The 'Defences' of which this volume is composed have appeared in The Speaker, and are here reprinted, after revision and amplification, by permission of the Editor. Portions of 'The Defence of Publicity' appeared in The Daily News.
October, 1901.
The reissue of a series of essays so ephemeral and even superfluous may seem at the first glance to require some excuse; probably the best excuse is that they will have been completely forgotten, and therefore may be read again with entirely new sensations. I am not sure, however, that this claim is so modest as it sounds, for I fancy that Shakespeare and Balzac, if moved to prayers, might not ask to be remembered, but to be forgotten, and forgotten thus; for if they were forgotten they would be everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are. The ancients were not wrong when they made Lethe the boundary of a better land; perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb back upon the bank of the earth and fancy himself in Elysium.
If, therefore, I am certain that most sensible people have forgotten the existence of this book—I do not speak in modesty or in pride—I wish only to state a simple and somewhat beautiful fact. In one respect the passing of the period during which a book can be considered current has afflicted me with some melancholy, for I had intended to write anonymously in some daily paper a thorough and crushing exposure of the work inspired mostly by a certain artistic impatience of the too indulgent tone of the critiques and the manner in which a vast number of my most monstrous fallacies have passed unchallenged. I will not repeat that powerful article here, for it cannot be necessary to do anything more than warn the reader against the perfectly indefensible line of argument adopted at the end of p. 28. I am also conscious that the title of the book is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is a legal metaphor, and, speaking legally, a defendant is not an enthusiast for the character of King John or the domestic virtues of the prairie-dog. He is one who defends himself, a thing which the present writer, however poisoned his mind may be with paradox, certainly never dreamed of attempting.
Criticism upon the book considered as literature, if it can be so considered, I should, of course, never dream of discussing—firstly, because it is ridiculous to do so; and, secondly, because there was, in my opinion, much justice in such criticism.
But there is one matter on which an author is generally considered as having a right to explain himself, since it has nothing to do with capacity or intelligence, and that is the question of his morals.
I am proud to say that a furious, uncompromising, and very effective attack was made upon what was alleged to be the utter immorality of this book by my excellent friend Mr. C.F.G. Masterman, in the 'Speaker.' The tendency of that criticism was to the effect that I was discouraging improvement and disguising scandals by my offensive optimism. Quoting the passage in which I said that 'diamonds were to be found in the dust-bin,' he said: 'There is no difficulty in finding good in what humanity rejects. The difficulty is to find it in what humanity accepts. The diamond is easy enough to find in the dust-bin. The difficulty is to find it in the drawing-room.' I must admit, for my part, without the slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing-room. But I merely mention this purely ethical attack in order to state, in as few sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into decay. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. No man ever did, and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an ugly thing beautiful. There must be some germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf for Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.
G. K. C.
In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes
that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a
level, and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping
roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with
loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose.
If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would be more difficult to imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation—it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.
Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope—the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of human history—that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.
This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.
The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not.
Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt,
and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody,
and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican.
The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives
and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other
people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that
if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto
death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons
of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of
It becomes increasingly apparent, therefore, that the world is in a permanent danger of being misjudged. That this is no fanciful or mystical idea may be tested by simple examples. The two absolutely basic words 'good' and 'bad,' descriptive of two primal and inexplicable sensations, are not, and never have been, used properly. Things that are bad are not called good by any people who experience them; but things that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity.
Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.
Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged
perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough
to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.
In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.
To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar
compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of
becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean
law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to
examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar
publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous
But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the
common-sense recognition of this fact—that the youth of the lower
orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic
reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its
wholesomeness—we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this
reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under
Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish.
So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy, recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanized and naked narrative as this.
Among these stories there are a certain number which deal
sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates,
which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers
like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the
same thing as Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' Scott's 'Rob Roy,' Scott's 'Lady of
the Lake,' Byron's 'Corsair,' Wordsworth's 'Rob Roy's Grave,'
Stevenson's 'Macaire,' Mr. Max Pemberton's 'Iron Pirate,' and a thousand
In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by
speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.
This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is
simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings.
He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factory
hands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five chartered
accountants to tea,' everyone would see the humour of so simple a
classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of
If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable
works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to
take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught
at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and
warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet
they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their
But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are the
criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of
humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never
doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is
noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies
spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these
maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who
believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of
people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy
writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call
If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to
solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the
leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one
leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's 'Liberty' seventy-six
times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the
name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in
his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on
the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should
immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes
expressed, was 'an artist in life.' Yet these vows are not more
extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar
periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures
in civic and national civilization—by kings, judges, poets, and
priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great
chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical
folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a
patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that
these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any
But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved
in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as
symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men who did these things were not
decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is
generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men
essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious
direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not
hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments
of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad
promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same
monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which
it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning.
