Autobiography
G.K. Chesterton
CONTENTS
I Hearsay Evidence II The Man with the Golden Key III How to Be a Dunce IV How to Be a Lunatic V Nationalism and Notting Hill VI The Fantastic Suburb VII The Crime of Orthodoxy VIII Figures in Fleet Street IX The Case against Corruption X Friendship and Foolery XI The Shadow of the Sword XII Some Political Celebrities XIII Some Literary Celebrities XIV Portrait of a Friend XV The Incomplete Traveller XVI The God with the Golden Key
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I
HEARSAY EVIDENCE
Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.
Nevertheless, the great Waterworks Tower was destined to play its part in my life, as I shall narrate on a subsequent page; but that story is connected with my own experiences, whereas my birth (as I have said) is an incident which I accept, like some poor ignorant peasant, only because it has been handed down to me by oral tradition. And before we come to any of my own experiences, it will be well to devote this brief chapter to a few of the other facts of my family and environment which I hold equally precariously on mere hearsay evidence. Of course what many call hearsay evidence, or what I call human evidence, might be questioned in theory, as in the Baconian controversy or a good deal of the Higher Criticism. The story of my birth might be untrue. I might be the long-lost heir of The Holy Roman Empire, or an infant left by ruffians from Limehouse on a door-step in Kensington, to develop in later life a hideous criminal heredity. Some of the sceptical methods applied to the world’s origin might be applied to my origin, and a grave and earnest enquirer come to the conclusion that I was never born at all. But I prefer to believe that common sense is something that my readers and I have in common; and that they will have patience with a dull summary of the facts.
I was born of respectable but honest parents; that is, in a world where the word “respectability” was not yet exclusively a term of abuse, but retained some dim philological connection with the idea of being respected. It is true that even in my own youth the sense of the word was changing; as I remember in a conversation between my parents, in which it was used with both implications. My father, who was serene, humorous and full of hobbies, remarked casually that he had been asked to go on what was then called The Vestry. At this my mother, who was more swift, restless and generally Radical in her instincts, uttered something like a cry of pain; she said, “Oh, Edward, don’t! You will be so respectable! We never have been respectable yet; don’t let’s begin now.” And I remember my father mildly replying, “My dear, you present a rather alarming picture of our lives, if you say that we have never for one single instant been respectable.” Readers of Pride and Prejudice will perceive that there was something of Mr. Bennet about my father; though there was certainly nothing of Mrs. Bennet about my mother.
Anyhow, what I mean here is that my people belonged to that rather old-fashioned English middle class; in which a business man was still permitted to mind his own business. They had been granted no glimpse of our later and loftier vision, of that more advanced and adventurous conception of commerce, in which a business man is supposed to rival, ruin, destroy, absorb and swallow up everybody else’s business. My father was a Liberal of the school that existed before the rise of Socialism; he took it for granted that all sane people believed in private property; but he did not trouble to translate it into private enterprise. His people were of the sort that were always sufficiently successful; but hardly, in the modern sense, enterprising. My father was the head of a hereditary business of house agents and surveyors, which had already been established for some three generations in Kensington; and I remember that there was a sort of local patriotism about it and a little reluctance in the elder members, when the younger first proposed that it should have branches outside Kensington. This particular sort of unobtrusive pride was very characteristic of this sort of older business men. I remember that it once created a comedy of cross-purposes, which could hardly have occurred unless there had been some such secret self-congratulation upon any accretion of local status. The incident is in more ways than one a glimpse of the tone and talk of those distant days.
My grandfather, my father’s father, was a fine-looking old man with white hair and beard and manners that had something of that rounded solemnity that went with the old-fashioned customs of proposing toasts and sentiments. He kept up the ancient Christian custom of singing at the dinner-table, and it did not seem incongruous when he sang “The Fine Old English Gentleman” as well as more pompous songs of the period of Waterloo and Trafalgar. And I may remark in passing that, having lived to see Mafeking Night and the later Jingo lyrics, I have retained a considerable respect for those old and pompous patriotic songs. I rather fancy it was better for the tradition of the English tongue to hear such rhetorical lines as these, about Wellington at the deathbed of William the Fourth,
For he came on the Angel of Victory’s wing But the Angel of Death was awaiting the King,
than to be entirely satisfied with howling the following lines, heard in all music-halls some twenty years afterwards:
And when we say we’ve always won And when they ask us how it’s done We proudly point to every one Of England’s soldiers of the Queen.
I cannot help having a dim suspicion that dignity has something to do with style; but anyhow the gestures, like the songs, of my grandfather’s time and type had a good deal to do with dignity. But, used as he was to ceremonial manners, he must have been a good deal mystified by a strange gentleman who entered the office and, having conferred with my father briefly on business, asked in a hushed voice if he might have the high privilege of being presented to the more ancient or ancestral head of the firm. He then approached my grandfather as if the old gentleman had been a sort of shrine, with profound bows and reverential apostrophes.
“You are a Monument,” said the strange gentleman, “Sir, you are a Landmark.”
My grandfather, slightly flattered, murmured politely that they had certainly been in Kensington for some little time.
“You are an Historical Character,” said the admiring stranger. “You have changed the whole destiny of Church and State.”
My grandfather still assumed airily that this might be a poetical manner of describing a successful house-agency. But a light began to break on my father, who had thought his way through all the High Church and Broad Church movements and was well-read in such things. He suddenly remembered the case of “Westerton versus Liddell” in which a Protestant churchwarden prosecuted a parson for one of the darker crimes of Popery, possibly wearing a surplice.
“And I only hope,” went on the stranger firmly, still addressing the Protestant Champion, “that the services at the Parish Church are now conducted in a manner of which you approve.”
My grandfather observed in a genial manner that he didn’t care how they were conducted. These remarkable words of the Protestant Champion caused his worshipper to gaze upon him with a new dawn of wonder, when my father intervened and explained the error pointing out the fine shade that divides Westerton and Chesterton. I may add that my grandfather, when the story was told, always used to insist that he had added to the phrase “I don’t care how they are conducted,” the qualifying words (repeated with a grave motion ot the hand) “provided it is with reverence and sincerity.” But I grieve to say that sceptics in the younger generation believed this to have been an afterthought.
The point is, however, that my grandfather was pleased, and not really very much amazed, to be called a monument and a landmark. And that was typical of many middle-class men, even in small businesses, in that remote world. For the particular sort of British bourgeoisie of which I am speaking has been so much altered or diminished, that it cannot exactly be said to exist today. Nothing quite like it at least can be found in England; nothing in the least like it, I fancy, was ever found in America. One peculiarity of this middle-class was that it really was a class and it really was in the middle. Both for good and evil, and certainly often to excess, it was separated both from the class above it and the class below. It knew far too little of the working classes, to the grave peril of a later generation. It knew far too little even of its own servants. My own people were always very kind to servants; but in the class as a whole there was neither the coarse familiarity in work, which belongs to democracies and can be seen in the clamouring and cursing housewives of the Continent, nor the remains of a feudal friendliness such as lingers in the real aristocracy. There was a sort of silence and embarrassment. It was illustrated in another hearsay anecdote, which I may here add to the anecdote of the Protestant Champion. A lady of my family went to live in a friend’s house in the friend’s absence; to be waited on by a sort of superior servant. The lady had got it fixed in her head that the servant cooked her own meals separately, whereas the servant was equally fixed on the policy of eating what was left over from the lady’s meals. The servant sent up for breakfast, say, five rashers of bacon; which was more than the lady wanted. But the lady had another fixed freak of conscience common in the ladies of the period. She thought nothing should be wasted; and could not see that even a thing consumed is wasted if it is not wanted. She ate the five rashers and the servant consequently sent up seven rashers. The lady paled a little, but followed the path of duty and ate them all. The servant, beginning to feel that she too would like a little breakfast, sent up nine or ten rashers. The lady, rallying all her powers, charged at them with her head down, and swept them from the field. And so, I suppose, it went on; owing to the polite silence between the two social classes. I dare not think how it ended. The logical conclusion would seem to be that the servant starved and the lady burst. But I suppose that, before they reached that point, some communications had been opened even between two people living on two floors of the same house. But that was certainly the weak side of that world; that it did not extend its domestic confidence to domestic servants. It smiled and felt superior when reading of old-world vassals who dined below the salt, and continued to feel equally superior to its own vassals, who dined below the floor.
But however we may criticise the old middle-class, and however heartily we may join in those immortal words of the Song of the Future, which are said to run:
Class-conscious we are, class-conscious we’ll be; Till our foot’s on the necks of the bourgeoisie,
it has a right to historical justice; and there are other points to remember. One point is that it was partly the real “culture conquests” of this stratum of the middle-class, and the fact that it really was an educated class, that made it unduly suspicious of the influence of servants. It attached rather too much importance to spelling correctly; it attached enormous importance to speaking correctly. And it did spell and speak correctly. There was a whole world in which nobody was any more likely to drop an h than to pick up a title. I early discovered, with the malice of infancy, that what my seniors were really afraid of was any imitation of the intonation and diction of the servants. I am told (to quote another hearsay anecdote) that about the age of three or four, I screamed for a hat hanging on a peg, and at last in convulsions of fury uttered the awful words, “If you don’t give it me, I’ll say ‘at.” I felt sure that would lay all my relations prostrate for miles around.
And this care about education and diction, though I can see much to criticise in it now, did really have its good side. It meant that my father knew all his English literature backwards, and that I knew a great deal of it by heart, long before I could really get it into my head. I knew pages of Shakespeare’s blank verse without a notion of the meaning of most of it; which is perhaps the right way to begin to appreciate verse. And it is also recorded of me that, at the age of six or seven, I tumbled down in the street in the act of excitedly reciting the words,
Good Hamlet, cast this nighted colour off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark, Do not for ever with thy veiled lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust,
at which appropriate moment I pitched forward on my nose.
What is perhaps even less appreciated is that the particular class I mean was not only cut off from what are called the lower classes, but also quite as sharply from what are called the upper classes. Since then we may say, with all graceful apologies, that this class has split up into the two great sections of the Snobs and the Prigs. The first are those who want to get into Society; the second are those who want to get out of Society, and into Societies. I mean Vegetarian Societies and Socialist Colonies and things of that sort. But the people I mean were not cranks, and, what is more, they were not snobs. There were plenty of people in their time, of course, who were snobbish; but those I mean were really a class apart. They never dreamed of knowing the aristocracy except in business. They had, what has since become almost incredible in England, a pride of their own.
For instance, almost all that district of Kensington was and is laid out like a chart or plan to illustrate Macaulay’s Essays. Of course we read Macaulay’s Essays; and in our simple isolation, often even believed them. We knew all the great names of the Whig aristocrats who had made the Revolution (and incidentally their own fortunes) and those names were written conspicuously all over the Kensington estates. Every day we passed Holland House, that opened its hospitality to Macaulay, and the statue of Lord Holland inscribed with the boast that he was the nephew of Fox and the friend of Grey. The street opposite where we came to live bore the name of Addison; the street of our later sojourn the name of Warwick, the step-son of Addison. Beyond was a road named after the house of Russell, to the south another with the name of Cromwell. Near us, on our original perch in Campden Hill, was the great name of Argyll. Now all these names thrilled me like trumpets, as they would any boy reading Macaulay. But it never so much as crossed my mind that we should ever know any people who bore them, or even especially want to. I remember making my father laugh very much by telling him of the old Scots ballad with the line,
There fell about a great dispute between Argyle and Airlie.
For he knew, as a house-agent, that Lord Airlie’s house was actually quite close to Argyll Lodge; and that nothing was more likely than that there might fall about a great dispute, directly affecting his own line of business. He knew the old Duke of Argyll in purely business relations, and showed me a letter from him as a curiosity; but to me it was like a delightful curiosity in a museum. I no more thought of expecting McCallum More to come in any way into my own social existence, than I expected Graham of Claverhouse to ride up on his great black horse to the front-door, or Charles the Second to drop in to tea. I regarded the Duke living at Argyll Lodge as an historical character. My people were interested in an aristocracy because it was still an historical thing. The point is worth mentioning, because it is exactly this difference, whether for good or evil, that justifies a fight or feud of which I shall have to write on a later page. Long afterwards, I had the luck to figure in a political row about the Sale of Peerages; and many said that we were wasting our energies in denouncing it. But we were not. The treatment of a title did make a difference; and I am just old enough to be able to measure the difference it has really made. If, regarding Lord Lome with historical respect, I had been introduced to an unknown Lord Leatherhead, I should have respected him also as something historical. If I were to meet him now, I should know he might be any pawnbroker from any gutter in Europe. Honours have not been sold; they have been destroyed.
One considerable family connected with the family business, merely in the way of business, may be worth mentioning for quite other reasons. The firm was, and indeed still is, agent for the large Phillimore Estate then owned by two brothers who both played considerable public parts; Admiral Phillimore who died long ago and Lord Justice Phillimore, one of the most famous of the modern English judges, who died more recently. We had nothing to do with such people, nor tried to, though I remember more than one quite independent testimony to the magnanimity of the old Admiral. But I mention this vague background of the great Kensington Estate for another reason. For the name of Phillimore was destined in a strange and double and rather ironic fashion, to be entwined with my subsequent adventures in life. The Admiral I never saw; but his son, who must have been a child of about my own age, I was long afterwards to know and love and lose, as a friend and an ally in a cause which would then have seemed fantastically far away from our boyhoods. And the Judge I was destined to see sitting on the seat of judgment, and to give evidence before him on behalf of my brother, who stood in the dock at the Old Bailey and was found guilty of patriotism and public spirit.
My mother’s family had a French surname; though the family, as I knew it by experience as well as tradition, was entirely English in speech and social habit. There was a sort of family legend that they were descended from a French private soldier of the Revolutionary Wars, who had been a prisoner in England and remained there; as some certainly did. But on the other side my mother came of Scottish people, who were Keiths from Aberdeen; and for several reasons, partly because my maternal grandmother long survived her husband and was a very attractive personality, and partly because of a certain vividness in any infusion of Scots blood or patriotism, this northern affiliation appealed strongly to my affections; and made a sort of Scottish romance in my childhood. But her husband, my maternal grandfather whom I never saw, must have been an interesting person too; and something of an historical type, if not an historical character. He had been one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early Teetotal movement; a characteristic which has not. But I am quite sure there was a great deal in him, beyond anything that is implied in mere public speaking or teetotalism. I am quite sure of it, because of two casual remarks he made; which are indeed the only two remarks I ever heard of him making. Once, when his sons were declaiming against mode and convention in the manner of all liberal youth, he said abruptly, “Ah, they talk a lot about fashion; but fashion is civilisation.” And in the other case, the same rising generation was lightly tossing about that pessimism which is only possible in the happy time of youth. They were criticising the General Thanksgiving in the Prayer-Book, and remarking that a good many people have very little reason to be thankful for their creation. And the old man, who was then so old that he hardly ever spoke at all, said suddenly out of his silence. “I should thank God for my creation if I knew I was a lost soul.”
Of the other side of my family I may say more when I come to my own memories; but I put this side of the matter first because there is so much more of it that I have received only at secondhand. And this is the part of the book which is forced to be biography and cannot be autobiography. It deals with the things that were just behind me and merely threw their shadows on my earliest path; the things I saw in reflection rather than reality. Of these there were more on my mother’s side; especially that historical interest in the house of Keith, which was mixed up with my general historical interest in things like the house of Argyll. But on my father’s side also there were legends; the nearest and most eminent figure being that Captain Chesterton, who was famous in his day as a reformer of prisons. He was a friend of Dickens, and, I suspect, himself something of a Dickens character. But indeed these first memories and rumours suggest that there were a good many Dickens characters in the days of Dickens. I am far from denying the inference; that a good many Dickens characters are humbugs. It would not be fair to say all I have said in praise of the old Victorian middle-class, without admitting that it did sometimes produce pretty hollow and pompous imposture. A solemn friend of my grandfather used to go for walks on Sunday carrying a prayer-book, without the least intention of going to church. And he calmly defended it by saying, with uplifted hand, “I do it, Chessie, as an example to others.” The man who did that was obviously a Dickens character. And I am disposed to think that, in being a Dickens character, he was in many ways rather preferable to many modern characters. Few modern men, however false, would dare to be so brazen. And I am not sure he was not really a more genuine fellow than the modern man who says vaguely that he has doubts or hates sermons, when he only wants to go and play golf. Hypocrisy itself was more sincere. Anyhow, it was more courageous.
What I can but call a Great Gusto breathed out of that epoch; something now only remembered in the rich and rollicking quotation of Swiveller and Micawber. But the point is that the savour of it could then be found in scores of quite worthy and obscure people; certainly much more worthy than the blatantly Pecksniffian person with the prayer-book; and much more obscure than the eccentric but efficient, and even eminent, prison governor and reformer. To use a trade term of the period, this indescribable sort of relish was by no means only a gentlemen’s relish. It was the effect, I think, of that popular humour, which is still perhaps our only really popular institution, working upon the remains of the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century orators, and the almost equally rhetorical rhetoric of the nineteenth-century poets, like Byron and Moore. Anyhow, it was evidently common to countless common or average people, and rather specially to commercial clerks. The clerk came afterwards to figure rather as a mere cheap Cockney with clipped speech; a sort of broken English that seems broken by accident; chipped rather than clipped. But there was a race that really dealt in periods as rounded as Christmas platters and punchbowls. My father told me of a fellow clerk of his youth, or boyhood, who took leave of the tavern or chop-house with a stately message of thanks, which he delivered in a big booming voice, before stalking into the street, “Tell Mrs. Bayfield that the steak was excellent; the potatoes done to a turn; in short a dinner fit for an Emperor.” Is not that exactly like “F.B.” in the moments when Thackeray was most Dickensian? From the same remote source, I recall another quite Dickensian scene; a bland, round-faced little man in spectacles, the sort that is always chaffed anywhere; and a fellow clerk named Carr, of more mysterious humours; both ghosts from my father’s time of apprenticeship. At intervals the more sombre clerk would call out across the office, “Mr. Hannay!” The round face, bright with its smile and spectacles, would bob up with never-failing freshness and expectation: “Yes, Mr. Carr.” Then Mr. Carr would fix him with a sphinxlike visage and say in hollow but resounding tones, “Boundless Space!” And then Mr. Carr would turn more briskly to the other clerks, shaking his head, and repeating in a hopeless tone, “He can’t grasp it!” I do not know what either of them would have thought of the idea of Professor Einstein entering the office and avenging Mr. Hannay on Mr. Carr, by suggesting that space is not boundless at all. The point is that there is this element of pomp and ritual about jokes; even about practical jokes; indeed even about practical deceptions. It was known in humbler walks, among mountebanks and even monstrosities, as well Dickens knew; and there was something as stately about the cheap-jacks demanding money as the orators demanding fame. One of my own earliest memories is of looking from a balcony above one of the big residential roads of a watering-place, and seeing a venerable party with white hair solemnly taking off a white hat as he walked down the centre of the street, and saying to nobody in particular in the loud voice of a lecturer, “When I first came into Cannon Street—I beg your pardon, Cannon Place …” a performance which he repeated every day, always falling into the same error to be followed by the same apology. This gave me, I know not why, enormous pleasure; partly, I think, from the feeling that a gigantic clockwork doll had been added to what Mr. Maurice Baring calls the puppet-show of memory. But his importance here is that the rest of his speech seemed all the more polished and faultless for that one strangely recurrent fault; and it always ended with a beautiful peroration, about recalling in the distant future, and in the hour of death, “the kindness I have met with in Cannon Place.” Later, I remember the same seaside paths paraded by a yet more loquacious public character wearing cap and gown, I fear with but little academic authority; but I think he marked a much later stage, because he was acrid and antagonistic, and appealed to his audience by calling them hypocrites and whited sepulchres; which had the curious effect upon that very English crowd of causing them to throw pennies into his mortar-board. But in the earlier stage which concerns me here, a glow of convivial courtesy covered everything; and the wing of friendship could never moult a feather. The amazing patience of our populace then went with a certain pomp, but it was a pompous geniality; and even their jeers were still jovial. Their mockery and their heroism still remain, heaven knows; but they no longer thus combine in the mock heroic. But anybody who heard, or heard of, the men I mention, will be certain to his dying day that Dick Swiveller did say, “When he who adores thee has left but the name—in case of letters or parcels,” or that the poor usher at the party did whisper to each lady in turn, “Had I a heart for falsehood framed I ne’er could injure you.” There was a glow in it; not to be copied by sparks, even when they really sparkle. The world is less gay for losing that solemnity.
Another real Victorian virtue, not to be discredited by many imaginary Victorian virtues, belongs not so much to my generation as to my father’s and grandfather’s; or at least, if I was specially lucky, to my father and grandfather. It should, therefore, be mentioned in this place; if it is illustrated by incidents within my own memory. My own people in any case had a strict standard of commercial probity; but I fancy the standard was stricter in all that more stolid commercial class than in a later time, when the notion of success was mixed up not only with cynicism but with a queer sort of piratical romance. The change may be felt, as in the word “respectable,” in the very atmosphere of certain words. The favourite modern ideal in morals and even in religion, especially the religion popularised in the papers for millions of modern business men, is the word “adventure.” The most menacing monster in morals, for the business men of my old middle-class, was branded with the title of “adventurer.” In later times, I fancy, the world has defended some pretty indefensible adventurers by implying the glamour of adventure. Anyhow, this is not merely my own belated opinion in an age of reaction. It was the opinion of the best even of the old optimists and orthodox economists, who lived when the change was beginning, and believed they were living in an age of reform. My own father and uncles were entirely of the period that believed in progress, and generally in new things, all the more because they were finding it increasingly difficult to believe in old things; and in some cases in anything at all. But though as Liberals they believed in progress, as honest men they often testified to deterioration.
I remember my father telling me how much he had begun to be pestered by great swarms of people wanting private commissions upon transactions, in which they were supposed to represent another interest. He mentioned it not only with the deepest disgust, but more or less as if it were a novelty as well as a nuisance. He was himself in the habit of meeting these unpleasant people with a humorously simulated burst of heartiness and even hilarity; but it was the only sort of occasion on which his humour might be called grim and even ferocious. When the agent, bargaining for some third party, hinted that an acceptable trifle would smooth the negotiations, he would say with formidable geniality, “Oh, certainly! certainly! So long as we are all friends and everything is open and above-board! I am sure your principals and employers will be delighted to hear from me that I’m paying you a small—” He would then be interrupted with a sort of shriek of fear and the kind diplomatic gentleman would cover his tracks as best he could in terror. “And doesn’t that prove to you,” said my father with innocent rationalism, “the immorality of such a proposal?”
My Uncle Sidney, who was his partner in the business, was a more unanswerable witness, because a more unwilling witness. My father was very universal in his interests and very moderate in his opinions; he was one of the few men I ever knew who really listened to argument; moreover, he was more traditional than many in the liberal age; he loved many old things, and had especially a passion for the French cathedrals and all the Gothic architecture opened up by Ruskin in that time. It was not quite so inconceivable that he might admit another side to modern progress. But my uncle was the very reverse of a laudator temporis acti. He was one of those sensitive and conscientious men, very typical of the modern world, who had the same scrupulous sense of the duty of accepting new things, and sympathising with the young, that older moralists may have had about preserving old things and obeying the elders. I remember him assuring me quite eagerly of the hopeful thoughts aroused in him by the optimistic official prophecies of the book called Looking Backwards a rather ironical title, seeing that the one thing forbidden to such futurists was Looking Backwards. And the whole philosophy, afterwards sublimated by the genius of Mr. Wells, was the duty of Looking Forwards. My uncle, much more than my father, was this scrupulously sanguine sort of man; and the last man in the world to hold any brief for the good old times. But he was also a quite transparently truthful man; and I remember him telling me, with that wrinkle of worry in his brow, which confessed his subconscious and sensitive anxiety, “I’m bound to confess that commercial morality has got steadily worse through my lifetime.”
Of course I admit, or rather I boast, that in anything like sympathy with any such Utopia, such individuals were in advance of the times. But I boast much more that, in the great modern growth of high finance, they were behind the times. The class as a whole was, indeed, dangerously deaf and blind upon the former question of economic exploitation; but it was relatively more vigilant and sensitive upon the latter question of financial decency. It never occurred to these people that anybody could possibly admire a man for being what we call “daring” in speculation, any more than a woman for being what we call “daring” in dress. There was something of the same atmospheric change in both cases. The absence of social ambition had a great deal to do with it. When the restrictions really were stuffy and stupid, they were largely those of ignorance; but this was nothing like so evil and ruinous as the ignorance of the real wrongs and rights of the working classes. Heaven knows, it is even possible that in some cases the reader knows, that I am no admirer of the complacent commercial prosperity of England in the nineteenth century. At the best it was an individualism that ended by destroying individuality; an industrialism which has done nothing except poison the very meaning of the word industry. At the worst it turned at last into a vulgar victory of sweating and swindling. I am only pointing out a particular point about a particular group or class, now extinct; that if they were ignorant of, or often indifferent to the sweating, they were really indignant at the swindling. In the same way, few will accuse me of Puritanism; but I think it due to the Puritan tradition to say that certain notions of social sobriety did have something to do with delaying the full triumph of flashy finance and the mere antics of avarice. Anyhow, there has been a change from a middle-class that trusted a business man to look after money because he was dull and careful, to one that trusts a business man to get more money because he is dashing and worldly. It has not always asked itself for whom he would get more money, or whose money he would get.
I know well I was very fortunate in my own family. But even those less fortunate were not subject to the special evils now commonly labelled Victorian. Indeed, in the modern sense, Victorian was not at all Victorian. It was a period of increasing strain. It was the very reverse of solid respectability; because its ethics and theology were wearing thin throughout. It may have been orderly compared with what came after; but not compared with the centuries that came before. It sometimes boasted of being domestic; but the Englishman’s home was not half so domestic as that of the horrid foreigner; the profligate Frenchman. It was the age when the Englishman sent all his sons to boarding-school and sent all his servants to Coventry. I cannot imagine why anybody ever said that the Englishman’s house was his castle; since he was one of the few Europeans who did not even own his house; and his house was avowedly a dull box of brick, of all the houses the least like a castle. Above all, so far from being stiff with orthodox religion, it was almost the first irreligious home in all human history. Theirs was the first generation that ever asked its children to worship the hearth without the altar. This was equally true, whether they went to church at eleven o’clock, with more decent thoroughness than the gay deceiver with the prayer-book, or were reverently agnostic or latitudinarian, as was much of my own circle. For the most part, it was family life stripped of its festivals and shrines and private cults, which had been its poetry in the past. It was a joke to talk of the heavy father’s heavy furniture, and call the chairs and tables his household gods. It was the fact that he was the first man, for whom there were no household gods but only furniture.
That was the duller side; but there has been even more exaggeration about the darker side. I mean that modern novelists and others have started a trick of writing as if the old middle-class home was almost always a private lunatic asylum, with the lunatic in charge; as in the case of the exceedingly Mad Hatter who inhabited Hatter’s Castle. This is a grotesque exaggeration; there were parents with this savage degree of selfishness; I recall not many more than three of them in the whole of our old social circle; but the wrong associations are attached even to them. A few of them may have been religious fanatics. I remember one, who locked up his daughters like prisoners; and one of them said to me, “You see he thinks nobody else can think at all, except himself and Herbert Spencer.” I remember another who was an extreme Radical, a champion of liberty everywhere except at home. The point is of some historic importance. Tyrants, religious or irreligious, turn up anywhere. But this type of tyrant was the product of the precise moment when a middle-class man still had children and servants to control; but no longer had creeds or guilds or kings or priests or anything to control him. He was already an anarchist to those above him; but still an authoritarian to those below. But he was an abnormal fellow anyhow; and none of my people bore the least resemblance to him.
What Puritanic element there was in this forgotten society must certainly be allowed for as a part of the picture. It was mostly, among my people, a rather illogical disapproval of certain forms of luxury and expenditure. Their tables would groan under far grander dinners than many aristocrats eat today. But they had, for instance, a fixed feeling that there was something rather raffish about taking a cab. It was probably connected with their sensitive pride about not aping the aristocracy. I can remember my grandfather, when he was nearly eighty and able to afford any number of cabs, standing in the pouring rain while seven or eight crowded omnibuses went by; and afterwards whispering to my father (in a hushed voice lest the blasphemy be heard by the young), “If three more omnibuses had gone by, upon my soul I think I should have taken a cab.” In the matter of driving about in cabs, I cannot claim to have kept the family escutcheon unspotted, or to have lived up to the high standard of my sires. But in the matter of their motive for not doing so, I am disposed to defend them, or at least to say that they are much misunderstood. They were the last descendants of Mrs. Gilpin, who told the chaise to stop a few doors from her house, lest the neighbours should think her proud. I am not sure that she was not a healthier person than the smart lady who will be seen in anybody’s Rolls Royce, lest the neighbours should think her humble.
Such, so far as I know it, was the social landscape in which I first found myself; and such were the people among whom I was born. I am sorry if the landscape or the people appear disappointingly respectable and even reasonable, and deficient in all those unpleasant qualities that make a biography really popular. I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and mildly impecunious uncle; and that I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am. I am not clear about what that is; but I am pretty sure that most of it is my own fault. And I am compelled to confess that I look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that should doubtless be reserved for the Utopias of the Futurist. Yet the landscape, as I see it now, was not altogether without a visionary and symbolic character. And among all the objects in that landscape, I find myself returning at the last to those which I mentioned first. In one way and another, those things have come to stand for so many other things, in the acted allegory of a human existence; the little church of my baptism and the waterworks, the bare, blind, dizzy tower of brick that seemed, to my first upward starings, to take hold upon the stars. Perhaps there was something in the confused and chaotic notion of a tower of water; as if the sea itself could stand on one end like a water-spout. Certainly later, though I hardly know how late, there came into my mind some fancy of a colossal water-snake that might be the Great Sea Serpent, and had something of the nightmare nearness of a dragon in a dream. And, over against it, the small church rose in a spire like a spear; and I have always been pleased to remember that it was dedicated to St. George.
II
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN KEY
The very first thing I can ever remember seeing with my own eyes was a young man walking across a bridge. He had a curly moustache and an attitude of confidence verging on swagger. He carried in his hand a disproportionately large key of a shining yellow metal and wore a large golden or gilded crown. The bridge he was crossing sprang on the one side from the edge of a highly perilous mountain chasm, the peaks of the range rising fantastically in the distance; and at the other end it joined the upper part of the tower of an almost excessively castellated castle. In the castle tower there was one window, out of which a young lady was looking. I cannot remember in the least what she looked like; but I will do battle with anyone who denies her superlative good looks.
To those who may object that such a scene is rare in the home life of house-agents living immediately to the north of Kensington High Street, in the later seventies of the last century, I shall be compelled to admit, not that the scene was unreal, but that I saw it through a window more wonderful than the window in the tower; through the proscenium of a toy theatre constructed by my father; and that (if I am really to be pestered about such irrelevant details) the young man in the crown was about six inches high and proved on investigation to be made of cardboard. But it is strictly true to say that I saw him before I can remember seeing anybody else; and that, so far as my memory is concerned, this was the sight on which my eyes first opened in this world. And the scene has to me a sort of aboriginal authenticity impossible to describe; something at the back of all my thoughts; like the very back-scene of the theatre of things. I have no shadow of recollection of what the young man was doing on the bridge, or of what he proposed to do with the key; though a later and wearier knowledge of literature and legend hints to me that he was not improbably going to release the lady from captivity. It is a not unamusing detail of psychology that, though I can remember no other characters in the story, I do remember noting that the crowned gentleman had a moustache and no beard, with a vague inference that there was another crowned gentleman who had a beard as well. We may safely guess, I imagine, that the bearded one was by way of being a wicked king; and we should not need much more converging evidence to convict him of having locked up the lady in the tower. All the rest is gone; scenes, subject, story, characters; but that one scene glows in my memory like a glimpse of some incredible paradise; and, for all I know, I shall still remember it when all other memory is gone out of my mind.
Apart from the fact of it being my first memory, I have several reasons for putting it first. I am no psychologist, thank God; but if psychologists are still saying what ordinary sane people have always said—that early impressions count considerably in life—I recognise a sort of symbol of all that I happen to like in imagery and ideas. All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary-line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window. To the grief of all grave dramatic critics, I will still assert that the perfect drama must strive to rise to the higher ecstasy of the peep-show. I have also a pretty taste in abysses and bottomless chasms and everything else that emphasises a fine shade of distinction between one thing and another; and the warm affection I have always felt for bridges is connected with the fact that the dark and dizzy arch accentuates the chasm even more than the chasm itself. I can no longer behold the beauty of the princess; but I can see it in the bridge that the prince crossed to reach her. And I believe that in feeling these things from the first, I was feeling the fragmentary suggestions of a philosophy I have since found to be the truth. For it is upon that point of truth that there might perhaps be a quarrel between the more material psychologists and myself. If any man tells me that I only take pleasure in the mysteries of the window and the bridge because I saw these models of them when I was a baby, I shall take the liberty of telling him that he has not thought the thing out. To begin with, I must have seen thousands of other things before as well as after; and there must have been an element of selection and some reason for selection. And, what is still more obvious, to date the occasion does not even begin to deal with the fact. If some laborious reader of little books on child-psychology cries out to me in glee and cunning, “You only like romantic things like toy-theatres because your father showed you a toy-theatre in your childhood,” I shall reply with gentle and Christian patience, “Yes, fool, yes. Undoubtedly your explanation is, in that sense, the true one. But what you are saying, in your witty way, is simply that I associate these things with happiness because I was so happy. It does not even begin to consider the question of why I was so happy. Why should looking through a square hole, at yellow pasteboard, lift anybody into the seventh heaven of happiness at any time of life? Why should it specially do so at that time of life? That is the psychological fact that you have to explain; and I have never seen any sort of rational explanation.”
I apologise for this parenthesis; and for mentioning child-psychology or anything else that can bring a blush to the cheek. But it happens to be a point on which I think some of our psycho-analysts display rather unblushing cheek. I do not wish my remarks confused with the horrible and degrading heresy that our minds are merely manufactured by accidental conditions, and therefore have no ultimate relation to truth at all. With all possible apologies to the freethinkers, I still propose to hold myself free to think. And anybody who will think for two minutes will see that this thought is the end of all thinking. It is useless to argue at all, if all our conclusions are warped by our conditions. Nobody can correct anybody’s bias, if all mind is all bias.
The interlude is now over, thank you; and I will proceed to the more practical relations between my memory and my story. And it will first be necessary to say something about memory itself; and the reliability of such stories. I have begun with this fragment of a fairy play in a toy-theatre, because it also sums up most clearly the strongest influences upon my childhood. I have said that the toy-theatre was made by my father; and anybody who has ever tried to make such a theatre or mount such a play, will know that this alone stands for a remarkable round of crafts and accomplishments. It involves being in much more than the common sense the stage carpenter, being the architect and the builder and the draughtsman and the landscape-painter and the story-teller all in one. And, looking back on my life, and the relatively unreal and indirect art that I have attempted to practise, I feel that I have really lived a much narrower life than my father’s.
His mere name, of course, is enough to recall wider memories. One of my first memories is playing in the garden under the care of a girl with ropes of golden hair; to whom my mother afterwards called out from the house, “You are an angel;” which I was disposed to accept without metaphor. She is now living in Vancouver as Mrs. Kidd; and she and her sister had more to do with enlivening my early years than most. Since then, I have met what used to be called the wits of the age; but I have never known wittier conversation. Among my first memories also are those seascapes that were blue flashes to boys of my generation; North Berwick with the cone of green hill that seemed like the hill absolute; and a French seaside associated with little girls, the daughters of my father’s old friend Mawer Cowtan, whom I shall not forget. But indeed I had a whole background of cousins; Tom Gilbert (my godfather, who gave me his last and my first name) had a large family of daughters, and my uncle Sidney a large family of sons; and they all still move in my memory almost like a male and female chorus in a great Greek play. The eldest of the boys, the one whom I once knew best, was killed with my brother in the Great War; but many of the others, I am glad to say, are still friends as well as relations. All these are memorable memories; but they do not resolve that first individual speculation about memory itself. The girl with the yellow hair is an early memory, in the sense in which some of the others have inevitably become later memories, at once expanded and effaced.
Really, the things we remember are the things we forget. I mean that when a memory comes back sharply and suddenly, piercing the protection of oblivion, it appears for an instant exactly as it really was. If we think of it often, while its essentials doubtless remain true, it becomes more and more our own memory of the thing rather than the thing remembered. I had a little sister who died when I was a child. I have little to go on; for she was the only subject about which my father did not talk. It was the one dreadful sorrow of his abnormally happy and even merry existence; and it is strange to think that I never spoke to him about it to the day of his death. I do not remember her dying; but I remember her falling off a rocking-horse. I know, from experience of bereavements only a little later, that children feel with exactitude, without a word of explanation, the emotional tone or tint of a house of mourning. But in this case, the greater catastrophe must somehow have become confused and identified with the smaller one. I always felt it as a tragic memory, as if she had been thrown by a real horse and killed. Something must have painted and repainted the picture in my mind; until I suddenly became conscious about the age of eighteen that it had become the picture of Amy Robsart lying at the foot of the stairs, flung down by Vamey and another villain. This is the real difficulty about remembering anything; that we have remembered too much—for we have remembered too often.
I will take another example of this psychological trick, though it involves the anticipation of much later events in my life. One of these glimpses of my own prehistoric history is a memory of a long upper room filled with light (the light that never was on sea or land) and of somebody carving or painting with white paint the deal head of a hobby-horse; the head almost archaic in its simplification. Ever since that day my depths have been stirred by a wooden post painted white; and even more so by any white horse in the street; and it was like meeting a friend in a fairytale to find myself under the sign of the White Horse at Ipswich on the first day of my honeymoon. But for that very reason, this image has remained and memory has constantly returned to it; and I have even done my best to deface and spoil the purity of the White Horse by writing an interminable ballad about it. A man does not generally manage to forget his wedding-day; especially such a highly comic wedding-day as mine. For the family remembers against me a number of now familiar legends, about the missing of trains, the losing of luggage, and other things counted yet more eccentric. It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself; and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller. They seemed to me the most natural things in the world. I did not buy the pistol to murder myself or my wife; I never was really modern. I bought it because it was the great adventure of my youth, with a general notion of protecting her from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads, to which we were bound; where, after all, there are still a suspiciously large number of families with Danish names. I shall not be annoyed if it is called childish; but obviously it was rather a reminiscence of boyhood, and not of childhood. But the ritual consumption of the glass of milk really was a reminiscence of childhood. I stopped at that particular dairy because I had always drunk a glass of milk there when walking with my mother in my infancy. And it seemed to me a fitting ceremonial to unite the two great relations of a man’s life. Outside the shop there was the figure of a White Cow as a sort of pendant to the figure of the White Horse; the one standing at the beginning of my new journey and the other at the end. But the point is here that the very fact of these allegories having been acted over again, at the stage of marriage and maturity, does in a sense transform them, and does in some sense veil even while it invokes the original visions of the child. The sign of the White Horse has been repainted, and only in that sense painted out. I do not so much remember it as remember remembering it. But if I really want to be realistic about those remote days, I must scratch around till I find something not too much blunted to scratch me; something sufficiently forgotten to be remembered. I make the experiment at this moment as I write. Searching for those lost surroundings, I recall for the first time, at this moment, that there was another shop, next to the milk-shop, which had some mysterious charm for my childhood; and then I recall that it was an oil and colour shop, and they sold gold paint smeared inside shells; and there was a sort of pale pointed chalks I have been less familiar with of late. I do not think here of the strong colours of the common paint-box, like crimson-lake and prussian-blue, much as I exulted and still exult in them. For another boy called Robert Louis Stevenson has messed about with my colours upon that sort of palette; and I have grown up to enjoy them in print as well as in paint. But when I remember that these forgotten crayons contained a stick of “light-red,” seemingly a more commonplace colour, the point of that dull red pencil pricks me as if it could draw red blood.
From this general memory about memory I draw a certain inference. What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall; not the things I should think most worth recalling. This is where it differs from the other great thrill of the past, all that is connected with first love and the romantic passion; for that, though equally poignant, comes always to a point; and is narrow like a rapier piercing the heart, whereas the other was more like a hundred windows opened on all sides of the head.
I have made here a sort of psychological experiment in memory. I have tried to think of the things I forget adjoining the things I remember; and in the childish case, though they are without form, I am sure they are of the same tint. I have long remembered the milk-shop; I have only just remembered the oil-shop; I have no notion at all about the next shop to the oil-shop. I am sure it was a shop shining with the same lost light of morning; because it was in the same street under the same sky. I have no notion on what street the row of windows in the long uplifted room looked out, when the white horse head was carved. But I feel in a flash that it was a happy street; or, if we must be pedantic, a street in which I should have been happy. Now it is not like that with even the happiest hours of the later things called love-affairs. I have already mentioned how my honeymoon began before the White Cow of my childhood; but of course I had in my time been myself a calf, not to say a moon-calf, in the sort of calf-love that dances in the moonshine long before the honeymoon. Those day-dreams also are wrecks of something divine; but they have the colour of sunset rather than the broad daylight. I have walked across wide fields at evening and seen, as a mere distant dot in a row of houses, one particular window and just distinguishable head; and been uplifted as with roaring trumpets as if by the salute of Beatrice. But it did not, and does not, make me think the other windows and houses were all almost equally interesting; and that is just what the glimpse of the baby’s wonderland does. We have read countless pages about love brightening the sun and making the flowers more flamboyant; and it is true in a sense; but not in the sense I mean. It changes the world; but the baby lived in a changeless world; or rather the man feels that it is he who has changed. He has changed long before he comes near to the great and glorious trouble of the love of woman; and that has in it something new and concentrated and crucial; crucial in the true sense of being as near as Cana to Calvary. In the later case, what is loved becomes instantly what may be lost.
My point here is that we can test the childish mood by thinking, not only of what was there, but of what must have been there. I think of the backs of houses of which I saw only the fronts; the streets that stretched away behind the streets I knew; the things that remained round the corner; and they still give me a thrill. One of the sports of the imagination, a game I have played all my life, was to take a certain book with pictures of old Dutch houses, and think not of what was in the pictures but of all that was out of the pictures, the unknown corners and side-streets of the same quaint town. The book was one my father had written and illustrated himself, merely for home consumption. It was typical of him that, in the Pugin period he had worked at Gothic illumination; but when he tried again, it was in another style of the dark Dutch renaissance, the grotesque scroll-work that suggests woodcarving more than stone-cutting. He was the sort of man who likes to try everything once. This was the only book he ever wrote; and he never bothered to publish it.
My father might have reminded people of Mr. Pickwick, except that he was always bearded and never bald; he wore spectacles and had all the Pickwickian evenness of temper and pleasure in the humours of travel. He was rather quiet than otherwise, but his quietude covered a great fertility of notions; and he certainly liked taking a rise out of people. I remember, to give one example of a hundred such inventions, how he gravely instructed some grave ladies in the names of flowers; dwelling especially on the rustic names given in certain localities. “The country people call them Sailors’ Pen-knives,” he would say in an offhand manner, after affecting to provide them with the full scientific name, or, “They call them Bakers’ Bootlaces down in Lincolnshire, I believe”; and it is a fine example of human simplicity to note how far he found he could safely go in such instructive discourse. They followed him without revulsion when he said lightly, “Merely a sprig of wild bigamy.” It was only when he added that there was a local variety known as Bishop’s Bigamy, that the full depravity of his character began to dawn on their minds. It was possibly this aspect of his unfailing amiability that is responsible for an entry I find in an ancient minute-book, of mock trials conducted by himself and his brothers; that Edward Chesterton was tried for the crime of Aggravation. But the same sort of invention created for children the permanent anticipation of what is profoundly called a Surprise. And it is this side of the business that is relevant here.
His versatility both as an experimentalist and a handy man, in all such matters, was amazing. His den or study was piled high with the stratified layers of about ten or twelve creative amusements; water-colour painting and modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic lanterns and mediaeval illumination. I have inherited, or I hope imitated, his habit of drawing; but in every other way I am emphatically an unhandy man. There had been some talk of his studying art professionally in his youth; but the family business was obviously safer; and his life followed the lines of a certain contented and ungrasping prudence, which was extraordinarily typical of him and all his blood and generation. He never dreamed of turning any of these plastic talents to any mercenary account, or of using them for anything but his own private pleasure and ours. To us he appeared to be indeed the Man with the Golden Key, a magician opening the gates of goblin castles or the sepulchres of dead heroes; and there was no incongruity in calling his lantern a magic-lantern. But all this time he was known to the world, and even the next-door neighbours, as a very reliable and capable though rather unambitious business man. It was a very good first lesson in what is also the last lesson of life; that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside. On the whole I am glad that he was never an artist. It might have stood in his way in becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career; his private career. He could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousand things he did so successfully.
If I made a generalisation about the Chestertons, my paternal kinsfolk (which may be dangerous, for there are a lot of them still alive), I should say that they were and are extraordinarily English. They have a perceptible and prevailing colour of good nature, of good sense not untinged with dreaminess, and a certain tranquil loyalty in their personal relations which was very notable even in one, like my brother Cecil, who in his public relations was supremely pugnacious and provocative. I think this sort of sleepy sanity rather an English thing; and in comparison it may not be entirely fanciful to suppose there was something French, after all, in the make-up of my mother’s family; for, allowing for the usual admixture, they ran smaller in stature, often darker in colouring, tough, extraordinarily tenacious, prejudiced in a humorous fashion and full of the fighting spirit. But whatever we may guess in such matters (and nobody has yet done anything but guess about heredity) it was for another purpose that I mentioned the savour of something racial about such a stock. English in so many things, the Chestertons were supremely English in their natural turn for hobbies. It is an element in this sort of old English business man which divides him most sharply from the American business man, and to some extent from the new English business man, who is copying the American. When the American begins to suggest that “salesmanship can be an art,” he means that an artist ought to put all his art into his salesmanship. The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father, sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life.
A hobby is not a holiday. It is not merely a momentary relaxation necessary to the renewal of work; and in this respect it must be sharply distinguished from much that is called sport. A good game is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as a hobby; and many go golfing or shooting grouse because this is a concentrated form of recreation; just as what our contemporaries find in whisky is a concentrated form of what our fathers found diffused in beer. If half a day is to take a man out of himself, or make a new man of him, it is better done by some sharp competitive excitement like sport. But a hobby is not half a day but half a life-time. It would be truer to accuse the hobbyist of living a double life. And hobbies, especially such hobbies as the toy theatre, have a character that runs parallel to practical professional effort, and is not merely a reaction from it. It is not merely taking exercise; it is doing work. It is not merely exercising the body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing. When Browning, that typical Victorian, says that he likes to know a butcher paints and a baker writes poetry, he would not be satisfied with the statement that a butcher plays tennis or a baker golf. And my father and uncles, also typical Victorians of the sort that followed Browning, were all marked in varying degrees by this taste for having their own tastes. One of them gave all his spare time to gardening and has somewhere in the horticultural records a chrysanthemum named after him, dating from the first days when chrysanthemums came to us from the islands of the Rising Sun. Another travelled in an ordinary commercial fashion, but made a most amazing collection of cranks and quacks, fitted to fill a far better memoir than this, whom he had met in his wanderings, and with whom he had argued and sympathised and quoted Browning and George Macdonald, and done I fancy not a little good, for he was himself a most interesting man; above all, interesting because he was interested. But in my own household, as I have said, it was not a question of one hobby but a hundred hobbies, piled on top of each other; and it is a personal accident, or perhaps a personal taste, that the one which has clung to my memory through life is the hobby of the toy theatre. In any case, watching such work has made one great difference to my life and views to this day.
I cannot do much, by the standard of my nursery days. But I have learned to love seeing things done; not the handle that ultimately causes them to be done, but the hand that does them. If my father had been some common millionaire owning a thousand mills that made cotton, or a million machines that made cocoa, how much smaller he would have seemed. And this experience has made me profoundly sceptical of all the modern talk about the necessary dullness of domesticity; and the degrading drudgery that only has to make puddings and pies. Only to make things! There is no greater thing to be said of God Himself than that He makes things. The manufacturer cannot even manufacture things; he can only pay to have them manufactured. And (in the same way) I am now incurably afflicted with a faint smile, when I hear a crowd of frivolous people, who could not make anything to save their lives, talking about the inevitable narrowness and stuffiness of the Victorian home. We managed to make a good many things in our Victorian home which people now buy at insane prices from Art and Craft Shops; the sort of shops that have quite as much craft as art. All the things that happened in the house, or were in any sense done on the premises, linger in my imagination like a legend; and as much as any, those connected with the kitchen or the pantry. Toffee still tastes nicer to me than the most expensive chocolates which Quaker millionaires sell by the million; and mostly because we made toffee for ourselves.
No. 999 in the vast library-catalogue of the books I have never written (all of them so much more brilliant and convincing than the books that I have written) is the story of a successful city man who seemed to have a dark secret in his life; and who was eventually discovered by the detectives still playing with dolls or tin soldiers or some undignified antic of infancy. I may say with all modesty that I am that man, in everything except his solidity of repute and his successful commercial career. It was perhaps even more true, in that sense, of my father before me; but I for one have never left off playing, and I wish there were more time to play. I wish we did not have to fritter away on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting coloured tinsel upon them. When I say this, I come to the third reason for taking the toy theatre as a text; and it is one about which there will be much misunderstanding, because of the repetitions and the stale sentiment that have somehow come to cling to it. It is one of those things that are always misunderstood, because they have been too often explained.
I am inclined to contradict much of the modern Cult of the Child at Play. Through various influences of a recent and rather romantic culture, the Child has become rather the Spoilt Child. The true beauty has been spoilt by the rather unscrupulous emotion of mature persons, who have themselves lost much of their sense of reality. The worst heresy of this school is that a child is concerned only with make-believe. For this is interpreted in the sense, at once sentimental and sceptical, that there is not much difference between make-believe and belief. But the real child does not confuse fact and fiction. He simply likes fiction. He acts it, because he cannot as yet write it or even read it; but he never allows his moral sanity to be clouded by it. To him no two things could possibly be more totally contrary than playing at robbers and stealing sweets. No possible amount of playing at robbers would ever bring him an inch nearer to thinking it is really right to rob. I saw the distinction perfectly clearly when I was a child; I wish I saw it half as clearly now. I played at being a robber for hours together at the end of the garden; but it never had anything to do with the temptation I had to sneak a new paint-box out of my father’s room. I was not being anything false; I was simply writing before I could write. Fortunately, perhaps, for the condition of the back-garden, I early transferred my dreams to some rude resemblance to writing; chiefly in the form of drawing straggling and sprawling maps of fabulous countries, inhabited by men of incredible shapes and colours and bearing still more incredible names. But though I might fill the world with dragons, I never had the slightest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons.
I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes a fable that has a moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own more weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious. Adults like the comic Sandford and Merton. Children liked the real Sandford and Merton. At least I know I liked it very much, and felt the heartiest faith in the Honest Farmer and the Noble Negro. I venture to dwell on the point if only in parenthesis: for on this also there is a current misunderstanding. Indeed there is what may be called a current cant; and none the less so because it is a cant against cant. It is now so common as to be conventional to express impatience with priggish and moralising stories for children; stories of the old-fashioned sort that concern things like the sinfulness of theft; and as I am recalling an old-fashioned atmosphere, I cannot refrain from testifying on the psychology of the business.
Now I must heartily confess that I often adored priggish and moralising stories. I do not suppose I should gain a subtle literary pleasure from them now; but that is not the point in question. The men who denounce such moralisings are men; they are not children. But I believe multitudes would admit their early affection for the moral tale, if they still had the moral courage. And the reason is perfectly simple. Adults have reacted against such morality, because they know that it often stands for immorality. They know that such platitudes have been used by hypocrites and pharisees, by cunning or perversion. But the child knows nothing about cunning or perversion. He sees nothing but the moral ideals themselves, and he simply sees that they are true. Because they are.
There is another blunder made by the modern cynic about the moralising story-teller. The former always imagines that there is an element of corruption, in his own cynical manner, about the idea of reward, about the position of the child who can say, as in Stevenson’s verses, “Every day when I’ve been good, I get an orange after food.” To the man made ignorant by experience this always appears as a vulgar bribe to the child. The modern philosopher knows that it would require a very large bribe indeed to induce him to be good. It therefore seems to the modern philosopher what it would seem to the modern politician to say, “I will give you fifty thousand pounds when you have, on some one definite and demonstrated occasion, kept your word.” The solid price seems something quite distinct from the rare and reluctant labour. But it does not seem like that to the child. It would not seem like that to the child, if the Fairy Queen said to the Prince, “You will receive the golden apple from the magic tree when you have fought the dragon.” For the child is not a Manichee. He does not think that good things are in their nature separate from being good. In other words, he does not, like the reluctant realist, regard goodness as a bad thing. To him the goodness and the gift and the golden apple, that is called an orange, are all parts of one substantial paradise and naturally go together. In other words, he regards himself as normally on amiable terms with the natural authorities; not normally as quarrelling or bargaining with them. He has the ordinary selfish obstacles and misunderstandings; but he does not, in his heart, regard it as odd that his parents should be good to him, to the extent of an orange, or that he should be good to them, to the extent of some elementary experiments in good behaviour. He has no sense of being corrupted. It is only we, who have eaten the forbidden apple (or orange) who think of pleasure as a bribe.
My main purpose here, however, is to say this. To me my whole childhood has a certain quality, which may be indescribable but is not in the least vague. It is rather more definite than the difference between pitch dark and daylight, or between having a toothache and not having a toothache. For the sequel of the story, it is necessary to attempt this first and hardest chapter of the story: and I must try to state somehow what I mean by saying that my own childhood was of quite a different kind, or quality, from the rest of my very undeservedly pleasant and cheerful existence.
Of this positive quality the most general attribute was clearness. Here it is that I differ, for instance, from Stevenson, whom I so warmly admire; and who speaks of the child as moving with his head in a cloud. He talks of the child as normally in a dazed daydream, in which he cannot distinguish fancy from fact. Now children and adults are both fanciful at times; but that is not what, in my mind and memory, distinguishes adults from children. Mine is a memory of a sort of white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly, and rather emphasising their solidity. The point is that the white light had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself; but not that the world was anything but a real world. I am much more disposed now to fancy that an apple-tree in the moonlight is some sort of ghost or grey nymph; or to see the furniture fantastically changing and crawling at twilight, as in some story of Poe or Hawthorne. But when I was a child I had a sort of confident astonishment in contemplating the apple-tree as an apple-tree. I was sure of it, and also sure of the surprise of it; as sure, to quote the perfect popular proverb, as sure as God made little apples. The apples might be as little as I was; but they were solid and so was I. There was something of an eternal morning about the mood; and I liked to see a fire lit more than to imagine faces in the firelight. Brother Fire, whom St. Francis loved, did seem more like a brother than those dream-faces which come to men who have known other emotions than brotherhood. I do not know whether I ever, as the phrase goes, cried for the moon; but I am sure that I should have expected it to be solid like some colossal snowball; and should always have had more appetite for moons than for mere moonshine. Only figures of speech can faintly express the fact; but it was a fact and not a figure of speech. What I said first about the toy theatre may be urged in contradiction, and as an example of delight in a mere illusion.
In that case, what I said first about the toy theatre will be entirely misunderstood. In fact, there was in that business nothing of an illusion or of a disillusion. If this were a ruthless realistic modern story, I should of course give a most heartrendering account of how my spirit was broken with disappointment, on discovering that the prince was only a painted figure. But this is not a ruthless realistic modern story. On the contrary, it is a true story. And the truth is that I do not remember that I was in any way deceived or in any way undeceived. The whole point is that I did like the toy theatre even when I knew it was a toy theatre. I did like the cardboard figures, even when I found they were of cardboard. The white light of wonder that shone on the whole business was not any sort of trick; indeed the things that now shine most in my memory were many of them mere technical accessories; such as the parallel sticks of white wood that held the scenery in place; a white wood that is still strangely mixed in my imaginative instincts with all the holy trade of the Carpenter. It was the same with any number of other games or pretences in which I took delight; as in the puppet-show of Punch and Judy. I not only knew that the figures were made of wood, but I wanted them to be made of wood. I could not imagine such a resounding thwack being given except by a wooden stick on a wooden head. But I took the sort of pleasure that a primitive man might have taken in a primitive craft, in seeing that they were carved and painted into a startling and grimacing caricature of humanity. I was pleased that the piece of wood was a face; but I was also pleased that the face was a piece of wood. That did not mean that the drama of wood, like the other drama of cardboard, did not reveal to me real ideas and imaginations, and give me glorious glimpses into the possibilities of existence. Of course the child did not analyse himself then; and the man cannot analyse him now. But I am certain he was not merely tricked or trapped. He enjoyed the suggestive function of art exactly as an art critic enjoys it; only he enjoyed it a jolly sight more. For the same reason I do not think that I myself was ever very much worried about Santa Claus, or that alleged dreadful whisper of the little boy that Father Christmas “is only your father.” Perhaps the word “only” would strike all children as the mot juste.
My fixed idolatry of Punch and Judy illustrated the same fact and the same fallacy. I was not only grateful for the fun, but I came to feel grateful for the very fittings and apparatus of the fun; the four-cornered tower of canvas with the one square window at the top, and everything down to the minimum of conventional and obviously painted scenery. Yet these were the very things I ought to have torn and rent in rage, as the trappings of imposture, if I had really regarded the explanation as spoiling the experience. I was pleased, and not displeased, when I discovered that the magic figures could be moved by three human fingers. And I was right; for those three human fingers are more magical than any magic figures; the three fingers which hold the pen and the sword and the bow of the violin; the very three fingers that the priest lifts in benediction as the emblem of the Blessed Trinity. There was no conflict between the two magics in my mind.
I will here sum up in four statements, which will look very like puzzles upon this page. I can assure the reader that they have a relevance to the ultimate upshot of this book. Having littered the world with thousands of essays for a living, I am doubtless prone to let this story stray into a sort of essay; but I repeat that it is not an essay but a story. So much so, that I am here employing a sort of device from a detective story. In the first few pages of a police novel, there are often three or four hints rather to rouse curiosity than allay it; so that the curate’s start of recognition, the cockatoo’s scream in the night, the burnt blotting-paper or the hasty avoidance of the subject of onions is exhibited in the beginning though not explained until the end. So it is with the dull and difficult interlude of this chapter; a mere introspection about infancy which is not introspective. The patient reader may yet discover that these dark hints have something to do with the ensuing mystery of my misguided existence, and even with the crime that comes before the end. Anyhow, I will set them down here without discussion of anything which they foreshadow.
First; my life unfolded itself in the epoch of evolution; which really only means unfolding. But many of the evolutionists of that epoch really seemed to mean by evolution the unfolding of what is not there. I have since, in a special sense, come to believe in development, which means the unfolding of what is there. Now it may seem both a daring and a doubtful boast, if I claim that in my childhood I was all there. At least, many of those who knew me best were quite doubtful about it. But I mean that the distinctions I make here were all there; I was not conscious of them but I contained them. In short, they existed in infancy in the condition called implicit; though they certainly did not then express themselves in what is commonly called implicit obedience.
Second; I knew, for instance, that pretending is not deceiving. I could not have defined the distinction if it had been questioned; but that was because it had never occurred to me that it could be questioned. It was merely because a child understands the nature of art, long before he understands the nature of argument. Now it is still not uncommon to say that images are idols and that idols are dolls. I am content to say here that even dolls are not idols, but in the true sense images. The very word images means things necessary to imagination. But not things contrary to reason; no, not even in a child. For imagination is almost the opposite of illusion.
Third; I have noted that I enjoyed Punch and Judy as a drama and not a dream; and indeed the whole extraordinary state of mind I strive to recapture was really the very reverse of a dream. It was rather as if I was more wide-awake then than I am now, and moving in broader daylight, which was to our broad daylight what daylight is to dusk. Only, of course, to those seeing the last gleam of it through the dusk, the light looks more uncanny than any darkness. Anyhow, it looks quite different; of that I am absolutely and solidly certain; though in such a subjective matter of sensation there can be no demonstration. What was the real meaning of that difference? I have some sort of notion now; but I will not mention it at this stage of the story.
Fourth; it will be quite natural, it will also be quite wrong, to infer from all this that I passed a quite exceptionally comfortable childhood in complete contentment; or else that my memory is merely a sundial that has only marked the sunny hours. But that is not in the least what I mean; that is quite a different question. I was often unhappy in childhood like other children; but happiness and unhappiness seemed of a different texture or held on a different tenure. I was very often naughty in childhood like other children; and I never doubted for a moment the moral of all the moral tales; that, as a general principle, people ought to be unhappy when they have been naughty. That is, I held the whole idea of repentance and absolution implicit but not unfolded in my mind. To add to all this, I was by no means unacquainted with pain, which is a pretty unanswerable thing; I had a fair amount of toothache and especially earache; and few can bemuse themselves into regarding earache as a form of epicurean hedonism. But here again there is a difference. For some unaccountable reason, and in some indescribable way, the pain did not leave on my memory the sort of stain of the intolerable or mysterious that it leaves on the mature mind. To all these four facts I can testify; exactly as if they were facts like my loving a toy gun or climbing a tree. Their meaning, in the murder or other mystery, will appear later.
For I fear I have prolonged preposterously this note on the nursery; as if I had been an unconscionable time, not dying but being born, or at least being brought up. Well, I believe in prolonging childhood; and I am not sorry that I was a backward child. But I can only say that this nursery note is necessary if all the rest is to be anything but nonsense; and not even nursery nonsense. In the chapters that follow, I shall pass to what are called real happenings, though they are far less real. Without giving myself any airs of the adventurer or the globe-trotter, I may say I have seen something of the world; I have travelled in interesting places and talked to interesting men; I have been in political quarrels often turning into faction fights; I have talked to statesmen in the hour of the destiny of states; I have met most of the great poets and prose writers of my time; I have travelled in the track of some of the whirlwinds and earthquakes in the ends of the earth; I have lived in houses burned down in the tragic wars of Ireland; I have walked through the ruins of Polish palaces left behind by the Red Armies; I have heard talk of the secret signals of the Ku Klux Klan upon the borders of Texas; I have seen the fanatical Arabs come up from the desert to attack the Jews in Jerusalem. There are many journalists who have seen more of such things than I; but I have been a journalist and I have seen such things; there will be no difficulty in filling other chapters with such things; but they will be unmeaning, if nobody understands that they still mean less to me than Punch and Judy on Campden Hill.
In a word; I have never lost the sense that this was my real life; the real beginning of what should have been a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living. It seems to me that when I came out of the house and stood on that hill of houses, where the roads sank steeply towards Holland Park, and terraces of new red houses could look out across a vast hollow and see far away the sparkle of the Crystal Palace (and seeing it was a juvenile sport in those parts), I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes astray from it in self-deception. It is only the grown man who lives a life of make-believe and pretending; and it is he who has his head in a cloud.
At this time, of course, I did not even know that this morning light could be lost; still less about any controversies as to whether it could be recovered. So far the disputes of that period passed over my head like storms high up in air; and as I did not foresee the problem I naturally did not foresee any of my searches for a solution. I simply looked at the procession in the street as I looked at the processions in the toy-theatre; and now and then I happened to see curious things, two-pence coloured rather than a penny plain, which were worthy of the wildest pageants of the toy-theatre. I remember once walking with my father along Kensington High Street, and seeing a crowd of people gathered by a rather dark and narrow entry on the southern side of that thoroughfare. I had seen crowds before; and was quite prepared for their shouting or shoving. But I was not prepared for what happened next. In a flash a sort of ripple ran along the line and all these eccentrics went down on their knees on the public pavement. I had never seen people play any such antics except in church; and I stopped and stared. Then I realised that a sort of little dark cab or carriage had drawn up opposite the entry; and out of it came a ghost clad in flames. Nothing in the shilling paint-box had ever spread such a conflagration of scarlet, such lakes of lake; or seemed so splendidly likely to incarnadine the multitudinous sea. He came on with all his glowing draperies like a great crimson cloud of sunset, lifting long frail fingers over the crowd in blessing. And then I looked at his face and was startled with a contrast; for his face was dead pale like ivory and very wrinkled and old, fitted together out of naked nerve and bone and sinew; with hollow eyes in shadow; but not ugly; having in every line the ruin of great beauty. The face was so extraordinary that for a moment I even forgot such perfectly scrumptious scarlet clothes.
We passed on; and then my father said, “Do you know who that was? That was Cardinal Manning.”
Then one of his artistic hobbies returned to his abstracted and humorous mind; and he said,
“He’d have made his fortune as a model.”
III
HOW TO BE A DUNCE
The change from childhood to boyhood, and the mysterious transformation that produces that monster the schoolboy, might be very well summed up in one small fact. To me the ancient capital letters of the Greek alphabet, the great Theta, a sphere barred across the midst like Saturn, or the great Upsilon, standing up like a tall curved chalice, have still a quite unaccountable charm and mystery, as if they were the characters traced in wide welcome over Eden of the dawn. The ordinary small Greek letters, though I am now much more familiar with them, seem to me quite nasty little things like a swarm of gnats. As for Greek accents, I triumphantly succeeded, through a long series of school-terms, in avoiding learning them at all; and I never had a higher moment of gratification than when I afterwards discovered that the Greeks never learnt them either. I felt, with a radiant pride, that I was as ignorant as Plato and Thucydides. At least they were unknown to the Greeks who wrote the prose and poetry that was thought worth studying; and were invented by grammarians, I believe, at the time of the Renaissance. But it is a simple psychological fact; that the sight of a Greek capital still fills me with happiness, the sight of a small letter with indifference tinged with dislike, and the accents with righteous indignation reaching the point of profanity. And I believe that the explanation is that I learnt the large Greek letters, as I learnt the large English letters, at home. I was told about them merely for fun while I was still a child; while the others I learnt during the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know.
But I say this merely to show that I was a much wiser and widerminded person at the age of six than at the age of sixteen. I do not base any educational theories upon it, heaven forbid. This work cannot, on some points, avoid being theoretical; but it need not add insult to injury by being educational. I certainly shall not, in the graceful modern manner, turn round and abuse my schoolmasters because I did not choose to learn what they were quite ready to teach. It may be that in the improved schools of today, the child is so taught that he crows aloud with delight at the sight of a Greek accent. But I fear it is much more probable that the new schools have got rid of the Greek accent by getting rid of the Greek. And upon that point, as it happens, I am largely on the side of my schoolmasters against myself. I am very glad that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were to a certain extent frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes. At least I know enough Greek to be able to see the joke, when somebody says (as somebody did the other day) that the study of that language is not suited to an age of democracy. I do not know what language he thought democracy came from; and it must be admitted that the word seems now to be a part of the language called journalese. But my only point for the moment is personal or psychological; my own private testimony to the curious fact that, for some reason or other, a boy often does pass, from an early stage when he wants to know nearly everything, to a later stage when he wants to know next to nothing. A very practical and experienced traveller, with nothing of the mystic about him, once remarked to me suddenly: “There must be something rottenly wrong with education itself. So many people have wonderful children and all the grown-up people are such duds.” And I know what he meant; though I am in doubt whether my present duddishness is due to education, or to some deeper and more mysterious cause.
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy. There grows all over what was once the child a sort of prickly protection like hair; a callousness, a carelessness, a curious combination of random and quite objectless energy with a readiness to accept conventions. I have blindly begun a lark which involved carrying on literally like a lunatic; and known all the time that I did not know why I was doing it. When I first met my best friend in the playground, I fought with him wildly for three-quarters of an hour; not scientifically and certainly not vindictively (I had never seen him before and I have been very fond of him ever since) but by a sort of inexhaustible and insatiable impulse, rushing hither and thither about the field and rolling over and over in the mud. And all the time I believe that both our minds were entirely mild and reasonable; and when we desisted from sheer exhaustion, and he happened to quote Dickens or the Bab Ballads, or something I had read, we plunged into a friendly discussion on literature which has gone on, intermittently, from that day to this. There is no explaining these things; if those who have done them cannot explain them. But since then I have seen boys in many countries and even of many colours; Egyptian boys in the bazaars of Cairo or mulatto boys in the slums of New York. And I have found that by some primordial law they all tend to three things; to going about in threes; to having no apparent object in going about at all; and, almost invariably speaking, to suddenly attacking each other and equally suddenly desisting from the attack.
Some may still question my calling this conduct conventional, from a general impression that two bankers or business partners do not commonly roll each other head-over-heels for fun, or in a spirit of pure friendship. It might be retorted that two business partners are not always by any means such pure friends. But in any case, it is true to call the thing a convention in more than the verbal sense of a collision. And it is exactly this convention that really separates the schoolboy from the child. When I went to St. Paul’s School, in Hammersmith, there really was a sort of convention of independence; which was in a certain degree a false independence; because it was a false maturity. Here we must remember once more the fallacy about “pretending” in childhood. The child does not really pretend to be a Red Indian; any more than Shelley pretended to be a cloud or Tennyson to be a brook. The point can be tested by offering a political pamphlet to the cloud, a peerage to the brook, or a penny for sweets to the Red Bull of the Prairies. But the boy really is pretending to be a man; or even a man of the world; which would seem a far more horrific metamorphosis. Schoolboys in my time could be blasted with the horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a Christian name. And the deadly nature of this blow really consisted in the fact that it cracked the whole convention of our lives; the convention that each of us was on his own; an independent gentleman living on private means. The secret that each of us did in fact possess a family, and parents who paid for our support, was conventionally ignored and only revealed in moments of maddened revenge. But the point is that there was already a faint touch of corruption in this convention; precisely because it was more serious and less frank than the tarra-diddles of infancy. We had begun to be what no children are—snobs. Children disinfect all their dramatic impersonations by saying “Let us pretend.” We schoolboys never said “Let us pretend”; we only pretended.
Boys, I have said, wander in threes. Three is certainly the symbolic number for comradeship, even if it is not always exactly the same as friendship. I have had the good luck to enjoy both, as did the Three Musketeers, or the Three Soldiers of Mr. Kipling. The first of my friends, with whom I fought in the field, has since written the best detective story of modern times and still conceals a very powerful sense of humour under the almost impenetrable disguise of a writer on the Daily Telegraph. He was, and indeed still is, remarkable for the combination of an extraordinary gravity of visage with extreme agility and quickness of movement. I used to say that he had the head of a professor on the body of a harlequin. It was a poetic pleasure to see him walk, a little pompously, down the street and suddenly scale a lamp-post like a monkey, with the alleged intention of lighting a cigarette, and then drop down and resume his walk with an unchanged expression of earnestness and serenity. He had extraordinarily well-balanced brains and could do almost anything with them; even writing an ordinary leading article for a London daily. But he could write clear and unadulterated nonsense with the same serious simplicity. It was he who invented that severe and stately form of Free Verse which has since been known by his own second name as “the Clerihew” (his name is Edward Clerihew Bentley) or “Biography for Beginners”; which dates from our days at school, when he sat listening to a chemical exposition, with his rather bored air and blank sheet of blotting paper before him. On this he wrote, inspired by the limpid spirit of song, the unadorned lines,
Sir Humphrey Davy Detested gravy. He incurred the odium Of discovering sodium.
Even in those days I used to draw pictures, or what were called pictures, to illustrate these biographical rhymes; though of course it was not till decades afterwards that we either of us had the notion of publishing a book, or of publishing anything. Long after we had both become incurable scribblers, we remained inconspicuous schoolboys; we never thought we could be anything else; I do not think we very clearly realised that we ever should be anything else; or that our schoolboy days would ever end. In that sense we were as unambitious as children whispering a secret language. Our jokes were all domestic or developed out of the daily affairs of the school; but they covered enough waste paper to stock a library. I remember an interminable romance, for which I was always drawing pictures, and which I still think had a touch of wild fancy. It arose merely from our walking behind three of the masters; two of them, who were young and tall, had between them a third, who was old and very small; so that there seemed a vague suggestion that they were supporting him. On this was based the great constructive theory that the elder master (who was one of the most important persons in the school) was in fact only a clock-work figure, which they carried about with them and wound up to go through his daily round. The dummy and the two conspirators were dragged through an endless reel of long-drawn (and badly drawn) adventures, some scraps of which must still be kicking about the world somewhere. But needless to say, we never thought of doing anything with them, except enjoying them. It has sometimes struck me as not being a bad thing to do with things.
My friend Bentley, indeed, had and has a natural talent for these elaborate strategic maps of nonsense, or the suggestion of such preposterous plots. It is something like the industry which accompanies the fantasy of Father Ronald Knox, when he makes a detailed map of the Barsetshire of Trollope or works out an incredible cryptogram to show that Queen Victoria wrote “In Memoriam.” I remember one day when the whole school assembled for a presentation to a master who was leaving us to take up a fellowship at Peterhouse. The congratulatory speech was made by one of the upper masters who happened to be a learned but heavy and very solemn old gentleman, whose manner and diction were alike ponderous and prosaic. My friend and I were sitting side by side, hopeless of any enlivenment except from the speaker’s solemnity; when the whole assembly was startled as by a thunderclap. The old gentleman had made a joke. What was even more shocking, it was quite a good joke. He remarked that, in sending our friend from this school to that college, we were robbing Paul to pay Peter. We looked at each other with a wild surmise. We shook our heads gravely. It could not be explained. But Bentley afterwards produced a most convincing and exhaustive explanation. He insisted that the elder schoolmaster had devoted his whole life to planning and preparations for that one joke. He had used his interest with the High Master to obtain for the junior master a place on the staff. He had intrigued with the University authorities to get him a Fellowship at that college. He had lived for that hour. He had now made his first and last joke; and probably would soon pass away in peace.
It was the third member of our original trio who brought into our secrets the breath of ambition and the air out of the great world. He was a dark and very thin youth, named Lucian Oldershaw, who looked and in some ways was very sensitive; but about those larger matters he was much less shy than we were. He was the son of an actor and had travelled about the country more than the rest of us; he had been to other schools and he knew much more of the variety of life. Above all, there possessed him, almost feverishly, a vast, amazing and devastating idea, the idea of doing something; of doing something in the manner of grown-up people, who were the only people who could be conceived as doing things. I well remember how my hair stood on end, when he first spoke casually about the official School Magazine; which was to me something like the School Prayers or the School Foundation. None of us had ever dreamed of contributing to it, any more than to the Encyclopedia Britannica. And my new friend, who was somewhat younger than I, spoke lightly about an old idea he had had of establishing some cooperation between all the great school magazines, those of Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the rest. If he had proposed that we should conquer and rule the British Empire, I could not have been more staggered; but he dismissed it as casually as he had called it up, and then proposed in cold blood that we should publish a magazine of our own; and have it printed at a real printer’s. He must have possessed considerable persuasive powers; because we actually did. We also founded a small society of boys of our own age, and called it the Junior Debating Club; though nobody, so far as I know, has ever heard of the Senior Debating Club. There was the Union, to which you belonged when you were in the top form, as you did other lawful and appalling things, such as dining with the High Master. But we no more anticipated that at our age, than we anticipated death.
Our debates are still recorded in stray volumes of our strange little paper; the persons of the play being mysteriously represented by their initials, as if they were members of a secret society in a sensational novel; as “Mr. B. emphatically disputed the last speaker’s statement,” or “These remarks provoked an indignant protest from Mr. C.” This and other deadly fascinations render these old volumes the favourite reading of my friend, Mr. Edward Fordham, who was himself a member of the club and delighted in decorating its chronicle with the most magnificent and florid journalese, and in making game in it of himself and others. He is still, I believe, especially attached to a passage in the reports which states, of one of the little boys who formed this society, “Mr. L.D. briefly described the Governments of France, America, Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain.” Sometimes, however, Fordham’s own burlesque rhetoric recoiled on his own head. He described one of the innumerable riots of our tea-table by writing, “A penny bun of the sticky order caressingly stung the chairman’s honoured cheek, sped on its errand of mercy by the unerring hand of Mr. F.” I may remark that I was the chairman; and I was generally honoured in that way. But the printer avenged me; for he rendered the missile as “A peony but of the stick order”; a most suggestive botanical formula. It was the beginning of a long career of martyrdom from misprints; which reached its crown when I wrote of a Nonconformist minister, “a distinguished correspondent,” and it came out as, “a distinguished co-respondent.”
Our debating club was actually founded and did actually debate, if it can be called debating. This part of the matter did not alarm me much; for I had debated off and on ever since I was born; certainly with my brother, probably with my nurse. But, what was infinitely more bloodcurdling, our paper did actually appear in print; and I contributed to it turgid poems, in which bad imitations of Swinburne were so exactly balanced with worse imitations of the Lays of Ancient Rome, that many of my simpler friends fell under the illusion that I had a style of my own. I have never read those verses since; there are limits to the degradation and despair which even autobiography demands. But I must admit that, for whatever reason, they attracted a certain amount of attention; and our experiment began to float to the surface of the school life and come within range of official attention, which was the last thing I had ever desired. It is only right to say that the magazine contained probably better, and certainly better educated, poetry than mine. Among the small group of twelve that formed our society was Robert Vernede, who also imitated Swinburne, but who was capable of appreciating how well Swinburne imitated the Greek poets. It is melancholy and amusing to reflect that of all those eager Swinburnian echoes, I can only remember an echo of parody; in which the style of Vernède’s first choruses, a la Atalanta, were rendered by Bentley in the form of a farewell to him when he departed from the tea-table:
Let the milk that was poured Be the draught of the cat, For from under the board From the seat where he sat The feet of his boots are departed; he has widowed the hall of his hat.
Vernède and Bentley were very intimate; and had something in common in their union of immobility and activity; but the immobility of Vernède was not dry and earnest like the other; but somnolent and oriental, like that of a Buddha, or (as his early friends were more prone to inform him) of a cat. He had that oval, almost Japanese face that can be seen in some of the Southern French blood of which he came. He lived to be a fine and promising poet and to write, on the outbreak of the fighting, a noble invocation to the English Sea, which multitudes must still remember. But his full promise as a poet he did not keep; because he kept a better one, and is dead on the field of honour.
For the rest, it is very typical of the difference between the two or three types that the work of E. C. B., my first and in every sense original friend, was the only work in the whole paper which might have been published by the same person fifteen years afterwards. Whatever the other relative merits of our minds, his was by far the most mature; perhaps for the very reason that it largely confined itself to being critical or flippant. Anyhow, the nonsense fables that he wrote for the paper would have made excellent paragraphs in any real paper. There was nothing particularly juvenile about them and, of all men I have known, he is the man whose mind has least changed, has least lost its balance and, above all, had least of the first youthful blunders in finding its balance. He had also, as I have said, a sort of calm versatility; he could carry out other people’s plans and improve them; he could, as the phrase goes, turn his hand to anything. On this absurd little rag of a school paper, the original three wrote letters in rotation, in three imaginary characters; and I think his were the best. Twenty years later, when Belloc and I started a scheme of Ballades for the Eye Witness, Bentley was brought in afterwards, in the same fashion; and I think his were the best. But he was at this time and perhaps for long after, too detached and ironic to become conspicuous in connection with a cause, or any of the things in which youth is generally both communal and combative. When some of us were pretending to be Knights of the Round Table, he was content to be Dagonet the fool, or in other words, the wise man. And it was in the character of a portentously solemn buffoon that he began to draw the attention of the elders. When the old High Master of St. Paul’s School ran his eye through a version of the Dog in the Manger, which described the cattle as being prevented “from refreshing their inner cows” he went into unearthly convulsions of his own extraordinary laughter which, like the other movements of his extraordinary voice, began like an organ and ended like a penny whistle. “That boy looks at the world standing on his head,” said the High Master of St. Paul’s School; and instantly we were in the full blaze of the spot-light.
It is time that something should be said about the masters, and especially the High Master. Immensely important as we thought ourselves in comparison with those remote but respectable enemies, after all they did have something to do with the school. The most eccentric and entertaining of them, Mr. Elam, has already been sketched in brilliant black and white by the pen of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. I have forgotten whether Mr. Mackenzie mentioned what always struck me as the most disturbing eccentricity of that eccentric; the open derision with which he spoke of his own profession and position, of those who shared it with him and even of those who were set over him in its exercise. He would explain the difference between satire and the bitterness of the risus sardonicus by the helpful parable, “If I were walking along the street and fell down in the mud, I should laugh a sardonic laugh. But if I were to see the High Master of this school fall down in the mud, I should laugh a sarcastic laugh.” I chiefly mention his name here for another reason; because he once vented his scorn for what he called “the trade of an usher” in the form of a rhetorical question addressed to a boy: “Why are boys sent to school, Robinson?” Robinson, with downcast eyes and an air of offensive virtue, replied faintly, “To learn, sir.” “No, boy, no,” said the old gentleman wagging his head. “It was because one day at breakfast Mr. Robinson said to Mrs. Robinson, ‘My dear, we must do something about that boy. He’s a nuisance to me and he’s a nuisance to you and he’s a perfect plague to the servants.’” Then, with an indescribable extreme of grinding and grating contempt: “‘So we’ll Pay Some Man… .’”
I say I introduce this ancient anecdote for another reason; and it is partly because I would suggest another answer. If ever the problem troubled me in my boyhood, it did not force me in the direction of the lofty morality of Robinson. The idea that I had come to school to work was too grotesque to cloud my mind for an instant. It was also in too obvious a contrast with the facts and the result. I was very fond of my friends; though, as is common at such an age, I was much too fond of them to be openly emotional about it. But I do remember coming, almost seriously, to the conclusion that a boy must go to school to study the characters of his schoolmasters. And I still think that there was something in it. After all, the schoolmaster is the first educated grown-up person that the boy comes to see constantly, after having been introduced at an early age to his father and mother. And the masters at St. Paul’s were very interesting; even those of them who were not so obviously eccentric as the celebrated Mr. Elam. To one very distinguished individual, my own personal debt is infinite; I mean, the historian of the Indian Mutiny and of the campaigns of Caesar—Mr. T. Rice Holmes. He managed, heaven knows how, to penetrate through my deep and desperately consolidated desire to appear stupid; and discover the horrible secret that I was, after all, endowed with the gift of reason above the brutes. He would suddenly ask me questions a thousand miles away from the subject at hand, and surprise me into admitting that I had heard of the Song of Roland, or even read a play or two of Shakespeare. Nobody who knows anything of the English schoolboy at that date will imagine that there was at the moment any pleasure in such prominence or distinction. We were all hag-ridden with a horror of showing off, which was perhaps the only coherent moral principal we possessed. There was one boy, I remember, who was so insanely sensitive on this point of honour, that he could hardly bear to hear one of his friends answer an ordinary question right. He felt that his comrade really ought to have invented some mistake, in the general interest of comradeship. When my information about the French epic was torn from me, in spite of my efforts, he actually put his head in his desk and dropped the lid on it, groaning in a generous and impersonal shame and faintly and hoarsely exclaiming, “Oh, shut it. … Oh, shut up!” He was an extreme exponent of the principle; but it was a principle which I fully shared. I can remember running to school in sheer excitement repeating militant lines of “Marmion” with passionate emphasis and exultation; and then going into class and repeating the same lines in the lifeless manner of a hurdy-gurdy, hoping that there was nothing whatever in my intonation to indicate that I distinguished between the sense of one word and another.
