbols in which a nation can
show itself essentially glad and great — by the
heroic in government, by the heroic in arms,
and by the heroic in art. Beyond government,
which is, as it were, the very shape and body of
a nation, the most significant thing about any
citizen is his artistic attitude towards a holiday
and his moral attitude towards a fight — that
264

The Fallacy of the Young Nation

is, his way of accepting life and his way of
accepting death.

Subjected to these eternal tests, America does
not appear by any means as particularly fresh
or untouched. She appears with all the weak-
ness and weariness of modern England or of
any other Western power. In her politics she
has broken up exactly as England has broken
up, into a bewildering opportunism and insin-
cerity. In the matter of war and the national
attitude towards war, her resemblance to Eng-
land is even more manifest and melancholy.
It may be said with rough accuracy that there
are three stages in the life of a strong people.
First, it is a small power, and fights small
powers. Then it is a great power, and fights
great powers. Then it is a great power, and
fights small powers, but pretends that they are
great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of
its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the
next step is to become a small power itself.
England exhibited this symptom of decadence
very badly in the war with the Transvaal; but
America exhibited it worse in the war with
Spain. There was exhibited more sharply and
absurdly than anywhere else the ironic contrast
between the very careless choice of a strong line
and the very careful choice of a weak enemy.
265

Heretics

America added to all her other late Roman or
Byzantine elements the element of the Cara-
callan triumph, the triumph over nobody.

But when we come to the last test of nation-
ality, the test of art and letters, the case is
almost terrible. The English colonies have
produced no great artists; and that fact may
prove that they are still full of silent possibilities
and reserve force. But America has produced
great artists. And that fact most certainly
proves that she is full of a fine futility and the
end of all things. Whatever the American men
of genius are, they are not young gods making
a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave,
barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr.
Henry James infect us with the spirit of a
schoolboy? No; the colonies have not spoken,
and they are safe. Their silence may be the
silence of the unborn. But out of America has
come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable
as the cry of a dying man.

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XIX — Slum Novelists and the Slums

ODD ideas are entertained in our time
about the real nature of the doctrine
pf human fraternity. The real doc-
trine is something which we do not,
with all our modern humanitarianism, very
clearly understand, much less very closely prac-
tise. There is nothing, for instance, particu-
larly undemocratic about kicking your butler
downstairs. It may be wrong, but it is not
unfraternal. Ik a certain sense, the blow or
kick may be Considered as a confession of
equality: you are meeting your butler body
to body; you a\e almost according him the
privilege of the Wei. There is nothing un-
democratic, though there may be something
unreasonable, in expecting a great deal from
the butler, and bejng filled with a kind of
frenzy of surprise \ihen he falls short of the
divine stature. The thing which is really un-
democratic and unfrat\mal is not to expect the
butler to be more or \ess divine. The thing
which is really undemocratic and unfraternal
is to say, as so many aodern humanitarians
say, " Of course one musWake allowances for
267 \

\
\

Heretics

those on a lower plane." All things considered,
indeed, it may be said, without undue exaggera-
tion, that the really undemocratic and unfra-
ternal thing is the common practice of not
kicking the butler downstairs.

It is only because such a vast section of the
modern world is out of sympathy with the serious
democratic sentiment that this statement will
seem to many to be lacking in seriousness.
Democracy is not philanthropy; it is not even
altruism or social reform. Democracy is not
founded on pity for the common man; democ-
racy is founded on reverence for the common
man, or, if you will, even on fear of him. It
does not champion man because man is so
miserable, but because man is so sublime. It
does not object so much to .he ordinary man
being a slave as to his not being a king, for its
dream is always the dream of the first Roman
republic, a nation of kings.

Next to a genuine repuMic, the most demo-
cratic thing in the world s a hereditary despot-
ism. I mean a despotsm in which there is
absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense
about intellect or special fitness for the post.
Rational despotism — that is, selective despot-
ism — is always a cirse to mankind, because
with that you have tie ordinary man misunder-
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Slum Novelists and the Slums

stood and misgoverned by some prig who has no
brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational
despotism is always democratic, because it is
the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form
of slavery is that which is called Caesarism, or
the choice of some bold or brilliant man as
despot because he is suitable. For that means
that men choose a representative, not because
he represents them, but because he does not.
Men trust an ordinary man like George III.
or William IV. because they are themselves
ordinary men and understand him. Men trust
an ordinary man because they trust themselves.
But men trust a great man because they do not
trust themselves. And hence the worship of
great men always appears in times of weakness
and cowardice; we never hear of great men
until the time when all other men are small.