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some
distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep
the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of the
weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and is
the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man
refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in
Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier
things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got
to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would
be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other
words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously
significant phrase, another man. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale
of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the
Decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward
to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday,
Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a
nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One
And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us—this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.
Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief, or love, or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it exegi monumentum oere perennius was the only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together. But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a vow. For what could be more maddening than an existence in which our mother or aunt received the information that we were going to assassinate the King or build a temple on Ben Nevis with the genial composure of custom?
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent
In Mr. Bernard Shaw's brilliant play 'The Philanderer,' we have a vivid
picture of this state of things. Charteris is a man perpetually
endeavouring to be a free-lover, which is like endeavouring to be a
This is a perfectly possible, rational and manly position. But what have
As we have said, it is exactly this backdoor, this sense of ha
Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless,
for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one
thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to
the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover
Some little time ago I stood among immemorial English trees that seemed
to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils. As I walked among
these living pillars I became gradually aware that the rustics who lived
and died in their shadow adopted a very curious conversational tone.
But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a pianist. When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor over hill and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they were less like mops. But it does appear to be a deep and essential difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure, or of the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.
The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with
which it is commonly regarded is somew
One ground exists for this terror: a strange idea has infected humanity
that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a
factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left naked
after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution; but
both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own, all
the pulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, in the House of Livelihood
as in the House of Life. There is no reason why this creature (new, as I
fancy, to art), the living skeleton, should not become the essential
The truth is that man's horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all. It is man's eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be genteel—a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of animals carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous shapes and appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs, when they are necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big for its body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour rather abruptly deserts him.
In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times
and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a
vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the
There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what
we call Nature lie in her beauty. But the fact that Nature is beautiful
in the sense that a dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful, is only one
of her charms, and almost an accidental one. The highest and most
valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and
It is a very significant fact that the form of art in which the modern
world has certainly not improved upon the ancient is what may roughly be
called the art of the open air. Public monuments have certainly not
improved, nor has the criticism of them improved, as is evident from the
fashion of condemning such a large number of them as pompous. An
interesting essay might be written on the enormous number of words that
are used as insults when they are really compliments. It is in itself a
Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous.
Pomp is its very object; it would be absurd to have columns and pyramids
blushing in some coy nook like violets in the woods of spring. And
public monuments have in this matter a great and much-needed lesson to
teach. Valour and mercy and the great enthusiasms ought to be a great
If a public monument does not meet this first supreme and obvious need, that it should be public and monumental, it fails from the outset.
There has arisen lately a school of realistic sculpture, which may
perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a
movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy
pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and
depressing object in the universe—far more hideous and depressing than
one of Mr. H.G. Wells's shapeless monsters of the slime (and not at all
unlike them)—is the statue of an English philanthropist. Almost as bad,
though, of course, not quite as bad, are the statues of English
politicians in Parliament Fields. Each of them is cased in a cylindrical
frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking
garment over the arm that might be either a bathing-towel or a light
great-coat. Each of them is in an oratorical attitude, which has all the
disadvantage of being affected without even any of the advantages of
being theatrical. Let no one suppose that such abortions arise merely
The two modes of commemorating a public man are a statue and a biography. They are alike in certain respects, as, for example, in the fact that neither of them resembles the original, and that both of them commonly tone down not only all a man's vices, but all the more amusing of his virtues. But they are treated in one respect differently. We never hear anything about biography without hearing something about the sanctity of private life and the necessity for suppressing the whole of the most important part of a man's existence. The sculptor does not work at this disadvantage. The sculptor does not leave out the nose of an eminent philanthropist because it is too beautiful to be given to the public; he does not depict a statesman with a sack over his head because his smile was too sweet to be endurable in the light of day. But in biography the thesis is popularly and solidly maintained, so that it requires some courage even to hint a doubt of it, that the better a man was, the more truly human life he led, the less should be said about it.
For this idea, this modern idea that sanctity is identical with secrecy,
there is one thing at least to be said. It is for all practical purposes
an entirely new idea; it was unknown to all the ages in which the idea
The mere grammatical meaning of the word 'martyr' breaks into pieces at
a blow the whole notion of the privacy of goodness. The Christian
It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars have never lost their sanctity, and they are more shameless and naked and numerous than advertisements of Pears' soap. It would be a strange world indeed if Nature was suddenly stricken with this ethereal shame, if the trees grew with their roots in the air and their load of leaves and blossoms underground, if the flowers closed at dawn and opened at sunset, if the sunflower turned towards the darkness, and the birds flew, like bats, by night.