Nobody, I think, ever got past my guard in this matter except Mr. T. R. Holmes and Mr. R. F. Cholmeley, who afterwards became the house-master of my two intimate friends, and who, I am glad to say, has often joined us in later years in our reunions of remembrance. But, somehow or other, a rumour must have begun to circulate among the authorities that we were not such fools as we looked. One day, to my consternation, the High Master stopped me in the street and led me along, roaring in my deafened and bewildered ears that I had a literary faculty which might come to something if somebody could give it solidity. Some time after that, to my cowering terror, he bellowed aloud to a whole crowd of parents and other preposterous intruders, on the occasion of a prize day, that our little magazine showed signs of considerable talent, though it was an unofficial publication on which he “might have hesitated to set his Imprimatur”. Somehow we felt it would have been even more crushing if he had set his Imprimatur. It sounded like the thumb of a giant.
Frederick Walker, Head Master of Manchester and afterwards High Master of St. Paul’s School, was, as most people know by this time, a very remarkable man. He was the sort of man who may live in anecdotes, like Dr. Johnson; indeed in some respects he was not unlike Dr. Johnson. He was like him in the startling volume of his voice, in his heavy face and figure, and in a certain tendency to explode at what did not seem to be exactly the appropriate moment; he would talk with perfect good humour and rationality and rend the roof over what seemed a trifle. In essential matters, however, his hard-hitting was generally quite right; and had even about it a homely and popular character, that somehow smacked of the north country. It is he of whom the famous tale is told that, when a fastidious lady wrote to ask him what was the social standing of the boys at his school, he replied, “Madam, so long as your son behaves himself and the fees are paid, no questions will be asked about his social standing.”
One day I was frozen with astonishment to find my name in an announcement on the notice-board, saying that I was to be accorded the privileges of the highest form, though I did not belong to it. It produced in me a desire to be accorded the privileges and protection of the coal-cellar and never to come out again. At the same time I learned that a special branch of the highest form had actually been created for my two principal friends, in order that they might study for History Scholarships at the Universities. All this seemed like the very universe breaking up and turning topsy-turvy; and indeed all sorts of things happened about this time that seemed to be quite outside the laws of nature. I got a prize, for instance; what was called the Milton Prize for what was called a prize poem; I imagine it was about as bad as all other prize poems, but I am happy to say that I cannot recall a single syllable of it. I do, however recall the subject, not without a faint thrill of irony; for the subject was St. Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit who preached to the Chinese. I recall these things, so contrary to the previous course of my school life, because I am not sorry to be an exception to the modern tendency to reproach the old Victorian schoolmaster with stupidity and neglect and to represent the rising generation as a shining band of Shelleys inspired by light and liberty to rise. The truth is that in this case it was I who exhibited the stupidity; though I really think it was largely an affected stupidity. And certainly it was I who rejoiced in the neglect, and who asked for nothing better than to be neglected. It was, if anything, the authorities who dragged me, in my own despite, out of the comfortable and protected atmosphere of obscurity and failure. Personally, I was perfectly happy at the bottom of the class.
For the rest, I think the chief impression I produced, on most of the masters and many of the boys, was a pretty well-founded conviction that I was asleep. Perhaps what nobody knew, not even myself, was that I was asleep and dreaming. The dreams were not much more sensible or valuable than they commonly are in persons in such profound slumber; but they already had this obscure effect on my existence; that my mind was already occupied, though I myself was idle. Before forming the few special friendships of which I speak, I was somewhat solitary; not sharply unpopular or in any sense persecuted, but solitary. But though I was solitary, I was not sorry; and I think I can claim that I was not sulky. One effect of this was that my first acquaintances, as distinct from my ultimate friends, were odd and scrappy sort of people like myself. These individuals were accidents; one or two of them I fear were disasters. I remember one youth who made one appearance in my daily life, that puzzled me like a detective story. I cannot imagine how I came to cultivate his society; still less how he came to cultivate mine. For he was a brilliant mathematician, and must presumably have worked hard at mathematics; whereas I worked less at mathematics, if possible, than at anything else. Moreover, I was very untidy and he was very tidy, with a large clean collar and an Eton jacket, also a large head very neatly brushed but something odd and perhaps too mature about his froglike face. One day he asked me whether I could lend him a Hall & Knight’s Algebra. So far as enthusiasm for that study was concerned I could answer, “Thy need is greater than mine,” with all the gesture of Sir Philip Sidney; but I had to observe some minimum of attention to the mathematical class; so in lending him the book, I told him I should want it back some time next week. As the time approached, I was much mystified by the fact that I found it quite difficult to get it back. He gave evasive replies; he interposed postponements and hazy promises; till at last I quarrelled with him, using the words of action which are really commoner among schoolboys as words than as actions; but anyhow indicating that I should make an earnest effort to punch his head. To this threat, he ultimately capitulated; and eventually led me to his locker, which he reluctantly opened. And his locker was stuffed from top to bottom with about twenty-five identical copies of Hall & Knight’s Algebra, which he had presumably collected by similar arts from similar acquaintances. I believe he left the school later, without any particular scandal; and I hope the poor fellow recovered his mental balance somewhere else. I write in no superior spirit; I was quite capable myself at many early stages of going mad in a quiet way; but not by an exaggerated appetite for Hall & Knight’s Algebra.
There was another little boy with whom I walked to school in the same fortuitous fellowship; a very prim and proper little boy, as became the son of the venerable and somewhat ponderous clergyman who held one of the highest scholastic posts in the school. He also was very neat, he also was quite an industrious pupil; and he also had a peculiarity. He was the most fertile, fluent and really disinterested liar I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. There was nothing base or materialistic about his mendacity; he was not trying to cheat anybody or to get anything; he simply boasted like Baron Munchausen in quiet and even tones all the way from Holland Park to Hammersmith. He told the most staggering stories about himself, without lifting his voice or showing the faintest embarrassment; and there was nothing else notable about him at all. I have often wondered what became of him; and whether he followed his father into the Church. It may be retorted by the light-minded, that he may have fallen so low as to write stories, even crime stories, like myself; which some regard as almost tantamount to joining the criminal classes. But I do not believe any of his stories would be probable enough for fiction.
Perhaps the same chapter of accidents, that threw me first in the way of these human curiosities, was responsible for another social accident, of which I am very glad; for it led to my seeing both sides of a very difficult social question; about which a great deal of nonsense is talked on both sides; and the worst nonsense of all by those who talk as if there were no question at all. It must be explained that St. Paul’s School, in schoolboy language, was more than most others a school of “swots.” I need hardly clear myself of the charge of swottishness; and, of course, there were many lazy boys, and some almost as lazy as I. But the diligent type was in a larger proportion than is usual; for the school was chiefly celebrated for winning scholarships at the Universities, rather than for athletics or other forms of fame. And there was another reason why this particular type was conspicuous. To put the point in popular language, there were a great many swots partly because there were a great many Jews.
Oddly enough, I lived to have later on the name of an Anti-Semite; whereas from my first days at school I very largely had the name of a Pro-Semite. I made many friends among the Jews, and some of these I have retained as life-long friends; nor have our relations ever been disturbed by differences upon the political or social problem. I am glad that I began at this end; but I have not really ended any differently from the way in which I began. I held by instinct then, and I hold by knowledge now, that the right way is to be interested in Jews as Jews; and then to bring into greater prominence the very much neglected Jewish virtues, which are the complement and sometimes even the cause of what the world feels to be the Jewish faults. For instance, one of the great Jewish virtues is gratitude. I was criticised in early days for quixotry and priggishness in protecting Jews; and I remember once extricating a strange swarthy little creature with a hooked nose from being bullied, or rather being teased; for the worst torture really consisted of his being lightly tossed from one boy to another amid wild stares of wide-eyed scientific curiosity and questions like, “What is it?” and “Is it alive?” Thirty years afterwards, when that little goblin was a great grown bearded man, utterly remote from me in type and trade and interests and opinions, he had a sort of permanent fountain of thanks for that trifling incident, which was quite embarrassing. In the same way, I noted that strong family bond among the Jews which, as I recognized, was not merely disguised but denied among most normal schoolboys. Doubtless, I came to know the Jews because in this sense they were a little abnormal, as I was then becoming a little abnormal myself. Yet there is nothing I have come to count more normal, and nothing I desire more to restore to its normal place, than those two things; the family and the theory of thanks. And then, in the light of these virtues as seen from within, it was often possible to understand the origin and even the justification of much of the Anti-Semitic criticism from without. For it is often the very loyalty of the Jewish family which appears as disloyalty to the Christian state. As the reader will realise before the end, it was partly what I admired in private friends, especially in two brothers named Solomon, which I came ultimately to denounce in political enemies, in two brothers named Isaacs. The first were good by every standard, the second vulnerable even by their own standard: and yet they had the same virtue.
I am not at all ashamed of having asked Aryans to have more patience with Jews or for having asked Anglo-Saxons to have more patience with Jew-baiters. The whole problem of the two entangled cultures and traditions is much too deep and difficult, on both sides, to be decided impatiently. But I have very little patience with those who will not solve the problem, on the ground that there is no problem to solve. I cannot explain the Jews; but I certainly will not explain them away. Nor have the Jews a worse enemy than the sort of Jew sceptic who sometimes tries to explain himself away. I have seen a whole book full of alternative theories of the particular historic cause of such a delusion about a difference; that it came from mediaeval priests or was burnt into us by the Inquisition; that it was a tribal theory arising out of Teutonism; that it was revolutionary envy of the few Jews who happened to be the big bankers of Capitalism; that it was Capitalist resistance to the few Jews who happened to be the chief founders of Communism. All these separate theories are false in separate ways; as in forgetting that mediaeval heresy hunts spared Jews more and not less than Christians; or that Capitalism and Communism are so very nearly the same thing, in ethical essence, that it would not be strange if they did take leaders from the same ethnological elements. But broadly, the evasions are contrary to common sense; as they were contrary even to the common sense of a boy of thirteen. I do not believe that a crowd on a race-course is poisoned by mediaeval theology; or the navvies in a Mile End pub misled by the ethnology of Gobineau or Max Müller; nor do I believe that a mob of little boys fresh from the cricket-field or the tuckshop were troubled about Marxian economics or international finance. Yet all these people recognise Jews as Jews when they see them; and the schoolboys recognised them, not with any great hostility except in patches; but with the integration of instinct. What they saw was not Semites or Schismatics or capitalists or revolutionists, but foreigners; only foreigners that were not called foreigners. This did not prevent friendship and affection, especially in my own case; but then it never has prevented it in the case of ordinary foreigners. One of these early friends of mine, now Professor of Latin at University College, happened to have all the Jewish virtues, and also all the others there are; he afterwards became a member of the little club already described; and passed through Oxford with distinction; probably greater distinction than my other friends.
Most of the members of our little club, however, thus passed on to the older Universities and were promising figures either on the academic or social and political side; two of them being Presidents of the Oxford and two of the Cambridge Union. Oldershaw, characteristically enough, was almost instantly found immersed and entangled in the establishment of yet another unofficial paper, called the J.C.R., in which were not a few memorable curiosities of literature; including the first work of a pen then unknown to me, but recognisable enough now in lines like, “We slumbered on the firelit ground beside the guns in Burgundy.” Bentley, on being requested by a poetical lady to write something suitable to Wordsworth’s Seat, did not relax his rigid flippancy and composed the simple lines that end:
It seems a pity certainly That two such men as we By such a trifle as the Grave Should separated be. ‘Twas ever thus; we might have had A pleasant afternoon, But Man is always born too late Or else he dies too soon.
while Lawrence Solomon, the learned Jewish friend of whom I have spoken, wrote about the best of the parodies of FitzGerald’s Omar, then a fashionable theme, warning undergraduates not to expect a Blue or a First: “For these were not for me; how should they be for you?” As a fact, I think he did get a First; but all of them must have lived to realise the further moral:
For them that win and them that lose the game For you, for me, the ending is the same, To climb the stairs to our old College room Look o’er the door; and see another’s name.
There seemed a general tendency of these schoolfellows of mine to excel in light verse; Fordham, who went to Cambridge, has written many satiric lyrics which have been published and many satiric dramas which ought to be published. If I wind up here some of the stories of my old friends, it is not because I dismiss them from my memories, but because I must admit a multitude of much less interesting people into my memoirs. One contrast in their subsequent careers has always struck me as a curious case of the incalculable individuality and freewill of man. A friend of Fordham, normal, virile and ambitious, popular rather in the sense of fashionable, always struck me as the sort of man who could wear a uniform in camp or court, serving the obvious virtues. When the Great War came, he became an uncompromising and unconventional Pacifist agitator. Another, a friend of Vernède, one of those rare spiritual types in which a Puritan tradition has really flowered into a full Hellenic culture, is the most unselfish man I ever knew in my life, of the sort that is still unsatisfied even with its own unselfishness. I should say he was something rather like a saint; but I should never have been surprised if he had been a Conscientious Objector. As a fact, he went to the Front in a flash like fire; and had his leg shot off in his first battle.
But all this time very queer things were groping and wrestling inside my own undeveloped mind; and I have said nothing of them in this chapter; for it was the sustained and successful effort of most of my school life to keep them to myself. I said farewell to my friends when they went up to Oxford and Cambridge; while I, who was at that time almost wholly taken up with the idea of drawing pictures, went to an Art School and brought my boyhood to an end.
IV
HOW TO BE A LUNATIC
I deal here with the darkest and most difficult part of my task; the period of youth which is full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of Sin. And before I deal with it in any detail, it is necessary to make a prefatory explanation upon one point. In the matter of religion, I have been much concerned with controversies about rather provocative problems; and have finally adopted a position which to many is itself a provocation. I have grieved my well-wishers, and many of the wise and prudent, by my reckless course in becoming a Christian, an orthodox Christian, and finally a Catholic in the sense of a Roman Catholic. Now in most of the matters of which they chiefly disapprove, I am not in the least ashamed of myself. As an apologist I am the reverse of apologetic. So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated. I am very proud of what people call priestcraft; since even that accidental term of abuse preserves the mediaeval truth that a priest, like every other man, ought to be a craftsman. I am very proud of what people call Mariolatry; because it introduced into religion in the darkest ages that element of chivalry which is now being belatedly and badly understood in the form of feminism. I am very proud of being orthodox about the mysteries of the Trinity or the Mass; I am proud of believing in the Confessional; I am proud of believing in the Papacy.
But I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of knowing the Devil. I made his acquaintance by my own fault; and followed it up along lines which, had they been followed further, might have led me to devil-worship or the devil knows what. On this doctrine, at least, there is, mingling with my knowledge, no shadow of self-satisfaction any more than of self-deception. On this one matter, a man may well be intellectually right only through being morally wrong. I am not impressed by the ethical airs and graces of sceptics on most of the other subjects. I am not over-awed by a young gentleman saying that he cannot submit his intellect to dogma; because I doubt whether he has even used his intellect enough to define dogma. I am not impressed very seriously by those who call Confession cowardly; for I gravely doubt whether they themselves would have the courage to go through with it. But when they say, “Evil is only relative. Sin is only negative. There is no positive badness; it is only the absence of positive goodness”—then I know that they are talking shallow balderdash only because they are much better men than I; more innocent and more normal and more near to God.
What I may call my period of madness coincided with a period of drifting and doing nothing; in which I could not settle down to any regular work. I dabbled in a number of things; and some of them may have had something to do with the psychology of the affair. I would not for a moment suggest it as a cause, far less as an excuse, but it is a contributory fact that among these dabblings in this dubious time, I dabbled in Spiritualism without having even the decision to be a Spiritualist. Indeed I was, in a rather unusual manner, not only detached but indifferent. My brother and I used to play with planchette, or what the Americans call the ouija board; but we were among the few, I imagine, who played in a mere spirit of play. Nevertheless I would not altogether rule out the suggestion of some that we were playing with fire; or even with hell-fire. In the words that were written for us there was nothing ostensibly degrading, but any amount that was deceiving. I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify, with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lies may be larks or they may be lures to the imperilled soul or they may be a thousand other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.
I will give one or two examples. We asked planchette, in our usual random fashion, what advice it would give to an acquaintance of ours, a solid and rather dull Member of Parliament who had the misfortune to be an authority on education. Planchette wrote down with brazen promptitude (in these later times it was always very prompt, though not always very clear) the simple words, “Get a divorce.” The wife of the politician was so respectable, and I will add so hideous, that the materials of a scandalous romance seemed to be lacking. So we sternly enquired of our familiar spirit what the devil he meant; possibly an appropriate invocation. The result was rather curious. It wrote down very rapidly an immensely and indeed incredibly long word, which was at first quite illegible. It wrote it again; it wrote it four or five times; it was always quite obviously the same word; and towards the end it was apparent that it began with the three letters “0. R. R.” I said, “This is all nonsense; there is no word in the English language beginning 0. R. R., let alone a word as long as that.” Finally it tried again and wrote the word out quite clearly; and it ran, “Orriblerevelationsinighlife”.
If it was our subconsciousness, our subconsciousness at least had a simple sense of humour. But that it was our subconsciousness rather than our consciousness (if it was not something outside both) is proved by the practical fact that we did go on puzzling over the written word, when it was again and again rewritten, and really never had a notion of what it was, until it burst upon us at last. Nobody who knew us, I think, would suppose us capable of playing such a long and solemn and silly deception on each other. We also, like our subconsciousness, had a sense of humour. But cases of this kind fill me with wonder and a faint alarm, when I consider the number of people who seem to be taking spirit communications seriously, and founding religions and moral philosophies upon them. There would indeed have been some Orrible Revelations in Igh Life, and some Orrible Revelations about our own mental state and moral behaviour, if we had trotted off to the M.P. with our little message from the higher sphere.
Here is another example of the same thing. My father, who was present while my brother and I were playing the fool in this fashion, had a curiosity to see whether the oracle could answer a question about something that he knew and we did not. He therefore asked the maiden name of the wife of an uncle of mine in a distant country; a lady whom we of the younger generation had never known. With the lightning decision of infallibility, the spirit pen said, “Manning”. With equal decision my father said, “Nonsense”. We then reproached our tutelary genius with its lamentable romancing and its still more lamentable rashness. The spirit, never to be beaten, wrote down the defiant explanation, “Married before”. And to whom, we asked with some sternness, had our remote but respected aunt been secretly married before. The inspired instrument instantly answered, “Cardinal Manning”.
Now I will pause here in passing to ask what exactly would have happened to me and my social circle, what would have ultimately been the state of my mind or my general conception of the world in which I lived, if I had taken these spiritual revelations as some spiritualists seem to take some spiritual revelations; in short, if we had taken them seriously? Whether this sort of thing be the pranks of some Puck or Poltergeist, or the jerks of some subliminal sense, or the mockery of demons or anything else, it obviously is not true in the sense of trustworthy. Anybody who had trusted it as true would have landed very near to a lunatic asylum. And when it comes to selecting a spiritual philosophy, among the sects and schools of the modern world these facts can hardly be entirely forgotten. Curiously enough, as I have already recorded, Cardinal Manning had crossed my path as a sort of flaming wraith even in my childhood. Cardinal Manning’s portrait hangs now at the end of my room as a symbol of a spiritual state which many would call my second childhood. But anyone would admit that both states are rather saner than my condition would have been, had I begun to dig up The Crime of the Cardinal, by delving in the distant past of a colonial aunt.
Well, even the guidance of higher and wiser intelligences in a better world did not drive me quite so raving mad as that. But I have sometimes fancied since that this practice, of the true psychology of which we really know so little, may possibly have contributed towards the disturbed or even diseased state of brooding and idling through which I passed at the time. I would not dogmatise either way; it is possible that it had nothing to do with it; it is possible that the whole thing was merely mechanical or accidental. I would leave planchette with a playful farewell, giving her the benefit of the doubt; I would allow that she may have been a joke or a fancy or a fairy or anything else; with the proviso that I would not touch her again with a barge-pole. There are other aspects, concerning things much more my own fault, in which a barge-pole would have been useful; but I may as well finish here the trail of my merely trivial and accidental relations to psychical research; as there will be no need to return to that aspect of it; and I should never think of judging it seriously by such trifles. This progress of the preternatural has gone on spreading and strengthening through my whole life. Indeed my life happens to cover the precise period of the real change; not realised by those occupied only with later changes or alternative spiritual solutions. When I was quite a boy, practically no normal person of education thought that a ghost could possibly be anything but a turnip-ghost; a thing believed in by nobody but the village idiot. When I was a young man, practically every person with a large circle had one or two friends with a fancy for what would still have been called mediums and moonshine. When I was middle-aged, great men of science of the first rank like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge claimed to have studied spirits as they might have studied spiders, and discovered ectoplasm exactly as they discovered protoplasm. At the time I write, the thing has grown into a considerable religious movement, by the activity of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, much less of a scientist, but much more of a journalist. I hope nobody will think me such a fool as to offer these fragments of random experience as affecting the real controversy. In the controversy, indeed, through most of my life, I have defended Spiritualism against scepticism; though I should now naturally defend Catholicism even against Spiritualism. But in the times of which I am writing, little crossed our path except stray stories; and the phantoms were sometimes rather phantasmal. There was some talk of wraiths or presences precipitated into distant places, which included a story about a man seen going into a public house who afterwards testified that he had not been present in the body in any such place or for any such errand. There were plenty of other and more plausible stories, which my brother and I repeated with a sort of vague vicarious excitement, without any definite deduction or doctrine; but my father, whose placid Victorian agnosticism on the point we strove in vain to pierce, would listen to a roll of spiritual revelations and shake his head and say, “Ah, it s all very well to talk about these lights and trumpets and voices; but I pin my faith to the man who said he didn’t go into the public-house.”
Most of this happened when I was at the art school; but even when I had left it, this very casual connection was continued, in a queer way, by the coincidence that I worked for a short time in the office of a publisher who rather specialised in spiritualistic and theosophical literature, known under the general title of the occult. It was not entirely my fault, if it was not the fault of the real spiritualists or other real spirits, if I blundered into rather queer and uncomfortable corners of Spiritualism. On my first day in the office I had my first insight into the occult; for I was very vague about the business, as about most other businesses. I knew we had just published a big and vigorously boomed book of the Life and Letters of the late Dr. Anna Kingsford, of whom I had never heard, though many of our customers seemed to have heard of hardly anybody else. My full enlightenment came when a distraught lady darted into the office and began to describe her most complex spiritual symptoms and to demand the books most suited to her complaint, which I was quite incompetent to select. I timidly offered the monumental Life and Letters; but she shrank away with something like a faint shriek. “No, no,” she cried, “I mustn’t! Anna Kingsford says I mustn’t.” Then, with more control, “Anna Kingsford told me this morning that I must not read her Life; it would be very bad for me, she said, to read her Life.” I ventured to say, or stammer, with all the crudity of common speech, “But Anna Kingsford is dead.” “She told me this morning,” repeated the lady, “that I must not read the book.” “Well,” I said, “I hope Dr. Kingsford hasn’t been giving that advice to many people; it would be rather bad for the business. It seems rather malicious of Dr. Kingsford.”
I soon found that malicious was a mild word for Dr. Anna Kingsford. With all respect to her shade, which is to me the shadow of a shade, I should have said then, and I think I should say now, that the more charitable word was “mad.” I mention the matter here because, while it involves no contradiction of the cosmic theory of Spiritualism, it does illustrate the accident by which I bumped into a queer sort of Spiritualist; and it has some relation to a more general view of reason and religion. The lady celebrated in this book was at least queer. Her boast was that she had killed a number of men merely by thinking about them; her excuse was that they were men who defended vivisection. She also had very visionary but very intimate interviews with various eminent public men, apparently in places of torment; I remember one with Mr. Gladstone, in which a discussion about Ireland and the Sudan was interrupted by Mr. Gladstone gradually growing red-hot from inside. “Feeling that he would wish to be alone,” said Dr. Anna Kingsford with delicacy, “I passed out”; and she must now, I fear, pass out of this fragmentary narrative. I hope I do her no injustice; I am fairly sure she was full of many generous enthusiasms; but I pin my faith, as my father would say, to that fine tact and sense of social decorum, which told her that turning completely red-hot is what no gentleman would desire to do in the presence of a lady.
On the whole, the jolliest Spiritualist I ever met, at least until long afterwards, and the psychic enquirer for whom I felt the most immediate sympathy, was a man who firmly believed that he had once got a successful tip for the Derby out of some medium somewhere, and was still pursuing mediums for information of the same kind. I suggested to him that he should purchase The Pink ‘un and turn it into a paper combining the two interests, and sold at every bookstall under the name of The Sporting and Spiritual Times. This, I said, could not fail to lift bookmakers and jockeys into a loftier sphere of spiritual contemplation, not to mention owners, who probably need it quite as much; while it would give to Spiritualism a sound, shrewd and successful business side, vastly increase its popularity, and give to some of its followers an indefinable air of contact with concrete objective matters and what is coarsely called common sense, which some of them, as I felt at the time, seemed in some fashion to lack. I need not speculate on it here.
For the rest, while I am on the topic, I may assure the reader that I have never experienced anything called psychical, which might be a desperate excuse for my subsequent belief in the things called spiritual. I have hardly happened to strike even the queer psychic coincidences that strike almost anybody; unless we count the story treasured in my household as that of the Wraith of Sarolea. Dr. Sarolea, that fiery Flemish Professor of French, is certainly one of the most striking men I have known; but he never struck my path till long afterwards; but it is undoubtedly the fact that we were expecting him to dinner and my wife beheld the unmistakable long figure and pointed beard from a window; after which he vanished utterly from the landscape. What made the story really creepy was that just afterwards a very young Scotsman appeared at the door, asking for Dr. Sarolea. The Scotsman remained to dinner; but not the wraith. He was to have come down with the wraith; who (as it turned out afterwards) had awaited him with some irritation at the National Liberal Club. One theory was that his rage had precipitated his astral body down to Beaconsfield, but was spent just before he reached the house. Another obvious theory, which my more materialistic mind naturally preferred, was that he had been murdered by the young man and hidden in the pond in my garden; but subsequent detective search found this to be unsound. I only mention my alternative theory, which I very much prefer, because it is impossible to mention Dr. Sarolea, even at this premature stage of the story, without saying something about him. Dr. Sarolea is one of the most learned linguists in Europe; he learns a new language every week or so. His library is one of the wonders of the world, not to say the monstrosities of the world. When last I saw him he gave me the impression of buying the neighbouring houses right and left to find room for his library. What, I asked myself, what is more probable than that a man of this sort should find himself in later life in the exact position of Faust? And what is more reasonable, what more probable, than that Mephistopheles should have met him at the corner of the road as he came up from Beaconsfield station; and propounded the old contract, by which, with a single blast of magic, he should be turned into the handsome young man who a moment later was knocking at my door? This psychic theory would be supported by the fact that the young man is now doing well in politics; and quite unshaken, of course, by the fact that Dr. Sarolea (I am happy to say) is still alive and active in Edinburgh. The only difficulty about it is one which also affects my triumphant theory that Shakespeare wrote Bacon (controversially far stronger than the converse), which paralysed my father’s faith in the story of the public-house; and leads me to suspect that this rather odd incident was one of those fairly ordinary oddities; as when we mistake a stranger for a friend; and then meet the friend afterwards. In short, the only objection to my complete and convincing psychic theory is that I do not believe a word of it.
All this, of course, happened ages afterwards: I only mention it here in order to disclaim any intention of taking my psychic experience seriously. But touching that early period directly described in this chapter, I have the same reason for alluding to the topic. I merely begin with this example of amateur psychical research, because the very fact that I indulged in it without reason and without result, that I did not come to any conclusion, or really even try to come to any conclusion, illustrates the fact that this is a period of life in which the mind is merely dreaming and drifting; and often drifting onto very dangerous rocks.
In this chapter, the period covered is roughly that of my going to an art school and is doubtless also coloured by the conditions of such a place. There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature. Moreover those who work are, I will not say the least intelligent, but, by the very nature of the case, for the moment the most narrow; those whose keen intelligence is for the time narrowed to a strictly technical problem. They do not want to be discursive and philosophical; because the trick they are trying to learn is at once incommunicable and practical; like playing the violin Thus philosophy is generally left to the idle; and it is generally a very idle philosophy. In the time of which I write it was also a very negative and even nihilistic philosophy. And though I never accepted it altogether, it threw a shadow over my mind and made me feel that the most profitable and worthy ideas were, as it were on the defensive. I shall have more to say of this aspect of the matter later on; the point is for the moment that an art school can be a very idle place and that I was then a very idle person.
Art may be long but schools of art are short and very fleeting, and there have been five or six since I attended an art school. Mine was the time of Impressionism; and nobody dared to dream there could be such a thing as Post-Impressionism or Post-Post-Impressionism. The very latest thing was to keep abreast of Whistler and take him by the white forelock, as if he were Time himself. Since then that conspicuous white forelock has rather faded into a harmony of white and grey and what was once so young has in its turn grown hoary. But I think there was a spiritual significance in Impressionism, in connection with this age as the age of scepticism. I mean that it illustrated scepticism in the sense of subjectivism. Its principal was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow. In one sense the Impressionist sceptic contradicted the poet who said he had never seen a purple cow. He tended rather to say that he had only seen a purple cow; or rather that he had not seen the cow but only the purple. Whatever may be the merits of this method of art, there is obviously something highly subjective and sceptical about it as a method of thought. It naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all. The philosophy of Impressionism is necessarily close to the philosophy of Illusion. And this atmosphere also tended to contribute, however indirectly, to a certain mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon me; and I think upon many others.
What surprises me in looking back on youth, and even on boyhood, is the extreme rapidity with which it can think its way back to fundamental things; and even to the denial of fundamental things. At a very early age I had thought my way back to thought itself. It is a very dreadful thing to do; for it may lead to thinking that there is nothing but thought. At this time I did not very clearly distinguish between dreaming and waking; not only as a mood but as a metaphysical doubt, I felt as if everything might be a dream. It was as if I had myself projected the universe from within, with its trees and stars; and that is so near to the notion of being God that it is manifestly even nearer to going mad. Yet I was not mad, in any medical or physical sense; I was simply carrying the scepticism of my time as far as it would go. And I soon found it would go a great deal further than most of the sceptics went. While dull atheists came and explained to me that there was nothing but matter, I listened with a sort of calm horror of detachment, suspecting that there was nothing but mind. I have always felt that there was something thin and third-rate about materialists and materialism ever since. The atheist told me so pompously that he did not believe there was any God; and there were moments when I did not even believe there was any atheist.
And as with mental, so with moral extremes. There is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly I could imagine the maddest, when I had never committed the mildest crime. Something may have been due to the atmosphere of the Decadents, and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism; but I am not disposed to dwell much on that defence; I suspect I manufactured most of my morbidities for myself. But anyhow, it is true that there was a time when I had reached that condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde, that “Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing I am”. I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde; but I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination. As Bunyan, in his morbid period, described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, I had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; plunging in deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide. I had never heard of Confession, in any serious sense, in those days; but that is what is really needed in such cases. I fancy they are not uncommon cases. Anyhow, the point is here that I dug quite low enough to discover the devil; and even in some dim way to recognise the devil. At least I never, even in this first vague and sceptical stage, indulged very much in the current arguments about the relativity of evil or the unreality of sin. Perhaps, when I eventually emerged as a sort of theorist, and was described as an Optimist, it was because I was one of the few people in that world of diabolism who really believed in devils.
In truth, the story of what was called my Optimism was rather odd. When I had been for some time in these, the darkest depths of the contemporary pessimism, I had a strong inward impulse to revolt; to dislodge this incubus or throw off this nightmare. But as I was still thinking the thing out by myself, with little help from philosophy and no real help from religion, I invented a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own. It was substantially this; that even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing. Even if the very daylight were a dream, it was a day-dream; it was not a nightmare. The mere fact that one could wave one’s arms and legs about (or those dubious external objects in the landscape which were called one’s arms and legs) showed that it had not the mere paralysis of a nightmare. Or if it was a nightmare, it was an enjoyable nightmare. In fact, I had wandered to a position not very far from the phrase of my Puritan grandfather, when he said that he would thank God for his creation if he were a lost soul. I hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks. I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all; not, like Henley for my unconquerable soul (for I have never been so optimistic about my own soul as all that) but for my own soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered. This way of looking at things, with a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude, was of course, to some extent assisted by those few of the fashionable writers who were not pessimists; especially by Walt Whitman, by Browning and by Stevenson; Browning’s “God must be glad one loves his world so much”, or Stevenson’s “belief in the ultimate decency of things”. But I do not think it is too much to say that I took it in a way of my own; even if it was a way I could not see clearly or make very clear. What I meant, whether or no I managed to say it, was this; that no man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy. There were other aspects of this feeling, and other arguments about it, to which I shall have to return. Here it is only a necessary part of the narrative; as it involves the fact that, when I did begin to write, I was full of a new and fiery resolution to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age.
Thus, among the juvenile verses I began to write about this time was one called “The Babe Unborn”, which imagined the uncreated creature crying out for existence and promising every virtue if he might only have the experience of life. Another conceived the scoffer as begging God to give him eyes and lips and a tongue that he might mock the giver of them; a more angry version of the same fancy. And I think it was about this time that I thought of the notion afterwards introduced into a tale called Manalive; of a benevolent being who went about with a pistol, which he would suddenly point at a pessimist, when that philosopher said that life was not worth living. This was not printed until long afterwards; but the verses were collected into a little volume; and my father was so imprudent as to help me to get them published under the title of The Wild Knight. And this is an important part of the story, in so far as any part of the story is important, because it did involve my introduction to literature and even to literary men.
My little volume of verse was reviewed with warm and almost overwhelming generosity by Mr. James Douglas, then almost entirely known as a leading literary critic. Impetuosity as well as generosity was always one of Mr. Douglas’s most attractive qualities. And he insisted, for some reason, on affirming positively that there was no such person as G. K. Chesterton; that the name was obviously a nom de plume; that the work was obviously not that of a novice but a successful writer; and finally that it could be none other than Mr. John Davidson. This naturally brought an indignant denial from Mr. John Davidson. That spirited poet very legitimately thanked the Lord that he had never written such nonsense; and I for one very heartily sympathised with him. Not very long afterwards, when Mr. John Lane had accepted the manuscript of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, I was lunching with that publisher and fell into a very pleasant conversation with a fair-haired young man on my left, a little older than myself. A more odd-looking man, a little like an elf, bald, black-haired and with a Mephistophelean tuft and monocle, joined in the conversation across the table; and we found that we agreed on a large number of literary subjects and formed, I think I may say, a lasting liking for each other. It was only afterwards that I discovered that the first man was Mr. James Douglas and the second man was Mr. John Davidson.
I am here advancing my story along the literary line, to a point which I have not yet reached on other lines that were rather political or social; but, for the sake of convenience, I may as well complete this part of my rather erratic development here. Perhaps the next most important accident that favoured me, and brought me into relation with the world of letters, was the fact that I wrote a long review on a book about Stevenson; perhaps the first of the rather stupid books written to belittle Stevenson. I defended Stevenson with so much vehemence, not to say violence, that I had the good fortune to attract the attention of very distinguished writers who, though themselves certainly neither violent nor vehement, were very specially Stevensonian. I received a charming letter, and later a great deal of hospitality and encouragement, from Sir Sidney Colvin; to whose house I often went, where I had the pleasure of meeting the lady who was afterwards Lady Colvin, and where I heard Stephen Phillips read aloud his play of “Ulysses”. Nobody could have been more magnanimous and considerate than Colvin always was to me; but I think we could never have been at one, as he was at one with Stevenson or even Stephen Phillips. For, except on the subject of Stevenson, we differed upon every subject in earth and heaven; he was both Imperialist in politics and Rationalist in religion; and with all his frigid refinement, he was whatever he was with an unquenchable pertinacity. He hated Radicals and Christian mystics and romantic sympathisers with small nationalities, and in fact everything that I had any tendency to be. But the same link of the love of Stevenson attached me a little later to another very eminent man of letters; Sir Edmund Gosse. In some way I always felt far more at home with Sir Edmund Gosse; because he despised all opinions and not merely my opinions. He had an extraordinary depth of geniality in his impartial cynicism. He had the art of snubbing without sneering. We always felt that he had not enjoyed snubbing but the snub itself, as a sort of art for art’s sake, a million miles from any personal malice. It was all the more artistic because of the courtly and silken manner that he commonly assumed. I was very fond of him; and it gives me great happiness to think that one of the last things he must have done was to write me a letter thanking me for another and much later vindication of Stevenson, in a book I wrote long afterwards, indeed only a few years ago. In this letter he said of Stevenson, with a very powerful simplicity coming from such a man, “I loved him; I love him still.” I have no right to use such strong terms in my case; but I feel something like that about Gosse.
About this time I discovered the secret of amiability in another person with a rather misleading reputation for acidity. Mr. Max Beerbohm asked me to lunch; and I have ever since known that he is himself the most subtle of his paradoxes. A man with his reputation might well find offence in the phrase amiability; I can only explain to so scholarly a wit that I put it in Latin or French because I dare not put it in English. Max played in the masquerade of his time, which he has described so brilliantly; and he dressed or overdressed the part. His name was supposed to be a synonym for Impudence; for the undergraduate who exhibited the cheek of a guttersnipe in the garb of a dandy. He was supposed to blow his own trumpet with every flourish of self-praise; countless stories were told about the brazen placidity of his egoism. How, when he had hardly written anything more than a few schoolboy essays, he bound them under the stately title of “The Works of Max Beerbohm.” How he projected a series of biographies called “Brothers of Great Men;” the first volume being “Herbert Beerbohm Tree.” And the first moment I heard his voice, or caught sight of the expression of his eyes, I knew that all this was the flat contrary of the truth. Max was and is a remarkably humble man, for a man of his gifts and his period. I have never known him, by a single phrase or intonation, claim to know more or judge better than he does; or indeed half so much or so well as he does. Most men spread themselves a little in conversation, and have their unreal victories and vanities; but he seems to me more moderate and realistic about himself than about anything else. He is more sceptical about everything than I am, by temper; but certainly he does not indulge in the base idolatry of believing in himself. On this point I wish I were so good a Christian as he. I hope, for the sake of his official or public personality, that he will manage to live down this last affront. But the people who could not see this fact, because an intelligent undergraduate enjoyed an intellectual rag, have something to learn about the possible combination of humility and humour.
Finally, a crown of what I can only call respectability came to me from the firm of Macmillan; in the form of a very flattering invitation to write the study of Browning for the English Men of Letters Series. It had just arrived when I was lunching with Max Beerbohm, and he said to me in a pensive way: “A man ought to write on Browning while he is young.” No man knows he is young while he is young. I did not know what Max meant at the time; but I see now that he was right; as he generally is. Anyhow, I need not say that I accepted the invitation to write a book on Browning. I will not say that I wrote a book on Browning; but I wrote a book on love, liberty, poetry, my own views on God and religion (highly undeveloped), and various theories of my own about optimism and pessimism and the hope of the world; a book in which the name of Browning was introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art, or at any rate with some decent appearance of regularity. There were very few biographical facts in the book, and those were nearly all wrong. But there is something buried somewhere in the book; though I think it is rather my boyhood than Browning’s biography.
I have pursued this literary part of my own biography in advance of the rest. But long before this it was apparent that the centre of gravity in my existence had shifted from what we will (for the sake of courtesy) call Art to what we will (for the sake of courtesy) call Literature. The agent in this change of intention was, in the first instance, my friend Ernest Hodder Williams, afterwards the head of the well-known publishing firm. He was attending Latin and English lectures at University College while I was attending, or not attending, to the art instructions of the Slade School. I joined him in following the English course; and for this reason I am able to boast myself among the many pupils who are grateful to the extraordinarily lively and stimulating learning of Professor W.P. Ker. Most of the other students were studying for examinations; but I had not even that object in this objectless period of my life. The result was that I gained an entirely undeserved reputation for disinterested devotion to culture for its own sake; and I once had the honour of constituting the whole of Professor Ker’s audience. But he gave as thorough and thoughtful a lecture as I have ever heard given, in a slightly more colloquial style; asked me some questions about my reading; and, on my mentioning something from the poetry of Pope, said with great satisfaction, “Ah, I see you have been well brought up.” Pope had much less than justice from that generation of the admirers of Shelley and Swinburne. Hodder Williams and I often talked about literature, following on these literary lectures; and he conceived a fixed notion that I could write; a delusion which he retained to the day of his death. In consequence of this, and in connection with my art studies, he gave me some books on art to review for the Bookman, the famous organ of his firm and family. I need not say that having entirely failed to learn how to draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I had discovered the easiest of all professions; which I have pursued ever since.
When I look back on these things, and indeed on my life generally, the thing that strikes me most is my extraordinary luck. I have already pleaded for the merits of the Moral Tale; but it is against all the proper principles that even any such measure of good fortune should have come to the Idle Apprentice. In the case of my association with Hodder Williams, it was against all reason that so unbusinesslike a person should have so businesslike a friend. In the case of the choice of a trade, it was outrageously unjust that a man should succeed in becoming a journalist merely by failing to become an artist. I say a trade and not a profession; for the only thing I can say for myself, in connection with both trades, is that I was never pompous about them. If I have had a profession, at least I have never been a professor. But in another sense there was about these first stages an element of luck, and even of accident. I mean that my mind remained very much abstracted and almost stunned; and these opportunities were merely things that happened to me, almost like calamities. To say that I was not ambitious makes it sound far too like a virtue, when it really was a not very disgraceful defect; it was that curious blindness of youth which we can observe in others and yet never explain in ourselves. But, above all, I mention it here also because it was connected with the continuity of that unresolved riddle of the mind, which I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The essential reason was that my eyes were turned inwards rather than outwards; giving my moral personality, I should imagine, a very unattractive squint. I was still oppressed with the metaphysical nightmare of negations about mind and matter, with the morbid imagery of evil, with the burden of my own mysterious brain and body; but by this time I was in revolt against them; and trying to construct a healthier conception of cosmic life, even if it were one that should err on the side of health. I even called myself an optimist, because I was so horribly near to being a pessimist. It is the only excuse I can offer. All this part of the process was afterwards thrown up in the very formless form of a piece of fiction called The Man Who Was Thursday. The title attracted some attention at the time; and there were many journalistic jokes about it. Some, referring to my supposed festive views, affected to mistake it for “The Man Who Was Thirsty.” Others naturally supposed that Man Thursday was the black brother of Man Friday. Others again, with more penetration, treated it as a mere title out of topsy-turveydom; as if it had been “The Woman Who Was Half-past Eight,” or “The Cow Who Was Tomorrow Evening.” But what interests me about it was this; that hardly anybody who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was “A Nightmare,” and the answer to a good many critical questions.
I pause upon the point here, because it is of some importance to the understanding of that time. I have often been asked what I mean by the monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in that story; and some have suggested, and in one sense not untruly, that he was meant for a blasphemous version of the Creator. But the point is that the whole story is a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the ’90s; and the ogre who appears brutal but is also cryptically benevolent is not so much God, in the sense of religion or irreligion, but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism. So far as the story had any sense in it, it was meant to begin with the picture of the world at its worst and to work towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black as it was already painted. I explained that the whole thing was thrown out in the nihilism of the ’90s in the dedicatory lines which I wrote to my friend Bentley, who had been through the same period and problems; asking rhetorically: “Who shall understand but you?” In reply to which a book-reviewer very sensibly remarked that if nobody understood the book except Mr. Bentley, it seemed unreasonable to ask other people to read it.
But I speak of it here because, though it came at the beginning of the story, it was destined to take on another meaning before the end of it. Without that distant sequel, the memory may appear as meaningless as the book; but for the moment I can only leave on record here the two facts to which I managed somehow and in some sense to testify. First, I was trying vaguely to found a new optimism, not on the maximum but the minimum of good. I did not so much mind the pessimist who complained that there was so little good. But I was furious, even to slaying, with the pessimist who asked what was the good of good. And second, even in the earliest days and even for the worst reasons, I already knew too much to pretend to get rid of evil. I introduced at the end one figure who really does, with a full understanding, deny and defy the good. Long afterwards Father Ronald Knox told me, in his whimsical manner, that he was sure that the rest of the book would be used to prove that I was a Pantheist and a Pagan, and that the Higher Critics of the future would easily show that the episode of the Accuser was an interpolation by priests.
This was not the case; in fact it was quite the other way. At this time I should have been quite as annoyed as anybody else for miles round, if I had found a priest interfering with my affairs or interpolating things in my manuscript. I put that statement into that story, testifying to the extreme evil (which is merely the unpardonable sin of not wishing to be pardoned), not because I had learned it from any of the million priests whom I had never met, but because I had learned it from myself. I was already quite certain that I could if I chose cut myself off from the whole life of the universe. My wife, when asked who converted her to Catholicism, always answers, “the devil”.
But all that was so long afterwards, that it has no relation to the groping and guesswork philosophy of the story in question. I would much rather quote a tribute from a totally different type of man, who was nevertheless one of the very few men who, for some reason or other, have ever made head or tail of this unfortunate romance of my youth. He was a distinguished psychoanalyst, of the most modern and scientific sort. He was not a priest; far from it; we might say, like the Frenchman asked if he had lunched on the boat, “au contraire”. He did not believe in the Devil; God forbid, if there was any God to forbid. But he was a very keen and eager student of his own subject; and he made my hair stand on end by saying that he had found my very juvenile story useful as a corrective among his morbid patients; especially the process by which each of the diabolical anarchs turns out to be a good citizen in disguise. “I know a number of men who nearly went mad,” he said quite gravely, “but were saved because they had really understood The Man Who Was Thursday.” He must have been rather generously exaggerative; he may have been mad himself, of course; but then so was I. But I confess it flatters me to think that, in this my period of lunacy, I may have been a little useful to other lunatics.
V
NATIONALISM AND NOTTING HILL
At this point of the story I must for a moment go back in order to go on. In the previous pages I have said a good deal about Art, both in the home and the school; of the art I lost by my own fault or gained by my father’s merit; of the gratitude I owe to the amateur and the apology I owe to the art-master; of all I was taught without learning it, and all I learnt without anybody teaching it. But in a sketch of the period, this predominance of Art is rather out of proportion to the contemporary position of Science. It was true that I could never exactly be called a scientific character; and even as between the Classical and Modern sides of my old school, I should always have chosen rather to idle at Greek than to idle at Chemistry. But science was in the air of all that Victorian world, and children and boys were affected by the picturesque aspects of it. Several of my father’s cronies were scientific either in their hobbies or their profession; one of them, a very delightful schoolmaster named Alexander Watherston, carried about with him a geological hammer, with which he would detach fossils from rocks or walls, to my intense delight; so that the very name of a geological hammer still suggests something primal and poetic like the hammer of Thor. My mother’s brother, Beaumont Grosjean, was an analytical chemist by calling, and a man stuffed with humour; I can recall how he professed to have proved by analysis the purity of one single product of current commerce; which was Nubian Blacking; I believe it no longer exists; so I can be neither reproached nor rewarded for the advertisement. But he was so captivated with this one case of commercial probity that he used the name as a moral term of eulogy, saying “No man could have behaved in a more Nubian fashion,” or, “Perhaps as Nubian an action as ever did honour to human nature.” It was the same scientific uncle who told me various fairy-tales of science, which I regret to say that I believed much less than the fairy-tales of fairyland. Thus he told me that when I jumped off a chair, the earth jumped towards me. At the time I took it for granted that this was a lie; or at any rate a joke. What Einstein has done with it now is another story—or perhaps another joke. But I mention science and the scientific uncle for another reason here.
I am just old enough to remember in infancy the world before telephones. And I remember that my father and my uncle fitted up the first telephone I ever saw with their own metal and chemicals, a miniature telephone reaching from the top bedroom under the roof to the remote end of the garden. I was really impressed imaginatively by this; and I do not think I have ever been so much impressed since by any extension of it. The point is rather important in the whole theory of imagination. It did startle me that a voice should sound in the room when it was really as distant as the next street. It would hardly have startled me more if it had been as distant as the next town. It does not startle me any more if it is as distant as the next continent. The miracle is over. Thus I admired even the large scientific things most on a small scale. So I always found that I was much more attracted by the microscope than the telescope. I was not overwhelmed in childhood, by being told of remote stars which the sun never reached, any more than in manhood by being told of an empire on which the sun never set. I had no use for an empire that had no sunsets. But I was inspired and thrilled by looking through a little hole at a crystal like a pin’s head; and seeing it change pattern and colour like a pigmy sunset.
I have already picked two quarrels with better men than myself, who were enthusiasts for childish romance, upon the reality of the romance of childhood. First, I disagree with them when they treat the infantile imagination as a sort of dream; whereas I remember it rather as a man dreaming might remember the world where he was awake. And second, I deny that children have suffered under a tyranny of moral tales. For I remember the time when it would have seemed the most hideous tyranny to take my moral tales away from me. And, in order to make this clear, I must contradict yet another common assumption in the romantic description of the dawn of life. The point is not very easy to explain; indeed I have spent the greater part of my life in an unsuccessful attempt to explain it. Upon the cartloads of ill-constructed books in which I have completely failed to do so, I have no desire to dwell. But perhaps, as a general definition, this might be useful; or, if not as a definition, at least as a suggestion. From the first vaguely, and of late more and more clearly, I have felt that the world is conceiving liberty as something that merely works outwards. And I have always conceived it as something that works inwards.
The ordinary poetic description of the first dreams of life is a description of mere longing for larger and larger horizons. The imagination is supposed to work towards the infinite; though in that sense the infinite is the opposite of the imagination. For the imagination deals with an image. And an image is in its nature a thing that has an outline and therefore a limit. Now I will maintain, paradoxical as it may seem, that the child does not desire merely to fall out of the window, or even to fly through the air or to be drowned in the sea. When he wishes to go to other places, they are still places; even if nobody has ever been there. But in truth the case is much stronger than that. It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively in love with limits. He uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving-stones. He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving-stones, in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself. I played that kind of game with myself all over the mats and boards and carpets of the house; and, at the risk of being detained during His Majesty’s pleasure, I will admit that I often play it still. In that sense I have constantly tried to cut down the actual space at my disposal; to divide and subdivide, into these happy prisons, the house in which I was quite free to run wild. And I believe that there is in this psychological freak a truth without which the whole modern world is missing its main opportunity. If we look at the favourite nursery romances, or at least if we have the patience to look at them twice, we shall find that they all really support this view; even when they have largely been accepted as supporting the opposite view. The charm of Robinson Crusoe is not in the fact that he could find his way to a remote island; but in the fact that he could not find any way of getting away from it. It is that fact which gives an intensive interest and excitement to all the things that he had with him on the island; the axe and the parrot and the guns and the little hoard of grain. The tale of Treasure Island is not the record of a vague desire to go on a sea voyage for one’s health. It ends where it began; and it began with Stevenson drawing a map of the island, with all its bays and capes cut out as clearly as fretwork. And the eternal interest of the Noah’s Ark, considered as a toy, consists in its complete suggestion of compactness and isolation; of creatures so comically remote and fantastic being all locked up in one box; as if Noah had been told to pack up the sun and moon with his luggage. In other words, it is exactly the same game that I have played myself, by piling all the things I wanted on a sofa, and imagining that the carpet around me was the surrounding sea.
This game of self-limitation is one of the secret pleasures of life. As it says in the little manuals about such sports, the game is played in several forms. One very good way of playing it is to look at the nearest bookcase, and wonder whether you would find sufficient entertainment in that chance collection, even if you had no other books. But always it is dominated by this principle of division and restriction; which begins with the game played by the child with the paving-stones. I dwell upon it here because it must be understood as something real and rooted, so far as I am concerned, in order that the other views I have offered about these things may make any sort of sense. If anybody chooses to say that I have founded all my social philosophy on the antics of a baby, I am quite satisfied to bow and smile.
It is really relevant to insist that I do not know at what exact stage of my childhood or my youth the idea consolidated as a sort of local patriotism. A child has by the light of nature (or perhaps some better light) an idea of fortifying and defending things; of saying that he is the king of the castle, but of being rather glad than otherwise that it is such a small castle. But as it is my whole thesis that there is something very real behind all these first movements of the mind, I do not think I was ever surprised to find that this instinct corresponded to an idea. Only, by a rather curious coincidence in my life, it had only just developed as a private idea, when I found it clinched and supported by a public idea. If I have since gone back to public ideas, or to the outside of my existence, I have tried to explain that the most important part of it had long been in the inside of my life; perhaps a long time before I found it there.
I was one day wandering about the streets in that part of North Kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me. I felt that London was already too large and loose a thing to be a city in the sense of a citadel. It seemed to me even larger and looser than the British Empire. And something irrationally arrested and pleased my eye about the look of one small block of little lighted shops, and I amused myself with the supposition that these alone were to be preserved and defended, like a hamlet in a desert. I found it quite exciting to count them and perceive that they contained the essentials of a civilisation, a chemist’s shop, a bookshop, a provision merchant for food and public-house for drink. Lastly, to my great delight, there was also an old curiosity shop bristling with swords and halberds; manifestly intended to arm the guard that was to fight for the sacred street. I wondered vaguely what they would attack or whither they would advance. And looking up, I saw grey with distance but still seemingly immense in altitude, the tower of the Waterworks close to the street where I was born. It suddenly occurred to me that capturing the Waterworks might really mean the military stroke of flooding the valley; and with that torrent and cataract of visionary waters, the first fantastic notion of a tale called The Napoleon of Notting Hill rushed over my mind.
I have never taken my books seriously; but I take my opinions quite seriously. I do not mention my fortunately forgotten romance because I wish to emulate the academic seriousness of Mr. Dodgson, who noted the exact conditions of time and landscape in which it first occurred to him that the Snark was after all a Boojum. But this detail of memory has to do with much more practical things. It happens to be the only way of explaining what was very soon to be my position in quite practical politics. It must first be clearly understood that contemporary politics, even in the common sense my own politics, were all driving or drifting exactly the other way. The two great movements during my youth and early manhood were Imperialism and Socialism. They were supposed to be fighting each other; and so doubtless they did, in the sense of waving Red Flags against Union Jacks. But as compared with those dim gropings in my own imagination, the two things were in union; at least as much in union as the Union Jack. Both believed in unification and centralisation on a large scale. Neither could have seen any meaning in my own fancy for having things on a smaller and smaller scale. That fancy itself was indeed too indistinct and instinctive as yet to suggest an alternative theory; and in some vague way I accepted the fashionable theories. I read Kipling and was attracted in many ways, though repelled in others. I called myself a Socialist; because the only alternative to being a Socialist was not being a Socialist. And not being a Socialist was a perfectly ghastly thing. It meant being a small-headed and sneering snob, who grumbled at the rates and the working-classes; or some hoary horrible old Darwinian who said the weakest must go to the wall. But in my heart I was a reluctant Socialist. I accepted the larger thing as the lesser evil—or even the lesser good.
Rather in the sense in which I was a reluctant Socialist, I was even ready to be a reluctant Imperialist. It was rather as the Mr. Burden of Mr. Belloc was a reluctant Imperialist; for indeed I inherited the tradition of an older business world, not unlike Mr. Burden’s. All my instincts told me that I could not entirely lose hold of patriotism; neither then nor at any later time had I any liking for what is commonly connoted by pacifism. I was willing to accept colonial adventure if it was the only way of protecting my country; just as I was willing to accept collectivist organisation if it was the only way of protecting my poorer fellow-citizens. I was willing that Britain should boast of having an empire, if she really had nothing better to boast of. I was willing to let Mr. Sidney Webb look after the poor, if nobody else would look after them, or if (as seemed to be assumed as an axiom of social science) it was quite impossible for them to look after themselves. But nothing of my heart or my imagination went with these wide generalisations; and something inside me was always subconsciously burrowing in the very opposite direction. I remained in this vague but not entirely unhealthy state of mind, hung between an inward instinct I could not follow and an outward expansion I did not really wish to follow, until something happened in the outer world which not only woke me from my dreams like a thunder-clap, but like a lightning-flash revealed me to myself. In 1895 came the Jameson Raid and a year or two afterwards the war with the two Republics of South Africa.
The nation seemed solid for the war. It was far more eager for the South African War than it was afterwards for the Great War. The latter was obviously much more crucial, and in my opinion much more just. But it did not produce that particular impression of a unanimous shout of applause such as marked the campaign for the extinction of President Kruger’s Dutch state. Crowds would doubtless cry both against Kruger and Kaiser; but the Kaiser with his moustaches never became so popular a caricature as the President with his chinbeard. The name became indeed a general term for anything exotic and alien; and a too elegant poet with long curly hair and velvet knee-breeches would be hailed by the apt and descriptive cry of “Kruger!” But the apparent unity covered more influential and instructive groups. Journalism and politics were for the policy of Annexation. Most of the newspapers followed the Daily Mail in its morals if not in its manners. The Liberal Imperialists practically took the lead in the Liberal Party, so that even the opposition could hardly oppose. And it must always be remembered that these pro-war politicians were those who were later charged with moderation or (very absurdly) with anti-patriotism during the war of 1914; Asquith and Haldane and Grey. It seemed that all moderate men were on what was called the patriotic side. I knew little of politics then; and to me the unity seemed greater than it was; but it was very great. I saw all the public men and public bodies, the people in the street, my own middle-class and most of my family and friends, solid in favour of something that seemed inevitable and scientific and secure. And I suddenly realised that I hated it; that I hated the whole thing as I had never hated anything before.
What I hated about it was what a good many people liked about it. It was such a very cheerful war. I hated its confidence, its congratulatory anticipations, its optimism of the Stock Exchange. I hated its vile assurance of victory. It was regarded by many as an almost automatic process like the operation of a natural law; and I have always hated that sort of heathen notion of a natural law. As the war proceeded, indeed, it began to be dimly felt that it was proceeding and not progressing. When the British had many unexpected failures and the Boers many unexpected successes, there was a change in the public temper, and less of optimism and indeed little but obstinacy. But the note struck from the first was the note of the inevitable; a thing abhorrent to Christians and to lovers of liberty. The blows struck by the Boer nation at bay, the dash and dazzling evasions of De Wet, the capture of a British general at the very end of the campaign, sounded again and again the opposite note of defiance; of those who, as I wrote later in one of my first articles, “disregard the omens and disdain the stars”. And all this swelled up within me into vague images of a modern resurrection of Marathon or Thermopylae; and I saw again my recurring dream of the unscalable tower and the besieging citizens; and began to draw out the rude outlines of my little romance of London. But above all, perhaps, what began to repel me about the atmosphere of the adventure was something insincere about the most normal part of the national claim; the suggestion of something like a rescue of our exiled representatives, the commercial citizens of Johannesburg, who were commonly called the Outlanders. As this would have been the most sympathetic plea if it was genuine, it was the more repulsive if it was hypocritical.
For this was the best case for the war; that if the Boers were fighting for their country, the British were fighting for their countrymen. Only there was rather a queer look about some of the portraits of their countrymen. It was constantly asserted that an Englishman named Edgar had been murdered; but no portrait of Edgar was published, because it happened that he was entirely black. Other portraits were published; other Outlanders were paraded and they were of other tints and shades. We began to guess that the people the Boers called Outlanders were often people whom the British would call Outsiders. Their names were symbolic as their noses. I remember waiting with a Pro-Boer friend in the midst of a Jingo mob outside the celebrated Queen’s Hall Meeting which ended in a free fight. My friend and I adopted a method of patriotic parody or reductio ad absurdum. We first proposed three cheers for Chamberlain, then three cheers for Rhodes, and then by degrees for more and more dubious and demi-naturalised patriots. We actually did get an innocent cheer for Beit. We got a more wavering cheer for Eckstein. But when it came to our impulsive appeal to the universal popularity of Albu, the irony of our intention was discovered; and the fight began. I found myself in a pugilistic encounter with an Imperialistic clerk, whose pugilism was at least no more scientific than my own. While this encounter (one of many other surrounding conflicts) was proceeding, another Imperialist must have abstracted my watch; the last I ever troubled to possess. He at any rate believed in the Policy of Annexation.
I was called a Pro-Boer and, unlike some Pro-Boers, I was very proud of the title. It expressed exactly what I meant much better than its idealistic synonyms. Some intellectuals indignantly repudiated the term, and said they were not Pro-Boers but only lovers of peace or pacifists. But I emphatically was a Pro-Boer, and I emphatically was not a pacifist. My point was that the Boers were right in fighting; not that anybody must be wrong in fighting. I thought that their farmers were perfectly entitled to take to horse and rifle in defence of their farms, and their little farming commonwealth, when it was invaded by a more cosmopolitan empire at the command of very cosmopolitan financiers. As no less an authority than Mr. Discobolus says in Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes, I thought so then and I think so still. But this sort of militant sympathy naturally separated those who thought as I did from our colleagues who were mere anti-militarists. The consequence was not unimportant to me personally. It was that I found I belonged to a minority of a minority. Most of those who not unnaturally sympathised with the British, disapproved of us for sympathising with the Boers. Most of those who sympathised with the Boers disapproved of us for sympathising with them for the wrong reasons. Indeed, I do not know whether the Jingo or the Pacifist found us the more offensive and objectionable. It was in this rather quaint condition that I naturally gravitated towards a friendship which has since played so considerable a part in my life, public as well as private.
My friends had just come down from Oxford, Bentley from Merton and Oldershaw from “the House”, where they had figured prominently in a group of young Liberals opposed in varying degrees to the current Imperialism; a group containing many names sufficiently famous afterwards; John Simon, now the well-known statesman and advocate, and Francis Hirst, the economist. Soon after our reunion in London, I went to meet Lucian Oldershaw at a little restaurant in Soho. It was in the days before everybody had discovered the whereabouts of Soho; and these small French eating-houses were only valued by a few gourmets on the ground that they were still places where it was possible to eat. I have never been anything so refined as a gourmet; so I am happy to say that I am still quite capable of being a glutton. My ignorance of cookery is such that I can even eat the food in the most fashionable and expensive hotels in London. Sometimes, in those luxurious halls, inhabited by the heroes and heroines of Oppenheim and Edgar Wallace, the food is just a shade too bad even for me. But those who really prefer eating good cutlets and omelets to living on gilt plaster and pantomime footmen had already found their way to delightful little dens off Leicester Square, where in those days a man could get a half-bottle of perfectly good red wine for sixpence. To one of these I went to meet my friend, who entered the place followed by a sturdy man with a stiff straw hat of the period tilted over his eyes, which emphasized the peculiar length and strength of his chin. He had a high-shouldered way of wearing a coat so that it looked like a heavy overcoat, and instantly reminded me of the pictures of Napoleon; and, for some vague reason, especially of the pictures of Napoleon on horseback. But his eyes, not without anxiety, had that curious distant keenness that is seen in the eyes of sailors; and there was something about his walk that has even been compared to a sailor’s roll. Long afterwards the words found their way into verse which expressed a certain consciousness of the combination, and of the blend of nations in his blood.
Almighty God will surely say, St. Michael, who is this that stands With Ireland in his doubtful eyes And Perigord between his hands, And on his arm the stirrup-thongs And in his gait the narrow seas And on his mouth Burgundian songs And in his heart the Pyrenees?
He sat down heavily on one of the benches and began to talk at once about some controversy or other; I gathered that the question was whether it could be reasonably maintained that King John was the best English king. He judicially decided in the negative; but, by the standards of Mrs. Markham’s History of England (to which he was much attached) he let the Plantagenet off lightly. After all, John had been a Regent, and no medieval Regent was a success. He went on talking, as he has, to my great pleasure and stimulation, gone on talking ever since. For this was Hilaire Belloc, already famous as an orator at Oxford where he was always pitted against another brilliant speaker, named F. E. Smith, who later became Lord Birkenhead. Belloc was supposed to represent Radicalism and Smith Toryism; but the contrast between them was more vital, and would have survived the reversing of the labels. Indeed the two characters and careers might stand as a study and problem in the meaning of failure and success.
As Belloc went on talking, he every now and then volleyed out very provocative parentheses on the subject of religion. He said that an important Californian lawyer was coming to England to call on his family, and had put up a great candle to St. Christopher praying that he might be able to make the voyage. He declared that he, Belloc, was going to put up an even bigger candle in the hope that the visitor would not make the voyage. “People say what’s the good of doing that?” he observed explosively. “I don’t know what good it does. I know it’s a thing that’s done. Then they say it can’t do any good—and there you have Dogma at once.” All this amused me very much, but I was already conscious of a curious undercurrent of sympathy with him, which many of those who were equally amused did not feel. And when, on that night and many subsequent nights, we came to talking about the War, I found that the subconscious sympathy had something of a real significance. I have had occasion to say, somewhere or other, that I am an Anti-Vivisectionist and an Anti-Anti-Vivisectionist. Something of the same mystery united our minds; we were both Pro-Boers who hated Pro-Boers. Perhaps it would be truer to say that we hated a certain number of unimaginative, unhistorical anti-militarists who were too pedantic to call themselves Pro-Boers. Perhaps it would be truer still to say that it was they who hated us. But anyhow that was the first link in the alliance. Though his military imagination flung its battle-line far across history from the Roman Legions to the last details of the guns of Gravelotte, and mine was a parochial fancy of an impossible skirmish in Notting Hill, we knew that the moral of the fable and the facts was the same; and when I finished my Cockney fantasy, I dedicated it to him. It was from that dingy little Soho cafe, as from a cave of witchcraft, that there emerged the quadruped, the twiformed monster Mr. Shaw has nicknamed the Chesterbelloc.
It would be grossly unjust to suggest that all or most of the antiwar party were like the prigs I have mentioned; though few of them of course were military in the Bellocian manner. And to one group of them I have a permanent gratitude; the Oxford group which I have already mentioned; and which included my own friends from Oxford. This group was just then enabled to achieve a very important work; which will probably be not without an ultimate effect on history. It managed to buy the old Radical weekly paper The Speaker and run it with admirable spirit and courage in rather a new mood of Radicalism; what some of its enemies might have called a romantic Radicalism. Its editor was Mr. J. L. Hammond, who was afterwards, with his wife, to do so great an historical service as the author of studies on the English Labourer in the last few centuries. He certainly was the last man in the world to be accused of a smug materialism or a merely tame love of peace. No indignation could have been at once more fiery and more delicate, in the sense of discriminating. And I knew that he also understood the truth, when I heard him say the words which so many would have misunderstood; “Imperialism is worse than Jingoism. A Jingo is a noisy fellow, who may happen to make a noise on the right side. But the Imperialist is the direct enemy of liberty.” That was exactly what I meant; the Boers might be making a noise (with Mauser rifles) but I thought it was a noise on the right side. It was at about the same time, and by the same connection, that I was able to begin making a very small noise on the right side myself. As I note elsewhere, the very first articles of mine to appear publicly were art reviews in the Bookman; and the original responsibility of letting me loose in the literary world lies with my friend the late Sir Ernest Hodder Williams. But the first connected series of articles, the first regular job in support of a regular cause, was made possible for me by Hammond and his friends of the new Speaker. It was there that I wrote, along with many pugnacious political articles, a series of casual essays afterwards republished as The Defendant. The name of Defendant is the only thing I cannot defend. It was certainly a quite incorrect and illogical use of language. The papers were in defence of various other things, such as Penny Dreadfuls and Skeletons. But a defendant does not properly mean a person defending other things. It means a person defending himself; and I should be the last to defend anything so indefensible.
It was by the same political connection that I was drawn still further into politics, as well as still further into journalism. The next turning-point of my journalistic fate was the purchase of the Daily News by the Pro-Boer Liberals; for it had belonged up to this moment, like practically every Liberal daily paper, to the Liberal Imperialists. A group of Liberals, of whom Mr. George Cadbury was the principal capitalist and the late Mr. R. C. Lehmann the principal practical journalist, appointed as literary editor my friend Mr. Archibald Marshall, who in his turn had the rashness to appoint me as a regular weekly contributor. Here I wrote an article every Saturday for many years; I was described, in the phrase of the time, as having a Saturday pulpit, rather like a Sunday pulpit. Whatever were the merits of the sermon, it is probable that I had a larger congregation than I have ever had before or since. And I occupied it until I gave it up long afterwards, at another political crisis, the story of which I shall have to tell on a later page.
I began to see a little of the leading politicians, though they seldom talked politics; and I imagine that politicians seldom do. I had already interviewed Lord Morley, when I was given the commission in the English Men of Letters which he edited; and I had been struck by something indescribable which has marked most public men of his profession. He was quite friendly and simple, and I am sure quite sincere; but he was in a manner cautious; and conscious of the possibility that his followers might lead him further than he wished to go. He spoke with a certain fatherly admiration of my friends of the Pro-Boer party, Hammond and Hirst and the rest; but he seemed to warn me that they were too fiery; and I did not want to be warned, being myself on fire. In short, he was a wise and good man; but he was not what numberless and nameless admirers would have thought him; he was not a clear intellectual fanatic; a foe of compromise; a sheer democrat called Honest John. He was a Front-Bench man, though a good one. The same applied to most of the Front-Bench men I have known; and I am glad to say I knew mostly the good ones. I had great joy out of the hearty humours of old Asquith, the late Lord Oxford; and though our conversations were light and even flippant, he was one who rose gloriously to flippancy. Once when he appeared in Court dress, on some superbly important occasion, an uncontrollable impulse of impertinence led me to ask whether the Court sword would really come out of its sheath. “Oh, yes,” he said, shaking a shaggily frowning head at me, “Do not provoke me.” But he also had about the fundamentals of politics and ethics this curious quality of vagueness, which I have found so often in men holding high responsibilities. He did not mind answering a silly question about a sword; but if it had been a sensible question about a super-tax, he would have adopted, however genially, a fencing sort of swordsmanship. He would have faintly felt that he was being heckled, and almost been disposed to ask for notice of that question. I have a difficulty in not darkening the fine shade that I intended; he was very public, as public men go; but they all seem to become hazier as they mount higher. It is the young and unknown who have decisive doctrines and sharply declared intentions. I once expressed it by saying, I think with some truth, that politicians have no politics.
As a fact, the one Front-Bench man who seemed in the days of my youth still eternally young was for me, in those days, on the opposite Front-Bench. The wonderful thing about George Wyndham was that he had come through political life without losing his political opinions, or indeed any opinions. Precisely what gave him such a genius for friendship was that life had left in him so much of himself; so much of his youth; so much even of his childhood. He might never have been a Cabinet Minister; he might have been any common literary or artistic fellow, with a soul to save and some dim and secretive ideas about saving it. He was not always trying, like Charles Augustus Fortescue, “to take a judgment broad and wide”; he had prejudices and private dogmas for which he would fight like a private person. When once or twice the talk of Mr. Asquith turned to religious matters, I found he was fully satisfied with that sort of broad idealism, that rather diluted “essence of Christianity” which is often sincere but seldom significant of any special social decision. But George Wyndham was an Anglo-Catholic as an individual, and would have practised his religion in any state of life. There was about him that edge, like the edge of a sword, which I cannot help preferring to being knocked down with a spiritual sandbag.
George Wyndham had all sorts of odd and original notions; and one of his eccentricities was to set a subject for conversation and ask for opinions all round, as if it were an examination or a game. One day I remember he sternly announced “Japan,” and asked me to start with a few words. I said: “I distrust Japan because it is imitating us at our worst. If it had imitated the Middle Ages or the French Revolution, I could understand; but it is imitating factories and materialism. It is like looking in the mirror and seeing a monkey.” He held up his hand like a master of the ceremonies, “That will do. That is enough;” and passed on to the next, who was I think Major, now General Seeley; who said he distrusted Japan for certain Imperial reasons connected with our Colonies and national defence. Then Mr. Winston Churchill said that what amused him was that as long as Japan was beautiful and polite, people treated it as barbarous; and now it had become ugly and vulgar, it was treated with respect, or words to that effect. Then Charles Masterman, in his manner of luxuriant gloom, said the Japs were Huns who would sweep us off the earth; that they were much stronger and more skilful than we, and were also detestable. Then one or two others spoke, expressing the same negative view, and then Wyndham, in his whimsical way, wound up with one of his extraordinary historical theories (of which he had a large selection) and said the Hairy Ainu was the cousin of the European and had been conquered by these horrid Mongols. “I do think,” he said gravely, “that we ought to come to the rescue of the Hairy Ainu.” And then somebody said with simple wonder; “Look here; we’ve been all round the table; and every manjack of us, for some reason serious or otherwise, seems to hate the Japanese. Why are we not only allies of the Japanese, but forbidden to say a word against them in any of the newspapers? Why is it the fashion or convention to praise the Japs everywhere and all the time?” But at that, I think, Mr. Churchill smiled the inscrutable smile of the statesman; and that veil of vagueness, of which I have spoken, seemed to descend upon everybody; and we never had an answer to the question, either then or since.
Charles Masterman, of whom I have just spoken, was a very remarkable man. He was also a very subtle and curious character; and many of my own best friends entirely misunderstood and underrated him. It is true that as he rose higher in politics, the veil of the politician began to descend a little on him also; but he became a politician from the noblest bitterness on behalf of the poor; and what was blamed in him was the fault of much more ignoble men. What was blamable, as distinct from what was blamed, in him was due to two things; he was a pessimistic official. He had had a dark Puritan upbringing and retained a sort of feeling of the perversity of the gods; he said to me, “I am the sort of man who goes under a hedge to eat an apple.” But he was also an organiser and liked governing; only his pessimism made him think that government had always been bad, and was now no worse than usual. Therefore, to men on fire for reform, he came to seem an obstacle and an official apologist; but the last thing he really wanted was to apologise for anything. He had a startling insight into character, and a way of suddenly expressing it, so that it braced rather than hurt. As Oldershaw once said to me, “His candour is beautiful.” But his melancholy made him contented, where happier men were discontented. His pessimism did the worst work of optimism. In person he was long, loose and lounging; and nearly as untidy as I was.
Apart from these various glimpses of various parties, my main work was on the Daily News, then practically controlled by Mr. Cadbury with Mr. A. G. Gardiner as its well-read and sympathetic editor: and I only dimly appreciated what I now see to have been the process by which the press came to be run like a big business. I remember gazing blankly at the poky little entrance being replaced by a revolving door; then a novelty to me, though probably to nobody else. It reminded me vaguely of a cattle-gate, and I remember asking old Mr. Cadbury whether it was meant to keep cows out of the office. He laughed immensely at this simple jest, having himself an attractive simplicity; but the incident is connected chiefly in my mind with a jest rather less Arcadian. There was working in the office a very prominent journalist of the Nonconformist culture, who took himself so seriously that in any crowd of common men he was certain to be taken frivolously. I am ashamed to say that I circulated, about this bland and blameless publicist, a legend that the mechanical structure of the new door was the key to the mystery of his permanent presence in the office. Again and again he had been thrown out, but with such ill-judged violence that the swinging portal swung him back again into the interior. The more unerring the aim, the more violent the energy, with which old Mr. Cadbury flung him towards the frontsteps, the more certain was his successful contributor to turn up smiling and be swept back to his office and his desk. Thus, I would say, having even then a tendency to moralise along such lines, every mechanical improvement brings a new problem with it. I do not demand faith in the fable, but I have not been discouraged in the moral, by seeing motoring lead to massacre, aviation destroy cities and machines increase unemployment.
Generally, meanwhile, I began to see something of the political world, and especially that allied to our own wing of the Liberal Party; notably in the enjoyment of the hospitality which the late Mr. Cadbury used to extend to large gatherings of his contributors and friends. It was an entertaining experience, especially when it illustrated, as it generally did, the very varied elements of which our party was made up. It was at one of these house-parties of the Cadburys that I first met a man for whom I had a very great regard, apart from the fact that his company was always amusing; I mean Will Crooks, for it always jarred against his whole solid personality to refer to him as Mr. Crooks. I have known a great many Labour members, and liked most of them; quite as much at any rate as Liberal members. The Labour members I knew covered every type from frigid Cambridge dons to eccentric English and Scottish aristocrats. Will Crooks was the only Labour leader I ever knew who reminded me for a single moment of the English labouring classes. His humour really was the humour of an omnibus conductor or a railway porter; and that sort of humour is a much more powerful and real thing than most modern forms of education or eloquence. His criticism on beholding a company of advanced Socialist intellectuals was not that they gave too concentrated a power to the abstraction of the State, or that they followed an impossible ideal unsupported by self-interest, but that, as he put it, “They got no backs to their ‘eads.” His wife also was as representative as a Roman matron; and it is in connection with her that I specially recall the curious clash of types and cultures that went on even inside our own political party. I remember an ethereal little lady with pale blue eyes and pale green garments, who was the wife of a well-known Anti-War journalist. She had a touching timidity in advancing her ideas; but, when they were advanced, they were a very serious business indeed. I remember that Mr. Noel Buxton, whose acquaintance I made about this time, was describing in an animated and amusing fashion the scurry and scamper of his life while contesting a seat at the election. In a dreadful hour, he happened to use the expression; “I just had time to snatch a cutlet—”; and the prophetess in the green garments was goaded, by the god within her, to speak. When Buxton had left the room she did so.
“Do you think that was really necessary?” she said with a painful fixity, like one in a trance. “Man is no better for a cutlet. Man does not really need cutlets.”
At this point she received hearty, one might almost say heavy support, from what was probably an unexpected quarter.
“No, my dear,” said Mrs. Crooks in resounding tones, “A man doesn’t want a cutlet! What’s the good of a cutlet? What a man wants is a good chump chop or a bit of the under-cut; and I’d see he got it.”
The other lady sighed; it was not quite what she had meant; and she was obviously a little alarmed to advance again against her large and solid opponent and be felled to the earth with a mutton-bone. But that little comedy of cross-purposes has always remained in my memory, as a perfect parable of the two kinds of Simple Life, the false and the true.
The vegetarian lady was really a very charming lady; but a very serious lady. Almost immediately after the above incident, I had to take her in to dinner. We passed through the conservatory, and merely in order to change the subject, in a flippant fashion I pointed to an insect-eating plant and said,
“Don’t you vegetarians feel remorse when you look at that? You live by devouring harmless plants; and here is a plant that actually devours animals. Surely it is a just judgment. It is the revenge of the vegetable world.”
She looked at me with staring blue eyes that were absolutely grave and unsmiling. “Oh,” she said, “But I don’t approve of revenge.”
This, I need hardly say, shattered and prostrated me altogether; I could only murmur in a vague and sullen manner that of course, if she didn’t believe in revenge, what was Christianity coming to, or words to that effect. But she long lingered in my thoughts and her type of thinking has run through all my life and times, like a thread of pale green and blue.
I mixed myself in politics also in other ways; I can hardly say in more practical ways. For the politics were not very practical politics—at least, not when I practised them. Charles Masterman used to swear with derisive gusto that when we went canvassing together, he went all down one side of a street and up most of the other, and found me in the first house, still arguing the philosophy of government with the first householder. This was perhaps unduly darkened by a jovial pessimism which belonged to Charles Masterman. But it is perfectly true that I began electioneering under the extraordinary delusion that the object of canvassing is conversion. The object of canvassing is counting. The only real reason for people being pestered in their own houses by party agents is quite unconnected with the principles of the party (which are often a complete mystery to the agents): it is simply that the agents may discover from the words, manner, gesticulations, oaths, curses, kicks or blows of the householder, whether he is likely to vote for the party candidate, or not to vote at all. I learnt this lesson gradually myself; from a vast variety of human faces and gestures revealed by the opening of front-doors. My friend Oldershaw and I went down together to canvass for a Liberal candidate in the country. It seems strange now to remember that, in our innocence, we did not know anything about him except that he was a Liberal candidate. He was, so far as my knowledge goes, a perfectly worthy and respectable gentleman; but as we passed through that and many other political elections a curious and obscure feeling began to grow in my mind. At the time I was not even conscious of it; even now I do not know how to describe that cold and creeping suggestion of the subconsciousness. When it ultimately rose to the surface and shaped itself, long afterwards in other campaigns, into a half articulate question, I think the question was, “Why is the candidate nearly always the worst duffer on his own platform?” To these elections and by-elections, to which I went in many places, many other speakers also went, always more eloquent and, then at least, much better known than I. There were on the platform men like John Simon and Belloc who spoke as well as it is possible to speak, probably better than they have ever spoken since. And all the time, as often as not, the man we were sending up specially to speak, in the supreme court of Parliament, could not speak at all. He was some solid and dressy tailor’s dummy, with a single eye-glass or waxed moustaches, who repeated exactly the same dull formula at every separate meeting. There is something interesting, as a matter of psychology, in this unconfessed half-consciousness in the mind of youth that things are not really right, even while the will and the convictions are ready to shout with loyalty to their perfect and universal rightness. Looking back on it now, after those other political experiences of Marconi days, which I shall have to describe later, I know exactly what it was I felt; I also know exactly what it was I did not understand. I know that what runs modern politics is money; and that the superiority of the fool in the frock-coat over Belloc and Simon simply consisted in the fact that he was richer than they were. But I was then quite innocent of all these things; and especially in the case of the first Liberal candidate I worked for, I shouted with sustained enthusiasm and fidelity. The extraordinary thing, about the first candidate I worked for, is that he got in.
But though I fear I was not of much use to the electioneering, it was ultimately of some use to me; as I saw more of the country life than a Londoner like myself had yet imagined, and encountered not a few entertaining country types. I remember at another election a sturdy old woman of Somerset, with a somewhat menacing and almost malevolent stare, who informed me on her own doorstep that she was a Liberal and I could not see her husband, because he was still a Tory. She then informed me that she had been twice married before, and both her husbands had been Tories when they married her, but had become Liberals afterwards. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder towards the invisible Conservative within and said, “I’ll have him ready by the ‘lection.” I was not permitted to penetrate further into this cavern of witchcraft, where she manufactured Liberals out of the most unpromising materials; and (it would appear) destroyed them afterwards. But she was only one of a number of such quaint and forcible rustics whom I encountered in my political travels. Nor indeed were they the only things that I encountered. For all this funny little fuss of politics was in this case spread out like a sprawling sham fight, or the manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain, over that enormous area of noble hills and valleys which had seen so many vaster struggles in the past, reaching back to that aboriginal struggle of the Pagans and the Christians which is the genesis of all our history. And such primitive things were probably already working their way to the surface of my own mind; things that I afterwards attempted to throw into very inadequate but at least more elemental and universal literary form. For I remember the faint and hazy inspiration that troubled me one evening on the road, as I looked beyond the little hamlet, patched so incongruously with a few election posters, and saw hung upon the hills, as if it were hung upon the heavens, remote as a pale cloud and archaic as a gigantic hieroglyph; the White Horse.
I only mention it here because there will be some misunderstanding even of my accidental and amateurish intervention in politics, if it is not understood that our political idealism, unpopular as it was, was felt inwardly as national and not as international. It was that which was a permanent source of irritation and misunderstanding, both within and without the political party. To us it seemed obvious that Patriotism and Imperialism were not only not the same thing, but very nearly opposite things. But it did not seem obvious, but very puzzling, to the great majority of healthy patriots and innocent Imperialists. It seemed equally puzzling to a great many anti-patriots and anti-Imperialists. Towards the end of this period, we published a book intended to explain our rather peculiar position; it was called England a Nation; it was edited by Oldershaw and had contributions by Masterman and myself and others. One of the contributions came from an Irish Nationalist member, my friend Hugh Law; and it was about this time, naturally enough, that I began to see something of the Irish Nationalists and to feel a strong and special sympathy with Irish Nationalism. Of this I may say more in another place; it is sufficient to remark here that it is to me a considerable satisfaction to think that I have always felt it the first duty of a real English patriot to sympathise with the passionate patriotism of Ireland; that I expressed it through the worst times of her tragedy and have not lost it in her triumph.