Hereditary despotism is, then, in essence and
sentiment democratic because it chooses from
mankind at random. If it does not declare that
every man may rule, it declares the next most
democratic thing; it declares that any man may
rule. Hereditary aristocracy is a far worse and
more dangerous thing, because the numbers
and multiplicity of an aristocracy make it some-
times possible for it to figure as an aristocracy
of intellect. Some of its members will pre-
269

Heretics

sumably have brains, and thus they, at any rate,
will be an intellectual aristocracy within the
social one. They will rule the aristocracy by
virtue of their intellect, and they will rule the
country by virtue of their aristocracy. Thus a
double falsity will be set up, and millions of
the images of God, who, fortunately for then-
wives and families, are neither gentlemen nor
clever men, will be represented by a man like
Mr. Balfour or Mr. Wyndham, because he is
too gentlemanly to be called merely clever, and
just too clever to be called merely a gentleman.
But even an hereditary aristocracy may exhibit,
by a sort of accident, from time to time some of
the basically democratic quality which belongs
to a hereditary despotism. It is amusing to
think how much conservative ingenuity has been
wasted in the defence of the House of Lords
by men who were desperately endeavouring to
prove that the House of Lords consisted of
clever men. There is one really good defence
of the House of Lords, though admirers of the
peerage are strangely coy about using it; and
that is, that the House of Lords, in its full and
proper strength, consists of stupid men. It
really would be a plausible defence of that
otherwise indefensible body to point out that
the clever men in the Commons, who owed their
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Slum Novelists and the Slums

power to cleverness, ought in the last resort to
be checked by the average man in the Lords,
who owed their power to accident. Of course,
there would be many answers to such a conten-
tion, as, for instance, that the House of Lords
is largely no longer a House of Lords, but a
House of tradesmen and financiers, or that the
bulk of the commonplace nobility do not vote,
and so leave the chamber to the prigs and the
specialists and the mad old gentlemen with
hobbies. But on some occasions the House of
Lords, even under all these disadvantages, is in
some sense representative. When all the peers
flocked together to vote against Mr. Gladstone's
second Home Rule Bill, for instance, those who
said that the peers represented the English
people, were perfectly right. All those dear old
men who happened to be born peers were at
that moment, and upon that question, the pre-
cise counterpart of all the dear old men who
happened to be born paupers or middle-class
gentlemen. That mob of peers did really rep-
resent the English people — that is to say, it
was honest, ignorant, vaguely excited, almost
unanimous, and obviously wrong. Of course,
rational democracy is better as an expression
of the public will than the haphazard hereditary
method. While we are about having any kind
271

Heretics

of democracy, let it be rational democracy. But
if we are to have any kind of oligarchy, let it
be irrational oligarchy. Then at least we shall
be ruled by men.

But the thing which is really required for
the proper working of democracy is not merely
the democratic system, or even the democratic
philosophy, but the democratic emotion. The
democratic emotion, like most elementary and
indispensable things, is a thing difficult to de-
scribe at any time. But it is peculiarly difficult
to describe it in our enlightened age, for the
simple reason that it is peculiarly difficult to
find it. It is a certain instinctive attitude which
feels the things in which all men agree to be
unspeakably important, and all the things in
which they differ (such as mere brains) to be
almost unspeakably unimportant. The nearest
approach to it in our ordinary life would be the
promptitude with which we should consider
mere humanity in any circumstance of shock
or death. We should say, after a somewhat
disturbing discovery, "There is a dead man
under the sofa." We should not be likely to
say, "There is a dead man of considerable
personal refinement under the sofa-" We
should say, "A woman has fallen into the
water." We should not say, "A, highly edu-
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Slum Novelists and the Slums

cated woman has fallen into the water." No-
body would say, "There are the remains of a
clear thinker in your back garden." Nobody
would say, "Unless you hurry up and Stop him,
a man with a very fine ear for music will have
jumped off that cliff." But this emotion, which
all of us have in connection with such things as
birth and death, is to some people native and
constant at all ordinary times and in all ordi-
nary places. It was native to St. Francis of
Assisi. It was native to Walt Whitman. In
this strange and splendid degree it cannot be
expected, perhaps, to pervade a whole com-
monwealth or a whole civilization; but one
commonwealth may have it much more than
another commonwealth, one civilization much
more than another civilization. No community,
perhaps, ever had it so much as the early Fran-
ciscans. No community, perhaps, ever had it
so little as ours.

Everything in our age has, when carefully
examined, this fundamentally undemocratic
quality. In religion and morals we should
admit, in the abstract, that the sins of the
educated classes were as great as, or perhaps
greater than, the sins of the poor and ignorant,
But in practice the great difference between the
mediaeval ethics and ours is that ours concen-

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Heretics

trate attention on the sins which are the sins of
the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins
which are the sins of the educated are sins at
all. We are always talking about the sin of
intemperate drinking, because it is quite obvious
that the poor have it more than the rich. But
we are always denying that there is any such
thing as the sin of pride, because it would be
quite obvious that the rich have it more than
the poor. We are always ready to make a
saint or prophet of the educated man who goes
into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the
uneducated. But the mediaeval idea of a saint
or prophet was something quite different. The
mediaeval saint or prophet was an uneducated
man who walked into grand houses to give a
little kindly advice to the educated. The old
tyrants had enough insolence to despoil the
poor, but they had not enough insolence to
preach to them. It was the gentleman who
oppressed the slums; but it was the slums that
admonished the gentleman. And just as we
are undemocratic in faith and morals, so we
are, by the very nature of our attitude in such
matters, undemocratic in the tone of our prac-
tical politics. It is a sufficient proof that we
are not an essentially democratic state that we
are always wondering what we shall do with
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Slum Novelists and the Slums