There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world
of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of
morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a
descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost
crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the
goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the
inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when
everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown
from a boy's bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and
experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical
phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown
in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is 'the heir of all
the ages' is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally
The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt and inventive in any age; and if we were asked what was the best proof of this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say, with all respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies, that it was to be found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of nonsense. 'The Dong with the Luminous Nose,' at least, is original, as the first ship and the first plough were original.
It is true in a certain sense that some of the greatest writers the
world has seen—Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne—have written
nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different sense.
The nonsense of these men was satiric—that is to say, symbolic; it was
It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr. Lear's
'Nonsense Rhymes.' To our mind he is both chronologically and
essentially the father of nonsense; we think him superior to Lewis
Carroll. In one sense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We
know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious
and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant
and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth and
While Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is purely intellectual, Lear introduces quite another element—the element of the poetical and even emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong a contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded reason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.
is an entirely different type of poetry to that exhibited in
'Jabberwocky.' Carroll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, makes his
whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words. But Edward Lear, with
more subtle and placid effrontery, is always introducing scraps of his
own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational statements,
which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The poet seems so easy on the matter that we are almost driven to pretend that we see his meaning, that we know the peculiar difficulties of a Pobble, that we are as old travellers in the 'Gromboolian Plain' as he is.
Our claim that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new
sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than a
mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of
mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen
out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any
great aesthetic growth. The principle of art for art's sake is a very
good principle if it means that there is a vital distinction between the
earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it is a very bad
This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder.
It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book
of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been
A book has at one time come under my notice called 'Terra Firma: the Earth not a Planet.' The author was a Mr. D. Wardlaw Scott, and he quoted very seriously the opinions of a large number of other persons, of whom we have never heard, but who are evidently very important. Mr. Beach of Southsea, for example, thinks that the world is flat; and in Southsea perhaps it is. It is no part of my present intention, however, to follow Mr. Scott's arguments in detail. On the lines of such arguments it may be shown that the earth is flat, and, for the matter of that, that it is triangular. A few examples will suffice:
One of Mr. Scott's objections was that if a projectile is fired from a moving body there is a difference in the distance to which it carries according to the direction in which it is sent. But as in practice there is not the slightest difference whichever way the thing is done, in the case of the earth 'we have a forcible overthrow of all fancies relative to the motion of the earth, and a striking proof that the earth is not a globe.'
This is altogether one of the quaintest arguments we have ever seen. It never seems to occur to the author, among other things, that when the firing and falling of the shot all take place upon the moving body, there is nothing whatever to compare them with. As a matter of fact, of course, a shot fired at an elephant does actually often travel towards the marksman, but much slower than the marksman travels. Mr. Scott probably would not like to contemplate the fact that the elephant, properly speaking, swings round and hits the bullet. To us it appears full of a rich cosmic humour.
I will only give one other example of the astronomical proofs:
'If the earth were a globe, the distance round the surface, say, at 45 degrees south latitude, could not possibly be any greater than the same latitude north; but since it is found by navigators to be twice the distance—to say the least of it—or double the distance it ought to be according to the globular theory, it is a proof that the earth is not a globe.'
This sort of thing reduces my mind to a pulp. I can faintly resist when a man says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have four legs; but when he says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have five legs I am crushed.
But, as I have indicated, it is not in the scientific aspect of this remarkable theory that I am for the moment interested. It is rather with the difference between the flat and the round worlds as conceptions in art and imagination that I am concerned. It is a very remarkable thing that none of us are really Copernicans in our actual outlook upon things. We are convinced intellectually that we inhabit a small provincial planet, but we do not feel in the least suburban. Men of science have quarrelled with the Bible because it is not based upon the true astronomical system, but it is certainly open to the orthodox to say that if it had been it would never have convinced anybody.
If a single poem or a single story were really transfused with the
Copernican idea, the thing would be a nightmare. Can we think of a
solemn scene of mountain stillness in which some prophet is standing in
For, despite Mr. Wardlaw Scott's horror at the Newtonian astronomy and
its contradiction of the Bible, the whole distinction is a good instance
of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old
Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the
spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had
no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact
of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of
gravitation has a curiously Hebrew sentiment in it—a sentiment of
combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity, by which
all things hang upon one thread. 'Thou hast hanged the world upon
nothing,' said the author of the Book
It would be an interesting speculation to imagine whether the world will
ever develop a Copernican poetry and a Copernican habit of fancy;
whether we shall ever speak of 'early earth-turn' instead of 'early
sunrise,' and speak indifferently of looking up at the daisies, or
looking down on the stars. But if we ever do, there are really a large
number of big and fantastic facts awaiting us, worthy to make a new
mythology. Mr. Wardlaw Scott, for example, with genuine, if unconscious,
imagination, says that according to astronomers, 'the sea is a vast
mountain of water miles high.' To have discovered that mountain of
moving crystal, in which the fishes build like birds, is like
discovering Atlantis: it is enough to make the old world young again.