Curiously enough, however, my sharpest memory of the puzzle of this patriotic paradox, and the difficulty of making others see what to me was so obvious, is not connected with Ireland or with England; but, of all places in the world, with Germany. Some time after all these events, I had to visit Frankfurt, where I took on rather casually the task of lecturing on English literature to a congress of German schoolmasters. We discussed Walter Scott’s Marmion and other metrical romances; we sang English songs over German beer, and had a very pleasant time. But there was already stirring, even among those mild and amiable Germans, something that was not so pleasant; and though they expressed it quite politely, I suddenly found myself once more in the same difficulty about the national and the imperial notion. For, speaking to some of them at large about literature, as to a merely cosmopolitan world of culture, I touched on this preference of mine for what some consider a narrower national idea. I found that they also were puzzled; they assured me, with that gravity with which Germans alone can repeat what they regard as a platitude, that Imperialismus and Patriotismus were the same thing. When they discovered that I did not like Imperialismus, even for my own country, a very curious expression came into their eyes, and a still more curious notion seems to have come into their heads. They formed the extraordinary idea that I was an internationalist indifferent, or even hostile, to English interests. Perhaps they thought Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an alias of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Anyhow, they began to talk more openly, but still vaguely; and there grew gradually on my consciousness the conviction that these extraordinary people really thought that I might accept or approve, on some toshy ethnological or sociological ground or other, the extension of the Teutonic Race at the expense even of the impotence or absorption of my own land. It was a somewhat difficult situation; for they said nothing definite that I had any right to resent; it was merely that I felt in the atmosphere a pressure and a threat. It was Der Tag. After thinking a moment, I said, “Well, gentlemen, if it ever came to anything like that, I think I should have to refer you to the poem of Scott that we have been discussing.” And I gravely repeated the answer of Marmion, when King James says that they may meet again in war as far south as Tamworth Castle.
Much honour’d were my humble home, If in its halls King James should come; But Nottingham has archers good, And Yorkshire men are stern of mood; Northumbrian prickers wild and rude. … And many a banner will be torn, And many a knight to earth be borne, And many a sheaf of arrows spent, Ere Scotland’s King shall cross the Trent.
I looked at them and they at me, and I think they understood; and there rose up like an enormous shadow over that drinking-hall the terror of things to be.
VI
THE FANTASTIC SUBURB
When I was a young journalist on the Daily News, I wrote in some article or other the sentence, “Clapham, like every other city, is built on a volcano.” When I opened the paper next day, I found the words confronting me, “Kensington, like every other city, is built on a volcano.” It did not matter, of course, but I was a little puzzled and mentioned it to my immediate superior in the office, as if it were some freak of a fanciful compositor. But he glowered at me in a heavy and resentful manner, which would alone be a confession of guilt, if there were any guilt, and said rather sulkily, “Why should it be Clapham?” And then, as if throwing off the mask, “Well, I live at Clapham.” And he, knowing that I lived at Kensington, had bitterly transferred to that royal borough what he imagined to be a taunt.
“But I was glorifying Clapham!” I cried pathetically, “I was showing it as epical and elemental and founded in the holy flame.” “You think you’re funny, don’t you?” he said. “I think I’m right,” I said, making that modest claim not for the last time; and then, not for the last but perhaps for the first time, the terrible truth dawned upon me.
If you said in a Basque village or a Bavarian town that the place was romantic, some might draw the dreadful deduction that you were an artist, and therefore possibly a madman; but nobody would have any particular reason to doubt that the madman meant what he said. But the citizen of Clapham could not believe that I meant what I said. The patriot of Clapham could not find it credible or conceivable that any remark about Clapham could be anything but a sneer at Clapham. He could not even say the word so that the first syllable of “Clapham” sounded like the last syllable of “thunderclap”. There was utterly veiled from his sight the visionary Clapham, the volcanic Clapham, what I may be allowed to put upon the cosmic map as Thunderclapham. I assured him again and again, almost with tears, that I was warmly sympathetic with any sensitive feelings he might have, if he was really proud of Clapham. But that was exactly the horrid secret. He was not proud or Clapham. The Clapham patriot was ashamed of Clapham.
That Clapham journalist, who glowered at me, has been the problem of my life. He has haunted me at every turn and corner like a shadow, as if he were a blackmailer or a murderer. It was against him that I marshalled the silly pantomime halberdiers of Notting Hill and all the rest. In other words, everything I have thought and done grew originally out of that problem which seemed to me a paradox. I shall have to refer to many problems in these pages, if they are to be truthful pages; and to glance at solutions with some of which the reader may agree, with some of which he may very violently disagree. But I will ask him to remember throughout that this was the primary problem for me, certainly in order of time and largely in order of logic. It was the problem of how men could be made to realise the wonder and splendour of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead. It is normal for a man to boast if he can, or even when he can’t, that he is a citizen of no mean city. But these men had really resigned themselves to being citizens of mean cities; and on every side of us the mean cities stretched far away beyond the horizon; mean in architecture, mean in costume, mean even in manners; but, what was the only thing that really mattered, mean in the imaginative conception of their own inhabitants. These mean cities were indeed supposed to be the component parts of a very great city; but in the thoughts of most modern people, the great city has become a journalistic generalisation, no longer imaginative and very nearly imaginary. On the other hand, the modern mode of life, only professing to be prosaic, pressed upon them day and night and was the real moulder of their minds. This, I say by way of preliminary guide or direction, was what originally led me into certain groups or movements and away from others.
What was called my medievalism was simply that I was very much interested in the historic meaning of Clapham Common. What was called my dislike of Imperialism was a dislike of making England an Empire, in the sense of something more like Clapham Junction. For my own visionary Clapham consisted of houses standing still; and not of trucks and trains rattling by; and I did not want England to be a sort of cloakroom or clearing-house for luggage labelled exports and imports. I wanted real English things that nobody else could import and that we enjoyed too much to export. And this was present even in the last and most disputed phase of change. I came to admit that some sort of universality, another sort of universality, would be needed before such places could really become shrines or sacred sites. In short, I eventually concluded, rightly or wrongly, that Clapham could not now be made mystical by the Clapham Sect. But I say it with the greatest respect for that old group of philanthropists, who devoted themselves to the cause of the remote negroes; the sect that did so much to liberate Africa; the Clapham Sect, that did so little to liberate Clapham.
Now it is essential to realise one fact following on the shadowy epic of Clapham and Kensington; that tale of two cities. It is necessary to insist that in those days, when Clapham was Clapham, London was Clapham; nay, Kensington was Clapham. I mean that, at this particular date, the general appearance of London was more plain and prosaic than it is now. There were indeed beautiful corners of Georgian and Regency architecture in many parts of London, and nowhere more than in Kensington. There are some still. But though there was some trace of the older movements in art, there was as yet no trace of the new ones. Morris had broken out here and there like a rash, in the form of wallpapers; but the very dullest phase of dead Victorianism was in most of the wallpapers and nearly all the walls. But London was already unthinkably large, in comparison with its few last relics of eighteenth-century elegance or its first faint signals of aesthetic revival. And that huge thing was a hideous thing, as a whole. The landscape of London was a thing of flat-chested houses, blank windows, ugly iron lamp-posts and vulgar vermilion pillar-boxes; and as yet, of very little else.
If I have at all suggested the modest virtues of my own middle-class group and family, it will be obvious already, I hope, that we were as ugly as the railings and lamp-posts between which we walked. I mean that our dress and furniture were as yet untouched by anything “arty”, in spite of a quite decently informed interest in art. We were even further from Bohemia than from Belgravia. When my mother said that we had never been respectable, she rather meant that we had never been dressy than that we had never been dowdy. By comparison with the aestheticism that has since crawled across London, we were all of us distinctly dowdy. It was the more so in my own family, because my father and my brother and I were negligent about externals we regarded as normal. We were careless in wearing careful clothes. The aesthetes were careful in wearing careless clothes. I wore an ordinary coat; it was due merely to undesigned friction or attrition if it became rather an extraordinary coat. The Bohemian wore a slouch-hat; but he did not slouch in it. I slouched in a top-hat; a shocking bad hat, but not one designed to shock the bourgeois. I was myself, in that sense, entirely bourgeois. Sometimes that hat, or something like the ghost of it, makes a spectral reappearance still, and is extracted from the dustbin or the pawnshop or the British Museum, to figure at the King’s Garden-Party. Of course, it may not be the same one. The great original was certainly more suited to a scarecrow in a kitchen-garden than to a guest in a king’s garden. But the point is that we never thought about the fashions, or the conventions, sufficiently seriously either to fulfil them or to defy them. My father was in a hundred happy and fruitful ways an amateur; but in no way at all a dilettante. And as this memoir must concern his much less estimable descendant, who actually went to an art-school, he may at least be allowed to boast that, if he failed to be an artist, he never tried to be an aesthete.
In short, the reader (if any) must not be misled at this stage by that Falstaffian figure in a brigand’s hat and cloak, which has appeared in many caricatures. That figure was a later work of art; though the artist was not merely the caricaturist; but a lady artist touched on as lightly as possible in this very Victorian narrative. That caricature merely commemorates what the female genius could do with the most unpromising materials. But when I was a boy or a bachelor, my dress and appearance were just like everybody else’s, only worse. My madness, which was considerable, was wholly within. But that madness was more and more moving in the direction of some vague and visionary revolt against the prosaic flatness of a nineteenth-century city and civilization; an imaginative impatience with the cylindrical hats and the rectangular houses; in short, that movement of the mind I have already associated with the Napoleon of Notting Hill and the imperfect patriot of Clapham. I had perhaps got no further than the feeling that those imprisoned in these inhuman outlines were human beings; that it was a bad thing that living souls should be thus feebly and crudely represented by houses like ill-drawn diagrams of Euclid, or streets and railways like dingy sections of machinery. I remember speaking to Masterman, very early in our acquaintance, as we watched the harassed crowds pouring through the passages of the Underground to the iron and symbolic Inner Circle, and quoting the words of Kipling about the disabled battleship:-
For it is not meet that English stock Should bide in the heart of an eight-day clock The death they may not see.
But I always retained a dim sense of something sacred in English stock, or in human stock, which separated me from the mere pessimism of the period. I never doubted that the human beings inside the houses were themselves almost miraculous; like magic and talismanic dolls, in whatever ugly dolls’-houses. For me, those brown brick boxes were really Christmas boxes. For, after all, Christmas boxes often came tied up in brown paper; and the jerry-builders’ achievements in brown brick were often extremely like brown paper.
To sum up, I accepted my environment and the practical fact that all hats and houses were like our hats and houses; and that this Cockney cosmos, so far as a Cockney could see, stretched away to the ends of the earth. For this reason, it fell out, as a rather determining accident, that I first saw as from afar, the first fantastic signal of something new and as yet far from fashionable; something like a new purple patch on that grey stretch of streets. It would not be remarkable now, but it was remarkable then. In those days I had the habit of walking over very wide stretches and circles of London; I always walked to and from my first art-school in St. John’s Wood; and it will give some hint or now London has altered to say that I commonly walked from Kensington to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and for a great part of the way in the middle of the road. One day I had turned my aimless steps westward, through the tangles of Hammersmith Broadway and along the road that goes to Kew, when I turned for some reason, or more likely without a reason, into a side street and straggled across the dusty turf through which ran a railway, and across the railway one of those disproportionately high bridges which bestride such narrow railway-lines like stilts. By a culmination of futility, I climbed up to this high and practically unused bridge; it was evening, and I think it was then I saw in the distance of that grey landscape, like a ragged red cloud of sunset, the queer artificial village of Bedford Park.
It is difficult, as I have said, to explain how there was then something fanciful about what is now so familiar. That sort of manufactured quaintness is now hardly even quaint; but at that time it was even queer. Bedford Park did look like what it partially professed to be; a colony for artists who were almost aliens; a refuge for persecuted poets and painters hiding in their red-brick catacombs or dying behind their red-brick barricades, when the world should conquer Bedford Park. In that somewhat nonsensical sense, it is rather Bedford Park that has conquered the world. Today, model cottages, council houses and arty-crafty shops—tomorrow, for all I know, prisons and workhouses and madhouses may present (outside) that minimum of picturesqueness, which was then considered the preposterous pose of those addicted to painting pictures. Certainly, if the clerk in Clapham had then been actually presented with such a fantastic cottage, he might have thought that the fairytale house was really a madhouse. This aesthetic experiment was quite recent; it had some elements of real co-operative and corporative independence; its own stores and post-office and church and inn. But the whole was vaguely under the patronage of old Mr. Comyns-Carr, who was not only regarded as the patriarch or the oldest inhabitant, but in some sense as the founder and father of the republic. He was not really so very old; but then the republic was very new; much newer than the new republic of Mr. Mallock, though filled with philosophical gossip of much the same sort, over which the patriarch benevolently beamed and brooded. At least, to quote a literary phrase then much quoted, he was older than the rocks which he sat among, or the roofs he sat under; and we might well have murmured another contemporary tag, a little vaguely perhaps, from memory:-
Match me this marvel, save where aesthetes are, A rose-red suburb half as old as Carr.
But though I think we all felt, if subconsciously, something dreamily theatrical about the thing, that it was partly a dream and partly a joke, it was not merely a fraud. Intelligent people will insinuate themselves even into an intelligentsia; and important people lived there quietly rather than importantly. Professor Yorke Powell, the distinguished historian, paraded there his long leonine beard and menacing and misleading eyebrows; and Dr. Todhunter, the eminent Celtic scholar, represented the Irish colony in the battles of culture. And in the same connection, if it was a place of shadows it could hardly be called a place of shams, when it contained one who is still perhaps the greatest poet writing in our tongue. There is always something fanciful about the conjunction of the world that the poet sees and the place he lives in; the fancy that the great golden lions of Blake roared and roamed in a small court off the Strand, or that Camberwell may have been haunted by Sordello, couched like a lion and expressing himself rather like a sphinx. And it amuses me to think that under those toy trees and gimcrack gables there was already passing a pageant of strange gods and the head-dresses of forgotten priests and the horns of holy unicorns and the wrinkled sleep of Druidic vegetation, and all the emblems of a new heraldry of the human imagination.
William Butler Yeats might seem as solitary as an eagle; but he had a nest. Wherever there is Ireland there is the Family; and it counts for a great deal. If the reader requires a test, let him ask why there is still a habit of calling this great and often grim genius “Willie Yeats”. Nobody, to my knowledge, talks about “Jackie Masefield”, or “Alfie Noyes”, or (what might be misunderstood by the light-minded) “Ruddy Kipling”. But in the case of Yeats, such familiarity might seem singularly incongruous with his tastes and temper; and analogous to talking of the great Gulliver as “Johnny Swift”. His own tone and temper, in public as well as private expression, is of a fastidiousness the very reverse of such familiarity.
There is no fool can call me friend And I may drink at the journey’s end With Landor and with Donne.
I mention it merely as a point of impersonal description, without pronouncing on the problem; it takes all sorts to make a world. I daresay that there are a good many fools who can call me a friend and also (a more chastening thought) a good many friends who can call me a fool. But in Yeats that fastidiousness is not only sincere but essentially noble, being full of a fine anger against the victory of baser over better things, leading him to call the terrible words over the great grave in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “the noblest epitaph in history.” The reason why, in spite of all this, the largest possible assembly and assortment of fools is probably at this moment calling poor Yeats “Willie,” at any rate behind his back, is to be found in the curious corporate stamp always left by the Irish family as a whole. The intensity and individualism of genius itself could never wash out of the world’s memories the general impression of Willie and Lily and Lolly and Jack; names cast backwards and forwards in a unique sort of comedy of Irish wit, gossip, satire, family quarrels and family pride. I knew the family more or less as a whole in those days; and for long afterward knew and admired those sisters of the poet who maintained in the Cuala industry a school of decoration and drapery not unworthy of the great lines about the heavens’ embroidered cloths. W. B. is perhaps the best talker I ever met, except his old father who alas will talk no more in this earthly tavern, though I hope he is still talking in Paradise. Among twenty other qualities, he had that rare but very real thing, entirely spontaneous style. The words will not come pouring out, any more than the bricks that make a great building come pouring out; they are simply arranged like lightning; as if a man could build a cathedral as quickly as a conjurer builds a house of cards. A long and elaborately balanced sentence, with dependent clauses alternative or antithetical, would flow out of such talkers with every word falling into its place, quite as immediately and innocently as most people would say it was a fine day or a funny business in the papers. I can still remember old Yeats, that graceful greybeard, saying in an offhand way about the South African War, “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain has the character, as he has the face, of the shrewish woman who ruins her husband by her extravagance; and Lord Salisbury has the character, as he has the face, of the man who is so ruined.” That style, or swift construction of a complicated sentence, was the sign of a lucidity now largely lost. You will find it in the most spontaneous explosions of Dr. Johnson. Since then some muddled notion has arisen that talking in that complete style is artificial; merely because the man knows what he means and means to say it. I know not from what nonsense world the notion first came; that there is some connection between being sincere and being semi-articulate. But it seems to be a notion that a man must mean what he says, because he breaks down even in trying to say it; or that he must be a marvel of power and decision, because he discovers in the middle of a sentence that he does not know what he was going to say. Hence the conversation of current comedy; and the pathetic belief that talk may be endless, so long as no statement is allowed to come to an end.
Yeats affected me strongly, but in two opposite ways; like the positive and negative poles of a magnet. It is necessary to explain what I mean, not so much for the sake of my own groping notions at this time, as for the sake of explaining the peculiarity of the period; about which most critics seem to be completely wrong at the present time. There was much in Victorian ideas that I dislike and much that I respect; but there was nothing whatever about Victorian ideas corresponding to what is now called Victorian. I am actually old enough to remember the Victorian Age; and it was almost a complete contrast to all that is now connoted by that word. It had all the vices that are now called virtues; religious doubt, intellectual unrest, a hungry credulity about new things, a complete lack of equilibrium. It also had all the virtues that are now called vices; a rich sense of romance, a passionate desire to make the love of man and woman once more what it was in Eden, a strong sense of the absolute necessity of some significance in human life. But everything that everybody tells me now about the Victorian atmosphere I feel instantly to be false, like a fog, which merely shuts out a vista. And in nothing is this more true than in the particular truth I must now try to describe.
The general background of all my boyhood was agnostic. My own parents were rather exceptional, among people so intelligent, in believing at all in a personal God or in personal immortality. I remember when my friend Lucian Oldershaw, who introduced me to this Bohemian colony, said to me suddenly, looking back on the tired lessons in the Greek Testament at St. Paul’s School, “Of course, you and I were taught our religion by agnostics;” and I, suddenly seeing the faces of all my schoolmasters, except one or two eccentric clergymen, knew that he was right. It was not specially our generation, it was much more the previous generation, that was agnostic after the fashion of Huxley. It was the period of which Mr. H. G. Wells, a sportive but spiritual child of Huxley, wrote truly enough that it was “full of the ironical silences that follow great controversies;” and in that controversy, Huxley had been superficially successful. So successful, that Mr. Wells, in the same passage, went so far as to say that the Bishops, “socially so much in evidence, are intellectually in hiding.” … How dear and distant it all seems! I have lived to see biological controversies, in which it is much truer to say that the official Darwinians are in hiding. The “silence” following on the first evolutionary controversy was a good deal more “ironical” than Mr. Wells was then aware. But then certainly the silence seemed to be one of religion defeated; a desert of materialism. Men no more expected the myriad mystical reactions now moving all nations than the flat-chested mansions of Pimlico and Bloomsbury had expected to see spreading through the land the crested roofs and cranky chimneys of Bedford Park.
But it was not in this that Bedford Park was eccentric. There was nothing new or odd about not having a religion. Socialism, mostly upon the rather wallpaper pattern of Morris, was a relatively new thing. Socialism, in the style of Bernard Shaw and the Fabians, was a rising thing. But agnosticism was an established thing. We might almost say that agnosticism was an established church. There was a uniformity of unbelief, like the Elizabethan demand for uniformity of belief; not among eccentric people, but simply among educated people. And, above all, among the educated people older than myself.
There were, indeed, fine fighting atheists. But they were mostly fighting something else besides theism. There could be no more virile or valiant type of them than my old friend Archie MacGregor, the artist, who was fighting the Boer War. As we agreed on this, we fell into a strong companionship; but even in those days, I realised that his atheism was not really revolutionary in the matter of morals. It was just the other way. It was not any “new morality,” but very decidedly the “old morality” that he was defending against Imperialism, merely on the ground that it was murder and theft. He was defending against the new ethic of Nietzsche the old ethic of Naboth. This, Mr. Wells and the Fabians saw with typical lucidity; that the sentimental Socialists were inconsistent, in saying that a peasant has no right to a field, but a peasantry has a right to an oilfield. Mr. Wells is not really a pacifist any more than a militarist; but the only sort of war he thinks right is the only sort of war I think wrong. Anyhow, broadly speaking, it is a complete mistake to suppose that the rebels who denounced Church and Chapel were those who denounced Empire and Army. The divisions cut across; but they cut mainly the other way. A fighting Pro-Boer like MacGregor was in as much of a minority among atheists as among artists; even in Bedford Park. I soon discovered that, when I emerged into the larger world of artists and literary men. No two men could have been more opposite than Henley and Colvin; and I was later to be in some sense a witness to the duel they fought over the dead body of Stevenson. But they were both stubborn materialists and they were both stubborn militarists. The truth is that for most men about this time Imperialism, or at least patriotism, was a substitute for religion. Men believed in the British Empire precisely because they had nothing else to believe in. Those beacon-fires of an imperial insularity shot a momentary gleam over the dark landscape of the Shropshire Lad; though I fear that many innocent patriots did not perceive the Voltairean sneer in the patriotic lines: “Get you the sons your fathers got, and God will save the Queen.” My present prejudices would be satisfied by saying that the last decay of Protestantism took the form of Prussianism.
But I am here describing myself as I was, when pure and unpolluted by such prejudices. And what I wish to attest, merely as a witness to the fact, is that the background of all that world was not merely atheism, but atheist orthodoxy, and even atheist respectability. That was quite as common in Belgravia as in Bohemia. That was above all normal in Suburbia; and only for that reason in this particular eccentric suburb. In that suburb, the type of the time was not a man like Archie MacGregor but a man like St. John Hankin. And the point is that a man like St. John Hankin was not eccentric but centric. He was a pessimist, which is something more atheistic than an atheist; he was a fundamental sceptic, that is a man without fundamentals; he was one who disbelieved in Man much more than he did in God; he despised democracy even more than devotion; he was professedly without enthusiasms of any kind; but in all this he was centric. He was very near to the centre of the culture and philosophy of London at that time. He was a man of real talent; and the memory of some of his amusing literary travesties still remains. I did not dislike him, though many did; but I did in a sense despair of him, as he despaired of everything. But it is entirely typical of the time that his pessimism managed to appear in Punch; and that, almost alone amid those ragged or ridiculous or affected artistic costumes, he always wore evening-dress. He had a low opinion of the world, but he was a man of the world; and especially of the world as it was then.
Now against this drab background of dreary modern materialism, Willie Yeats was calmly walking about as the Man Who Knew the Fairies. Yeats stood for enchantment; exactly where Hankin stood for disenchantment. But I very specially rejoiced in the fighting instinct which made the Irishman so firm and positive about it. He was the real original rationalist who said that the fairies stand to reason. He staggered the materialists by attacking their abstract materialism with a completely concrete mysticism; “Imagination!” he would say with withering contempt; “There wasn’t much imagination when Farmer Hogan was dragged out of bed and thrashed like a sack of potatoes—that they did, they had ‘um out;” the Irish accent warming with scorn; “they had ‘um out and thumped ‘um; and that’s not the sort of thing that a man wants to imagine.” But the concrete examples were not only a comedy; he used one argument which was sound, and I have never forgotten it. It is the fact that it is not abnormal men like artists, but normal men like peasants, who have borne witness a thousand times to such things; it is the farmers who see the fairies. It is the agricultural labourer who calls a spade a spade who also calls a spirit a spirit; it is the woodcutter with no axe to grind, except for woodcutting, who will say he saw a man hang on a gallows and afterwards hang round it as a ghost. It is all very well to say we ought not to believe in the ghost on an ignorant man’s evidence. But we should hang the man on the gallows on the same man’s evidence.
I was all for fighting for Willie Yeats and his fairies against materialism. I was especially for fighting for Willie Yeats and his farmers against the mechanical urban materialism. But already a further complication had arisen, which I must try to explain; not only to explain myself, but to explain the whole development of the poetry and the period. There had already appeared in that world the beginnings of a reaction against materialism; something analogous to what has since appeared in the form of Spiritualism. It has even taken the yet more defiant form of Christian Science, which denied the existence of the body merely because its enemies had denied the existence of the soul. But the form it took first, or most generally, in the world of which I speak, was the thing commonly called Theosophy; also sometimes called Esoteric Buddhism. It is probable that I must here allow at least for the allegation of a prejudice. If it existed, it was not an orthodox or a religious or even a pious prejudice. I was myself almost entirely Pagan and Pantheist. When I disliked Theosophy I had no Theology. Perhaps I did not dislike Theosophy, but only Theosophists. It is certainly true, I am afraid, whatever the failure in charity, that I did dislike some Theosophists. But I did not dislike them because they had erroneous doctrines, when I myself had no doctrines; or because they had no claim to be Christians, when in fact they would have claimed Christianity, among other things, much more confidentiy than I could myself. I disliked them because they had shiny pebbly eyes and patient smiles. Their patience mostly consisted of waiting for others to rise to the spiritual plane where they themselves already stood. It is a curious fact, that they never seemed to hope that they might evolve and reach the plane where their honest green-grocer already stood. They never wanted to hitch their own lumbering waggon to a soaring cabman; or see the soul of their charwoman like a star beckon to the spheres where the immortals are. Yet I suspect that I am unjust to these people in their real personalities. I fancy it was a combination of three things; Asia and Evolution and the English lady; and I think they would be nicer separate.
Now Yeats was not in the least like these Theosophical ladies; nor did he follow or seek out their special spiritual prophetess, Mrs. Besant, who was a dignified, ladylike, sincere, idealistic egoist. He sought out Madam Blavatsky, who was a coarse, witty, vigorous, scandalous old scally-wag; and I admire his taste. But I do think that this particular Oriental twist led him a dance, when he followed the fakirs and not the fairies. I shall not be misunderstood if I say of that great man that he is bewitched; that is, that Madam Blavatsky was a witch.
For whether or no Yeats was bewitched, it is certain that Yeats was not deceived. He was not taken in by the theosophical smile; or all that shining, or rather shiny, surface of optimism. He, having a more penetrating mind, had already penetrated to the essential pessimism that lies behind that Asiatic placidity; and it is arguable that the pessimism was not so depressing as the optimism. Anyhow, while those highly refined English ladies were stepping from star to star, as from stair to stair, he knew enough of what was meant by the Sorrowful Wheel, to realise that this starry stairway was uncommonly like a treadmill. The more feverish of my friends, in this circle, used to go and sit in rooms full of images of Buddha to calm themselves; though I myself never needed any image of Buddha to encourage me to do nothing or to go to sleep. But Yeats knew something of the mind and not only the face of Buddha; and if he would never have used such Tennysonian terms, he knew that it meant for his own mind, if calm at all, if any calm, a calm despair. In the scheme of mysticism to which he more and more tended after his first more fortunate adventures among farmers and fairies, the ancient religions stood more and more for the idea that the secret of the sphinx is that she has no secret. The veil of Isis was more and more merely the veil of Maya; illusion, ending with the last illusion that the veil of Isis is rent; the last and worst illusion that we are really disillusioned. He said to me once, apropos of somebody’s disappointment about something achieved, “You would not get out of your chair and walk across the room, if Nature had not her bag of illusions.” Then he added, as if against a silent protest, “It isn’t a very cheerful philosophy that everything is illusion.” It was not. I cannot answer for the fairies, but I doubt whether the farmers accepted it; and there was something in one half-grown Cockney journalist which entirely refused to accept it. So that I found myself in this odd double attitude towards the poet, agreeing with him about the fairytales on which most people disagreed with him, and disagreeing with him about the philosophy on which most people agreed with him, though in a much muddier and more prosaic way. Thus, when I read that wonderful poetical play, Land of Heart’s Desire, produced soon after at the Abbey Theatre, I was conscious of the sharp sensation, not so much that I disbelieved in the fairies, as that I disagreed with them. Though I had then no more notion of being a Catholic than of being a Cannibal, my sympathies were all for the Family against the Fairy. They were even then for the priest against the fairy. In all that magic burst of music, there was only one thing said by the fairy with which I fully and entirely sympathised; and that was the line: “I am tired of winds and waters and pale lights.” I do not think I have anything to alter in the sentence of literary criticism that I wrote long after: “There is only one thing against the Land of Heart’s Desire; the heart does not desire it.” Yet I admired the play almost passionately as a play; and in the debates of mere literature, always defended it against stupid jokes about the Celtic Twilight uttered by those who preferred the London Fog. So, later on, when I was on the Daily News, I defended, against the dramatic critic, the dramatic merit of a later play, which is full of good things; the play called Where There Is Nothing There Is God. But I was all groping and groaning and travailing with an inchoate and half-baked philosophy of my own, which was very nearly the reverse of the remark that where there is nothing there is God. The truth presented itself to me, rather, in the form that where there is anything there is God. Neither statement is adequate in philosophy; but I should have been amazed to know how near in some ways was my Anything to the Ens of St. Thomas Aquinas.
There was a debating-club in Bedford Park, on which I first tried my crude ideas with even cruder rhetoric. It deserved better treatment. It was frightful fun. It was called the “I.D.K.”; and an awful seal of secrecy was supposed to attach to the true meaning of the initials. Perhaps the Theosophists did really believe that it meant India’s Divine Karma. Possibly the Socialists did interpret it as “Individualists Deserve Kicking”. But it was a strict rule of the club that its members should profess ignorance of the meaning of its name; in the manner of the Know-Nothing movement in American politics. The stranger, the mere intruder into the sacred village, would ask, “But what does I.D.K. mean?”; and the initiate was expected to shrug his shoulders and say, “I don’t know,” in an offhand manner; in the hope that it would not be realised that, in a seeming refusal to reply, he had in fact replied. I know not whether this motto was symbolic of the agnosticism of men like Hankin or the mysticism of men like Yeats. But both points of view were, of course, present; and I think they pretty well divided that intellectual world between them. Certainly I always preferred the Celtic Twilight to the materialistic midnight. I had more sympathy with the magician’s cloak that clothed the man who believed in magic, or the dark elf-locks of the poet who had really something to tell us about elves, than with the black clothes and blank shirt-front of the sort of man who seemed to proclaim that the modern world, even when it is festive, is only the more funereal. What I did not realise was that there was a third angle, and a very acute angle, which was capable of piercing with the sharpness, and some would say the narrowness of a sword.
The secretary of this debating-club always proved her efficiency by entirely refusing to debate. She was one of a family of sisters, with one brother, whom I had grown to know through the offices of Oldershaw; and they had a cousin on the premises, who was engaged to a German professor and permanently fascinated by the subject of German fairytales. She was naturally attracted also to the Celtic fairytales that were loose in the neighbourhood; and one day she came back glowing with the news that Willie Yeats had cast her horoscope, or performed some such occult rite, and told her that she was especially under the influence of the moon. I happened to mention this to a sister of the secretary, who had only just returned to the family circle, and she told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that she hated the moon.
I talked to the same lady several times afterwards; and found that this was a perfectly honest statement of the fact. Her attitude on this and other things might be called a prejudice; but it could not possibly be called a fad, still less an affectation. She really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle of which I was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand, she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical. She practised gardening; in that curious Cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it. She was a queer card. She wore a green velvet dress barred with grey fur, which I should have called artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an attractive face, which I should have called elvish, but that she hated all the talk about elves. But what was arresting and almost blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. She never knew what was meant by being “under the influence” of Yeats or Shaw or Tolstoy or anybody else. She was intelligent, with a great love of literature, and especially of Stevenson. But if Stevenson had walked into the room and explained his personal doubts about personal immortality, she would have regretted that he should be wrong upon the point; but would otherwise have been utterly unaffected. She was not at all like Robespierre, except in a taste for neatness in dress; and yet it is only in Mr. Belloc’s book on Robespierre that I have ever found any words that describe the unique quality that cut her off from the current culture and saved her from it. “God had given him in his mind a stone tabernacle in which certain great truths were preserved imperishable.”
I saw a good deal of her later on, on various social occasions of the district; she was a witness to the grand and grotesque occasion on which I rode a bicycle for the first and last time; attired in the frock-coat and top hat of the period on the tennis lawn at Bedford Park. Believe it or not (as the great newspapers say when they tell lies based on ignorance of the elements of history) but it is true that I rode round and round the tennis-court with a complete natural balance, only disturbed by the intellectual problem of how I could possibly get off; eventually I fell off; I did not notice what happened to my hat, but then I seldom did. The image of that monstrous revolving ride has often recurred to me, as indicating that something odd must have happened to me about that time. The lady in question worked very hard as secretary of an educational society in London; and I formed the impression then, which I have not lost, that the worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease working; the racketing of trains and trams and the slow return to remote homes. She was a very alert person, and normally quite the reverse of absent-minded; but she told me once with some remorse that she had been so tired that she had left her parasol in the waiting room of a railway-station. We thought no more of it for the moment; but as I walked home that night, by my custom, from Bedford Park to Kensington, very nearly in the middle of the night, I happened to see the identical railway-station stand up black and bulky against the moonlight; and I committed my first and last crime; which was burglary, and very enjoyable. The station, or that part of the station, seemed to be entirely locked up; but I knew exactly the whereabouts of the waiting-room in question; and I found the shortest cut to it was to climb up the steep grassy embankment and crawl under the platform out upon the line; I then clambered onto the platform and recovered the parasol. As I returned by the same route (still in the battered top hat and the considerably deranged frock-coat) I stared up at the sky and found myself filled with all sorts of strange sensations. I felt as if I had just fallen from the moon, with the parasol for a parachute. Anyhow, as I looked back up the tilt of turf grey in the moonshine, like unearthly lunar grasses I did not share the lady’s impiety to the patroness of lunatics.
It was fortunate, however, that our next most important meeting was not under the sign of the moon but of the sun. She has often affirmed, during our later acquaintance, that if the sun had not been shining to her complete satisfaction on that day, the issue might have been quite different. It happened in St. James’s Park; where they keep the ducks and the little bridge, which has been mentioned in no less authoritative a work than Mr. Belloc’s Essay on Bridges, since I find myself quoting that author once more. I think he deals in some detail, in his best topographical manner, with various historic sites on the Continent; but later relapses into a larger manner, somewhat thus: “The time has now come to talk at large about Bridges. The longest bridge in the world is the Forth Bridge, and the shortest bridge in the world is a plank over a ditch in the village of Loudwater. The bridge that frightens you most is the Brooklyn Bridge, and the bridge that frightens you least is the bridge in St. James’s Park.” I admit that I crossed that bridge in undeserved safety; and perhaps I was affected by my early romantic vision of the bridge leading to the princess’s tower. But I can assure my friend the author that the bridge in St. James’s Park can frighten you a good deal.
VII
THE CRIME OF ORTHODOXY
I used to say that my autobiography ought to consist of a series of short stories like those about Sherlock Holmes; only that his were astonishing examples of observation, and mine astonishing examples of lack of observation. In short, they were to be “Adventures” concerned with my absence of mind, instead of his presence of mind. One, I remember was called “The Adventure of the Pro-Boer’s Corkscrew”, and commemorated the fact that I once borrowed a corkscrew from Hammond and found myself trying to open my front-door with it, with my latch-key in the other hand. Few will believe my statement, but it is none the less true that the incident came before and not after the more appropriate use of the corkscrew. I was perfectly sober; probably I should have been more vigilant if I had been drunk. Another anecdote, expanded into “The Adventure of the Astonished Clerk”, accused me of having asked for a cup of coffee instead of a ticket at the booking-office of a railway station, and doubtless I went on to ask the waitress politely for a third single to Battersea. I am not particularly proud of this characteristic, for I think that presence of mind is far more really poetical than absence of mind. But I only mention it, at this stage, because it introduces a character who played a considerable part in the fortunes of my friends and myself; and who, in the absorbing narrative of “The Adventure of the Curate’s Trousers”, was cast for the important part of the curate.
I cannot remember exactly where my brother or I first met the Rev. Conrad Noel. I rather fancy it was at some strange club where somebody was lecturing on Nietzsche; and where the debaters (by typical transition) passed from the gratifying thought that Nietzsche attacked Christianity to the natural inference that he was a True Christian. And I admired the common sense of a curate, with dark curly hair and a striking face, who got up and pointed out that Nietzsche would be even more opposed to True Christianity than to False Christianity, supposing there were any True Christianity to oppose. I learned that the curate’s name was Noel, but in many ways his intervention was symbolic of my experience of that strange world. That Intelligentsia of the artistic and vaguely anarchic clubs was indeed a very strange world. And the strangest thing about it, I fancy, was that, while it thought a great deal about thinking, it did not think. Everything seemed to come at second or third hand; from Nietzsche or Tolstoy or Ibsen or Shaw; and there was a pleasant atmosphere of discussing all these things, without any particular sense of responsibility for coming to any conclusion on them. The company often included really clever people, like Mr. Edgar Jepson, who always seemed as if he had strayed out of Society to smile mysteriously in Bohemia. Here and there it would include a man who had not only cleverness but strong traditional beliefs, which he kept largely to himself; like my old friend Louis McQuilland, who was long content to appear as a modern of the club called the Moderns, dealing in detached epigrams of the Wilde and Whistler fashion; and guarding within him all the time a flame of pure Catholic faith and burning Irish Nationalism, which never appeared save when those sacred things were challenged. But I think it profoundly significant, as a matter of intellectual instincts, that he preferred the almost avowed nonsense of the Decadents to the more high-minded and heretical earnestness of the Fabians. He once said in his wrath, on the occasion of the hundredth eulogy on Candida or Arms and the Man, something which ran (if I remember right) in a Scriptural form, “Stay me with Hitchens, comfort me with Beerbohm; for I am sick of Shaw.”
But a large section of the Intelligentsia seemed wholly devoid of Intelligence. As was perhaps natural, those who pontificated most pompously were often the most windy and hollow. I remember a man with a long beard and a deep booming voice who proclaimed at intervals, “What we need is Love,” or, “All we require is Love,” like the detonations of a heavy gun. I remember another radiant little man who spread out his fingers and said, “Heaven is here! It is now!” which seemed a disturbing thought under the circumstances. There was an aged, aged man who seemed to live at one of these literary clubs; and who would hold up a large hand at intervals and preface some fairly ordinary observation by saying, “A Thought.” One day Jepson, I think, goaded beyond endurance, is said to have exploded with the words, “But, good God, man, you don’t call that a thought, do you?” But that was what was the matter with not a few of these thinkers. A sort of Theosophist said to me, “Good and evil, truth and falsehood, folly and wisdom are only aspects of the same upward movement of the universe.” Even at that stage it occurred to me to ask, “Supposing there is no difference between good and bad, or between false and true, what is the difference between up and down?”
Now there was one thing that I began to note, as I noted on that minor occasion of the debate on Nietzsche. All that clique, in praising the Ibsenite and Shavian drama, was of course very contemptuous of the old Victorian drama. It sneered steadily at the stock types of old farces; at the drawling guardmen and grotesque grocers of Caste or Our Boys. But there was one old farcical type that had become far more false; and that was the comic curate of The Private Secretary: the simpleton who “did not like London” and asked for a glass of milk and a Bath-Bun. And many of the sceptics in that highly scientific world had not, by any means, outgrown the Victorian joke about the curate. Having myself been trained, first on the farce about the curate, and then on the scepticism about the priest, I was quite ready to believe that a dying superstition was represented by such feeble persons. As a fact, I found that they were very often by far the ablest and most forcible persons. In debate after debate I noticed the same thing happen that I have already noted in the debate on Nietzsche. It was the farcical curate, it was the feebleminded clergyman, who got up and applied to the wandering discussion at least some sort of test of some sort of truth; who showed all the advantages of having been tolerably trained in some sort of system of thinking. Dreadful seeds of doubt began to be sown in my mind. I was almost tempted to question the accuracy of the anticlerical legend; nay, even the accuracy of the farce of The Private Secretary. It seemed to me that the despised curates were rather more intelligent than anybody else; that they, alone in that world of intellectualism, were trying to use their intellects. For that reason I begin such adventures with the Adventure of the Curate’s Trousers. For that reason I mention first Mr. Conrad Noel. He had no Bath-Bun. He did not confine himself to a glass of milk. Nobody, with the smallest knowledge of him, could truthfully say that he did not like London.
Conrad Noel, the son of a poet and the grandson of a peer, had all the incalculable elements of the eccentric aristocrat; the sort of eccentric aristocrat who so often figures as a particularly destructive democrat. That great gentleman, Cunninghame Graham, whom I knew more slightly but always respected profoundly, was the same sort of uncompromising rebel; but he had a sort of Scottish seriousness similar to Spanish seriousness; while Noel’s humour was half English and half Irish but always mainly humorous. He delighted, of course, in shocking people and taking a rise out of them. I remember how he used to say, shaking his head with an air of brooding concentration: “Ah, how little people know about the work of a clergyman’s life; such demands on him! Such distracting and different duties! All the afternoon behind the scenes at the Butterfly Theatre, talking to Poppy Pimpernel; all the evening doing a pub-crawl with Jack Bootle; back to the club after dinner, etc.” As a matter of fact, he occupied much of his time with things perhaps equally fantastic but more intellectual. He had a love of nosing out the headquarters of incredible or insane sects; and wrote an amusing record of them called Byways of Belief. He had a special affection for an old gentleman with long grey whiskers, living in the suburbs; whose name, it appeared, was King Solomon David Jesus. This prophet was not afraid to protest, as a prophet should, against what he considered the pomps and vanities of this world. He began the interview by coldly rebuking Conrad Noel for having sent in a visiting-card inscribed, “Rev. Conrad Noel”; since all such official titles were abolished in the New Dispensation. Conrad delicately insinuated, in self-defence, that there seemed to be something about calling oneself Solomon David Jesus, which might raise rather grave problems of identity and a somewhat formidable historical comparison. And anyhow, an old gentleman who called himself King could hardly insist on such severe republican simplicity. However, the monarch explained that his title had been given him by an actual voice speaking out of the sky; and the Rev. Conrad admitted that he could not claim that his visiting-card had been thus written at dictation.
Sometimes, instead of his visiting the New Religions, the New Religions visited him, which was rather more alarming. He and his wife, a very charming little lady whose demureness was perhaps a little deceptive, had gone out to a matinee and came back to find ten Doukhobors eating their tea. Doukhobors, it may be explained to those who have had no such happy visitations, are a sect of Russian Pacifists and practical Communists, who believe in living by mutual hospitality. It is a curious and mystifying circumstance, by the way, that while the Doukhobors lived in Russia and had differences with a foreign authority, they invariably behaved themselves like a band of saints and according to the highest pattern of primitive Christians; but when they crossed to Canada, and came under a British authority, they were strangely demoralised, and degenerated into dangerous fanatics who used to go about stealing horses out of carts and cows out of sheds; because they disapproved of the captivity of animals. Anyhow, Conrad Noel, who certainly would not have thought the worse of them for defying either the Russian or the British Empire, had met a member of this sect somewhere; and I suppose in some hazy and hearty fashion invited him to pay a call some day. He was there with nine others like unto himself, stowing away the muffins and macaroons; and explaining that they would be delighted to pay for so ample and sumptuous a meal; but unfortunately, they did not approve of money. “If, however,” explained the Primitive Christian, “there is any small form of service”—any domestic assistance they could offer in return, they would be delighted thus to discharge the debt. Then was a light of battle to be seen in the eye of Mrs. Conrad Noel, who proceeded in quiet tones to tell them all the things she would undoubtedly like done; there were a great many of them, more than I can recall; but I have a general impression that carrying the grand piano up five floors onto the roof, or carting the billiard-table to the other end of the garden, were typical of the class of tasks to which the tottering and staggering Doukhobors were directed, by that gentle but vindictive lady. It is to be feared that none of them came to the house of that hospitable Christian Socialist again; except indeed one isolated Doukhobor, who struck out a line for himself; for the simple domestic toil with which he paid for his meal consisted in going into Noel’s study and altering Noel’s sermon; blacking out whole passages of it and inserting sentiments of a more unimpeachably Doukhobor tendency. In his case, I suspect that Mr. Noel, as well as Mrs. Noel, began to have doubts about the Doukhobor ideal.
But Mr. Noel certainly never lost his belief in what may be called the Russian Communist ideal; though he would have been as astonished as anybody else if he had been told then of the fortunes that lay before Russian Communism. Here, however, I am chiefly concerned with him as an example of my preliminary prevailing impression of how stupid the anti-clericals were and how much more relatively intelligent the clerics were. From this time also, dates the first faint beginnings of my own divergence from the merely Communist to what is called the Distributist ideal. It was, after all, only the further sub-division of my Notting Hill romance from the street to the house; but it was solidified by Belloc, my Irish friends and my French holidays. But I fancy the first spark flew when a Theosophist, at a drawing-room meeting, was droning on about the immorality of Christians who believed in the Forgiveness of Sins; since there was only Karma, by which we reap what we sow. “If that window is broken,” he said mournfully, “our host [Sir Richard Stapley] might pardon it; but the window will still be broken.” Whereupon a spectacled baldish little curate, quite unknown to me, jumped up and said, “But it isn’t wrong to break a window. It’s only wrong because it’s Stapley’s window; and if he doesn’t mind, why should anybody else?”
Anyhow, it was when I was staying with Conrad Noel, afterwards famous as the parson who flew the Red Flag from his church at Thaxted in Essex, that I happened to be dressing for dinner and made the (it seems to me) very excusable error of mistaking his black clerical trousers for my evening ones. I trust I violated no grave ecclesiastical law, relative to the unlawful assumption of priestly vestments; but Conrad Noel himself was always fairly casual in the matter of costume. The world thought him a very Bohemian sort of clergyman, as it now thinks him a very Bolshevist sort of clergyman. The world would be wiser if it realised that, in spite of this, he was and is a very unworldly sort of clergyman; and much too unworldly to be judged rightly by the world. I did not always agree with his attitude, and I do not now altogether agree with his politics; but I have always known that he glowed with conviction and the simplicity of the fighting spirit. But in those days his external eccentricity was more provocative than is a red rag to a bull or a red flag to a bully. He delighted in making the quaintest combinations of costume made up of the clerical, the artistic and the proletarian. He took great pleasure in appearing in correct clerical clothes, surmounted with a sort of hairy or furry cap, making him look like an aesthetic rat-catcher. I had the pleasure of walking with him, thus attired, right across the vast stretch of South London, starting from Blackfriars Bridge and going on till we saw the green hills beyond Croydon; a very interesting expedition too rarely undertaken by those from the richer side of the river. I also remember one occasion when I was walking away from some meeting with him and with Dr. Percy Dearmer, then chiefly famous as an authority on the history of ritual and of vestments. Dr. Dearmer was in the habit of walking about in a cassock and biretta which he had carefully reconstructed as being of exactly the right pattern for an Anglican or Anglo-Catholic priest; and he was humorously grieved when its strictly traditional and national character was misunderstood by the little boys in the street. Somebody would call out, “No Popery,” or “To hell with the Pope,” or some other sentiment of larger and more liberal religion. And Percy Dearmer would sternly stop them and say, “Are you aware that this is the precise costume in which Latimer went to the stake?”
Meanwhile my own costume, however calamitous, was the result rather of accident than design; but this was sometime later and my wife had already disguised me as far as possible in the large hat and cloak familiar to caricaturists. But it was also at a sufficiently early date in English history for frock-coats to be worn on formal occasions. I had taken off the cloak and retained the frock-coat and the wide hat; and I must have borne a more or less formless resemblance to a Boer missionary. Thus I walked innocently down the street, with the hairy cap of the aesthetic rat-catcher on one side and the ceremonial biretta and cassock of Bishop Latimer on the other. And Charles Masterman, who always wore conventional clothes in an unconventional manner, a top-hat on the back of his head and an umbrella flourished with derisive gestures, walked behind and pointed at the three of us as we unconsciously filled the pavement and cried aloud, “Could you see three backs like that anywhere in God’s creation?”
I mention this fringe of eccentricity, even of eccentricity in dress, upon the border of the Anglo-Catholic party in the Anglican Church, because it really had a great deal to do with the beginning of the process by which Bohemian journalists, like my brother and myself, were drawn towards the serious consideration of the theory of a Church. I was considerably influenced by Conrad Noel; and my brother, I think, even more so.
I have said very little of my brother so far, in spite of the great part he played in my boyhood and youth; and the omission has been due to anything in the world except oblivion. My brother was much too remarkable a person not to have a chapter to himself. And I have decided, not without thought, that he will be best presented at full length when the time comes to deal with his very vital effect on modern history, and the whole story of the campaign against political corruption. But it is relevant here to remark that he differed from me at the very beginning; and not least in beginning his questions at the beginning. I always retained a sort of lingering loyalty or vague sympathy with the traditions of the past; so that, even during the period when I practically believed in nothing, I believed in what some have called “the wish to believe.” But my brother at the beginning did not even wish to believe; or at least did not wish to admit that he wished to believe. He adopted the extreme attitude of antagonism, and almost of anarchism; largely, no doubt, out of a reaction and as a result of our interminable arguments, or rather argument. For we really devoted all our boyhood to one long argument, unfortunately interrupted by meal-times, by school-times, by work hours and many such irritating and irrelevant frivolities. But though he was ready at first to take up the cudgels for anarchism or atheism or anything, he had the sort of mind in which anarchism or atheism could survive anything except the society of anarchists and atheists. He had far too lucid and lively a mind not to be bored with materialism as maintained by materialists. This negative reaction against negation, however, might not have carried him far, if the positive end of the magnet had not begun to attract him; in the person of personalities like Conrad Noel. It was certainly through that eccentric cleric that my brother began to cease to be anything so barren as a mere anti-clerical. I remember that, when conventional people complained of Noel’s wild ways, or attributed to him worse things of which he certainly was not guilty, my brother Cecil answered them by quoting the words of the man healed of blindness in the Gospel: “Whether the man be a sinner or no, I know not; but this I know; that whereas I was blind, now I see.”
The old High Church or Anglo-Catholic group, of which Conrad Noel represented the most revolutionary extreme and Percy Dearmer (at least at that time) the most historical and liturgical, was in fact a very fine body of men, to which I for one shall always feel a gratitude like that of my brother and the blind man in Scripture. Its leader, in so far as it had a leader among the higher branches of the Anglican system, was that most fascinating and memorable man, Henry Scott Holland, who moved among younger men like one much younger than they; unforgettable with his humorous frog’s face and great stature and voice of bull-like bellowing; as if he were the frog that had conquered the fable and really turned into a bull. In an abstract intellectual sense, of course, their leader was rather Dr. Gore; but anyone who knew his peculiar merits would expect him to seem a thinner and more shadowy figure in the background. Sometimes all of them assembled on one platform, especially on the platforms of the Christian Social Union, which I joined at a later date; and I hope that all who survive of those old friends, from whom I have been sundered in thought but never in sympathy, will forgive me if I recall here any of the follies that enlivened our friendship. I remember when about five or six of us addressed the astonished town of Nottingham, on what we considered to be its Christian duty towards the modern problem of industrial poverty. I remember the faces of the citizens of that great city while I spoke; and I regret to say that I recorded my impressions in some verses, supposed to represent the impressions of a Nottingham tradesman; they became something of a jest in our little circle and I quote them for the pleasure of recalling those old exhilarating days.
The Christian Social Union here Was very much annoyed; It seems there is some duty Which we never should avoid, And so they sing a lot of hymns To help the Unemployed.
Upon a platform at the end The speakers were displayed And Bishop Hoskins stood in front And hit a bell and said That Mr. Carter was to pray, And Mr. Carter prayed.
Then Bishop Gore of Birmingham He stood upon one leg And said he would be happier If beggars didn’t beg, And that if they pinched his palace It would take him down a peg.
He said that Unemployment Was a horror and a blight, He said that charities produced Servility and spite, And stood upon the other leg And said it wasn’t right.
And then a man named Chesterton Got up and played with water, He seemed to say that principles Were nice and led to slaughter And how we always compromised And how we didn’t orter.
Then Canon Holland fired ahead Like fifty cannons firing, We tried to find out what he meant With infinite enquiring, But the way he made the windows jump We couldn’t help admiring.
He said the human soul should be Ashamed of every sham, He said a man should constantly Ejaculate “I am” …when he had done, I went outside And got into a tram.
I rather prided myself on these lines, merely because they are, in the main, a very accurate report of the speeches; or of what the speeches probably appeared to be to the audience. And I also disinter them from their dust-bin because they remind me of a characteristic expression of Scott Holland, which I have since found to be a characteristic problem of human life. There was one verse of my doggerel verses which I have omitted, because it would certainly be misunderstood, as Scott Holland himself was misunderstood. He was a man of great clearness and great fairness of mind, and what he said always meant something and was a result of the unpopular sport of thinking. But he was also a man with a natural surge of laughter within him, so that his broad strong mouth seemed always to be shut down on it in a grimace of restraint. I remember that on this occasion he was urging what is probably the best argument for State intervention, tending in the general direction of State Socialism, which was common in the Christian Social Union and pronounced in the definite and defiant Christian Socialists, like Conrad Noel. He said that the Commonwealth, the social authority, was worthy of being regarded in a positive and not merely in a negative light; that we ought to be able to trust the things it did, and not to think only of the things it punished us for doing. The politician should be more than the policeman; he should produce and construct and not merely punish. At this point his immense internal enjoyment of a joke bubbled to the surface and he said, waving his hand to the rigid and respectable Nottingham audience, “Punishment is an exceptional instrument. After all, it is only occasionally that you and I feel that tap on the shoulder, and that gruff recommendation to ‘come along quietly.’ It is not every day of our lives that we are put in the dock and sentenced to some term of imprisonment. Most of our relations to Government are peaceable and friendly. Why, I suppose that even in this room there are quite half a dozen people who have never been in jail at all.” A ghastly stare was fixed on all the faces of the audience; and I have ever since seen it in my own dreams; for it has constituted a considerable part of my own problem.
I have never understood, from that day to this, any more than he did, why a solid argument is any less solid because you make the illustrations as entertaining as you can. What Holland was saying was perfectly sensible and philosophical. It was that the State exists to provide lamp-posts and schools, as well as gibbets and jails. But I strongly suspect that many, who were sufficiently intelligent not to imagine that he was mad, did imagine that he was flippant. And I myself have made in the course of a less useful life the same curious discovery. If you say that two sheep added to two sheep make four sheep, your audience will accept it patiently—like sheep. But if you say it of two monkeys, or two kangaroos, or two sea-green griffins, people will refuse to believe that two and two make four. They seem to imagine that you must have made up the arithmetic, just as you have made up the illustration of the arithmetic. And though they would actually know that what you say is sense, if they thought about it sensibly, they cannot believe that anything decorated by an incidental joke can be sensible. Perhaps it explains why so many successful men are so dull—or why so many dull men are successful.
But I have also dwelt for a moment on such a meeting and such a group, because I am only too glad, in the light of after events, to testify to the pleasure with which I recall it. When people of many different parties talked of all High Churchmen as high and dry, when they used to talk of the dehumanised detachment of Charles Gore or the despairing depression of Charles Masterman, I had every motive to remember much better and brighter things; and to leave some little record here of how uproariously encouraging was the pessimism of Masterman, how subtly sympathetic the detachment of Dr. Gore. Good friends and very gay companions. … 0 anima humana naturaliter Christiana, whither were you marching so gallantly that you could not find the natural way?
But I have been carried far ahead of my narrative by these memories of the Anglo-Catholic group, and all the names that naturally follow the mention of the first name of Noel. When Noel first appeared on the horizon of my brother and myself, my brother was frankly anti-religious and I had no religion except the very haziest religiosity. And it is necessary in this chapter to say something of the tendencies by which I shifted nearer and nearer to the orthodox side; and eventually found myself, as I have described, in the very heart of a clerical group of canons and curates. My first introduction, in Sydney Smith’s phrase, came through very wild curates. Conrad Noel might have been the incarnate fulfilment of Sydney Smith’s vision or fancy; and indeed it so happened that, in his case, while the wild curate was in every sense singular, the wild curates were also in the plural. My old friend the Rev. A. L. Lilley now a Canon of Hereford, was then the vicar of a parish in Paddington Green; and his large and genial sympathies expressed themselves in the marked eccentricity of his assistant clergy. For he was one of the two or three Broad Churchmen I have known who were actually broad. His curates were a group which we irreverently referred to at one time as a menagerie; one, I remember, was of gigantic stature with fierce grey hair, eyebrows and moustaches very like Mark Twain. Another was a Syrian and actually, I believe, a runaway monk from some monastery in the desert. The third was Conrad Noel. I have sometimes thought it must have been rather amusing to be a faithful parishioner of Paddington Green.
But the question here is of the intellectual approach, even to so eccentric a borderland of orthodoxy. And the reader must once more reconcile himself, with a groan, to some brief references to real beliefs, and the thing which some call theory, and I call thought. In the purely religious sense, I was brought up among people who were Unitarians and Universalists, but who were well aware that a great many people around them were becoming agnostics or even atheists. Indeed there were two tendencies in what was called the emancipation of faith from the creeds and dogmas of the past. The two tendencies were in flatly contrary directions; and it is thoroughly typical of that world that they were both called by the same name. Both were supposed to be liberal theology or the religion of all sensible men. But, in fact, one half of the sensible men were more and more arguing that, because God was in His heaven, all must be right with the world; with this world or with the next. The other half of them were specially bent on showing that it was very doubtful if there was any God in any heaven, and that it was so certain to the scientific eye that all is not right with the world, that it would be nearer the truth to say that all is wrong with the world. One of these movements of progress led into the glorious fairyland of George Macdonald, the other led into the stark and hollowed hills of Thomas Hardy. The one school was specially insisting that God must be supremely perfect if He exists; the other that, if He exists, He must be grossly imperfect. And by the time I passed from boyhood to manhood, the pessimistic doubt had considerably clouded the optimistic dogma.
Now I think the first thing that struck me as startling was exactly this; that these two schools, which were logically in contradiction, were practically in combination. The idealistic theists and the realistic atheists were allies—against what? It has taken me about two-thirds of my life to find out the answer to that question. But when I first noticed it, the question seemed quite unanswerable; and, what was queerer still, to the people themselves it did not seem even questionable. I myself had sat at the feet of that large-hearted and poetic orator, Stopford Brooke, and I long accepted the sort of optimistic theism that he taught; it was substantially the same as that which I had learnt since childhood under the glamorous mysticism of George Macdonald. It was full and substantial faith in the Fatherhood of God, and little could be said against it, even in theological theory, except that it rather ignored the free-will of man. Its Universalism was a sort of optimistic Calvinism. But, anyhow, that was my first faith, before anything that could really be called my first doubt. But what struck me as extraordinary, even at first, was that these optimists seemed to be in the same camp as the pessimists. To my simple mind, it seemed that there could be no connection except contradiction, between the man whose whole faith was in the Fatherhood of God, and the man who said there was no God or the man who said that God was no Father. I pointed out something of the sort, long afterwards, when liberal literary critics were supposed to class together the philosophies of Meredith and Hardy. It seemed to me obvious that Meredith maintains on the whole that Nature is to be trusted, and Hardy that Nature is not to be trusted. To my innocent mind, these two ideas seemed a little inconsistent. I had not yet discovered the higher synthesis which connects them. For the higher synthesis which connects them consists in wearing liberty ties and curiously shaped beards and hats and meeting in cultured clubs where they drink coffee, or (in darker and more disreputable dens) cocoa. That is the only connection there is between the ideas; but it took me a long time to find it out. These sceptical doctrinaires do not recognise each other by the doctrines. They recognise each other by the beard or the clothes, as the lower animals know each other by the fur or the smell.
I suppose I have got a dogmatic mind. Anyhow, even when I did not believe in any of the things called dogmas, I assumed that people were sorted out into solid groups by the dogmas they believed or disbelieved. I supposed that the Theosophists all sat in the same hall because they all believed in Theosophy. I supposed the Theistic Church believed in Theism. I supposed that the atheists all combined because they disbelieved in Theism. I imagined that the Ethical Societies consisted entirely of people who believed in Ethics but not in theology or even religion. I have come to the conclusion that I was largely mistaken in this idea. I believe now that the congregations of these semi-secular chapels consist largely of one vast and vague sea of wandering doubters, with their wandering doubts, who may be found one Sunday seeking a solution from the Theists and another Sunday from the Theosophists. They may be scattered among many such chapels; they are only connected by the convention of unconventionality, which is connoted by “not going to church.” I will give two incidents as examples of what I mean; though they are separated by a long interval of years. In the very early days of which I am now speaking, before I ever dreamed of being myself attached to any formal system of faith, I used to wander about to many assemblies giving lectures, or what were politely called lectures. I may remark that my suspicion was confirmed, by the fact that I very often saw the same people in quite different congregations; especially a worried looking man with dark anxious eyes, and a very aged Jew with a long white beard and a smile carved immutably, like that of an Egyptian image.
On one occasion I had been lecturing to an Ethical Society, when I happened to see on the wall a portrait of Priestley, the great Unitarian of a hundred years ago. I remarked that it was a very fine engraving; and one of the faithful, to whom I was speaking, replied that it had probably been hung there because the place was quite recently a Unitarian chapel; I think he said only a few years before. I was considerably intrigued, knowing that the old Unitarians were as dogmatic as Moslems on the one point of the One God, and that the ethical group were as undogmatic as any agnostics upon that particular dogma. “That is very interesting,” I said. “May I ask whether the whole of your society abandoned Theism all at once and in a body?”
“Well, no,” he replied rather hazily, “I don’t fancy it was exactly like that. I rather think the fact was that our leaders wanted very much to have Dr. Stanton Coit as a preacher, and he wouldn’t come unless the thing was simply an Ethical Society.”
Of course I cannot answer for the accuracy of what the gentleman said, as I did not know him from Adam; but in any case my point here concerns the cloudy condition of the mind of the ordinary audiences, and not of the actual lecturers or leaders. Dr. Stanton Coit himself, for instance, had a perfectly clear idea of an ethic unsupported by theology. But, taking this typical member of the movement, there is something rather extraordinary about what had actually happened, or what he seriously supposed had actually happened. By this theory, God Almighty had been dropped out of the whole business, as a concession to Dr. Stanton Coit. It was generally felt, apparently, that it would be really rather churlish not to meet him on a little thing like that. Now it happened that, years afterwards, a friend of mine enquired after the fortunes of this particular Ethical Society, and was informed that its congregation was somewhat diminished. The reason given was that the distinguished ethical lecturer could hardly be expected to be so active as he had been in earlier days; and that in consequence a number of his followers had now “gone off to listen to Maude Royden.” Now Miss Maude Royden, whatever may be counted controversial in her position, certainly professes to be enough of an orthodox Christian to play the part of a loyal Anglican, and even of an Anglican parson. So that the truly astonishing history of this school of thought, if we regard it as a school of thought, was more or less as follows. They began by believing in the Creation but not the Incarnation. For the sake of Dr. Coit they ceased to believe in the Creation. And for the sake of Miss Royden they agreed to believe in the Creation and the Incarnation as well. The truth of the matter is, I imagine, that these particular people never did believe or disbelieve in anything. They liked to go and hear stimulating lecturers; and they had a vague preference, almost impossible to reduce to any definable thesis, for those lecturers who were supposed to be in some way heterodox and unconventional. And having since had longer and larger opportunities of watching the general drift of such people, and having seen the dark-eyed doubter and the patriarchal Jew in more and more motley and incongruous assemblies, I have come to the conclusion that there never were any large schools of thought, so separate and so static as I innocently imagined in my youth. I have been granted, as it were, a sort of general view or vision of all that field of negation and groping and curiosity. And I saw pretty much what it all really meant. There was no Theistic Church; there was no Theosophical Brotherhood; there were no Ethical Societies; there were no New Religions. But I saw Israel scattered on the hills as sheep that have not a shepherd; and I saw a large number of the sheep run about bleating eagerly in whatever neighbourhood it was supposed that a shepherd might be found.
Amid all this scattered thinking, sometimes not unfairly to be called scatter-brained thinking, I began to piece together the fragments of the old religious scheme; mainly by the various gaps that denoted its disappearance. And the more I saw of real human nature, the more I came to suspect that it was really rather bad for all these people that it had disappeared. Many of them held, and still hold, very noble and necessary truths in the social and secular area. But even these it seemed to me they held less firmly than they might have done, if there had been anything like a fundamental principle of morals and metaphysics to support them. Men who believed ardently in altruism were yet troubled by the necessity of believing with even more religious reverence in Darwinism, and even in the deductions from Darwinism about a ruthless struggle as the rule of life. Men who naturally accepted the moral equality of mankind yet did so, in a manner, shrinkingly, under the gigantic shadow of the Superman of Nietzsche and Shaw. Their hearts were in the right place; but their heads were emphatically in the wrong place, being generally poked or plunged into vast volumes of materialism and scepticism, crabbed, barren, servile and without any light of liberty or of hope.
I began to examine more exactly the general Christian theology which many execrated and few examined. I soon found that it did in fact correspond to many of these experiences of life; that even its paradoxes corresponded to the paradoxes of life. Long afterwards Father Waggett (to mention another very able man of the old Anglo-Catholic group), once said to me, as we stood on the Mount of Olives in view of Gethsemane and Aceldama, “Well, anyhow, it must be obvious to anybody that the doctrine of the Fall is the only cheerful view of human life.” It is indeed obvious to me; but the thought passed over me at the moment, that a very large proportion of that old world of sceptical sects and cliques, to which I had once belonged, would find it a much more puzzling paradox than the paradoxes of Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. I will not develop the argument here, which I have so often developed elsewhere; I merely mention it to suggest my general sense, even at this stage, that the old theological theory seemed more or less to fit into experience, while the new and negative theories did not fit into anything, least of all into each other. It was about this time that I had published some studies on contemporary writers, such as Kipling and Shaw and Wells; and feeling that each of them erred through an ultimate or religious error, I gave the book the title of Heretics. It was reviewed by Mr. G. S. Street, the very delightful essayist, who casually used the expression that he was not going to bother about his theology until I had really stated mine. With all the solemnity of youth, I accepted this as a challenge; and wrote an outline of my own reasons for believing that the Christian theory, as summarised in the Apostles’ Creed, would be found to be a better criticism of life than any of those that I had criticised. I called it Orthodoxy, but even at the time I was very much dissatisfied with the title. It sounded a thinnish sort of thing to be defending through thick and thin. Even then I fancy I had a dim foreshadowing that I should have to find some better name for it before I died. As it was, the only interesting effect of the title, or the book, that I ever heard of, occurred on the frontiers of Russia. There I believe the Censor, under the old Russian regime, destroyed the book without reading it. From its being called Orthodoxy, he naturally inferred that it must be a book on the Greek Church. And from its being a book on the Greek Church, he naturally inferred that it must be an attack on it.
But there did remain one rather vague virtue about the title, from my point of view; that it was provocative. And it is an exact test of that extraordinary modern society that it really was provocative. I had begun to discover that, in all that welter of inconsistent and incompatible heresies, the one and only really unpardonable heresy was orthodoxy. A serious defence of orthodoxy was far more startling to the English critic than a serious attack on orthodoxy was to the Russian censor. And through this experience I learned two very interesting things, which serve to divide all this part of my life into two distinct periods. Very nearly everybody, in the ordinary literary and journalistic world, began by taking it for granted that my faith in the Christian creed was a pose or a paradox. The more cynical supposed that it was only a stunt. The more generous and loyal warmly maintained that it was only a joke. It was not until long afterwards that the full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really thought the thing was true. And I have found, as I say, that this represents a real transition or border-line in the life of the apologists. Critics were almost entirely complimentary to what they were pleased to call my brilliant paradoxes; until they discovered that I really meant what I said. Since then they have been more combative; and I do not blame them.
I first made this discovery at a dinner-party, in connection with another controversy, which must be mentioned because it is relevant here. I think it was a dinner given by the staff of the Clarion, the important and popular Socialist paper of the period, then edited by Mr. Robert Blatchford; a veteran whom I pause to salute across the ages, hoping he will not count me less friendly if I recall these battles of the distant past. As I shall explain in a moment, I had just had a very pugnacious public argument with Mr. Blatchford, which, as I was then a comparatively young though relatively rising journalist, was naturally a landmark in my life. But I remember that there was, sitting next to me at this dinner, one of those very refined and rather academic gentlemen from Cambridge who seemed to form so considerable a section of the rugged stalwarts of Labour. There was a cloud on his brow, as if he were beginning to be puzzled about something; and he said suddenly, with abrupt civility, “Excuse my asking, Mr. Chesterton, of course I shall quite understand if you prefer not to answer, and I shan’t think any the worse of it, you know, even if it’s true. But I suppose I’m right in thinking you don’t really believe in those things you’re defending against Blatchford?” I informed him with adamantine gravity that I did most definitely believe in those things I was defending against Blatchford. His cold and refined face did not move a visible muscle; and yet I knew in some fashion it had completely altered. “Oh, you do,” he said, “I beg your pardon. Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know.” And he went on eating his (probably vegetarian) meal. But I was sure that for the rest of the evening, despite his calm, he felt as if he were sitting next to a fabulous griffin.
That this stage may be understood, it must be realised what the things I was defending against Blatchford were. It was not a question of some abstract theological thesis, like the definition of the Trinity or the dogmas of Election or Effectual Grace. I was not yet so far gone in orthodoxy as to be so theological as all that. What I was defending seemed to me a plain matter of ordinary human morals. Indeed it seemed to me to raise the question of the very possibility of any morals. It was the question of Responsibility, sometimes called the question of Free Will, which Mr. Blatchford had attacked in a series of vigorous and even violent proclamations of Determinism; all apparently founded on having read a little book or pamphlet by Professor Haeckel. The question had a great many amusing or arresting aspects; but the point of it in this place is what I have already suggested. It was not that I began by believing in supernormal things. It was that the unbelievers began by disbelieving even in normal things. It was the secularists who drove me to theological ethics, by themselves destroying any sane or rational possibility of secular ethics. I might myself have been a secularist, so long as it meant that I could be merely responsible to secular society. It was the Determinist who told me, at the top of his voice, that I could not be responsible at all. And as I rather like being treated as a responsible being, and not as a lunatic let out for the day, I began to look around for some spiritual asylum that was not merely a lunatic asylum.
On that day, in short, I escaped from an error, which still entangles many better men than myself. There is still a notion that the agnostic can remain secure of this world, so long as he does not wish to be what is called “other-worldly.” He can be content with common sense about men and women, so long as he is not curious of mysteries about angels and archangels. It is not true. The questions of the sceptic strike direct at the heart of this our human life; they disturb this world, quite apart from the other world; and it is exactly common sense that they disturb most. There could not be a better example than this queer appearance, in my youth, of the determinist as a demagogue; shouting to a mob of millions that no man ought to be blamed for anything he did, because it was all heredity and environment. Logically, it would stop a man in the act of saying “Thank you” to somebody for passing the mustard. For how could he be praised for passing the mustard, if he could not be blamed for not passing the mustard? I know it can be maintained that fatalism makes no difference to the facts of our life. Some say that fatalists can still go on punishing or blaming. Some say (professing, with no little humour, to be humanitarian) that they can leave off blaming but still go on punishing. But if determinism made no difference, why should Blatchford thunder furiously from a pulpit about the difference it made? The explanation was to be found in Blatchford himself. He was a very normal man to have come by so abnormal a heresy; an old soldier with brown Italian eyes and a walrus moustache and full of the very sentiments that soldiers have and Socialists generally have not. He was a firm patriot and not a little of a Tory; certainly very much of a Protectionist. But this Determinism appealed to him through another very normal sentiment; the sentiment of undiluted compassion. He called his book of Determinist pamphlets a plea “for the Underdog.” And it was obvious that he thought throughout of the sort of poor and disreputable and often oppressed person who can really be called the underdog. To him, and to many other men of healthy but vague modern sentiment, the notion of a sinner really connected itself entirely with the notion of a drunkard or a thieving tramp or some sort of scallywag at war with society. In the grossly unjust social system we suffer, it is probable enough that many of these really are punished unjustly; that some ought not to be punished at all; that some, perhaps, are really not responsible at all. And Blatchford, seeing them driven to prison in droves, felt neither more nor less than a pity for the weak and the unfortunate; which was, at the worst, a slightly lopsided exaggeration of Christian charity. He was so anxious to forgive that he denied the need of forgiveness.
And I awaken from all these dreams of the past suddenly, and with something like a shout of laughter. For the next episode in my life was one of helping certain friends and reformers to fix the terrible truth called Responsibility, not on tramps or drunkards, but on the rulers of the State and the richest men in the Empire. I was trying to put a chain and collar of Responsibility, not on the Underdog, but on the Top-dog. And the next thing that I was to hear about Blatchford was that he also, bursting with indignation, was demanding justice, punishment, vengeance almost without pardon, upon other strong tyrants who had trampled on the weak; and was fiercely nailing the arrogant princes of Prussia with Responsibility for the invasion of Belgium. So do paper sophistries go up in a great fire.
VIII
FIGURES IN FLEET STREET
The profound problem of how I ever managed to fall on my feet in Fleet Street is a mystery; at least it is still a mystery to me. It used to be said by critics that falling on my feet was only a preliminary to standing on my head. But in fact Fleet Street, not to mention my head, was a rather seasick and earthquaky sort of thing to stand on. On the whole, I think I owe my success (as the millionaires say) to having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the exact opposite. For what they all told me was that the secret of success in journalism was to study the particular journal and write what was suitable to it. And, partly by accident and ignorance and partly through the real rabid certainties of youth, I cannot remember that I ever wrote any article that was at all suitable to any paper.
On the contrary, I think I became a sort of comic success by contrast. I have a notion that the real advice I could give to a young journalist, now that I am myself an old journalist, is simply this: to write an article for the Sporting Times and another for the Church Times, and put them into the wrong envelopes. Then, if the article were accepted and were reasonably intelligent, all the sporting men would go about saying to each other, “Great mistake to suppose there isn’t a good case for us; really brainy fellows say so;” and all the clergymen would go about saying to each other, “Rattling good writing on some of our religious papers; very witty fellow.” This is perhaps a little faint and fantastic as a theory; but it is the only theory upon which I can explain my own undeserved survival in the journalistic squabble of the old Fleet Street. I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old Daily News and told them all about French cafés and Catholic cathedrals; and they loved it, because they had never heard of them before. I wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old Clarion and defended medieval theology and all the things their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit. What is really the matter, with almost every paper, is that it is much too full of things suitable to the paper. But in these later days of the solidification of journalism, like everything else, into trusts and monopolies, there seems to be even less likelihood of anyone repeating my rare and reckless and unscrupulous manoeuvre; of anyone waking up to find himself famous as the only funny man on the Methodist Monthly; or the only serious man on Cocktail Comics.
Anyhow, all will agree that I was an accident in Fleet Street. Some will say a fatal accident, such as is proclaimed on the placards of Fleet Street. But Fleet Street itself was full of such accidents; it might have been called the Street of Accident, as a man whom I am proud to have first met there afterwards called it the Street of Adventure. Philip Gibbs himself accentuated that intellectual incongruity which was the comedy of the place; he carried a curious air of being the right man in the wrong place. His fine falcon face, with its almost unearthly refinement, seemed set in a sort of fastidious despair about ever making it the right place. This was long before he gained his great distinctions as a war correspondent; but he dealt in the same detached way with the other great wars in the past. He had been studying the struggle between the great men of the French Revolution; and had concentrated on what seemed to me an unbalanced yet delicate detestation of Camille Desmoulins. He summoned him before a tribunal of earnest talk, in my presence; and all the time he was talking, I thought how like he looked to those high-minded, hatchet-faced, hard humanitarian idealists among the great revolutionists whom he criticised. David should have painted his profile. I begin with that impression of Gibbs precisely because his figure did seem so detached and cleancut against the background. But I myself was only the background; it was lightly alleged that I could by myself have constituted a back scene. In other words, I belonged to the old Bohemian life of Fleet Street; which has since been destroyed, not by the idealism of detachment, but by the materialism of machinery. A newspaper proprietor in later years assured me that it was a slander on journalism to tell all these tales about taverns and ragged pressmen and work and recreation coming at random at all hours of the night. “A newspaper office is now exactly like any other place of business,” he said with a radiant smile; and I agreed with a groan. The very name of Bohemia has faded from the map of London as it has faded from the map of Europe. I have never understood why the new diplomacy abandoned that old and noble national name, which was among the things that were not lost on Mohacs Field; but it would seem that in both cases the best things are lost in victory and not in defeat. At least I know that I should have been annoyed if, in order to gain with doubtful judgment another strip of territory, I had been suddenly asked to talk about England as West Saxony; and that is what has happened to the long epic of Serbia, now described as North Slavia. I remember when it was announced that Bohemia was to cease to exist, at the very moment when it came into existence. It was to be called Czechoslovakia; and I went about asking people in Fleet Street whether this change was to be applied to the metaphorical Bohemia of our own romantic youth. When the wild son disturbed the respectable household, was it to be said, “I wish Tom would get out of his Czechoslovakian ways,” or, when Fleet Street grew riotous, “I hate these rowdy Czechoslovakian parties.” But the question is merely fanciful; for there is very little left in Fleet Street that its worst enemies could call Czechoslovakian. The newspaper proprietor was perfectly right in his facts; journalism is now conducted like any other business. It is conducted as quietly, as soberly, as sensibly as the office of any successful moneylender or moderately fraudulent financier. To such persons, it will indeed seem idle if I recall that the old taverns in which men drank, or the old courts in which they starved, were often full of starving poets and drunken scholars; and all sorts of perverse personalities who sometimes even tried to tell the truth; men of the type of old Crosland, that queer cantankerous man, who hated so many things (including me) but had often justified his great farewell, in which he said bitterly that he had:
… trod the path to hell, But there were many things he might have sold And did not sell.
For one thing, it was always said of him that he nearly died of hunger in Fleet Street with a volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in his pocket.
A man of that impossible sort, of finer spiritual culture and, therefore, of less fame or success, was Johnston Stephen, who was, I am proud to say, my friend. He was of the great Scottish family, of Leslie Stephen and of “J.K.S.”; and he was quite as wise as the one and as witty as the other. But he had a certain distinction very difficult to define; the world with which he dealt simplified it by saying he was mad. I should prefer to say that he could not completely digest anything; he refused things of which he thoroughly approved at the last moment, with a movement like that of a bucking horse. Sometimes his objection was profound enough, and always illuminated by an idea; but he lacked the power of final adherence. He once made to me the very sensible remark, “The only little difficulty that I have about joining the Catholic Church is that I do not think I believe in God. All the rest of the Catholic system is so obviously right and so obviously superior to anything else, that I cannot imagine anyone having any doubt about it.” And I remember that he was grimly gratified when I told him, at a later stage of my own beliefs, that real Catholics are intelligent enough to have this difficulty; and that St. Thomas Aquinas practically begins his whole argument by saying, “Is there a God? Apparently not.” But, I added, it was my experience that entering into the system even socially brought an ever-increasing certitude upon the original question. For the rest, while a fierily patriotic Scotsman, he had too much of such sympathy to be popular with many Scots. I remember when he was asked whether the Church was not corrupt and crying out for the Reformation, he answered with disconcerting warmth, “Who can doubt it? How horrible must have been the corruption which could have tolerated for so long three Catholic priests like John Knox and John Calvin and Martin Luther.”
Somebody ought to have written a life of Stephen or collected his literary remains; which were left to vanish as journalistic remains. I once had a notion of doing it myself; it is one of the many duties I have neglected. There was an essay on Burns in my brother’s paper, the New Witness, which was so much better than most essays on Burns, or essays on anything, that it might have made a man’s name if the man had been on the make. He remains to me as a great monument of the futility of the present condition of fame, which is merely fashion. He had indeed violent freaks of temperament; but these did not in the old days extinguish a man like Swift or a man like Landor. If he is remembered in no better way, it is well that I should dedicate this passing note to his memory. He has long since discovered the answer to his only religious difficulty.
All these extremes were too extreme to be typical; the fine fanatic who said what he liked and died; the mere snob or sneak who said what he was told to say and lived, if you can call it living. But it is only fair to Fleet Street to say that there were some who kept their intellectual independence, and yet kept their connection with the working machine of journalism; mostly by having a wide range of variety in their work, and because monopoly was not yet so uniform as to prevent them having some choice of masters; even if it were already a choice of tyrants. Perhaps the most brilliant of these, who might without exaggeration be called the Queen of Fleet Street, was a lady with whom I have the great honour to be connected; I mean the wife of my brother Cecil. She has always managed to remain a freelance, or the Joan of Arc of a whole company of freelances, though there is one field especially in which her banner has now been displayed to all. She always had a hundred irons in the fire; though only one of her fires is now so big as to be a bonfire and a beacon. Everyone has heard of the Cecil Houses, in which homeless women find that real hospitality, human and humorous, which was incredibly absent from the previous priggish philanthropy; and nearly everyone has read about their origin, in her own astounding book which records her own astounding adventure. She went out without a penny to live among the penniless; and brought back our only authoritative account of such a life. But not everybody understands that flame of angry charity which resents the poor being pestered even more than their being neglected; hating the selfishness of the sweater, but hating more the spiritual pride peculiar to the spy. She has sympathy with Communists, as I have, and perhaps points of agreement I have not. But I know that she stands, first, for the privacy of the poor who are allowed no privacy. She fights after all, as I do, for the private property of those who have none.
It marked a sort of sublimation of the Fleet Street spirit in my sister-in-law that, within healthy limits, she not only could do everything, but she would do anything. Her work was patch-work of the wildest and most bizarre description; and she was almost continuously in a state of hilarious irony in contemplation of its contrast. She would turn easily from a direct and demagogic, though quite tragically sincere, appeal in a Sunday paper against official oppression of poor mothers to an almost cynical modern criticism of the most sophisticated modern plays. She would finish a hard controversial comment on the Marconi Case, full of facts and figures, for the Eye-Witness, and lightly turn to the next chapter in a shamelessly melodramatic and Victorian serial, full of innocent heroines and infamous villains, for “Fireside Romances,” or “Wedding Bells.” It was of her that the story was told that, having driven whole teams of plotters and counter-plotters successfully through a serious Scotch newspaper, she was pursuing one of the side-plots for a few chapters, when she received a telegram from the editor, “You have left your hero and heroine tied up in a cavern under the Thames for a week, and they are not married.”