the poor. If we were democrats, we should be
wondering what the poor will do with us. With
us the governing class is always saying to itself,
"What laws shall we make?" In a purely
democratic state it would be always saying,
"What laws can we obey?" A purely demo-
cratic state perhaps there has never been. But
even the feudal ages were in practice thus far
democratic, that every feudal potentate knew
that any laws which he made would in all
probability return upon himself. His feathers
might be cut off for breaking a sumptuary law.
His head might be cut off for high treason.
But the modern laws are almost always laws
made to affect the governed class, but not the
governing. We have public-house licensing
laws, but not sumptuary laws. That is to say,
we have laws against the festivity and hospi-
tality of the poor, but no laws against the
festivity and hospitality of the rich. We have
laws against blasphemy — that is, against a
kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which
nobody but a rough and obscure man would
be likely to indulge. But we have no laws
against heresy — that is, against the intellectual
poisoning of the whole people, in which only a
prosperous and prominent man would be likely
to be successful. The evil of aristocracy is not

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Heretics

that it necessarily leads to the infliction of bad
things or the suffering of sad ones; the evil of
aristocracy is that it places everything in the
hands of a class of people who can always
inflict what they can never suffer. Whether
what they inflict is, in their intention, good or
bad, they become equally frivolous. The case
against the governing class of modern England
is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like,
you may call the English oligarchs too fantas-
tically unselfish. The case against them simply
is that when they legislate for all men, they
always omit themselves.

We are undemocratic, then, in our religion,
as is proved by our efforts to "raise" the poor.
We are undemocratic in our government, as is
proved by our innocent attempt to govern them
well. But above all we are undemocratic in
our literature, as is proved by the torrent of
novels about the poor and serious studies of the
poor which pour from our publishers every
month. And the more "modern" the book
is the more certain it is to be devoid of demo-
cratic sentiment.

A poor man is a man who has not got much
money. This may seem a simple and unneces-
sary description, but in the face of a great
mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very
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Slum Novelists and the Slums

necessary indeed; most of our realists and so-
ciologists talk about a poor man as if he were
an octopus or an alligator. There is no more
need to study the psychology of poverty than
to study the psychology of bad temper, or the
psychology of vanity, or the psychology of
animal spirits. A man ought to know some-
thing of the emotions of an insulted man, not
by being insulted, but simply by being a man.
And he ought to know something of the emo-
tions of a poor man, not by being poor, but
simply by being a man. Therefore, in any
writer who is describing poverty, my first objec-
tion to him will be that he has studied his
subject. A democrat would have imagined it.

A great many hard things have been said
about religious slumming and political or social
slumming, but surely the most despicable of all
is artistic slumming. The religious teacher is
at least supposed to be interested in the coster-
monger because he is a man; the politician is
in some dim and perverted sense interested in
the costermonger because he is a citizen; it is
only the wretched writer who is interested in the
costermonger merely because he is a coster-
monger. Nevertheless, so long as he is merely
seeking impressions, or in other words copy,
his trade, though dull, is honest. But when he
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Heretics

endeavours to represent that he is describing
the spiritual core of a costermonger, his dim
vices and his delicate virtues, then we must
object that his claim is preposterous; we must
remind him that he is a journalist and nothing
else. He has far less psychological authority
even than the foolish missionary. For he is
in the literal and derivative sense a journalist,
while the missionary is an eternalist. The mis-
sionary at least pretends to have a version of
the man's lot for all time; the journalist only
pretends to have a version of it from day to day.
The missionary comes to tell the poor man that
he is in the same condition with all men.
The journalist comes to tell other people how
different the poor man is from everybody else.

If the modern novels about the slums, such
as novels of Mr. Arthur Morrison, or the ex-
ceedingly able novels of Mr. Somerset Maug-
ham, are intended to be sensational, I can only
say that that is a noble and reasonable object,
and that they attain it. A sensation, a shock
to the imagination, like the contact with cold
water, is always a good and exhilarating thing;
and, undoubtedly, men will always seek this
sensation (among other forms) in the form of
the study of the strange antics of remote or
alien peoples. In the twelfth century men
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Slum Novelists and the Slums

obtained this sensation by reading about
dog-headed men in Africa. In the twentieth
century they obtained it by reading about
pig-headed Boers in Africa. The men of the
twentieth century were certainly, it must be
admitted, somewhat the more credulous of the
two. For it is not recorded of the men in the
twelfth century that they organized a sanguinary
crusade solely for the purpose of altering the
singular formation of the heads of the Africans.
But it may be, and it may even legitimately be,
that since all these monsters have faded from
the popular mythology, it is necessary to have in
our fiction the image of the horrible and hairy
East-ender, merely to keep alive in us a fearful
and childlike wonder at external peculiarities.
But the Middle Ages (with a great deal more
common sense than it would now be fashionable
to admit) regarded natural history at bottom
rather as a kind of joke; they regarded the
soul as very important. Hence, while they had
a natural history of dog-headed men, they did
not profess to have a psychology of dog-headed
men. They did not profess to mirror the mind
of a dog-headed man, to share his tenderest
secrets, or mount with his most celestial musings.
They did not write novels about the semi-
canine creature, attributing to him all the oldest
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Heretics

morbidities and all the newest fads. It is per-
missible to present men as monsters if we wish
to make the reader jump ; and to make anybody
jump is always a Christian act. But it is not
permissible to present men as regarding them-
selves as monsters, or as making themselves
jump. To summarize, our slum fiction is quite
defensible as aesthetic fiction; it is not defensible
as spiritual fact.