In the early days of the world, the discovery of a fact of natural
history was immediately followed by the realization of it as a fact of
poetry. When man awoke from the long fit of absent-mindedness which is
called the automatic animal state, and began to notice the queer facts
that the sky was blue and the grass green, he immediately began to use
those facts symbolically. Blue, the colour of the sky, became a symbol
of celestial holiness; green passed into the language as indicating a
freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to
live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue, the
symbolism would have been different. B
There are some things of which the world does not like to be reminded, for they are the dead loves of the world. One of these is that great enthusiasm for the Arcadian life which, however much it may now lie open to the sneers of realism, did, beyond all question, hold sway for an enormous period of the world's history, from the times that we describe as ancient down to times that may fairly be called recent. The conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of Theocritus, of Virgil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, of Shakespeare, and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathen were stone and brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of the China Shepherdess. The Catholic Church and the Ideal Shepherd are indeed almost the only things that have bridged the abyss between the ancient world and the modern. Yet, as we say, the world does not like to be reminded of this boyish enthusiasm.
But imagination, the function of the historian, cannot let so great an
Let us, then, consider in this light the old pastoral or Arcadian ideal.
But first certainly one thing must be definitely recognised. This
Arcadian art and literature is a lost enthusiasm. To study it is like
fumbling in the love-letters of a dead man. To us its flowers seem as
tawdry as cockades; the lambs that dance to the shepherd's pipe seem to
dance with all the artificiality of a ballet. Even our own prosaic toil
seems to us more joyous than that holiday. Where its ancient exuberance
All this may be frankly recognised: all the barren sentimentality of the Arcadian ideal and all its insolent optimism. But when all is said and done, something else remains.
Through ages in which the most arrogant and elaborate ideals of power and civilization held otherwise undisputed sway, the ideal of the perfect and healthy peasant did undoubtedly represent in some shape or form the conception that there was a dignity in simplicity and a dignity in labour. It was good for the ancient aristocrat, even if he could not attain to innocence and the wisdom of the earth, to believe that these things were the secrets of the priesthood of the poor. It was good for him to believe that even if heaven was not above him, heaven was below him. It was well that he should have amid all his flamboyant triumphs the never-extinguished sentiment that there was something better than his triumphs, the conception that 'there remaineth a rest.'
The conception of the Ideal Shepherd seems absurd to our modern ideas. But, after all, it was perhaps the only trade of the democracy which was equalized with the trades of the aristocracy even by the aristocracy itself. The shepherd of pastoral poetry was, without doubt, very different from the shepherd of actual fact. Where one innocently piped to his lambs, the other innocently swore at them; and their divergence in intellect and personal cleanliness was immense. But the difference between the ideal shepherd who danced with Amaryllis and the real shepherd who thrashed her is not a scrap greater than the difference between the ideal soldier who dies to capture the colours and the real soldier who lives to clean his accoutrements, between the ideal priest who is everlastingly by someone's bed and the real priest who is as glad as anyone else to get to his own. There are ideal conceptions and real men in every calling; yet there are few who object to the ideal conceptions, and not many, after all, who object to the real men.