It was in connection with this last line of journalistic adventure that an incident occurred of greater public, indeed of a certain historic importance. It is not only a landmark in the history of the law, but it throws a lurid light on that curious lawlessness which, in many modern matters, seems to be the principal effect of law. My sister-in-law was contributing to a Sunday paper in serial form one of these gravely, not to say brazenly, romantic romances. In this case something brazen, in the sense of something theatrical and even pantomimic, was perfectly appropriate to the theme, for the villain on whom the tale revolved was represented as a theatrical producer on a colossal scale like that of Cochran or Reinhardt. He was represented as doing various unscrupulous things, as is the humble duty of a bad man in what is only meant to be a good story; but not otherwise of any extraordinary depravity, and even adorned with something of the magnanimity suitable to melodrama. I fear I have forgotten his name; perhaps, as the sequel will prove, it is just as well. But let us suppose, for the sake of argument or narrative, that his name in the story was Arthur Mandeville. Now it so happened that there floated about somewhere in the great dust-cloud of atoms drifting round theatrical circles and occasionally or indirectly connected with theatrical or semi-theatrical enterprises, utterly unknown to anybody connected with the serial or the Sunday paper, a private individual whose name actually was Arthur Mandeville. He was not even an actor in any sense of an actor in action; he was certainly not a manager in any ordinary sense of having any theatre to manage; he was no more in any position remotely resembling that of the man in the story than he was the Sultan or the President of the United States. But he was a man who had once, in a series of other small enterprises, paid salaries to some small company of performers and given some small show somewhere. This man brought an action for heavy damages against the paper, on the ground of a malicious and vindictive blasting of his private reputation; and he won it.
The extraordinary thing was that nobody, from first to last, pretended that there had been any attack upon this man at all. The judge, in giving his judgment in the man’s favour, upon the law of the matter, repeatedly declared that it had been proved up to the hilt that the lady who wrote the story had never even heard of the gentleman who she was supposed to have pursued with her envenomed darts. But the judge was none the less convinced that, as the law stood, the two coincidences of the name and of some shadowy and temporary point of contact with a similar profession, were enough to constitute a case of libel. A considerable section of the literary world awoke to this state of affairs in a condition of not unnatural alarm. It looked as if the trade of the novelist might well be classed among the dangerous trades, if he could not casually call the drunken sailor by the name of Jack Robinson, without some danger of being fined and sold up by all the Jack Robinsons who may happen to be sailing, or to have sailed, all the seas of the world. The ancient question of what should be done with the drunken sailor, if he invariably took a fancy to avenging himself legally upon anybody who should say “Jack Robinson,” gave rise to some considerable literary and journalistic discussion at the time.
I remember, in the course of the controversy, that I suggested that we should have to fall back on some alternative to names, such as numbers, in describing the ringing repartees leading up to the duel in which the subtle and crafty 7991 died upon the sword of the too-impetuous 3893; or the vows breathed by the passionate lips of 771 in the ear of 707. But another way of evading the difficulty, to which I was much more attached, was that of equipping all the characters with names so extraordinary, that it was practically impossible that they could be the real names of any real people anywhere; and by way of illustration I wrote a moving love-scene between Bunchusa Blutterspangle and Splitcat Chintzibobs. Fortunately, for general journalistic convenience, my proposals were not accepted; and a much more practical proposal, invented by my sister-in-law, was carried out with complete success. She republished the whole story in book form; and before doing so went round to a number of leading literary men of the day, especially those she knew best, and obtained their permission to use their names for all the characters in the book; retaining her own name, as a graceful acknowledgment, as the name of the original villain. Anyone curious enough to look up that curiosity of literature, will find the most famous persons figuring on every other page in the humblest or most improbable capacities; a dear old stage-door keeper of the name of Bernard Shaw, a cabman known to his comrades in the cab-shelter as Barry Pain, and many others whom I forget. Some little time afterwards, I think, this extraordinary condition of the law was altered, in a typically English manner; that is, not by anything so logical and pedantic as a new law, but simply by another judge saying that the law meant the exact opposite of what the first judge had said it meant. But this queer little affair has some relevance to more real problems that arose, when we found ourselves more seriously engaged in the same strange field of modern British legalism.
There is no Law of Libel. That is why everybody is so much afraid of it. That is why it is so tremendously and tragically and comically typical of a certain spirit that now fills all our social life and institutions; a spirit at once ingenious and evasive. Strange as it will sound, this is the English way of maintaining a Terror. The Latins, when they do it, do it by rigidity; but we actually do it by laxity. In plain words, we increase the terror of law, by adding to it all the terrors of lawlessness. The machine is felt to be dangerous, not so much because it strikes by rule, as because it strikes at random. Or, at any rate, so far as any opponent looking for logical protection from it can calculate, it strikes at random. This is more true of almost all our laws than of any other laws in Christendom. But even lawyers would almost admit that it has come to be very like the truth about the law of libel. Some definitions of libel are so strict that nobody could really apply them; other parallel definitions are so loose that nobody could imagine to whom they could apply. The result is that libel, if nothing else, has become a mere weapon to crush any criticism of the powers that now rule the State.
All this must be kept in mind, when we come to more crucial and exciting events in connection with the Eyewitness; I only mention this incident here to indicate the lively manner in which the lady in question conducted the endless comedy of Fleet Street. In connection with the paper above mentioned, of which my brother was first the sub-editor and then the editor, there were a hundred such anecdotes and amusing episodes. I fancy I can trace the lady’s hand, as well as the editor’s, in one of the most admirably absurd correspondences I have ever seen in the columns of journalism. It all began, if I remember right, with my brother writing something about the meeting between H. G. Wells and Booker Washington, the famous Negro publicist in America, in which some doubt was thrown on how far Mr. Wells understood the difficulties of Mr. Washington, and by inference those of the White South in which he worked. This view was enforced and exaggerated in a letter dated from Bexley, which warned everybody of the real dangers of racial admixture and intermarriage; it was signed “White Man.” This produced a fiery letter from Mr. Wells, humorously headed, “The White Man of Bexley,” as if the man were a sort of monster. Mr. Wells said he did not know what life was like “among the pure whites of Bexley,” but that elsewhere meeting people did not always mean marrying them; “The etiquette is calmer.” Then, I think, a real Negro intervened in the debate about his nature and destiny; and signed his letter, “Black Man.” Then came a more detached query, I should guess from some Brahmin or Parsee student at some college, pointing out that the racial problem was not confined to the races of Africa; and asking what view was taken of intermarriage with the races of Asia. He signed his letter “Brown Man.” Finally, there appeared a letter, of which I remember almost every word; for it was short and simple and touching in its appeal to larger and more tolerant ideals. It ran, I think, as follows:
“Sir, May I express my regret that you should continue a correspondence which causes considerable pain to many innocent persons who, by no fault of their own, but by the iron laws of nature, inherit a complexion uncommon among their fellow-creatures and attractive only to the elite. Surely we can forget all these differences; and, whatever our race or colour, work hand in hand for the broadening of the brotherhood of humanity. Yours faithfully, Mauve Man with Green Spots.”
This correspondence then ceased.
There were indeed other correspondences which seemed as if they would never cease. To few correspondents was given such power as that of the Mauve Man to paralyse all others with a sense that it was impossible to say or do any more. Some of these controversies are referred to in other connections in this book; some of them, like my own intermittent controversy with Mr. Bernard Shaw, have been going on at intervals for the greater part of our lives. But the controversy to which my sister-in-law was most deeply and warmly committed, as being connected with the work that has since made her so deservedly famous, was the protection of the homes of the poor, especially against an interference more insulting than indifference: the great uniting indignation of our otherwise often diverse group.
She was married to my brother just before he went to the War, in a little Roman Catholic church off Fleet Street; for he was already of that communion. He was twice invalided home; he volunteered three times for the Front and the third time met his death. In another chapter I shall deal with him more individually, and especially with that rarer sort of courage which he showed in politics, under instant threats of imprisonment and ruin. While in the trenches he wrote an excellent History of America and a bacchanalian ballade addressed to his fellow-soldiers, and having the refrain, “It was in Fleet Street that I learnt to drink.” Even his Bohemian loyalty to the legend of the Street of Adventure would hardly have stretched itself to saying, “It was in Fleet Street that I learnt to think.” For indeed he learnt to think in the nursery; and he was one of those who carry a sort of innocence of intellectual intensity through all things in life, whether they are in Fleet Street or at the Front. And my thoughts go back to poor Stephen and many noble madmen I knew, who had that quality, when I recall those lines one of our friends wrote about the Fanatic, or the man who wanted to keep his word; “That great word that every man gave God before his life began;” and who also, it will be remembered, “Had two witnesses to swear he kept it once in Berkeley Square; where hardly anything survives.” For though my brother was the most good-humoured person I ever knew, and could live in good fellowship with absolutely anybody, not only the merely dirty but the really vulgar, what was really deepest in him was a steep and even staggering obstinacy.
He kept his word as none but he Could keep it; and as did not we, And round him while he kept his word Today’s diseased and faithless herd, A moment loud, a moment strong, But foul for ever, rolled along.
IX
THE CASE AGAINST CORRUPTION
My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end; for I am sure that he argued energetically with the soldiers among whom he died, in the last glory of the Great War. It is reported of me that when I was told that I possessed a brother, my first thought went to my own interminable taste for reciting verses, and that I said, “That’s all right; now I shall always have an audience.” If I did say this, I was in error. My brother was by no means disposed to be merely an audience; and frequently forced the function of an audience upon me. More frequently still, perhaps, it was a case of there being simultaneously two orators and no audience. We argued throughout our boyhood and youth until we became the pest of our whole social circle. We shouted at each other across the table, on the subject of Parnell or Puritanism or Charles the First’s head, until our nearest and dearest fled at our approach, and we had a desert around us. And though it is not a matter of undiluted pleasure to recall having been so horrible a nuisance, I am rather glad in other ways that we did so early thrash out our own thoughts on almost all the subjects in the world. I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarrelled.
Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument. Anyhow, our argument was never interrupted until it began to reach its conclusion in the proper form; which is conviction. I do not say that at any particular moment either of us would have admitted being in error; but as a matter of fact, it was through that incessant process of disagreement that we came at last to agree. He began as a more mutinous sort of Pagan, a special enemy of the Puritan, a defender of Bohemian enjoyments, sociable but entirely secular. I began with more disposition to defend in a vague way the Victorian idealism, and even to say a word for Puritan religion, chiefly from a dim subconscious sympathy with any sort or religion. But in fact, by a process of elimination, we came more and more to think that the same sort of non-Puritan religion was the more plausible and promising; and to end eventually, but quite independently, in the same Church. I think it was a good thing that we had tested every link of logic by mutual hammering. I will even add something that sounds too like a boast; though it is meant to be a tribute. I will say that the man who had got used to arguing with Cecil Chesterton has never since had any reason to fear an argument with anybody.
The editor of the New Statesman, an acute critic of quite a different school from ours, said to me a little while ago, “Your brother was the very finest debater I have ever heard or heard of”, and such editors, of course, had known all the politicians and popular speakers. The qualities of his speaking were those of logic and lucidity combined with a sort of violent and startling courage. Indeed, he illustrated what I think is a common error on the subject of logic. The logician is too often presented as a prig; as a thin and frigid person of a pallid complexion. Both in experience and history, I have generally found that it was very full-blooded and warm-hearted people who had that gift of clear and connected thought. Charles Fox was like that; Danton was like that; and Cecil Chesterton was certainly like that. He had all that I have described as the Chesterton simplicity and steadiness in his personal relations; his affections were particularly fixed and tranquil; but in battle he had a sort of bull-necked pugnacity and intolerance. He did not seem to wish to live and leave a fallacy alive; he certainly could not leave a fallacy alone. The development of his political ideas was for a time decidedly divergent from my own. When I went to work with the Pro-Boers of the Daily News, and generally upheld the Liberal cause, though rather more romantically than many Liberals, he gravitated to a sort of practical Tory Democracy, which was more and more permeated by the Socialism of Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw. He eventually became an active and effective member of the Fabian Executive. But what was much more important, he had within him a living and most menacing sort of intolerance; a hatred of the real corruptions and hypocrisies of modern politics and an extraordinary idea of telling the truth.
I have already indicated that I myself, though I believed in Liberalism, was finding it dimly difficult to believe in Liberals. It would be truer, perhaps, to say that I was finding it difficult to believe in politics; because the reality seemed almost unreal, as compared with the reputation or the report. I could give twenty instances to indicate what I mean; but they would be no more than indications, because the doubt itself was doubtful. I remember going to a great Liberal club, and walking about in a large crowded room, somewhere at the end of which a bald gentleman with a beard was reading something from a manuscript in a low voice. It was hardly unreasonable that we did not listen to him, because we could not in any case have heard; but I think a very large number of us did not even see him. We shifted and shunted about and collided with each other; I met various friends of mine and exchanged a few words; Bentley and Belloc and Hammond and the rest. We talked in an ordinary fashion; it is possible, though not certain, that one or other of us asked carelessly what was supposed to be happening in the other corner of the large hall. Then we drifted away together, talking about important things, or things which seemed to us important.
Next morning I saw across the front of my Liberal paper in gigantic headlines the phrase: “Lord Spencer Unfurls the Banner.” Under this were other remarks, also in large letters, about how he had blown the trumpet for Free Trade and how the blast would ring through England and rally all the Free-Traders. It did appear, on careful examination, that the inaudible remarks which the old gentleman had read from the manuscript were concerned with economic arguments for Free Trade; and very excellent arguments too, for all I know. But the contrast between what that orator was to the people who heard him, and what he was to the thousands of newspaper readers who did not hear him, was so huge a hiatus and disproportion that I do not think I ever quite got over it. I knew henceforward what was meant, or what might be meant, by a Scene in the House, or a Challenge from the Platform, or any of those sensational events which take place in the newspapers and nowhere else.
This sense of unreality in the party struggle, which was gradually growing upon me, grew much more swiftly on my brother and my friend Belloc; because they were by temperament of a more rapid and resolute sort. They entered into a sort of partnership for the study of the question; and the outcome of that partnership was a book which had a considerable effect; though at that time, of course, it was mostly an effect of irritation or incredulity. They collaborated in a work called The Party System; of which the general thesis was that there were really no Parties, though there certainly was a system. The system, according to this view, was essentially one of rotation; but of rotation revolving on a central group, which really consisted of the leading politicians on both sides; or, as they were called for convenience in the book, “The Front Benches.” An unreal conflict was kept up for the benefit of the public, and to a certain extent with the innocent assistance of the rank and file; but the Leader of the House was more truly in partnership with the Leader of the Opposition than either of them were with their own followers, let alone their own constituents. This was the thesis maintained in the book; and for the moment its immediate importance in this narrative is not so much concerned with its truth or falsehood as with the personal results arising from the alliance of its two authors. For the point of view attracted sufficient attention to lead a few supporters to launch a weekly paper; of which Belloc was the editor and Cecil Chesterton the sub-editor; and to which I contributed first an occasional and eventually a weekly article.
There had never been anything like the Eye-Witness in England before; certainly not within the memory of the oldest men then living. Nor indeed has there ever been anything like it in England since. But its novelty and originality cannot be measured by those who can only compare it with what has happened in England since. It is a paradox palpably true that an original thing cannot at once be successful and still seem original. We can never appreciate how startling it might sound to be told that the earth was round, if we had really and invariably thought it was flat. By this time, so to speak, its roundness has become more flat than its flatness. It has become a dull platitude and only the denial of it would disturb us. So it is with political revolutions; and so it was with the considerable revolution introduced by the Eye-Witness in English journalism. Nobody can measure the change who was not brought up, as I was, in the ordinary newspaper-reading middle-class of the Victorian Age. We need not argue here about all that may be said for and against the idealism, or the optimism, or the sentimentalism, or the hypocrisy or the virtue of the Victorian Age. It is enough to say that it rested solidly on some social convictions, that were not only conventions. One of them was the belief that English politics were not only free from political corruption, but almost entirely free from personal motives about money. It was a point of patriotic pride that set a limit to the fiercest movements of party anger. I can remember that old Tories like my grandfather would actually pause in the full sweep of their denunciations of the demoniac conduct of Mr. Gladstone, to wave away the faintest suggestion that there could be any fiends rending the souls of our statesmen less erected, as Milton says, than the fiends of ambition or jealousy; “Heaven forbid that I should suggest that any English Prime Minister …” No; Frenchmen might have discovered the negotiable value of coins of the realm; Italians and Austrians might think it well worthwhile to double their income; the statesmen of Bulgaria or Bolivia might have some notion of the meaning of money; but English politicians passed their lives in an absent-minded trance, like that of Mr. Skimpole; kept their eyes fixed on the fixed stars, never enquired whether politics had made them richer or poorer; and received their salaries with a start of surprise.
Well, for good or evil, that is all dead. And what killed it was primarily the journalistic explosion called the Eye-Witness; and especially its dealing with the Marconi Case and the question of the Sale of Peerages. In one sense indeed, as I shall suggest in a moment, the world fell far short of following up the lead of those particular leaders; and there has been nothing since recalling their pointed and personal denunciations. But the general tone has entirely altered. Everybody is familiar with jeers against politicians, jokes about political payments, journalistic allusions to the sale of honours or the Secret Party Fund; above all, nobody is now shocked by them. Perhaps it would be better if they were shocked, or in other words shamed by them. If they were ashamed of them, they might possibly make some attempt to alter them. For that is the weak side of the ultimate result of the revelations. The object of the Eye-Witness was to make the English public know and care about the peril of political corruption. It is now certain that the public does know. It is not so certain that the public does care. And we may well warn the more cynical and realistic generation around us not to be too confident in its superiority to the hoodwinked and humbug-ridden nineteenth century. I know that my Victorian uncles did not know how England is really governed. But I have a strong suspicion that if my Victorian uncles had known, they would have been horrified and not amused; and they would have put a stop to it somehow. Nobody is trying to put a stop to it now.
It is the fashion to divide recent history into Pre-War and Post-War conditions. I believe it is almost as essential to divide them into the Pre-Marconi and Post-Marconi days. It was during the agitations upon that affair that the ordinary English citizen lost his invincible ignorance; or, in ordinary language, his innocence. And as I happened to play a part, secondary indeed, but definite, in the quarrel about this affair, and as in any case anything that my brother did was of considerable importance to me and my affairs, it will be well to pause for a moment upon this peculiar business; which was at the time, of course, systematically misrepresented and which is still very widely misunderstood. I think it probable that centuries will pass before it is seen clearly and in its right perspective; and that then it will be seen as one of the turning-points in the whole history of England and the world.
There are various legends about it. One is, for instance, the legend that we denounced certain Cabinet Ministers because they gambled on the Stock Exchange. It is likely enough that we did make fun of a man like Mr. Lloyd George, who made himself the mouthpiece of the Nonconformist Conscience and called on all the chapels to show forth the old fighting Puritan spirit, when he appeared in a transaction uncommonly like a gamble; just as we should denounce a politician who drank champagne and tried to start a campaign of Prohibition. But we should not denounce him for drinking champagne but for prohibiting champagne. Similarly, we should not denounce a Puritan politician for gambling, so much as for talking as if nobody could ever gamble. My brother, I need not say, was not likely to be shocked at anybody indulging in a bet or a wager; though he might possibly have recommended him to do a flutter on the Derby or the Oaks rather than on the Stock Exchange. But, as a fact, the whole notion that the question was one of merely doing a flutter is a fiction. It is a fiction, which was put up by the politicians at the time, as a mask for the fact. The charge against the Marconi Ministers was that they received a tip, or were “let in on the ground-floor,” as the financial phrase goes, by a government contractor whose contract was at the time being considered or accepted by the Government. In fact, on the face of it at any rate, there were all the conditions that go to make up what is commonly called “a secret commission.” Whether the acceptance of the tip did or did not affect the acceptance of the contract might be argued; but the question at issue was one of a contract and a tip, and not of an ordinary little flutter in stocks and shares. The pivotal fact of the position, of course, was that the Government contractor was the brother of one of these members of the Government. The very extraordinary monopoly which the Government then granted to the Marconi Company was in fact granted to its managing director, Mr. Godfrey Isaacs, the brother of Sir Rufus Isaacs, then the Attorney General. These facts alone justified at least enquiry; and the first efforts of all the politicians were directed to preventing any enquiry at all.
Until the editor of the Eye-Witness forced the politicians to reveal something, the politicians had begun by protesting that there was nothing whatever to reveal. Mr. Lloyd George spoke of mere rumours, by implication of baseless rumours, “passing from one foul lip to another.” The particular Samuel who happened to be doing a Ministerial job at the moment got up and gratuitously asserted that none of his colleagues had ever had any financial connection with this company; alluding in a distant manner to the Marconi Company. Sir Rufus Isaacs made the same distant denial in almost the same words; in fact he drew quite a quaint picture of the far-off, the almost frigid relations between himself and Mr. Godfrey Isaacs; and spoke of having once met his brother “at a family function,” and heard for the first time of the success of his government contract. Meanwhile my brother, who had succeeded to the full editorship of the paper and renamed it the New Witness, continued a confessedly violent, not to say abusive attack on the Isaacses, but latterly and largely on the previous career of Mr. Godfrey Isaacs as a promoter of ephemeral companies. Eventually, Mr. Godfrey Isaacs prosecuted my brother for the personal libel on himself; much to my brother’s delight. It is a rather remarkable fact that on the very day that my brother’s reply was received, announcing that he intended to justify or prove his statement, the politicians took the first step towards telling some of the truth. The step may at first sight seem odd. It consisted of prosecuting for libel a French paper called Le Matin.
It seems odd; because there were some very conspicuous English papers to be prosecuted. There was the New Witness, roaring aloud week after week to be prosecuted. There was the Morning Post, which said many things nearly as strong; there was Mr. Maxse, in the National Review, who said things quite as strong. I was myself so much amused with the inconsequence of this foreign diversion that I published some verses in the New Witness beginning:
I am so swift to seize affronts My spirit is so high Whoever has insulted me Some foreigner must die. I made a claim for damage (For the Times has called me ‘thief’) Against a paper in Alsace A paper called Le Juif. And when the Morning Post unearthed Some murders I’d devised A Polish organ of finance At once apologised. … I know it sounds confusing But, as Mr. Lammle said, The anger of a gentleman Is boiling in my head.
The actual method, of course, is by this time familiar enough. Some fool who has got the facts wrong is always prosecuted, instead of the serious critics who have got the facts right. And, in the case of Le Matin, the occasion was merely used as an opportunity for the Ministers involved to give their own version of the real facts before it was too late. To the profound astonishment and distress of many, they admitted that, in spite of the reassuring remarks in Parliament, they had in fact received a large number of shares from the American branch of the Marconi Company. Most of the loyal Liberals who followed them were rather flabbergasted; but in the ordinary Party press the matter was duly whitewashed. Of course, the ordinary Tory press would have done exactly the same with an ordinary Tory scandal, of which there were quite as many. But I should like to name and record here, honoris causa and for the credit of himself and the true Radical creed, the name of the late H. W. Massingham, the editor of The Nation, who alone in such a crisis spoke and acted like a man. He was as devoted to the Party of Peace, Retrenchment and Reform, as any of the others; but his devotion took the form of an instant appreciation of its moral danger. He came home from the Matin explanation, shaken and horror-stricken, and he printed in his paper the words, “Political corruption is the Achilles heel of Liberalism.”
Attempts were made afterwards to justify all this inconsistency and contradiction, by explaining that the shares had been taken in the American branch of the enterprise and that the Parliamentary explanations had only referred to “this Company.” I must confess that I should feel very much more charity towards the fiction, if it were not for the explanation. I might easily forget and forgive, after all these years, if the politicians said they had lied as schoolboys lie, out of loyalty to their own class or club; and under certain conventions of Parliamentary self-defence; I might even think that this conventional fidelity was not so much merely dishonourable as a perverted form of honour. But if they say that a statement of that sort was not fiction, because the word “American” was suppressed, then (I grieve to say) I could only conclude that they did not know the meaning of truth. The test is perfectly simple. Suppose they had got up and told the whole simple truth saying, “These Ministers have shares in American but not in English Marconis,” the result would have been a shock; which they meant to avoid and did avoid. In other words, on their own theory of their own action, they meant to deceive and did deceive. That they deceived by a verbal equivocation of the double sense of “this Company” does not make it better, but worse. However, all their moral ideas were in such confusion that we need not necessarily even believe their explanation of their explanation. Their real reason may even have been better than their false excuse; and their lie may have been more loyal than they had the courage to confess.
Another legend about the Marconi Case, floating about like a cloud and obscuring its true outline, is this notion that my brother being convicted and fined the rather nominal sum of £100 was a legal answer to the attack on the Marconi Ministers. This is, as the lawyers say, a question of law as well as fact; and in both it is quite false. Mr. Justice Phillimore, who was opposed to our case in a degree rather beyond the limits of the judicial, was nevertheless a very lucid and precise lawyer; and he left no doubt on this point whatever. In his summing up, he said most emphatically that the jury had nothing whatever to do with the question of whether the politicians had improperly dabbled in Marconis; that their verdict was not to answer that political question one way or the other; that they were concerned solely with whether the individual Godfrey Isaacs, in his career as a company-promoter previous to the Marconi Case, had been unfairly described by the individual Cecil Chesterton. The jury were strongly instructed to find, and did find, that the description of the company-promoter was wrong. But the jury did not find, and were expressly told that they were not competent to find, that the conduct of the Marconi Ministers was right.
Whatever Godfrey Isaacs was really like, he is dead now; and I certainly am not going back to dig up the poor fellow’s defunct companies. There are perhaps only two things to be added to that personal part of the story; and I think they are both worth adding. One is that it is supremely characteristic of my brother that, while he undoubtedly used all the violent vocabulary of Cobbett in attacking Godfrey Isaacs and the rest, he had not in fact the faintest grain of malice, or even irritation. He always spoke of the brothers Isaacs and their set, in private conversation, with perfect good-humour and charity; allowing for their Jewish virtues of family loyalty and the rest, and even finding excuses for the other politicians; though it is extremely typical of the real attitude of our group, which was accused of fanatical Anti-Semitism, that he was always more ready to excuse the Jews than the Gentiles. That is another of the legends about the Marconi Case; that it was an attack on Jews. As Mr. Belloc said, in giving evidence, anybody less like a Jew than Mr. Lloyd George it would be difficult to imagine. And there is to be added to this a curious and ironic conclusion of the matter; for many years after my brother received the Last Sacraments and died in a hospital in France, his old enemy, Godfrey Isaacs, died very shortly after having been converted to the same universal Catholic Church. No one would have rejoiced more than my brother; or with less bitterness or with more simplicity. It is the only reconciliation; and it can reconcile anybody. Requiescat in pace.
Finally, it may be worth noting that the last and least worthy of the legends about the Marconi Case was a notion, which I found floating about at one time, that my brother and Mr. Belloc had parted company on the matter, because Mr. Belloc in his evidence had referred the examiners to my brother as responsible editor of the later issues of the paper. As one who was inside all the councils, and was naturally prejudiced if anything on my brother’s side, I may testify that there was never a word of truth in this supposed division or desertion. The policy of my brother, claiming to answer all questions himself, may have been wise or unwise; I myself had my doubts about its wisdom. But such as it was, it was adopted by him in consultation with Mr. Belloc, as a part of their common policy; and on my suggestion, my brother afterwards inserted a note in the paper explaining this simple fact. The result was simple and significant. The Commission never dared to call him at all. For the rest, the political scandal was treated like all other political scandals. A Parliamentary Commission was appointed and reported that everything was very nice; a Minority Report was issued which reported that some things were not quite so nice; and political life (if you can call it life) went on as before. But what makes me laugh is the thought of the poor puzzled, honest and indignant Tories, who read the Morning Post and imagined that a Tory chivalry was storming the fortress of corrupt Radicalism, when they read the Parliamentary Debates on the subject; and especially the passage in which Arthur Balfour said that they must judge men like Lloyd George (whom they knew so well and loved so much) more leniently than they would judge a common outsider. The poor Primrose League must have been horribly mystified by the problem of this mildness on the Front Benches. They would have found the answer to the problem in a book called The Party System.
Soon after the affair had concluded, as such affairs always conclude in modern England, with a formal verdict and a whitewashing committee, all our politics and practical life were turned upside down by the external earthquake of the Great War. There was not so complete a disconnection as some suppose; for Prussia was partly encouraged to attack by a gross exaggeration of the seriousness, I will not say of the Orangeman, but certainly of the seriousness with which the Englishman really regards the Orangeman. And that threat of civil war from Northern Ireland was very largely lashed into extravagance, as an expedient for proving that the Party System did mean something after all. For a very long time past, the Irish Question had been the only life in the English Parliament. It was alive because it was concerned with religion, or with two religions; and when the Irish question was withdrawn, the English Parliamentary Party System visibly fell to pieces. But there were other ways in which the issue of corruption continued to affect the country in wartime; not least in the Dope Scandal and in the fact that firms did brazenly continue to trade with the enemy. But in truth, the evil connection went back further than that. As a fact, it goes back to the very beginning of the War, though few people even began to understand it until long afterwards.
If I were asked who produced or precipitated the Great War (in the instant sense that he prevented it being prevented), I should give an answer that would surprise nearly all sections of opinion, and almost certainly surprise the man himself. I should not say the Kaiser; for that simplification was only one of the series of British bogeys like Kruger before or Mussolini afterwards; though I am quite certain the evil originally arose with the power of Prussia. Still less should I say the Czar of Russia or some Slavonic fanatic who committed a crime at Sarajevo. Long after the acts and attitudes of all these people were recognised, it would have been perfectly possible to avoid the war; and nearly everybody wanted to avoid it. I should say that the fire-eater, who precipitated it when others might have prevented it, was some sort of worthy Quaker of the type of old Mr. Cadbury, whom I knew and served in my youth.
And it all arose out of the existence of the Party System; or rather, in a sense, out of the non-existence of the Party System. When the public theory of a thing is different from the practical reality of that thing, there is always a convention of silence that cannot be broken; there are things that must not be said in public. The fact concealed in this case exactly illustrated the thesis of the book called, The Party System; that there were not two real parties ruling alternately, but one real group, “the Front Benches,” ruling all the time. The fact here was that the foreign policy of Asquith and Grey did not vitally differ from that which would have been pursued by Balfour and Bonar Law. All were patriots upon this point; all were, in my personal opinion, right; but anyhow, all thought that England would have to intervene if Germany threatened France. They all thought so; and if they had all said so, and said so months before, Germany would never have challenged the power of such an alliance. My brother and many millions more would be walking about alive.
The Liberal leaders could not say so; not for fear of the Liberty Party, let alone the people; but for fear of the particular and powerful forces which supported the Liberal Party; and therefore supported the Party System. And under the conditions of our party politics, a party is supported not so much by fighting as by funds. They are called, heaven knows why, in a most extraordinary metaphor, “the sinews of war.” They are provided by the sale of peerages to rich men and all sorts of ignominious methods; but there is no question of such methods here. Many such party supporters, and certainly Mr. Cadbury, were in complete good faith, especially about supporting Peace. But very many of them were Quakers, simply because the Quakers happened to possess a minority of millionaires, a group much smaller but much richer than the Liberal Party as a whole. And the very constitution of modern party politics is such that a government has to placate such supporters, and profess to represent their ideals or prejudices, or whatever we happen to think them. In short, the whole thing was and is a plutocracy; but it was not specially in this case the fault of this group of plutocrats.
That increasing number of intellectuals, who are content to say that Democracy has been a failure, miss the point of the far more disastrous calamity that Plutocracy has been a success. I mean it has been the only sort of success it could be; for Plutocracy has no philosophy or morals or even meaning; it can only be a material success, that is, a base success. Plutocracy can only mean the success of plutocrats in being plutocrats. But this they enjoyed until a short time ago, when an economic judgment shook them like an earthquake. With Democracy the cast is exactly the reverse. We may say, with some truth, that Democracy has failed; but we shall only mean that Democracy has failed to exist. It is nonsense to say that the complicated but centralised Capitalist States of the last hundred years have suffered from an extravagant sense of the equality of men or the simplicity of manhood. At most we might say that the civic theory has provided a sort of legal fiction, behind which a rich man could rule a civilisation where he could once rule a city; or a usurer throw his net over six nations, where he once threw it over one village. But there is no stronger proof of the fact that it emphatically is plutocracy, and most emphatically is not democracy, that has caused popular institutions to become unpopular, than this example of the pull of the Pacifists upon the Liberal Government just before the Great War. It is only necessary to ask exactly how much such extreme Pacifists counted in the Party Fund, and how much they counted in the Party.
For no electioneering agent, however active and anxious, would have got into an abnormal panic about the votes of the Quakers. He would have given them the normal attention that he would give to the votes of the Plymouth Brethren or the Peculiar People, who would very probably have the habit of voting Liberal. There are not enough individual Quakers to create a landslide of votes at a General Election. By the nature of modern politics, and nobody’s fault in particular, the whole point and pivot of the situation was not the large proportion of men who were Quakers, but the large proportion of Quakers who were millionaires. And since this situation is bad at its best, as with Quakers who were sincere in their Pacifism, we can hardly think too badly of so bad a situation at its worst. At its worst it meant that the worst sort of traitors could and did trade with the enemy throughout the War, that the worst sort of profiteers could and did blackmail their own country for bloodsucking profits in the worst hour of her peril, that the worst sort of politicians could play any game they liked with the honour of England and the happiness of Europe, if they were backed and boomed by some vulgar monopolist millionaire; and these insolent interests nearly brought us to a crash in the supreme crisis of our history; because Parliament had come to mean only a secret government by the rich.
So ended the last considerable attempt to purge Parliament, or the ancient institution of the English. Some years before a similar attempt had been made in France, inspired by the chivalry of Déroulède, who acted much in the military and Christian spirit of Belloc and my brother. That also had failed; and Parliaments continued to prosper; that is they continued to rot. We have lived to see the last phase; when the revolt against that rot in representative institutions broke out further south, in the very gates of Rome; and it did not fail. But it has brought with it changes not wholly comforting to one who loves liberty and the ancient English conception of a Free Parliament. I am proud to have been among those who tried to save it, even if it was too late.
X
FRIENDSHIP AND FOOLERY
There are some who complain of a man for doing nothing; there are some, still more mysterious and amazing, who complain of having nothing to do. When actually presented with some beautiful blank hours or days, they will grumble at their blankness. When given the gift of loneliness, which is the gift of liberty, they will cast it away; they will destroy it deliberately with some dreadful game with cards or a little ball. I speak only for myself; I know it takes all sorts to make a world; but I cannot repress a shudder when I see them throwing away their hard-won holidays by doing something. For my own part, I never can get enough Nothing to do. I feel as if I had never had leisure to unpack a tenth part of the luggage of my life and thoughts. I need not say that there is nothing particularly misanthropic in my desire for isolation; quite the other way. In my morbid boyhood, as I have said, I was sometimes, in quite a horrible sense, solitary in society. But in my manhood, I have never felt more sociable than I do in solitude.
I have already figured here as a lunatic; and have now only to add that I have occasionally been a happy lunatic as well as an unhappy one. And as I have mentioned the joy of solitude, it will be suitably erratic to proceed at once to the joy of many jokes with many companions; and above all, it will be well to begin with the best of all my companionships. I am not going to describe my honeymoon, at some of the more comic incidents of which I have already glanced. After we were married, my wife and I lived for about a year in Kensington, the place of my childhood; but I think we both knew that it was not to be the real place of our abode. I remember that we strolled out one day, for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a journey into the void, a voyage deliberately objectless. I saw a passing omnibus labelled “Hanwell” and, feeling this to be an appropriate omen, we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray station, which I entered and asked the man in the ticket-office where the next train went to. He uttered the pedantic reply, “Where do you want to go to?” And I uttered the profound and philosophical rejoinder, “Wherever the next train goes to.” It seemed that it went to Slough; which may seem to be singular taste, even in a train. However, we went to Slough, and from there set out walking with even less notion of where we were going. And in that fashion we passed through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort of village, and stayed at an inn called The White Hart. We asked the name of the place and were told that it was called Beaconsfield (I mean of course that it was called Beconsfield and not Beaconsfield), and we said to each other, “This is the sort of place where some day we will make our home.”
The things that come back to me in my memory, as most worth doing and worth remembering, are all sorts of absurd interludes and escapades with my companions, full of their conversation and coloured with their characters. Belloc still awaits a Boswell. His vivacious and awakening personality has shown all the continuity of Dr. Johnson’s; and though he has had personal sorrow and in later years not a little solitude, he was fully entitled to say, like the man in his own song,
For you that took the all in all, the things you left were three, A loud voice for singing and clear eyes to see And a spouting fount of life within that never yet has dried.
Bentley or Conrad Noel were characters who could have been put into any comedy; and the levities of Maurice Baring were worthy of some fantastic macaroni or incroyable of the eighteenth century.
Among the memories that are blown back to me, as by a wind over the Downs, is that of the winter day when Belloc dragged us through Sussex to find the source of the Arun. The company included his wife and mine; none of us had been long married, and perhaps we knew less than we do now of the diversity of human temperaments, not to say temperatures. He and I were fond of cold weather; my wife and his wife, who was a very charming Californian, were not. We did find the place where the Arun rose in the hills; and it was indeed, of all the sights I have seen, one of the most beautiful; I might almost say the most classical. For it rose in a (partly frozen) pool in a small grove of slender trees, silver with the frost, that looked somehow like the pale and delicate pillars of a temple. But I think the ladies, though both of them sensitive to scenery, looked on that cold paradise with something of a cold eye. When this began to be discovered, Belloc instantly proposed the remedy of hot rum, in large tumblers at an adjoining inn; and we were puzzled by the fact that the remedy was regarded with almost as much distaste as the disease. However, we ourselves, who did not feel the cold, heartily consumed the rum; and Belloc, who has always had a trick of repeating scraps of recently discovered verse, which happened to please him, would volley out at intervals the lines of Miss Coleridge:
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise And the doors stood open at our feast; When there passed us a woman with the west in her eyes And a man with his back to the east.
There is no doubt, so far as we were concerned, that we were young and were merry; but I have sometimes doubted since whether we were very, very wise.
We then returned to Belloc’s house; where he rather neutralised the effects of the restoring warmth, by continually flinging open the door and rushing out to a telescope in the garden (it was already a frosty starlight) and loudly hallooing to the ladies to come and see God making energy. His wife declined, in terms of not a little humour; to which he retorted cheerfully:
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise And the doors stood open at our feast; When there passed us a woman with the west in her eyes And a man with his back to the east.
Needless to say, however, his hospitality terminated with a magnificent feast with wine, and all ended in a glow of gaiety; but there lingers a sort of legend of that day in winter, when some of us were so much more interested in the barometer than the telescope. The feminine aspect of the story was afterwards embodied in an echo of the everlasting refrain:
We were cold, we were bitter, we were very nearly dead, And the doors stood open by desire, And there faced us a woman with a cold in her head And a man with his back to the fire.
Those are the sort of silly things that come back to me in memory; and a real life of anybody would almost entirely consist of them. But a real life of anybody is a very difficult thing to write; and as I have failed two or three times in trying to do it to other people, I am under no illusion that I can really do it to myself. I remember another rather ridiculous private incident which had more of what is called public interest. For it involved the meeting of Belloc and a very famous and distinguished author; and I think the meeting was the most comic comedy of cross-purposes that ever happened in the world. One could write books about its significance, social, national, international and historic. It had in it all sorts of things; including the outside and the inside of England. And yet as an anecdote it would probably seem pointless, so subtle and penetrating is the point.
One summer we took a house at Rye, that wonderful inland island, crowned with a town as with a citadel, like a hill in a mediaeval picture. It happened that the house next to us was the old oak-panelled mansion which had attracted, one might almost say across the Atlantic, the fine aquiline eye of Henry James. For Henry James, of course, was an American who had reacted against America; and steeped his sensitive psychology in everything that seemed most antiquatedly and aristocratically English. In his search for the finest shades among the shadows of the past, one might have guessed that he would pick out that town from all towns and that house from all houses. It had been the seat of a considerable patrician family of the neighbourhood, which had long ago decayed and disappeared. It had, I believe, rows of family portraits, which Henry James treated as reverently as family ghosts. I think in a way he really regarded himself as a sort of steward or custodian of the mysteries and secrets of a great house, where ghosts might have walked with all possible propriety. The legend says (I never learned for certain if it was true) that he had actually traced that dead family-tree until he found that there was far away in some manufacturing town, one unconscious descendant of the family, who was a cheerful and commonplace commercial clerk. And it is said that Henry James would ask this youth down to his dark ancestral house, and receive him with funereal hospitality, and I am sure with comments of a quite excruciating tact and delicacy. Henry James always spoke with an air which I can only call gracefully groping; that is not so much groping in the dark in blindness as groping in the light in bewilderment, through seeing too many avenues and obstacles. I would not compare it, in the unkind phrase of Mr. H. G. Wells, to an elephant trying to pick up a pea. But I agree that it was like something with a very sensitive and flexible proboscis, feeling its way through a forest of facts; to us often invisible facts. It is said, I say, that these thin straws of sympathy and subtlety were duly split for the benefit of the astonished commerical gentleman, while Henry James, with his bowed dome-like head, drooped with unfathomable apologies and rendered a sort of silent account of his stewardship. It is also said that the commercial gentleman thought the visit a great bore and the ancestral home a hell of a place; and probably fidgeted about with a longing to go out for a B and S and the Pink ‘Un.
Whether this tale be true or not, it is certain that Henry James inhabited the house with all the gravity and loyalty of the family ghost; not without something of the oppressive delicacy of a highly cultured family butler. He was in point of fact a very stately and courteous old gentleman; and, in some social aspects especially, rather uniquely gracious. He proved in one point that there was a truth in his cult of tact. He was serious with children. I saw a little boy gravely present him with a crushed and dirty dandelion. He bowed; but he did not smile. That restraint was a better proof of the understanding of children than the writing of What Maisie Knew. But in all relations of life he erred, if he erred, on the side of solemnity and slowness; and it was this, I suppose, that got at last upon the too lively nerves of Mr. Wells; who used, even in those days, to make irreverent darts and dashes through the sombre house and the sacred garden and drop notes to me over the garden wall. I shall have more to say of Mr. H. G. Wells and his notes later; here we are halted at the moment when Mr. Henry James heard of our arrival in Rye and proceeded (after exactly the correct interval) to pay his call in state.
Needless to say, it was a very stately call of state; and James seemed to fill worthily the formal frock-coat of those far-off days. As no man is so dreadfully well-dressed as a well-dressed American, so no man is so terribly well-mannered as a well-mannered American. He brought his brother William with him, the famous American philosopher; and though William James was breezier than his brother when you knew him, there was something finally ceremonial about this idea of the whole family on the march. We talked about the best literature of the day; James a little tactfully, myself a little nervously. I found he was more strict than I had imagined about the rules of artistic arrangement; he deplored rather than depreciated Bernard Shaw, because plays like Getting Married were practically formless. He said something complimentary about something of mine; but represented himself as respectfully wondering how I wrote all I did. I suspected him of meaning why rather than how. We then proceeded to consider gravely the work of Hugh Walpole, with many delicate degrees of appreciation and doubt; when I heard from the front-garden a loud bellowing noise resembling that of an impatient foghorn. I knew, however, that it was not a fog-horn; because it was roaring out, “Gilbert! Gilbert!” and was like only one voice in the world; as rousing as that recalled in one of its former phrases, of those who
Heard Ney shouting to the guns to unlimber And hold the Beresina Bridge at night.
I knew it was Belloc, probably shouting for bacon and beer; but even I had no notion of the form or guise under which he would present himself.
I had every reason to believe that he was a hundred miles away in France. And so, apparently, he had been; walking with a friend of his in the Foreign Office, a co-religionist of one of the old Catholic families; and by some miscalculation they had found themselves in the middle of their travels entirely without money. Belloc is legitimately proud of having on occasion lived, and being able to live, the life of the poor. One of the Ballades of the Eye-Witness, which was never published, described tramping abroad in this fashion:
To sleep and smell the incense of the tar, To wake and watch Italian dawns aglow And underneath the branch a single star, Good Lord, how little wealthy people know.
In this spirit they started to get home practically without money. Their clothes collapsed and they managed to get into some workmen’s slops. They had no razors and could not afford a shave. They must have saved their last penny to recross the sea; and then they started walking from Dover to Rye; where they knew their nearest friend for the moment resided. They arrived, roaring for food and drink and derisively accusing each other of having secretly washed, in violation of an implied contract between tramps. In this fashion they burst in upon the balanced tea-cup and tentative sentence of Mr. Henry James.
Henry James had a name for being subtle; but I think that situation was too subtle for him. I doubt to this day whether he, of all men, did not miss the irony of the best comedy in which he ever played a part. He had left America because he loved Europe, and all that was meant by England or France; the gentry, the gallantry, the traditions of lineage and locality, the life that had been lived beneath old portraits in oak-panelled rooms. And there, on the other side of the tea-table, was Europe, was the old thing that made France and England, the posterity of the English squires and the French soldiers; ragged, unshaven, shouting for beer, shameless above all shades of poverty and wealth; sprawling, indifferent, secure. And what looked across at it was still the Puritan refinement of Boston; and the space it looked across was wider than the Atlantic.
It is only fair to say that my two friends were at the moment so disreputable that even an English inn-keeper was faintly at fault in his unfailing nose for gentlemen. He knew they were not tramps; but he had to rally his powers of belief to become completely convinced that they were a Member of Parliament and an official at the Foreign Office. But, though he was a simple and even stupid man, I am not sure that he did not know more about it than Henry James. The fact that one of my friends insisted on having a bottle of port decanted and carrying it through the streets of Rye, like a part of a religious procession, completely restored his confidence in the class to which such lunatics belonged. I have always been haunted by the contradictions of that comedy; and if I could ever express all that was involved in it, I should write a great book on international affairs. I do not say I should become the champion of an Anglo-American Alliance; for any fool can do that, and indeed generally does. But I should begin to suggest something which is often named and has never been even remotely approached: an Anglo-American Understanding.
In those days down at Rye, as I have said, I saw something of Mr. H. G. Wells, and learnt to appreciate that in him which I think made him rebel against the atmosphere of Henry James; though Henry James did really appreciate that quality in Wells. Indeed, Henry James expressed it as well as it could be expressed by saying, “Whatever Wells writes is not only alive, but kicking.” It seems rather unfortunate that, after this, it should have been Henry James who was kicked. But I can sympathise in some ways with H. G’s mutiny against the oak-panelling and the ghosts. What I have always liked about Wells is his vigorous and unaffected readiness for a lark. He was one of the best men in the world with whom to start a standing joke; though perhaps he did not like it to stand too long after it was started. I remember we worked a toy-theatre together with a pantomime about Sidney Webb. I also remember that it was we who invented the well-known and widespread national game of Gype. All sorts of variations and complications were invented in connection with Gype. There was Land Gype and Water Gype. I myself cut out and coloured pieces of cardboard of mysterious and significant shapes, the instruments of Table Gype; a game for the little ones. It was even duly settled what disease threatened the over-assiduous player; he tended to suffer from Gype’s Ear. My friends and I introduced allusions to the fashionable sport in our articles; Bentley successfully passed one through the Daily News and I through some other paper. Everything was in order and going forward; except the game itself, which has not yet been invented.
I can understand a man like Wells feeling that Henry James would show a certain frigidity towards Gype; and for the sacred memory of Gype I can excuse his reaction; but I have always thought that he reacted too swiftly to everything; possibly as a part of the swiftness of his natural genius. I have never ceased to admire and sympathise; but I think he has always been too much in a state of reaction. To use the name which would probably annoy him most, I think he is a permanent reactionary. Whenever I met him, he seemed to be coming from somewhere, rather than going anywhere. He always had been a Liberal, or had been a Fabian, or had been a friend of Henry James or Bernard Shaw. And he was so often nearly right, that his movements irritated me like the sight of somebody’s hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore. But I think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
The name of Mr. H. G. Wells has already inevitably suggested the name of Mr. Bernard Shaw; and it is a mere accident of the arrangement of this book that he has not figured in it fairly prominently from the first. As I have explained on an earlier page, I myself began with an acceptance of Socialism; simply because it seemed at the time the only alternative to the dismal acceptance of Capitalism. I have also noted that my brother, who took Socialism more seriously or at least more scientifically, became a recognised influence in the Fabian Society and was at that time much more familiar with G. B. S. than I. He was also by the nature of the case, much more in agreement with him. My principal experience, from first to last, has been in argument with him. And it is worth remarking that I have learned to have a warmer admiration and affection out of all that argument than most people get out of agreement. Bernard Shaw, unlike some whom I have had to consider here, is seen at his best when he is antagonistic. I might say that he is seen at his best when he is wrong. Or rather, everything is wrong about him but himself.
I began arguing with Mr. Bernard Shaw in print almost as early as I began doing anything. It was about my Pro-Boer sympathies in the South African War. Those who do not understand what the Fabian political philosophy was may not realise that the leading Fabians were nearly all Imperialists. Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb were in that matter strong Imperialists; Hubert Bland was a still stronger Imperialist; my brother was as strong an Imperialist as Hubert Bland. And even Bernard Shaw, though retaining a certain liberty to chaff everybody, was quite definitely an Imperialist, as compared with myself and my friends the Pro-Boers. Since then a legend has arisen, especially among his stupidest opponents, that Mr. Bernard Shaw is an impudent Irish revolutionary who has always been Anti-British. The truth is that Mr. Bernard Shaw has always been a great deal too Pro-British. The play of John Bull’s Other Island is a great deal too Pro-British. It makes the Other Island a great deal too much John Bull’s. It credits the English business man with a success in Ireland that he has never had. It suggests indeed that the success is almost due to the stupidity. But in fact the attempts of men like Balfour and Birrell and Wyndham and Morley to rule Ireland might be much more truly described as a brilliant failure than a stupid success. The point was not that stupid men made something out of it, but that clever men made nothing. So it was in this old and determining crisis of the war with the Dutch Republic. As compared with Belloc or myself, Bernard Shaw was definitely in favour of the South African War. At any rate, he was very definitely in favour of the South African Peace, the particular Pax Britannica that was aimed at by the South African War. It was the same, for that matter, with Mr. H. G. Wells; then a sort of semi-detached Fabian. He went out of his way to scoff at the indignation of the Pro-Boers against the Concentration Camps. Indeed he still maintains, while holding all wars indefensible, that this is the only sort of war to be defended. He says that great wars between great powers are absurd, but that it might be necessary, in policing the planet, to force backward peoples to open their resources to cosmopolitan commerce. In other words, he defends the only sort of war I thoroughly despise, the bullying of small states for their oil or gold; and he despises the only sort of war that I really defend, a war of civilisations and religions, to determine the moral destiny of mankind.
I say this as a compliment to the Fabians. I say it as a compliment to their consistency, as well as contradiction of their controversial views. They were and are quite right, holding their views about centralisation, to be on the side of the Big Battalions and the Big Businesses. It is the sentimental Socialists (as Mr. Wells quite truly points out) who are inconsistent, in saying that a peasant has no right to a corn-field, but a peasantry has a right to an oil-field. It is they who are the more nebulous thinkers when they defend small nationalities but not small properties; more nebulous but sometimes much nicer. There is only a thin sheet of paper between the Imperialist and the Internationalist; and the first Fabians had the lucidity to see the fact. Most of the other Socialists have preferred sheets of paper, and they have grown thinner and thinner sheets.
In the same way Mr. Bernard Shaw has been highly flattered by the false charges brought against him; especially the general charge of being a sort of Irish rebel. Anyone who remembers those old times knows that he was, if anything, the very reverse. It was a part of the Fabian cult of commonsense to regard Irish nationalism as a narrow sentimentalism, distracting men from the main business of socialising the resources of the whole world. But I only note this error here to emphasise the fact that my controversy with G. B. S., both logically and chronologically, is from the beginning. Since then I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world; and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity. I have defended the institution of the family against his Platonist fancies about the State. I have defended the institutions of Beef and Beer against his hygienic severity of vegetarianism and total abstinence. I have defended the old Liberal notion of nationalism against the new Socialist notion of internationalism. I have defended the cause of the Allies against the perverse sympathy felt by pacifists for the militarism of the Central Empires. I have defended what I regard as the sacred limitations of Man against what he regards as the soaring illimitability of Superman. Indeed it was in this last matter of Man and Superman that I felt the difference to become most clear and acute; and we had many discussions upon it with all sides. It was my friend Lucian Oldershaw who announced his intention of writing an answer to “Man and Superman,” called “Shaw and Oldershaw.”
For in fact all these differences come back to a religious difference; indeed I think all differences do. I did not know myself, at the beginning, what the religious difference was; still less what the religion was. But the difference is this; that the Shavians believe in evolution exactly as the old Imperialists believed in expansion. They believe in a great growing and groping thing like a tree; but I believe in the flower and the fruit; and the flower is often small. The fruit is final and in that sense finite; it has a form and therefore a limit. There has been stamped upon it an image, which is the crown and consummation of an aim; and the mediaeval mystics used the same metaphor and called it Fruition. And as applied to man, it means this; that man has been made more sacred than any superman or super-monkey; that his very limitations have already become holy and like a home; because of that sunken chamber in the rocks, where God became very small.
I have dwelt on this long duel that I may end with the right salute to the duellist. It is not easy to dispute violently with a man for twenty years, about sex, about sin, about sacraments, about personal points of honour, about all the most sacred or delicate essentials of existence, without sometimes being irritated or feeling that he hits unfair blows or employs discreditable ingenuities. And I can testify that I have never read a reply by Bernard Shaw that did not leave me in a better and not a worse temper or frame of mind; which did not seem to come out of inexhaustible fountains of fair-mindedness and intellectual geniality; which did not savour somehow of that native largeness which the philosopher attributed to the Magnanimous Man. It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as much as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.
Thus it happened that, while there are few of my contemporaries I like better, we have met more in public than in private; and generally upon platforms; especially upon platforms where we were put up to fight each other, like two knock-about comedians. And indeed he has his eccentricities, rather perhaps to be called consistencies, which often hamper conventional conviviality. Even hostesses, let alone hosts, are sometimes puzzled by a gentleman who has rather more horror of tea than of wine or beer. When I have met him among my more festive friends, he has always stood up starkly for his negative ideals, sometimes to the point of defiance. Among the more joyful of the memories that I am stirring in this chapter were many of the moonstruck banquets given by Mr. Maurice Baring; who in such matters might well have a chapter to himself. The trouble is that I fear the chapter would be found incredible and cast discredit on the rest of this laborious but reliable narrative. It is not for me to do justice here to the godlike joy of life that induced a gentleman to celebrate his fiftieth birthday in a Brighton hotel at midnight by dancing a Russian dance with inconceivable contortions and then plunging into the sea in evening dress. It were not wholly wise perhaps to tell the whole story of that great supper-party in a vast tent in a garden in Westminster; after which eggs were boiled in Sir Herbert Tree’s hat (because it was the most chic and shining of the hats of the company); and I remember indulging in a wild fencing match with real swords against a gentleman who was, fortunately, more intoxicated than I. The whole of that great occasion was actually recorded in cold blood, of all places in the world, in a French newspaper. The reason was that a little French journalist, after making a placid and witty speech full of compliments, had then indulged for the rest of the evening in the treacherous Gallic trick of strict temperance. I remember that his article (which was highly unreliable), began with the words, “‘I denounce Shaw. He is sober.’ Who said these words? These were the words of George Wells;” and continued in an equally personal vein. But it is really true, and I know that Shaw would think it merely consistent and creditable, that he himself got up and sternly protested and then stalked out of the room as a seventeenth-century Puritan might have left a tavern full of Cavaliers.
But even the most sincere seventeenth-century Puritan was in error in supposing that Cavaliers could not be sincere, and even serious. He may often have classed with mere roysterers men of the quality of Donne or Herbert or Sir Thomas Browne. There was a great deal of wisdom as well as wit over the nuts and wine in those riots of my youth; and not only outstanding wisdom but outstanding virtue. It is a coincidence that I have already symbolised such virtue in the surname of Herbert. Maurice Baring himself has recorded in a noble elegy the virtues of the Herbert of his own generation; the second Auberon Herbert, son of the eccentric Individualist, who afterwards inherited the title of Lord Lucas. He was assuredly the good cavalier. Every man was the better for meeting him, in however Bacchanalian an environment; courage and frankness and the love of freedom stood out of him like staring signals, though he was entirely modest and natural; and the battered party name of Liberal meant something so long as he was alive. His courage was of the queerest quality; casual and as it were, in a quiet way, crazy. He had a wooden leg or foot, having lost the use of one limb in the South African War; and I have known him climb out of the window at the top of a dizzy tower of flats and crawl somehow like a fly to the next window, without railing or balcony or any apparent foothold; and having re-entered by the next window climb out again by the next, so weaving a sort of winding pattern round the top of the building. This story is strictly true; but there were a great many legends in that circle, the growth of which it was amusing to watch. I once smashed an ordinary tumbler at Herbert’s table, and an ever-blossoming tradition sprang up that it had been a vessel of inconceivable artistic and monetary value, its price perpetually mounting into millions and its form and colour taking on the glories of the Arabian Nights. From this incident (and from the joyful manner in which Baring trampled like an elephant among the fragments of the crystal) arose a catchword used by many of us in many subsequent controversies, in defence of romantic and revolutionary things; the expression: “I like the noise of breaking glass.” I made it the refrain of a ballade which began:
Prince, when I took your goblet tall And smashed it with inebriate care, I knew not how from Rome and Gaul You gained it; I was unaware It stood by Charlemagne’s great chair And served St. Peter at High Mass. … I’m sorry if the thing was rare; I like the noise of breaking glass.
It is only just to our happy company to say that we did not confine ourselves to saying or singing our own lyrics; though Belloc was generally ready to oblige; and the loud and roaring but none the less pathetic song with the chorus:
And the Gates of Heaven are opening wide To let poor Hilary in
was first heard, I think, at one of these quiet evenings for mutual edification and culture. But we must have sung a vast number of the finest songs in the English language, by poets ancient and modern; and a legend persists that, when Herbert had rooms not far from Buckingham Palace, we sang “Drake’s Drum” with such passionate patriotism that King Edward the Seventh sent in a request for the noise to stop.
I was mainly led to the mention of these idle though agreeable memories, by remarking that his quite unaffected aversion to this sort of thing marked the Puritanic element in Bernard Shaw. He is probably still regarded by many as a buffoon; as a fact he has far too little sympathy with mere buffoonery. His austerity in such things is so much a part of his personality and purity of aim, that one can hardly wish it altered; but the truth remains that the Puritan cannot understand the morality and religion of the Cavalier. In most matters I have found myself rather more in sympathy with Mr. Bernard Shaw than with Mr. H. G. Wells, the other genius of the Fabians, warmly as I admire them both. But, in this matter. Wells was more of my sort than Shaw. Wells does understand the glow and body of good spirits, even when they are animal spirits; and he understands the Saturnalia in which the senator can sometimes relax like the slave. Even here, however, there is a distinction. Shaw has plenty of appetite for adventure; but in his case it would be most welcome as open air adventure. He would not see the fun of cellars or smugglers’ caves; but require a levity in some sense celestial in the literal sense of being sub divo. To put it shortly. Wells would understand larking; but Shaw would only understand skylarking.
I was destined to see some of his skylarking on one occasion at least; and to be privileged to play the fool with him far from the political platform, if not so very far from the theatrical stage. It began by Bernard Shaw coming down to my house in Beaconsfield, in the heartiest spirits and proposing that we should appear together, disguised as Cowboys, in a film of some sort projected by Sir James Barrie. I will not describe the purpose or character of the performance; because nobody ever discovered it; presumably with the exception of Sir James Barrie. But throughout the proceedings, even Barrie had rather the appearance of concealing his secret from himself. All I could gather was that two other well-known persons, Lord Howard de Walden and Mr. William Archer, the grave Scottish critic and translator of Ibsen, had also consented to be Cowboys. “Well,” I said, after a somewhat blank pause of reflection, “God forbid that anyone should say I did not see a joke, if William Archer could see it.” Then after a pause I asked, “But what is the joke?” Shaw replied with hilarious vagueness that nobody knew what the joke was. That was the joke.
I found that the mysterious proceeding practically divided itself into two parts. Both were pleasantly conspiratorial in the manner of Mr. Oppenheim or Mr. Edgar Wallace. One consisted of an appointment in a sort of abandoned brickfield somewhere in the wilds of Essex; in which spot, it was alleged, our cowpunching costumes were already concealed. The other consisted of an invitation to supper at the Savoy, to “talk things over” with Barrie and Granville Barker. I kept both these melodramatic assignations; and though neither of them threw any light upon what we were supposed to be doing, they were both very amusing in their way and rather different from what might have been expected. We went down to the waste land in Essex and found our Wild West equipment. But considerable indignation was felt against William Archer; who, with true Scottish foresight, arrived there first and put on the best pair of trousers. They were indeed a magnificent pair of fur trousers; while the other three riders of the prairie had to be content with canvas trousers. A running commentary upon this piece of individualism continued throughout the afternoon; while we were being rolled in barrels, roped over faked precipices and eventually turned loose in a field to lasso wild ponies, which were so tame that they ran after us instead of our running after them, and nosed in our pockets for pieces of sugar. Whatever may be the strain on credulity, it is also a fact that we all got onto the same motor-bicycle; the wheels of which were spun round under us to produce the illusion of hurtling like a thunderbolt down the mountain-pass. When the rest finally vanished over the cliffs clinging to the rope, they left me behind as a necessary weight to secure it; and Granville Barker kept on calling out to me to Register Self-Sacrifice and Register Resignation, which I did with such wild and sweeping gestures as occurred to me; not, I am proud to say, without general applause. And all this time Barrie, with his little figure behind his large pipe, was standing about in an impenetrable manner; and nothing could extract from him the faintest indication of why we were being put through these ordeals. Never had the silencing effects of the Arcadia Mixture appeared to me more powerful or more unscrupulous. It was as if the smoke that rose from that pipe was a vapour not only of magic, but of black magic.
But the other half of the mystery was, if possible, more mysterious. It was all the more mysterious because it was public, not to say crowded. I went to the Savoy supper under the impression that Barrie and Barker would explain to a small party some small part of the scheme. Instead of that I found the stage of the Savoy Theatre thronged with nearly everybody in London, as the Society papers say when they mean everybody in Society. From the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith to the yellowest and most cryptic Oriental attache, they were all there, dining at little tables and talking about everything but the matter in hand. At least they were all there except Sir James Barrie; who on this occasion made himself almost completely invisible. Towards the end of the meal. Sir Edward Elgar casually remarked to my wife, “I suppose you know you’re being filmed all this time.”
From what I know of the lady, it is unlikely that she was brandishing a champagne-bottle or otherwise attracting social attention; but some of them were throwing bread about and showing marked relaxation from the cares of State. Then the Original Four, whom destiny had selected for a wild western life, were approached with private instructions, which worked out in public as follows. The stage was cleared and the company adjourned to the auditorium, where Bernard Shaw harangued them in a furious speech, with savage gesticulations denouncing Barker and Barrie and finally drawing an enormous sword. The other three of us rose at this signal, also brandishing swords, and stormed the stage, going out through the back scenery. And there We (whoever We were) disappear for ever from the record and reasonable understanding of mankind; for never from that day to this has the faintest light been thrown on the reasons of our remarkable behaviour. I have since heard in a remote and roundabout way certain vague suggestions, to the effect that there was some symbolical notion of our vanishing from real life and being captured or caught up into the film world of romance; being engaged through all the rest of the play in struggling to fight our way back to reality. Whether this was the idea I have never known for certain; I only know that I received immediately afterwards a friendly and apologetic note from Sir James Barrie, saying that the whole scheme was going to be dropped.
I do not know; but I have often wondered. And I have sometimes fancied that there was another sense, darker than my own fancy, in which the secret put in Barrie’s pipe had ended in smoke. There had really been a sort of unearthly unreality in all the levity of those last hours; like something high and shrill that might crack; and it did crack. I have sometimes wondered whether it was felt that this fantasy of fashionable London would appear incongruous with something that happened some days later. For what happened then was that a certain Ultimatum went out from the Austrian Government against Serbia. I rang up Maurice Baring at a further stage of that rapidly developing business; and I can remember the tones of his voice when he said, “We’ve got to fight. They’ve all got to fight. I don’t see how anybody can help it.”
If the Cowboys were indeed struggling to find the road back to Reality they found it all right.
XI
I had been living, already for a long time, in the town of Beaconsfield in the County of Bucks; the town which some Colonials imagine to have been named after Lord Beaconsfield the politician. It is rather as if they thought that England had been named after Mr. England the pirate. I am almost tempted to add that I say it with an apology to pirates. I do not know for certain why Disraeli took his title from Beaconsfield, which he scarcely ever visited, rather than from Hughenden, where he lived. But I was told by old Lord Burnham, the founder of the Daily Telegraph, that (as the story ran) he had chosen the title originally intended for Burke, who did live at Beaconsfield and whose legend still clings in many ways to the place. Mr. Garvin, the editor of the Observer, lives in what was once the house of Burke’s agent and the oak-tree in my own garden was one of the line of trees that marked the limit of this land. I am glad that Mr. Garvin fits into that political landscape much better than I do; for I admire Burke in many things while disagreeing with him in nearly everything. But Mr. Garvin strikes me as being rather like Burke; in his Irish origin, in his English Conservatism, in his eloquence and gravity and something that can only be called urgency of mind. I once suggested to him that he should appear at a local festival as Burke and I as Fox; a part for which I have no claim except in circumference. But I hope there will never come a dark and difficult hour when political differences become personal, and Mr. Garvin begins to throw daggers about and say that our friendship is at an end.
I have lived in Beaconsfield from the time when it was almost a village to the time when, as the enemy profanely says, it is almost a suburb. It would be truer to say that the two things in some sense still exist side by side; and the popular instinct has recognised the division by actually talking about the Old Town and the New Town. I once planned a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in several volumes, which was to be called “The Two Barbers of Beaconsfield” and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For those two shops do indeed belong to two different civilisations. The hairdresser of the New Town belongs to the new world and has the spotlessness of the specialist; the other has what may be called the ambidexterity of the peasant, shaving (so to speak) with one hand while he stuffs squirrels or sells tobacco with the other. The latter tells me from his own recollection what happened in Old Beaconsfield; the former, or his assistants, tell me from the Daily Mail what has not happened in a wider world. But I suggest this comparison, merely as an introduction to a parallel matter of local interest; which happens to embody, better perhaps than any other emblem, all those large matters that are more than local. If I wanted to write a book about the whole of this great passage in the history of England, including the Great War and many other changes almost as great, I should write it in the form of a History of the Beaconsfield War Memorial.
The plain primary proposal was that a cross should be set up at the cross-roads. Before the discussion was half over there had entered into it the following subjects of debate: (1) The Position of Woman in the Modern World, (2) Prohibition and the Drink Question, (3) The Excellence or Exaggeration of the Cult of Athletics, (4) The Problem of Unemployment, Especially in Relation to Ex-Service Men, (5) The Question of Support for Hospitals and the General Claims of Surgery and Medicine, (6) The Justice of the War, (7) Above all, or rather under all, for it was in many ways masked or symbolically suggested, the great war of religion which has never ceased to divide mankind, especially since that sign was set up among them. Those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants of a little country town; the rector and the doctor and the bank manager and the respectable trades-men of the place, with a few hangers-on like myself, of the more disreputable professions of journalism or the arts. But the powers that were present there in the spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history; Mahomet was there and the Iconoclasts, who came riding out of the East to ruin the statues of Italy, and Calvin and Rousseau and the Russian anarchs and all the older England that is buried under Puritanism; and Henry the Third ordering the little images for Westminster and Henry the Fifth, after Agincourt, on his knees before the shrines of Paris. If one could really write that little story of that little place, it would be the greatest of historical monographs.
The first thing to note, as typical of the modern tone, is a certain effect of toleration which actually results in timidity. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it. There is a further qualification of some interest; that in this, as in many things, there is an immense intellectual superiority in the poor, and even in the ignorant. The cottagers of the Old Town either liked the Cross because it was Christian and said so, or else disliked the Cross because it was Popish and said so. But the leaders of the No-Popery Party were ashamed to talk No-Popery. They did not say in so many words that they thought a Crucifix a wicked thing; but they said, in any number of words, that they thought a parish pump or a public fountain or a municipal motor-bus a good thing. But the greater number of them tended to the proposal of a Club Building, especially for ex-service men; where the latter could have refreshment (that is where the Drink Question came in) or play games (that is where the Athletic Question came in) or possibly even share the Club on equal terms with their wives and women-folk (that is where the Wrongs of Women came in) and generally, in fact, enjoy all that we should desire ex-soldiers to enjoy, if there were really any chance of letting them do so. The scheme was in that sense admirable; but, as it proceeded, it became almost too admirable, in the original Latin sense of astonishing. Those who had propounded it called themselves, I need hardly say, the Practical Party. They justly condemned us of the other group as dreamers and mystical visionaries. They set to work to draw up their plans for the Club; and they were certainly plans of the most magnificent completeness. There were to be cricket-fields and football-fields and swimming-baths and golf-courses, for all I know. The incident has a primary moral, with reference to that strange modern notion about what is practical and constructive, which seems merely to mean what is large and largely advertised. By the end of the controversy the plan of the Practical Party had swelled to the ends of the earth and taken on the dimensions of Aladdin’s Palace. There was not the remotest chance of collecting subscriptions for such a scheme; at the rate it was developing it might run to millions. Meanwhile, the vision of the mere visionaries could be realised easily for a few hundred pounds.
And the second moral to the story is this; that the modern mind finds it very difficult to understand the idea of an aim or object. When I was speaking on behalf of the simple stone monument at the cross-roads, I quoted the excellent saying of Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, when his sister asks him, just before the ball, whether it would not be much more rational if conversation at a ball took the place of dancing; and he answers, “Much more rational, but not half so like a ball.” I pointed out that a parish-pump might seem to some more rational than a Cross, but it was not half so like a War Memorial. A club, or a hospital ward, or anything having its own practical purpose, policy and future, would not really be a War Memorial at all; it would not be in practice a memory of the War. If people thought it wrong to have a memory of the War, let them say so. If they did not approve of wasting money on a War Memorial, let us scrap the War Memorial and save the money. But to do something totally different which we wanted to do, on pretence of doing something else that we did not do, was unworthy of Homo sapiens and the dignity of that poor old anthropoid. I got some converts to my view; but I think that many still thought I was not practical; though in fact I was very specially practical, for those who understand what is really meant by a Pragma. The most practical test of the problem of unmemorial memorials was offered by the Rector of Beaconsfield, who simply got up and said, “We already have a ward in the Wycombe Hospital which was supposed to commemorate something. Can anybody here tell me what it commemorates?”
Anyhow, the Cross was the crux; and it is no pun but a plain truth to put it so. But the curious point is that few of those who found the Cross crucial would admit in so many words that it was crucial because it was the Cross. They advanced all sorts of alternative objections or made all sorts of alternative proposals. One lady wished to have a statue of a soldier, and I shuddered inwardly, knowing what such statues can be; fortunately another lady, with a nephew in the Navy, called out indignantly, “What about the sailors?” Whereupon the first lady said with hasty but hearty apology, “Oh, yes; and a sailor as well.” Whereupon a third lady, with a brother in the Air Force, proposed that this also should be included in the group; and the first lady with large and generous gestures accepted all and every addition of the kind; so that this magnificent sculptural monument was soon towering into tanks and toppling with aeroplanes. It seemed a little dangerous; but it was safer than a market-cross. Other objections to the latter symbol were adduced, probably to cover the real objection; such as the monument as an obstacle to traffic. The local doctor, an admirable physician but a sceptic of rather a schoolboy sort, observed warmly, “If you do stick up a thing like this, I hope you’ll stick a light on it, or all our cars will smash into it in the dark.” Whereupon my wife, who was then an ardent Anglo-Catholic, observed with an appearance of dreamy rapture, “Oh, yes! How beautiful! A lamp continually burning before the Cross!” Which was not exactly what the man of science had proposed; but it could not have been more warmly seconded.
Lastly, the most significant part of this social episode was the end of it. If anyone fails to realise how lasting, or lingering, in spite of everything, are the old social forms of England and its structure as an ancient aristocratic state, he could not do better than consider the last quiet and ironic ending of the great battle of the Beaconsfield War Memorial. There was a huge paper plebiscite in which hardly anybody knew what he was voting for, but which turned up somehow with a narrow numerical majority for the building of the Club. The Club, for which the practical majority had voted was never built. The Cross, for which the more mystical minority had largely forgotten to vote, was built. When the whole fuss of papers and public meetings was over, and everybody was thinking about other things, the rector of the parish raised a quiet subscription of his own among his own co-religionists and sympathisers; got enough money to put up a Cross and put it up. Meanwhile Lord Burnham, the chief landlord of the neighbourhood, equally casually informed the Ex-Service Men and their sympathisers that they could use a hall, which was his property, for their Club, if they liked, they appeared to be perfectly contented; and so far from demanding any other Club, seemed to have become fairly indifferent about the use of this one. So did the Great War pass over Beaconsfield, making the world safe for Democracy and the holding of any number of public meetings full of the revolutionary hopes of the Modern World; and so in the end the whole matter was decided at the private discretion of the Squire and Parson, as it was in the days of old.
There was a sequel, however, involving more serious things. A renewed shock went through the anti-clerical party on finding that the Cross was a Crucifix. This represented, to many amiable and professedly moderate Nonconformists and other Protestants, exactly that extra touch that they could not tolerate. The distinction is all the more clearly to be kept in mind because it is, on the face of it, an entirely irrational distinction. The sort of Evangelical who demands what he calls a Living Christ must surely find it difficult to reconcile with his religion an indifference to a Dying Christ; but anyhow one would think he would prefer it to a Dead Cross. To salute the Cross in that sense is literally to bow down to wood and stone; since it is only an image in stone of something that was made of wood. It is surely less idolatrous to salute the Incarnate God or His image; and the case is further complicated by the relation of the image to the other object. If a man were ready to wreck every statue of Julius Caesar, but also ready to kiss the sword that killed him, he would be liable to be misunderstood as an ardent admirer of Caesar. If a man hated to have a portrait of Charles the First, but rubbed his hands with joy at the sight of the axe that beheaded him, he would have himself to blame if he were regarded rather as a Roundhead than a Royalist. And to permit a picture of the engine of execution, while forbidding a picture of the victim, is just as strange and sinister in the case of Christ as in that of Caesar. And this illustrates something about the whole situation, which grew clearer and clearer to me about this time and initiated the next step of my life.
Of that revolution in my life I shall write more fully later. But for the moment, in the particular connection under consideration, I will say this. The fact that, after all these alarums and excursions, and as the almost inconsequent outcome of so much fuss and turmoil, a carved crucifix does now actually stand in the heart of the little town that is my home, is naturally a source of intense and somewhat ironic joy to me. But, with quite undiminished sympathy and respect for my friends and neighbours who did actually set it up, there is a certain quality in the way in which it came, and the way in which it was accepted, that is not to me entirely acceptable. I do not want the crucifix to be a compromise, or a concession to the weaker brethren, or a makeweight or a by-product. I want it to be a blazon and a boast. I want there to be no more doubt about our all glorying in it than there would have been in any body of old Crusaders pitting the Cross against the Crescent. And if anyone wants to know my feelings about a point on which I touch rarely and with reluctance: the relation of the Church I left to the Church I joined, there is the answer as compact and concrete as a stone image. I do not want to be in a religion in which I am allowed to have a crucifix. I feel the same about the much more controversial question of the honour paid to the Blessed Virgin. If people do not like that cult, they are quite right not to be Catholics. But in people who are Catholics, or call themselves Catholics, I want the idea not only liked but loved and loved ardently, and above all proudly proclaimed. I want it to be what the Protestants are perfectly right in calling it; the badge and sign of a Papist. I want to be allowed to be enthusiastic about the existence of the enthusiasm; not to have my chief enthusiasm coldly tolerated as an eccentricity of myself. And that is why, with all the good will in the world, I cannot feel the crucifix at one end of the town as a substitute for the little Roman Catholic Church at the other.
But I have here introduced the War Memorial in connection with the other matter of the War. I have purposely approached the episode of the War from the wrong end. I have spoken first of certain problems that arose when it was all over; because it happens to illustrate certain peculiarities in my own position and experience. There are certain things to be said that can hardly be said except as by one regarding the War in retrospect; the problem involved had hardly arisen when we only saw it in prospect; and yet, unless I pass on to some such summary, all that I say on this subject may be much misunderstood; especially in the atmosphere that has been spreading during the last ten or twelve years.
I have always suffered from the disadvantage, among my solid and sturdy British countrymen, of not altering my opinions quickly enough. I have generally attempted, in a modest way, to have reasons for my opinions; and I have never been able to see why the opinions should change until the reasons change. If I were really a sturdy and stolid Briton, it would, of course, be enough for me that the fashions change. For that sort of sturdy Briton does not want to be consistent with himself; he only wants to be consistent with everybody else. But having what I am pleased to suppose a sort of political philosophy, I have in many matters retained my political opinions. I thought in the first days of the Home Rule quarrel that Ireland ought to be governed by Irish ideas. And I still think so, even when my fellow Liberals have made the shocking discovery that Irish ideas are ordinary Christian ideas. I thought that England’s action in the South African War was wrong; and I still think it was wrong. I thought that England’s action in the Great War was right; and I still think it was right. I did not learn my politics in the first case from the Daily Mail and I do not propose to learn any others in the second case from the Daily Express. In the first case, I thought and think that Jewish financial power should not dominate England. In the second case, I thought and think that Prussian militarism and materialism should not dominate Europe. Until I alter my view of these two principles, I can see no reason for altering my view of the practical applications of them. Obstinacy of this sort, founded on a cold insensibility to the fluctuations of the market and to all the weight which attaches to the opinions of the two or three men who own all the newspapers, has on the face of it all sorts of disadvantages in dividing an individual from his contemporaries. But it has some advantages; and one advantage is that the man can look, without division of heart or disturbance of mind, at the War Memorial of Beaconsfield.
For the whole point at issue is really there. The Memorial was set up, like the Monument after the Great Fire, to commemorate the fact that something had been saved out of the Great War. What was saved was Beaconsfield; just as what was saved was Britain; not an ideal Beaconsfield, not a perfect or perfectly progressing Beaconsfield, not a New Beaconsfield with gates of gold and pearl descending out of heaven from God; but Beaconsfield. A certain social balance, a certain mode of life, a certain tradition of morals and manners, some parts of which I regret, some parts of which I value, was in fact menaced by the fate of falling into a complete and perhaps permanent inferiority and impotence, as compared with another tradition and mode of life. It is all nonsense to say that in such a struggle defeat would not have been destruction, merely because it probably would not have been what is legally called annexation. States so defeated become vassal-states, retaining a merely formal independence, and in every vital matter steered by the diplomacy and penetrated by the culture of the conqueror. The men whose names are written on the Beaconsfield War Memorial died to prevent Beaconsfield being so immediately overshadowed by Berlin that all its reforms would be modelled on Berlin, all its products used for the international purposes of Berlin, even if the King of Prussia were not called in so many words the Suzerain of the King of England. They died to prevent it and they did prevent it. Let those who enjoy the thought insist that they died in vain.
Conflict came to a head in Europe because the Prussian was insufferable. What would he have been like if he, who was already insufferable, had been shown to be insuperable? What would the Kaiser, with his Mailed Fist and his boasts of being Attila and the leader of the Huns, even in time of peace, have been like if he had issued completely victorious out of a universal war? Yet that is the common-sense question to be asked, if we are asking whether it was worth while for men to fight and go on fighting. It is not the point to put wild and visionary questions about whether the world has been vastly improved by the War; whether Utopia or the New Jerusalem have come out of the War; to ask in that apocalyptic fashion what has come out of the War. We have come out of the War, and come out alive; England and Europe have come out of the War, with all their sins on their heads, confused, corrupted, degraded; but not dead. The only defensible war is a war of defence. And a war of defence, by its very definition and nature, is one from which a man comes back battered and bleeding and only boasting that he is not dead.
Those who now think too little of the Allied Cause are those who once thought too much of it. Those who are disappointed with the great defence of civilisation are those who expected too much of it. A rather unstable genius like Mr. H. G. Wells is typical of the whole contradiction. He began by calling the Allied effort, The War That Will End War. He has ended by saying, through his rather equivocal mask of Mr. Clissold, that it was no better than a forest fire and that it settled nothing. It is hard to say which of the two statements is the more absurd. It settled exactly what it set out to settle. But that was something rather more rational and modest than what Mr. Wells had settled that it was to settle. To tell a soldier defending his country that it is The War That Will End War is exactly like telling a workman, naturally rather reluctant to do his day’s work, that it is The Work That Will End Work. We never promised to put a final end to all war or all work or all worry. We only said that we were bound to endure something very bad because the alternative was something worse. In short, we said what every man on the defensive has to say. Mr. Brown is attacked by a burglar and manages to save his life and property. It is absurd to turn round on him and say, “After all, what has come out of the battle in the back-garden? It is the same old Septimus Brown, with the same face, the same trousers, the same temper a little uncertain at breakfast, the same taste for telling the anecdote about the bookmaker at Brighton.” It is absurd to complain that Mr. Brown has not been turned into a Greek god merely by being bashed on the head by a burglar. He had a right to defend himself; he had a right to save himself; and what he saved was himself, so far no better and no worse. If he had gone out to purify the world by shooting all possible burglars, it would not have been a defensive war. And it would not have been a defensible one.
That is what I mean by saying that for me the War Memorial of Beaconsfield commemorates the rescue of Beaconsfield; not of an ideal Beaconsfield, but of the real Beaconsfield. There are all sorts of things in such an English country town with which I do not agree; there are many which I have tried all my life to alter. I do not like the English landed system, with its absence of peasants and its predominance of squires; I do not like the formless religious compromise of Puritanism turning into Paganism; but I do not want it discredited and flattened out by Prussianism. The defence of its prestige and independence against an inhuman and heathen hegemony was just. But I am far from certain that a War to End War would have been just. I am far from certain that, even if anybody could prevent all protest or defiance under arms, offered by anybody anywhere under any provocation, it would not be an exceedingly wicked thing to do.
This interlude on the intellectual aspects of the War is necessary; because all I say about the passing details of the War period will be unmeaning, if it is assumed that I sympathise with the rather weak-minded reaction that is going on around us. At the first outbreak of the War I attended the conference of all the English men of letters, called together to compose a reply to the manifesto of the German professors. I at least, among all those writers, can say, “What I have written I have written.” I wrote several pamphlets against Prussia, which many would consider violent, though in that moment every one supported their violence. I am still perfectly prepared to support their truth. I hardly know of a word I would alter. I did not take my views from the fever of that fashion; nor with that fever have they passed away.