One enormous obstacle stands in the way of
its actuality. The men who write it, and the
men who read it, are men of the middle classes
or the upper classes; at least, of those who are
loosely termed the educated classes. Hence,
the fact that it is the life as the refined man
sees it proves that it cannot be the life as the
unrefined man lives it. Rich men write stories
about poor men, and describe them as speaking
with a coarse, or heavy, or husky enunciation.
But if poor men wrote novels about you or me
they would describe us as speaking with some
absurd shrill and affected voice, such as we only
hear from a duchess in a three-act farce. The
slum novelist gains his whole effect by the fact
that some detail is strange to the reader; but
that detail by the nature of the case cannot be
strange in itself. It cannot be strange to the
soul which he is professing to study. The slum
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Slum Novelists and the Slums

novelist gains his effects by describing the same
grey mist as draping the dingy factory and the
dingy tavern. But to the man he is supposed
to be studying there must be exactly the same
difference between the factory and the tavern
that there is to a middle-class man between a
late night at the office and a supper at Pagani's.
The slum novelist is content with pointing out
that to the eye of his particular class a pickaxe
looks dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty. But
the man he is supposed to be studying sees the
difference between them exactly as a clerk sees
the difference between a ledger and an edition
de luxe. The chiaroscuro of the life is inevi-
tably lost; for to us the high lights and the
shadows are a light grey. But the high lights
and the shadows are not a light grey in that
life any more than in any other. The kind
of man who could really express the pleasures
of the poor would be also the kind of man
who could share them. In short, these books
are not a record of the psychology of poverty.
They are a record of the psychology of wealth
and culture when brought in contact with
poverty. They are not a description of the
state of the slums. They are only a very dark
and dreadful description of the state of the
shimmers.

Heretics

One might give innumerable examples of the
essentially unsympathetic and unpopular quality
of these realistic writers. But perhaps the sim-
plest and most obvious example with which we
could conclude is the mere fact that these writers
are realistic. The poor have many other vices,
but, at least, they are never realistic. The poor
are melodramatic and romantic in grain; the
poor all believe in high moral platitudes and
copy-book maxims; probably this is the ultimate
meaning of the great saying, "Blessed are the
poor." Blessed are the poor, for they are
always making life, or trying to make life like
an Adelphi play. Some innocent educational-
ists and philanthropists (for even philanthropists
can be innocent) have expressed a grave aston-
ishment that the masses prefer shilling shockers
to scientific treatises and melodramas to prob-
lem plays. The reason is very simple. The
realistic story is certainly more artistic than the
melodramatic story. If what you desire is deft
handling, delicate proportions, a unity of artistic
atmosphere, the realistic story has a full advan-
tage over the melodrama. In everything that
is light and bright and ornamental the realistic
story has a full advantage over the melodrama.
But, at least, the melodrama has one indispu-
table advantage over the realistic story. The
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Slum Novelists and the Slums

melodrama is much more like life. It is much
more like man, and especially the poor man.
It is very banal and very inartistic when a
poor woman at the Adelphi says, "Do you
think I will sell my own child?" But poor
women in the Battersea High Road do say,
"Do you think I will sell my own child?"
They say it on every available occasion; you can
hear a sort of murmur or babble of it all the
way down the street. It is very stale and weak
dramatic art (if that is all) when the workman
confronts his master and says, "I'm a man."
But a workman does say "I'm a man" two or
three times every day. In fact, it is tedious,
possibly, to hear poor men being melodramatic
behind the footlights; but that is because one
can always hear them being melodramatic in
the street outside. In short, melodrama, if it
is dull, is dull because it is too accurate. Some-
what the same problem exists in the case of
stories about schoolboys. Mr. Kipling's " Stalky
and Co." is much more amusing (if you are
talking about amusement) than the late Dean
Farrar's "Eric; or, Little by Little." But
"Eric" is immeasurably more like real school-
life. For real school-life, real boyhood, is full
of the things of which Eric is full — priggish-
ness, a crude piety, a silly sin, a weak but
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Heretics

continual attempt at the heroic, in a word,
melodrama. And if we wish to lay a firm basis
for any efforts to help the poor, we must not
become realistic and see them from the outside.
We must become melodramatic, and see them
from the inside. The novelist must not take
out his notebook and say, "I am an expert."
No; he must imitate the workman in the Adelphi
play. He must slap himself on the chest and
say, "I am a man."