The fact, then, is this: So far from resenting the existence in art and
literature of an ideal shepherd, I genuinely regret that the shepherd is
Undoubtedly the modern grocer, if called upon to act in an Arcadian
manner, if desired to oblige with a symbolic dance expressive of the
delights of grocery, or to perform on some simple instrument while his
assistants skipped around him, would be embarrassed, and perhaps even
reluctant. But it may be questioned whether this temporary reluctance of
the grocer is a good thing, or evidence of a good condition of poetic
feeling in the grocery business as a whole. There certainly should be an
ideal image of health and happiness in any trade, and its remoteness
from the reality is not the only important question. No one supposes
that the mass of traditional conceptions of duty and glory are always
operative, for example, in the mind of a soldier or a doctor; that the
Battle of Waterloo actually makes a private enjoy pipeclaying his
When all is said and done, then, we think it much open to question
whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance
of the ideal of the happy peasant. It is foolish enough to suppose that
the rustic went about all over ribbons, but it is better than knowing
that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact. The
It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition
stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff
shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the
Primarily, at least, there is one rather peculiar thing which must in
justice be said about it. The readers of this strange science must be
allowed to be, upon the whole, as disinterested as a prophet seeing
visions or a child reading fairy-tales. Here, again, we find, as we so
often do, that whatever view of this matter of popular literature we can
trust, we can trust least of all the comment and censure current among
the vulgar educated. The ordinary version of the ground of this
popularity for information, which would be given by a person of greater
cultivation, would be that common men are chiefly interested in those
sordid facts that surround them on every side. A very small degree of
examination will show us that whatever ground there is for the
popularity of these insane encyclopaedias, it cannot be the ground of
utility. The version of life given by a pe
I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who actually talked in private
life after the manner of these papers. His conversation consisted of
fragmentary statements about height and weight and depth and time and
population, and his conversation was a nightmare of dulness. During the
shortest pause he would ask whether his interlocutors were aware how
many tons of rust were scraped every year off the Menai Bridge, and how
many rival shops Mr. Whiteley had bought up since he opened his
That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of
information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial,
it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along
with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it
The modern view of heraldry is pretty accurately represented by the
Heraldry properly so called was, of course, a wholly limited and aristocratic thing, but the remark needs a kind of qualification not commonly realized. In a sense there was a plebeian heraldry, since every shop was, like every castle, distinguished not by a name, but a sign. The whole system dates from a time when picture-writing still really ruled the world. In those days few could read or write; they signed their names with a pictorial symbol, a cross—and a cross is a great improvement on most men's names.
Now, there is something to be said for the peculiar influence of
pictorial symbols on men's minds. All letters, we learn, were originally
pictorial and heraldic: thus the letter A is the portrait of an ox, but
the portrait is now reproduced in so impressionist a manner that but
little of the rural atmosphere can be absorbed by contemplating it. But
as long as some pictorial and poetic quality remains in the symbol, the
Thus in the old aristocratic days there existed this vast pictorial
For it cannot be denied that the world lost something finally and most
unfortunately about the beginning of the nineteenth century. In former
times the mass of the people was conceived as mean and commonplace, but
only as comparatively mean and commonplace; they were dwarfed and
eclipsed by certain high stations and splendid callings. But with the
There were in the French Revolution a class of people at whom everybody
laughed, and at whom it was probably difficult, as a practical matter,
to refrain from laughing. They attempted to erect, by means of huge
wooden statues and brand-new festivals, the most extraordinary new
religions. They adored the Goddess of Reason, who would appear, even
when the fullest allowance has been made for their many virtues, to be
the deity who had least smiled upon them. But these capering maniacs,
disowned alike by the old world and the new, were men who had seen a
great truth unknown alike to the new world and the old. They had seen
the thing that was hidden from the wise and understanding, from the
There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often they are made.
But while nothing in this world would persuade us that a great friend of
Mr. Forbes Robertson, let us say, would experience no surprise or
discomfort at seeing him enter the room in the bodily form of Mr.
Chaplin, there is a confusion constantly made between being attracted by
exterior, which is natural and universal, and being attracted by what is
called physical beauty, which is not entirely natural and not in the
least universal. Or rather, to speak more strictly, the conception of
physical beauty has been narrowed to mean a certain kind of physical
beauty which no more exhausts the possibilities of external
attractiveness than the respectability of a Clapham builder exhausts
The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been the
Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have
wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against
the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have
long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a
stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the
Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism—an
asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish
It is extraordinary to watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters
of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The
chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have
been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie
a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Who ever feels
that the giants in Greek art and poetry were really big—big as some
folk-lore giants have been? In some Scandinavian story a hero walks for
miles along a mountain ridge, which eventually turns out to be the
bridge of the giant's nose. That is what we should call, with a calm
conscience, a large giant. But this earthquake fancy terrified the
Greeks, and their terror has terrified all mankind out of their natural
Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the
same conception applies to noses. To insist that one type of face is
ugly because it differs from that of the Venus of Milo is to look at it
But this frigid theory of the beautiful has not succeeded in conquering
the art of the world, except in name. In some quarters, indeed, it has
never held sway. A glance at Chinese dragons or Japanese gods will show
how independent are Orientals of the conventional idea of facial and
bodily regularity, and how keen and fiery is their enjoyment of real
beauty, of goggle eyes, of sprawling claws, of gaping mouths and
writhing coils. In the Middle Ages men broke away from the Greek
standard of beauty, and lifted up in adoration to heaven great towers,
which seemed alive with dancing apes and devils. In the full summer of
technical artistic perfection the revolt was carried to its real
This branch of art is commonly dismissed as the grotesque. We have never
been able to understand why it should be humiliating to be laughable,
since it is giving an elevated artistic pleasure to others. If a
gentleman who saw us in the street were suddenly to burst into tears at
the mere thought of our existence, it might be considered disquieting
and uncomplimentary; but laughter is not uncomplimentary. In truth,
however, the phrase 'grotesque' is a misleading description of ugliness
in art. It does not follow that either the Chinese dragons or the Gothic
gargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the least
intended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance of
satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the whole
key of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jut
out in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red pines
I have never been able to understand why certain forms of art should be marked off as something debased and trivial. A comedy is spoken of as 'degenerating into farce'; it would be fair criticism to speak of it 'changing into farce'; but as for degenerating into farce, we might equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a story is spoken of as 'melodramatic,' and the phrase, queerly enough, is not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as 'pantomimic' or 'sensational' is innocently supposed to be biting, Heaven knows why, for all works of art are sensations, and a good pantomime (now extinct) is one of the pleasantest sensations of all. 'This stuff is fit for a detective story,' is often said, as who should say, 'This stuff is fit for an epic.'
Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification,
there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of
it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set up for
them, no gust of generous artistic pride to lift them up, do actually
tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children of
the great mother, they grow up in darkness, dirty and unlettered, and
The case of farce, and its wilder embodiment in harlequinade, is
especially important. That these high and legitimate forms of art,
glorified by Aristophanes and Molière, have sunk into such contempt may
be due to many causes: I myself have little doubt that it is due to the
astonishing and ludicrous lack of belief in hope and hilarity which
marks modern aesthetics, to such an extent that it has spread even to
the revolutionists (once the hopeful section of men), so that even those
who ask us to fling the stars into the sea are not quite sure that they
will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary
art must be a symbol of some phase of the human spirit; but whereas the
phase is, in human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it
must have a certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate for its
lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round a tea-table may have
The whole of this view of farce and pantomime may seem insane to us; but
we fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing in this strange age of
transition is so depressing as its merriment. All the most brilliant men
The old masters of a healthy madness, Aristophanes or Rabelais or
Shakespeare, doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics
of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and
consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But what
abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have reserved
for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and did not
even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the
It is no part of my intention to defend humility on practical grounds. Practical grounds are uninteresting, and, moreover, on practical grounds the case for humility is overwhelming. We all know that the 'divine glory of the ego' is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility—in other people.
But the matter must go deeper than this. If the grounds of humility are found only in social convenience, they may be quite trivial and temporary. The egoists may be the martyrs of a nobler dispensation, agonizing for a more arduous ideal. To judge from the comparative lack of ease in their social manner, this seems a reasonable suggestion.
There is one thing that must be seen at the outset of the study of
humility from an intrinsic and eternal point of view. The new philosophy
of self-esteem and self-assertion declares that humility is a vice. If
it be so, it is quite clear that it is one of those vices which are an
integral part of original sin. It follows with the precision of
clockwork every one of the great joys of life. No one, for example, was
ever in love without indulging in a positive debauch of humility. All
full-blooded and natural people, such as schoolboys, enjoy humility the
moment they attain hero-worship. Humility, again, is said both by its
upholders and opponents to be the peculiar growth of Christianity. The
real and obvious reason of this is often missed. The pagans insisted
upon self-assertion because it was the essence of their creed that the
gods, though strong and just, were mystic, capricious, and even
indifferent. But the essence of Christianity was in a literal sense the
New Testament—a covenant with God which opened to men a clear
deliverance. They thought themselves secure; they claimed palaces of
pearl and silver under the oath and seal of the Omnipotent; they
believed themselves rich with an irrevocable benediction which set them
above the stars; and immediately they discovered humility. It was only
This particular instance survives in the evangelical revivalists of the
street. They are irritating enough, but no one who has really studied
them can deny that the irritation is occasioned by these two things, an
irritating hilarity and an irritating humility. This combination of joy
and self-prostration is a great deal too universal to be ignored. If
humility has been discredited as a virtue at the present day, it is not
wholly irrelevant to remark that this discredit has arisen at the same
time as a great collapse of joy in current literature and philosophy.
Men have revived the splendour of Greek self-assertion at the same time
that they have revived the bitterness of Greek pessimism. A literature
has arisen which commands us all to arrogate to ourselves the liberty of
self-sufficing deities at the same time that it exhibits us to ourselves
as dingy maniacs who ought to be chained up like dogs. It is certainly a
curious state of things altogether. When we are genuinely happy, we
think we are unworthy of happiness. But when we are demanding a divine
emancipation we seem to be perfectly certain that we are unworthy of
The only explanation of the matter must be found in the conviction that
humility has infinitely deeper roots than any modern men suppose; that
it is a metaphysical and, one might almost say, a mathematical virtue.