Immediately after the outbreak of War I was bowled over by a very bad illness, which lasted for many months and at one time came very near to ending so as to cut me off from all newspaper communications and this wicked world. The last thing I did while I was still on my feet, though already very ill, was to go to Oxford and speak to a huge packed mass of undergraduates in defence of the English Declaration of War. That night is a nightmare to me; and I remember nothing except that I spoke on the right side. Then I went home and went to bed, tried to write a reply to Bernard Shaw, of which about one paragraph may still exist, and was soon incapable of writing anything. The illness left certain results that prevented me, even when I had recovered, from doing anything more useful than writing. But I set to work to contribute as much as I could both to the general press and the Government Propaganda; of which there were several departments. And I may remark here that the conduct of the war, whether at home or abroad, was an excellent education for any writer, tending too much to theories, in that complex but concrete matter of the material of mankind; the mystery and inconsistency of man. Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper. And I must admit that I was astounded, when writing propagandist literature at the request of various Government Departments, at the small and spinsterish vanities and jealousies that seemed to divide those Departments; and the way in which they kept up their fussy formalities in the full glare of the Day of Judgment. The facts were really very much as they were so cleverly described by Mr. Arnold Bennett in his story of Lord Raingo. I could understand a man being a coward and running away from a German; I can understand, and I hope humbly might emulate, a man fighting and standing firm. But that any Englishman should behave as if it were not a fight between an Englishman and a German, but a fight between a Foreign Office clerk and a War Office clerk, is something that altogether escapes my imagination. I daresay every one of those Government officials would have died for England without any fuss at all. But he could not have it suggested that some two-penny leaflet should pass through another little cell in the huge hive of Whitehall, without making a most frightful fuss. I had imagined that I was, for the moment, of one body with Englishmen from whom I differed on the deepest vitals of the soul; one in that hour of death with atheists and pessimists and Manichean Puritans and even with Orangemen from Belfast. But the forms of the Circumlocution Office could still divide men whom neither God nor devil could put asunder. It was a small thing; but it was a part of that realisation of the real riddle of man, which is hidden from boys and comes only to men in their maturity; and which took on more and more the nature of a religious enlightenment; upon the true doctrine of Original Sin and of Human Dignity. It was part of that belated process of growing up, which must unfortunately precede the splendid attainment of second childhood.
When I first recovered full consciousness, in the final turn of my long sickness, I am told that I asked for Land and Water, in which Mr. Belloc had already begun his well-known series of War articles, the last of which I had read, or been able to understand, being the news of the new hope from the Marne. When I woke again to real things, the long battles before Ypres were over and the long trench war had begun. The nurse, knowing that I had long been incapable of really reading anything, gave me a copy of the paper at random, as one gives a doll to a sick child. But I suddenly asserted in a loud and clear voice that this was an old number dealing with the first attempt before Nancy; and that I wanted all the numbers of the paper that had appeared since the Battle of the Marne. My mind, such as it is, had suddenly become perfectly clear; as clear as it is now. That also was something of a lesson in the paradox of real things, so different from many modern and merely theatrical things. Since then I have known that everything is not a slow and graduated curve of evolution; but that there is in life and death an element of catastrophe that carries something of the fear of miracle.
At my clear and reiterated request, they brought me the whole huge file of the weekly paper; and I read it steadily through, understanding all the facts and figures and diagrams and calculations, and studying them so closely that I really felt at the end that I had not lost so very much of the general history of the War. I found that the pamphlets I had written were already in circulation, especially abroad; all the more successfully because in a sense secretly. My old friend Masterman, in charge of one Propaganda Department, told me with great pride that his enemies were complaining that no British propaganda was being pushed in Spain or Sweden. At this he crowed aloud with glee; for it meant that propaganda like mine was being absorbed without people even knowing it was propaganda. And I myself saw my very bellicose essay called “The Barbarism of Berlin” appearing as a quiet Spanish philosophical study called “The Concept of Barbarism.” The fools who baited Masterman would have published it with a Union Jack cover and a picture of the British Lion, so that hardly one Spaniard would read it, and no Spaniard would believe it. It was in matters of that sort that the rather subtle individuality of Masterman was so superior to his political surroundings. In many respects, as I have hinted, he suffered himself to sink too deeply into those surroundings. He allowed himself to be used as a Party hack by Party leaders who were in every way his inferiors. But all that dark humour that was deepest in him came out again, as he grinned over this attack on his success as an intellectual smuggler.
But I am rather proud of the fact that if I wrote a little book called “The Barbarism of Berlin,” I also wrote during the War a rather larger book called The Crimes of England. For I was vividly convinced of the folly of England merely playing the Pharisee in this moment of intense moral reality. I therefore wrote a book actually making a list of the real sins of the British Empire in modern history; and then pointing out that in every one of them, not only was the German Empire far worse, but the worst tendencies of Britain had actually been borrowed from Germany. It was a Pro-German policy, the support of the Protestant hero in Prussia or the Protestant princes of Hanover, that had involved us in our mortal quarrel with Ireland and in many worse things. All our recent Imperialism had been praise of Prussia, as an example and an excuse. Nevertheless, to write of the Crimes of England, under that naked title, was at that time liable to misunderstanding; and I believe that in some places the book was banned like a pacifist pamphlet. It was not very pacifist. But all this was to happen later. When I first recovered, I read up, as I have said, the facts of the War. And then, like one resuming the normal routine of his life, I started again to answer Mr. Bernard Shaw There is some foundation for the anecdote told in Colonel Repington’s memoirs; that Mr. Belloc and I went on talking through an air-raid and did not know it had begun. I am not sure at what stage we did eventually realise it; but I am quite sure we went on talking. I cannot quite see what else there was to do. But I remember the occasion very well; partly because it was the first air-raid that I had experienced, though I was going to and fro in London all through that period; and secondly because there were other circumstances, which Colonel Repington does not mention, which accentuated the ironic side of the abstractions of conversation and the actuality of bombs. It was at the house of Lady Juliet Duff; and among the guests was Major Maurice Baring, who had brought with him a Russian in uniform; who talked in such a way as to defy even the interruptions of Belloc, let alone of mere bombs. He talked French in a flowing monologue that suavely swept us all before it; and the things he said had a certain quality characteristic of his nation; a quality which many have tried to define, but which may best be simplified by saying that his nation appears to possess every human talent except common sense. He was an aristocrat, a landed proprietor, an officer in one of the crack regiments of the Czar, a man altogether of the old regime. But there was something about him that is the making of every Bolshevist; something I have felt in every Russian I ever met. I can only say that when he walked out of the door, one felt he might just as well have walked out of the window. He was not a Communist; but he was a Utopian; and his Utopia was far, far madder than any Communism. His practical proposal was that poets alone should be allowed to rule the world. He was himself, as he gravely explained, a poet. But he was so courteous and complimentary as to select me, as being also a poet, to be the absolute and autocratic governor of England. D’Annunzio was similarly enthroned to govern Italy. Anatole France was enthroned to govern France. I pointed out, in such French as could be interposed into such a mild torrent, that government required an idée générale and that the ideas of France and D’Annunzio were flatly opposed, rather to the disadvantage of any patriotic Frenchman. But he waved all such doubts away; he was sure that so long as the politicians were poets, or at any rate authors, they could never make any mistakes or fail to understand each other. Kings and magnates and mobs might collide in blind conflict; but literary men can never quarrel. It was somewhere about this stage in the new social structure that I began to be conscious of noises without (as they say in the stage directions) and then of the thrilling reverberations and the thunder of the war in heaven. Prussia, the Prince of the Air, was raining fire on the great city of our fathers; and whatever may be said against Prussia, she is not governed by poets. We went on talking, of course, with no alteration in the arrangements, except that the lady of the house brought down her baby from an upper floor; and still the great plan unfolded itself for the poetic government of the world. Nobody in such circumstances is entirely without passing thoughts of the possible end; and much has been written about ideal or ironic circumstances in which that end might come. But I could imagine few more singular circumstances, in which to find myself at the point of death, than sitting in a big house in Mayfair and listening to a mad Russian, offering me the Crown of England.
When he had gone, Belloc and I walked across the Park with the last rumblings still echoing in the sky, and heard the All Clear signal as we came out by Buckingham Gate, like the noise of trumpets of triumph. And we talked a little of the prospects of the War, which were then in the transition stage between the last peril and the last deliverance; and we parted, not without a certain belated emotion of excitement; and I went along Kensington High Road to my mother’s home.
Among the legends, not to say the lies, that became current about Belloc among people who knew nothing about him, was the legend that he was what was called an Optimist about the War; or that he exaggerated the German casualties in order to make out a case for mere comfort and reassurance. To anybody who knows Belloc this idea is grotesque in the last degree. To begin with, being an animal endowed with the power of thought, he is quite incapable of supposing it to matter whether you are an Optimist or a Pessimist upon a question of fact; or of recommending anybody to be bright and cheerful so that it will not rain tomorrow. Second, in so far as mood and emotion have their legitimate place in life, his mood and emotion are generally not optimistic enough. And third, those persons who have taken the trouble to go into the actual facts and figures about enemy mortality have agreed that his calculations were substantially correct and those of the other party wildly incorrect. The truth is that, at the very beginning of a novel type of trench warfare, everybody’s calculations were for a time incorrect; but his were corrected as early as anybody’s and were afterwards continually right while the opposite ones were continually wrong. For the rest, what threw out every scientific estimate of the war was a factor that was moral and not scientific; a standing instance of the change of all material things on the pivot of the human will. It was the revolt in Russia. Nobody worth speaking of predicted it; but Belloc himself said the wisest thing in a general fashion about affairs of the kind. In one of his articles in Land and Water, he must have rather puzzled many of his readers, I fear, by an elaborate historical reconstruction of the outlook on the future, in the mind of a Greek official in Byzantium, at the beginning of the sixth century, calculating and combining all the forces of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. He noted how much a man might think he had accounted for all the possibilities, the danger of a religious split between East and West, the danger of the barbarian raids on Gaul or Britain, the situation in Africa and Spain, and so on; and then say he had in his hand all the materials of change. “At that moment, far away in a little village of Arabia, Mahomet was eighteen years old.”
I need not dwell further on that old and idle quarrel; if the men who ranted about Optimism are remembered at all in serious history, they will be remembered because they quarrelled with Belloc. They were the half-educated proprietors of the Yellow Press of that time, who were annoyed with him for certain relevant remarks he had made about the Sale of Peerages. But it is worth pausing upon for a moment in order to emphasise what was certainly true of all my friends, and I think of all the worthier friends of England; that we never based our convictions on small-minded swagger about Success; that we worked for victory while being entirely ready for defeat; and we never predicted anything about the end of the war, or any other future event; Belloc least of all; as when I heard him say in the first of his London lectures; “It is no part of any speaker or writer to talk about victories being made certain beforehand by this or that. God alone gives victory.”
There is another aspect of the way in which the Yellow Press spread panic and political mutiny and called them patriotism and journalistic enterprise. It was apparently supposed that England was in need of being prodded on from behind. My friend Bentley, doing excellent work on the Daily Telegraph, described it more truly as England being stabbed in the back. The Daily Telegraph, indeed, during those days of fever, did an admirable work of medicinal and moral sanitation. But for me and my little group the quarrel had another effect; that we were, in very varying proportions, fighting upon two fronts; regarding the Hohenzollerns and the Harmsworths as equally successful advertisers and equally unsuccessful statesmen. And it fell to me to give a full expression to this double attitude, for a reason that I could never in common conditions have forseen.
I became an editor. It would at any time have seemed to me about as probable or promising as that I should become a publisher or a banker or a leader-writer on The Times. But the necessity arose out of the continued existence of our little paper, the New Witness, which was passionately patriotic and Pro-Ally but as emphatically opposed to the Jingoism of the Daily Mail. There were not too many people who could be trusted to maintain these two distinct indignations, without combining them by the disgusting expedient of being moderate. There were not too many of such people; but I was in a manner one of them. And when my brother went to the Front, he left his paper in my hands, requesting me to edit it until he returned. But I went on editing it because he did not return. For my brother was destined to prove, in a dark hour of doom, that he alone of all the men of our time possessed the two kinds of courage that have nourished the nation; the courage of the forum and of the field. In the second case he suffered with thousands of men equally brave; in the first he suffered alone. For it is another example of the human irony that it seems easier to die in battle than to tell the truth in politics. Human nature is in any case a strange affair; and on the news of my brother’s death, I as editor of his paper was moved to an odd reaction which I cannot altogether explain, but which I could only express by writing an open letter to Rufus Isaacs, Lord Reading, upon the memories of our great Marconi quarrel. I tried to tell him, with all restraint, that I believed he had really acted against my nation, but in favour of his own blood; and that he who had talked, and doubtless despised even in talking, the tedious Parliamentary foolery about having once met his brother at a family function, had in truth acted throughout from those deep domestic loyalties that were my own tragedy in that hour. But I added, “You are far more unhappy; for your brother is still alive.”
It is strange, as I have said, that in a little while his brother was also dead and in the same religious confession as that of my own brother. So ended, symbolically enough, the great Marconi duel; and I continued the editing of my brother’s paper, if you can call it editing; and all the other financiers and politicians showed no signs of dying in any faith, or indeed of dying at all. The War worked to its end, in which so many lives were ended; the Germans made their last vast and vain assaults and Foch struck his final blow before Chalons, where Christendom had broken the Huns a thousand years before. But in England the politicians continued to beam benevolently upon us; new noblemen continued to spring into life from somewhat obscure commercial soils; there were any number of flourishing economic ventures, supported by forceful publicity and magnetic personality; and all the powers of the scientific mergers and newspaper combines, that now rule the State, rose slowly into their present power and peace. As the Ancient Mariner remarked, in a moment of melancholy comparison:
The many men so beautiful And they all dead did lie; And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.
XII
SOME POLITICAL CELEBRITIES
On almost every occasion when I have met somebody, I have met somebody else. That is, I have met a private man who was oddly different from the public man. Even when the character was not the very contrary of the caricature, as outlined in the newspapers, I might employ a licence of language, by saying that it was even more contrary than a contrary. I mean that the relation was more subtle, and the reality on another plane; that when after long experience, I discovered with some amazement that a tribute was true, even when the truth was almost the opposite of the tribute. We all rejoiced, for instance, in the chorus of spontaneous tributes to the late King George the Fifth. And yet the very repetition of testimony, about the honesty of his public service, gave an indescribable impression of routine which made the impression incomplete. I only met him once myself, at the house of the late Lord Burnham, where he was shooting; and for what my impression is worth, he certainly did strike me as about as genuine a person as I ever met. But he was genuine in a rather unexpected way. He was not only honest but frank, and so free and easy in his likes and dislikes that he might have been called indiscreet. G.B.S. said truly of his public talks that they were indeed the King’s English; the private were also decidedly Plain English. He was anything but the supreme Permanent Official many eulogies implied; he was not like some reliable solicitor in whom family secrets are locked up, or some doctor congested with the silence of professional confidences; he was much more like a little sea-captain, who keeps a certain silence and etiquette on his quarterdeck; but plenty of anecdotes, not to say anathemas, in his cabin. But there is no substitute for meeting a man, even meeting him for an hour or two; it will always tell us when a real distortion of history or legend is beginning. And if it should ever happen that I hear before I die, among the new generations who never saw George the Fifth, that he is being either praised as a strong silent man, or depreciated as a stupid and empty man, I shall know that history has got the whole portrait wrong.
Sometimes I have had even briefer contacts, with even more curious surprises. I talked to the late Marquess Curzon for only about ten minutes, in an accidental crush, though I had been to his house once or twice; he did not seem to mind the crush; he did not even seem to mind the conversation, or to mind me; he was entirely pleasant and good-tempered. And he said the one thing out of a thousand that hardly anybody, including myself, would have expected Curzon to say. He said how heartily he agreed with me that the cries, catcalls, jokes and jeers of the mob at a public-meeting were very much wittier and more worth hearing than the speeches of statesmen from the platform. I had expressed this view in an Illustrated London News article; but he, who was so often the stateliest of statesmen on the most privileged of platforms, would not have occurred to me as the most ardent supporter of the rabble or the buffoon who championed it. Yet it is unquestionably true that he did on many occasions say and do things, that provoked and even created the popular legend of his unpopular attitude. He was the one and only example of an English aristocrat who presented himself as a Prussian aristocrat; and this is very odd, because English aristocrats may often be cynics but are not barbarians. In a word, they are more subtle; but I sometimes fancy that Curzon in some queer way was more subtle than that subtlety. Everyone knows that there was a sort of heroic artificiality about his bodily life; that he sustained his very posture with difficulty; and I suspect that something of that strain turned itself to a sort of stiff and swaggering joke. He came from Oxford when it was the fashion to be a pessimist in philosophy and a reactionary in politics; and rather as the artistic decadents made themselves out worse than they were, he made himself out more undemocratic than he was. It is typical that many of the tales against him are said to have been invented by himself. But in all that I am merely guessing, from a few words said to me by a man who could not have been as stupid as a Prussian; in other cases, in which I had limited but still longer intercourse, I have noticed the same contradiction.
My first illumination, about the contrast between a human being and his political portrait or caricature, came to me with the case of Lord Hugh Cecil. I believe I met him first at the house of Wilfrid Ward, whom I ought to have mentioned long before as an influence enlightening me in many ways; for he had written in the Dublin Review a most sympathetic critique of Orthodoxy, at a time when many of his world must have thought it a piece of rowdy paradox. He laid down the excellent critical test; that the critics could not understand what he liked, but he could understand what they disliked. “Truth can understand error; but error cannot understand Truth.” It was through his kindness that I was, at a later stage, made a member of the Synthetic Society, which was justly proud of its continuity with the Society in which the great Huxley could debate with the equally great Ward (called. God knows why, Ideal Ward), and in which I was privileged to meet several very pivotal persons, such as Baron von Hugel and my old friend Father Waggett of Palestinian days. But if it be asked why I mention it here, the answer is rather curious. For some reason, there were very few literary men in this group devoted to philosophy; except Wilfrid Ward himself, who was an excellent editor and expositor. But there were all the better sort of politicians, or those who might have been statesmen. There I met old Haldane, yawning with all his Hegelian abysses; who appeared to me as I must have appeared to a neighbour in a local debating-club, when he dismissed metaphysical depths and pointed at me, saying, “There is that Leviathan whom Thou hast made to take his sport therein.” But I never forgot that England betrayed him in charging him with betraying England. There also I met Balfour, obviously preferring any philosophers with any philosophies to his loyal followers of the Tory Party. Perhaps religion is not the opium of the people, but philosophy is the opium of the politicians. All of which brings me back to Lord Hugh Cecil.
In Liberal caricatures, and in all the letter-press of Liberalism generally, Lord Hugh Cecil was always depicted as a mediaeval ascetic; it was all very restrained and refined, or he might have been actually denounced as a saint. “F. C. G.” always depicted him in a long cassock and a very Italian-looking biretta; and something like a Gothic stained-glass window was introduced, if possible, as the sort of thing he carried about with him. I absorbed all these things in my simplicity; I could not even then feel so much horror of them as did the clientele of the Daily News; but that made it all the easier to believe that an obviously intellectual gentleman was really in love with mediaeval architecture and authority. And then I happened to meet Lord Hugh Cecil. I met him at the house of Wilfrid Ward, that great clearing-house of philosophies and theologies; for the vast and valuable work of Wilfrid Ward largely turned upon the very fact that he was more fully in sympathy with the Cecils and the Balfours and the rest than I myself could ever have been. I listened to Lord Hugh’s very lucid statements of his position; nobody who loves logic could be unimpressed by so logical a mind; and I formed a number of very definite impressions about him. One was that he had many quite individual ideas of his own; another that he regarded all such ideas, including his own, in what has been called a dry light. But the strongest impression I received, was that he was a Protestant. I was myself still a thousand miles from being a Catholic; but I think it was the perfect and solid Protestantism of Lord Hugh that fully revealed to me that I was no longer a Protestant. He was, and probably still is, the one real Protestant; for his religion is intensely real. From time to time, he startles the world he lives in by a stark and upstanding defence of the common Christian theology and ethics, in which all Protestants once believed. For the Protestant world in England today is a very curious and subtle thing, which it would not become me to criticise; but this may be said of it without offence, that while it is naturally a little disturbed by a Protestant accepting Catholicism, it is far more terribly disturbed by any Protestant who still preserves Protestantism. And then I thought of the dear old Radical caricatures of the mediaevalist in the cassock; and laughter came as a relief. Old Kensit was a Jesuit compared with Hugh Cecil; for anti-ritualism is only a riotous form of ritualism; and poor old Kensit actually had the simplicity to be photographed with a crucifix in his hand. I once thought it queer that a Cecil should become famous for a revolt against the Reformation. And I have lived to see such men accused by blatant Jingoism of protecting Germany, as once by blatant Radicalism of favouring Rome. But I lived to realise that Hugh Cecil has been as heroically loyal to his house as to his country. No man has been truer to a tradition than he to the tradition of that great Protestant England, which the genius of the founder of his family established.
It was George Wyndham who once confirmed this notion of mine, by noting what he called the extreme Individualism of Lord Hugh Cecil. The commercial character of that compact and patriotic England of recent centuries had much to do, for instance, with Lord Hugh Cecil being so stubborn a Free-Trader. For he is not only an Old Protestant; this chivalric Tory is also most emphatically an Old Radical. He would have been much more at home in the Manchester School than in the Middle Ages. And I have here dwelt so long on his name, with no other basis than having listened to his luminous conversation, because I do seriously think that he stands at the very centre of that recent civilisation today; and might be called the one strong pillar still upholding the England in which I was born. But George Wyndham’s ideas were always flowing in a different direction, as were my own; and they were in a sense marked or measured by our common feeling about this other Conservative statesman. For Wyndham was not a Conservative; he was a Tory; that is, he was capable of being a Jacobite, which is something as rebellious as a Jacobin. He did not merely wish to preserve Protestantism or Free Trade, or anything grown native to the nation; he wanted to revive things older and really more international. And my first impressions of the falsity of the Party System came to me, while I was still a Liberal journalist, in the realisation of how much I agreed with Wyndham and how much Wyndham disagreed with Cecil.
I first met George Wyndham at Taplow, at the house of Lord and Lady Desborough, who had long been very good friends to me as to many literary people of all colours and opinions; and I felt almost immediately that Wyndham’s opinions were at least of the same general colour as my own. And if ever there was a man of whom the word “colour” in his opinions and everything else, recurs naturally to the mind, it was he. He also suffered, of course, from the silly simplifications of the political comments and cartoons. Because he happened to have been in the army, he was always depicted as a drawling guardsman; and because he happened to be a handsome man, it was always insinuated that he was merely a ladies’ man. In most essential ways it was curiously untrue. Wyndham was very definitely what is called a man’s man. He was passionately fond of the particular things that ladies do not generally like; such as sitting up all night to pursue pertinaciously the same interminable argument, upon all sorts of points of detail and pure logic; so that he would not let his guests go till almost daybreak, unless he had settled to his own satisfaction the meaning of “T. T.” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets; or what were the private expectations of Chaucer touching the publication of Troilus and Cressida. He was not in any sense a dandy; but in so far as he did dress well, he was totally indifferent to how other men who were his friends might dress, which is another mark of purely masculine companionship. He was a good companion in sporting society as in literary society; but in neither was he anything like what is called a society man. He had huge sympathy with gypsies and tramps; and collected many men of letters (including myself) who looked rather like tramps. The inward generosity which gave a gusto or relish to all he did was really at the opposite extreme to all that mere polish, implied by those who slandered him by calling him “charming.” He had first written to me some congratulations upon a letter I had sent to the Westminster Gazette on Religious Education; in which, even at that early date, I suggested that many Anglicans felt that Christ is not entirely disconnected from His own Mother. Wyndham was supported in this by the deep natural mysticism of his wife; a woman not to be forgotten by anyone who ever knew her, and still less to be merely praised by anyone who adequately appreciated her. She always showed a most moving curiosity about where I had picked up this passion for what is called Mariolatry in this Protestant land; and I could assure her with truth, though without any complete explanation, that I had had it in some form from boyhood.
It was at Taplow, at the same time as my first meeting with Wyndham, that I also had my first meeting with the late Earl Balfour; but, though I talked to him fairly often on abstract things, I never came to know him thus personally and certainly never to understand him so well. I do not think he was a very easy person to understand. He was, of course, quite an easy person to misunderstand; having all those external features, whether of elegance or eccentricity, which go to make up a public character; that is, a political cartoon. But in his case the caricatures were even more wildly wide of the mark; and I think that the compliments were worse than the caricatures. His foes in the press depicted him as Miss Arthur; and his friends in the press referred to him gracefully as Prince Arthur; and I do not know which of the two was more misleading. There certainly was nothing feminine about him, in the unchivalrous sense in which that word is used for what is silly or weak or wavering; very much the other way. It is typical of these times that he was always criticised as a cloudy and confusing speaker, when he was in fact a remarkably clear speaker; and anybody could follow him who could follow an argument. Only to the Modern Mind it would seem that lucidity is more bewildering than mystification. As for the contemporary pictures of a drooping lily, they might as well have represented his uncle Lord Salisbury as a little broken snowdrop. But there was really something odd about Arthur Balfour. He was always most pleasant and amiable to me; but he had not the general reputation of being pleasant and amiable to everybody. For him alone might have been invented the true definition: “A gentleman is one who is never rude except intentionally.” But though he was perhaps an aristocrat to excess, he was not in the least like an ordinary excessive aristocrat. I have met many men of his rank; some arrogant gentlemen; and a few really offensive gentlemen. But they had the simplicity of vanity and ignorance; and the case of Balfour was not simple, as he was not the ordinary bad extreme, nor was he the ordinary good extreme; the good squire or even the good knight. Describing Arthur Balfour as Prince Arthur was far less true than describing George Wyndham as St. George. Wyndham really had that romantic or chivalric touch; in Balfour there was something else that I never understood. I have sometimes thought it was national rather than social. Charles II is often quoted as saying that Presbyterianism is no religion for a gentleman; it is less often quoted that he also said Anglicanism was no religion for a Christian. But it is odd that his brief and distorted memory of the Scots made him say that Presbyterianism is no religion for a gentleman, touching the one country where gentlemen were often Presbyterians. Scotland has been much modified by this Puritan creed long ruling among the nobles, like old Argyll of my boyhood’s time. And Balfour had something in his blood which I think was the cold ferocity of Calvinism; a bleak streak sometimes felt when the wind changes even in the breezy voyages of Stevenson. The comparison will show that this is without prejudice; for I had from childhood a romantic feeling about Scotland, even that cold flat eastern coast. It may not be believed, but I have played golf as a lad on the links a bowshot from Whittinghame, in the days when ordinary English people asked, “What is golf?” It came with a rush over the Border, like the blue bonnets, a year or two later; and grew fashionable largely because Arthur Balfour was the fashion. Whatever else it was, his spell was a Scottish spell; and his pride was a Scottish pride; and there was something hollow-eyed and headachy about his long fine head, which had nothing in it of the English squires; and suggested to me rather the manse than the castle. Also, as one who went to neither great University, and has many jolly friends from his, very unlike him, I may be allowed to hint that somehow one did think of him as a Cambridge man.
I have known practically nothing of politicians after the Age of Asquith and Balfour; but I had some knowledge of one other who is also a Scottish type and another sort of Scottish enigma. To me the mystery about Mr. James Ramsay MacDonald was this; that when I knew him slightly, in my youth, in the days when we were all Socialists, he had the name of being rather a cold and scientific exponent of Socialism; the more expansive and even emotional sort of eloquence seems to have developed late in life, in quite poetical speeches I have heard from him when we have since sat on the same platform, being supposed to do something to restore Rural England. But I remember when I was emotional and expansive, and full of early enthusiasm for Blatchford’s Merrie England, feeling in him a more than Fabian frigidity, as he said (neatly enough) that Blatchford’s popularisation was like a man fully explaining a motor-car by describing a wheelbarrow. On the later occasion, he was really deploring with me the ravages of the motor-car; though I can hardly picture him carrying rusticity so far as to be wheeled about like Mr. Pickwick in a wheelbarrow. But perhaps there was always something about him more suited to tranquil and traditional things. When he was still counted a revolutionary Labour leader with a red tie, I heard Balfour refer to him in Parliament with respectful regret; “confessing myself an admirer of the Parliamentary style of the honourable gentleman,” and somehow, when I heard those words, I think I knew that the man with the red tie was destined for a National Ministry. Even then, at least, he looked much more like an aristocrat than most aristocrats do.
But these statesmen were not the kind of men, or even the kind of Scotsmen, with whom I tended to linger. I felt much more kinship with the sort of Scot who, even when he was interested in politics, would never really be allowed in practical politics. A splendid specimen of this type of man was Cunninghame Graham. No Cabinet Minister would ever admire his Parliamentary style; though he had a much better style than any Cabinet Minister. Nothing could prevent Balfour being Prime Minister or MacDonald being Prime Minister; but Cunninghame Graham achieved the adventure of being Cunninghame Graham. As Bernard Shaw remarked, it is an achievement so fantastic that it would never be believed in a romance. Nor can it be said in this case, that the Scots are in a conspiracy to praise each other; for I grieve to say that I heard one of these great statesmen deliver a speech full of the noblest ideals with Cunninghame Graham at my elbow, muttering in my ear in a soft but fierce fashion: “I never could stand a Protestant sermon.”
There was a small row or scandal, connected with Cunninghame Graham and his candour in politics, which has always stuck in my memory as a symbol. It explains why I, for one, have always got on much better with revolutionists than with reformers; even when I entirely disagreed with the revolutions or entirely agreed with the reforms. In Ireland it would have been different; but in England, during most of my life, the revolutionists were always Socialists; and in theory, almost always State Socialists. And I had early begun to doubt, and later to deny, the Socialist or any other assumption that involved a complete confidence in the State. I think I had begun to doubt it ever since I met the statesmen. On the other hand, I really did agree with the Liberals on many definite points that had become part of the Liberal programme; such as Home Rule for Ireland and a democratic decentralisation many held to be the death of the Empire. But I always felt, and I still feel, more personal sympathy with a Communist like Conrad Noel than with a Liberal like John Simon; while recognising that both are in their own way sincere. I think the reason is that the revolutionists did, in a sense, judge the world; not justly like the saints; but independently like the saints. Whereas the reformers were so much a part of the world they reformed, that the worst of them tended to be snobs and even the best of them to be specialists. Some of the Liberal specialists, of the more frigid Cambridge type, did faintly irritate me; much more than any mere anarchist or atheist. They seemed so very negative and their criticism was a sort of nagging. One distinguished man, who happened to affect me in this way, was the late J. A. Hobson, not to be confounded with the S. G. Hobson whose excellent economic studies still enlighten our debates; but a most high-minded and public-spirited speaker and writer in his own right. I hesitate to name so honest and earnest a man in a critical spirit; but nobody who recalls, with whatever respect, that gaunt figure and keen and bitter countenance, will pretend that his own spirit was not supremely critical. He was one of the most independent and intelligent of the Liberal critics of Imperialism, and on that point I was wholly with the Liberals; I disliked Imperialism; and yet I almost liked it by the time that Hobson had finished speaking against it. And I remember one occasion when he took the chair at some meeting of or about Aborigines or the native races of the Empire; and he had Cunninghame Graham on his right, while I had the honour of sitting on the other side. Hobson made a very able political speech, but somehow it seemed to me to be a party speech; concerned more for Liberalism than Liberty. I may be wrong; anyhow, I missed something, as he picked holes in the British Empire until it consisted entirely of holes tied together with red tape. And then Cunninghame Graham began to speak; and I realised what was wanting. He painted a picture, a historical picture, like a pageant of Empires; talking of the Spanish Empire and the British Empire as things to be reviewed with an equal eye; as things which brave and brilliant men had often served with double or doubtful effects; he poured scorn on the provincial ignorance which supposes that Spanish Empire-builders or proconsuls had all been vultures of rapine or vampires of superstition; he declared that many of the Spanish, like many of the English, had been rulers of whom any Empire might be proud. And then he traced such figures against the dark and tragic background of those ancient human populations which they had so often either served or conquered in vain.
Now in the course of this speech Cunninghame Graham had occasion to say in passing, touching some local riot and crime; “I have never been able to feel myself that tyrannicide, in certain circumstances, is intrinsically and inevitably indefensible.” Will it be believed that there was immediately a horrible howling fuss about these words; that they were the only words of the speech that anybody bothered to remember; that these were only remembered as an execrable example of the frenzy of the foes of the Empire; and that all the funny people on that platform were lumped together as gory regicides who went about drinking the blood of kings? And all the time, I had been saying to myself that Cunninghame Graham at least had been fair to Empires as Empires—whereas J. A. Hobson had not been fair to the British Empire at all. There was nothing particularly unprecedented or preposterous in what the Scottish Socialist had said about tyrannicide, though we may disagree with it for particular moral or religious reasons. He only said what practically all the great Pagans would have said; what all the admirers of Hermodius and Aristogiton would have said; what many Renaissance theorists, Catholic and non-Catholic, would have said; what all the great French Revolutionists would have said; what practically all the classic poets and tragedians down to modern times would have said. It was no more than was implied in a hundred sacred pictures of Judith or a hundred secular praises of Brutus. But Mr. Hobson would have been shocked, I fear, at the faintest suggestion of the killing of an evil king; but he was not in the least shocked at the implied impossibility of the power of a good king, or the modern ignorance of all that men have meant by kingship.
It was the irritant of this irritation, which seemed to me a little local irritation, against any large views either of loyalty or liberty, that slowly estranged me from political liberalism. But it would not be fair to say so, without adding that I did know men, capable of working with the party, who were really full of something that was not liberalism but liberality. Two men of that type remain in my memory; and it is for their sake and in their sense that I say I am a Liberal. One was Augustine Birrell, who enlivened his politics through literature; and the other was the last Gladstonian, G. W. E. Russell, who did it by inheriting the very real religion of Gladstone. They were both very Victorian, as became their generation; but they inherited an appreciation of all the great Victorians, which covered a great variety. Birrell was a Nonconformist with a very rich comprehension of Newman. Russell was a High Churchman with a quite detached admiration of Matthew Arnold. And they both drew out of these deeper and wider things a certain rich repose in humour denied to the mere men of the Party System. I shall never forget the occasion when old Birrell, roused by the rather vulgar refinement of the popular Puritan press, as expressed by a suave editor who patronised the polysyllabic style of Dr. Johnson, rose like a white-maned lion at the dinner-table where the editor had spoken, and told him that if he wanted to understand the style of Dr. Johnson, he should consult the passage in which Dr. Johnson called somebody the son of a bitch. It was spat out with such virile anger that it sounded alarmingly like a personal remark. And I shall never forget the other occasion, in which Russell figured in what might seem the opposite fashion; for Russell was a sleek, slow-moving, heavy man and had the name of a sybarite; but he was never afraid of being in a minority; and he took the chair at a Pro-Boer dinner when Pro-Boers were most unpopular. At the end his health was proposed by Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the celebrated teetotal fanatic, or shall we say enthusiast, who was also a brave man, and could fight for the few. He was by this time an old man; and anyhow, by some accident, he confused the terms of the toast; calling it a vote of thanks; or what not. I only know that, for some reason, the last scene of this dinner is also astonishingly vivid in my memory. For Russell rose like some vast fish, gazing upwards insolently at the ceiling as he always did, and began: “This toast, which Sir Wilfrid Lawson seems to have a post-prandial difficulty in enunciating …”
There were many others, of course, who were complete exceptions to anything I have said here about the atmosphere of political Liberalism. One to whom I owe more than to most other people was Philip Wicksteed, the Dante lecturer; but there again, the modern mind had been broadened by a study of narrow mediaeval dogmas. But on the whole, I must confess that I reached a point of practical separation; I did not in the least desire to come any nearer to the imperialism of Curzon, or the cynical patriotism of Balfour, or the patriotic pacifism of Cecil; I am not a Conservative, whatever I am; I am certainly not a Unionist, whatever I am; but the general atmosphere of liberality was too illiberal to be endured.
Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act roughly marks the moment of my disappearance; for I thought it a step to the Servile State; as legally recognising two classes of citizens; fixed as masters and servants. But a comic coincidence helped it; for I had just written The Flying Inn, containing a verse of violent abuse of Cocoa. After all these years, it can do no harm to mention that a Liberal editor wrote me a very sympathetic but rather sad letter, hoping that no personal attack was meant on some of the pillars of the Party. I assured him that my unaffected physical recoil from cocoa was not an attack on Mr. Cadbury; also that the Praise of Wine was a traditional thing not intended as an advertisement for Mr. Gilbey. So I left the Liberal paper and wrote for a Labour paper, which turned ferociously Pacifist when the War came: and since then I have been the gloomy and hated outcast you behold, cut off from the joys of all the political parties.
XIII
SOME LITERARY CELEBRITIES
I am just old enough to remember what were called Penny Readings; at which the working-classes were supposed to have good literature read to them, because they were not then sufficiently educated to read bad journalism for themselves. As a boy, or even a child, I passed one evening in something curiously called the Progressive Hall; as if the very building could not stand still, but must move onward like an omnibus along the path of progress. There was a little chairman with eyeglasses, who was nervous; and a big stout staring schoolmaster called Ash, who was not at all nervous; and a programme of performers if not eminent no doubt excellent. Mr. Ash read “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in resounding tones; and the audience awaited eagerly the change to a violin solo. The chairman explained hastily that Signor Robinsoni was unfortunately unable to perform that evening, but Mr. Ash had kindly consented to read “The May Queen.” The next item on the programme was a song, probably called “Sea Whispers,” to be sung by Miss Smith accompanied by Miss Brown. But it was not sung by Miss Smith or accompanied by Miss Brown; because, as the chairman somewhat feverishly explained, they were unable to attend; but we were solaced by the announcement that Mr. Ash had kindly consented to read “The Lord of Burleigh.” At about this point a truly extraordinary thing occurred; extraordinary at any time, to any one who knows the patience and politeness of the English poor; still more astonishing in the less sophisticated poor of those distant days. There arose slowly in the middle of the room, like some vast leviathan arising from the ocean, a huge healthy simple-faced man, of the plastering profession, who said in tones as resounding as Mr. Ash’s, and far more hearty and human, “Well, I’ve just ‘ad about enough of this. Good evening, Mr. Ash; good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” And with a wave of universal benediction, he shouldered his way out of the Progressive Hall with an unaffected air of complete amiability and profound relief.
I hardly know why, but that giant has remained in my memory as the one original titan who first rebelled against the Victorians. And I still vastly prefer his colossal common sense and complete good humour to the often petty and sometimes spiteful sneers or sniggers of more recent and cultured critics against the Victorian conventions. But it has warned me that, both for good reasons and bad, there is now a tendency to regard some Victorians as bores, or at least the subject as a bore; and my own memory of men older than myself, in the world of letters, is necessarily a memory of the Victorians, if only of the late Victorians. Even in this respect, of course, the present fashion is very patchy and paradoxical. For instance, there seems to be a much more vivid interest in the lives of such literary men than in their literary works. Any amount is written and rewritten about the romance of Mr. and Mrs. Browning, in plays and pages of biography and gossip. But though their story is rewritten, I rather doubt whether Browning is re-read, or whether Mrs. Browning is read at all. There seem to be more details remembered out of the story of the Brontës than there are details remembered out of the Brontë stories. It is a queer ending for all the aesthetic talk about an artist being only important in his art. Queerest of all, there is more popularity for a book about a man like Palmerston, whose politics are quite dead, than for a book by a man like Carlyle, whose politics would seem partly applicable in these days of reaction and dictatorship. On the whole, despite the giant shadow of the plasterer, I can advance shamelessly as a late Victorian from under the very shadow of Queen Victoria; whose shadow never grows less.
The first great Victorian I ever met, I met very early, though only for a brief interview: Thomas Hardy. I was then a quite obscure and shabby young writer awaiting an interview with a publisher. And the really remarkable thing about Hardy was this; that he might have been himself an obscure and shabby young writer awaiting a publisher; even a new writer awaiting his first publisher. Yet he was already famous everywhere; he had written his first and finest novels culminating in Tess; he had expressed his queer personal pessimism in the famous passage about the President of the Immortals. He had already the wrinkle of worry on his elfish face that might have made a man look old; and yet, in some strange way, he seemed to me very young. If I say as young as I was, I mean as simply pragmatical and even priggish as I was. He did not even avoid the topic of his alleged pessimism; he defended it, but somehow with the innocence of a boys’ debating-club. In short, he was in a sort of gentle fuss about his pessimism, just as I was about my optimism. He said something like this: “I know people say I’m a pessimist; but I don’t believe I am naturally; I like a lot of things so much; but I could never get over the idea that it would be better for us to be without both the pleasures and the pains; and that the best experience would be some sort of sleep.” I have always had a weakness for arguing with anybody; and this involved all that contemporary nihilism against which I was then in revolt; and for about five minutes, in a publisher’s office, I actually argued with Thomas Hardy. I argued that nonexistence is not an experience; and there can be no question of preferring it or being satisfied with it. Honestly, if I had been quite simply a crude young man, and nothing else, I should have thought his whole argument very superficial and even silly. But I did not think him either superficial or silly.
For this was the rather tremendous truth about Hardy; that he had humility. My friends who knew him better have confirmed my early impression; Jack Squire told me that Hardy in his last days of glory as a Grand Old Man would send poems to the Mercury and offer to alter or withdraw them if they were not suitable. He defied the gods and dared the lightning and all the rest of it; but the great Greeks would have seen that there was no thunderbolt for him, because he had not «ubris» (greek) or insolence. For what heaven hates is not impiety but the pride of impiety. Hardy was blasphemous but he was not proud; and it is pride that is a sin and not blasphemy. I have been blamed for an alleged attack on Hardy, in a sketch of Victorian literature; it was apparently supposed that talking about the village atheist brooding on the village idiot was some sort of attack. But this is not an attack on Hardy; this is the defence of Hardy. The whole case for him is that he had the sincerity and simplicity of the village atheist; that is, that he valued atheism as a truth and not a triumph. He was the victim of that decay of our agricultural culture, which gave men bad religion and no philosophy. But he was right in saying, as he said essentially to me all those years ago, that he could enjoy things, including better philosophy or religion. There came back to me four lines, written by an Irish lady in my own little paper:
Who can picture the scene at the starry portals? Truly, imagination fails, When the pitiless President of the Immortals Shows unto Thomas the print of the nails?
I hope it is not profane to say that this hits the right nail on the head. In such a case, the second Thomas would do exactly what Prometheus and Satan never thought of doing; he would pity God.
I must leap a long stretch of years before I come to my meeting with the other great Victorian novelist so often bracketed with Hardy; for by that time I had made some sort of journalistic name, which was responsible for my wife and myself being invited to visit George Meredith. But even across the years, I felt the curious contrast. Hardy was a well, covered with the weeds of a stagnant period of scepticism, in my view; but with truth at the bottom of it; or anyhow with truthfulness at the bottom of it. But Meredith was a fountain. He had exactly the shock and shining radiation of a fountain in his own garden where he entertained us. He was already an old man, with the white pointed beard and the puff of white hair like thistle-down; but that also seemed to radiate. He was deaf; but the reverse of dumb. He was not humble; but I should never call him proud. He still managed to be a third thing, which is almost as much the opposite of being proud; he was vain. He was a very old man; and he was still magnificently vain. He had all those indescribable touches of a quite youthful vanity; even, for instance, to the point of preferring to dazzle women rather than men; for he talked the whole time to my wife rather than to me. We did not talk to him very much; partly because he was deaf but much more because he was not dumb. On an honest review, I doubt whether we could either of us have got in a word or two edgeways. He talked and talked, and drank ginger-beer, which he assured us with glorious gaiety he had learned to like quite as much as champagne.
Meredith was not only full of life, but he was full of lives. His vitality had that branching and begetting genius of the novelist, which is always inventing new stories about strange people. He was not like most old novelists; he was interested in what was novel. He did not live in the books he had written; he lived in the books he had not written. He described a number of novels that were really novel; especially one about the tragedy of Parnell. I do not think I agreed very much with his interpretation; for he held that Parnell might easily have recovered popularity, if he had been capable of wanting it; but that he was naturally secretive and solitary. But I doubt whether that Irish squire was really any more secretive than any number of speechless English squires, who were at the same moment conducting exactly the same sort of sex intrigue, and would have been equally angry and equally inarticulate if they had been discovered. Only they never were discovered. For there was no hope that the discovery might delay the deliverance of a Christian nation. But that was the quality that struck me personally about Meredith. Ever on the jump, he could jump to conclusions; so great a man could never be called superficial; but in a sense, being so swift means being superficial. Many cheap parodies of Sherlock Holmes have made him a blunderer; we have yet to read a real comedy of a Sherlock Holmes who was really clever with insufficient data. We talk of a devouring thirst for information; but real thirst does not devour but swallow. So Meredith, for instance, swallowed the current racial theory of dividing the nations by the Teuton and the Celt.
The name of James Barrie dates also from my youth, though of course he was younger than Meredith or Hardy; he has lived to be my very good friend; but he is of all friends the least egotistical; and I connect him largely with intensely interesting memories of these other men and their contemporaries. He remains especially as a witness to the greatness of Meredith; in a world which has rather strangely forgotten him; but he also told me many tales of the men I never met; such as Stevenson and Henley and Wilde; with Wells and Shaw I have dealt in another place in another connection. But there is one impression that has been left in my mind by such memories of such men; and that is the strangely fugitive character of the controversies even about the greatest literary men. Like anybody writing any memoirs, I find that my first difficulty is to convey how immensely important certain individuals appeared at certain epochs. For those men are no longer topics, even when they are still classics. I remember Barrie giving me a most amusing account of a violent scene of literary controversy, in which Henley hurled his crutch across the room and hit some other eminent literary critic in the stomach. That will illustrate a certain importance that seemed to attach to certain intellectual tastes and preferences. For this piece of creative critical self-expression was apparently provoked by the statement, during a discussion about Ibsen and Tolstoy, that one of these great men was great enough to hang the other on his watch-chain. But what strikes me as the grand and grim joke of the whole business, is that the narrator had apparently entirely forgotten whether Ibsen was to hang Tolstoy on his watch-chain or Tolstoy to hang Ibsen on his watch-chain. From which I venture to infer that neither of those giants now seems quite so gigantic to anybody as they then seemed to somebody.
But I have seen Sir James Barrie many times since, and could say many other things about him; only there is something in his own humorous self-effacement that seems to create round him a silence like his own. In the case of the elder Victorians, it was generally true that I met the man only once, upon a sort of privileged embassy; and such impressions may easily be illusions. If it was so in the case of Meredith, it was much more so in the case of Swinburne. For by the time I saw him, he was a sort of god in a temple, who could only be approached through a high-priest. I had a long conversation with Watts-Dunton and then a short conversation with Swinburne. Swinburne was quite gay and skittish, though in a manner that affected me strangely as spinsterish; but he had charming manners and especially the courtesy of a consistent cheerfulness. But Watts-Dunton, it must be admitted, was very serious indeed. It is said that he made the poet a religion; but what struck me as odd, even at the time, was that his religion seemed to consist largely of preserving and protecting the poet’s irreligion. He thought it essential that no great man should be contaminated with Christianity. He shook his head over Browning’s temptation to that creed… “Anybody so borné as poor Browning was.” He then referred me to his friend’s “Hertha” as the crest of his creation; “Then he was quite on top of the wave.” And I, who knew my Swinburne backwards, delighting in the poetry and already rather despising the philosophy, thought it was a queer metaphor to use about the real and sincere Swinburne:
It is little enough that a man can save In the reach of life, in the tide of time, Who swims in sight of the great third wave, That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.
I did not think it had been crossed or climbed in the monstrously muddled pantheism of “Hertha”; in which a later Swinburne absurdly attempted to deduce a revolutionary ethic, of the right to resist wrongs, from a cosmic monism which could only mean that all things are equally wrong or right.
Of course, I have only noted here a name or two, because they are the most famous; I do not even say that they are the most worthy of fame. For instance, supposing that we each keep a private collection of our pet pessimists, I have always been more intellectually impressed by A. E. Housman than by Thomas Hardy. I do not mean that I have been impressed by anybody with the intellectual claims of pessimism, which I always thought was piffle as well as poison; but it seems to me that Housman has, more than Hardy, a certain authority of great English literature; which is all the more classic because its English is such very plain English. I could never quite digest Hardy as a poet, much as I admire him as a novelist; whereas Housman seems to me one of the one or two great classic poets of our time. I have had both friends and fellowship in discontent with the Socialists; indeed, I was not discontented with them about conditions with which they were discontented, but rather about the prospects with which they were contented. And there was a sort of official optimism, when the collectivist ticket-collector of the Fabian tram called out, “Next stop, Utopia,” at which something in me not merely heathen, was always stirred to a sympathy with the words of that high heathen genius:
The troubles of our proud and angry dust Are from eternity and shall not fail.
As everyone knows, the poet was also a professor, and one of the first authorities on the old Pagan literature. I cherish a story about him which happens to concern this double character of the classical and the poetical. It may be a familiar story; it may be a false story. It describes the start of an after-dinner speech he made at Trinity, Cambridge; and whoever made it or invented it had a superb sense of style. “This great College, of this ancient University, has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Person sober. And here am I, a better poet than Person, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, betwixt and between.” But Hardy and Housman, like Henley and Swinburne, and most of the other great men among my elders for that matter, produced on my mind a curious cloudy impression of being all one background of pagan pessimism; though what it was in the foreground, to which they were a background, I did not really know; or at least I was very vague. But some sense of sameness in these very varied persons and positions took the form, in my case, of making me wonder why they were so much divided into literary groups; and what the groups were for. I was puzzled by culture being cut up into sections that were not even sects. Colvin kept one court, which was very courtly; Henley kept another, which was not exactly courtly, or was full of rather rowdy courtiers; in the suburbs Swinburne was established as Sultan and Prophet of Putney, with Watts-Dunton as a Grand Vizier. And I could not make out what it was all about; the prophet was not really a commander of the faithful because there was no faith; and as for the doubt, it was equally common to all the rival groups of the age. I could not understand why it should matter so very much to Mr. Watts-Dunton, if Colvin chose to like one particular new poet or Henley chose to dislike another.
I have known one or two isolated cases also of the mere man of imagination. It is always difficult to give even an outline of men of this kind; precisely because an outline is always the line at which a thing touches other things outside itself. I have already suggested very vaguely, for instance, something of the position of W. B. Yeats; but that is precisely because Yeats does touch some things outside his own thoughts; and suggests controversies about Theosophy or Mythology or Irish politics. But he who is simply the imaginative man can only be found in the images he makes and not in the portraits of him that other people make. Thus I could mention a number of detached and definite things about Mr. Walter de la Mare; only that they would not, strictly speaking, be about him. I could say that he has a dark Roman profile rather like a bronze eagle, or that he lives in Taplow not far from Taplow Court, where I have met him and many other figures in the landscape of this story; or that he has a hobby of collecting minute objects, of the nature of ornaments, but hardly to be seen with the naked eye. My wife happens to have the same hobby of collecting tiny things as toys; though some have charged her with inconsistency on the occasion when she collected a husband. But she and de la Mare used to do a trade, worthy of Goblin Market, in these pigmy possessions. I could mention the fact that I once found a school, somewhere in the wilds of the Old Kent Road, if I remember right, where all the little girls preserved a sort of legend of Mr. de la Mare, as of a fairy uncle, because he had once lectured there ever so long ago. I’ve no idea what spells he may have worked on that remote occasion; but he had certainly in the words of an elder English poet, knocked ‘em in the Old Kent Road. But even a thing like this has not strictly speaking anything to do with the subject; the centre and fullness of the subject. And I have never been able to say anything that is, in that sense, about the subject. The nearest I could ever come to judging imaginative work would be simply to say this; that if I were a child, and somebody said to me no more than the two words Peacock Pie, I should pass through a certain transforming experience. I should not think of it especially as being a book. I should not even think of it as being a man; certainly not as something now so sadly familiar as a literary man. A sacramental instinct within me would give me the sense that there was somewhere and somehow a substance, gorgeously coloured and good to eat. Which is indeed the case. Nor would any doubts and differences about the theoretical or ethical edges of Mr. Yeats’s personality affect my appetite, even now that I am no longer a child, for the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun.
The images of imaginative men are indisputable; and I never wanted to dispute about them. The ideas of logical and dogmatic men (especially the sceptics, those very dogmatic men) are disputable; and I always wanted to dispute about them. But I never wanted to dispute about tastes where there are no tests. I have never taken sides where there are neither tastes held in common nor theses held in controversy; and this has kept me out of many movements. But then I am conscious of a gap or defect in my mind about such matters. I always feel it yawning in me like an abyss (yawning is the correct description so far as I am concerned), when people tell me that something ought to be done for the sake of “the Drama”. I think Shaw’s Caesar & Cleopatra is a good drama; though to my ethical tastes it is both too Pacifist and too Imperialist. I think Are You a Mason? is a good drama; and my appreciation has nothing to do with a Popish suspicion about Masonry. But to talk about helping “the drama,” sounds to me like helping the typewriter or the printing press. It seems, to my simple mind, to depend a good deal on what comes out of it.
But among these literary figures, there was one figure whom I shall put last because I ought to put it first. It was the figure of a contemporary and companion of all that world of culture; a close friend of Meredith; an artist admired as artistic by the aesthetes and even by the decadents. But Alice Meynell, though she preferred to be aesthetic rather than anaesthetic, was no aesthete; and there was nothing about her that can decay. The thrust of life in her was like that of a slender tree with flowers and fruit for all seasons; and there was no drying up of the sap of her spirit, which was in ideas. She could always find things to think about; even on a sick bed in a darkened room, where the shadow of a bird on the blind was more than the bird itself, she said, because it was a message from the sun. Since she was so emphatically a craftsman, she was emphatically an artist and not an aesthete; above all, she was like that famous artist who said that he always mixed his paints with brains. But there was something else about her which I did not understand at the time, which set her apart as something separate from the time. She was strong with deep roots where all the Stoics were only stiff with despair; she was alive to an immortal beauty where all the Pagans could only mix beauty with mortality. And though she passed through my own life fitfully, and far more rarely than I could wish, and though her presence had indeed something of the ghostly gravity of a shadow and her passing something of the fugitive accident of a bird, I know now that she was not fugitive and she was not shadowy. She was a message from the Sun.
XIV
PORTRAIT OF A FRIEND
Apart from vanity or mock modesty (which healthy people always use as jokes) my real judgment of my own work is that I have spoilt a number of jolly good ideas in my time. There is a reason for this; and it is really rather a piece of autobiography than of literary criticism. I think The Napoleon of Notting Hill was a book very well worth writing; but I am not sure that it was ever written. I think that a harlequinade like The Flying Inn was an extremely promising subject, but I very strongly doubt whether I kept the promise. I am almost tempted to say that it is still a very promising subject—for somebody else. I think the story called The Ball and the Cross had quite a good plot, about two men perpetually prevented by the police from fighting a duel about the collision of blasphemy and worship, or what all respectable people would call, “a mere difference about religion.” I believe that the suggestion that the modern world is organised in relation to the most obvious and urgent of all questions, not so much to answer it wrongly, as to prevent it being answered at all, is a social suggestion that really has a great deal in it; but I am much more doubtful about whether I got a great deal out of it, even in comparison with what could be got out of it. Considered as stories, in the sense of anecdotes, these things seem to me to have been more or less fresh and personal; but considered as novels, they were not only not as good as a real novelist would have made them, but they were not as good as I might have made them myself, if I had really even been trying to be a real novelist. And among many more abject reasons for not being able to be a novelist, is the fact that I always have been and presumably always shall be a journalist.
But it was not the superficial or silly or jolly part of me that made me a journalist. On the contrary, it is such part as I have in what is serious or even solemn. A taste for mere fun might have led me to a public-house, but hardly to a publishing-house. And if it led me to a publishing-house, for the publishing of mere nonsense-rhymes or fairytales, it could never thus have led me to my deplorable course of endless articles and letters in the newspapers. In short, I could not be a novelist; because I really like to see ideas or notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women. But I could be a journalist because I could not help being a controversialist. I do not even know if this would be called mock modesty or vanity, in the modern scale of values; but I do know that it is neither. It occurs to me that the best and most wholesome test, for judging how far mere incompetence or laziness, and how far a legitimate liking for direct democratic appeal, has prevented me from being a real literary man, might be found in a study of the man of letters I happen to know best; who had the same motives for producing journalism, and yet has produced nothing but literature.
In the days when Belloc was known to Bentley and Oldershaw, but not to me, when they were all together in the Radical group at Oxford, Belloc himself chiefly frequented a much smaller group which called itself the Republican Club. So far as I can make out, the Republican Club never consisted of more than four members, and generally of less; one or more of them having been solemnly expelled either for Toryism or for Socialism. This was the club which Belloc celebrated in the fine dedication of his first book; of which two lines have passed into some popular celebrity: “There’s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends;” but in the course of which he also described in more detail the ideals of this fastidious fellowship.
We kept the Rabelaisian plan We dignified the dainty cloisters With Natural Law, the Rights of Man, Song, Stoicism, Wine and Oysters.
We taught the art of writing things On men we still would like to throttle, And where to get the blood of kings At only half-a-crown a bottle.
Of the three other corners of this very Four-Square Gospel of Citizenship, that is of Belloc’s three constant colleagues in the old Republican club, one is still, I believe, a distinguished exile and official in Burma; or as his old friends loved to say with sour smiles of affectionate resignation, “a Satrap”; as if he had somehow Medised, or condescended to the oriental barbarism which we call Imperialism. I have no doubt that as a fact he was a happy and highly satisfactory Satrap; but he was the one member of the group whom I never met. The other two Republicans, who were Belloc’s most intimate friends at Oxford, have both in different ways played a considerable part in my own life. One was John Swinnerton Phillimore, son of the old Admiral whose name made a sort of background for the Kensington of my boyhood, afterwards Latin Professor at Glasgow University and one of the first classical authorities of his time; now, alas, only an ever-deepening memory. The other was Francis Yvon Eccles, the distinguished French scholar, whom I now meet all too seldom through his gravitation towards living in France.
Eccles, like Belloc, was the child of one French and one English parent; but there was a certain misleading comedy about the names, as if they had been interchanged like labels. For Eccles, who happened to have the English surname, looked much more like a Frenchman, and Belloc, with the French surname, looked much more like an Englishman; indeed he ended by being the one solitary but symbolic Englishman really looking like the traditional John Bull. It is true that he reached this traditional type through the possession of a square chin like that of the great Emperor of the French, and the subsequent assumption of side-whiskers to satisfy the conventions of the Spaniards. But the combined effect of these foreign influences was that he looked exactly like what all English farmers ought to look like; and was, as it were, a better portrait of Cobbett than Cobbett was. Moreover, the symbol was true; for the roots that hold him to the Downs and the deep ploughlands of South England were even deeper, so far as instinct is concerned, than the marble foundations of the abstract Republic of the Republican Club. I remember drinking a pot of beer with a publican not far from Horsham and mentioning my friend’s name; and the publican, who obviously had never heard of books or such bosh, merely said, “Farms a bit, doesn’t he?” and I thought how hugely flattered Belloc would be.
I knew Eccles in Fleet Street, from the first days of the old Pro-Boer Speaker, of which he was largely the literary adviser; yet it was always inevitable to think of him as sitting outside a café in Paris rather than London. His head, his hat, his arched eyebrows and wrinkled forehead of quite disinterested curiosity, his Mephistophelean tuft, his type of patient lucidity, were far more French than his friend with the French name. Whether or no these externals commonly correspond to characters, they certainly do not always correspond to careers. Thus, John Phillimore, the son of a sailor and coming largely of a family of sailors, himself looked very much more like a sailor than like a don. His dark compact figure and bright brown face might have been on any quarter-deck. On the other hand, by another such carnival comedy of exchange, I always thought that his cousin, who is, I believe, a distinguished Admiral looked much more like a don or a professor. But John Phillimore, as things fell out, had to be a rather unique sort of don; and at once a popular and a pugnacious professor. You could not conduct classes amid the racial and religious chaos of Glasgow, full of wild Highlanders and wild Irish, and young fanatical Communists and old fanatical Calvinists, without possessing some of the qualities of the quarter-deck. Most of the stories about Phillimore read like tales of mutiny on the high seas. It was shrewdly said of him that the effect of the word “gentlemen,” as said by him, was like the famous effect of the word “Quirites!”, as said by Caesar. On a similar occasion an insubordinate but intelligent Glasgow crowd seems to have instantly grasped the gratifying irony of his appeal, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! I have not yet ceased casting my pearls.”
The chief fact relevant to this chapter, however, is that Belloc’s career began with the ideals of the Republican Club. To those who talk about ideals, but do not think about ideas, it may seem odd that both he and Eccles have ended as strong Monarchists. But there is a thin difference between good despotism and good democracy; both imply equality, with authority; whether the authority be impersonal or personal. What both detest is oligarchy; even in its more human form of aristocracy, let alone its present repulsive form of plutocracy. Belloc’s first faith was in the impersonal authority of the Republic, and he concentrated on its return in the eighteenth century, but rather specially touching its military aspect. His first two books were the very fine monographs on the two most famous of the French Revolutionists; and he was, in that sense, very heartily revolutionary. But I mention the matter here for a special reason, in connection with something in which he was and is rather unique in this country; native and rooted as is his real relation to this country. I have already remarked that to know him well is to know that, as a man, he is English and not French. But there is another aspect in his curious case. In so far as he is a traditionalist, he is an English traditionalist. But when he was specially a revolutionist, he was in the very exact sense a French Revolutionist. And it might be roughly symbolised by saying that he was an English poet but a French soldier.
Now I thought I knew all about Revolutionists long before I met the representative of the Republican Club. I had talked to them in dirty taverns or untidy studios, or more depressing vegetarian hostels. I knew there were differences in cut and colour; and that some were more really revolutionary than others. I knew that some wore pale green neckties and gave lectures on decorative art; while some wore red neckties and made speeches on Trade Union platforms. I have sung “The Red Flag” in hearty chorus with the latter, and William Morris’s “England, Awake” in more refined accents with the former. And though I knew nothing of the comparison with another method, I did more and more realise, with an ever sinking heart, that for some reason we had not got a decent revolutionary song to our name; and that in the matter of producing any respectable sort of Hymn of Hate, my countrymen were a washout.
One weakness of these popular war-songs was that they were not war-songs. They never gave the faintest hint of how anybody could ever make war on anything. They were always waiting for the Dawn; without the least anticipation that they might be shot at dawn, or the least intelligent preparation for shooting anybody else at dawn. “England awake; the long long night is over; faint in the east behold the dawn appear.” They were all like that; they were all Songs Before Sunrise; as if the sun that rose on the just and the unjust did not also rise on the conquered and the conqueror. But the English revolutionary poet wrote as if he owned the sun and was certain to be the conqueror. In other words, I found that the Socialist idea of war was exactly like the Imperialist idea of war; and I was strengthened and deepened in my detestation of both of them. I have heard many arguments against the idea of a Class War; but the argument which discredits it for me is the fact that the Socialists, like the Imperialists, always assumed that they would win the war. I am no Fascist; but the March on Rome gave them the surprise they needed. To say the least, it considerably halted the inevitable proletarian triumph; just as the Boers had halted the inevitable British triumph. And I do not like inevitable triumphs. Also I do not believe in them. I do not think that any social solution, even a more manly one like that of Morris, should be called “as sure as that tomorrow’s sun will rise.”
And then Belloc wrote a poem called “The Rebel,” and nobody noticed the interesting point about it. It is a very violent and bitter poem; it would be much too revolutionary for most of the revolutionists; even those with red ties would blush, and those with pale green ties would turn pale and green with sickness, at such threats against the rich as break out here—“and hack their horses at the knees and hew to death their timber trees,” and the very fine ending, “and all these things I mean to do; for fear perhaps my little son should break his hands as I have done.”
That is not a Song Before Sunrise. That is an attack before sunrise. But the peculiar point I wish to note here, appears in the previous verse about the actual nature of the attack. It is the only revolutionary poem I ever read, that suggested that there was any plan for making any attack. The first two lines of the verse run: “When we shall find them where they stand, a mile of men on either hand?” The Comrades of the Dawn always seemed to be marching in column, and singing. They never seemed to have heard of deploying; into the long line that faces the foe for battle. The next two lines are: “I mean to charge from right away, and force the flanks of their array.” Whoever heard of the Comrades of the Dawn having so complicated an idea as that of turning the enemy’s flank? Then comes the encirclement:
And press them inward from the plains And drive them clamouring down the lanes, And gallop and harry and have them down, And carry the gates and hold the town.
The Pursuit; and then the Holding of the Bridgehead.
Now that is the only Song of the Class War I ever read that has the haziest notion of what a war would be like. In this wild lyric, full of vindictive violence and destruction, there is also in quite swift lyrical form a perfectly clear tactical plan and military map; a definite description of how men may storm a fortress, if it has to be stormed. The violence of this democratic, though doubtless dramatic, utterance goes far beyond anything that any Communist will reach in a hundred years. But it involves also the real character of battle; and a battle, like every human work, is at once designed in its beginning and doubtful in its end. Now the Comrades of the Dawn already annoyed me; because their revolution was wildly undesigned in its beginning, but had no doubt about its end. Just like Imperialism; and the South African War.
That is what I mean by saying that Belloc is an English poet but a French soldier. The man at rest, and therefore the man in reality, is the man of Sussex; but he has been enlarged, or some would say infected, by the foreign influence of those who have known real revolutions and invasions; and if he were called upon to conduct a revolution, he would conduct it as logically as a Parisian mob still conducts a riot. As he once remarked, such a democratic mob can deploy. But I have only taken this chance example to illustrate a general truth about a very remarkable man. I have taken the fact that the ordinary song of revolt is only militant, but his is also military. I mean that it is full of the notion, not only of fighting for the faith, but of getting to grips with the fact. If we are going to fight the rich, or fight the revolt against the rich, or fight resistance to a reasonable redistribution of riches, or fight anything else, this is how it is done. And when I remember all the other romantic revolutionary songs it does not at all surprise me, at least in this country, to realise that no fighting has been done.
Now that is exactly how his contemporaries have missed the whole point about Belloc at every point of his action; for instance, in his historic study, The Servile State. Because the English, of whom I am one, are romantic, and because they delight in the romance that the French are romantic, and delight in the more delirious romance that Belloc is French, they have simply been stone-blind to him when he is entirely scientific. His study of the Servile State is as strictly scientific as a military map is military. There is nothing romantic about it; nothing rollicking about it; nothing even particularly amusing about it, except the two admirable words, “this fool,” which occur in the calm procession of a thousand impartial words in the chapter on The Practical Man. And even excepting that is like accusing Euclid of making a joke, when he proves a proposition with a reductio ad absurdum. Anyone who knows the place of reason in the modern scheme, can imagine what happened. First, before reading what Belloc wrote, the critics started to criticise what Belloc would probably write. They said he threatened us with a horrible nightmare called the Servile State. As a fact, it was his whole point that it was not a nightmare, but something that we were already almost as habituated to accepting as to accepting the daylight. All the time, a thesis as pivotal as that of Adam Smith or Darwin is hardly realised, or even criticised, by anybody as what it is, though it has been criticised quite wildly, conjecturally and at random, as everything that it isn’t. Bernard Shaw roundly asserted that it was a mere revival of Herbert Spencer’s description of all dependence on the State as slavery. And when we pointed out that he could not have read a page of Belloc’s book if he really thought it was like Herbert Spencer’s book, he replied with characteristic gaiety that it was Herbert Spencer’s that he had not read. Many supposed that it was a sort of satiric description of a Socialist State; something between Laputa and Brave New World. Others seem still to suppose that the Servile State is a general term for any tyranny or oppressive official State; and even use the term currently in that sense. For it is typical of our time and country that, while no one could say the book was popular, the title of the book was immediately and vastly popular. There was a time when errand-boys and railway-porters said “Servile State”; they did not know what it meant; but they knew about as much as the book-reviewers and even the dons.
The thesis of the book is that the Socialist movement does not lead to Socialism. This is partly because of compromise and cowardice; but partly also because men have a dim indestructible respect for property, even in its disgusting disguise of modern monopoly. Therefore, instead of the intentional result, Socialism, we shall have the unintentional resultant: Slavery. The compromise will take the form of saying, “We must feed the poor; we won’t rob the rich; so we will tell the rich to feed the poor, handing them over to be the permanent servants of a master-class, to be maintained whether they are working or no, and in return for that complete maintenance giving a complete obedience.” All this, or the beginnings of it, can be seen in a hundred modern changes, from such things as Insurance Acts, which divide citizens by law into two classes of masters and servants, to all sorts of proposals for preventing strikes and lock-outs by compulsory arbitration. Any law that sends a man back to his work, when he wants to leave it, is in plain fact a Fugitive Slave Law.
Now I take that one example of a scientific thesis, maintained in a purely scientific way, to show how very little the intellectual importance of Belloc’s work has been understood. The reason of that misunderstanding lies in the other fact about him, which is really foreign and relatively French; the habit of separating in his own mind the scientific from the artistic; the ornamental from the useful. It is true that when a Frenchman designs a park as an ornamental park the paths are very curly indeed because they are only ornamental. When he designs a road, he makes it as straight as a ramrod, like the roads down which French soldiers used to march with all their ramrods; because a road is meant to be useful and is most short when it is straight. Belloc’s little Arcadian lyric, “When I was not much older than Cupid and bolder,” is very like an ornamental French garden; and his book on the Servile State is very like a French military road. No man is more instinctively witty; and no man can be more intentionally dull.
These two voices of Belloc, so to speak, were so distinct that he could sometimes pass from one to the other and make it seem like two persons speaking; effecting a transition on a platform almost as dramatic as the dialogue of a ventriloquist with his doll. When he stood as a Liberal member for Salford, he often managed to bewilder his hecklers by spraying them with these sharply alternated showers of cold and hot water. Salford was a poor and popular constituency, in which there were many strata of simple and provincial people, retaining the prejudices of our great-grandfathers; one of them being the touching belief that anybody with a French name could be made to cower and grovel by any allusion to the Battle of Waterloo. This was probably the only battle of which the heckler himself had ever heard; and his information about it was limited to the partly inaccurate statement that it was won by the English. He therefore used to call out at intervals, “Who won Waterloo?” And Belloc would affect to take this with grave exactitude, as a technical question put to him upon a tactical problem, and would reply with the laborious lucidity of a lecturer, “The issue of Waterloo was ultimately determined, chiefly by Colborne’s manoeuvre in the centre, supported by the effects of Van der Smitzen’s battery earlier in the engagement. The Prussian failure in synchrony was not sufficiently extensive, etc.” And then, while the unfortunate patriot in the audience was still endeavouring to grapple with this unexpected growth of complexity in the problem he had propounded, Belloc would suddenly change his own note to the ringing directness of the demagogue, would openly boast of the blood of that Pyrenean soldier who had followed the revolutionary army of Napoleon, and risen in its ranks, through all the victories that established a code of justice all over a continent and restored citizenship to civilisation. “It is good democratic blood; and I am not ashamed of it.”
This transition of tone had a tremendous effect, the whole hall rose at him roaring with applause and the investigator of the Belgian campaign was left isolated. But that is exactly the point; that he really was isolated. It is a point, not only in the subtlety of that blend of French and English blood; but also of the rather special subtlety of the English. The English are insular, not so much in the sense of being insolent but simply of being ignorant; but they are not spiteful. Other things being equal, they would rather cheer a Frenchman who was proud of being a Frenchman, as they cheered Napoleon’s Marshal at the Coronation of Queen Victoria, than remind him of Napoleon’s misfortune at Waterloo. And the same interesting distinction cuts the other way also. We have been told in a tiresome way from childhood about something that was called French rhetoric. To our shame, we have forgotten that there was until very lately a noble thing called English rhetoric. And as distinct from his irony or his objective scientific militarism, the rhetoric of Belloc was thoroughly English rhetoric. There was nothing in it that could not have been said by Cobbett or even by Fox, in the days when the genuine English Radical could address the genuine English crowd. What has weakened that direct popular appeal has been the change that turned nearly all Englishmen into a sort of imitation Londoners; and the rhetoric of Westminster grew more and more pompous and hypocritical while the wit of Whitechapel grew more and more acrid and flippant. But it has been possible, even in my own time, to hear occasionally the voice historic and a virile English demagogue; talking in plain English about primary emotions. Nobody ever did it better, when he chose, than old John Burns, for whom I have spoken and voted so often in the days when I lived in Battersea. To mention one case, as a sort of model; it was natural enough that the old Dock-Strike agitator, having become a Cabinet Minister and in many ways a rather Conservative force, should be assailed by more revolutionary groups as an extinct volcano if not a surrendered fortress. But Burns knew how to deal with that sort of thing when speaking to democrats; by cutting deeper into human facts instead of sliding away upon legal fictions. He was taunted by some Socialists at a Battersea meeting with not having opposed the Royal Grant to Queen Mary or some princess at the celebrations on the appearance of an heir. I can imagine how the smoother sort of Lib-Lab social climber, passing through Parliament into the governing class, would explain away his position in terms of the etiquette of the House. John Burns said, “I am the son of my mother and the husband of my wife. And if you ask me to put a public insult upon a woman who has just borne a child, I will not do it.” That is English rhetoric: and it is as good as any in the world.
But while it is quite a mistake to suppose that there was anything particularly French about the direct democratic oratory that Belloc used in those days, there was another quality which he also used, which I think may really be called a rather French speciality. We generally have some very silly and inadequate notion in our minds when we talk about French wit; and the full richness of that fruit of culture is seldom covered even when we talk of French irony. For the best French irony is nothing so simple as merely saying one thing and meaning the opposite. It is at once exhibiting and withdrawing, in one flash, a series of aspects of a thing; like a man twirling a jewel with twenty facets. And the more brief it is, the more flippant it is, the more seemingly superficial it is, the more there is in that irony an element of mystery. There is always a touch of bewilderment, for the simple, in the tale of such tags as that of Voltaire: “To succeed in the world it is not sufficient to be stupid, you must be well-mannered.” Curiously enough, there is exactly that quality in an ordinary military dispatch, sent out by a very silent and practical soldier; by Foch at the supreme crisis of the Marne. “My right is hard pressed; my left is retreating; situation excellent; I attack.” For it might be all sorts of things besides the quite prosaic and practical thing that it is; it might be a paradox; or a boast; or a bitter jest of despair; and all the time it is in fact a quite correct description of the advantage of his own immediate tactical situation, as exact as a military map. I have never so vividly felt that there was really something French about Belloc, as when he would from time to time suddenly say things like that on a public platform before an entirely puzzled audience. I remember once when he was lecturing on the same campaign in the Great War; a purely technical lecture full of plans and figures. And he paused to say parenthetically that perhaps nobody would ever understand why Von Kluck made his one big blunder before Paris. “Perhaps,” said Belloc, like a man for a moment bemused, “perhaps he was inspired.”
Now you can make all sorts of things out of that; in all sorts of opposite directions. You could make it a Voltairean sneer at divine inspiration, and the disasters it brings; or a dark mysterious judgment like that suggested when “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” or all kinds of other fine shades between the two. But you could never be quite certain that you had got to the bottom of it. So that shining ornamental pond which looks so shallow, and is called French wit, is indeed the deepest of all wells and truth lies at the bottom of it. Finally, it may be remarked, that this very diversity in one man’s methods, and his own habit of keeping these diverse things distinct, is the explanation of the accident by which many people have been disappointed or bewildered or even bored by Belloc in different aspects; because they were looking for the revelation of one of the legends about him, when he happened to be concentrating with cold ferocity on something much more prosaic or precise. In debating with Bernard Shaw about the Law of Rent, he observed austerely that if they were discussing economics, he would discuss economics, but if Mr. Shaw was making jokes he would be happy to reply in comic verse. To which Mr. Shaw, ever ready to rise to a sporting event, pursued the subject in some delightful doggerel; which Belloc acknowledged with the song about “the strip to the south of the Strand”; then including the Adelphi. But it is typical that his song simply was a song, and could have been sung in any pub as a drinking-song.
One of the most amusing events of my life occurred when I took the chair for a private celebration of Belloc’s sixtieth birthday. There were about forty people assembled, nearly all of them were what is called important in the public sense, and the rest were even more important in the private sense, as being his nearest intimates and connections. To me it was that curious experience, something between the Day of Judgment and a dream, in which men of many groups known to me at many times, all appeared together as a sort of resurrection. Anybody will understand that feeling who has had, as most people have had, the experience of some total stranger stopping him in the street and saying, “And how are the old set?” On such occasions I become acutely conscious of having belonged to a large number of old sets. Most of the people I knew well enough; but some of the younger I had known quite lately and others long ago; and they included, as do all such gatherings, those whom I had intended to enquire about, and never carried out my intention. Anyhow, they were of all sorts except the stupid sort; and the renewed comradeship stirred in me the memory of a hundred controversies. There was my old friend Bentley, who dated from my first days at school; and Eccles, who reminded me of the earliest political rows of the Pro-Boers; and Jack Squire (now Sir John) who first floated into my circle in the days of the Eye-Witness and my brother’s campaign against corruption; and Duff Cooper, a rising young politician I had met but a month or so before, and A. P. Herbert of somewhat similar age; and the brilliant journalist I had long known as Beachcomber, and only recently known as Morton. It was to be, and was, a very jolly evening; there were to be no speeches. It was specially impressed upon me, that there were to be no speeches. Only I, as presiding, was to be permitted to say a few words in presenting Belloc with a golden goblet modelled on certain phrases in his heroic poem in praise of wine, which ends by asking that such a golden cup should be the stirrup-cup of his farewell to friends:
And sacramental raise me the divine Strong brother in God and last companion, wine.
I merely said a few words to the effect that such a ceremony might have been as fitting thousands of years ago, at the festival of a great Greek poet; and that I was confident that Belloc’s sonnets and strong verse would remain like the cups and the carved epics of the Greeks. He acknowledged it briefly, with a sad good humour, saying he found that, by the age of sixty, he did not care very much whether his verse remained or not. “But I am told,” he added with suddenly reviving emphasis, “I am told that you begin to care again frightfully when you are seventy. In which case, I hope I shall die at sixty-nine.” And then we settled down to the feast of old friends, which was to be so happy because there were no speeches.
Towards the end of the dinner somebody whispered to me that it would perhaps be better if a word were said in acknowledgement of the efforts of somebody else whose name I forget, who was supposed to have arranged the affair. I therefore briefly thanked him; and he still more briefly thanked me, but added that it was quite a mistake, because the real author of the scheme was Johnnie Morton, otherwise Beachcomber, who sat immediately on his right. Morton rose solemnly to acknowledge the abruptly transferred applause; glanced to his own right, and warmly thanked whoever happened to be sitting there (I think it was Squire) for having inspired him with this grand conception of a banquet for Belloc. Squire arose, and with many courteous gestures, explained that the gentleman on his own right, Mr. A. P. Herbert, had been the true and deep and ultimate inspiration of this great idea; and that it was only fitting that the secret of his initiative should be now revealed. By this time, the logic of the jest was in full gallop and could not be restrained; even if I had wished to restrain it. A. P. Herbert rose to the occasion with superb presence of mind, and gave the series quite a new and original turn. He is an excellent speaker; and, as we all know, an admirable author; but I never knew before that he is an admirable actor. For some reason best known to himself, he chose to pretend to be the oratorical official of some sort of Workmen’s Benevolent Society, like the Oddfellows or the Foresters. He did not need to tell us that he was taking this part; in the tone of his voice, he told it in the first few words. I shall never forget the exactitude of the accent with which he said, “I’m sure, friends, we’re all very pleased to see Ex-Druid Chesterton among us this evening.” But he also gave his speech a definite logical direction. He said it was not to ‘im, but to our old and faithful friend Duff Cooper that this pleasant evening was really due. Duff Cooper, sitting next to him, then rose and in resolute and ringing tones delivered an imitation of a Liberal platform speech, full of invocations of his great leader Lloyd-George. He explained, however, that Mr. E. C. Bentley on his right, and not himself, had arranged this tribute to that pillar of political Liberalism, Mr. Belloc. Bentley gave one glance to his own right, and rose with exactly that supercilious gravity that I had seen forty years ago in the debating-clubs of our boyhood; the memory of his balanced eyeglasses and bland solemnity came back to me across my life with such intensity as stirs the tears that are born of time. He said, with his precise enunciation, that he had himself followed through life one simple and sufficient rule. In all problems that arose, he had been content to consult exclusively the opinion of Professor Eccles. In every detail of daily life, in his choice of a wife, of a profession, of a house, of a dinner, he had done no more than carry out whatever Professor Eccles might direct. On the present occasion, any appearance he might have had of arranging the Belloc banquet was in fact a mask for Professor Eccles’ influence. Professor Eccles responded in a similar but even more restrained fashion, merely saying that he had been mistaken for the man next to him, the real founder of the feast; and so by fatal and unfaltering steps, the whole process went round the whole table; till every single human being had made a speech. It is the only dinner I have ever attended, at which it was literally true that every diner made an after-dinner speech. And that was the very happy ending of that very happy dinner, at which there were to be no speeches.
I did not myself make another speech; though I was far from thinking that there had been too much speechifying. Only certain fragmentary words, a memory of a late Victorian poet whom I know, Sir William Watson, floated on the surface of my mind; and it was those words that I should have said, if I had said anything. For what the poet said to his friend is all that I could have added, in a merely personal spirit, to the many things that were said that night about Hilaire Belloc; and I should not have been ashamed if the words had sounded like a vaunt:
Nor without honour my days ran, Nor yet without a boast shall end; for I was Shakespeare’s countryman And were not you my friend.
XV
THE INCOMPLETE TRAVELLER
If these my memoirs are not exactly lavishly dated, as indeed my letters are never dated at all, I hope no one will suspect me of any lack of reverence for that great academic school of history now generally known as 1066 and All That. I have some rudiments of knowledge about what may be called 1066; for instance, I know that the Conquest did not really happen until 1067. But I think the point somewhat unimportant, as compared, let us say, with the current view that the Normans reared towers over Galilee and reigned in Sicily, and helped to give birth to St. Thomas Aquinas, solely that they might make Anglo-Saxons yet more Anglo-Saxon, in the far-off hope of their becoming Anglo-American. In short, I have the deepest respect for 1066; but I shall continue in a humble way to wage a relentless war with All That.
But for me, in any case, compromise and amendment would come too late. I have written several books that were supposed to be biographies; and lives of really great and remarkable men, meanly refusing them the most elementary details of chronology; and it would be a more than mortal meanness that I should now have the arrogance to be accurate about my own life, when I have failed to be thus accurate about theirs. Who am I that I should be dated more carefully than Dickens or Chaucer? What blasphemy if I reserved for myself what I had failed to render to St. Thomas and St. Francis of Assisi. It seems to be a clear case, in which common Christian humility commands me to continue in a course of crime.
But if I do not date my letters, or my literary sketches, when I am at home and am to some extent regulated by the clock and the calendar, still less do I feel capable of such punctuality when the timeless spirit of holiday travel has not only hurled me through space, but knocked me out of time. I shall give only this short chapter to a few notes of travel; because most of the notebooks have already been turned into some other sort of books; on Ireland and America, on Palestine and Rome. I will only touch here on a few things that I happen not to have recorded elsewhere; a visit to Spain; my second visit to America; and my first, but I hope not my last, visit to Poland.