XX — Concluding Remarks on the Impor-
tance of Orthodoxy

WHETHER the human mind can
advance or not, is a question too
little discussed, for nothing can
be more dangerous than to found
our social philosophy on any theory which is
debatable but has not been debated. But if
we assume, for the sake of argument, that there
has been in the past, or will be in the future,
such a thing as a growth or improvement of
the human mind itself, there still remains a
very sharp objection to be raised against the
modern version of that improvement. The
vice of the modern notion of mental progress
is that it is always something concerned with
the breaking of bonds, the effacing of bounda-
ries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there
be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean
the growth into more and more definite convic-
tions, into more and more dogmas. The
human brain is a machine for coming to con-
clusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is
rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to
believe, we are hearing of something having

28 S

Heretics

almost the character of a contradiction in terms.
It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to
hold down a carpet ; or a bolt that was too strong
to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be de-
fined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal
who makes tools; ants and beavers and many
other animals make tools, in the sense that they
make an apparatus. Man can be denned as
an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles
doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on con-
clusion in the formation of some tremendous
scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the
only legitimate sense of which the expression
is capable, becoming more and more human.
When he drops one doctrine after another in a
refined scepticism, when he declines to tie him-
self to a system, when he says that he has
outgrown definitions, when he says that he
disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagi-
nation, he sits as God, holding no form of creed
but contemplating all, then he is by that very
process sinking slowly backwards into the
vagueness of the vagrant animals and the
unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no
dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.
If then, I repeat, there is to be mental ad-
vance, it must be mental advance in the con-
struction of a definite philosophy of life. And
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Concluding Remarks

that philosophy of life must be right and the
other philosophies wrong. Now of all, or
nearly all, the able modern writers whom I
have briefly studied in this book, this is espe-
cially and pleasingly true, that they do each of
them have a constructive and affirmative view,
and that they do take it seriously and ask us
to take it seriously. There is nothing merely
sceptically progressive about Mr. Rudyard
Kipling. There is nothing in the least broad-
minded about Mr. Bernard Shaw. The pa-
ganism of Mr. Lowes Dickinson is more grave
than any Christianity. Even the opportunism
of Mr. H. G. Wells is more dogmatic than the
idealism of anybody else. Somebody com-
plained, I think, to Matthew Arnold that he
was getting as dogmatic as Carlyle. He replied,
"That may be true; but you overlook an ob-
vious difference. I am dogmatic and right,
and Carlyle is dogmatic and wrong." The
strong humour of the remark ought not to
disguise from us its everlasting seriousness and
common sense; no man ought to write at all,
or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that
he is in truth and the other man in error. In
similar style, I hold that I am dogmatic and
right, while Mr. Shaw is dogmatic and wrong.
But my main point, at present, is to notice that
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Heretics

the chief among these writers I have discussed
do most sanely and courageously offer them-
selves as dogmatists, as founders of a system.
It may be true that the thing in Mr. Shaw most
interesting to me, is the fact that Mr. Shaw is
wrong. But it is equally true that the thing
in Mr. Shaw most interesting to himself, is the
fact that Mr. Shaw is right. Mr. Shaw may
have none with him but himself; but it is not
for himself he cares. It is for the vast and
universal church, of which he is the only
member.

The two typical men of genius whom I have
mentioned here, and with whose names I have
begun this book, are very symbolic, if only
because they have shown that the fiercest dog-
matists can make the best artists. In the fin
de silde atmosphere every one was crying out
that literature should be free from all causes
and all ethical creeds. Art was to produce only
exquisite workmanship, and it was especially
the note of those days to demand brilliant plays
and brilliant short stories. And when they got
them, they got them from a couple of moralists.
The best short stories were written by a man
trying to preach Imperialism. The best plays
were written by a man trying to preach Social-
ism. All the art of all the artists looked tiny
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Concluding Remarks

and tedious beside the art which was a by-
product of propaganda.

The reason, indeed, is very simple. A man
cannot be wise enough to be a great artist
without being wise enough to wish to be a
philosopher. A man cannot have the energy
to produce good art without having the energy
to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is
content with art; a great artist is content with
nothing except everything. So we find that
when real forces, good or bad, like Kipling and
G. B. S., enter our arena, they bring with them
not only startling and arresting art, but very
startling and arresting dogmas. And they care
even more, and desire us to care even more,
about their startling and arresting dogmas than
about their startling and arresting art. Mr.
Shaw is a good dramatist, but what he desires
more than anything else to be is a good politi-
cian. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is by divine caprice
and natural genius an unconventional poet; but
what he desires more than anything else to be
is a conventional poet. He desires to be the
poet of his people, bone of their bone, and flesh
of their flesh, understanding their origins, cele-
brating their destiny. He desires to be Poet
Laureate, a most sensible and honourable and
public-spirited desire. Having been given by
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Heretics

the gods originality — that is, disagreement with
others — he desires divinely to agree with them.
But the most striking instance of all, more
striking, I think, even than either of these, is
the instance of Mr. H. G. Wells. He began in
a sort of insane infancy of pure art. He began
by making a new heaven and a new earth, with
the same irresponsible instinct by which men
buy a new necktie or button-hole. He began
by trifling with the stars and systems in order
to make ephemeral anecdotes; he killed the
universe for a joke. He has since become more
and more serious, and has become, as men
inevitably do when they become more and more
serious, more and more parochial. He was
frivolous about the twilight of the gods; but
he is serious about the London omnibus. He
was careless in "The Time Machine," for that
dealt only with the destiny of all things; but
he is careful, and even cautious, in "Mankind
in the Making," for that deals with the day
after to-morrow. He began with the end of
the world, and that was easy. Now he has
gone on to the beginning of the world, and that
is difficult. But the main result of all this is
the same as in the other cases. The men who
have really been the bold artists, the realistic
artists, the uncompromising artists, are the men
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Concluding Remarks