Probably this can best be tested by a study of those who frankly
disregard humility and assert the supreme duty of perfecting and
expressing one's self. These people tend, by a perfectly natural
process, to bring their own great human gifts of culture, intellect, or
moral power to a great perfection, successively shutting out everything
that they feel to be lower than themselves. Now shutting out things is
all very well, but it has one simple corollary—that from everything
that we shut out we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on the
wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on
us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can
reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the
door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the
beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically
the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtain
Now if we imagine that a man wished truly, as far as possible, to see
everything as it was, he would certainly proceed on a different
principle. He would seek to divest himself for a time of those personal
peculiarities which tend to divide him from the thing he studies. It is
In a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it
is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the
luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or
a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the
cosmic things are what they really are—of immeasurable stature. That
the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own
foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off
for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting
forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as
incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like
gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on
their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.
Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terrible
landscapes; here a desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock; here a
miraculous forest, of which all the trees flower above the head with the
hues of sunset; here, again, a sea full of monsters that Dante would not
have dared to dream. These are the visions of him who, like the child in
the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the sage
whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming
larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller
and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance; the
The aristocrats of the nineteenth century have destroyed entirely their
one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and arrogant;
but they flaunt unobtrusively, and their attempts at arrogance are
depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of
variety, vivacity, and fulness of life; oligarchy was the world's first
experiment in liberty. But now they have adopted the opposite ideal of
'good form,' which may be defined as Puritanism without religion. Good
form has sent them all into black like the stroke of a funeral bell.
They engage, like Mr. Gilbert's curates, in a war of mildness, a
positive competition of obscurity. In old times the lords of the earth
sought above all things to be distinguished from each other; with that
object they erected outrageous images on their helmets and painted
The consequences of this are inevitable. The aristocracy must lose their function of standing to the world for the idea of variety, experiment, and colour, and we must find these things in some other class. To ask whether we shall find them in the middle class would be to jest upon sacred matters. The only conclusion, therefore, is that it is to certain sections of the lower class, chiefly, for example, to omnibus-conductors, with their rich and rococo mode of thought, that we must look for guidance towards liberty and light.
The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang. Every
day a nameless poet weaves some fairy tracery of popular language. It
may be said that the fashionable world talks slang as much as the
democratic; this is true, and it strongly supports the view under
and these two lines sum up a truth about the old oligarchs. They could
not write three legible letters, but they could sometimes speak
literature. Douglas, when he hurled the heart of Bruce in front of him
in his last battle, cried out, 'Pass first, great heart, as thou wert
ever wont.' A Spanish nobleman, when commanded by the King to receive a
Anyone, however, who should seek for such pearls in the conversation of
a young man of modern Belgravia would have much sorrow in his life. It
is not only impossible for aristocrats to assert proudly the poetry of
life; it is more impossible for them than for anyone else. It is
positively considered vulgar for a nobleman to boast of his ancient
name, which is, when one comes to think of it, the only rational object
of his existence. If a man in the street proclaimed, with rude feudal
rhetoric, that he was the Earl of Doncaster, he would be arrested as a
lunatic; but if it were discovered that he really was the Earl of
Doncaster, he would simply be cut as a cad. No poetical prose must be
expected from Earls as a class. The fashionable slang is hardly even a
language; it is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating
certain broad, well-understood states of mind. 'Bored,' 'cut up,'
'jolly,' 'rotten,' and so on, are like the words of some tribe of
savages whose vocabulary has only twenty of them. If a man of fashion
I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic
allusiveness is the characteristic of true slang. Such an expression as
'Keep your hair on' is positively Meredithian in its perverse and
mysterious manner of expressing an idea. The Americans have a well-known
expression about 'swelled-head' as a des
The real reason of this great development of eloquence among the lower
orders again brings us back to the case of the aristocracy in earlier
times. The lower classes live in a state of war, a war of words. Their
readiness is the product of the same fiery individualism as the
readiness of the old fighting oligarchs. Any cabman has to be ready with
his tongue, as any gentleman of the last century had to be ready with
his sword. It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this
process should be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of
society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic
eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in
the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The essential point is that somebody
must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we paused for a moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many sonnets. To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social relations 'breaking the ice.' If this were expanded into a sonnet, we should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of everlasting ice, the sombre and baffling mirror of the Northern nature, over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away with them—a whole chaos of fairy tales.