Let me first feed the hunger for dates upon the date-palm of Palestine, if the flippancy be forgiven; and so at least get the first few journeys in their right order; even if I consider some of the subsequent cases in more general style. I can proudly claim that I do know the date of my pilgrimage to Jerusalem; partly because it was a year after the close of the Great War, and partly because when my publishers suggested my going to the Holy Land, it sounded to me like going to the moon. It was the first of my long journeys, through a country still imperilled and under arms; it involved crossing the desert at night in something like a cattle-truck; and parts even of the Promised Land had some of the qualities of a lunar landscape. One incident in that wilderness still stands out in my memory for some strange reason; there is no need to recur here to Palestinian politics; but I was wandering about in the wilderness in a car with a zealous little Zionist; he seemed at first almost monomaniac, of the sort who answers the statement, “It’s a fine day,” with the eager reply, “Oh, yes, the climate is perfect for our project.” But I came to sympathise with his romance; and when he said, “It’s a lovely land; I should like to put the Song of Solomon in my pocket and wander about,” I knew that, Jew or Gentile, mad or sane, we two were of the same sort. The lovely land was a wilderness of terraced rock to the horizon, and really impressive; there was not a human thing in sight but ourselves and the chauffeur, who was a black-browed giant, the rare but real Jewish type that turns prizefighter. He was an excellent driver; and the rule in those parts is that a Ford can go anywhere if it keeps off the road. He had gone ahead to clear some fallen stones and I remarked on this efficiency. The swarthy little professor beside me had taken a book from his pocket, but replied dispassionately, “Yes; I only know him slightly; between ourselves, I believe he is a murderer; but I made no indelicate enquiries.” He then continued to read the Song of Solomon, and savoured those spices that rise when the south wind blows upon the garden. The hour was full of poetry; and not without irony.
The dates of my first and second visits to America have some true significance; for one was about a year after the Palestinian visit, and the other was comparatively recently; in 1930. This is not only because the first was very near the beginning and the second very near the end of the prolonged freak of Prohibition. I will not stop here to argue with any fool who thinks there is something funny about objecting to Prohibition. What is part of the same process is this; that one began with the Boom and the other saw the start of the Slump and what is more important, a profound revolution in the highly intelligent American people. It is not trivial that, touching Prohibition, they had wholly changed; at the beginning even those who disliked it believed in it; at the end even those who liked it disbelieved in it. But it is much more important that, by the end, life-long Republicans told me of their intention to vote for Franklin Roosevelt; even those who had cursed the demagogy of Theodore Roosevelt. The Americans have seen more plutocracy than anybody; but I am not sure they may not see through it sooner than anybody else.
For the rest, my last American tour consisted of inflicting no less than ninety-nine lectures on people who never did me any harm; and the remainder of the adventure, which was very enjoyable, breaks up like a dream into isolated incidents. An aged negro porter, with a face like a walnut, whom I discouraged from brushing my hat, and who rebuked me saying, “Ho, young man. Yo’s losing yo dignity before yo time. Yo’s got to look nice for de girls.” A grave messenger who came to me in a Los Angeles hotel, from a leading film magnate, wishing to arrange for my being photographed with the Twenty-Four Bathing-Beauties; Leviathan among the Nereids; an offer which was declined amid general surprise. An agonising effort to be fair to the subtleties of the evolutionary controversy, in addressing the students of Notre Dame, Indiana, in a series on “Victorian Literature,” of which no record remained except that one student wrote in the middle of his blank notebook, “Darwin did a lot of harm.” I am not at all certain that he was wrong; but it was something of a simplification of my reasons for being agnostic about the agnostic deductions, in the debates about Lamarck and Mendel. A debate about the history of religion with a very famous sceptic; who, when I tried to talk about Greek cults or Asiatic asceticism, appeared to be unable to think of anything except Jonah and the Whale. But it is the curse of this comic career of lecturing that it seems to bring on the lighted stage nothing except comedies; and I have already said that I do not think America takes them any more seriously than I do. The real American commentary was serious and sound; and none more so than that of an industrial master of machinery, who said to me, “People must go back to the farm.”
I had pottered about in France ever since my father took me there as a boy; and Paris was the only foreign capital I knew. I owe it to him that I was at least a traveller and not a tripper. The distinction is not snobbish; indeed it is one rather of epoch than education; half the trouble about the modern man is that he is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners. The traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see. A true traveller in a primitive epic or folk-tale did not pretend to like a beautiful princess because she was beautiful. It is still true of a poor sailor; of a tramp; in short, of a traveller. Thus he need form no opinion of Paris newspapers; but if he wanted to, he would probably read them. The tripper never reads them, calls them rags, and knows as much about the rags as the chiffonnier who picks them up with a spike. I will give only one case, since it recalls my connection with a very early controversy. All England came to two great moral conclusions about a man called Zola; or rather about two men both called Zola. The first was merely a filthy Frenchman; a pornographer we jailed by proxy even in his publisher. The second was a hero and martyr for the truth, presumably tortured by the Inquisition—just like Galileo. The truth concerned the Dreyfus Case; and as a journalist behind the scenes I soon found out the truth was not so simple. Déroulède said, “Dreyfus may or may not be guilty; but France is not guilty.” I say Dreyfus may have been innocent, but Dreyfusards were not always innocent; even when they were English editors. It was my first awful eye-opener about our press propaganda. I am not talking of the conclusion but of the methods of the Dreyfusards. A quite independent intelligent Scot, an Oxford friend of Oldershaw, told me they had practically proposed forgery, by falsifying the size of handwriting. But the only point here is Zola, who was first nasty and then noble; even in his very pictures, his brow grew loftier and his neck less thick. Now I would not go to either extreme about poor Zola; but I happened to be in Paris on the day of his funeral at the Pantheon. Paris was fiercely divided; and I bought one of the fanatical rags in a cafe, in which Maurice Barrès, a pretty detached littérateur, gave his reasons for having voted against the apotheosis; and wrote in one sentence all that I have tried to say here about the pessimists and the atheists and the realists and the rest. He said he did not object to obscenity; “I do not care how far down you force the mind of man; so long as you do not break the spring.”
Most of us would not look at such rags as that, of course; but they are full of remarks like that, for anyone who, not content even with condescending to look at them, has the morbid curiosity to read them. And the remark seems to me a more important comment on what Zola stood for than the mere fact that he stood for the Dreyfusard Party, even if he was as trustworthy about Dreyfus as he was certainly untrustworthy about Lourdes. Now we have not that sort of comment in England; for bulk and business methods and good printing do not provide it. But we have good things of our own to balance its absence; and the best of them are things we hardly ever hear anything about.
After all, the strangest country I ever visited was England; but I visited it at a very early age, and so became a little queer myself. England is extremely subtle; and about the best of it there is something almost secretive; it is amateur even more than aristocratic in tradition; it is never official. Among its very valuable and hardly visible oddities is this. There is one type of Englishman I have very frequently met in travel and never met in books of travel. He is the expiation for the English tripper; he may be called the English exile. He is a man of good English culture quite warmly and unaffectedly devoted to some particular foreign culture. In some sense, he has already figured in this story; for Maurice Baring had exactly that attitude towards Russia and Professor Eccles towards France. But I have met a particularly charming Anglo-Irish academic gentleman doing exactly the same work of penetrating with sympathy the soul of Poland; I have met another searching out the secrets of Spanish music in Madrid; and everywhere they are dotted about on the map, doing not only something for Europe but very decidedly something for England; proving to Lithuanian antiquaries or Portuguese geographers that we are not all bounders and boosters; but come of the people that could interpret Plutarch and translate Rabelais. They are a microscopically small minority; like nearly every English group that really knows what is going on; but they are a seed and therefore a secret. It can only be a comic coincidence, but it is a curious fact, that they are mostly of a certain personal type; tending to slight baldness and agreeable smiles under old-fashioned moustaches. If sociology were a science, which is absurd, I would set up a claim like a Darwinian scientist to have discovered a species. It is remembering these men that I find it easiest to range rapidly, for the purpose of this short chapter, over the different countries in which they are our very unofficial diplomatists.
I love France; and I am glad I saw it first when I was young. For if an Englishman has understood a Frenchman, he has understood the most foreign of foreigners. The nation that is nearest is now the furthest away. Italy and Spain and rather especially Poland are much more like England than that square fortress of equal citizens and Roman soldiers; full of family councils and patria potestas and private property under the Roman Law; the keep and citadel of Christendom. This is evident, for a first example, in the case of Italy. When I first went to Florence, I had only a confused impression that this Italian city was full of English ladies; and that they were all Theosophists. But when I first went to Assisi after I had been to Rome (in more senses than one), I saw that this is not quite fair. There really is a sympathy between English and Italian culture, which there is not as yet between English and French culture. There is really something warm-hearted and romantic gilding those stark cliffs that look across the plain to Perugia; and it is in touch with two nations. The English do appreciate St. Francis as they do not appreciate Pascal or the Curé d’Ars. The English can read Dante in a translation, even when they cannot read Italian, they cannot read Racine, even when they can read French. In short, they have some comprehension of medievalism in Italy; when they have not a glimmer of the granite grandeur of classicism in France. The surname of Rossetti was not altogether an accident. The devotion of my old friend Philip Wicksteed to Dante was an excellent example of what I mean by the typical Englishman with a foreign hobby.
I felt the same when I went to lecture in Madrid; and met that shy and polite Englishman who could have lectured to the Spaniards on their own Spanish tunes and songs. I did not feel that Spanish people were in a difficult sense different from English people; but only that a stupid Puritanism had forbidden the English to show the hearty and healthy emotions the Spanish are allowed to show. The most manifest emotion, as it struck me, was the pride of fathers in their little boys. I have seen a little boy run the whole length of the tree-lined avenues in the great streets, in order to leap into the arms of a ragged workman, who hugged him with more than maternal ecstasy. It may of course be said that this is un-English; which seems an ungenerous reflection on the English. I prefer to say that the Spanish workman, only too probably, had not been to an English public school. But really there are very few English people who would not like it to happen. Puritanism is only a paralysis; which stiffens into Stoicism when it loses religion. That sort of warmth and casualness was my impression of Spain. Oh yes, I saw the Escorial. Yes, thank you I visited Toledo; it is glorious, but I remember it best by a more glorious peasant woman who poured out wine by the gallon and talked all the time.
I recently revisited Spain, if the Catalans will allow me to call it Spain (opinions apart, I am sincerely sympathetic with such sensitive points), for I revisited it with a rush in a car that could only charge down the eastern coast to Tarragona. If I say that I charged, the motion is metaphorical; the motive power was a motor driven by Miss Dorothy Collins who acted as secretary, courier, chauffeuse, guide, philosopher and above all friend, without whom my wife and I would have often been without friends and in need of philosophy. For after crossing France and cresting the Pyrenees like Charlemagne and the Alps like Napoleon (or like Hannibal accompanied by an elephant) she brought me again to Florence, to deliver some lecture, and then returned through Switzerland to Calais, where the great campaign began.
In the course of it, I had two curious experiences in two foreign cafés. One was outside Barcelona, where the proprietor was an authentic American gangster, who had actually written a book of confessions about his own organised robbing and racketeering. Modest, like all great men, about the ability he had shown in making big business out of burglary and highway robbery, he was very proud of his literary experiment, and especially of his book; but, like some other literary men, he was dissatisfied with his publishers. He said he had rushed across just in time to find that they had stolen nearly all his royalties. “It was a shame,” I said sympathetically, “why it was simply robbery.” “I’ll say it was,” he said with an indignant blow on the table. “It was just plain robbery.”
The other day was dateless, even for my dateless life; for I had forgotten time and had no notion of anything anywhere, when in a small French town I strolled into a cafe noisy with French talk. Wireless songs wailed unnoted; which is not surprising, for French talk is much better than wireless. And then, unaccountably, I heard a voice speaking in English; and a voice I had heard before. For I heard the words, ”… wherever you are, my dear people, whether in this country or beyond the sea,” and I remembered Monarchy and an ancient cry; for it was the King; and that is how I kept the Jubilee.
Returning through France, I remembered again the riddle, that I had found those far countries so near; but that the two nations that are nearest are those we never understand; Ireland and France. About Ireland, I have already written much; and I have nothing to say because I have nothing to unsay. I have written about Ireland in the hour of her tragedy, after the red dawn of the Easter Rising and the nightmare threat of conscription; and again in the hour of her triumph, when the Eucharistic Congress blazed before millions in the Phoenix Park; and all the swords and the trumpets saluted what was a Phoenix indeed. But there is one more nation, not unlike her in that tragedy and triumph, with a note on which I will end. Some day perhaps I may attempt a fuller study. Here in this chapter I only recall one or two things; not those I could remember, but those I cannot forget.
When I visited Poland, I was honoured by an invitation from the Government; but all the hospitality I received was far too much alive to remind me of anything official. There is a sort of underground tavern in Warsaw, where men drink Tokay, which would cure any official of officialism; and there they sang the marching songs of the Poles. Cracow is now even more the national city because it is not the capital; and its secrets are better explored by men like Professor Roman Dyboski than by anybody entangled in Statecraft. But I saw something of that difficult statesmanship—enough to know that, nothing but nonsense is talked about in the newspapers which discuss what they call the Polish Corridor. The fairest generalisation is this: recent events would be better understood, if everybody saw the self-evident fact that the Poles always have a choice of evils. I met the great Pilsudski; and that grand and rather grim old soldier of fortune practically told me that, of the two, he preferred Germany to Russia. It is equally clear that his rival Dmowski, who also entertained us delightfully in his rural retreat, had decided that, of the two, he preferred Russia to Germany. I had met this interesting man before; for Dr. Sarolea brought him to my house; where the Belgian, in his impish way, had taunted the Pole with his Anti-Semitism, saying persuasively, “After all, your religion came from the Jews.” To which the Pole answered, “My religion came from Jesus Christ, who was murdered by the Jews.” Pilsudski was also very sympathetic with Lithuania; though Lithuanians and Poles were quarrelling at the time. He was enthusiastic for Wilno; and I afterwards found on the frontier a historic site where Poles and Lithuanians are at peace—even when they are at war.
I was driving with a Polish lady, who was very witty and well-aquainted with the whole character of Europe, and also of England (as is the barbarous habit of the Slavs); and I only noticed that her tone changed, if anything to a sort of coolness, as we stopped outside an archway leading to a side-street, and she said, “We can’t drive in here.” I wondered; for the gateway was wide and the street apparently open. As we walked under the arch she said in the same colourless tone; “You take off your hat here.” And then I saw the open street. It was filled with a vast crowd, all facing me; and all on their knees on the ground. It was as if someone were walking behind me; or some strange bird were hovering over my head. I faced around, and saw in the centre of the arch great windows standing open, unsealing a chamber full of gold and colours; there was a picture behind; but parts of the whole picture were moving like a puppet-show, stirring strange double memories like a dream of the bridge in the puppet-show of my childhood; and then I realised that from those shifting groups there shone and sounded the ancient magnificence of the Mass.
One other memory I will add here. I made the acquaintance of a young Count whose huge and costly palace of a country house, upon the old model (for he had quite different notions himself), had been burned and wrecked and left in ruins by the retreat of the Red Army after the Battle of Warsaw. Looking at such a mountain of shattered marbles and black and blasted tapestries, one of our party said, “It must be a terrible thing for you to see your old family home destroyed like this.” But the young man, who was very young in all his gestures, shrugged his shoulders and laughed, at the same time looking a little sad. “Oh, I do not blame them for that,” he said. “I have been a soldier myself, and in the same campaign; and I know the temptations. I know what a fellow feels, dropping with fatigue and freezing with cold, when he asks himself what some other fellow’s armchairs and curtains can matter, if he can only have fuel for the night. On the one side or the other, we were all soldiers; and it is a hard and horrible life. I don’t resent at all what they did here. There is only one thing that I really resent. I will show it to you.”
And he led us out into a long avenue lined with poplars; and at the end of it was a statue of the Blessed Virgin; with the head and the hands shot off. But the hands had been lifted; and it is a strange thing that the very mutilation seemed to give more meaning to the attitude of intercession; asking mercy for the merciless race of men.
XVI
THE GOD WITH THE GOLDEN KEY
Some time ago, seated at ease upon a summer evening and taking a serene review of an indefensibly fortunate and happy life, I calculated that I must have committed at least fifty-three murders, and been concerned with hiding about half a hundred corpses for the purpose of the concealment of crimes; hanging one corpse on a hat-peg, bundling another into a postman’s bag, decapitating a third and providing it with somebody else’s head, and so on through quite a large number of innocent artifices of the kind. It is true that I have enacted most of these atrocities on paper; and I strongly recommend the young student, except in extreme cases, to give expression to his criminal impulses in this form; and not run the risk of spoiling a beautiful and well-proportioned idea by bringing it down to the plane of brute material experiment, where it too often suffers the unforseen imperfections and disappointments of this fallen world, and brings with it various unwelcome and unworthy social and legal consequences. I have explained elsewhere that I once drew up a scientific table of Twenty Ways of Killing a Wife and have managed to preserve them all in their undisturbed artistic completeness, so that it is possible for the artist, after a fashion, to have successfully murdered twenty wives and yet keep the original wife after all; an additional point which is in many cases, and especially my own, not without its advantages. Whereas, for the artist to sacrifice his wife and possibly his neck, for the mere vulgar and theatrical practical presentation of one of these ideal dramas, is to lose, not only this, but all the ideal enjoyment of the other nineteen. This being my strict principle, from which I have never wavered, there has been nothing to cut short the rich accumulation of imaginative corpses; and, as I say, I have already accumulated a good many. My name achieved a certain notoriety as that of a writer of these murderous short stories, commonly called detective stories; certain publishers and magazines have come to count on me for such trifles; and are still kind enough, from time to time, to write to me ordering a new batch of corpses; generally in consignments of eight at a time.
Any who have come upon traces of this industry may possibly know that a large number of my little crime stories were concerned with a person called Father Brown; a Catholic priest whose external simplicity and internal subtlety formed something near enough to a character for the purposes of this sketchy sort of story-telling. And certain questions have arisen, especially questions about the identity or accuracy of the type, which have not been without an effect on more important things.
As I have said, I have never taken my novels or short stories very seriously, or imagined that I had any particular status in anything so serious as a novel. But I can claim at the same time that it was novel enough to be novel, in the sense of not being historical or biographical; and that even one of my short stories was original enough to do without originals. The notion that a character in a novel must be “meant” for somebody or “taken from” somebody is founded on a misunderstanding of the nature of narrative fancy, and especially of such slight fancies as mine. Nevertheless, it has been generally said that Father Brown had an original in real life; and in one particular and rather personal sense, it is true.
The notion that a novelist takes a character bodily and in all its details from a friend or an enemy is a blunder that has done a great deal of harm. Even the characters of Dickens, at once so plainly creations and so plainly caricatures, were measured against mere mortals, as if there were any mortals who could fit exactly the magnificent mock-heroic stature of Weller or Micawber. I remember my father telling me how some of his contemporaries indignantly purged themselves of the charge of being the model of Mr. Pecksniff; and especially of how the well-known S. C. Hall, the Spiritualist, cleared himself with an eloquence which some found too sublime to be convincing. “How can I be said to resemble Pecksniff?” said this worthy man to my father. “You know me. The world knows me. The world knows that I have devoted my life to the good of others, that I have lived a pure and exalted life devoted to the highest duties and ideals, that I have sought always to set an example of truth, of justice, of probity, or purity and or public virtue. What resemblance can there be between me and Pecksniff?”
When a writer invents a character for the purposes of fiction, especially of light or fanciful fiction, he fits him out with all sorts of features meant to be effective in that setting and against that background. He may have taken, and probably has taken, a hint from a human being. But he will not hesitate to alter the human being, especially in externals, because he is not thinking of a portrait but of a picture. In Father Brown, it was the chief feature to be featureless. The point of him was to appear pointless; and one might say that his conspicuous quality was not being conspicuous. His commonplace exterior was meant to contrast with his unsuspected vigilance and intelligence; and that being so, of course I made his appearance shabby and shapeless, his face round and expressionless, his manners clumsy, and so on. At the same time, I did take some of his inner intellectual qualities from my friend, Father John O’Connor of Bradford, who has not, as a matter of fact, any of these external qualities. He is not shabby, but rather neat; he is not clumsy, but very delicate and dexterous; he not only is but looks amusing and amused. He is a sensitive and quickwitted Irishman, with the profound irony and some of the potential irritability of his race. My Father Brown was deliberately described as a Suffolk dumpling from East Anglia. That, and the rest of his description, was a deliberate disguise for the purpose of detective fiction. But for all that, there is a very real sense in which Father O’Connor was the intellectual inspiration of these stories; and of much more important things as well. And in order to explain these things, especially the important things, I cannot do better than tell the story of how the first notion of this detective comedy came into my mind.
In those early days, especially just before and just after I was married, it was my fate to wander over many parts of England, delivering what were politely called lectures. There is a considerable appetite for such bleak entertainments, especially in the north of England, the south of Scotland and among certain active Nonconformist centres even in the suburbs of London. With the mention of bleakness there comes back to me the memory of one particular chapel, lying in the last featureless wastes to the north of London, to which I actually had to make my way through a blinding snow-storm, which I enjoyed very much; because I like snowstorms. In fact, I like practically all kinds of English weather except that particular sort of weather that is called “a glorious day.” So none need weep prematurely over my experience, or imagine that I am pitying myself or asking for pity. Still, it is the fact that I was exposed to the elements for nearly two hours either on foot or on top of a forlorn omnibus wandering in a wilderness; and by the time I arrived at the chapel I must have roughly resembled the Snow Man that children make in the garden. I proceeded to lecture, God knows on what, and was about to resume my wintry journey, when the worthy minister of the chapel, robustly rubbing his hands and slapping his chest and beaming at me with the rich hospitality of Father Christmas, said in a deep, hearty, fruity voice, “Come, Mr. Chesterton; it’s a bitter cold night! Do let me offer you an oswego biscuit.” I assured him gratefully that I felt no such craving; it was very kind of him, for there was no possible reason, in the circumstances for his offering me any refreshment at all. But I confess that the thought of returning through the snow and the freezing blast, for two more hours, with the glow of that one biscuit within me, and the oswego fire running through all my veins, struck me as a little out of proportion. I fear it was with considerable pleasure that I crossed the road and entered a public-house immediately opposite the chapel, under the very eyes of the Nonconformist Conscience.
This is a parenthesis; and I could add a good many parentheses about distant days of vagabond lecturing. Of those days the tale is told that I once sent a telegram to my wife in London, which ran; “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” I cannot remember whether this story is true; but it is not unlikely or, I think, unreasonable. It was in the course of such wanderings that I made many friends whose friendship I value; such as Mr. Lloyd Thomas, then in Nottingham, and Mr. McClelland of Glasgow. But I mention these here only as leading up to that very accidental meeting in Yorkshire, which was to have consequences for me rather beyond the appearance of accident. I had gone to give a lecture at Keighley on the high moors of the West Riding, and stayed the night with a leading citizen ot that little industrial town; who had assembled a group of local friends such as could be conceived, I suppose, as likely to be patient with lecturers; including the curate of the Roman Catholic Church; a small man with a smooth face and a demure but elfish expression. I was struck by the tact and humour with which he mingled with his very Yorkshire and very Protestant company; and I soon found out that they had, in their bluff way, already learned to appreciate him as something of a character. Somebody gave me a very amusing account of how two gigantic Yorkshire farmers, of that district, had been deputed to go the rounds of various religious centres, and how they wavered, with nameless terrors, before entering the little presbytery of the little priest. With many sinkings of heart, they seem to have come finally to the conclusion that he would hardly do them any serious harm; and that if he did they could send for the police. They really thought, I suppose, that he had his house fitted up with all the torture engines of the Spanish Inquisition. But even these farmers, I was told, had since accepted him as a neighbour, and as the evening wore on his neighbours decidedly encouraged his considerable powers of entertainment. He expanded, and was soon in the middle of reciting that great heart-searching dramatic lyric which is entitled, “My Boots are Tight.” I liked him very much; but if you had told me that ten years afterwards I should be a Mormon Missionary in the Cannibal Islands, I should not have been more surprised than at the suggestion that, fully fifteen years afterwards, I should be making to him my General Confession and being received into the Church that he served.
Next morning he and I walked over Keighley Gate, the great wall of the moors that separates Keighley from Wharfedale, for I was visiting friends in Ilkley; and after a few hours talk on the moors, it was a new friend whom I introduced to my old friends at my journey’s end. He stayed to lunch; he stayed to tea; he stayed to dinner; I am not sure that, under their pressing hospitality, he did not stay the night; and he stayed there many nights and days on later occasions; and it was there that we most often met. It was on one of these visits that the incident occurred, which led me to take the liberty of putting him, or rather part of him, into a string of sensational stories. But I mention it, not because I attach any importance to those stories, but because it has a more vital connection with the other story; the story that I am telling here.
I mentioned to the priest in conversation that I proposed to support in print a certain proposal, it matters not what, in connection with some rather sordid social questions of vice and crime. On this particular point he thought I was in error, or rather in ignorance; as indeed I was. And, merely as a necessary duty and to prevent me from falling into a mare’s nest, he told me certain facts he knew about perverted practices which I certainly shall not set down or discuss here. I have confessed on an earlier page that in my own youth I had imagined for myself any amount of iniquity; and it was a curious experience to find that this quiet and pleasant celibate had plumbed those abysses far deeper than I. I had not imagined that the world could hold such horrors. If he had been a professional novelist throwing such filth broadcast on all the bookstalls for boys and babies to pick up, of course he would have been a great creative artist and a herald of the Dawn. As he was only stating them reluctantly, in strict privacy, as a practical necessity, he was, of course, a typical Jesuit whispering poisonous secrets in my ear. When we returned to the house, we found it was full of visitors, and fell into special conversation with two hearty and healthy young Cambridge undergraduates, who had been walking or cycling across the moors in the spirit of the stern and vigorous English holiday. They were no narrow athletes, however, but interested in various sports and in a breezy way in various arts; and they began to discuss music and landscape with my friend Father O’Connor. I never knew a man who could turn with more ease than he from one topic to another, or who had more unexpected stores of information, often purely technical information, upon all. The talk soon deepened into a discussion on matters more philosophical and moral; and when the priest had left the room, the two young men broke out into generous expressions of admiration, saying truly that he was a remarkable man, and seemed to know a great deal about Palestrina or Baroque architecture, or whatever was the point at the moment. Then there fell a curious reflective silence, at the end of which one of the undergraduates suddenly burst out. “All the same, I don’t believe his sort of life is the right one. It’s all very well to like religious music and so on, when you’re all shut up in a sort of cloister and don’t know anything about the real evil in the world. But I don’t believe that’s the right ideal. I believe in a fellow coming out into the world, and facing the evil that’s in it, and knowing something about the dangers and all that. It’s a very beautiful thing to be innocent and ignorant; but I think it’s a much finer thing not to be afraid of knowledge.”
To me, still almost shivering with the appallingly practical facts of which the priest had warned me, this comment came with such a colossal and crushing irony, that I nearly burst into a loud harsh laugh in the drawing-room. For I knew perfectly well that, as regards all the solid Satanism which the priest knew and warred against with all his life, these two Cambridge gentlemen (luckily for them) knew about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator.
And there sprang up in my mind the vague idea of making some artistic use of these comic yet tragic cross-purposes; and constructing a comedy in which a priest should appear to know nothing and in fact know more about crime than the criminals. I afterwards summed up the special idea in the story called “The Blue Cross”, otherwise very slight and improbable, and continued it through the interminable series of tales with which I have afflicted the world. In short, I permitted myself the grave liberty of taking my friend and knocking him about; beating his hat and umbrella shapeless, untidying his clothes, punching his intelligent countenance into a condition of pudding-faced fatuity, and generally disguising Father O’Connor as Father Brown. The disguise, as I have said, was a deliberate piece of fiction, meant to bring out or accentuate the contrast that was the point of the comedy. There is also in the conception, as in nearly everything I have ever written, a good deal of inconsistency and inaccuracy on minor points; not the least of such flaws being the general suggestion of Father Brown having nothing in particular to do, except to hang about in any household where there was likely to be a murder. A very charming Catholic lady I know once paid my detective priest the appropriate compliment of saying, “I am very fond of that officious little loafer.”
Nevertheless, the incident of the Cambridge undergraduates, and their breezy contempt for the fugitive and cloistered virtue of a parish priest, stood for much more serious things in my life than my unfortunate, but merely professional, heap of corpses or massacre of characters. It brought me in a manner face to face once more with those morbid but vivid problems of the soul, to which I have earlier alluded, and gave me a great and growing sense that I had not found any real spiritual solution of them; though in certain external ways of proportion and practice, they trouble a man less in manhood than they do in youth. They still troubled me a good deal; but I might have sunk more and more into some sort of compromise or surrender of mere weariness, but for this sudden glimpse of the pit that is at all our feet. I was surprised at my own surprise. That the Catholic Church knew more about good than I did was easy to believe. That she knew more about evil than I did seemed incredible.
When people ask me, or indeed anybody else, “Why did you join the Church of Rome?” the first essential answer, if it is partly an elliptical answer, is, “To get rid of my sins.” For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people’s sins. It is confirmed by the logic, which to many seems startling, by which the Church deduces that sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned. And this brought me sharply back to those visions or fancies with which I have dealt in the chapter about childhood. I spoke there of the indescribable and indestructible certitude in the soul, that those first years of innocence were the beginning of something worthy, perhaps more worthy than any of the things that actually followed them. I spoke of the strange daylight, which was something more than the light of common day, that still seems in my memory to shine on those steep roads down from Campden Hill, from which one could see the Crystal Palace from afar. Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man. The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.
I am not here defending such doctrines as that of the Sacrament of Penance; any more than the equally staggering doctrine of the Divine love for man. I am not writing a book of religious controversy; of which I have written several and shall probably, unless violently restrained by my friends and relatives, write several more. I am here engaged in the morbid and degrading task of telling the story of my life; and have only to state what actually were the effects of such doctrines on my own feelings and actions. And I am, by the nature of the task, especially concerned with the fact that these doctrines seem to me to link up my whole life from the beginning, as no other doctrines could do; and especially to settle simultaneously the two problems of my childish happiness and my boyish brooding. And they specially affected one idea; which I hope it is not pompous to call the chief idea of my life; I will not say the doctrine I have always taught, but the doctrine I should always have liked to teach. That is the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted. Thus the Sacrament of Penance gives a new life, and reconciles a man to all living, but it does not do it as the optimists and the hedonists and the heathen preachers of happiness do it. The gift is given at a price, and is conditioned by a confession. In other words, the name of the price is Truth, which may also be called Reality; but it is facing the reality about oneself. When the process is only applied to other people it is called Realism.
I began by being what the pessimists called an optimist; I have ended by being what the optimists would very probably call a pessimist. And I have never in fact been either, and I have never really changed at all. I began by defending vermilion pillar-boxes and Victorian omnibuses although they were ugly. I have ended by denouncing modern advertisements or American films even when they are beautiful. The thing that I was trying to say then is the same thing that I am trying to say now; and even the deepest revolution of religion has only confirmed me in the desire to say it. For indeed, I never saw the two sides of this single truth stated together anywhere, until I happened to open the Penny Catechism and read the words, “The two sins against Hope are presumption and despair.”
I began in my boyhood to grope for it from quite the other end; the end of the earth most remote from purely supernatural hopes. But even about the dimmest earthly hope, or the smallest earthly happiness, I had from the first an almost violently vivid sense of those two dangers; the sense that the experience must not be spoilt by presumption or despair. To take a convenient tag out of my first juvenile book of rhymes, I asked through what incarnations or prenatal purgatories I must have passed, to earn the reward of looking at a dandelion. Now it would be easy enough, if the thing were worth while even for a commentator, to date that phrase by certain details, or guess that it might have been worded otherwise at a later time. I do not believe in Reincarnation, if indeed I ever did; and since I have owned a garden (for I cannot say since I have been a gardener) I have realised better than I did that there really is a case against weeds. But in substance what I said about the dandelion is exactly what I should say about the sunflower or the sun, or the glory which (as the poet said) is brighter than the sun. The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed. Now there are two ways of complaining of the weed or the flower; and one was the fashion in my youth and another is the fashion in my later days; but they are not only both wrong, but both wrong because the same thing is right. The pessimists of my boyhood, when confronted with the dandelion, said with Swinburne:
I am weary of all hours Blown buds and barren flowers Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep.
And at this I cursed them and kicked at them and made an exhibition of myself; having made myself the champion of the Lion’s Tooth, with a dandelion rampant on my crest. But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, “You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge’s,” or “You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth’s.” Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, “Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions,” or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you. These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them. Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, “What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?” we are to say like the discontented cabman, “What’s this?” or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, “Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?” Now I not only dislike this attitude quite as much as the Swinburnian pessimistic attitude, but I think it comes to very much the same thing; to the actual loss of appetite for the chop or the dish of dandelion-tea. And the name of it is Presumption and the name of its twin brother is Despair.
This is the principle I was maintaining when I seemed an optimist to Mr. Max Beerbohm; and this is the principle I am still maintaining when I should undoubtedly seem a pessimist to Mr. Gordon Selfridge. The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them. I originally said that a cockney lamp-post painted pea-green was better than no light or no life; and that if it was a lonely lamp-post, we might really see its light better against the background of the dark. The Decadent of my early days, however, was so distressed by it that he wanted to hang himself on the lamp-post, to extinguish the lamp, and to let everything relapse into aboriginal darkness. The modern millionaire comes bustling along the street to tell me he is an Optimist and has two million five thousand new lamp-posts, all ready painted not a Victorian pea-green but a Futuristic chrome yellow and electric blue, and that he will plant them over the whole world in such numbers that nobody will notice them, especially as they will all look exactly the same. And I cannot quite see what the Optimist has got to be Optimistic about. A lamp-post can be significant although it is ugly. But he is not making lamp-posts significant; he is making them insignificant.
In short, as it seems to me, it matters very little whether a man is discontented in the name of pessimism or progress, if his discontent does in fact paralyse his power of appreciating what he has got. The real difficulty of man is not to enjoy lamp-posts or landscapes, not to enjoy dandelions or chops; but to enjoy enjoyment. To keep the capacity of really liking what he likes; that is the practical problem which the philosopher has to solve. And it seemed to me at the beginning, as it seems to me now in the end, that the pessimists and optimists of the modern world have alike missed and muddled this matter; through leaving out the ancient conception of humility and the thanks of the unworthy. This is a matter much more important and interesting than my opinions; but, in point of fact, it was by following this thin thread of a fancy about thankfulness, as slight as any of those dandelion clocks that are blown upon the breeze like thistledown, that I did arrive eventually at an opinion which is more than an opinion. Perhaps the one and only opinion that is really more than an opinion.
For this secret of antiseptic simplicity was really a secret; it was not obvious, and certainly not obvious at that time. It was a secret that had already been almost entirely left to, and locked up with, certain neglected and unpopular things. It was almost as if the dandelion-tea really were a medicine, and the only recipe or prescription belonged to one old woman, a ragged and nondescript old woman, rather reputed in our village to be a witch. Anyhow, it is true that both the happy hedonists and the unhappy pessimists were stiffened by the opposite principle of pride. The pessimist was proud of pessimism, because he thought nothing good enough for him; the optimist was proud of optimism, because he thought nothing was bad enough to prevent him from getting good out of it. There were valuable men of both these types; there were men with many virtues; but they not only did not possess the virtue I was thinking of, but they never thought of it. They would decide that life was no good, or that it had a great deal of good; but they were not in touch with this particular notion, of having a great deal of gratitude even for a very little good. And as I began to believe more and more that the clue was to be found in such a principle, even if it was a paradox, I was more and more disposed to seek out those who specialised in humility, though for them it was the door of heaven and for me the door of earth.
For nobody else specialises in that mystical mood in which the yellow star of the dandelion is startling, being something unexpected and undeserved. There are philosophies as varied as the flowers of the field, and some of them weeds and a few of them poisonous weeds. But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower. Men will crown themselves with flowers and brag of them, or sleep on flowers and forget them, or number and name all the flowers only in order to grow a super-flower for the Imperial International Flower Show; or, on the other hand, trample the flowers like a stampede of buffaloes, or root up the flowers as a childish camouflage of the cruelty of nature, or tear the flowers with their teeth to show that they are enlightened philosophical pessimists. But this original problem with which I myself started, the utmost possible imaginative appreciation of the flower—about that they can make nothing but blunders, in that they are ignorant of the elementary facts of human nature; in that, working wildly in all directions, they are all without exception going the wrong way to work. Since the time of which I speak, the world has in this respect grown even worse. A whole generation has been taught to talk nonsense at the top of its voice about having “a right to life” and “a right to experience” and “a right to happiness.” The lucid thinkers who talk like this generally wind up their assertion of all these extraordinary rights, by saying that there is no such thing as right and wrong. It is a little difficult, in that case, to speculate on where their rights came from; but I, at least, leaned more and more to the old philosophy which said that their real rights came from where the dandelion came from; and that they will never value either without recognising its source. And in that ultimate sense uncreated man, man merely in the position of the babe unborn, has no right even to see a dandelion; for he could not himself have invented either the dandelion or the eyesight.
I have here fallen back on one idle figure of speech from a fortunately forgotten book of verses; merely because such a thing is light and trivial, and the children puff it away like thistledown; and this will be most fitting to a place in which formal argument would be quite a misfit. But lest anyone should suppose that the notion has no relation to the argument, but is only a sentimental fancy about weeds or wild flowers, I will lightly and briefly suggest how even the figure fits in with all the aspects of the argument. For the first thing the casual critic will say is “What nonsense all this is; do you mean that a poet cannot be thankful for grass and wild flowers without connecting it with theology; let alone your theology?” To which I answer, “Yes; I mean he cannot do it without connecting it with theology, unless he can do it without connecting it with thought. If he can manage to be thankful when there is nobody to be thankful to, and no good intentions to be thankful for, then he is simply taking refuge in being thoughtless in order to avoid being thankless.” But indeed the argument goes beyond conscious gratitude, and applies to any sort of peace or confidence or repose, even unconscious confidence or repose. Even the nature-worship which Pagans have felt, even the nature-love which Pantheists have felt, ultimately depends as much on some implied purpose and positive good in things, as does the direct thanksgiving which Christians have felt. Indeed Nature is at best merely a female name we give to Providence when we are not treating it very seriously; a piece of feminist mythology. There is a sort of fireside fairytale, more fitted for the hearth than for the altar; and in that what is called Nature can be a sort of fairy godmother. But there can only be fairy godmothers because there are godmothers; and there can only be godmothers because there is God.
What has troubled me about sceptics all my life has been their extraordinary slowness in coming to the point; even to the point of their own position. I have heard them denounced, as well as admired, for their headlong haste and reckless rush of innovation; but my difficulty has always been to get them to move a few inches and finish their own argument. When first it was even hinted that the universe may not be a great design, but only a blind and indifferent growth, it ought to have been perceived instantly that this must for ever forbid any poet to retire to the green fields as to his home, or to look at the blue sky for his inspiration. There would be no more of any such traditional truth associated with green grass than with green rot or green rust; no more to be recalled by blue skies than by blue noses amputated in a freezing world of death. Poets, even Pagans, can only directly believe in Nature if they indirectly believe in God; if the second idea should really fade, the first is bound to follow sooner or later; and, merely out of a sad respect for human logic, I wish it had been sooner. Of course a man might have an almost animal appreciation of certain accidents of form or colour in a rock or a pool, as in a rag-bag or a dustbin; but that is not what the great poets or the great pagans meant by mysteries of Nature or the inspiration of the elemental powers. When there is no longer even a vague idea of purposes or presences, then the many-coloured forest really is a rag-bag and all the pageant of the dust only a dustbin. We can see this realisation creeping like a slow paralysis over all those of the newest poets who have not reacted towards religion. Their philosophy of the dandelion is not that all weeds are flowers; but rather that all flowers are weeds. Indeed it reaches to something like nightmare; as if Nature itself were unnatural. Perhaps that is why so many of them try desperately to write about machinery; touching which nobody has yet disputed the Argument from Design. No Darwin has yet maintained that motors began as scraps of metal, of which most happened to be scrapped; or that only those cars, which had grown a carburettor by accident, survived the struggle for life in Piccadilly. But whatever the reason, I have read modern poems obviously meant to make grass seem something merely scrubby and prickly and repugnant, like an unshaven chin.
That is the first note; that this common human mysticism about the dust or the dandelion or the daylight or the daily life of man does depend, and always did depend on theology, if it dealt at all in thought. And if it be next asked why this theology, I answer here—because it is the only theology that has not only thought, but thought of everything. That almost any other theology or philosophy contains a truth, I do not at all deny; on the contrary, that is what I assert; and that is what I complain of. Of all the other systems or sects I know, every single one is content to follow a truth, theological or theosophical or ethical or metaphysical; and the more they claim to be universal, the more it means that they merely take something and apply it to everything. A very brilliant Hindu scholar and man of science said to me, “There is but one thing, which is unity and universality. The points in which things differ do not matter; it is only their agreement that matters.” And I answered, “The agreement we really want is the agreement between agreement and disagreement. It is the sense that things do really differ, although they are at one.” Long afterwards I found what I meant stated much better by a Catholic writer, Coventry Patmore: “God is not infinite; He is the synthesis of infinity and boundary.” In short, the other teachers were always men of one idea, even when their one idea was universality. They were always especially narrow when their one idea was breadth. I have only found one creed that could not be satisfied with a truth, but only with the Truth, which is made of a million such truths and yet is one. And even in this passing illustration about my own private fancy, this was doubly demonstrated. If I had wandered away like Bergson or Bernard Shaw, and made up my own philosophy out of my own precious fragment of truth, merely because I had found it for myself, I should soon have found that truth distorting itself into a falsehood. Even in this one case, there are two ways in which it might have turned on me and rent me. One would have been by encouraging the delusion to which I was most prone; and the other by excusing the falsehood which I thought most inexcusable. First, the very exaggeration of the sense that daylight and dandelions and all early experience are a sort of incredible vision would, if unbalanced by other truths, have become in my case very unbalanced indeed. For that notion of seeing a vision was dangerously near to my old original natural nightmare, which had led me to move about as if I were in a dream; and at one time to lose the sense of reality and with it much of the sense of responsibility. And again, on the side of responsibility, in the more practical and ethical sphere, it might have forced on me a sort of political Quietism, to which I was really as much of a conscientious objector as to Quakerism. For what could I have said, if some tyrant had twisted this idea of transcendental contentment into an excuse for tyranny? Suppose he had quoted at me my verses about the all-sufficiency of elementary existence and the green vision of life, had used them to prove that the poor should be content with anything, and had said, like the old oppressor, “Let them eat grass.”
In a word, I had the humble purpose of not being a maniac, but especially of not being a monomaniac; and above all, of not being a monomaniac about a notion merely because it was my own. The notion was normal enough, and quite consistent with the Faith; indeed, it was already a part of it. But only as a part of it could it have remained normal. And I believe this to be true of practically all the notions of which my ablest contemporaries have made new philosophies; many of them normal enough at the start. I have therefore come to the conclusion that there is a complete contemporary fallacy about the liberty of individual ideas; that such flowers grow best in a garden, and even grow biggest in a garden; and that in the wilderness they wither and die.
Here again, I am well aware that somebody will ask the natural and normally reasonable question: “Do you really mean that a man cannot object to people being asked to eat grass, unless he accepts your particular creed?” To which I will only answer for the moment, “Yes; I do mean that; but not exactly as you mean it.” I will only add here, in passing, that what really revolts me and everybody else about that famous taunt of the tyrant is that it conveys some suggestion of treating men like beasts. I will also add that it would not remove my objection, even if the beasts had enough grass, or if the botanists had proved that grass is the most nutritious diet.
Now why do I offer here this handful of scrappy topics, types, metaphors all totally disconnected? Because I am not now expounding a religious system. I am finishing a story; rounding off what has been to me at least a romance, and very much of a mystery-story. It is a purely personal narrative that began in the first pages of this book; and I am answering at the end only the questions I asked at the beginning. I have said that I had in childhood, and have partly preserved out of childhood, a certain romance of receptiveness, which has not been killed by sin or even by sorrow; for though I have not had great troubles, I have had many. A man does not grow old without being bothered; but I have grown old without being bored. Existence is still a strange thing to me; and as a stranger I give it welcome. Well, to begin with, I put that beginning of all my intellectual impulses before the authority to which I have come at the end; and I find it was there before I put it there. I find myself ratified in my realisation of the miracle of being alive; not in some hazy literary sense such as the sceptics use, but in a definite dogmatic sense; of being made alive by that which can alone work miracles.
I have said that this rude and primitive religion of gratitude did not save me from ingratitude; from sin which is perhaps most horrible to me because it is ingratitude. But here again I have found that the answer awaited me. Precisely because the evil was mainly of the imagination, it could only be pierced by that conception of confession which is the end of mere solitude and secrecy. I had found only one religion which dared to go down with me into the depths of myself. I know, of course, that the practice of Confession, having been reviled through three or four centuries and through the greater part of my own life, has now been revived in a belated fashion. The scientific materialists, permanently behind the times, have revived all that was reviled in it as indecent and introspective. I have heard that a new sect has started once more the practice of the most primitive monasteries, and treated the confessional as communal. Unlike the primitive monks of the desert, it seems to find a satisfaction in performing the ritual in evening-dress. In short, I would not be supposed to be ignorant of the fact that the modern world, in various groups, is now prepared to provide us with the advantages of Confession. None of the groups, so far as I know, professes to provide the minor advantage of Absolution.
I have said that my morbidities were mental as well as moral; and sounded the most appalling depths of fundamental scepticism and solipsism. And there again I found that the Church had gone before me and established her adamantine foundations; that she had affirmed the actuality of external things; so that even madmen might hear her voice; and by a revelation in their very brain begin to believe their eyes.
Finally I said I had tried, however imperfectly, to serve justice; and that I saw our industrial civilisation as rooted in injustice, long before it became so common a comment as it is today. Anybody who cares to turn up the files of the great newspapers, even those supposed to be Radical newspapers, and see what they said about the Great Strikes, and compare it with what my friends and I said at the same date, can easily test whether this is a boast or a brute fact. But anybody reading this book (if anybody does) will see that from the very beginning my instinct about justice, about liberty and equality, was somewhat different from that current in our age; and from all the tendencies towards concentration and generalisation. It was my instinct to defend liberty in small nations and poor families; that is to defend the rights of man as including the rights of property; especially the property of the poor. I did not really understand what I meant by Liberty, until I heard it called by the new name of Human Dignity. It was a new name to me; though it was part of a creed nearly two thousand years old. In short, I had blindly desired that a man should be in possession of something, if it were only his own body. In so far as materialistic concentration proceeds, a man will be in possesion of nothing; not even his own body. Already there hover on the horizon sweeping scourges of sterilisation or social hygiene, applied to everybody and imposed by nobody. At least I will not argue here with what are quaintly called the scientific authorities on the other side. I have found one authority on my side.
This story, therefore, can only end as any detective story should end, with its own particular questions answered and its own primary problem solved. Thousands of totally different stories, with totally different problems have ended in the same place with their problems solved. But for me my end is my beginning, as Maurice Baring quoted of Mary Stuart, and this overwhelming conviction that there is one key which can unlock all doors brings back to me the first glimpse of the glorious gift of the senses; and the sensational experience of sensation. And there starts up again before me, standing sharp and clear in shape as of old, the figure of a man who crosses a bridge and carries a key; as I saw him when I first looked into fairyland through the window of my father’s peep-show. But I know that he who is called Pontifex, the Builder of the Bridge, is called also Claviger, the Bearer of the Key; and that such keys were given him to bind and loose when he was a poor fisher in a far province, beside a small and almost secret sea.
I
HEARSAY EVIDENCE
Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.
Nevertheless, the great Waterworks Tower was destined to play its part in my life, as I shall narrate on a subsequent page; but that story is connected with my own experiences, whereas my birth (as I have said) is an incident which I accept, like some poor ignorant peasant, only because it has been handed down to me by oral tradition. And before we come to any of my own experiences, it will be well to devote this brief chapter to a few of the other facts of my family and environment which I hold equally precariously on mere hearsay evidence. Of course what many call hearsay evidence, or what I call human evidence, might be questioned in theory, as in the Baconian controversy or a good deal of the Higher Criticism. The story of my birth might be untrue. I might be the long-lost heir of The Holy Roman Empire, or an infant left by ruffians from Limehouse on a door-step in Kensington, to develop in later life a hideous criminal heredity. Some of the sceptical methods applied to the world’s origin might be applied to my origin, and a grave and earnest enquirer come to the conclusion that I was never born at all. But I prefer to believe that common sense is something that my readers and I have in common; and that they will have patience with a dull summary of the facts.
I was born of respectable but honest parents; that is, in a world where the word “respectability” was not yet exclusively a term of abuse, but retained some dim philological connection with the idea of being respected. It is true that even in my own youth the sense of the word was changing; as I remember in a conversation between my parents, in which it was used with both implications. My father, who was serene, humorous and full of hobbies, remarked casually that he had been asked to go on what was then called The Vestry. At this my mother, who was more swift, restless and generally Radical in her instincts, uttered something like a cry of pain; she said, “Oh, Edward, don’t! You will be so respectable! We never have been respectable yet; don’t let’s begin now.” And I remember my father mildly replying, “My dear, you present a rather alarming picture of our lives, if you say that we have never for one single instant been respectable.” Readers of Pride and Prejudice will perceive that there was something of Mr. Bennet about my father; though there was certainly nothing of Mrs. Bennet about my mother.
Anyhow, what I mean here is that my people belonged to that rather old-fashioned English middle class; in which a business man was still permitted to mind his own business. They had been granted no glimpse of our later and loftier vision, of that more advanced and adventurous conception of commerce, in which a business man is supposed to rival, ruin, destroy, absorb and swallow up everybody else’s business. My father was a Liberal of the school that existed before the rise of Socialism; he took it for granted that all sane people believed in private property; but he did not trouble to translate it into private enterprise. His people were of the sort that were always sufficiently successful; but hardly, in the modern sense, enterprising. My father was the head of a hereditary business of house agents and surveyors, which had already been established for some three generations in Kensington; and I remember that there was a sort of local patriotism about it and a little reluctance in the elder members, when the younger first proposed that it should have branches outside Kensington. This particular sort of unobtrusive pride was very characteristic of this sort of older business men. I remember that it once created a comedy of cross-purposes, which could hardly have occurred unless there had been some such secret self-congratulation upon any accretion of local status. The incident is in more ways than one a glimpse of the tone and talk of those distant days.
My grandfather, my father’s father, was a fine-looking old man with white hair and beard and manners that had something of that rounded solemnity that went with the old-fashioned customs of proposing toasts and sentiments. He kept up the ancient Christian custom of singing at the dinner-table, and it did not seem incongruous when he sang “The Fine Old English Gentleman” as well as more pompous songs of the period of Waterloo and Trafalgar. And I may remark in passing that, having lived to see Mafeking Night and the later Jingo lyrics, I have retained a considerable respect for those old and pompous patriotic songs. I rather fancy it was better for the tradition of the English tongue to hear such rhetorical lines as these, about Wellington at the deathbed of William the Fourth,
For he came on the Angel of Victory’s wing But the Angel of Death was awaiting the King,
than to be entirely satisfied with howling the following lines, heard in all music-halls some twenty years afterwards:
And when we say we’ve always won And when they ask us how it’s done We proudly point to every one Of England’s soldiers of the Queen.
I cannot help having a dim suspicion that dignity has something to do with style; but anyhow the gestures, like the songs, of my grandfather’s time and type had a good deal to do with dignity. But, used as he was to ceremonial manners, he must have been a good deal mystified by a strange gentleman who entered the office and, having conferred with my father briefly on business, asked in a hushed voice if he might have the high privilege of being presented to the more ancient or ancestral head of the firm. He then approached my grandfather as if the old gentleman had been a sort of shrine, with profound bows and reverential apostrophes.
I
TESTIMONIANZE PER SENTITO DIRE
Prostrandomi in cieca credulità, com’è mia consuetudine, dinanzi alla mera autorità e alla tradizione degli anziani, inghiottendo superstiziosamente una storia che al momento non potevo verificare per esperimento o giudizio privato, sono fermamente dell’opinione di essere nato il 29 maggio 1874, su Campden Hill, a Kensington; e battezzato secondo i formulari della Chiesa d’Inghilterra nella chiesetta di San Giorgio, di fronte alla grande Torre dell’Acquedotto che dominava quel crinale. Non pretendo alcun significato nella relazione tra i due edifici; e nego con indignazione che la chiesa sia stata scelta perché occorreva tutta la potenza dell’acqua della Londra occidentale per fare di me un cristiano.
Ciononostante, la grande Torre dell’Acquedotto era destinata a recitare la sua parte nella mia vita, come narrerò in una pagina successiva; ma quella storia è legata alle mie stesse esperienze, mentre la mia nascita (come ho detto) è un episodio che accetto, al pari di qualche povero e ignorante contadino, solo perché mi è stato tramandato dalla tradizione orale. E prima di venire a una qualunque delle mie esperienze, sarà bene dedicare questo breve capitolo ad alcuni degli altri fatti relativi alla mia famiglia e al mio ambiente, che ritengo con altrettanta precarietà su una mera testimonianza per sentito dire. Naturalmente ciò che molti chiamano testimonianza per sentito dire, o ciò che io chiamo testimonianza umana, potrebbe essere messo in dubbio in teoria, come nella controversia baconiana o in buona parte dell’Alta Critica. La storia della mia nascita potrebbe essere falsa. Potrei essere l’erede perduto da tempo del Sacro Romano Impero, o un bambino abbandonato da certi malandrini di Limehouse su una soglia di casa a Kensington, per sviluppare più tardi nella vita un’orrenda ereditarietà criminale. Alcuni dei metodi scettici applicati all’origine del mondo potrebbero applicarsi alla mia origine, e un serio e zelante indagatore potrebbe giungere alla conclusione che io non sia mai nato affatto. Ma preferisco credere che il buonsenso sia qualcosa che i miei lettori e io abbiamo in comune; e che essi avranno pazienza con un noioso riassunto dei fatti.
Sono nato da genitori rispettabili ma onesti; vale a dire, in un mondo in cui la parola «rispettabilità» non era ancora esclusivamente un termine d’ingiuria, ma conservava qualche vaga connessione filologica con l’idea dell’essere rispettati. È vero che perfino nella mia stessa giovinezza il senso della parola stava mutando; come ricordo in una conversazione tra i miei genitori, in cui essa fu usata con entrambe le implicazioni. Mio padre, che era sereno, spiritoso e pieno di passatempi, osservò con noncuranza di essere stato invitato a entrare in quella che allora si chiamava La Fabbriceria. A questo mia madre, che era più svelta, irrequieta e in genere Radicale nei suoi istinti, emise qualcosa come un grido di dolore; disse: «Oh, Edward, non farlo! Diventerai così rispettabile! Noi non siamo mai stati rispettabili finora; non cominciamo adesso.» E ricordo mio padre replicare mitemente: «Mia cara, tu offri un quadro piuttosto allarmante delle nostre vite, se dici che non siamo mai stati per un solo istante rispettabili.» I lettori di Pride and Prejudice scorgeranno che c’era qualcosa del signor Bennet in mio padre; benché non ci fosse di certo nulla della signora Bennet in mia madre.
Comunque sia, ciò che intendo dire qui è che la mia gente apparteneva a quella piuttosto antiquata classe media inglese; in cui a un uomo d’affari era ancora consentito di badare ai propri affari. Non era stato loro concesso alcun barlume della nostra più tarda e più elevata visione, di quella più avanzata e avventurosa concezione del commercio, in cui si suppone che un uomo d’affari rivaleggi, rovini, distrugga, assorba e inghiotta gli affari di tutti gli altri. Mio padre era un Liberale della scuola che esisteva prima dell’ascesa del Socialismo; dava per scontato che tutte le persone sane di mente credessero nella proprietà privata; ma non si dava la pena di tradurla in libera impresa. La sua gente era del genere che aveva sempre abbastanza successo; ma quasi mai, nel senso moderno, intraprendente. Mio padre era il capo di un’attività ereditaria di agenti immobiliari e periti, già stabilita da circa tre generazioni a Kensington; e ricordo che c’era una sorta di patriottismo locale al riguardo e una certa riluttanza nei membri più anziani, quando i più giovani proposero per la prima volta di aprire filiali fuori Kensington. Questo particolare genere di discreto orgoglio era assai caratteristico di questo genere di uomini d’affari più anziani. Ricordo che una volta diede origine a una commedia di equivoci, che difficilmente sarebbe potuta accadere se non ci fosse stato un simile segreto autocompiacimento per ogni accrescimento dello status locale. L’episodio è, sotto più di un aspetto, uno scorcio del tono e delle chiacchiere di quei giorni lontani.
Mio nonno, il padre di mio padre, era un bell’uomo anziano dai capelli e dalla barba bianchi e dai modi che avevano qualcosa di quella rotonda solennità che si accompagnava alle usanze antiquate del proporre brindisi e sentimenti. Manteneva l’antica usanza cristiana di cantare a tavola, e non pareva incongruo quando cantava «The Fine Old English Gentleman» così come canzoni più pompose del periodo di Waterloo e Trafalgar. E posso osservare per inciso che, essendo vissuto fino a vedere la notte di Mafeking e le successive liriche jingoiste, ho conservato un considerevole rispetto per quelle vecchie e pompose canzoni patriottiche. Sono piuttosto incline a credere che fosse meglio per la tradizione della lingua inglese udire versi retorici come questi, su Wellington al letto di morte di Guglielmo Quarto,
Poiché egli giunse sull’ala dell’Angelo della Vittoria Ma l’Angelo della Morte attendeva il Re,
che non essere del tutto appagati dall’urlare i versi seguenti, uditi in tutti i music-hall una ventina d’anni dopo:
E quando diciamo d’aver sempre vinto E quando ci chiedono come si sia fatto Indichiamo con fierezza ognuno Dei soldati della Regina d’Inghilterra.
Non posso fare a meno di avere il vago sospetto che la dignità abbia qualcosa a che fare con lo stile; ma comunque i gesti, come le canzoni, del tempo e del tipo di mio nonno avevano molto a che fare con la dignità. Ma, avvezzo com’era ai modi cerimoniosi, deve essere stato assai sconcertato da uno strano gentiluomo che entrò nell’ufficio e, dopo aver conferito brevemente con mio padre per affari, chiese a bassa voce se potesse avere l’alto privilegio di essere presentato al più antico o ancestrale capo della ditta. Si avvicinò poi a mio nonno come se il vecchio gentiluomo fosse stato una sorta di reliquiario, con profondi inchini e reverenti apostrofi.
“You are a Monument,” said the strange gentleman, “Sir, you are a Landmark.”
My grandfather, slightly flattered, murmured politely that they had certainly been in Kensington for some little time.
“You are an Historical Character,” said the admiring stranger. “You have changed the whole destiny of Church and State.”
My grandfather still assumed airily that this might be a poetical manner of describing a successful house-agency. But a light began to break on my father, who had thought his way through all the High Church and Broad Church movements and was well-read in such things. He suddenly remembered the case of “Westerton versus Liddell” in which a Protestant churchwarden prosecuted a parson for one of the darker crimes of Popery, possibly wearing a surplice.
“And I only hope,” went on the stranger firmly, still addressing the Protestant Champion, “that the services at the Parish Church are now conducted in a manner of which you approve.”
My grandfather observed in a genial manner that he didn’t care how they were conducted. These remarkable words of the Protestant Champion caused his worshipper to gaze upon him with a new dawn of wonder, when my father intervened and explained the error pointing out the fine shade that divides Westerton and Chesterton. I may add that my grandfather, when the story was told, always used to insist that he had added to the phrase “I don’t care how they are conducted,” the qualifying words (repeated with a grave motion ot the hand) “provided it is with reverence and sincerity.” But I grieve to say that sceptics in the younger generation believed this to have been an afterthought.
The point is, however, that my grandfather was pleased, and not really very much amazed, to be called a monument and a landmark. And that was typical of many middle-class men, even in small businesses, in that remote world. For the particular sort of British bourgeoisie of which I am speaking has been so much altered or diminished, that it cannot exactly be said to exist today. Nothing quite like it at least can be found in England; nothing in the least like it, I fancy, was ever found in America. One peculiarity of this middle-class was that it really was a class and it really was in the middle. Both for good and evil, and certainly often to excess, it was separated both from the class above it and the class below. It knew far too little of the working classes, to the grave peril of a later generation. It knew far too little even of its own servants. My own people were always very kind to servants; but in the class as a whole there was neither the coarse familiarity in work, which belongs to democracies and can be seen in the clamouring and cursing housewives of the Continent, nor the remains of a feudal friendliness such as lingers in the real aristocracy. There was a sort of silence and embarrassment. It was illustrated in another hearsay anecdote, which I may here add to the anecdote of the Protestant Champion. A lady of my family went to live in a friend’s house in the friend’s absence; to be waited on by a sort of superior servant. The lady had got it fixed in her head that the servant cooked her own meals separately, whereas the servant was equally fixed on the policy of eating what was left over from the lady’s meals. The servant sent up for breakfast, say, five rashers of bacon; which was more than the lady wanted. But the lady had another fixed freak of conscience common in the ladies of the period. She thought nothing should be wasted; and could not see that even a thing consumed is wasted if it is not wanted. She ate the five rashers and the servant consequently sent up seven rashers. The lady paled a little, but followed the path of duty and ate them all. The servant, beginning to feel that she too would like a little breakfast, sent up nine or ten rashers. The lady, rallying all her powers, charged at them with her head down, and swept them from the field. And so, I suppose, it went on; owing to the polite silence between the two social classes. I dare not think how it ended. The logical conclusion would seem to be that the servant starved and the lady burst. But I suppose that, before they reached that point, some communications had been opened even between two people living on two floors of the same house. But that was certainly the weak side of that world; that it did not extend its domestic confidence to domestic servants. It smiled and felt superior when reading of old-world vassals who dined below the salt, and continued to feel equally superior to its own vassals, who dined below the floor.
But however we may criticise the old middle-class, and however heartily we may join in those immortal words of the Song of the Future, which are said to run:
Class-conscious we are, class-conscious we’ll be; Till our foot’s on the necks of the bourgeoisie,
it has a right to historical justice; and there are other points to remember. One point is that it was partly the real “culture conquests” of this stratum of the middle-class, and the fact that it really was an educated class, that made it unduly suspicious of the influence of servants. It attached rather too much importance to spelling correctly; it attached enormous importance to speaking correctly. And it did spell and speak correctly. There was a whole world in which nobody was any more likely to drop an h than to pick up a title. I early discovered, with the malice of infancy, that what my seniors were really afraid of was any imitation of the intonation and diction of the servants. I am told (to quote another hearsay anecdote) that about the age of three or four, I screamed for a hat hanging on a peg, and at last in convulsions of fury uttered the awful words, “If you don’t give it me, I’ll say ‘at.” I felt sure that would lay all my relations prostrate for miles around.
«Voi siete un Monumento,» disse lo strano gentiluomo, «Signore, voi siete un Punto di Riferimento.»
Mio nonno, lievemente lusingato, mormorò cortesemente che essi si trovavano di certo a Kensington da un certo tempo.
«Voi siete un Personaggio Storico,» disse lo sconosciuto ammirato. «Avete mutato l’intero destino della Chiesa e dello Stato.»
Mio nonno continuava a supporre con leggerezza che questo potesse essere un modo poetico di descrivere una fiorente agenzia immobiliare. Ma una luce cominciò a farsi in mio padre, che si era fatto strada attraverso tutti i movimenti dell’Alta Chiesa e della Chiesa Larga ed era assai ferrato in tali cose. Ricordò d’improvviso il caso «Westerton contro Liddell» in cui un fabbriciere protestante perseguì un parroco per uno dei più oscuri crimini del papismo, forse l’indossare una cotta.
«E spero soltanto,» proseguì con fermezza lo sconosciuto, rivolgendosi ancora al Campione Protestante, «che le funzioni alla Chiesa Parrocchiale siano ora condotte in un modo di cui voi approviate.»
Mio nonno osservò con fare gioviale che non gli importava come fossero condotte. Queste notevoli parole del Campione Protestante indussero il suo adoratore a fissarlo con una nuova alba di stupore, quando mio padre intervenne e spiegò l’errore, additando la sottile sfumatura che divide Westerton da Chesterton. Posso aggiungere che mio nonno, quando la storia veniva raccontata, insisteva sempre di aver aggiunto alla frase «Non m’importa come sono condotte» le parole di riserva (ripetute con un grave moto della mano) «purché sia con riverenza e sincerità». Ma mi affligge dire che gli scettici della generazione più giovane credevano che ciò fosse stato un ripensamento.
Il punto è, comunque, che mio nonno fu contento, e non troppo stupito, di essere chiamato un monumento e un punto di riferimento. E ciò era tipico di molti uomini della classe media, anche nei piccoli commerci, in quel mondo remoto. Poiché il particolare genere di borghesia britannica di cui parlo è stato talmente alterato o diminuito da non potersi dire esattamente che esista oggi. Nulla di esattamente simile ad esso, almeno, si può trovare in Inghilterra; nulla che vi somigli minimamente, immagino, si è mai trovato in America. Una peculiarità di questa classe media era che era davvero una classe ed era davvero nel mezzo. Sia nel bene che nel male, e certo spesso all’eccesso, era separata sia dalla classe superiore ad essa sia da quella inferiore. Sapeva assai troppo poco delle classi lavoratrici, con grave pericolo di una generazione successiva. Sapeva assai troppo poco perfino dei propri domestici. La mia gente fu sempre molto gentile con i domestici; ma nella classe nel suo insieme non c’era né la rozza familiarità nel lavoro, che appartiene alle democrazie e si può vedere nelle massaie schiamazzanti e imprecanti del Continente, né i resti di una cordialità feudale come indugia nella vera aristocrazia. C’era una sorta di silenzio e d’imbarazzo. Ciò fu illustrato in un altro aneddoto per sentito dire, che posso qui aggiungere all’aneddoto del Campione Protestante. Una signora della mia famiglia andò a vivere nella casa di un’amica in assenza dell’amica; per essere servita da una sorta di domestica superiore. La signora si era fissata in testa che la domestica si cucinasse i propri pasti separatamente, mentre la domestica era altrettanto fissata nella politica di mangiare ciò che avanzava dai pasti della signora. La domestica mandò su per la colazione, poniamo, cinque fette di pancetta; il che era più di quanto la signora volesse. Ma la signora aveva un’altra fissa bizzarria di coscienza, comune nelle signore del periodo. Riteneva che nulla dovesse essere sprecato; e non riusciva a vedere che perfino una cosa consumata è sprecata se non la si vuole. Mangiò le cinque fette, e di conseguenza la domestica mandò su sette fette. La signora impallidì un poco, ma seguì il sentiero del dovere e le mangiò tutte. La domestica, cominciando a sentire che anche lei avrebbe gradito un po’ di colazione, mandò su nove o dieci fette. La signora, radunando tutte le sue forze, le caricò a testa bassa, e le spazzò via dal campo. E così, suppongo, andò avanti; a causa del cortese silenzio tra le due classi sociali. Non oso pensare come finì. La conclusione logica parrebbe essere che la domestica morì di fame e la signora scoppiò. Ma suppongo che, prima che giungessero a quel punto, si fossero aperte alcune comunicazioni anche tra due persone che vivevano su due piani della stessa casa. Ma quello era di certo il lato debole di quel mondo; che non estendeva la sua confidenza domestica ai domestici. Sorrideva e si sentiva superiore leggendo dei vassalli del vecchio mondo che pranzavano al di sotto del sale, e continuava a sentirsi altrettanto superiore verso i propri vassalli, che pranzavano al di sotto del pavimento.
Ma per quanto si possa criticare la vecchia classe media, e per quanto di cuore ci si possa unire a quelle immortali parole della Canzone del Futuro, che si dice suonino così:
Coscienti della classe siamo, coscienti della classe saremo; Finché il nostro piede sarà sul collo della borghesia,
essa ha diritto alla giustizia storica; e ci sono altri punti da ricordare. Un punto è che fu in parte proprio la «conquista culturale» di questo strato della classe media, e il fatto che fosse davvero una classe istruita, a renderla indebitamente sospettosa dell’influenza dei domestici. Attribuiva un’importanza piuttosto eccessiva alla corretta ortografia; attribuiva un’enorme importanza al parlare correttamente. E scriveva e parlava davvero correttamente. C’era tutto un mondo in cui nessuno era più incline a perdere un’acca che a raccogliere un titolo. Scoprii presto, con la malizia dell’infanzia, che ciò di cui i miei maggiori avevano davvero paura era ogni imitazione dell’intonazione e della dizione dei domestici. Mi si dice (per citare un altro aneddoto per sentito dire) che verso l’età di tre o quattro anni, strillai per un cappello appeso a un gancio, e alla fine, in convulsioni di furia, pronunciai le tremende parole: «Se non me lo dai, dirò ‘appello.» Ero certo che ciò avrebbe steso a terra tutti i miei parenti per miglia intorno.
And this care about education and diction, though I can see much to criticise in it now, did really have its good side. It meant that my father knew all his English literature backwards, and that I knew a great deal of it by heart, long before I could really get it into my head. I knew pages of Shakespeare’s blank verse without a notion of the meaning of most of it; which is perhaps the right way to begin to appreciate verse. And it is also recorded of me that, at the age of six or seven, I tumbled down in the street in the act of excitedly reciting the words,
Good Hamlet, cast this nighted colour off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark, Do not for ever with thy veiled lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust,
at which appropriate moment I pitched forward on my nose.
What is perhaps even less appreciated is that the particular class I mean was not only cut off from what are called the lower classes, but also quite as sharply from what are called the upper classes. Since then we may say, with all graceful apologies, that this class has split up into the two great sections of the Snobs and the Prigs. The first are those who want to get into Society; the second are those who want to get out of Society, and into Societies. I mean Vegetarian Societies and Socialist Colonies and things of that sort. But the people I mean were not cranks, and, what is more, they were not snobs. There were plenty of people in their time, of course, who were snobbish; but those I mean were really a class apart. They never dreamed of knowing the aristocracy except in business. They had, what has since become almost incredible in England, a pride of their own.
For instance, almost all that district of Kensington was and is laid out like a chart or plan to illustrate Macaulay’s Essays. Of course we read Macaulay’s Essays; and in our simple isolation, often even believed them. We knew all the great names of the Whig aristocrats who had made the Revolution (and incidentally their own fortunes) and those names were written conspicuously all over the Kensington estates. Every day we passed Holland House, that opened its hospitality to Macaulay, and the statue of Lord Holland inscribed with the boast that he was the nephew of Fox and the friend of Grey. The street opposite where we came to live bore the name of Addison; the street of our later sojourn the name of Warwick, the step-son of Addison. Beyond was a road named after the house of Russell, to the south another with the name of Cromwell. Near us, on our original perch in Campden Hill, was the great name of Argyll. Now all these names thrilled me like trumpets, as they would any boy reading Macaulay. But it never so much as crossed my mind that we should ever know any people who bore them, or even especially want to. I remember making my father laugh very much by telling him of the old Scots ballad with the line,
There fell about a great dispute between Argyle and Airlie.
For he knew, as a house-agent, that Lord Airlie’s house was actually quite close to Argyll Lodge; and that nothing was more likely than that there might fall about a great dispute, directly affecting his own line of business. He knew the old Duke of Argyll in purely business relations, and showed me a letter from him as a curiosity; but to me it was like a delightful curiosity in a museum. I no more thought of expecting McCallum More to come in any way into my own social existence, than I expected Graham of Claverhouse to ride up on his great black horse to the front-door, or Charles the Second to drop in to tea. I regarded the Duke living at Argyll Lodge as an historical character. My people were interested in an aristocracy because it was still an historical thing. The point is worth mentioning, because it is exactly this difference, whether for good or evil, that justifies a fight or feud of which I shall have to write on a later page. Long afterwards, I had the luck to figure in a political row about the Sale of Peerages; and many said that we were wasting our energies in denouncing it. But we were not. The treatment of a title did make a difference; and I am just old enough to be able to measure the difference it has really made. If, regarding Lord Lome with historical respect, I had been introduced to an unknown Lord Leatherhead, I should have respected him also as something historical. If I were to meet him now, I should know he might be any pawnbroker from any gutter in Europe. Honours have not been sold; they have been destroyed.
One considerable family connected with the family business, merely in the way of business, may be worth mentioning for quite other reasons. The firm was, and indeed still is, agent for the large Phillimore Estate then owned by two brothers who both played considerable public parts; Admiral Phillimore who died long ago and Lord Justice Phillimore, one of the most famous of the modern English judges, who died more recently. We had nothing to do with such people, nor tried to, though I remember more than one quite independent testimony to the magnanimity of the old Admiral. But I mention this vague background of the great Kensington Estate for another reason. For the name of Phillimore was destined in a strange and double and rather ironic fashion, to be entwined with my subsequent adventures in life. The Admiral I never saw; but his son, who must have been a child of about my own age, I was long afterwards to know and love and lose, as a friend and an ally in a cause which would then have seemed fantastically far away from our boyhoods. And the Judge I was destined to see sitting on the seat of judgment, and to give evidence before him on behalf of my brother, who stood in the dock at the Old Bailey and was found guilty of patriotism and public spirit.
My mother’s family had a French surname; though the family, as I knew it by experience as well as tradition, was entirely English in speech and social habit. There was a sort of family legend that they were descended from a French private soldier of the Revolutionary Wars, who had been a prisoner in England and remained there; as some certainly did. But on the other side my mother came of Scottish people, who were Keiths from Aberdeen; and for several reasons, partly because my maternal grandmother long survived her husband and was a very attractive personality, and partly because of a certain vividness in any infusion of Scots blood or patriotism, this northern affiliation appealed strongly to my affections; and made a sort of Scottish romance in my childhood. But her husband, my maternal grandfather whom I never saw, must have been an interesting person too; and something of an historical type, if not an historical character. He had been one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early Teetotal movement; a characteristic which has not. But I am quite sure there was a great deal in him, beyond anything that is implied in mere public speaking or teetotalism. I am quite sure of it, because of two casual remarks he made; which are indeed the only two remarks I ever heard of him making. Once, when his sons were declaiming against mode and convention in the manner of all liberal youth, he said abruptly, “Ah, they talk a lot about fashion; but fashion is civilisation.” And in the other case, the same rising generation was lightly tossing about that pessimism which is only possible in the happy time of youth. They were criticising the General Thanksgiving in the Prayer-Book, and remarking that a good many people have very little reason to be thankful for their creation. And the old man, who was then so old that he hardly ever spoke at all, said suddenly out of his silence. “I should thank God for my creation if I knew I was a lost soul.”
E questa cura per l’educazione e per la dizione, benché ora vi trovi molto da criticare, aveva davvero il suo lato buono. Significava che mio padre conosceva a menadito tutta la sua letteratura inglese, e che io ne conoscevo gran parte a memoria, molto prima di poterla davvero cacciare in testa. Conoscevo pagine dei versi sciolti di Shakespeare senza avere la minima nozione del loro significato; il che è forse il modo giusto di cominciare ad apprezzare la poesia. E si racconta anche di me che, all’età di sei o sette anni, caddi lungo disteso per strada nell’atto di recitare eccitatamente le parole,
Buon Amleto, getta via questo colore notturno, E lascia che il tuo occhio guardi come un amico sulla Danimarca, Non cercare per sempre con le tue palpebre velate Il tuo nobile padre nella polvere,
nel qual momento appropriato piombai in avanti sul naso.
Ciò che è forse anche meno apprezzato è che la particolare classe di cui parlo non era soltanto tagliata fuori da quelle che si chiamano le classi inferiori, ma anche altrettanto nettamente da quelle che si chiamano le classi superiori. Da allora possiamo dire, con tutte le graziose scuse, che questa classe si è scissa nelle due grandi sezioni degli Snob e dei Sussiegosi. I primi sono coloro che vogliono entrare nella Società; i secondi sono coloro che vogliono uscire dalla Società, ed entrare nelle Associazioni. Intendo le Associazioni Vegetariane e le Colonie Socialiste e cose di quel genere. Ma le persone di cui parlo non erano dei fissati e, per giunta, non erano snob. C’era, s’intende, gran quantità di persone al loro tempo che erano snob; ma quelle di cui parlo erano davvero una classe a parte. Non si sognarono mai di conoscere l’aristocrazia se non per affari. Avevano, ciò che da allora è divenuto quasi incredibile in Inghilterra, un orgoglio tutto loro.
Per esempio, quasi tutto quel quartiere di Kensington era ed è disposto come una carta o una piantina per illustrare i Saggi di Macaulay. Naturalmente leggevamo i Saggi di Macaulay; e, nel nostro semplice isolamento, spesso addirittura vi credevamo. Conoscevamo tutti i grandi nomi degli aristocratici Whig che avevano fatto la Rivoluzione (e per inciso le proprie fortune) e quei nomi erano scritti a chiare lettere in tutte le tenute di Kensington. Ogni giorno passavamo davanti a Holland House, che apriva la sua ospitalità a Macaulay, e alla statua di Lord Holland iscritta con il vanto di essere nipote di Fox e amico di Grey. La strada di fronte a dove venimmo ad abitare portava il nome di Addison; la strada del nostro successivo soggiorno il nome di Warwick, il figliastro di Addison. Oltre c’era una strada che prendeva nome dalla casa dei Russell, a sud un’altra col nome di Cromwell. Vicino a noi, sul nostro originario trespolo su Campden Hill, c’era il grande nome di Argyll. Ora tutti questi nomi mi facevano fremere come trombe, come avrebbero fatto a qualunque ragazzo che leggesse Macaulay. Ma non mi passò mai neppure per la mente che noi potessimo mai conoscere persone che li portassero, o addirittura desiderarlo. Ricordo di aver fatto ridere molto mio padre raccontandogli della vecchia ballata scozzese col verso,
Ci fu una gran contesa tra Argyle e Airlie.
Poiché egli sapeva, da agente immobiliare, che la casa di Lord Airlie era in effetti assai vicina a Argyll Lodge; e che nulla era più probabile del fatto che potesse insorgere una gran contesa, direttamente attinente al suo stesso ramo d’affari. Conosceva il vecchio Duca di Argyll in rapporti puramente d’affari, e mi mostrò una lettera di lui come una curiosità; ma per me era come una deliziosa curiosità in un museo. Non pensavo di aspettarmi che McCallum More entrasse in qualche modo nella mia stessa esistenza sociale, più di quanto mi aspettassi Graham of Claverhouse arrivare al galoppo sul suo grande cavallo nero fino all’ingresso, o Carlo Secondo capitare a prendere il tè. Consideravo il Duca che viveva a Argyll Lodge come un personaggio storico. La mia gente si interessava a un’aristocrazia perché era ancora una cosa storica. Il punto merita d’essere menzionato, perché è esattamente questa differenza, nel bene o nel male, che giustifica una lotta o una faida di cui dovrò scrivere in una pagina successiva. Molto tempo dopo, ebbi la fortuna di figurare in una rissa politica sulla Vendita dei Titoli Nobiliari; e molti dissero che stavamo sprecando le nostre energie a denunciarla. Ma non era così. Il trattamento di un titolo faceva davvero una differenza; e sono giusto abbastanza vecchio da poter misurare la differenza che esso ha davvero fatto. Se, considerando Lord Lorne con storico rispetto, mi fossi stato presentato uno sconosciuto Lord Leatherhead, avrei rispettato anche lui come qualcosa di storico. Se dovessi incontrarlo ora, saprei che potrebbe essere un prestasoldi qualsiasi da un rigagnolo qualsiasi d’Europa. Le Onorificenze non sono state vendute; sono state distrutte.
Una considerevole famiglia legata all’attività familiare, meramente per ragioni d’affari, può valer la pena di menzionare per tutt’altre ragioni. La ditta era, e in effetti è ancora, agente della grande Tenuta Phillimore, allora posseduta da due fratelli che recitarono entrambi parti pubbliche di rilievo: l’Ammiraglio Phillimore, morto molto tempo fa, e Lord Justice Phillimore, uno dei più famosi tra i moderni giudici inglesi, morto più di recente. Non avevamo nulla a che fare con simile gente, né cercammo di averne, benché ricordi più di una testimonianza del tutto indipendente sulla magnanimità del vecchio Ammiraglio. Ma menziono questo vago sfondo della grande Tenuta di Kensington per un’altra ragione. Poiché il nome di Phillimore era destinato, in un modo strano e duplice e piuttosto ironico, a intrecciarsi con le mie successive avventure nella vita. L’Ammiraglio non lo vidi mai; ma suo figlio, che doveva avere all’incirca la mia stessa età da bambino, ero destinato molto più tardi a conoscere e ad amare e a perdere, come amico e come alleato in una causa che allora sarebbe parsa fantasticamente lontana dalle nostre fanciullezze. E il Giudice ero destinato a vederlo sedere sul seggio del giudizio, e a deporre dinanzi a lui in favore di mio fratello, che stava sul banco degli imputati all’Old Bailey e fu trovato colpevole di patriottismo e di spirito pubblico.
La famiglia di mia madre aveva un cognome francese; benché la famiglia, per come la conobbi per esperienza oltre che per tradizione, fosse interamente inglese nella lingua e nelle abitudini sociali. C’era una sorta di leggenda familiare secondo cui discendevano da un soldato semplice francese delle Guerre Rivoluzionarie, che era stato prigioniero in Inghilterra e vi era rimasto; come certamente alcuni fecero. Ma dall’altro lato mia madre veniva da gente scozzese, che erano Keith di Aberdeen; e per diverse ragioni, in parte perché la mia nonna materna sopravvisse a lungo al marito ed era una personalità assai attraente, e in parte per una certa vividezza in ogni infusione di sangue o patriottismo scozzese, questa affiliazione settentrionale faceva forte presa sui miei affetti; e creò una sorta di Romanzo scozzese nella mia infanzia. Ma suo marito, il mio nonno materno che non vidi mai, deve essere stato una persona interessante anche lui; e qualcosa di un tipo storico, se non di un personaggio storico. Era stato uno dei vecchi predicatori laici wesleyani ed era così coinvolto nella controversia pubblica, una caratteristica che è discesa a suo nipote. Era anche uno dei capi del primo movimento Teetotale; una caratteristica che non lo è. Ma sono certissimo che ci fosse molto in lui, al di là di tutto ciò che è implicito nel mero parlare in pubblico o nell’astinenza. Ne sono certissimo, a causa di due osservazioni casuali che fece; che sono in effetti le uniche due osservazioni che io abbia mai sentito attribuirgli. Una volta, mentre i suoi figli inveivano contro la moda e la convenzione alla maniera di tutta la gioventù liberale, disse bruscamente: «Ah, parlano tanto della moda; ma la moda è civiltà.» E nell’altro caso, la stessa generazione nascente stava scagliando con leggerezza quel pessimismo che è possibile solo nel felice tempo della giovinezza. Criticavano il Ringraziamento Generale nel Libro delle Preghiere, e osservavano che parecchie persone hanno ben poca ragione di essere grate della propria creazione. E il vecchio, che era allora così vecchio da non parlare quasi mai affatto, disse d’improvviso, uscendo dal suo silenzio: «Ringrazierei Dio per la mia creazione se sapessi di essere un’anima perduta.»