who have turned out, after all, to be writing
"with a purpose." Suppose that any cool and
cynical art-critic, any art-critic fully impressed
with the conviction that artists were greatest
when they were most purely artistic, suppose
that a man who professed ably a humane
aestheticism, as did Mr. Max Beerbohm, or a
cruel aestheticism, as did Mr. W. E. Henley, had
cast his eye over the whole fictional literature
which was recent in the year 1895, and had
been asked to select the three most vigorous
and promising and original artists and artistic
works, he would, I think, most certainly have
said that for a fine artistic audacity, for a real
artistic delicacy, or for a whiff of true novelty in
art, the things that stood first were "Soldiers
Three," by a Mr. Rudyard Kipling; "Arms
and the Man," by a Mr. Bernard Shaw; and
"The Time Machine," by a man called Wells.
And all these men have shown themselves
ingrainedly didactic. You may express the
matter if you will by saying that if we want
doctrines we go to the great artists. But it is
clear from the psychology of the matter that
this is not the true statement; the true statement
is that when we want any art tolerably brisk
and bold we have to go to the doctrinaires.
In concluding this book, therefore, I would
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Heretics

ask, first and foremost, that men such as these
of whom I have spoken should not be insulted
by being taken for artists. No man has any
right whatever merely to enjoy the work of Mr.
Bernard Shaw; he might as well enjoy the
invasion of his country by the French. Mr.
Shaw writes either to convince or to enrage us.
No man has any business to be a Kiplingite
without being a politician, and an Imperialist
politician. If a man is first with us, it should
be because of what is first with him. If a man
convinces us at all, it should be by his convic-
tions. If we hate a poem of Kipling's from
political passion, we are hating it for the same
reason that the poet loved it; if we dislike him
because of his opinions, we are disliking him
for the best of all possible reasons. If a man
comes into Hyde Park to preach it is permissible
to hoot him; but it is discourteous to applaud
him as a performing bear. And an artist is
only a performing bear compared with the
meanest man who fancies he has anything to
say.

There is, indeed, one class of modern writers
and thinkers who cannot altogether be over-
looked in this question, though there is no space
here for a lengthy account of them, which, in-
deed, to confess the truth, would consist chiefly
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Concluding Remarks

of abuse. I mean those who get over all these
abysses and reconcile all these wars by talking
about "aspects of truth," by saying that the
art of Kipling represents one aspect of the
truth, and the art of William Watson another;
the art of Mr. Bernard Shaw one aspect of the
truth, and the art of Mr. Cunningham Grahame
another; the art of Mr. H. G. Wells one aspect,
and the art of Mr. Coventry Patmore (say)
another. I will only say here that this seems
to me an evasion which has not even had the
sense to disguise itself ingeniously in words.
If we talk of a certain thing being an aspect of
truth, it is evident that we claim to know what
is truth; just as, if we talk of the hind leg of a
dog, we claim to know what is a dog. Unfor-
tunately, the philosopher who talks about as-
pects of truth generally also asks, "What is
truth?" Frequently even he denies the exist-
ence of truth, or says it is inconceivable by the
human intelligence. How, then, can he recog-
nize its aspects? I should not like to be an
artist who brought an architectural sketch to a
builder, saying, "This is the south aspect of
Sea- View Cottage. Sea- View Cottage, of course,
does not exist." I should not even like very
much to have to explain, under such circum-
stances, that Sea- View Cottage might exist, but

293

Heretics

was unthinkable by the human mind. Nor
should I like any better to be the bungling and
absurd metaphysician who professed to be able
to see everywhere the aspects of a truth that is
not there. Of course, it is perfectly obvious
that there are truths in Kipling, that there are
truths in Shaw or Wells. But the degree to
which we can perceive them depends strictly
upon how far we have a definite conception
inside us of what is truth. It is ludicrous to
suppose that the more sceptical we are the more
we see good in everything. It is clear that the
more we are certain what good is, the more we
shall see good in everything.

I plead, then, that we should agree or dis-
agree with these men. I plead that we should
agree with them at least in having an abstract
belief. But I know that there are current in
the modem world many vague objections to
having an abstract belief, and I feel that we
shall not get any further until we have dealt
with some of them. The first objection is
easily stated.