The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are,
first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in
consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is
possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools
and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of
a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the
universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a
transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this:
that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put
again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those
delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark
these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within
There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energies and aspirations, may easily be convinced that it will find new things to appreciate; but it will never be convinced, at bottom, that it has properly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not found—that on which we were born.
But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simple or ignorant)—we do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in this matter—that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the child, so much admired by its worshippers, are common enough. The fact is that this is precisely where baby-worship is so profoundly right. Any words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, the child's words and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the philosopher's words and antics are equally wonderful.
The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and
our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards
our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a
considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards
children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an
unfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them,
We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of
things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with
precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the
infantile limitations. A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle
of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as his
accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers and
Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammering
and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise
and tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life,
generally healthy in motive, but often intolerable in a domestic
commonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptious
tyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities as
rather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told them
that they would 'understand when they were older,' we should probably be
adopting the best and most crushing attitude towards the weaknesses of
humanity. In our relations to children we prove that the paradox is
The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we
feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious
reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The
very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels;
we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a
microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see
the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to
think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like
imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the
leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we
feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of
stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a
deity might feel if he had created something that he could not
But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.
In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the
popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of
There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective
story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good
epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate
form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent
The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it
is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is
expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among
mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that
they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our
descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the
mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees.
Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious
the detective story is certainly the 'Iliad.' No one can have failed to
notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London
with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of
This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city
is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while
Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious
ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may
not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no
brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message
from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The
narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention,
the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick
There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories.
While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so
universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and
rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the
mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of
departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the
The decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two is a
serious and distressing matter. Only in consequence of such a decay
could the current lust of territory be confounded with the ancient love
of country. We may imagine that if there were no such thing as a pair of
lovers left in the world, all the vocabulary of love might without
rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire. If no
type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one
left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was
rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that
lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the 'love of
the city,' that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been
written in red blood on the same table with the primal passions of our
being. On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet
anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk,
like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun
by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not
realize what the word 'love' means, that they mean by the love of
country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something
of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his
What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly. For the first of all the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid counsellor the best. Love is drawn to truth by the unerring magnetism of agony; it gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with vociferous optimism round a death-bed.
We have to ask, then, Why is it that this recent movement in England,
which has honestly appeared to many a renascence of patriotism, seems to
us to have none of the marks of patriotism—at least, of patriotism in
its highest form? Why has the adoration of o
I have, rightly or wrongly, a notion of the chief cause of this
pettiness in English patriotism of to-day, and I will attempt to expound
it. It may be taken generally that a man loves his own stock and
environment, and that he will find something to praise in it; but
whether it is the most praiseworthy thing or no will depend upon the
man's enlightenment as to the facts. If the son of Thackeray, let us
We are, as a nation, in the truly extraordinary condition of not knowing
our own merits. We have played a great and splendid part in the history
of universal thought and sentiment; we have been among the foremost in
that eternal and bloodless battle in which the blows do not slay, but
create. In painting and music we are inferior to many other nations; but
in literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence, if history
be taken as a whole, we can hold our own with any. But all this vast
heritage of intellectual glory is kept from our schoolboys like a
heresy; and they are left to live and die in the dull and infantile type
of patriotism which they learnt from a box of tin soldiers. There is no
harm in the box of tin soldiers; we do not expect children to be equally
The peculiar lack of any generosity or delicacy in the current English nationalism appears to have no other possible origin but in this fact of our unique neglect in education of the study of the national literature. An Englishman could not be silly enough to despise other nations if he once knew how much England had done for them. Great men of letters cannot avoid being humane and universal. The absence of the teaching of English literature in our schools is, when we come to think of it, an almost amazing phenomenon. It is even more amazing when we listen to the arguments urged by headmasters and other educational conservatives against the direct teaching of English. It is said, for example, that a vast amount of English grammar and literature is picked up in the course of learning Latin and Greek. This is perfectly true, but the topsy-turviness of the idea never seems to strike them. It is like saying that a baby picks up the art of walking in the course of learning to hop, or that a Frenchman may successfully be taught German by helping a Prussian to learn Ashanti. Surely the obvious foundation of all education is the language in which that education is conveyed; if a boy has only time to learn one thing, he had better learn that.
We have deliberately neglected this great heritage of high national sentiment. We have made our public schools the strongest walls against a whisper of the honour of England. And we have had our punishment in this strange and perverted fact that, while a unifying vision of patriotism can ennoble bands of brutal savages or dingy burghers, and be the best thing in their lives, we, who are—the world being judge—humane, honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst thing in ours. What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that have produced sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who could walk with Dante, that we should talk as if we have never done anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are the children of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are judged, it will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of failing to appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual transgression of failing to appreciate ourselves.
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