Of the other side of my family I may say more when I come to my own memories; but I put this side of the matter first because there is so much more of it that I have received only at secondhand. And this is the part of the book which is forced to be biography and cannot be autobiography. It deals with the things that were just behind me and merely threw their shadows on my earliest path; the things I saw in reflection rather than reality. Of these there were more on my mother’s side; especially that historical interest in the house of Keith, which was mixed up with my general historical interest in things like the house of Argyll. But on my father’s side also there were legends; the nearest and most eminent figure being that Captain Chesterton, who was famous in his day as a reformer of prisons. He was a friend of Dickens, and, I suspect, himself something of a Dickens character. But indeed these first memories and rumours suggest that there were a good many Dickens characters in the days of Dickens. I am far from denying the inference; that a good many Dickens characters are humbugs. It would not be fair to say all I have said in praise of the old Victorian middle-class, without admitting that it did sometimes produce pretty hollow and pompous imposture. A solemn friend of my grandfather used to go for walks on Sunday carrying a prayer-book, without the least intention of going to church. And he calmly defended it by saying, with uplifted hand, “I do it, Chessie, as an example to others.” The man who did that was obviously a Dickens character. And I am disposed to think that, in being a Dickens character, he was in many ways rather preferable to many modern characters. Few modern men, however false, would dare to be so brazen. And I am not sure he was not really a more genuine fellow than the modern man who says vaguely that he has doubts or hates sermons, when he only wants to go and play golf. Hypocrisy itself was more sincere. Anyhow, it was more courageous.
What I can but call a Great Gusto breathed out of that epoch; something now only remembered in the rich and rollicking quotation of Swiveller and Micawber. But the point is that the savour of it could then be found in scores of quite worthy and obscure people; certainly much more worthy than the blatantly Pecksniffian person with the prayer-book; and much more obscure than the eccentric but efficient, and even eminent, prison governor and reformer. To use a trade term of the period, this indescribable sort of relish was by no means only a gentlemen’s relish. It was the effect, I think, of that popular humour, which is still perhaps our only really popular institution, working upon the remains of the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century orators, and the almost equally rhetorical rhetoric of the nineteenth-century poets, like Byron and Moore. Anyhow, it was evidently common to countless common or average people, and rather specially to commercial clerks. The clerk came afterwards to figure rather as a mere cheap Cockney with clipped speech; a sort of broken English that seems broken by accident; chipped rather than clipped. But there was a race that really dealt in periods as rounded as Christmas platters and punchbowls. My father told me of a fellow clerk of his youth, or boyhood, who took leave of the tavern or chop-house with a stately message of thanks, which he delivered in a big booming voice, before stalking into the street, “Tell Mrs. Bayfield that the steak was excellent; the potatoes done to a turn; in short a dinner fit for an Emperor.” Is not that exactly like “F.B.” in the moments when Thackeray was most Dickensian? From the same remote source, I recall another quite Dickensian scene; a bland, round-faced little man in spectacles, the sort that is always chaffed anywhere; and a fellow clerk named Carr, of more mysterious humours; both ghosts from my father’s time of apprenticeship. At intervals the more sombre clerk would call out across the office, “Mr. Hannay!” The round face, bright with its smile and spectacles, would bob up with never-failing freshness and expectation: “Yes, Mr. Carr.” Then Mr. Carr would fix him with a sphinxlike visage and say in hollow but resounding tones, “Boundless Space!” And then Mr. Carr would turn more briskly to the other clerks, shaking his head, and repeating in a hopeless tone, “He can’t grasp it!” I do not know what either of them would have thought of the idea of Professor Einstein entering the office and avenging Mr. Hannay on Mr. Carr, by suggesting that space is not boundless at all. The point is that there is this element of pomp and ritual about jokes; even about practical jokes; indeed even about practical deceptions. It was known in humbler walks, among mountebanks and even monstrosities, as well Dickens knew; and there was something as stately about the cheap-jacks demanding money as the orators demanding fame. One of my own earliest memories is of looking from a balcony above one of the big residential roads of a watering-place, and seeing a venerable party with white hair solemnly taking off a white hat as he walked down the centre of the street, and saying to nobody in particular in the loud voice of a lecturer, “When I first came into Cannon Street—I beg your pardon, Cannon Place …” a performance which he repeated every day, always falling into the same error to be followed by the same apology. This gave me, I know not why, enormous pleasure; partly, I think, from the feeling that a gigantic clockwork doll had been added to what Mr. Maurice Baring calls the puppet-show of memory. But his importance here is that the rest of his speech seemed all the more polished and faultless for that one strangely recurrent fault; and it always ended with a beautiful peroration, about recalling in the distant future, and in the hour of death, “the kindness I have met with in Cannon Place.” Later, I remember the same seaside paths paraded by a yet more loquacious public character wearing cap and gown, I fear with but little academic authority; but I think he marked a much later stage, because he was acrid and antagonistic, and appealed to his audience by calling them hypocrites and whited sepulchres; which had the curious effect upon that very English crowd of causing them to throw pennies into his mortar-board. But in the earlier stage which concerns me here, a glow of convivial courtesy covered everything; and the wing of friendship could never moult a feather. The amazing patience of our populace then went with a certain pomp, but it was a pompous geniality; and even their jeers were still jovial. Their mockery and their heroism still remain, heaven knows; but they no longer thus combine in the mock heroic. But anybody who heard, or heard of, the men I mention, will be certain to his dying day that Dick Swiveller did say, “When he who adores thee has left but the name—in case of letters or parcels,” or that the poor usher at the party did whisper to each lady in turn, “Had I a heart for falsehood framed I ne’er could injure you.” There was a glow in it; not to be copied by sparks, even when they really sparkle. The world is less gay for losing that solemnity.
Dell’altro lato della mia famiglia potrò dire di più quando verrò ai miei ricordi personali; ma metto questo lato della faccenda per primo perché ce n’è tanto di più che ho ricevuto solo di seconda mano. E questa è la parte del libro che è costretta a essere biografia e non può essere autobiografia. Tratta delle cose che erano appena dietro di me e gettavano soltanto le loro ombre sul mio primissimo sentiero; le cose che vidi in riflesso piuttosto che in realtà. Di queste ce n’erano di più dal lato di mia madre; specialmente quell’ interesse storico per la casata dei Keith, che era mescolato con il mio interesse storico generale per cose come la casata degli Argyll. Ma anche dal lato di mio padre c’erano leggende; la figura più vicina e più eminente essendo quel Capitano Chesterton, che fu famoso ai suoi tempi come riformatore delle prigioni. Era amico di Dickens e, sospetto, egli stesso qualcosa di un personaggio dickensiano. Ma in verità questi primi ricordi e queste dicerie suggeriscono che ci fossero parecchi personaggi dickensiani ai giorni di Dickens. Sono ben lungi dal negare l’inferenza; che parecchi personaggi dickensiani sono impostori. Non sarebbe giusto dire tutto ciò che ho detto in lode della vecchia classe media vittoriana, senza ammettere che essa talvolta produsse impostura piuttosto vuota e pomposa. Un solenne amico di mio nonno usava andare a passeggio la domenica portando un libro di preghiere, senza la minima intenzione di andare in chiesa. E lo giustificava con calma dicendo, a mano alzata: «Lo faccio, Chessie, come esempio per gli altri.» L’uomo che faceva questo era palesemente un personaggio dickensiano. E sono incline a pensare che, essendo un personaggio dickensiano, egli fosse per molti versi piuttosto preferibile a molti personaggi moderni. Pochi uomini moderni, per quanto falsi, oserebbero essere tanto sfacciati. E non sono sicuro che non fosse in realtà un tipo più genuino dell’uomo moderno che dice vagamente di avere dubbi o di odiare i sermoni, quando vuole soltanto andare a giocare a golf. L’ipocrisia stessa era più sincera. Comunque, era più coraggiosa.
Ciò che non posso non chiamare un Grande Gusto emanava da quell’epoca; qualcosa ora ricordato soltanto nella ricca e sfrenata citazione di Swiveller e Micawber. Ma il punto è che il sapore di ciò si poteva allora trovare in una moltitudine di persone del tutto degne e oscure; di certo assai più degne della persona sfacciatamente pecksniffiana col libro di preghiere; e assai più oscure dell’eccentrico ma efficiente, e persino eminente, governatore e riformatore di prigioni. Per usare un termine gergale del periodo, questo indescrivibile genere di gusto non era affatto soltanto un gusto da gentiluomini. Era l’effetto, credo, di quell’umorismo popolare, che è forse ancora la nostra unica istituzione davvero popolare, agente sui resti della retorica degli oratori del Settecento, e sulla retorica quasi altrettanto retorica dei poeti dell’Ottocento, come Byron e Moore. Comunque, era evidentemente comune a innumerevoli persone comuni o mediocri, e piuttosto in modo particolare agli impiegati di commercio. L’impiegato venne poi a figurare piuttosto come un mero e dozzinale Cockney dal parlare tronco; una sorta d’inglese spezzato che sembra spezzato per caso; scheggiato piuttosto che troncato. Ma c’era una razza che davvero trattava in periodi rotondi come i piatti e le zuppiere del Natale. Mio padre mi raccontò di un compagno impiegato della sua giovinezza, o fanciullezza, che si congedava dalla taverna o dalla trattoria con un maestoso messaggio di ringraziamento, che pronunciava con voce grossa e tonante, prima d’incamminarsi impettito in strada: «Dite alla signora Bayfield che la bistecca era eccellente; le patate cotte a puntino; in breve, un pranzo degno di un Imperatore.» Non è esattamente come «F.B.» nei momenti in cui Thackeray era più dickensiano? Dalla stessa remota fonte, rammento un’altra scena del tutto dickensiana; un mite ometto dal viso tondo con gli occhiali, il tipo che viene sempre canzonato dovunque; e un compagno impiegato di nome Carr, di umori più misteriosi; entrambi fantasmi del tempo di apprendistato di mio padre. A intervalli il più cupo dei due impiegati gridava attraverso l’ufficio: «Signor Hannay!» Il volto tondo, luminoso col suo sorriso e i suoi occhiali, spuntava con mai smentita freschezza e aspettativa: «Sì, signor Carr.» Allora il signor Carr lo fissava con una faccia sfingea e diceva con toni cavi ma risonanti: «Spazio Sconfinato!» E poi il signor Carr si voltava più bruscamente verso gli altri impiegati, scuotendo il capo, e ripetendo in tono disperato: «Non riesce ad afferrarlo!» Non so che cosa avrebbero pensato l’uno o l’altro dell’idea del Professor Einstein che entra nell’ufficio e vendica il signor Hannay sul signor Carr, suggerendo che lo spazio non è affatto sconfinato. Il punto è che c’è questo elemento di pompa e di rituale negli scherzi; persino negli scherzi pratici; anzi persino negli inganni pratici. Era noto in ambienti più umili, tra saltimbanchi e persino mostruosità, come ben sapeva Dickens; e c’era qualcosa di altrettanto maestoso nei ciarlatani che reclamavano denaro quanto negli oratori che reclamavano fama. Uno dei miei primissimi ricordi è di quando guardavo da un balcone sopra una delle grandi strade residenziali di una stazione balneare, e vedevo un venerando tale dai capelli bianchi togliersi solennemente un cappello bianco mentre camminava in mezzo alla strada, e diceva a nessuno in particolare con la voce sonora di un conferenziere: «Quando venni per la prima volta in Cannon Street… chiedo scusa, Cannon Place…» una performance che ripeteva ogni giorno, cadendo sempre nello stesso errore, seguito dalla stessa scusa. Questo mi dava, non so perché, un piacere enorme; in parte, credo, dalla sensazione che una gigantesca bambola a orologeria fosse stata aggiunta a ciò che il signor Maurice Baring chiama il teatro delle marionette della Memoria. Ma la sua importanza qui è che il resto del suo discorso pareva tanto più forbito e impeccabile per quell’unico errore stranamente ricorrente; e finiva sempre con una bella perorazione, sul rammentare nel remoto futuro, e nell’ora della morte, «la gentilezza che ho incontrato in Cannon Place.» Più tardi, ricordo gli stessi sentieri sul mare percorsi da un personaggio pubblico ancor più loquace che portava tocco e toga, temo con ben poca autorità accademica; ma credo che egli segnasse uno stadio assai più tardo, perché era acre e antagonista, e si appellava al suo pubblico chiamandoli ipocriti e sepolcri imbiancati; il che aveva sul quel pubblico assai inglese il curioso effetto di indurli a gettare monetine nel suo tocco. Ma nello stadio precedente che qui mi riguarda, un bagliore di conviviale cortesia ricopriva ogni cosa; e l’ala dell’Amicizia non poteva mai perdere una piuma. La sorprendente pazienza del nostro popolino andava allora con una certa pompa, ma era una pomposa cordialità; e persino i loro scherni erano ancora gioviali. La loro derisione e il loro Eroismo restano ancora, il cielo lo sa; ma non si combinano più così nell’eroicomico. Ma chiunque abbia udito, o sentito parlare, degli uomini che menziono, sarà certo fino al giorno della sua morte che Dick Swiveller disse davvero: «Quando colui che ti adora non ha lasciato che il nome — in caso di lettere o pacchi», o che il povero maestrino alla festa bisbigliò davvero a ogni signora a turno: «Se avessi un cuore foggiato per la falsità, mai potrei farti torto.» C’era un bagliore in ciò; non imitabile dagli sfavillanti, anche quando sfavillano davvero. Il mondo è meno gaio per aver perduto quella solennità.
Another real Victorian virtue, not to be discredited by many imaginary Victorian virtues, belongs not so much to my generation as to my father’s and grandfather’s; or at least, if I was specially lucky, to my father and grandfather. It should, therefore, be mentioned in this place; if it is illustrated by incidents within my own memory. My own people in any case had a strict standard of commercial probity; but I fancy the standard was stricter in all that more stolid commercial class than in a later time, when the notion of success was mixed up not only with cynicism but with a queer sort of piratical romance. The change may be felt, as in the word “respectable,” in the very atmosphere of certain words. The favourite modern ideal in morals and even in religion, especially the religion popularised in the papers for millions of modern business men, is the word “adventure.” The most menacing monster in morals, for the business men of my old middle-class, was branded with the title of “adventurer.” In later times, I fancy, the world has defended some pretty indefensible adventurers by implying the glamour of adventure. Anyhow, this is not merely my own belated opinion in an age of reaction. It was the opinion of the best even of the old optimists and orthodox economists, who lived when the change was beginning, and believed they were living in an age of reform. My own father and uncles were entirely of the period that believed in progress, and generally in new things, all the more because they were finding it increasingly difficult to believe in old things; and in some cases in anything at all. But though as Liberals they believed in progress, as honest men they often testified to deterioration.
I remember my father telling me how much he had begun to be pestered by great swarms of people wanting private commissions upon transactions, in which they were supposed to represent another interest. He mentioned it not only with the deepest disgust, but more or less as if it were a novelty as well as a nuisance. He was himself in the habit of meeting these unpleasant people with a humorously simulated burst of heartiness and even hilarity; but it was the only sort of occasion on which his humour might be called grim and even ferocious. When the agent, bargaining for some third party, hinted that an acceptable trifle would smooth the negotiations, he would say with formidable geniality, “Oh, certainly! certainly! So long as we are all friends and everything is open and above-board! I am sure your principals and employers will be delighted to hear from me that I’m paying you a small—” He would then be interrupted with a sort of shriek of fear and the kind diplomatic gentleman would cover his tracks as best he could in terror. “And doesn’t that prove to you,” said my father with innocent rationalism, “the immorality of such a proposal?”
My Uncle Sidney, who was his partner in the business, was a more unanswerable witness, because a more unwilling witness. My father was very universal in his interests and very moderate in his opinions; he was one of the few men I ever knew who really listened to argument; moreover, he was more traditional than many in the liberal age; he loved many old things, and had especially a passion for the French cathedrals and all the Gothic architecture opened up by Ruskin in that time. It was not quite so inconceivable that he might admit another side to modern progress. But my uncle was the very reverse of a laudator temporis acti. He was one of those sensitive and conscientious men, very typical of the modern world, who had the same scrupulous sense of the duty of accepting new things, and sympathising with the young, that older moralists may have had about preserving old things and obeying the elders. I remember him assuring me quite eagerly of the hopeful thoughts aroused in him by the optimistic official prophecies of the book called Looking Backwards a rather ironical title, seeing that the one thing forbidden to such futurists was Looking Backwards. And the whole philosophy, afterwards sublimated by the genius of Mr. Wells, was the duty of Looking Forwards. My uncle, much more than my father, was this scrupulously sanguine sort of man; and the last man in the world to hold any brief for the good old times. But he was also a quite transparently truthful man; and I remember him telling me, with that wrinkle of worry in his brow, which confessed his subconscious and sensitive anxiety, “I’m bound to confess that commercial morality has got steadily worse through my lifetime.”
Of course I admit, or rather I boast, that in anything like sympathy with any such Utopia, such individuals were in advance of the times. But I boast much more that, in the great modern growth of high finance, they were behind the times. The class as a whole was, indeed, dangerously deaf and blind upon the former question of economic exploitation; but it was relatively more vigilant and sensitive upon the latter question of financial decency. It never occurred to these people that anybody could possibly admire a man for being what we call “daring” in speculation, any more than a woman for being what we call “daring” in dress. There was something of the same atmospheric change in both cases. The absence of social ambition had a great deal to do with it. When the restrictions really were stuffy and stupid, they were largely those of ignorance; but this was nothing like so evil and ruinous as the ignorance of the real wrongs and rights of the working classes. Heaven knows, it is even possible that in some cases the reader knows, that I am no admirer of the complacent commercial prosperity of England in the nineteenth century. At the best it was an individualism that ended by destroying individuality; an industrialism which has done nothing except poison the very meaning of the word industry. At the worst it turned at last into a vulgar victory of sweating and swindling. I am only pointing out a particular point about a particular group or class, now extinct; that if they were ignorant of, or often indifferent to the sweating, they were really indignant at the swindling. In the same way, few will accuse me of Puritanism; but I think it due to the Puritan tradition to say that certain notions of social sobriety did have something to do with delaying the full triumph of flashy finance and the mere antics of avarice. Anyhow, there has been a change from a middle-class that trusted a business man to look after money because he was dull and careful, to one that trusts a business man to get more money because he is dashing and worldly. It has not always asked itself for whom he would get more money, or whose money he would get.
Un’altra vera virtù vittoriana, da non screditare a causa di molte immaginarie virtù vittoriane, appartiene non tanto alla mia generazione quanto a quella di mio padre e di mio nonno; o almeno, se fui particolarmente fortunato, a mio padre e a mio nonno. Dovrebbe, dunque, essere menzionata in questo luogo; se è illustrata da episodi entro la mia stessa Memoria. La mia gente in ogni caso aveva un rigido criterio di probità commerciale; ma immagino che il criterio fosse più rigido in tutta quella più flemmatica classe commerciale che in un tempo successivo, quando la nozione di successo si mescolò non solo al cinismo ma a una strana sorta di Romanticismo piratesco. Il mutamento si può avvertire, come nella parola «rispettabile», nella stessa atmosfera di certe parole. L’ideale moderno prediletto nella morale e perfino nella religione, specialmente la religione resa popolare nei giornali per milioni di uomini d’affari moderni, è la parola «avventura». Il più minaccioso Mostro nella morale, per gli uomini d’affari della mia vecchia classe media, era bollato col titolo di «avventuriero». In tempi successivi, immagino, il mondo ha difeso certi avventurieri piuttosto indifendibili insinuando il fascino dell’avventura. Comunque, questa non è soltanto la mia tardiva opinione in un’età di reazione. Era l’opinione dei migliori perfino tra i vecchi ottimisti e gli ortodossi economisti, che vissero quando il mutamento cominciava, e credevano di vivere in un’età di Riforma. Mio padre stesso e i miei zii erano interamente del periodo che credeva nel progresso, e in genere nelle cose nuove, tanto più perché trovavano sempre più difficile credere nelle cose vecchie; e in certi casi in qualsiasi cosa. Ma benché come Liberali credessero nel progresso, da uomini onesti testimoniavano spesso il deterioramento.
Ricordo mio padre raccontarmi quanto avesse cominciato a essere assediato da grandi sciami di persone che volevano commissioni private su transazioni in cui si supponeva rappresentassero un altro interesse. Lo menzionava non solo col più profondo disgusto, ma più o meno come se fosse una novità oltre che una seccatura. Egli stesso era solito accogliere queste sgradevoli persone con un umoristico e simulato scoppio di cordialità e persino d’ilarità; ma era l’unico genere di occasione in cui il suo umorismo poteva dirsi tetro e persino feroce. Quando l’agente, mercanteggiando per qualche terza parte, accennava che una gradita inezia avrebbe agevolato le trattative, egli diceva con formidabile cordialità: «Oh, certamente! certamente! Finché siamo tutti amici e tutto è aperto e alla luce del sole! Sono sicuro che i vostri mandanti e datori di lavoro saranno lieti di sapere da me che vi sto pagando un piccolo…» A quel punto veniva interrotto da una sorta di strillo di paura, e il gentile e diplomatico signore copriva le proprie tracce come meglio poteva, atterrito. «E non vi prova questo,» diceva mio padre con innocente razionalismo, «l’immoralità di una simile proposta?»
Mio Zio Sidney, che era suo socio nell’attività, era un testimone più inconfutabile, perché testimone più riluttante. Mio padre era assai universale nei suoi interessi e assai moderato nelle sue opinioni; era uno dei pochi uomini che io abbia mai conosciuto che davvero ascoltasse un ragionamento; per giunta, era più tradizionalista di molti nell’età liberale; amava molte cose antiche, e aveva in special modo una passione per le cattedrali francesi e per tutta l’architettura gotica dischiusa da Ruskin in quel tempo. Non era del tutto inconcepibile che egli ammettesse un altro lato del progresso moderno. Ma mio zio era proprio l’opposto di un laudator temporis acti. Era uno di quegli uomini sensibili e scrupolosi, assai tipici del mondo moderno, che avevano lo stesso scrupoloso senso del dovere di accettare cose nuove, e di simpatizzare con i giovani, che i moralisti più anziani potevano aver avuto riguardo al preservare cose vecchie e all’obbedire agli anziani. Ricordo che mi assicurava con vera premura i pensieri di speranza suscitati in lui dalle ottimistiche profezie ufficiali del libro intitolato Looking Backwards, titolo piuttosto ironico, visto che l’unica cosa proibita a simili futuristi era il Guardare Indietro. E l’intera filosofia, sublimata più tardi dal genio del signor Wells, era il dovere di Guardare Avanti. Mio zio, assai più di mio padre, era questo tipo scrupolosamente sanguigno d’uomo; e l’ultimo uomo al mondo a difendere i bei tempi andati. Ma era anche un uomo veritiero con tutta trasparenza; e ricordo che egli mi diceva, con quella ruga di preoccupazione sulla fronte, che confessava la sua subconscia e sensibile ansia: «Sono costretto a confessare che la moralità commerciale è peggiorata costantemente nell’arco della mia vita.»
Naturalmente ammetto, o piuttosto mi vanto, che in qualcosa come la simpatia per una qualunque simile Utopia, tali individui erano in anticipo sui tempi. Ma mi vanto assai di più che, nella grande crescita moderna dell’alta finanza, essi erano indietro rispetto ai tempi. La classe nel suo insieme era, in effetti, pericolosamente sorda e cieca sulla prima questione dello sfruttamento economico; ma era relativamente più vigile e sensibile sulla seconda questione della decenza finanziaria. Non veniva mai in mente a questa gente che qualcuno potesse ammirare un uomo per essere ciò che chiamiamo «audace» nella speculazione, non più di quanto ammirasse una donna per essere ciò che chiamiamo «audace» nel vestire. C’era qualcosa dello stesso mutamento atmosferico in entrambi i casi. L’assenza di Ambizione sociale aveva molto a che fare con ciò. Quando le restrizioni erano davvero soffocanti e stupide, erano in gran parte quelle dell’ignoranza; ma ciò non era affatto tanto malvagio e rovinoso quanto l’ignoranza dei veri torti e diritti delle classi lavoratrici. Il cielo sa, è persino possibile che in certi casi il lettore sappia, che io non sono un ammiratore della compiaciuta prosperità commerciale dell’Inghilterra nell’Ottocento. Nel migliore dei casi era un Individualismo che finì col distruggere l’individualità; un industrialismo che non ha fatto nulla se non avvelenare il significato stesso della parola industria. Nel peggiore dei casi si tramutò infine in una volgare vittoria dello sfruttamento e della truffa. Sto solo additando un punto particolare riguardo a un particolare gruppo o classe, ora estinto; che, se erano ignari, o spesso indifferenti, allo sfruttamento, erano davvero indignati per la truffa. Allo stesso modo, pochi mi accuseranno di Puritanesimo; ma credo sia dovuto alla tradizione puritana dire che certe nozioni di sobrietà sociale ebbero davvero qualcosa a che fare col ritardare il pieno trionfo della finanza sgargiante e delle mere buffonate dell’avarizia. Comunque, c’è stato un mutamento da una classe media che si fidava di un uomo d’affari perché badasse al denaro in quanto ottuso e cauto, a una che si fida di un uomo d’affari perché faccia più denaro in quanto brillante e mondano. Non sempre si è chiesta per chi egli avrebbe fatto più denaro, o di chi fosse il denaro che avrebbe fatto.
I know well I was very fortunate in my own family. But even those less fortunate were not subject to the special evils now commonly labelled Victorian. Indeed, in the modern sense, Victorian was not at all Victorian. It was a period of increasing strain. It was the very reverse of solid respectability; because its ethics and theology were wearing thin throughout. It may have been orderly compared with what came after; but not compared with the centuries that came before. It sometimes boasted of being domestic; but the Englishman’s home was not half so domestic as that of the horrid foreigner; the profligate Frenchman. It was the age when the Englishman sent all his sons to boarding-school and sent all his servants to Coventry. I cannot imagine why anybody ever said that the Englishman’s house was his castle; since he was one of the few Europeans who did not even own his house; and his house was avowedly a dull box of brick, of all the houses the least like a castle. Above all, so far from being stiff with orthodox religion, it was almost the first irreligious home in all human history. Theirs was the first generation that ever asked its children to worship the hearth without the altar. This was equally true, whether they went to church at eleven o’clock, with more decent thoroughness than the gay deceiver with the prayer-book, or were reverently agnostic or latitudinarian, as was much of my own circle. For the most part, it was family life stripped of its festivals and shrines and private cults, which had been its poetry in the past. It was a joke to talk of the heavy father’s heavy furniture, and call the chairs and tables his household gods. It was the fact that he was the first man, for whom there were no household gods but only furniture.
That was the duller side; but there has been even more exaggeration about the darker side. I mean that modern novelists and others have started a trick of writing as if the old middle-class home was almost always a private lunatic asylum, with the lunatic in charge; as in the case of the exceedingly Mad Hatter who inhabited Hatter’s Castle. This is a grotesque exaggeration; there were parents with this savage degree of selfishness; I recall not many more than three of them in the whole of our old social circle; but the wrong associations are attached even to them. A few of them may have been religious fanatics. I remember one, who locked up his daughters like prisoners; and one of them said to me, “You see he thinks nobody else can think at all, except himself and Herbert Spencer.” I remember another who was an extreme Radical, a champion of liberty everywhere except at home. The point is of some historic importance. Tyrants, religious or irreligious, turn up anywhere. But this type of tyrant was the product of the precise moment when a middle-class man still had children and servants to control; but no longer had creeds or guilds or kings or priests or anything to control him. He was already an anarchist to those above him; but still an authoritarian to those below. But he was an abnormal fellow anyhow; and none of my people bore the least resemblance to him.
What Puritanic element there was in this forgotten society must certainly be allowed for as a part of the picture. It was mostly, among my people, a rather illogical disapproval of certain forms of luxury and expenditure. Their tables would groan under far grander dinners than many aristocrats eat today. But they had, for instance, a fixed feeling that there was something rather raffish about taking a cab. It was probably connected with their sensitive pride about not aping the aristocracy. I can remember my grandfather, when he was nearly eighty and able to afford any number of cabs, standing in the pouring rain while seven or eight crowded omnibuses went by; and afterwards whispering to my father (in a hushed voice lest the blasphemy be heard by the young), “If three more omnibuses had gone by, upon my soul I think I should have taken a cab.” In the matter of driving about in cabs, I cannot claim to have kept the family escutcheon unspotted, or to have lived up to the high standard of my sires. But in the matter of their motive for not doing so, I am disposed to defend them, or at least to say that they are much misunderstood. They were the last descendants of Mrs. Gilpin, who told the chaise to stop a few doors from her house, lest the neighbours should think her proud. I am not sure that she was not a healthier person than the smart lady who will be seen in anybody’s Rolls Royce, lest the neighbours should think her humble.
Such, so far as I know it, was the social landscape in which I first found myself; and such were the people among whom I was born. I am sorry if the landscape or the people appear disappointingly respectable and even reasonable, and deficient in all those unpleasant qualities that make a biography really popular. I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and mildly impecunious uncle; and that I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am. I am not clear about what that is; but I am pretty sure that most of it is my own fault. And I am compelled to confess that I look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that should doubtless be reserved for the Utopias of the Futurist. Yet the landscape, as I see it now, was not altogether without a visionary and symbolic character. And among all the objects in that landscape, I find myself returning at the last to those which I mentioned first. In one way and another, those things have come to stand for so many other things, in the acted allegory of a human existence; the little church of my baptism and the waterworks, the bare, blind, dizzy tower of brick that seemed, to my first upward starings, to take hold upon the stars. Perhaps there was something in the confused and chaotic notion of a tower of water; as if the sea itself could stand on one end like a water-spout. Certainly later, though I hardly know how late, there came into my mind some fancy of a colossal water-snake that might be the Great Sea Serpent, and had something of the nightmare nearness of a dragon in a dream. And, over against it, the small church rose in a spire like a spear; and I have always been pleased to remember that it was dedicated to St. George.
So bene di essere stato assai fortunato nella mia stessa famiglia. Ma perfino quelli meno fortunati non erano soggetti agli speciali mali ora comunemente etichettati come vittoriani. In effetti, nel senso moderno, il Vittoriano non era affatto vittoriano. Era un periodo di crescente tensione. Era proprio l’opposto della solida rispettabilità; perché la sua etica e la sua teologia si andavano assottigliando dappertutto. Poteva essere ordinato in confronto a ciò che venne dopo; ma non in confronto ai secoli che vennero prima. Talvolta si vantava di essere domestico; ma la Casa dell’inglese non era neppure la metà tanto domestica di quella dell’orrido straniero; il dissoluto francese. Era l’età in cui l’inglese mandava tutti i suoi figli in collegio e mandava tutti i suoi domestici a quel paese. Non riesco a immaginare perché mai qualcuno abbia detto che la casa dell’inglese fosse il suo Castello; giacché egli era uno dei pochi europei che non possedeva neppure la propria casa; e la sua casa era dichiaratamente una scatola di mattoni, la meno simile a un Castello tra tutte le case. Soprattutto, ben lungi dall’essere impettito di religione ortodossa, esso fu quasi il primo focolare irreligioso in tutta la storia umana. La loro fu la prima generazione che abbia mai chiesto ai propri figli di venerare il focolare senza l’altare. Ciò era ugualmente vero, sia che andassero in chiesa alle undici in punto, con più decorosa scrupolosità del gaio ingannatore col libro di preghiere, sia che fossero riverentemente agnostici o latitudinari, come lo era gran parte della mia cerchia. Per la maggior parte, era vita familiare spogliata delle sue feste e dei suoi santuari e dei suoi culti privati, che erano stati la sua poesia nel passato. Era uno scherzo parlare del pesante mobilio del pesante padre di famiglia, e chiamare le sedie e i tavoli i suoi dèi domestici. Era il fatto che egli era il primo uomo, per il quale non c’erano dèi domestici, ma soltanto mobilio.
Quello era il lato più insulso; ma c’è stata perfino più esagerazione riguardo al lato più tenebroso. Intendo che i romanzieri moderni e altri hanno preso l’abitudine di scrivere come se la vecchia Casa della classe media fosse quasi sempre un manicomio privato, col matto al comando; come nel caso dell’oltremodo Matto Cappellaio che abitava Hatter’s Castle. Questa è una grottesca esagerazione; c’erano genitori con questo selvaggio grado di egoismo; ne rammento non molto più di tre in tutta la nostra vecchia cerchia sociale; ma perfino a loro sono attribuite le associazioni sbagliate. Alcuni di essi potevano essere fanatici religiosi. Ne ricordo uno, che rinchiudeva le figlie come prigioniere; e una di esse mi disse: «Vedi, egli pensa che nessun altro sappia pensare affatto, tranne lui stesso e Herbert Spencer.» Ne ricordo un altro che era un Radicale estremo, un campione della libertà dappertutto tranne che a Casa. Il punto è di una certa importanza storica. I tiranni, religiosi o irreligiosi, spuntano dovunque. Ma questo tipo di Tiranno era il prodotto del preciso momento in cui un uomo della classe media aveva ancora figli e domestici da tenere a freno; ma non aveva più credi o corporazioni o re o preti o alcunché a tenere a freno lui. Era già un anarchico verso quelli sopra di lui; ma pur sempre un autoritario verso quelli sotto di lui. Ma era comunque un tipo anomalo; e nessuno dei miei recava la minima somiglianza con lui.
Quale elemento puritano ci fosse in questa società dimenticata va certo tenuto in conto come parte del quadro. Era per lo più, tra la mia gente, una disapprovazione piuttosto illogica di certe forme di lusso e di spesa. Le loro tavole gemevano sotto pranzi assai più grandiosi di quanti molti aristocratici ne mangino oggi. Ma avevano, per esempio, la ferma sensazione che ci fosse qualcosa di piuttosto sconveniente nel prendere una carrozza. Era probabilmente legato al loro sensibile orgoglio di non scimmiottare l’aristocrazia. Ricordo mio nonno, quando aveva quasi ottant’anni e poteva permettersi un numero qualsiasi di carrozze, stare in piedi sotto la pioggia scrosciante mentre sette o otto omnibus affollati passavano; e poi bisbigliare a mio padre (a voce bassa, per timore che la bestemmia fosse udita dai giovani): «Se fossero passati altri tre omnibus, sull’anima mia credo che avrei preso una carrozza.» In materia di andare in giro in carrozza, non posso pretendere di aver mantenuto lo stemma di famiglia senza macchia, o di essere stato all’altezza dell’alto criterio dei miei avi. Ma quanto al loro motivo per non farlo, sono incline a difenderli, o almeno a dire che sono assai fraintesi. Erano gli ultimi discendenti della signora Gilpin, che disse al calesse di fermarsi a poche porte dalla sua casa, per timore che i vicini la credessero orgogliosa. Non sono sicuro che non fosse una persona più sana della smart lady che si farà vedere nella Rolls Royce di chiunque, per timore che i vicini la credano umile.
Tale, per quanto ne so, era il paesaggio sociale in cui mi trovai per la prima volta; e tali erano le persone tra cui nacqui. Mi dispiace se il paesaggio o le persone appaiono deludentemente rispettabili e persino ragionevoli, e privi di tutte quelle sgradevoli qualità che rendono una biografia davvero popolare. Mi rincresce di non avere alcun padre tetro e selvaggio da offrire allo sguardo del pubblico come vera causa di tutta la mia tragica eredità; nessuna madre dal viso pallido e parzialmente avvelenata, i cui istinti suicidi mi abbiano maledetto con le tentazioni del temperamento artistico. Mi rincresce che non ci fosse nella gamma della nostra famiglia nulla di molto più pepato di un remoto e blandamente squattrinato zio; e che non possa compiere il mio dovere di vero moderno, maledicendo chiunque mi abbia fatto ciò che sono. Non ho le idee chiare su che cosa ciò sia; ma sono piuttosto sicuro che la maggior parte di esso sia colpa mia. E sono costretto a confessare che ripenso a quel paesaggio dei miei primi giorni con un piacere che senza dubbio andrebbe riservato alle Utopie del Futurista. Eppure il paesaggio, come lo vedo ora, non era del tutto privo di un carattere visionario e simbolico. E tra tutti gli oggetti di quel paesaggio, mi ritrovo a tornare infine a quelli che ho menzionato per primi. In un modo o nell’altro, quelle cose sono giunte a rappresentare tante altre cose, nell’Allegoria recitata di un’esistenza umana; la chiesetta del mio battesimo e l’acquedotto, la nuda, cieca, vertiginosa torre di mattoni che pareva, ai miei primi sguardi rivolti in alto, afferrare le stelle. Forse c’era qualcosa nella confusa e caotica nozione di una torre d’acqua; come se il mare stesso potesse stare ritto su un’estremità come una tromba d’acqua. Certo più tardi, benché non sappia bene quanto tardi, entrò nella mia mente una qualche fantasia di un colossale serpente d’acqua che potesse essere il Grande Serpente di Mare, e aveva qualcosa dell’incubica vicinanza di un drago in un sogno. E, di fronte ad essa, la chiesetta si levava in una guglia come una lancia; e mi ha sempre fatto piacere ricordare che era dedicata a San Giorgio.
II
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN KEY
The very first thing I can ever remember seeing with my own eyes was a young man walking across a bridge. He had a curly moustache and an attitude of confidence verging on swagger. He carried in his hand a disproportionately large key of a shining yellow metal and wore a large golden or gilded crown. The bridge he was crossing sprang on the one side from the edge of a highly perilous mountain chasm, the peaks of the range rising fantastically in the distance; and at the other end it joined the upper part of the tower of an almost excessively castellated castle. In the castle tower there was one window, out of which a young lady was looking. I cannot remember in the least what she looked like; but I will do battle with anyone who denies her superlative good looks.
To those who may object that such a scene is rare in the home life of house-agents living immediately to the north of Kensington High Street, in the later seventies of the last century, I shall be compelled to admit, not that the scene was unreal, but that I saw it through a window more wonderful than the window in the tower; through the proscenium of a toy theatre constructed by my father; and that (if I am really to be pestered about such irrelevant details) the young man in the crown was about six inches high and proved on investigation to be made of cardboard. But it is strictly true to say that I saw him before I can remember seeing anybody else; and that, so far as my memory is concerned, this was the sight on which my eyes first opened in this world. And the scene has to me a sort of aboriginal authenticity impossible to describe; something at the back of all my thoughts; like the very back-scene of the theatre of things. I have no shadow of recollection of what the young man was doing on the bridge, or of what he proposed to do with the key; though a later and wearier knowledge of literature and legend hints to me that he was not improbably going to release the lady from captivity. It is a not unamusing detail of psychology that, though I can remember no other characters in the story, I do remember noting that the crowned gentleman had a moustache and no beard, with a vague inference that there was another crowned gentleman who had a beard as well. We may safely guess, I imagine, that the bearded one was by way of being a wicked king; and we should not need much more converging evidence to convict him of having locked up the lady in the tower. All the rest is gone; scenes, subject, story, characters; but that one scene glows in my memory like a glimpse of some incredible paradise; and, for all I know, I shall still remember it when all other memory is gone out of my mind.
Apart from the fact of it being my first memory, I have several reasons for putting it first. I am no psychologist, thank God; but if psychologists are still saying what ordinary sane people have always said—that early impressions count considerably in life—I recognise a sort of symbol of all that I happen to like in imagery and ideas. All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary-line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window. To the grief of all grave dramatic critics, I will still assert that the perfect drama must strive to rise to the higher ecstasy of the peep-show. I have also a pretty taste in abysses and bottomless chasms and everything else that emphasises a fine shade of distinction between one thing and another; and the warm affection I have always felt for bridges is connected with the fact that the dark and dizzy arch accentuates the chasm even more than the chasm itself. I can no longer behold the beauty of the princess; but I can see it in the bridge that the prince crossed to reach her. And I believe that in feeling these things from the first, I was feeling the fragmentary suggestions of a philosophy I have since found to be the truth. For it is upon that point of truth that there might perhaps be a quarrel between the more material psychologists and myself. If any man tells me that I only take pleasure in the mysteries of the window and the bridge because I saw these models of them when I was a baby, I shall take the liberty of telling him that he has not thought the thing out. To begin with, I must have seen thousands of other things before as well as after; and there must have been an element of selection and some reason for selection. And, what is still more obvious, to date the occasion does not even begin to deal with the fact. If some laborious reader of little books on child-psychology cries out to me in glee and cunning, “You only like romantic things like toy-theatres because your father showed you a toy-theatre in your childhood,” I shall reply with gentle and Christian patience, “Yes, fool, yes. Undoubtedly your explanation is, in that sense, the true one. But what you are saying, in your witty way, is simply that I associate these things with happiness because I was so happy. It does not even begin to consider the question of why I was so happy. Why should looking through a square hole, at yellow pasteboard, lift anybody into the seventh heaven of happiness at any time of life? Why should it specially do so at that time of life? That is the psychological fact that you have to explain; and I have never seen any sort of rational explanation.”
I apologise for this parenthesis; and for mentioning child-psychology or anything else that can bring a blush to the cheek. But it happens to be a point on which I think some of our psycho-analysts display rather unblushing cheek. I do not wish my remarks confused with the horrible and degrading heresy that our minds are merely manufactured by accidental conditions, and therefore have no ultimate relation to truth at all. With all possible apologies to the freethinkers, I still propose to hold myself free to think. And anybody who will think for two minutes will see that this thought is the end of all thinking. It is useless to argue at all, if all our conclusions are warped by our conditions. Nobody can correct anybody’s bias, if all mind is all bias.
II
L’UOMO DALLA CHIAVE D’ORO
La primissima cosa che io ricordi d’aver mai visto coi miei occhi fu un giovane che attraversava un ponte. Aveva i baffi arricciati e un’aria di sicurezza che sfiorava la spavalderia. Reggeva in mano una chiave sproporzionatamente grande, d’un lucente metallo giallo, e portava una grande corona d’oro o dorata. Il ponte che stava attraversando si slanciava da un lato dall’orlo d’un abisso montano quanto mai periglioso, con le vette della catena che si levavano fantastiche in lontananza; e all’altro capo si congiungeva alla parte superiore della torre d’un castello fin troppo merlato. Nella torre del castello c’era un’unica finestra, dalla quale una giovane dama guardava fuori. Non rammento minimamente che aspetto avesse; ma darò battaglia a chiunque neghi la sua bellezza superlativa.
A coloro che potessero obiettare che una simile scena è rara nella vita domestica degli agenti immobiliari che abitano immediatamente a nord di Kensington High Street, negli ultimi anni Settanta del secolo scorso, sarò costretto ad ammettere, non che la scena fosse irreale, ma che la vidi attraverso una finestra più meravigliosa della finestra nella torre; attraverso il boccascena d’un teatrino di cartone costruito da mio padre; e che (se davvero mi si deve tormentare con simili dettagli irrilevanti) il giovane con la corona era alto circa sei pollici e, a un esame più attento, risultò fatto di cartone. Ma è rigorosamente vero dire che lo vidi prima di poter ricordare d’aver visto chiunque altro; e che, per quanto concerne la mia memoria, quello fu lo spettacolo su cui i miei occhi si aprirono per la prima volta in questo mondo. E quella scena ha per me una sorta d’autenticità primigenia impossibile da descrivere; qualcosa che sta sul fondo di tutti i miei pensieri; come lo sfondo stesso del teatro delle cose. Non ho ombra di ricordo di ciò che il giovane facesse sul ponte, o di ciò che intendesse fare con la chiave; benché una più tarda e più stanca conoscenza della letteratura e della leggenda mi suggerisca che, non improbabilmente, stava per liberare la dama dalla prigionia. È un particolare non privo di spasso, dal punto di vista psicologico, che, pur non ricordando nessun altro personaggio della storia, ricordi tuttavia d’aver notato che il gentiluomo coronato aveva i baffi e non la barba, con la vaga inferenza che vi fosse un altro gentiluomo coronato che aveva la barba anche lui. Possiamo, immagino, indovinare senza rischio che il barbuto era una specie di malvagio re; e non ci occorrerebbe molta più prova convergente per condannarlo d’aver rinchiuso la dama nella torre. Tutto il resto è svanito; scene, soggetto, storia, personaggi; ma quell’unica scena risplende nella mia memoria come lo scorcio d’un incredibile paradiso; e, per quanto ne so, la ricorderò ancora quando ogni altra memoria sarà uscita dalla mia mente.
A parte il fatto d’essere il mio primo ricordo, ho parecchie ragioni per porlo per primo. Non sono uno psicologo, grazie a Dio; ma se gli psicologi vanno ancora dicendo ciò che le persone comuni e sane hanno sempre detto—che le prime impressioni contano considerevolmente nella vita—io riconosco una sorta di simbolo di tutto ciò che mi accade d’amare nelle immagini e nelle idee. Per tutta la vita ho amato i margini; e la linea di confine che oppone nettamente una cosa a un’altra. Per tutta la vita ho amato le cornici e i limiti; e sosterrò che il più vasto deserto appare più vasto se visto attraverso una finestra. Con dolore di tutti i gravi critici drammatici, continuerò ad affermare che il dramma perfetto deve sforzarsi d’elevarsi all’estasi superiore dello spettacolo da spioncino. Ho anche un gusto raffinato per gli abissi e le voragini senza fondo e per ogni altra cosa che accentui una fine sfumatura di distinzione tra una cosa e l’altra; e il caldo affetto che ho sempre provato per i ponti è connesso col fatto che l’arco scuro e vertiginoso accentua l’abisso ancor più dell’abisso stesso. Non posso più contemplare la bellezza della principessa; ma posso vederla nel ponte che il principe attraversò per raggiungerla. E credo che, provando queste cose fin dal principio, io provassi i frammentari accenni d’una filosofia che ho poi scoperto essere la verità. Poiché è proprio su quel punto della verità che potrebbe forse sorgere una contesa tra gli psicologi più materialisti e me. Se qualcuno mi dice che traggo piacere dai misteri della finestra e del ponte soltanto perché ne vidi questi modellini quand’ero un bimbo, mi prenderò la libertà di dirgli che non ha pensato la cosa fino in fondo. Tanto per cominciare, devo aver visto migliaia d’altre cose sia prima che dopo; e dev’esserci stato un elemento di selezione e qualche ragione per la selezione. E, cosa ancor più ovvia, datare l’occasione non comincia neppure ad affrontare il fatto. Se qualche laborioso lettore di libriccini sulla psicologia infantile mi grida con gioia e astuzia: «Ti piacciono le cose romantiche come i teatrini soltanto perché tuo padre ti mostrò un teatrino nella tua infanzia», risponderò con dolce e cristiana pazienza: «Sì, sciocco, sì. Senza dubbio la tua spiegazione è, in quel senso, quella vera. Ma ciò che stai dicendo, nel tuo modo arguto, è semplicemente che io associo queste cose alla felicità perché ero tanto felice. Non comincia neppure a considerare la questione del perché io fossi tanto felice. Perché mai guardare attraverso un foro quadrato, un cartone giallo, dovrebbe innalzare chicchessia al settimo cielo della felicità in un qualsiasi momento della vita? Perché mai dovrebbe farlo in modo speciale in quel momento della vita? Questo è il fatto psicologico che tu devi spiegare; e io non ho mai visto alcuna sorta di spiegazione razionale.»
Mi scuso per questa parentesi; e per aver menzionato la psicologia infantile o qualsiasi altra cosa che possa portare il rossore alle guance. Ma si dà il caso che sia un punto sul quale ritengo che alcuni dei nostri psicoanalisti sfoggino una faccia tosta piuttosto priva di rossore. Non desidero che le mie osservazioni siano confuse con l’orribile e degradante eresia secondo cui le nostre menti sono meramente fabbricate da condizioni accidentali, e non hanno perciò alcuna relazione ultima con la verità. Con tutte le possibili scuse ai liberi pensatori, propongo ancora di ritenermi libero di pensare. E chiunque voglia pensare per due minuti vedrà che questo pensiero è la fine d’ogni pensiero. È del tutto inutile argomentare, se tutte le nostre conclusioni sono distorte dalle nostre condizioni. Nessuno può correggere il pregiudizio di chicchessia, se tutta la mente è tutta pregiudizio.
The interlude is now over, thank you; and I will proceed to the more practical relations between my memory and my story. And it will first be necessary to say something about memory itself; and the reliability of such stories. I have begun with this fragment of a fairy play in a toy-theatre, because it also sums up most clearly the strongest influences upon my childhood. I have said that the toy-theatre was made by my father; and anybody who has ever tried to make such a theatre or mount such a play, will know that this alone stands for a remarkable round of crafts and accomplishments. It involves being in much more than the common sense the stage carpenter, being the architect and the builder and the draughtsman and the landscape-painter and the story-teller all in one. And, looking back on my life, and the relatively unreal and indirect art that I have attempted to practise, I feel that I have really lived a much narrower life than my father’s.
His mere name, of course, is enough to recall wider memories. One of my first memories is playing in the garden under the care of a girl with ropes of golden hair; to whom my mother afterwards called out from the house, “You are an angel;” which I was disposed to accept without metaphor. She is now living in Vancouver as Mrs. Kidd; and she and her sister had more to do with enlivening my early years than most. Since then, I have met what used to be called the wits of the age; but I have never known wittier conversation. Among my first memories also are those seascapes that were blue flashes to boys of my generation; North Berwick with the cone of green hill that seemed like the hill absolute; and a French seaside associated with little girls, the daughters of my father’s old friend Mawer Cowtan, whom I shall not forget. But indeed I had a whole background of cousins; Tom Gilbert (my godfather, who gave me his last and my first name) had a large family of daughters, and my uncle Sidney a large family of sons; and they all still move in my memory almost like a male and female chorus in a great Greek play. The eldest of the boys, the one whom I once knew best, was killed with my brother in the Great War; but many of the others, I am glad to say, are still friends as well as relations. All these are memorable memories; but they do not resolve that first individual speculation about memory itself. The girl with the yellow hair is an early memory, in the sense in which some of the others have inevitably become later memories, at once expanded and effaced.
Really, the things we remember are the things we forget. I mean that when a memory comes back sharply and suddenly, piercing the protection of oblivion, it appears for an instant exactly as it really was. If we think of it often, while its essentials doubtless remain true, it becomes more and more our own memory of the thing rather than the thing remembered. I had a little sister who died when I was a child. I have little to go on; for she was the only subject about which my father did not talk. It was the one dreadful sorrow of his abnormally happy and even merry existence; and it is strange to think that I never spoke to him about it to the day of his death. I do not remember her dying; but I remember her falling off a rocking-horse. I know, from experience of bereavements only a little later, that children feel with exactitude, without a word of explanation, the emotional tone or tint of a house of mourning. But in this case, the greater catastrophe must somehow have become confused and identified with the smaller one. I always felt it as a tragic memory, as if she had been thrown by a real horse and killed. Something must have painted and repainted the picture in my mind; until I suddenly became conscious about the age of eighteen that it had become the picture of Amy Robsart lying at the foot of the stairs, flung down by Vamey and another villain. This is the real difficulty about remembering anything; that we have remembered too much—for we have remembered too often.
I will take another example of this psychological trick, though it involves the anticipation of much later events in my life. One of these glimpses of my own prehistoric history is a memory of a long upper room filled with light (the light that never was on sea or land) and of somebody carving or painting with white paint the deal head of a hobby-horse; the head almost archaic in its simplification. Ever since that day my depths have been stirred by a wooden post painted white; and even more so by any white horse in the street; and it was like meeting a friend in a fairytale to find myself under the sign of the White Horse at Ipswich on the first day of my honeymoon. But for that very reason, this image has remained and memory has constantly returned to it; and I have even done my best to deface and spoil the purity of the White Horse by writing an interminable ballad about it. A man does not generally manage to forget his wedding-day; especially such a highly comic wedding-day as mine. For the family remembers against me a number of now familiar legends, about the missing of trains, the losing of luggage, and other things counted yet more eccentric. It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself; and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller. They seemed to me the most natural things in the world. I did not buy the pistol to murder myself or my wife; I never was really modern. I bought it because it was the great adventure of my youth, with a general notion of protecting her from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads, to which we were bound; where, after all, there are still a suspiciously large number of families with Danish names. I shall not be annoyed if it is called childish; but obviously it was rather a reminiscence of boyhood, and not of childhood. But the ritual consumption of the glass of milk really was a reminiscence of childhood. I stopped at that particular dairy because I had always drunk a glass of milk there when walking with my mother in my infancy. And it seemed to me a fitting ceremonial to unite the two great relations of a man’s life. Outside the shop there was the figure of a White Cow as a sort of pendant to the figure of the White Horse; the one standing at the beginning of my new journey and the other at the end. But the point is here that the very fact of these allegories having been acted over again, at the stage of marriage and maturity, does in a sense transform them, and does in some sense veil even while it invokes the original visions of the child. The sign of the White Horse has been repainted, and only in that sense painted out. I do not so much remember it as remember remembering it. But if I really want to be realistic about those remote days, I must scratch around till I find something not too much blunted to scratch me; something sufficiently forgotten to be remembered. I make the experiment at this moment as I write. Searching for those lost surroundings, I recall for the first time, at this moment, that there was another shop, next to the milk-shop, which had some mysterious charm for my childhood; and then I recall that it was an oil and colour shop, and they sold gold paint smeared inside shells; and there was a sort of pale pointed chalks I have been less familiar with of late. I do not think here of the strong colours of the common paint-box, like crimson-lake and prussian-blue, much as I exulted and still exult in them. For another boy called Robert Louis Stevenson has messed about with my colours upon that sort of palette; and I have grown up to enjoy them in print as well as in paint. But when I remember that these forgotten crayons contained a stick of “light-red,” seemingly a more commonplace colour, the point of that dull red pencil pricks me as if it could draw red blood.
L’intermezzo è ormai finito, grazie; e passerò ai rapporti più pratici tra la mia memoria e la mia storia. E sarà anzitutto necessario dire qualcosa sulla memoria stessa; e sull’attendibilità di simili racconti. Ho cominciato con questo frammento d’una fiaba recitata in un teatrino di cartone, perché esso riassume anche nel modo più chiaro le più forti influenze sulla mia infanzia. Ho detto che il teatrino fu costruito da mio padre; e chiunque abbia mai tentato di costruire un simile teatro o di allestire una simile rappresentazione saprà che questo soltanto equivale a un notevole insieme di mestieri e d’abilità. Comporta l’essere, in un senso ben più che comune, il macchinista di scena, e insieme l’architetto e il costruttore e il disegnatore e il pittore di paesaggi e il narratore, tutto in uno. E, ripensando alla mia vita, e all’arte relativamente irreale e indiretta che ho tentato d’esercitare, sento d’aver vissuto in realtà una vita assai più angusta di quella di mio padre.
Il suo solo nome, s’intende, basta a richiamare memorie più ampie. Uno dei miei primi ricordi è di quando giocavo in giardino sotto la custodia d’una fanciulla dalle trecce d’oro; alla quale mia madre in seguito gridò dalla casa: «Sei un angelo»; cosa che ero disposto ad accettare senza metafora. Ora vive a Vancouver come Mrs. Kidd; e lei e sua sorella ebbero più parte d’ogni altro nel rallegrare i miei primi anni. Da allora ho incontrato quelli che si soleva chiamare gli spiriti arguti dell’epoca; ma non ho mai conosciuto conversazione più arguta. Tra i miei primi ricordi vi sono anche quei paesaggi marini che erano lampi azzurri per i ragazzi della mia generazione; North Berwick col cono di verde collina che pareva la collina per antonomasia; e una spiaggia francese associata a certe bambine, le figlie del vecchio amico di mio padre Mawer Cowtan, che non dimenticherò. Ma in verità avevo tutto uno sfondo di cugini; Tom Gilbert (il mio padrino, che mi diede il suo ultimo e il mio primo nome) aveva una numerosa famiglia di figlie, e mio zio Sidney una numerosa famiglia di figli; e tutti si muovono ancora nella mia memoria quasi come un coro maschile e femminile in una grande tragedia greca. Il maggiore dei ragazzi, quello che un tempo conobbi meglio, cadde con mio fratello nella Grande Guerra; ma molti degli altri, sono lieto di dirlo, sono tuttora amici oltre che parenti. Tutti questi sono ricordi memorabili; ma non risolvono quella prima speculazione individuale sulla memoria stessa. La fanciulla dai capelli biondi è un ricordo precoce, nel senso in cui alcuni degli altri sono inevitabilmente divenuti ricordi più tardi, insieme dilatati e cancellati.
Davvero, le cose che ricordiamo sono le cose che dimentichiamo. Voglio dire che, quando un ricordo torna nitido e improvviso, trafiggendo la protezione dell’oblio, esso appare per un istante esattamente com’era realmente. Se vi pensiamo spesso, mentre i suoi elementi essenziali rimangono senza dubbio veri, esso diviene sempre più il nostro proprio ricordo della cosa anziché la cosa ricordata. Avevo una sorellina che morì quand’ero bambino. Ho poco su cui basarmi; poiché era l’unico argomento di cui mio padre non parlava. Fu l’unico terribile dolore della sua esistenza anormalmente felice e persino gaia; ed è strano pensare che non gliene parlai mai fino al giorno della sua morte. Non ricordo il suo morire; ma ricordo che cadde da un cavallo a dondolo. So, per esperienza di lutti solo di poco posteriori, che i bambini avvertono con esattezza, senza una parola di spiegazione, il tono o la tinta emotiva d’una casa in lutto. Ma in questo caso la catastrofe maggiore dev’essersi in qualche modo confusa e identificata con quella minore. L’ho sempre sentita come un ricordo tragico, come se fosse stata disarcionata da un cavallo vero e uccisa. Qualcosa deve aver dipinto e ridipinto il quadro nella mia mente; finché a un tratto, verso i diciott’anni, divenni consapevole che esso era diventato il quadro d’Amy Robsart distesa ai piedi delle scale, precipitata da Varney e da un altro furfante. Questa è la vera difficoltà del ricordare qualsiasi cosa; che ne abbiamo ricordato troppo—perché l’abbiamo ricordato troppo spesso.
Prenderò un altro esempio di questo trucco psicologico, benché comporti l’anticipazione di eventi assai più tardi della mia vita. Uno di questi barlumi della mia storia preistorica è un ricordo d’una lunga stanza alta e inondata di luce (la luce che non fu mai su mare né su terra) e di qualcuno che intagliava o dipingeva di bianco la testa d’abete d’un cavallo a dondolo; una testa quasi arcaica nella sua semplificazione. Da quel giorno le mie profondità sono state smosse da un palo di legno dipinto di bianco; e ancor più da qualsiasi cavallo bianco per la strada; e fu come incontrare un amico in una fiaba il ritrovarmi sotto l’insegna del White Horse a Ipswich il primo giorno della mia luna di miele. Ma proprio per questa ragione quest’immagine è rimasta e la memoria vi è costantemente tornata; e ho persino fatto del mio meglio per deturpare e guastare la purezza del White Horse scrivendone una ballata interminabile. Un uomo di solito non riesce a dimenticare il giorno delle proprie nozze; specialmente un giorno di nozze comicissimo come il mio. Poiché la famiglia ricorda a mio carico un certo numero d’ormai familiari leggende, sulla perdita dei treni, lo smarrimento dei bagagli, e altre cose ritenute ancor più eccentriche. Mi si accusa, e con perfetta verità, d’essermi fermato per via a bere un bicchiere di latte in un negozio e a comprare una rivoltella con le cartucce in un altro. Alcuni hanno visto in ciò singolari doni di nozze che uno sposo facesse a se stesso; e se la sposa l’avesse conosciuto meno, suppongo avrebbe potuto immaginare che fosse un suicida o un assassino o, peggio ancora, un astemio. A me parevano le cose più naturali del mondo. Non comprai la pistola per assassinare me stesso o mia moglie; non fui mai davvero moderno. La comprai perché era la grande avventura della mia giovinezza, con la vaga idea di proteggerla dai pirati che senza dubbio infestavano i Norfolk Broads, verso i quali eravamo diretti; dove, dopotutto, vi è ancora un numero sospettosamente grande di famiglie dai nomi danesi. Non mi offenderò se la si dirà puerile; ma evidentemente era piuttosto una reminiscenza dell’adolescenza, e non dell’infanzia. Ma il rituale consumo del bicchiere di latte era davvero una reminiscenza dell’infanzia. Mi fermai a quella particolare latteria perché vi avevo sempre bevuto un bicchiere di latte quando passeggiavo con mia madre nella mia prima età. E mi parve un cerimoniale acconcio per unire le due grandi relazioni della vita d’un uomo. Fuori del negozio c’era la figura d’una Mucca Bianca come una sorta di pendant alla figura del White Horse; l’una posta all’inizio del mio nuovo viaggio e l’altra alla fine. Ma il punto è, qui, che il fatto stesso che queste allegorie siano state recitate di nuovo, nella fase del matrimonio e della maturità, in un certo senso le trasforma, e in un certo senso vela persino, pur mentre le evoca, le visioni originali del bambino. L’insegna del White Horse è stata ridipinta, e solo in quel senso cancellata. Non tanto la ricordo, quanto ricordo di ricordarla. Ma se davvero voglio essere realistico su quei giorni remoti, devo raspare intorno finché non trovi qualcosa non troppo smussato per graffiarmi; qualcosa a sufficienza dimenticato da poter essere ricordato. Faccio l’esperimento in questo momento, mentre scrivo. Cercando quei perduti dintorni, rammento per la prima volta, in questo istante, che c’era un altro negozio, accanto alla latteria, che aveva un misterioso fascino per la mia infanzia; e poi rammento che era un negozio d’oli e colori, e vi vendevano vernice dorata spalmata dentro conchiglie; e c’era una sorta di gessetti pallidi e appuntiti coi quali ho avuto meno familiarità negli ultimi tempi. Non penso qui ai colori forti della comune scatola dei colori, come il lacca cremisi e il blu di Prussia, per quanto ne esultassi e ancora ne esulti. Poiché un altro ragazzo di nome Robert Louis Stevenson ha pasticciato coi miei colori su quella specie di tavolozza; e sono cresciuto fino a goderne nella stampa oltre che nella pittura. Ma quando ricordo che quei pastelli dimenticati contenevano un bastoncino di «rosso chiaro», in apparenza un colore più banale, la punta di quella spenta matita rossa mi punge come se potesse trarre sangue rosso.
From this general memory about memory I draw a certain inference. What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall; not the things I should think most worth recalling. This is where it differs from the other great thrill of the past, all that is connected with first love and the romantic passion; for that, though equally poignant, comes always to a point; and is narrow like a rapier piercing the heart, whereas the other was more like a hundred windows opened on all sides of the head.
I have made here a sort of psychological experiment in memory. I have tried to think of the things I forget adjoining the things I remember; and in the childish case, though they are without form, I am sure they are of the same tint. I have long remembered the milk-shop; I have only just remembered the oil-shop; I have no notion at all about the next shop to the oil-shop. I am sure it was a shop shining with the same lost light of morning; because it was in the same street under the same sky. I have no notion on what street the row of windows in the long uplifted room looked out, when the white horse head was carved. But I feel in a flash that it was a happy street; or, if we must be pedantic, a street in which I should have been happy. Now it is not like that with even the happiest hours of the later things called love-affairs. I have already mentioned how my honeymoon began before the White Cow of my childhood; but of course I had in my time been myself a calf, not to say a moon-calf, in the sort of calf-love that dances in the moonshine long before the honeymoon. Those day-dreams also are wrecks of something divine; but they have the colour of sunset rather than the broad daylight. I have walked across wide fields at evening and seen, as a mere distant dot in a row of houses, one particular window and just distinguishable head; and been uplifted as with roaring trumpets as if by the salute of Beatrice. But it did not, and does not, make me think the other windows and houses were all almost equally interesting; and that is just what the glimpse of the baby’s wonderland does. We have read countless pages about love brightening the sun and making the flowers more flamboyant; and it is true in a sense; but not in the sense I mean. It changes the world; but the baby lived in a changeless world; or rather the man feels that it is he who has changed. He has changed long before he comes near to the great and glorious trouble of the love of woman; and that has in it something new and concentrated and crucial; crucial in the true sense of being as near as Cana to Calvary. In the later case, what is loved becomes instantly what may be lost.
My point here is that we can test the childish mood by thinking, not only of what was there, but of what must have been there. I think of the backs of houses of which I saw only the fronts; the streets that stretched away behind the streets I knew; the things that remained round the corner; and they still give me a thrill. One of the sports of the imagination, a game I have played all my life, was to take a certain book with pictures of old Dutch houses, and think not of what was in the pictures but of all that was out of the pictures, the unknown corners and side-streets of the same quaint town. The book was one my father had written and illustrated himself, merely for home consumption. It was typical of him that, in the Pugin period he had worked at Gothic illumination; but when he tried again, it was in another style of the dark Dutch renaissance, the grotesque scroll-work that suggests woodcarving more than stone-cutting. He was the sort of man who likes to try everything once. This was the only book he ever wrote; and he never bothered to publish it.
My father might have reminded people of Mr. Pickwick, except that he was always bearded and never bald; he wore spectacles and had all the Pickwickian evenness of temper and pleasure in the humours of travel. He was rather quiet than otherwise, but his quietude covered a great fertility of notions; and he certainly liked taking a rise out of people. I remember, to give one example of a hundred such inventions, how he gravely instructed some grave ladies in the names of flowers; dwelling especially on the rustic names given in certain localities. “The country people call them Sailors’ Pen-knives,” he would say in an offhand manner, after affecting to provide them with the full scientific name, or, “They call them Bakers’ Bootlaces down in Lincolnshire, I believe”; and it is a fine example of human simplicity to note how far he found he could safely go in such instructive discourse. They followed him without revulsion when he said lightly, “Merely a sprig of wild bigamy.” It was only when he added that there was a local variety known as Bishop’s Bigamy, that the full depravity of his character began to dawn on their minds. It was possibly this aspect of his unfailing amiability that is responsible for an entry I find in an ancient minute-book, of mock trials conducted by himself and his brothers; that Edward Chesterton was tried for the crime of Aggravation. But the same sort of invention created for children the permanent anticipation of what is profoundly called a Surprise. And it is this side of the business that is relevant here.
His versatility both as an experimentalist and a handy man, in all such matters, was amazing. His den or study was piled high with the stratified layers of about ten or twelve creative amusements; water-colour painting and modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic lanterns and mediaeval illumination. I have inherited, or I hope imitated, his habit of drawing; but in every other way I am emphatically an unhandy man. There had been some talk of his studying art professionally in his youth; but the family business was obviously safer; and his life followed the lines of a certain contented and ungrasping prudence, which was extraordinarily typical of him and all his blood and generation. He never dreamed of turning any of these plastic talents to any mercenary account, or of using them for anything but his own private pleasure and ours. To us he appeared to be indeed the Man with the Golden Key, a magician opening the gates of goblin castles or the sepulchres of dead heroes; and there was no incongruity in calling his lantern a magic-lantern. But all this time he was known to the world, and even the next-door neighbours, as a very reliable and capable though rather unambitious business man. It was a very good first lesson in what is also the last lesson of life; that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside. On the whole I am glad that he was never an artist. It might have stood in his way in becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career; his private career. He could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousand things he did so successfully.
Da questa memoria generale sulla memoria traggo una certa inferenza. Ciò che era meraviglioso nell’infanzia è che qualsiasi cosa in essa fosse una meraviglia. Non era semplicemente un mondo pieno di miracoli; era un mondo miracoloso. Ciò che mi dà questo scossone è quasi tutto ciò che davvero rammento; non le cose che riterrei più degne d’esser rammentate. È qui che ciò differisce dall’altro grande brivido del passato, tutto ciò che è connesso col primo amore e con la passione romantica; poiché questo, benché ugualmente struggente, viene sempre a un punto; ed è stretto come uno stocco che trafigge il cuore, mentre l’altro era piuttosto come cento finestre spalancate su tutti i lati del capo.
Ho fatto qui una sorta d’esperimento psicologico sulla memoria. Ho cercato di pensare alle cose che dimentico contigue alle cose che ricordo; e nel caso infantile, benché siano prive di forma, son certo che sono della stessa tinta. Ho ricordato a lungo la latteria; ho ricordato solo ora il negozio d’oli; non ho la minima nozione del negozio accanto a quello d’oli. Son certo che era un negozio splendente della stessa luce perduta del mattino; perché era nella stessa strada sotto lo stesso cielo. Non ho nozione su quale strada s’affacciasse la fila di finestre nella lunga stanza sollevata, quando fu intagliata la testa del cavallo bianco. Ma sento in un lampo che era una strada felice; o, se dobbiamo essere pedanti, una strada in cui sarei stato felice. Ora, non è così nemmeno per le ore più felici delle cose più tarde chiamate storie d’amore. Ho già accennato a come la mia luna di miele cominciasse davanti alla Mucca Bianca della mia infanzia; ma naturalmente a mio tempo ero stato anch’io un vitello, per non dire un vitello lunatico, in quella sorta d’amore da vitello che danza al chiaro di luna assai prima della luna di miele. Anche quei sogni a occhi aperti sono relitti di qualcosa di divino; ma hanno il colore del tramonto anziché quello della piena luce del giorno. Ho attraversato ampi campi a sera e ho visto, come un mero puntino distante in una fila di case, una particolare finestra e una testa appena distinguibile; e ne sono stato innalzato come da trombe squillanti, come dal saluto di Beatrice. Ma ciò non mi faceva, e non mi fa, pensare che le altre finestre e case fossero tutte quasi ugualmente interessanti; ed è proprio questo che fa lo scorcio del paese delle meraviglie del bambino. Abbiamo letto innumerevoli pagine sull’amore che ravviva il sole e rende i fiori più fiammeggianti; ed è vero in un certo senso; ma non nel senso che intendo. Esso muta il mondo; ma il bambino viveva in un mondo immutabile; o piuttosto è l’uomo che sente d’esser cambiato lui. Egli è cambiato molto prima d’avvicinarsi al grande e glorioso turbamento dell’amore per la donna; e questo ha in sé qualcosa di nuovo e di concentrato e di cruciale; cruciale nel vero senso d’esser vicino, quanto Cana lo è al Calvario. Nel caso più tardo, ciò che è amato diventa istantaneamente ciò che può esser perduto.
Il mio punto qui è che possiamo saggiare lo stato d’animo infantile pensando non solo a ciò che c’era, ma a ciò che dovette esserci. Penso ai retri delle case di cui vidi soltanto le facciate; alle strade che si stendevano dietro le strade che conoscevo; alle cose che restavano dietro l’angolo; e mi danno ancora un brivido. Uno degli svaghi dell’immaginazione, un gioco che ho fatto per tutta la vita, era prendere un certo libro con illustrazioni di vecchie case olandesi, e pensare non a ciò che c’era nelle illustrazioni ma a tutto ciò che ne stava fuori, gli angoli sconosciuti e le viuzze laterali della stessa bizzarra cittadina. Il libro era uno che mio padre aveva scritto e illustrato lui stesso, meramente per consumo domestico. Era tipico di lui che, nel periodo di Pugin, avesse lavorato alla miniatura gotica; ma quando ci riprovò, fu in un altro stile, quello del cupo Rinascimento olandese, il grottesco lavoro a volute che suggerisce l’intaglio del legno più che quello della pietra. Era il tipo d’uomo a cui piace provare tutto una volta. Questo fu l’unico libro che scrisse mai; e non si preoccupò mai di pubblicarlo.
Mio padre avrebbe potuto ricordare alla gente Mr. Pickwick, se non fosse che era sempre barbuto e mai calvo; portava gli occhiali e aveva tutta la pickwickiana equanimità di temperamento e il piacere per gli umori del viaggio. Era piuttosto silenzioso, ma la sua quiete celava una grande fertilità di trovate; e certamente gli piaceva prendere in giro la gente. Ricordo, per dare un esempio tra un centinaio di simili invenzioni, come istruisse gravemente certe gravi signore sui nomi dei fiori; indugiando specialmente sui nomi rustici dati in certe località. «La gente di campagna li chiama Temperini dei Marinai», diceva con aria disinvolta, dopo aver finto di fornire loro il nome scientifico completo, oppure: «Li chiamano Stringhe dei Fornai giù nel Lincolnshire, mi pare»; ed è un bell’esempio di semplicità umana notare fin dove scoprì di potersi spingere senza rischio in un simile discorso istruttivo. Lo seguivano senza ribrezzo quando diceva con leggerezza: «Non è che un rametto di bigamia selvatica.» Fu solo quando aggiunse che ne esisteva una varietà locale nota come Bigamia del Vescovo, che la piena depravità del suo carattere cominciò ad albeggiare nelle loro menti. Fu forse questo aspetto della sua immancabile amabilità a essere responsabile d’una registrazione che trovo in un antico libro di verbali, di processi burleschi condotti da lui stesso e dai suoi fratelli; che Edward Chesterton fu processato per il crimine d’Aggravamento. Ma lo stesso genere d’invenzione creava per i bambini la permanente attesa di ciò che si chiama profondamente una Sorpresa. Ed è questo lato della faccenda che qui è pertinente.
La sua versatilità, sia come sperimentatore sia come uomo tuttofare, in tutte queste faccende, era stupefacente. Il suo covo o studio era accatastato in alto con gli strati stratificati d’una decina o dozzina di svaghi creativi; pittura ad acquerello e modellismo e fotografia e vetrate e traforo e lanterne magiche e miniatura medievale. Ho ereditato, o spero d’aver imitato, la sua abitudine al disegno; ma in ogni altro modo sono decisamente un uomo maldestro. C’era stato un certo discorso sul fatto che studiasse arte professionalmente in gioventù; ma l’attività di famiglia era ovviamente più sicura; e la sua vita seguì le linee d’una certa prudenza contenta e non avida, straordinariamente tipica di lui e di tutto il suo sangue e la sua generazione. Non sognò mai di volgere alcuno di questi talenti plastici a qualche fine mercenario, o d’usarli per qualcosa che non fosse il proprio privato piacere e il nostro. A noi appariva davvero l’Uomo dalla Chiave d’Oro, un mago che apriva le porte di castelli di folletti o i sepolcri d’eroi morti; e non c’era alcuna incongruità nel chiamare la sua lanterna una lanterna magica. Ma per tutto questo tempo egli era conosciuto dal mondo, e persino dai vicini di casa, come un uomo d’affari molto affidabile e capace benché piuttosto poco ambizioso. Fu un’ottima prima lezione su ciò che è anche l’ultima lezione della vita; che in ogni cosa che conta, l’interno è molto più grande dell’esterno. Nel complesso sono lieto che non fosse mai un artista. Ciò avrebbe potuto ostacolarlo nel diventare un dilettante. Avrebbe potuto rovinargli la carriera; la sua privata carriera. Non avrebbe mai potuto fare un volgare successo di tutte le mille cose che faceva con tanto successo.
If I made a generalisation about the Chestertons, my paternal kinsfolk (which may be dangerous, for there are a lot of them still alive), I should say that they were and are extraordinarily English. They have a perceptible and prevailing colour of good nature, of good sense not untinged with dreaminess, and a certain tranquil loyalty in their personal relations which was very notable even in one, like my brother Cecil, who in his public relations was supremely pugnacious and provocative. I think this sort of sleepy sanity rather an English thing; and in comparison it may not be entirely fanciful to suppose there was something French, after all, in the make-up of my mother’s family; for, allowing for the usual admixture, they ran smaller in stature, often darker in colouring, tough, extraordinarily tenacious, prejudiced in a humorous fashion and full of the fighting spirit. But whatever we may guess in such matters (and nobody has yet done anything but guess about heredity) it was for another purpose that I mentioned the savour of something racial about such a stock. English in so many things, the Chestertons were supremely English in their natural turn for hobbies. It is an element in this sort of old English business man which divides him most sharply from the American business man, and to some extent from the new English business man, who is copying the American. When the American begins to suggest that “salesmanship can be an art,” he means that an artist ought to put all his art into his salesmanship. The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father, sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life.
A hobby is not a holiday. It is not merely a momentary relaxation necessary to the renewal of work; and in this respect it must be sharply distinguished from much that is called sport. A good game is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as a hobby; and many go golfing or shooting grouse because this is a concentrated form of recreation; just as what our contemporaries find in whisky is a concentrated form of what our fathers found diffused in beer. If half a day is to take a man out of himself, or make a new man of him, it is better done by some sharp competitive excitement like sport. But a hobby is not half a day but half a life-time. It would be truer to accuse the hobbyist of living a double life. And hobbies, especially such hobbies as the toy theatre, have a character that runs parallel to practical professional effort, and is not merely a reaction from it. It is not merely taking exercise; it is doing work. It is not merely exercising the body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing. When Browning, that typical Victorian, says that he likes to know a butcher paints and a baker writes poetry, he would not be satisfied with the statement that a butcher plays tennis or a baker golf. And my father and uncles, also typical Victorians of the sort that followed Browning, were all marked in varying degrees by this taste for having their own tastes. One of them gave all his spare time to gardening and has somewhere in the horticultural records a chrysanthemum named after him, dating from the first days when chrysanthemums came to us from the islands of the Rising Sun. Another travelled in an ordinary commercial fashion, but made a most amazing collection of cranks and quacks, fitted to fill a far better memoir than this, whom he had met in his wanderings, and with whom he had argued and sympathised and quoted Browning and George Macdonald, and done I fancy not a little good, for he was himself a most interesting man; above all, interesting because he was interested. But in my own household, as I have said, it was not a question of one hobby but a hundred hobbies, piled on top of each other; and it is a personal accident, or perhaps a personal taste, that the one which has clung to my memory through life is the hobby of the toy theatre. In any case, watching such work has made one great difference to my life and views to this day.
I cannot do much, by the standard of my nursery days. But I have learned to love seeing things done; not the handle that ultimately causes them to be done, but the hand that does them. If my father had been some common millionaire owning a thousand mills that made cotton, or a million machines that made cocoa, how much smaller he would have seemed. And this experience has made me profoundly sceptical of all the modern talk about the necessary dullness of domesticity; and the degrading drudgery that only has to make puddings and pies. Only to make things! There is no greater thing to be said of God Himself than that He makes things. The manufacturer cannot even manufacture things; he can only pay to have them manufactured. And (in the same way) I am now incurably afflicted with a faint smile, when I hear a crowd of frivolous people, who could not make anything to save their lives, talking about the inevitable narrowness and stuffiness of the Victorian home. We managed to make a good many things in our Victorian home which people now buy at insane prices from Art and Craft Shops; the sort of shops that have quite as much craft as art. All the things that happened in the house, or were in any sense done on the premises, linger in my imagination like a legend; and as much as any, those connected with the kitchen or the pantry. Toffee still tastes nicer to me than the most expensive chocolates which Quaker millionaires sell by the million; and mostly because we made toffee for ourselves.
No. 999 in the vast library-catalogue of the books I have never written (all of them so much more brilliant and convincing than the books that I have written) is the story of a successful city man who seemed to have a dark secret in his life; and who was eventually discovered by the detectives still playing with dolls or tin soldiers or some undignified antic of infancy. I may say with all modesty that I am that man, in everything except his solidity of repute and his successful commercial career. It was perhaps even more true, in that sense, of my father before me; but I for one have never left off playing, and I wish there were more time to play. I wish we did not have to fritter away on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting coloured tinsel upon them. When I say this, I come to the third reason for taking the toy theatre as a text; and it is one about which there will be much misunderstanding, because of the repetitions and the stale sentiment that have somehow come to cling to it. It is one of those things that are always misunderstood, because they have been too often explained.
Se dovessi fare una generalizzazione sui Chesterton, i miei parenti paterni (il che può essere pericoloso, poiché molti di loro sono ancora vivi), direi che erano e sono straordinariamente inglesi. Hanno un percettibile e prevalente colorito di buona indole, di buon senso non privo d’una punta di fantasticheria, e una certa tranquilla lealtà nei rapporti personali che era assai notevole persino in uno, come mio fratello Cecil, che nei suoi rapporti pubblici era supremamente battagliero e provocatorio. Ritengo che questa sorta di sonnolenta assennatezza sia piuttosto una cosa inglese; e, in confronto, potrebbe non essere del tutto fantasioso supporre che ci fosse qualcosa di francese, dopotutto, nella composizione della famiglia di mia madre; poiché, tenuto conto della consueta mescolanza, erano di statura più minuta, spesso più scuri di carnagione, coriacei, straordinariamente ostinati, prevenuti in modo faceto e pieni dello spirito combattivo. Ma qualunque cosa possiamo indovinare in tali materie (e nessuno ha ancora fatto altro che indovinare, in fatto d’ereditarietà) fu per un altro scopo che menzionai il sapore di qualcosa di razziale in una simile stirpe. Inglesi in tante cose, i Chesterton erano supremamente inglesi nella loro naturale inclinazione per gli hobby. È un elemento, in questa sorta di vecchio uomo d’affari inglese, che lo distingue più nettamente dall’uomo d’affari americano, e in qualche misura dal nuovo uomo d’affari inglese, che sta copiando l’americano. Quando l’americano comincia a suggerire che «l’arte di vendere può essere un’arte», intende che un artista dovrebbe mettere tutta la sua arte nel suo vendere. Il vecchio inglese all’antica, come mio padre, vendeva case per vivere ma riempiva la propria casa della propria vita.
Un hobby non è una vacanza. Non è meramente un momentaneo rilassamento necessario al rinnovamento del lavoro; e sotto questo aspetto va nettamente distinto da molto di ciò che si chiama sport. Un buon gioco è una buona cosa, ma non è la stessa cosa d’un hobby; e molti vanno a giocare a golf o a cacciare il gallo cedrone perché questa è una forma concentrata di ricreazione; proprio come ciò che i nostri contemporanei trovano nel whisky è una forma concentrata di ciò che i nostri padri trovavano diffuso nella birra. Se mezza giornata deve trarre un uomo fuori di sé, o farne un uomo nuovo, ciò si ottiene meglio con qualche acuta eccitazione competitiva come lo sport. Ma un hobby non è mezza giornata bensì mezza vita. Sarebbe più esatto accusare l’appassionato d’hobby di vivere una doppia vita. E gli hobby, specialmente hobby come il teatrino di cartone, hanno un carattere che corre parallelo allo sforzo professionale pratico, e non è meramente una reazione ad esso. Non è meramente fare esercizio; è fare lavoro. Non è meramente esercitare il corpo invece della mente, cosa eccellente ma ormai in gran parte riconosciuta. È esercitare il resto della mente; cosa ormai quasi trascurata. Quando Browning, quel tipico vittoriano, dice che gli piace sapere che un macellaio dipinge e un fornaio scrive poesie, non si accontenterebbe dell’affermazione che un macellaio gioca a tennis o un fornaio a golf. E mio padre e i miei zii, anch’essi tipici vittoriani del genere che seguì Browning, erano tutti segnati in vario grado da questo gusto d’avere gusti propri. Uno di loro dedicava tutto il suo tempo libero al giardinaggio e ha da qualche parte, negli annali orticoli, un crisantemo che porta il suo nome, risalente ai primi giorni in cui i crisantemi ci giunsero dalle isole del Sol Levante. Un altro viaggiava in modo ordinario per commercio, ma fece una stupefacente collezione di stravaganti e ciarlatani, degni di riempire una memoria assai migliore di questa, che aveva incontrato nei suoi vagabondaggi, e coi quali aveva discusso e simpatizzato e citato Browning e George Macdonald, e fatto, immagino, non poco bene, poiché era egli stesso un uomo interessantissimo; soprattutto interessante perché era interessato. Ma nella mia stessa casa, come ho detto, non era questione d’un hobby ma di cento hobby, accatastati l’uno sull’altro; ed è un accidente personale, o forse un gusto personale, che quello rimastomi aggrappato alla memoria per tutta la vita sia l’hobby del teatrino di cartone. In ogni caso, l’aver osservato un simile lavoro ha fatto una gran differenza nella mia vita e nelle mie vedute fino a oggi.