A common hesitation in our day touching
the use of extreme convictions is a sort of notion
that extreme convictions, specially upon cosmic
matters, have been responsible in the past for
the thing which is called bigotry. But a very
294

Concluding Remarks

small amount of direct experience will dissipate
this view. In real life the people who are most
bigoted are the people who have no convictions
at all. The economists of the Manchester
school who disagree with Socialism take Social-
ism seriously. It is the young man in Bond
Street, who does not know what socialism
means, much less whether he agrees with it,
who is quite certain that these socialist fellows
are making a fuss about nothing. The man
who understands the Calvinist philosophy
enough to agree with it must understand the
Catholic philosophy in order to disagree with
it. It is the vague modern who is not at all
certain what is right who is most certain that
Dante was wrong. The serious opponent of
the Latin Church in history, even in the act
of showing that it produced great infamies,
must know that it produced great saints. It
is the hard-headed stockbroker, who knows no
history and believes no religion, who is, never-
theless, perfectly convinced that all these priests
are knaves. The Salvationist at the Marble
Arch may be bigoted, but he is not too bigoted
to yearn from a common human kinship after
the dandy on church parade. But the dandy
on church parade is so bigoted that he does not
in the least yearn after the Salvationist at the

295

Heretics

Marble Arch. Bigotry may be roughly defined
as the anger of men who have no opinions. It
is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that
vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite
to excess. Bigotry may be called the appalling
frenzy of the indifferent. This frenzy of the in-
different is in truth a terrible thing ; it has made all
monstrous and widely pervading persecutions.
In this degree it was not the people who cared
who ever persecuted; the people who cared were
not sufficiently numerous. It was the people
who did not care who filled the world with
fire and oppression. It was the hands of the
indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands
of the indifferent that turned the rack. There
have come some persecutions out of the pain of
a passionate certainty; but these produced, not
bigotry, but fanaticism — a very different and
a somewhat admirable thing. Bigotry in the
main has always been the pervading omnipo-
tence of those who do not care crushing out
those who care in darkness and blood.

There are people, however, who dig some-
what deeper than this into the possible evils of
dogma. It is felt by many that strong philo-
sophical conviction, while it does not (as they
perceive) produce that sluggish and fundamen-
tally frivolous condition which we call bigotry,
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Concluding Remarks

does produce a certain concentration, exaggera-
tion, and moral impatience, which we may agree
to call fanaticism. They say, in brief, that
ideas are dangerous things. In politics, for
example, it is commonly urged against a man
like Mr. Balfour, or against a man like Mr.
John Morley, that a wealth of ideas is danger-
ous. The true doctrine on this point, again,
is surely not very difficult to state. Ideas are
dangerous, but the man to, whom they are least
dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted
with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-
tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to
whom they are most dangerous is the man of
no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the
first idea fly to his head like wine to the head
of a teetotaller. It is a common error, I think,
among the Radical idealists of my own party
and period to suggest that financiers and busi-
ness men are a danger to the empire because
they are so sordid or so materialistic. The
truth is that financiers and business men are a
danger to the empire because they can be senti-
mental about any sentiment, and idealistic
about any ideal, any ideal that they find lying
about. Just as a boy who has not known much
of women is apt too easily to take a woman for
the woman, so these practical men, unaccus-
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Heretics

tomed to causes, are always inclined to think
that if a thing is proved to be an ideal it is
proved to be the ideal. Many, for example,
avowedly followed Cecil Rhodes because he had
a vision. They might as well have followed
him because he had a nose; a man without some
kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of
a monstrosity as a noseless man. People say
of such a figure, in almost feverish whispers,
"He knows his own mind," which is exactly like
saying in equally feverish whispers, "He blows
his own nose." Human nature simply cannot
subsist without a hope and aim of some kind;
as the sanity of the Old Testament truly said,
where there is no vision the people perisheth.
But it is precisely because an ideal is necessary
to man that the man without ideals is in per-
manent danger of fanaticism. There is nothing
which is so likely to leave a man open to the
sudden and irresistible inroad of an unbalanced
vision as the cultivation of business habits. All
of us know angular business men who think
that the earth is fiat, or that Mr. Kruger was at
the head of a great military despotism, or that
men are graminivorous, or that Bacon wrote
Shakespeare. Religious and philosophical be-
liefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and
nothing can take from them that beauty of
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Concluding Remarks

danger. But there is only one way of really
guarding ourselves against the excessive danger
of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy
and soaked in religion.

Briefly, then, we dismiss the two opposite
dangers of bigotry and fanaticism, bigotry which
is a too great vagueness and fanaticism which
is a too great concentration. We say that the
cure for the bigot is belief; we say that the cure
for the idealist is ideas. To know the best
theories of existence and to choose the best
from them (that is, to the best of our own strong
conviction) appears to us the proper way to be
neither bigot nor fanatic, but something more
firm than a bigot and more terrible than a
fanatic, a man with a definite opinion. But
that definite opinion must in this view begin
with the basic matters of human thought, and
these must not be dismissed as irrelevant, as
religion, for instance, is too often in our days
dismissed as irrelevant. Even if we think re-
ligion insoluble, we cannot think it irrelevant.
Even if we ourselves have no view of the ulti-
mate verities, we must feel that wherever such
a view exists in a man it must be more important
than anything else in him. The instant that'
the thing ceases to be the unknowable, it
becomes the indispensable.

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Heretics

There can be no doubt, I think, that the idea
does exist in our time that there is something
narrow or irrelevant or even mean about attack-
ing- a man's religion, or arguing from it in
matters of politics or ethics. There can be
quite as little doubt that such an accusation of
narrowness is itself almost grotesquely narrow.
To take an example from comparatively current
events: we all know that it was not uncommon
for a man to be considered a scarecrow of
bigotry and obscurantism because he distrusted
the Japanese, or lamented the rise of the Japa-
nese, on the ground that the Japanese were
Pagans. Nobody would think that there was
anything antiquated or fanatical about distrust-
ing a people because of some difference between
them and us in practice or political machinery.
Nobody would think it bigoted to say of a
people, "I distrust their influence because they
are Protectionists." No one would think it
narrow to say, "I lament their rise because they
are Socialists, or Manchester Individualists, or
strong believers in militarism and conscrip-
tion." A difference of opinion about the nature
of Parliaments matters very much; but a differ-
ence of opinion about the nature of sin does not
matter at all. A difference of opinion about
the object of taxation matters very much; but
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Concluding Remarks

a difference of opinion about the object of
human existence does not matter at all. We
have a right to distrust a man who is in a
different kind of municipality; but we have no
right to mistrust a man who is in a different
kind of cosmos. This sort of enlightenment is
surely about the most unenlightened that it is
possible to imagine. To recur to the phrase
which I employed earlier, this is tantamount to
saying that everything is important with the
exception of everything. Religion is exactly
the thing which cannot be left out — because
it includes everything. The most absent-minded
person cannot well pack his Gladstone-bag and
leave out the bag. We have a general view of
existence, whether we like it or not; it alters,
or, to speak more accurately, it creates and
involves everything we say or do, whether we
like it or not. If we regard the Cosmos as a
dream, we regard the Fiscal Question as a
dream. If we regard the Cosmos as a joke,
we regard St. Paul's Cathedral as a joke. If
everything is bad, then we must believe (if it
be possible) that beer is bad; if everything be
good, we are forced to the rather fantastic con-
clusion that scientific philanthropy is good.
Every man in the street must hold a metaphys-
ical system, and hold it firmly. The utmost
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Heretics

possibility is that he may have held it so firmly
and so long as to have forgotten all about its
existence.

This latter situation is certainly possible; in
fact, it is the situation of the whole modern
world. The modem world is filled with men
who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not
even know that they are dogmas. It may be
said even that the modern world, as a corporate
body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it
does not know that they are dogmas. It may
be thought "dogmatic," for instance, in some
circles accounted progressive, to assume the
perfection or improvement of man in another
world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to
assume the perfection or improvement of man
in this world; though that idea of progress is
quite as unproved as the idea of immortality,
and from a rationalistic point of view quite as
improbable. Progress happens to be one of
our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which
is not thought dogmatic. Or, again, we see
nothing "dogmatic" in the inspiring, but cer-
tainly most startling, theory of physical science,
that we should collect facts for the sake of facts,
even though they seem as useless as sticks and
straws. This is a great and suggestive idea,
and its utility may, if you will, be proving
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Concluding Remarks

itself, but its utility is, in the abstract, quite as
disputable as the utility of that calling on
oracles or consulting shrines which is also said
to prove itself. Thus, because we are not in a
civilization which believes strongly in oracles or
sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who
killed themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ.
But being in a civilization which does believe in
this dogma of fact for facts' sake, we do not see
the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to
find the North Pole. I am not speaking of a
tenable ultimate utility which is true both of
the Crusades and the polar explorations. I
mean merely that we do see the superficial and
aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about
the idea of men crossing a continent with armies
to conquer the place where a man died. But
we do not see the aesthetic singularity and
startling quality of men dying in agonies to
find a place where no man can live — a place
only interesting because it is supposed to be
the meeting-place of some lines that do not
exist.

Let us, then, go upon a long journey and
enter on a dreadful search. Let us, at least,
dig and seek till we have discovered our own
opinions. The dogmas we really hold are far
more fantastic, and, perhaps, far more beautiful

3°3

Heretics

than we think. In the course of these essays
I fear that I have spoken from time to time
of rationalists and rationalism, and that in a
disparaging sense. Being full of that kindliness
which should come at the end of everything,
even of a book, I apologize to the rationalists
even for calling them rationalists. There are
no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and
live in them. Some, with a sumptuous literary
rum, believe in the existence of the lady clothed
with the sun. Some, with a more rustic, elvish
instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in
the impossible sun itself. Some hold the un-
demonstrable dogma of the existence of God;
some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the
existence of the man next door.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that
they are disputed. Thus every man who utters
a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism
of our time does not really destroy the beliefs,
rather it creates them; gives them their limits
and their plain and defiant shape. We who are
Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a
truism. Now it has been disputed, and we
hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in
patriotism once thought patriotism to be reason-
able, and thought little more about it. Now
we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to

3°4

Concluding Remarks

be right. We who are Christians never knew
the great philosophic common sense which
inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian
writers pointed it out to us. The great march
of mental destruction will go on. Everything
will be denied. Everything will become a
creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the
stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma
to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we
are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity
to say that we are all awake. Fires will be
kindled to testify that two and two make four.
Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are
green in summer. We shall be left defending,
not only the incredible virtues and sanities of
human life, but something more incredible still,
this huge impossible universe which stares us
in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies
as if they were invisible. We shall look on the
impossible grass and the skies with a strange
courage. We shall be of those who have seen
and yet have believed.

THE END.

305