Non so fare granché, secondo il metro dei giorni della mia stanza dei bambini. Ma ho imparato ad amare il vedere le cose fatte; non la leva che in ultimo le fa fare, ma la mano che le fa. Se mio padre fosse stato qualche comune milionario padrone di mille filande che facevano cotone, o d’un milione di macchine che facevano cacao, quanto più piccolo sarebbe apparso. E questa esperienza mi ha reso profondamente scettico su tutti i moderni discorsi sulla necessaria uggia della vita domestica; e sulla degradante fatica di chi non ha che da fare budini e torte. Solo fare cose! Non c’è cosa più grande da dire di Dio stesso che Egli fa cose. Il fabbricante non può nemmeno fabbricare cose; può solo pagare perché gliele fabbrichino. E (allo stesso modo) sono ora inguaribilmente afflitto da un lieve sorriso, quando sento una folla di persone frivole, che non saprebbero fare nulla nemmeno per salvarsi la vita, parlare dell’inevitabile ristrettezza e afa della casa vittoriana. Riuscivamo a fare parecchie cose nella nostra casa vittoriana che ora la gente compra a prezzi folli nelle Botteghe d’Arte e Artigianato; quel genere di botteghe che hanno tanta astuzia quanta arte. Tutte le cose che accadevano in casa, o che in qualche senso si facevano tra quelle mura, indugiano nella mia immaginazione come una leggenda; e più d’ogni altra, quelle connesse con la cucina o la dispensa. La caramella mou ha ancora per me un sapore più gradevole dei più costosi cioccolatini che i milionari quaccheri vendono a milioni; e soprattutto perché la caramella la facevamo noi stessi.
Il n. 999 nel vasto catalogo-biblioteca dei libri che non ho mai scritto (tutti tanto più brillanti e convincenti dei libri che ho scritto) è la storia d’un uomo di città di successo che pareva avere un oscuro segreto nella vita; e che alla fine fu scoperto dai detective mentre giocava ancora con bambole o soldatini di stagno o qualche indegna buffonata dell’infanzia. Posso dire con tutta modestia che quell’uomo sono io, in tutto tranne che nella sua solidità di reputazione e nella sua riuscita carriera commerciale. Era forse ancor più vero, in quel senso, di mio padre prima di me; ma io, per parte mia, non ho mai smesso di giocare, e vorrei che ci fosse più tempo per giocare. Vorrei che non dovessimo sciupare in cose frivole, come conferenze e letteratura, il tempo che avremmo potuto dedicare a un lavoro serio, solido e costruttivo come ritagliare figure di cartone e incollarvi sopra orpelli colorati. Quando dico questo, giungo alla terza ragione per prendere il teatrino di cartone come tema; ed è una ragione a proposito della quale ci sarà molto fraintendimento, a causa delle ripetizioni e del sentimento trito che in qualche modo hanno finito con l’aderirvi. È una di quelle cose che sono sempre fraintese, perché sono state spiegate troppo spesso.
I am inclined to contradict much of the modern Cult of the Child at Play. Through various influences of a recent and rather romantic culture, the Child has become rather the Spoilt Child. The true beauty has been spoilt by the rather unscrupulous emotion of mature persons, who have themselves lost much of their sense of reality. The worst heresy of this school is that a child is concerned only with make-believe. For this is interpreted in the sense, at once sentimental and sceptical, that there is not much difference between make-believe and belief. But the real child does not confuse fact and fiction. He simply likes fiction. He acts it, because he cannot as yet write it or even read it; but he never allows his moral sanity to be clouded by it. To him no two things could possibly be more totally contrary than playing at robbers and stealing sweets. No possible amount of playing at robbers would ever bring him an inch nearer to thinking it is really right to rob. I saw the distinction perfectly clearly when I was a child; I wish I saw it half as clearly now. I played at being a robber for hours together at the end of the garden; but it never had anything to do with the temptation I had to sneak a new paint-box out of my father’s room. I was not being anything false; I was simply writing before I could write. Fortunately, perhaps, for the condition of the back-garden, I early transferred my dreams to some rude resemblance to writing; chiefly in the form of drawing straggling and sprawling maps of fabulous countries, inhabited by men of incredible shapes and colours and bearing still more incredible names. But though I might fill the world with dragons, I never had the slightest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons.
I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes a fable that has a moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own more weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious. Adults like the comic Sandford and Merton. Children liked the real Sandford and Merton. At least I know I liked it very much, and felt the heartiest faith in the Honest Farmer and the Noble Negro. I venture to dwell on the point if only in parenthesis: for on this also there is a current misunderstanding. Indeed there is what may be called a current cant; and none the less so because it is a cant against cant. It is now so common as to be conventional to express impatience with priggish and moralising stories for children; stories of the old-fashioned sort that concern things like the sinfulness of theft; and as I am recalling an old-fashioned atmosphere, I cannot refrain from testifying on the psychology of the business.
Now I must heartily confess that I often adored priggish and moralising stories. I do not suppose I should gain a subtle literary pleasure from them now; but that is not the point in question. The men who denounce such moralisings are men; they are not children. But I believe multitudes would admit their early affection for the moral tale, if they still had the moral courage. And the reason is perfectly simple. Adults have reacted against such morality, because they know that it often stands for immorality. They know that such platitudes have been used by hypocrites and pharisees, by cunning or perversion. But the child knows nothing about cunning or perversion. He sees nothing but the moral ideals themselves, and he simply sees that they are true. Because they are.
There is another blunder made by the modern cynic about the moralising story-teller. The former always imagines that there is an element of corruption, in his own cynical manner, about the idea of reward, about the position of the child who can say, as in Stevenson’s verses, “Every day when I’ve been good, I get an orange after food.” To the man made ignorant by experience this always appears as a vulgar bribe to the child. The modern philosopher knows that it would require a very large bribe indeed to induce him to be good. It therefore seems to the modern philosopher what it would seem to the modern politician to say, “I will give you fifty thousand pounds when you have, on some one definite and demonstrated occasion, kept your word.” The solid price seems something quite distinct from the rare and reluctant labour. But it does not seem like that to the child. It would not seem like that to the child, if the Fairy Queen said to the Prince, “You will receive the golden apple from the magic tree when you have fought the dragon.” For the child is not a Manichee. He does not think that good things are in their nature separate from being good. In other words, he does not, like the reluctant realist, regard goodness as a bad thing. To him the goodness and the gift and the golden apple, that is called an orange, are all parts of one substantial paradise and naturally go together. In other words, he regards himself as normally on amiable terms with the natural authorities; not normally as quarrelling or bargaining with them. He has the ordinary selfish obstacles and misunderstandings; but he does not, in his heart, regard it as odd that his parents should be good to him, to the extent of an orange, or that he should be good to them, to the extent of some elementary experiments in good behaviour. He has no sense of being corrupted. It is only we, who have eaten the forbidden apple (or orange) who think of pleasure as a bribe.
My main purpose here, however, is to say this. To me my whole childhood has a certain quality, which may be indescribable but is not in the least vague. It is rather more definite than the difference between pitch dark and daylight, or between having a toothache and not having a toothache. For the sequel of the story, it is necessary to attempt this first and hardest chapter of the story: and I must try to state somehow what I mean by saying that my own childhood was of quite a different kind, or quality, from the rest of my very undeservedly pleasant and cheerful existence.
Sono incline a contraddire buona parte del moderno Culto del Bambino che Gioca. Attraverso varie influenze d’una cultura recente e piuttosto romantica, il Bambino è diventato piuttosto il Bambino Viziato. La vera bellezza è stata guastata dall’emozione piuttosto senza scrupoli di persone mature, che hanno esse stesse perduto gran parte del loro senso della realtà. La peggiore eresia di questa scuola è che un bambino sia interessato soltanto al far finta. Poiché ciò viene interpretato nel senso, insieme sentimentale e scettico, che non ci sia molta differenza tra il far finta e il credere. Ma il vero bambino non confonde il fatto e la finzione. Semplicemente ama la finzione. La recita, perché non sa ancora scriverla né tantomeno leggerla; ma non permette mai che la sua sanità morale ne sia offuscata. Per lui non potrebbero esserci due cose più totalmente contrarie del giocare ai ladri e del rubare i dolci. Nessuna quantità di gioco ai ladri lo avvicinerebbe mai d’un pollice al pensare che rubare sia davvero giusto. Vedevo la distinzione con perfetta chiarezza quand’ero bambino; vorrei vederla ora anche solo la metà così chiaramente. Giocai a fare il ladro per ore intere in fondo al giardino; ma ciò non ebbe mai nulla a che fare con la tentazione che avevo di sgraffignare una nuova scatola di colori dalla stanza di mio padre. Non stavo facendo nulla di falso; stavo semplicemente scrivendo prima di saper scrivere. Fortunatamente, forse, per le condizioni del giardino sul retro, trasferii presto i miei sogni a una rozza parvenza di scrittura; principalmente nella forma del disegnare mappe sconnesse e sgangherate di paesi favolosi, abitati da uomini di forme e colori incredibili e recanti nomi ancor più incredibili. Ma per quanto potessi riempire il mondo di draghi, non ebbi mai il minimo reale dubbio che gli eroi dovessero combattere coi draghi.
Devo fermarmi a sfidare molti amanti dei bambini per crudeltà verso i bambini. È del tutto falso dire che il bambino disdegni una favola che ha una morale. Molto spesso ama la morale più della favola. Gli adulti leggono la propria più stanca beffa in una mente ancora abbastanza vigorosa da essere del tutto seria. Agli adulti piace il comico Sandford and Merton. Ai bambini piaceva il vero Sandford and Merton. Almeno so che a me piaceva moltissimo, e provavo la più cordiale fede nell’Onesto Fattore e nel Nobile Negro. Mi permetto d’insistere sul punto anche solo tra parentesi: poiché anche su questo c’è un fraintendimento corrente. Anzi, c’è ciò che si può chiamare un luogo comune corrente; e non meno tale per il fatto d’essere un luogo comune contro i luoghi comuni. È ormai così comune da esser convenzionale l’esprimere impazienza verso le storie moraleggianti e pedanti per bambini; storie del genere all’antica che riguardano cose come la peccaminosità del furto; e poiché sto rievocando un’atmosfera all’antica, non posso astenermi dal testimoniare sulla psicologia della faccenda.
Ora devo confessare di cuore che spesso adoravo le storie pedanti e moraleggianti. Non suppongo che ne trarrei ora un sottile piacere letterario; ma non è questo il punto in questione. Gli uomini che denunciano tali moraleggiamenti sono uomini; non sono bambini. Ma credo che moltitudini ammetterebbero il loro precoce affetto per il racconto morale, se avessero ancora il coraggio morale. E la ragione è perfettamente semplice. Gli adulti hanno reagito contro tale moralità, perché sanno che spesso essa sta per immoralità. Sanno che simili luoghi comuni sono stati usati da ipocriti e farisei, per astuzia o per perversione. Ma il bambino non sa nulla d’astuzia o di perversione. Non vede altro che gli ideali morali stessi, e vede semplicemente che sono veri. Perché lo sono.
C’è un altro abbaglio preso dal moderno cinico riguardo al narratore moraleggiante. Il primo immagina sempre che ci sia un elemento di corruzione, alla sua propria maniera cinica, nell’idea della ricompensa, nella posizione del bambino che può dire, come nei versi di Stevenson: «Ogni giorno che sono stato buono, ricevo un’arancia dopo il pranzo.» All’uomo reso ignorante dall’esperienza ciò appare sempre come una volgare corruzione del bambino. Il moderno filosofo sa che occorrerebbe una tangente davvero assai grande per indurlo a essere buono. Perciò sembra al moderno filosofo ciò che sembrerebbe al moderno politico il dire: «Ti darò cinquantamila sterline quando tu, in una qualche occasione precisa e dimostrata, avrai mantenuto la parola.» Il prezzo solido sembra qualcosa di del tutto distinto dalla rara e riluttante fatica. Ma non sembra così al bambino. Non sembrerebbe così al bambino, se la Regina delle Fate dicesse al Principe: «Riceverai la mela d’oro dall’albero magico quando avrai combattuto il drago.» Poiché il bambino non è un Manicheo. Non pensa che le cose buone siano nella loro natura separate dall’essere buone. In altre parole, non considera, come il riluttante realista, la bontà come una cosa cattiva. Per lui la bontà e il dono e la mela d’oro, che si chiama arancia, sono tutti parti d’un unico paradiso sostanziale e vanno naturalmente insieme. In altre parole, egli considera se stesso come normalmente in rapporti amichevoli con le autorità naturali; non come normalmente in lite o in contrattazione con esse. Ha gli ordinari ostacoli egoistici e i fraintendimenti; ma non considera, in cuor suo, come strano che i suoi genitori siano buoni con lui, fino a un’arancia, o che egli sia buono con loro, fino a qualche elementare esperimento di buona condotta. Non ha alcun senso d’essere corrotto. Siamo solo noi, che abbiamo mangiato la mela proibita (o arancia), a pensare al piacere come a una tangente.
Il mio scopo principale qui, tuttavia, è dire questo. Per me tutta la mia infanzia ha una certa qualità, che può essere indescrivibile ma non è affatto vaga. È piuttosto più definita della differenza tra il buio pesto e la luce del giorno, o tra l’avere il mal di denti e il non averlo. Per il seguito della storia, è necessario tentare questo primo e più arduo capitolo della storia: e devo cercare d’enunciare in qualche modo ciò che intendo dicendo che la mia infanzia fu di tutt’altro genere, o qualità, dal resto della mia esistenza tanto immeritatamente piacevole e allegra.
Of this positive quality the most general attribute was clearness. Here it is that I differ, for instance, from Stevenson, whom I so warmly admire; and who speaks of the child as moving with his head in a cloud. He talks of the child as normally in a dazed daydream, in which he cannot distinguish fancy from fact. Now children and adults are both fanciful at times; but that is not what, in my mind and memory, distinguishes adults from children. Mine is a memory of a sort of white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly, and rather emphasising their solidity. The point is that the white light had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself; but not that the world was anything but a real world. I am much more disposed now to fancy that an apple-tree in the moonlight is some sort of ghost or grey nymph; or to see the furniture fantastically changing and crawling at twilight, as in some story of Poe or Hawthorne. But when I was a child I had a sort of confident astonishment in contemplating the apple-tree as an apple-tree. I was sure of it, and also sure of the surprise of it; as sure, to quote the perfect popular proverb, as sure as God made little apples. The apples might be as little as I was; but they were solid and so was I. There was something of an eternal morning about the mood; and I liked to see a fire lit more than to imagine faces in the firelight. Brother Fire, whom St. Francis loved, did seem more like a brother than those dream-faces which come to men who have known other emotions than brotherhood. I do not know whether I ever, as the phrase goes, cried for the moon; but I am sure that I should have expected it to be solid like some colossal snowball; and should always have had more appetite for moons than for mere moonshine. Only figures of speech can faintly express the fact; but it was a fact and not a figure of speech. What I said first about the toy theatre may be urged in contradiction, and as an example of delight in a mere illusion.
In that case, what I said first about the toy theatre will be entirely misunderstood. In fact, there was in that business nothing of an illusion or of a disillusion. If this were a ruthless realistic modern story, I should of course give a most heartrendering account of how my spirit was broken with disappointment, on discovering that the prince was only a painted figure. But this is not a ruthless realistic modern story. On the contrary, it is a true story. And the truth is that I do not remember that I was in any way deceived or in any way undeceived. The whole point is that I did like the toy theatre even when I knew it was a toy theatre. I did like the cardboard figures, even when I found they were of cardboard. The white light of wonder that shone on the whole business was not any sort of trick; indeed the things that now shine most in my memory were many of them mere technical accessories; such as the parallel sticks of white wood that held the scenery in place; a white wood that is still strangely mixed in my imaginative instincts with all the holy trade of the Carpenter. It was the same with any number of other games or pretences in which I took delight; as in the puppet-show of Punch and Judy. I not only knew that the figures were made of wood, but I wanted them to be made of wood. I could not imagine such a resounding thwack being given except by a wooden stick on a wooden head. But I took the sort of pleasure that a primitive man might have taken in a primitive craft, in seeing that they were carved and painted into a startling and grimacing caricature of humanity. I was pleased that the piece of wood was a face; but I was also pleased that the face was a piece of wood. That did not mean that the drama of wood, like the other drama of cardboard, did not reveal to me real ideas and imaginations, and give me glorious glimpses into the possibilities of existence. Of course the child did not analyse himself then; and the man cannot analyse him now. But I am certain he was not merely tricked or trapped. He enjoyed the suggestive function of art exactly as an art critic enjoys it; only he enjoyed it a jolly sight more. For the same reason I do not think that I myself was ever very much worried about Santa Claus, or that alleged dreadful whisper of the little boy that Father Christmas “is only your father.” Perhaps the word “only” would strike all children as the mot juste.
My fixed idolatry of Punch and Judy illustrated the same fact and the same fallacy. I was not only grateful for the fun, but I came to feel grateful for the very fittings and apparatus of the fun; the four-cornered tower of canvas with the one square window at the top, and everything down to the minimum of conventional and obviously painted scenery. Yet these were the very things I ought to have torn and rent in rage, as the trappings of imposture, if I had really regarded the explanation as spoiling the experience. I was pleased, and not displeased, when I discovered that the magic figures could be moved by three human fingers. And I was right; for those three human fingers are more magical than any magic figures; the three fingers which hold the pen and the sword and the bow of the violin; the very three fingers that the priest lifts in benediction as the emblem of the Blessed Trinity. There was no conflict between the two magics in my mind.
I will here sum up in four statements, which will look very like puzzles upon this page. I can assure the reader that they have a relevance to the ultimate upshot of this book. Having littered the world with thousands of essays for a living, I am doubtless prone to let this story stray into a sort of essay; but I repeat that it is not an essay but a story. So much so, that I am here employing a sort of device from a detective story. In the first few pages of a police novel, there are often three or four hints rather to rouse curiosity than allay it; so that the curate’s start of recognition, the cockatoo’s scream in the night, the burnt blotting-paper or the hasty avoidance of the subject of onions is exhibited in the beginning though not explained until the end. So it is with the dull and difficult interlude of this chapter; a mere introspection about infancy which is not introspective. The patient reader may yet discover that these dark hints have something to do with the ensuing mystery of my misguided existence, and even with the crime that comes before the end. Anyhow, I will set them down here without discussion of anything which they foreshadow.
Di questa qualità positiva l’attributo più generale era la chiarezza. È qui che differisco, per esempio, da Stevenson, che tanto calorosamente ammiro; e che parla del bambino come di chi si muove con la testa tra le nuvole. Egli parla del bambino come normalmente immerso in un istupidito sogno a occhi aperti, in cui non sa distinguere la fantasia dal fatto. Ora, i bambini e gli adulti sono entrambi fantasiosi a tratti; ma non è questo che, nella mia mente e nella mia memoria, distingue gli adulti dai bambini. La mia è una memoria d’una sorta di luce bianca su ogni cosa, che ritagliava le cose con gran nettezza, e ne accentuava piuttosto la solidità. Il punto è che quella luce bianca aveva in sé una sorta di meraviglia, come se il mondo fosse nuovo quanto me stesso; ma non che il mondo fosse qualcosa di diverso da un mondo reale. Sono ora molto più disposto a immaginare che un melo al chiaro di luna sia una sorta di fantasma o di grigia ninfa; o a vedere i mobili mutarsi e strisciare fantasticamente al crepuscolo, come in qualche racconto di Poe o di Hawthorne. Ma quand’ero bambino avevo una sorta di fiducioso stupore nel contemplare il melo come un melo. Ne ero certo, e certo anche della sorpresa che dava; certo, per citare il perfetto proverbio popolare, certo come che Dio fece le piccole mele. Le mele potevano essere piccole quanto me; ma erano solide e così ero io. C’era qualcosa d’un eterno mattino in quello stato d’animo; e mi piaceva vedere un fuoco acceso più che immaginare volti nel bagliore del fuoco. Frate Fuoco, che san Francesco amava, sembrava davvero più un fratello di quei volti da sogno che vengono agli uomini che hanno conosciuto altre emozioni che non la fratellanza. Non so se mai, come dice la frase, piansi per la luna; ma son certo che me la sarei aspettata solida come qualche colossale palla di neve; e avrei sempre avuto più appetito per le lune che per il mero chiaro di luna. Solo figure retoriche possono debolmente esprimere il fatto; ma era un fatto e non una figura retorica. Ciò che ho detto prima sul teatrino di cartone potrebbe essere addotto a contraddizione, e come esempio di diletto in una mera illusione.
In tal caso, ciò che ho detto prima sul teatrino di cartone sarà del tutto frainteso. In realtà, in quella faccenda non c’era nulla d’un’illusione o d’una disillusione. Se questa fosse una spietata storia realistica moderna, dovrei naturalmente dare un resoconto quanto mai straziante di come il mio spirito fu spezzato dalla delusione, allo scoprire che il principe non era che una figura dipinta. Ma questa non è una spietata storia realistica moderna. Al contrario, è una storia vera. E la verità è che non ricordo d’essere stato in alcun modo ingannato né in alcun modo disingannato. Tutto il punto è che il teatrino di cartone mi piaceva anche quando sapevo che era un teatrino di cartone. Le figure di cartone mi piacevano, anche quando scoprivo che erano di cartone. La luce bianca della meraviglia che risplendeva su tutta la faccenda non era una sorta di trucco; anzi, le cose che ora più risplendono nella mia memoria erano molte di esse meri accessori tecnici; come i bastoncini paralleli di legno bianco che tenevano in posizione la scenografia; un legno bianco che è ancora stranamente mescolato nei miei istinti immaginativi con tutto il sacro mestiere del Falegname. Lo stesso valeva per qualsiasi altro gioco o finzione in cui mi dilettavo; come nello spettacolo di burattini di Punch and Judy. Non solo sapevo che le figure erano fatte di legno, ma volevo che fossero fatte di legno. Non riuscivo a immaginare che un colpo così sonoro potesse esser assestato se non da un bastone di legno su una testa di legno. Ma provavo la sorta di piacere che un uomo primitivo poteva provare in un mestiere primitivo, nel vedere che erano intagliate e dipinte in una sorprendente e ghignante caricatura dell’umanità. Ero lieto che il pezzo di legno fosse un volto; ma ero anche lieto che il volto fosse un pezzo di legno. Ciò non significava che il dramma di legno, come l’altro dramma di cartone, non mi rivelasse idee e immaginazioni reali, e non mi desse gloriosi scorci sulle possibilità dell’esistenza. Naturalmente il bambino non analizzava se stesso allora; e l’uomo non può analizzarlo ora. Ma sono certo che non fu meramente ingannato o intrappolato. Godeva della funzione suggestiva dell’arte esattamente come ne gode un critico d’arte; solo che ne godeva d’un bel po’ di più. Per la stessa ragione non penso d’essere mai stato molto turbato da Babbo Natale, o da quel presunto terribile sussurro del bambinetto secondo cui Father Christmas «è solo tuo padre». Forse la parola «solo» colpirebbe tutti i bambini come il mot juste.
La mia fissa idolatria di Punch and Judy illustrava lo stesso fatto e la stessa fallacia. Non solo ero grato per il divertimento, ma giunsi a sentirmi grato per i finimenti stessi e per l’apparato del divertimento; la torre quadrangolare di tela con l’unica finestra quadrata in cima, e tutto quanto, fino al minimo di scenografia convenzionale e palesemente dipinta. Eppure queste erano proprio le cose che avrei dovuto strappare e lacerare con rabbia, come i fronzoli dell’impostura, se avessi davvero considerato la spiegazione come una rovina dell’esperienza. Fui lieto, e non contrariato, quando scoprii che le figure magiche potevano essere mosse da tre dita umane. E avevo ragione; poiché quelle tre dita umane sono più magiche di qualsiasi figura magica; le tre dita che reggono la penna e la spada e l’archetto del violino; le tre stesse dita che il sacerdote leva in benedizione come emblema della Santissima Trinità. Non c’era conflitto tra le due magie nella mia mente.
Riassumerò qui in quattro affermazioni, che avranno un’aria molto simile a rompicapi su questa pagina. Posso assicurare il lettore che hanno una rilevanza per l’esito ultimo di questo libro. Avendo cosparso il mondo di migliaia di saggi per vivere, sono senza dubbio incline a lasciare che questa storia sconfini in una sorta di saggio; ma ripeto che non è un saggio ma una storia. Tanto che qui sto impiegando una sorta d’espediente da storia poliziesca. Nelle prime pagine d’un romanzo poliziesco, ci sono spesso tre o quattro indizi atti piuttosto a suscitare la curiosità che a placarla; così che il trasalimento di riconoscimento del curato, lo strillo della cacatua nella notte, la carta assorbente bruciata o la frettolosa elusione dell’argomento delle cipolle sono esibiti al principio benché non spiegati fino alla fine. Così è con l’uggioso e difficile intermezzo di questo capitolo; una mera introspezione sull’infanzia che non è introspettiva. Il paziente lettore potrà ancora scoprire che questi oscuri indizi hanno qualcosa a che fare col mistero che segue della mia mal indirizzata esistenza, e persino col delitto che viene prima della fine. Comunque, li annoterò qui senza discutere alcunché di ciò che essi presagiscono.
First; my life unfolded itself in the epoch of evolution; which really only means unfolding. But many of the evolutionists of that epoch really seemed to mean by evolution the unfolding of what is not there. I have since, in a special sense, come to believe in development, which means the unfolding of what is there. Now it may seem both a daring and a doubtful boast, if I claim that in my childhood I was all there. At least, many of those who knew me best were quite doubtful about it. But I mean that the distinctions I make here were all there; I was not conscious of them but I contained them. In short, they existed in infancy in the condition called implicit; though they certainly did not then express themselves in what is commonly called implicit obedience.
Second; I knew, for instance, that pretending is not deceiving. I could not have defined the distinction if it had been questioned; but that was because it had never occurred to me that it could be questioned. It was merely because a child understands the nature of art, long before he understands the nature of argument. Now it is still not uncommon to say that images are idols and that idols are dolls. I am content to say here that even dolls are not idols, but in the true sense images. The very word images means things necessary to imagination. But not things contrary to reason; no, not even in a child. For imagination is almost the opposite of illusion.
Third; I have noted that I enjoyed Punch and Judy as a drama and not a dream; and indeed the whole extraordinary state of mind I strive to recapture was really the very reverse of a dream. It was rather as if I was more wide-awake then than I am now, and moving in broader daylight, which was to our broad daylight what daylight is to dusk. Only, of course, to those seeing the last gleam of it through the dusk, the light looks more uncanny than any darkness. Anyhow, it looks quite different; of that I am absolutely and solidly certain; though in such a subjective matter of sensation there can be no demonstration. What was the real meaning of that difference? I have some sort of notion now; but I will not mention it at this stage of the story.
Fourth; it will be quite natural, it will also be quite wrong, to infer from all this that I passed a quite exceptionally comfortable childhood in complete contentment; or else that my memory is merely a sundial that has only marked the sunny hours. But that is not in the least what I mean; that is quite a different question. I was often unhappy in childhood like other children; but happiness and unhappiness seemed of a different texture or held on a different tenure. I was very often naughty in childhood like other children; and I never doubted for a moment the moral of all the moral tales; that, as a general principle, people ought to be unhappy when they have been naughty. That is, I held the whole idea of repentance and absolution implicit but not unfolded in my mind. To add to all this, I was by no means unacquainted with pain, which is a pretty unanswerable thing; I had a fair amount of toothache and especially earache; and few can bemuse themselves into regarding earache as a form of epicurean hedonism. But here again there is a difference. For some unaccountable reason, and in some indescribable way, the pain did not leave on my memory the sort of stain of the intolerable or mysterious that it leaves on the mature mind. To all these four facts I can testify; exactly as if they were facts like my loving a toy gun or climbing a tree. Their meaning, in the murder or other mystery, will appear later.
For I fear I have prolonged preposterously this note on the nursery; as if I had been an unconscionable time, not dying but being born, or at least being brought up. Well, I believe in prolonging childhood; and I am not sorry that I was a backward child. But I can only say that this nursery note is necessary if all the rest is to be anything but nonsense; and not even nursery nonsense. In the chapters that follow, I shall pass to what are called real happenings, though they are far less real. Without giving myself any airs of the adventurer or the globe-trotter, I may say I have seen something of the world; I have travelled in interesting places and talked to interesting men; I have been in political quarrels often turning into faction fights; I have talked to statesmen in the hour of the destiny of states; I have met most of the great poets and prose writers of my time; I have travelled in the track of some of the whirlwinds and earthquakes in the ends of the earth; I have lived in houses burned down in the tragic wars of Ireland; I have walked through the ruins of Polish palaces left behind by the Red Armies; I have heard talk of the secret signals of the Ku Klux Klan upon the borders of Texas; I have seen the fanatical Arabs come up from the desert to attack the Jews in Jerusalem. There are many journalists who have seen more of such things than I; but I have been a journalist and I have seen such things; there will be no difficulty in filling other chapters with such things; but they will be unmeaning, if nobody understands that they still mean less to me than Punch and Judy on Campden Hill.
In a word; I have never lost the sense that this was my real life; the real beginning of what should have been a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living. It seems to me that when I came out of the house and stood on that hill of houses, where the roads sank steeply towards Holland Park, and terraces of new red houses could look out across a vast hollow and see far away the sparkle of the Crystal Palace (and seeing it was a juvenile sport in those parts), I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes astray from it in self-deception. It is only the grown man who lives a life of make-believe and pretending; and it is he who has his head in a cloud.
At this time, of course, I did not even know that this morning light could be lost; still less about any controversies as to whether it could be recovered. So far the disputes of that period passed over my head like storms high up in air; and as I did not foresee the problem I naturally did not foresee any of my searches for a solution. I simply looked at the procession in the street as I looked at the processions in the toy-theatre; and now and then I happened to see curious things, two-pence coloured rather than a penny plain, which were worthy of the wildest pageants of the toy-theatre. I remember once walking with my father along Kensington High Street, and seeing a crowd of people gathered by a rather dark and narrow entry on the southern side of that thoroughfare. I had seen crowds before; and was quite prepared for their shouting or shoving. But I was not prepared for what happened next. In a flash a sort of ripple ran along the line and all these eccentrics went down on their knees on the public pavement. I had never seen people play any such antics except in church; and I stopped and stared. Then I realised that a sort of little dark cab or carriage had drawn up opposite the entry; and out of it came a ghost clad in flames. Nothing in the shilling paint-box had ever spread such a conflagration of scarlet, such lakes of lake; or seemed so splendidly likely to incarnadine the multitudinous sea. He came on with all his glowing draperies like a great crimson cloud of sunset, lifting long frail fingers over the crowd in blessing. And then I looked at his face and was startled with a contrast; for his face was dead pale like ivory and very wrinkled and old, fitted together out of naked nerve and bone and sinew; with hollow eyes in shadow; but not ugly; having in every line the ruin of great beauty. The face was so extraordinary that for a moment I even forgot such perfectly scrumptious scarlet clothes.
We passed on; and then my father said, “Do you know who that was? That was Cardinal Manning.”
Then one of his artistic hobbies returned to his abstracted and humorous mind; and he said,
“He’d have made his fortune as a model.”
Primo; la mia vita si dispiegò nell’epoca dell’evoluzione; che in realtà significa soltanto dispiegamento. Ma molti degli evoluzionisti di quell’epoca parevano davvero intendere per evoluzione il dispiegamento di ciò che non c’è. Da allora, in un senso speciale, sono giunto a credere nello sviluppo, che significa il dispiegamento di ciò che c’è. Ora, può sembrare una vanteria insieme ardita e dubbia, se pretendo che nella mia infanzia io fossi tutto presente. Almeno, molti di quelli che meglio mi conoscevano ne dubitavano assai. Ma intendo dire che le distinzioni che qui faccio erano tutte presenti; non ne ero consapevole ma le contenevo. In breve, esse esistevano nella prima età nella condizione detta implicita; benché non si esprimessero allora, di certo, in ciò che si chiama comunemente obbedienza implicita.
Secondo; sapevo, per esempio, che il far finta non è ingannare. Non avrei saputo definire la distinzione se fosse stata messa in questione; ma ciò era perché non m’era mai venuto in mente che potesse esser messa in questione. Era semplicemente perché un bambino comprende la natura dell’arte molto prima di comprendere la natura dell’argomentazione. Ora, non è ancora raro dire che le immagini sono idoli e che gli idoli sono bambole. Mi accontento di dire qui che persino le bambole non sono idoli, ma nel vero senso immagini. La parola stessa immagini significa cose necessarie all’immaginazione. Ma non cose contrarie alla ragione; no, nemmeno in un bambino. Poiché l’immaginazione è quasi l’opposto dell’illusione.
Terzo; ho notato che godevo di Punch and Judy come d’un dramma e non come d’un sogno; e in verità l’intero straordinario stato mentale che mi sforzo di ricatturare era davvero il rovescio esatto d’un sogno. Era piuttosto come se fossi allora più sveglio di quanto lo sia ora, e mi muovessi in una più ampia luce del giorno, che stava alla nostra ampia luce del giorno come la luce del giorno sta al crepuscolo. Solo che, naturalmente, a coloro che ne vedono l’ultimo barlume attraverso il crepuscolo, la luce appare più perturbante di qualsiasi tenebra. Comunque, appare del tutto diversa; di questo sono assolutamente e solidamente certo; benché in una materia così soggettiva di sensazione non possa esserci dimostrazione. Qual era il vero significato di quella differenza? Ho ora una sorta di nozione; ma non la menzionerò a questo stadio della storia.
Quarto; sarà del tutto naturale, e sarà anche del tutto sbagliato, inferire da tutto ciò che io trascorsi un’infanzia eccezionalmente comoda in completa contentezza; oppure che la mia memoria sia meramente una meridiana che ha segnato soltanto le ore soleggiate. Ma non è affatto ciò che intendo; è tutt’altra questione. Fui spesso infelice nell’infanzia come gli altri bambini; ma la felicità e l’infelicità parevano d’una tessitura diversa o tenute a un titolo diverso. Fui assai spesso birichino nell’infanzia come gli altri bambini; e non dubitai mai per un istante della morale di tutti i racconti morali; che, come principio generale, la gente dovrebbe essere infelice quando è stata birichina. Vale a dire, tenevo l’intera idea del pentimento e dell’assoluzione implicita ma non dispiegata nella mia mente. E per giunta, non ero affatto ignaro del dolore, che è una cosa piuttosto inoppugnabile; ebbi una discreta quantità di mal di denti e specialmente di mal d’orecchi; e pochi possono illudersi fino a considerare il mal d’orecchi come una forma d’edonismo epicureo. Ma anche qui c’è una differenza. Per qualche inspiegabile ragione, e in qualche modo indescrivibile, il dolore non lasciò sulla mia memoria quella sorta di macchia dell’intollerabile o del misterioso che esso lascia sulla mente matura. A tutti questi quattro fatti posso testimoniare; esattamente come se fossero fatti come il mio amare uno schioppo giocattolo o l’arrampicarmi su un albero. Il loro significato, nel delitto o altro mistero, apparirà più avanti.
Poiché temo d’aver prolungato in modo spropositato questa nota sulla stanza dei bambini; come se avessi impiegato un tempo inverosimile, non a morire, ma a nascere, o almeno a essere allevato. Ebbene, io credo nel prolungare l’infanzia; e non mi dispiace d’essere stato un bambino tardivo. Ma posso solo dire che questa nota sulla stanza dei bambini è necessaria se tutto il resto non deve essere altro che nonsenso; e nemmeno nonsenso da stanza dei bambini. Nei capitoli che seguono, passerò a ciò che si chiamano fatti reali, benché siano assai meno reali. Senza darmi arie da avventuriero o da giramondo, posso dire d’aver visto qualcosa del mondo; ho viaggiato in luoghi interessanti e parlato con uomini interessanti; sono stato in dispute politiche che spesso si tramutavano in risse di fazione; ho parlato con statisti nell’ora del destino degli Stati; ho incontrato la maggior parte dei grandi poeti e prosatori del mio tempo; ho viaggiato sulla scia d’alcuni dei turbini e dei terremoti agli estremi confini della terra; ho abitato in case incendiate nelle tragiche guerre d’Irlanda; ho camminato tra le rovine di palazzi polacchi lasciate dietro di sé dalle Armate Rosse; ho udito parlare dei segnali segreti del Ku Klux Klan ai confini del Texas; ho visto i fanatici Arabi salire dal deserto per attaccare gli Ebrei a Gerusalemme. Vi sono molti giornalisti che hanno visto più di simili cose di me; ma io sono stato un giornalista e ho visto simili cose; non ci sarà difficoltà a riempire altri capitoli con simili cose; ma esse saranno prive di significato, se nessuno comprende che ancora significano per me meno di Punch and Judy su Campden Hill.
In una parola; non ho mai perduto la sensazione che quella fosse la mia vera vita; il vero inizio di ciò che avrebbe dovuto essere una vita più reale; un’esperienza perduta nella terra dei viventi. Mi pare che, quando uscivo di casa e stavo su quella collina di case, dove le strade digradavano ripide verso Holland Park, e file di nuove case rosse potevano affacciarsi su una vasta conca e scorgere lontano lo scintillio del Crystal Palace (e scorgerlo era uno svago giovanile da quelle parti), ero allora subconsciamente certo, come ora sono coscientemente certo, che là c’era la bianca e solida strada e il degno inizio della vita dell’uomo; e che è l’uomo che in seguito la oscura con i sogni o se ne smarrisce nell’autoinganno. È solo l’uomo adulto che vive una vita di far finta e di finzione; ed è lui che ha la testa tra le nuvole.
A quel tempo, s’intende, non sapevo nemmeno che questa luce mattutina potesse esser perduta; e ancor meno di qualsiasi controversia sul fatto che potesse esser recuperata. Fin lì le dispute di quel periodo passavano sopra la mia testa come tempeste alte nell’aria; e poiché non prevedevo il problema, naturalmente non prevedevo alcuna delle mie ricerche d’una soluzione. Guardavo semplicemente la processione nella strada come guardavo le processioni nel teatrino di cartone; e di tanto in tanto mi capitava di vedere cose curiose, da due pence colorate anziché da un penny in bianco, degne dei più sfrenati cortei del teatrino di cartone. Ricordo che una volta, camminando con mio padre lungo Kensington High Street, vidi una folla di persone radunata presso un ingresso piuttosto scuro e stretto sul lato meridionale di quella via. Avevo già visto folle; ed ero ben preparato ai loro schiamazzi o alle loro spinte. Ma non ero preparato a ciò che accadde in seguito. In un lampo una sorta d’increspatura corse lungo la fila e tutti quegli eccentrici caddero in ginocchio sul pubblico marciapiede. Non avevo mai visto la gente fare simili buffonate se non in chiesa; e mi fermai e fissai. Poi mi resi conto che una sorta di piccola carrozza scura o vettura s’era fermata di fronte all’ingresso; e ne uscì un fantasma vestito di fiamme. Nulla nella scatola di colori da uno scellino aveva mai steso una simile conflagrazione di scarlatto, simili laghi di lacca; o pareva così splendidamente atto a insanguinare di rosso il mare moltitudinoso. Avanzava con tutti i suoi drappi fiammeggianti come una grande cremisi nube di tramonto, levando lunghe fragili dita sulla folla in benedizione. E poi guardai il suo volto e fui trasalito da un contrasto; poiché il suo volto era pallido come la morte, simile all’avorio, e assai rugoso e vecchio, connesso insieme di nudo nervo e osso e tendine; con occhi incavati nell’ombra; ma non brutto; con in ogni linea la rovina d’una grande bellezza. Il volto era così straordinario che per un momento dimenticai persino quelle vesti scarlatte così perfettamente squisite.
Proseguimmo; e poi mio padre disse: «Sai chi era quello? Quello era il Cardinal Manning.»
Poi uno dei suoi hobby artistici tornò alla sua mente astratta e umoristica; e disse:
«Avrebbe fatto fortuna come modello.»
III
HOW TO BE A DUNCE
The change from childhood to boyhood, and the mysterious transformation that produces that monster the schoolboy, might be very well summed up in one small fact. To me the ancient capital letters of the Greek alphabet, the great Theta, a sphere barred across the midst like Saturn, or the great Upsilon, standing up like a tall curved chalice, have still a quite unaccountable charm and mystery, as if they were the characters traced in wide welcome over Eden of the dawn. The ordinary small Greek letters, though I am now much more familiar with them, seem to me quite nasty little things like a swarm of gnats. As for Greek accents, I triumphantly succeeded, through a long series of school-terms, in avoiding learning them at all; and I never had a higher moment of gratification than when I afterwards discovered that the Greeks never learnt them either. I felt, with a radiant pride, that I was as ignorant as Plato and Thucydides. At least they were unknown to the Greeks who wrote the prose and poetry that was thought worth studying; and were invented by grammarians, I believe, at the time of the Renaissance. But it is a simple psychological fact; that the sight of a Greek capital still fills me with happiness, the sight of a small letter with indifference tinged with dislike, and the accents with righteous indignation reaching the point of profanity. And I believe that the explanation is that I learnt the large Greek letters, as I learnt the large English letters, at home. I was told about them merely for fun while I was still a child; while the others I learnt during the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know.
But I say this merely to show that I was a much wiser and widerminded person at the age of six than at the age of sixteen. I do not base any educational theories upon it, heaven forbid. This work cannot, on some points, avoid being theoretical; but it need not add insult to injury by being educational. I certainly shall not, in the graceful modern manner, turn round and abuse my schoolmasters because I did not choose to learn what they were quite ready to teach. It may be that in the improved schools of today, the child is so taught that he crows aloud with delight at the sight of a Greek accent. But I fear it is much more probable that the new schools have got rid of the Greek accent by getting rid of the Greek. And upon that point, as it happens, I am largely on the side of my schoolmasters against myself. I am very glad that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were to a certain extent frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes. At least I know enough Greek to be able to see the joke, when somebody says (as somebody did the other day) that the study of that language is not suited to an age of democracy. I do not know what language he thought democracy came from; and it must be admitted that the word seems now to be a part of the language called journalese. But my only point for the moment is personal or psychological; my own private testimony to the curious fact that, for some reason or other, a boy often does pass, from an early stage when he wants to know nearly everything, to a later stage when he wants to know next to nothing. A very practical and experienced traveller, with nothing of the mystic about him, once remarked to me suddenly: “There must be something rottenly wrong with education itself. So many people have wonderful children and all the grown-up people are such duds.” And I know what he meant; though I am in doubt whether my present duddishness is due to education, or to some deeper and more mysterious cause.
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy. There grows all over what was once the child a sort of prickly protection like hair; a callousness, a carelessness, a curious combination of random and quite objectless energy with a readiness to accept conventions. I have blindly begun a lark which involved carrying on literally like a lunatic; and known all the time that I did not know why I was doing it. When I first met my best friend in the playground, I fought with him wildly for three-quarters of an hour; not scientifically and certainly not vindictively (I had never seen him before and I have been very fond of him ever since) but by a sort of inexhaustible and insatiable impulse, rushing hither and thither about the field and rolling over and over in the mud. And all the time I believe that both our minds were entirely mild and reasonable; and when we desisted from sheer exhaustion, and he happened to quote Dickens or the Bab Ballads, or something I had read, we plunged into a friendly discussion on literature which has gone on, intermittently, from that day to this. There is no explaining these things; if those who have done them cannot explain them. But since then I have seen boys in many countries and even of many colours; Egyptian boys in the bazaars of Cairo or mulatto boys in the slums of New York. And I have found that by some primordial law they all tend to three things; to going about in threes; to having no apparent object in going about at all; and, almost invariably speaking, to suddenly attacking each other and equally suddenly desisting from the attack.
Some may still question my calling this conduct conventional, from a general impression that two bankers or business partners do not commonly roll each other head-over-heels for fun, or in a spirit of pure friendship. It might be retorted that two business partners are not always by any means such pure friends. But in any case, it is true to call the thing a convention in more than the verbal sense of a collision. And it is exactly this convention that really separates the schoolboy from the child. When I went to St. Paul’s School, in Hammersmith, there really was a sort of convention of independence; which was in a certain degree a false independence; because it was a false maturity. Here we must remember once more the fallacy about “pretending” in childhood. The child does not really pretend to be a Red Indian; any more than Shelley pretended to be a cloud or Tennyson to be a brook. The point can be tested by offering a political pamphlet to the cloud, a peerage to the brook, or a penny for sweets to the Red Bull of the Prairies. But the boy really is pretending to be a man; or even a man of the world; which would seem a far more horrific metamorphosis. Schoolboys in my time could be blasted with the horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a Christian name. And the deadly nature of this blow really consisted in the fact that it cracked the whole convention of our lives; the convention that each of us was on his own; an independent gentleman living on private means. The secret that each of us did in fact possess a family, and parents who paid for our support, was conventionally ignored and only revealed in moments of maddened revenge. But the point is that there was already a faint touch of corruption in this convention; precisely because it was more serious and less frank than the tarra-diddles of infancy. We had begun to be what no children are—snobs. Children disinfect all their dramatic impersonations by saying “Let us pretend.” We schoolboys never said “Let us pretend”; we only pretended.
III
COME ESSERE UN SOMARO
Il passaggio dall’infanzia alla fanciullezza, e la misteriosa trasformazione che produce quel Mostro che è lo scolaro, potrebbero riassumersi assai bene in un piccolo fatto. Per me le antiche lettere maiuscole dell’alfabeto greco, la grande Theta, una sfera sbarrata a metà come Saturno, o la grande Ypsilon, ritta come un alto calice ricurvo, hanno ancora un fascino e un mistero del tutto inspiegabili, come se fossero i caratteri tracciati in ampio benvenuto sull’Eden dell’Alba. Le comuni lettere greche minuscole, benché ora io abbia con esse assai più familiarità, mi paiono cosette piuttosto sgradevoli, come uno sciame di moscerini. Quanto agli accenti greci, riuscii trionfalmente, attraverso una lunga serie di trimestri scolastici, a evitare del tutto di impararli; e non ebbi mai momento di maggior gratificazione di quando scoprii in seguito che neppure i Greci li avevano mai imparati. Sentii, con un raggiante orgoglio, di essere ignorante quanto Platone e Tucidide. Almeno essi erano ignoti ai Greci che scrissero la prosa e la poesia ritenute degne di studio; e furono inventati dai grammatici, credo, al tempo del Rinascimento. Ma è un semplice fatto psicologico; che la vista di una maiuscola greca mi riempie ancora di felicità, la vista di una lettera minuscola d’indifferenza sfumata di avversione, e gli accenti di sdegno virtuoso che tocca il punto della bestemmia. E credo che la spiegazione sia che imparai le grandi lettere greche, come imparai le grandi lettere inglesi, a casa. Me ne parlarono per puro divertimento mentre ero ancora un bambino; mentre le altre le imparai durante il periodo di ciò che comunemente si chiama Educazione; vale a dire, il periodo durante il quale venivo istruito da qualcuno che non conoscevo, su qualcosa che non volevo conoscere.
Ma dico questo soltanto per mostrare che ero una persona assai più saggia e di mente più aperta all’età di sei anni che all’età di sedici. Non ci fondo alcuna teoria educativa, il cielo me ne guardi. Quest’opera non può, su certi punti, evitare di essere teorica; ma non ha bisogno di aggiungere la beffa al danno essendo educativa. Di certo non intendo, alla graziosa maniera moderna, voltarmi a insultare i miei maestri perché non scelsi di imparare ciò che erano prontissimi a insegnare. Può darsi che nelle scuole migliorate di oggi il bambino sia istruito così bene da gongolare a voce alta di gioia alla vista di un accento greco. Ma temo sia assai più probabile che le scuole nuove si siano sbarazzate dell’accento greco sbarazzandosi del greco. E su quel punto, come càpita, sto in gran parte dalla parte dei miei maestri contro me stesso. Sono ben lieto che i miei ostinati sforzi per non imparare il latino siano stati in una certa misura frustrati; e di non essere riuscito del tutto a sfuggire perfino alla contaminazione della lingua di Aristotele e Demostene. Almeno so abbastanza greco da poter cogliere lo scherzo, quando qualcuno dice (come qualcuno ha detto l’altro giorno) che lo studio di quella lingua non si addice a un’età di democrazia. Non so da quale lingua egli pensasse provenisse la democrazia; e bisogna ammettere che la parola sembra ora far parte della lingua chiamata giornalese. Ma il mio unico punto per il momento è personale o psicologico; la mia stessa privata testimonianza al curioso fatto che, per qualche ragione o l’altra, un ragazzo spesso passa, da uno stadio precoce in cui vuole sapere quasi tutto, a uno stadio successivo in cui vuole sapere pressoché nulla. Un viaggiatore assai pratico ed esperto, senza nulla del mistico in sé, una volta mi osservò all’improvviso: «Ci deve essere qualcosa di marciamente sbagliato nell’Educazione stessa. Tanta gente ha bambini meravigliosi e tutti gli adulti sono degli emeriti buoni a nulla.» E so che cosa intendeva; benché io sia in dubbio se il mio presente essere buono a nulla sia dovuto all’Educazione, o a qualche causa più profonda e più misteriosa.
La fanciullezza è cosa assai complessa e incomprensibile. Anche quando la si è attraversata, non si capisce che cosa fosse. Un uomo non può mai capire del tutto un ragazzo, anche quando è stato il ragazzo. Cresce su tutto ciò che un tempo era il bambino una sorta di protezione spinosa come peluria; una insensibilità, una noncuranza, una curiosa combinazione di energia casuale e del tutto priva di scopo con una prontezza ad accettare le convenzioni. Ho ciecamente intrapreso una bravata che comportava il comportarsi letteralmente da lunatico; e ho saputo per tutto il tempo di non sapere perché la stessi facendo. Quando incontrai per la prima volta il mio migliore amico nel cortile, lottai con lui selvaggiamente per tre quarti d’ora; non scientificamente e di certo non vendicativamente (non l’avevo mai visto prima e gli sono stato assai affezionato da allora) ma per una sorta di impulso inesauribile e insaziabile, precipitandoci qua e là per il campo e rotolando più e più volte nel fango. E per tutto il tempo credo che entrambe le nostre menti fossero interamente miti e ragionevoli; e quando desistemmo per pura spossatezza, e a lui càpitò di citare Dickens o le Bab Ballads, o qualcosa che avevo letto, ci tuffammo in un’amichevole discussione sulla letteratura che è proseguita, a intermittenza, da quel giorno a questo. Non c’è spiegazione a queste cose; se coloro che le hanno fatte non possono spiegarle. Ma da allora ho visto ragazzi in molti paesi e persino di molti colori; ragazzi egiziani nei bazar del Cairo o ragazzi mulatti nei bassifondi di New York. E ho scoperto che, per qualche legge primordiale, essi tendono tutti a tre cose; ad andare in giro in tre; a non avere alcuno scopo apparente nell’andare in giro affatto; e, quasi invariabilmente parlando, ad aggredirsi d’improvviso l’un l’altro e a desistere altrettanto d’improvviso dall’aggressione.
Alcuni potranno ancora contestare il mio definire convenzionale questa condotta, per l’impressione generale che due banchieri o due soci in affari non usino comunemente rotolare l’uno l’altro a capofitto per divertimento, o in uno spirito di pura Amicizia. Si potrebbe ribattere che due soci in affari non sono affatto sempre amici tanto puri. Ma in ogni caso, è corretto chiamare la cosa una convenzione in più che nel senso verbale di una collisione. Ed è esattamente questa convenzione che davvero separa lo scolaro dal bambino. Quando andai alla St. Paul’s School, a Hammersmith, c’era davvero una sorta di convenzione d’indipendenza; che era in un certo grado una falsa indipendenza; perché era una falsa maturità. Qui dobbiamo ricordare ancora una volta il malinteso sul «far finta» nell’infanzia. Il bambino non finge davvero di essere un Pellerossa; più di quanto Shelley fingesse di essere una nuvola o Tennyson un ruscello. Il punto si può verificare offrendo un pamphlet politico alla nuvola, un titolo nobiliare al ruscello, o un penny per i dolciumi al Toro Rosso delle Praterie. Ma il ragazzo finge davvero di essere un uomo; o addirittura un uomo di mondo; il che parrebbe una metamorfosi assai più orrifica. Gli scolari ai miei tempi potevano essere fulminati dall’orribile rivelazione di avere una sorella, o addirittura un nome di battesimo. E la letale natura di questo colpo consisteva davvero nel fatto che incrinava l’intera convenzione delle nostre vite; la convenzione che ciascuno di noi badasse a sé; un gentiluomo indipendente che viveva di rendita. Il segreto che ciascuno di noi possedesse in effetti una famiglia, e genitori che pagavano per il nostro sostentamento, era convenzionalmente ignorato e rivelato soltanto in momenti di esasperata Vendetta. Ma il punto è che c’era già una debole traccia di corruzione in questa convenzione; proprio perché essa era più seria e meno franca delle frottole dell’infanzia. Avevamo cominciato a essere ciò che nessun bambino è — snob. I bambini disinfettano tutte le loro impersonificazioni drammatiche dicendo «Facciamo finta». Noi scolari non dicevamo mai «Facciamo finta»; fingevamo soltanto.
Boys, I have said, wander in threes. Three is certainly the symbolic number for comradeship, even if it is not always exactly the same as friendship. I have had the good luck to enjoy both, as did the Three Musketeers, or the Three Soldiers of Mr. Kipling. The first of my friends, with whom I fought in the field, has since written the best detective story of modern times and still conceals a very powerful sense of humour under the almost impenetrable disguise of a writer on the Daily Telegraph. He was, and indeed still is, remarkable for the combination of an extraordinary gravity of visage with extreme agility and quickness of movement. I used to say that he had the head of a professor on the body of a harlequin. It was a poetic pleasure to see him walk, a little pompously, down the street and suddenly scale a lamp-post like a monkey, with the alleged intention of lighting a cigarette, and then drop down and resume his walk with an unchanged expression of earnestness and serenity. He had extraordinarily well-balanced brains and could do almost anything with them; even writing an ordinary leading article for a London daily. But he could write clear and unadulterated nonsense with the same serious simplicity. It was he who invented that severe and stately form of Free Verse which has since been known by his own second name as “the Clerihew” (his name is Edward Clerihew Bentley) or “Biography for Beginners”; which dates from our days at school, when he sat listening to a chemical exposition, with his rather bored air and blank sheet of blotting paper before him. On this he wrote, inspired by the limpid spirit of song, the unadorned lines,
Sir Humphrey Davy Detested gravy. He incurred the odium Of discovering sodium.
Even in those days I used to draw pictures, or what were called pictures, to illustrate these biographical rhymes; though of course it was not till decades afterwards that we either of us had the notion of publishing a book, or of publishing anything. Long after we had both become incurable scribblers, we remained inconspicuous schoolboys; we never thought we could be anything else; I do not think we very clearly realised that we ever should be anything else; or that our schoolboy days would ever end. In that sense we were as unambitious as children whispering a secret language. Our jokes were all domestic or developed out of the daily affairs of the school; but they covered enough waste paper to stock a library. I remember an interminable romance, for which I was always drawing pictures, and which I still think had a touch of wild fancy. It arose merely from our walking behind three of the masters; two of them, who were young and tall, had between them a third, who was old and very small; so that there seemed a vague suggestion that they were supporting him. On this was based the great constructive theory that the elder master (who was one of the most important persons in the school) was in fact only a clock-work figure, which they carried about with them and wound up to go through his daily round. The dummy and the two conspirators were dragged through an endless reel of long-drawn (and badly drawn) adventures, some scraps of which must still be kicking about the world somewhere. But needless to say, we never thought of doing anything with them, except enjoying them. It has sometimes struck me as not being a bad thing to do with things.
My friend Bentley, indeed, had and has a natural talent for these elaborate strategic maps of nonsense, or the suggestion of such preposterous plots. It is something like the industry which accompanies the fantasy of Father Ronald Knox, when he makes a detailed map of the Barsetshire of Trollope or works out an incredible cryptogram to show that Queen Victoria wrote “In Memoriam.” I remember one day when the whole school assembled for a presentation to a master who was leaving us to take up a fellowship at Peterhouse. The congratulatory speech was made by one of the upper masters who happened to be a learned but heavy and very solemn old gentleman, whose manner and diction were alike ponderous and prosaic. My friend and I were sitting side by side, hopeless of any enlivenment except from the speaker’s solemnity; when the whole assembly was startled as by a thunderclap. The old gentleman had made a joke. What was even more shocking, it was quite a good joke. He remarked that, in sending our friend from this school to that college, we were robbing Paul to pay Peter. We looked at each other with a wild surmise. We shook our heads gravely. It could not be explained. But Bentley afterwards produced a most convincing and exhaustive explanation. He insisted that the elder schoolmaster had devoted his whole life to planning and preparations for that one joke. He had used his interest with the High Master to obtain for the junior master a place on the staff. He had intrigued with the University authorities to get him a Fellowship at that college. He had lived for that hour. He had now made his first and last joke; and probably would soon pass away in peace.
It was the third member of our original trio who brought into our secrets the breath of ambition and the air out of the great world. He was a dark and very thin youth, named Lucian Oldershaw, who looked and in some ways was very sensitive; but about those larger matters he was much less shy than we were. He was the son of an actor and had travelled about the country more than the rest of us; he had been to other schools and he knew much more of the variety of life. Above all, there possessed him, almost feverishly, a vast, amazing and devastating idea, the idea of doing something; of doing something in the manner of grown-up people, who were the only people who could be conceived as doing things. I well remember how my hair stood on end, when he first spoke casually about the official School Magazine; which was to me something like the School Prayers or the School Foundation. None of us had ever dreamed of contributing to it, any more than to the Encyclopedia Britannica. And my new friend, who was somewhat younger than I, spoke lightly about an old idea he had had of establishing some cooperation between all the great school magazines, those of Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the rest. If he had proposed that we should conquer and rule the British Empire, I could not have been more staggered; but he dismissed it as casually as he had called it up, and then proposed in cold blood that we should publish a magazine of our own; and have it printed at a real printer’s. He must have possessed considerable persuasive powers; because we actually did. We also founded a small society of boys of our own age, and called it the Junior Debating Club; though nobody, so far as I know, has ever heard of the Senior Debating Club. There was the Union, to which you belonged when you were in the top form, as you did other lawful and appalling things, such as dining with the High Master. But we no more anticipated that at our age, than we anticipated death.
I ragazzi, ho detto, vagano in tre. Tre è di certo il numero simbolico per il Cameratismo, anche se non è sempre esattamente lo stesso dell’Amicizia. Ho avuto la fortuna di godere di entrambi, come i Tre Moschettieri, o i Tre Soldati del signor Kipling. Il primo dei miei amici, con cui lottai nel campo, ha da allora scritto la migliore storia poliziesca dei tempi moderni e cela ancora un potentissimo senso dell’Umorismo sotto il quasi impenetrabile travestimento di uno scrittore del Daily Telegraph. Era, e in effetti è ancora, notevole per la combinazione di una straordinaria gravità di volto con estrema agilità e rapidità di movimento. Ero solito dire che aveva la testa di un professore sul corpo di un arlecchino. Era un poetico piacere vederlo camminare, un po’ pomposamente, giù per la strada e d’improvviso scalare un lampione come una scimmia, con la presunta intenzione di accendere una sigaretta, e poi lasciarsi cadere e riprendere la sua passeggiata con un’immutata espressione di serietà e serenità. Aveva cervelli straordinariamente ben bilanciati e poteva farci quasi qualsiasi cosa; persino scrivere un ordinario articolo di fondo per un quotidiano di Londra. Ma poteva scrivere sciocchezze chiare e non adulterate con la medesima seria semplicità. Fu lui a inventare quella severa e maestosa forma di Verso Libero che è da allora nota col suo stesso secondo nome come «il Clerihew» (il suo nome è Edward Clerihew Bentley) o «Biografia per Principianti»; che risale ai nostri giorni di scuola, quando sedeva ad ascoltare un’esposizione chimica, con la sua aria piuttosto annoiata e un foglio bianco di carta assorbente davanti a sé. Su questo scrisse, ispirato dal limpido spirito della Canzone, i disadorni versi,
Sir Humphrey Davy Detestava il sugo grave. Incorse nell’odio universale Per aver scoperto il sodio metallico.
Anche in quei giorni ero solito disegnare figure, o ciò che si chiamava figure, per illustrare queste rime biografiche; benché naturalmente non fu che decenni dopo che a uno di noi due venne l’idea di pubblicare un libro, o di pubblicare alcunché. Molto tempo dopo che eravamo entrambi divenuti inguaribili scribacchini, restavamo scolari senza spicco; non pensammo mai di poter essere alcunché di diverso; non credo che ci rendessimo affatto conto chiaramente che avremmo mai dovuto essere alcunché di diverso; o che i nostri giorni di scuola sarebbero mai finiti. In quel senso eravamo privi d’ambizione come bambini che sussurrano una lingua segreta. I nostri scherzi erano tutti domestici o sviluppati dalle faccende quotidiane della scuola; ma coprivano abbastanza carta straccia da rifornire una biblioteca. Ricordo un interminabile Romanzo, per il quale disegnavo di continuo figure, e che credo ancora avesse un tocco di sfrenata fantasia. Nacque semplicemente dal nostro camminare dietro tre dei maestri; due dei quali, giovani e alti, avevano fra loro un terzo, che era vecchio e assai piccolo; così che pareva vagamente suggerirsi che essi lo sorreggessero. Su questo si basò la grande teoria costruttiva secondo cui il maestro più anziano (che era una delle persone più importanti della scuola) era in realtà soltanto una figura a orologeria, che essi portavano in giro con sé e caricavano per fargli compiere il suo giro quotidiano. Il fantoccio e i due cospiratori venivano trascinati attraverso una interminabile bobina di lunghe (e mal disegnate) avventure, alcuni frammenti delle quali devono ancora circolare da qualche parte per il mondo. Ma inutile dire che non pensammo mai di farne qualcosa, tranne che divertircene. Talvolta mi ha colpito come non sia una cattiva cosa da fare con le cose.
Il mio amico Bentley, in effetti, aveva e ha un talento naturale per queste elaborate mappe strategiche di nonsenso, o per il suggerimento di trame tanto assurde. È qualcosa di simile all’industria che accompagna la fantasia di Padre Ronald Knox, quando traccia una dettagliata mappa del Barsetshire di Trollope o elabora un incredibile crittogramma per dimostrare che la Regina Vittoria scrisse «In Memoriam». Ricordo un giorno in cui l’intera scuola si radunò per un dono a un maestro che ci lasciava per assumere una fellowship a Peterhouse. Il discorso di congratulazioni fu fatto da uno dei maestri anziani che si dava il caso fosse un vecchio gentiluomo dotto ma pesante e assai solenne, i cui modi e la cui dizione erano insieme ponderosi e prosaici. Il mio amico e io sedevamo fianco a fianco, senza speranza di alcun ravvivamento tranne che dalla solennità dell’oratore; quando l’intera assemblea fu fatta trasalire come da un tuono. Il vecchio gentiluomo aveva fatto uno scherzo. Ciò che era ancor più scioccante, era uno scherzo piuttosto buono. Osservò che, mandando il nostro amico da questa scuola a quel college, stavamo derubando Paolo per pagare Pietro. Ci guardammo l’un l’altro con selvaggia congettura. Scuotemmo il capo con gravità. Non si poteva spiegare. Ma Bentley in seguito produsse una spiegazione convincentissima ed esaustiva. Insistette che il maestro più anziano aveva dedicato la sua intera vita a progettare e a preparare quell’unico scherzo. Aveva usato la sua influenza presso l’Alto Maestro per ottenere per il maestro più giovane un posto nel corpo insegnante. Aveva intrigato con le autorità universitarie per procurargli una Fellowship a quel college. Aveva vissuto per quell’ora. Aveva ora fatto il suo primo e ultimo scherzo; e probabilmente sarebbe presto trapassato in pace.
Fu il terzo membro del nostro trio originario a portare nei nostri segreti il soffio dell’Ambizione e l’aria del grande mondo. Era un giovane bruno e assai magro, di nome Lucian Oldershaw, che appariva ed era per certi versi assai sensibile; ma su quelle faccende più grandi era assai meno timido di noi. Era figlio di un attore e aveva girato il paese più del resto di noi; era stato in altre scuole e conosceva assai di più la varietà della vita. Soprattutto, lo possedeva, quasi febbrilmente, una vasta, stupefacente e devastante idea, l’idea di fare qualcosa; di fare qualcosa alla maniera degli adulti, che erano le uniche persone che si potessero concepire nel fare cose. Ricordo bene come mi si rizzarono i capelli, quando egli parlò per la prima volta con noncuranza dell’ufficiale Rivista Scolastica; che per me era qualcosa come le Preghiere della Scuola o la Fondazione della Scuola. Nessuno di noi aveva mai sognato di contribuirvi, non più di quanto avesse sognato di contribuire all’Enciclopedia Britannica. E il mio nuovo amico, che era alquanto più giovane di me, parlò con leggerezza di una vecchia idea che aveva avuto di stabilire una qualche cooperazione tra tutte le grandi riviste scolastiche, quelle di Eton, Harrow, Winchester e le altre. Se avesse proposto che conquistassimo e governassimo l’Impero Britannico, non avrei potuto essere più sbalordito; ma egli la scartò con la stessa noncuranza con cui l’aveva evocata, e poi propose a sangue freddo che pubblicassimo una rivista tutta nostra; e la facessimo stampare da uno stampatore vero. Deve aver posseduto considerevoli poteri di persuasione; perché lo facemmo davvero. Fondammo anche una piccola società di ragazzi della nostra età, e la chiamammo il Circolo Junior di Dibattito; benché nessuno, per quanto ne so, abbia mai sentito parlare del Circolo Senior di Dibattito. C’era l’Unione, a cui si apparteneva quando si era nella classe più alta, come si facevano altre cose lecite e terribili, come cenare con l’Alto Maestro. Ma noi non ci aspettavamo ciò più di quanto ci aspettassimo la Morte.
Our debates are still recorded in stray volumes of our strange little paper; the persons of the play being mysteriously represented by their initials, as if they were members of a secret society in a sensational novel; as “Mr. B. emphatically disputed the last speaker’s statement,” or “These remarks provoked an indignant protest from Mr. C.” This and other deadly fascinations render these old volumes the favourite reading of my friend, Mr. Edward Fordham, who was himself a member of the club and delighted in decorating its chronicle with the most magnificent and florid journalese, and in making game in it of himself and others. He is still, I believe, especially attached to a passage in the reports which states, of one of the little boys who formed this society, “Mr. L.D. briefly described the Governments of France, America, Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain.” Sometimes, however, Fordham’s own burlesque rhetoric recoiled on his own head. He described one of the innumerable riots of our tea-table by writing, “A penny bun of the sticky order caressingly stung the chairman’s honoured cheek, sped on its errand of mercy by the unerring hand of Mr. F.” I may remark that I was the chairman; and I was generally honoured in that way. But the printer avenged me; for he rendered the missile as “A peony but of the stick order”; a most suggestive botanical formula. It was the beginning of a long career of martyrdom from misprints; which reached its crown when I wrote of a Nonconformist minister, “a distinguished correspondent,” and it came out as, “a distinguished co-respondent.”
Our debating club was actually founded and did actually debate, if it can be called debating. This part of the matter did not alarm me much; for I had debated off and on ever since I was born; certainly with my brother, probably with my nurse. But, what was infinitely more bloodcurdling, our paper did actually appear in print; and I contributed to it turgid poems, in which bad imitations of Swinburne were so exactly balanced with worse imitations of the Lays of Ancient Rome, that many of my simpler friends fell under the illusion that I had a style of my own. I have never read those verses since; there are limits to the degradation and despair which even autobiography demands. But I must admit that, for whatever reason, they attracted a certain amount of attention; and our experiment began to float to the surface of the school life and come within range of official attention, which was the last thing I had ever desired. It is only right to say that the magazine contained probably better, and certainly better educated, poetry than mine. Among the small group of twelve that formed our society was Robert Vernede, who also imitated Swinburne, but who was capable of appreciating how well Swinburne imitated the Greek poets. It is melancholy and amusing to reflect that of all those eager Swinburnian echoes, I can only remember an echo of parody; in which the style of Vernède’s first choruses, a la Atalanta, were rendered by Bentley in the form of a farewell to him when he departed from the tea-table:
Let the milk that was poured Be the draught of the cat, For from under the board From the seat where he sat The feet of his boots are departed; he has widowed the hall of his hat.
Vernède and Bentley were very intimate; and had something in common in their union of immobility and activity; but the immobility of Vernède was not dry and earnest like the other; but somnolent and oriental, like that of a Buddha, or (as his early friends were more prone to inform him) of a cat. He had that oval, almost Japanese face that can be seen in some of the Southern French blood of which he came. He lived to be a fine and promising poet and to write, on the outbreak of the fighting, a noble invocation to the English Sea, which multitudes must still remember. But his full promise as a poet he did not keep; because he kept a better one, and is dead on the field of honour.
For the rest, it is very typical of the difference between the two or three types that the work of E. C. B., my first and in every sense original friend, was the only work in the whole paper which might have been published by the same person fifteen years afterwards. Whatever the other relative merits of our minds, his was by far the most mature; perhaps for the very reason that it largely confined itself to being critical or flippant. Anyhow, the nonsense fables that he wrote for the paper would have made excellent paragraphs in any real paper. There was nothing particularly juvenile about them and, of all men I have known, he is the man whose mind has least changed, has least lost its balance and, above all, had least of the first youthful blunders in finding its balance. He had also, as I have said, a sort of calm versatility; he could carry out other people’s plans and improve them; he could, as the phrase goes, turn his hand to anything. On this absurd little rag of a school paper, the original three wrote letters in rotation, in three imaginary characters; and I think his were the best. Twenty years later, when Belloc and I started a scheme of Ballades for the Eye Witness, Bentley was brought in afterwards, in the same fashion; and I think his were the best. But he was at this time and perhaps for long after, too detached and ironic to become conspicuous in connection with a cause, or any of the things in which youth is generally both communal and combative. When some of us were pretending to be Knights of the Round Table, he was content to be Dagonet the fool, or in other words, the wise man. And it was in the character of a portentously solemn buffoon that he began to draw the attention of the elders. When the old High Master of St. Paul’s School ran his eye through a version of the Dog in the Manger, which described the cattle as being prevented “from refreshing their inner cows” he went into unearthly convulsions of his own extraordinary laughter which, like the other movements of his extraordinary voice, began like an organ and ended like a penny whistle. “That boy looks at the world standing on his head,” said the High Master of St. Paul’s School; and instantly we were in the full blaze of the spot-light.
I nostri dibattiti sono ancora registrati in sparsi volumi del nostro strano giornaletto; i personaggi della recita rappresentati misteriosamente dalle loro iniziali, come se fossero membri di una società segreta in un Romanzo sensazionalistico; come «Il Sig. B. contestò con enfasi la affermazione dell’ultimo oratore», o «Queste osservazioni provocarono un’indignata protesta da parte del Sig. C.» Questa e altre letali attrattive rendono questi vecchi volumi la lettura prediletta del mio amico, il signor Edward Fordham, che fu egli stesso un membro del circolo e si dilettava a ornarne la cronaca col più magnifico e florido giornalese, e a farci baldoria su se stesso e sugli altri. È ancora, credo, particolarmente affezionato a un passo dei resoconti che afferma, di uno dei ragazzini che formavano questa società: «Il Sig. L.D. descrisse brevemente i Governi di Francia, America, Germania, Austria, Italia e Spagna.» Talvolta, però, la stessa retorica burlesca di Fordham gli rimbalzava sulla testa. Descrisse uno degli innumerevoli tumulti del nostro tavolo da tè scrivendo: «Un panino da un penny, di quelli appiccicosi, punse carezzevolmente la venerata guancia del presidente, spedito nella sua missione di Misericordia dalla mano infallibile del Sig. F.» Posso osservare che il presidente ero io; e in genere venivo onorato in quel modo. Ma lo stampatore mi vendicò; poiché rese il proiettile come «Una peonia ma di quelli appicci»; formula botanica assai suggestiva. Fu l’inizio di una lunga carriera di Martirio a opera dei refusi; che toccò il suo apice quando scrissi di un pastore anticonformista, «un illustre corrispondente», e uscì come «un illustre correo».
Il nostro circolo di dibattito fu davvero fondato e davvero dibatté, se lo si può chiamare dibattere. Questa parte della faccenda non mi allarmava granché; poiché dibattevo a fasi alterne fin da quando ero nato; di certo con mio fratello, probabilmente con la mia Bambinaia. Ma, ciò che era infinitamente più agghiacciante, il nostro giornale davvero comparve in stampa; e vi contribuii con Poesie turgide, in cui cattive imitazioni di Swinburne erano bilanciate così esattamente da peggiori imitazioni dei Lays of Ancient Rome, che molti dei miei più semplici amici caddero nell’illusione che io avessi uno stile mio. Non ho mai riletto quei versi da allora; ci sono limiti alla degradazione e alla Disperazione che perfino l’autobiografia esige. Ma devo ammettere che, per una qualche ragione, essi attrassero una certa quantità di attenzione; e il nostro esperimento cominciò a venire a galla nella vita scolastica e a entrare nel raggio dell’attenzione ufficiale, che era l’ultima cosa che avessi mai desiderato. È giusto dire che la rivista conteneva poesia probabilmente migliore, e di certo più istruita, della mia. Tra il piccolo gruppo di dodici che formavano la nostra società c’era Robert Vernede, che anch’egli imitava Swinburne, ma che era capace di apprezzare quanto bene Swinburne imitasse i poeti greci. È Malinconico e divertente riflettere che di tutte quelle avide eco swinburniane, io possa ricordare soltanto un’eco di Parodia; in cui lo stile dei primi cori di Vernède, alla Atalanta, fu reso da Bentley nella forma di un addio a lui quando si allontanò dal tavolo da tè:
Che il latte che fu versato Sia la bevanda del gatto, Poiché di sotto l’asse Dal seggio ov’egli sedette I piedi dei suoi stivali sono partiti; ha vedovato l’atrio del suo cappello.
Vernède e Bentley erano assai intimi; e avevano qualcosa in comune nella loro unione di immobilità e attività; ma l’immobilità di Vernède non era arida e seria come quella dell’altro; bensì sonnolenta e orientale, come quella di un Buddha, o (come i suoi primi amici erano più inclini a informarlo) di un gatto. Aveva quel volto ovale, quasi giapponese, che si può vedere in una parte del sangue francese meridionale da cui proveniva. Visse abbastanza da essere un poeta valido e promettente e da scrivere, allo scoppio dei combattimenti, una nobile invocazione al Mare Inglese, che moltitudini devono ancora ricordare. Ma la sua piena promessa di poeta non la mantenne; perché ne mantenne una migliore, ed è morto sul campo dell’Onore.
Del resto, è assai tipico della differenza tra i due o tre tipi che l’opera di E. C. B., il mio primo e in ogni senso originale amico, fosse l’unica opera in tutto il giornale che avrebbe potuto essere pubblicata dalla stessa persona quindici anni dopo. Quali che fossero gli altri meriti relativi delle nostre menti, la sua era di gran lunga la più matura; forse proprio per la ragione che si limitava in gran parte a essere critica o frivola. Comunque, le favole nonsense che scrisse per il giornale sarebbero state eccellenti trafiletti in qualunque giornale vero. Non c’era nulla di particolarmente giovanile in esse e, di tutti gli uomini che io abbia conosciuto, egli è l’uomo la cui mente è cambiata di meno, ha perso di meno l’equilibrio e, soprattutto, ha avuto meno di tutti i primi giovanili passi falsi nel trovare il proprio equilibrio. Aveva anche, come ho detto, una sorta di calma versatilità; poteva realizzare i piani altrui e migliorarli; poteva, come si suol dire, mettere mano a qualsiasi cosa. Su quell’assurdo giornaletto scolastico da nulla, i tre originari scrivevano lettere a turno, in tre personaggi immaginari; e credo che i suoi fossero i migliori. Vent’anni dopo, quando Belloc e io avviammo un progetto di Ballate per l’Eye Witness, Bentley fu introdotto in seguito, alla stessa maniera; e credo che i suoi fossero i migliori. Ma egli era a quel tempo e forse per molto dopo troppo distaccato e ironico per divenire cospicuo in connessione con una causa, o con alcuna delle cose in cui la gioventù è in genere insieme comunitaria e combattiva. Quando alcuni di noi fingevano di essere Cavalieri della Tavola Rotonda, egli si accontentava di essere Dagonet il Buffone, o in altre parole, il saggio. E fu nella parte di un buffone portentosamente solenne che cominciò ad attirare l’attenzione degli anziani. Quando il vecchio Alto Maestro della St. Paul’s School fece scorrere l’occhio su una versione del Cane nella Mangiatoia, che descriveva il bestiame come impedito «dal ristorare le loro vacche interiori», egli sprofondò in ultraterrene convulsioni della sua stessa straordinaria risata che, come gli altri movimenti della sua straordinaria voce, cominciava come un organo e finiva come un fischietto da un penny. «Quel ragazzo guarda il mondo stando a testa in giù,» disse l’Alto Maestro della St. Paul’s School; e all’istante fummo in pieno bagliore del riflettore.
It is time that something should be said about the masters, and especially the High Master. Immensely important as we thought ourselves in comparison with those remote but respectable enemies, after all they did have something to do with the school. The most eccentric and entertaining of them, Mr. Elam, has already been sketched in brilliant black and white by the pen of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. I have forgotten whether Mr. Mackenzie mentioned what always struck me as the most disturbing eccentricity of that eccentric; the open derision with which he spoke of his own profession and position, of those who shared it with him and even of those who were set over him in its exercise. He would explain the difference between satire and the bitterness of the risus sardonicus by the helpful parable, “If I were walking along the street and fell down in the mud, I should laugh a sardonic laugh. But if I were to see the High Master of this school fall down in the mud, I should laugh a sarcastic laugh.” I chiefly mention his name here for another reason; because he once vented his scorn for what he called “the trade of an usher” in the form of a rhetorical question addressed to a boy: “Why are boys sent to school, Robinson?” Robinson, with downcast eyes and an air of offensive virtue, replied faintly, “To learn, sir.” “No, boy, no,” said the old gentleman wagging his head. “It was because one day at breakfast Mr. Robinson said to Mrs. Robinson, ‘My dear, we must do something about that boy. He’s a nuisance to me and he’s a nuisance to you and he’s a perfect plague to the servants.’” Then, with an indescribable extreme of grinding and grating contempt: “‘So we’ll Pay Some Man… .’”
I say I introduce this ancient anecdote for another reason; and it is partly because I would suggest another answer. If ever the problem troubled me in my boyhood, it did not force me in the direction of the lofty morality of Robinson. The idea that I had come to school to work was too grotesque to cloud my mind for an instant. It was also in too obvious a contrast with the facts and the result. I was very fond of my friends; though, as is common at such an age, I was much too fond of them to be openly emotional about it. But I do remember coming, almost seriously, to the conclusion that a boy must go to school to study the characters of his schoolmasters. And I still think that there was something in it. After all, the schoolmaster is the first educated grown-up person that the boy comes to see constantly, after having been introduced at an early age to his father and mother. And the masters at St. Paul’s were very interesting; even those of them who were not so obviously eccentric as the celebrated Mr. Elam. To one very distinguished individual, my own personal debt is infinite; I mean, the historian of the Indian Mutiny and of the campaigns of Caesar—Mr. T. Rice Holmes. He managed, heaven knows how, to penetrate through my deep and desperately consolidated desire to appear stupid; and discover the horrible secret that I was, after all, endowed with the gift of reason above the brutes. He would suddenly ask me questions a thousand miles away from the subject at hand, and surprise me into admitting that I had heard of the Song of Roland, or even read a play or two of Shakespeare. Nobody who knows anything of the English schoolboy at that date will imagine that there was at the moment any pleasure in such prominence or distinction. We were all hag-ridden with a horror of showing off, which was perhaps the only coherent moral principal we possessed. There was one boy, I remember, who was so insanely sensitive on this point of honour, that he could hardly bear to hear one of his friends answer an ordinary question right. He felt that his comrade really ought to have invented some mistake, in the general interest of comradeship. When my information about the French epic was torn from me, in spite of my efforts, he actually put his head in his desk and dropped the lid on it, groaning in a generous and impersonal shame and faintly and hoarsely exclaiming, “Oh, shut it. … Oh, shut up!” He was an extreme exponent of the principle; but it was a principle which I fully shared. I can remember running to school in sheer excitement repeating militant lines of “Marmion” with passionate emphasis and exultation; and then going into class and repeating the same lines in the lifeless manner of a hurdy-gurdy, hoping that there was nothing whatever in my intonation to indicate that I distinguished between the sense of one word and another.
Nobody, I think, ever got past my guard in this matter except Mr. T. R. Holmes and Mr. R. F. Cholmeley, who afterwards became the house-master of my two intimate friends, and who, I am glad to say, has often joined us in later years in our reunions of remembrance. But, somehow or other, a rumour must have begun to circulate among the authorities that we were not such fools as we looked. One day, to my consternation, the High Master stopped me in the street and led me along, roaring in my deafened and bewildered ears that I had a literary faculty which might come to something if somebody could give it solidity. Some time after that, to my cowering terror, he bellowed aloud to a whole crowd of parents and other preposterous intruders, on the occasion of a prize day, that our little magazine showed signs of considerable talent, though it was an unofficial publication on which he “might have hesitated to set his Imprimatur”. Somehow we felt it would have been even more crushing if he had set his Imprimatur. It sounded like the thumb of a giant.
Frederick Walker, Head Master of Manchester and afterwards High Master of St. Paul’s School, was, as most people know by this time, a very remarkable man. He was the sort of man who may live in anecdotes, like Dr. Johnson; indeed in some respects he was not unlike Dr. Johnson. He was like him in the startling volume of his voice, in his heavy face and figure, and in a certain tendency to explode at what did not seem to be exactly the appropriate moment; he would talk with perfect good humour and rationality and rend the roof over what seemed a trifle. In essential matters, however, his hard-hitting was generally quite right; and had even about it a homely and popular character, that somehow smacked of the north country. It is he of whom the famous tale is told that, when a fastidious lady wrote to ask him what was the social standing of the boys at his school, he replied, “Madam, so long as your son behaves himself and the fees are paid, no questions will be asked about his social standing.”
È ora che qualcosa si dica sui maestri, e specialmente sull’Alto Maestro. Per quanto immensamente importanti ci ritenessimo in confronto a quei remoti ma rispettabili nemici, dopo tutto essi avevano davvero qualcosa a che fare con la scuola. Il più eccentrico e divertente di loro, il signor Elam, è già stato ritratto in brillante bianco e nero dalla penna del signor Compton Mackenzie. Ho dimenticato se il signor Mackenzie abbia menzionato ciò che sempre mi colpì come l’eccentricità più sconcertante di quell’eccentrico; l’aperta derisione con cui parlava della sua stessa professione e posizione, di coloro che la condividevano con lui e persino di coloro che erano posti sopra di lui nel suo esercizio. Spiegava la differenza tra la Satira e l’amarezza del risus sardonicus con la utile Parabola: «Se camminassi per strada e cadessi nel fango, farei una risata sardonica. Ma se dovessi vedere l’Alto Maestro di questa scuola cadere nel fango, farei una risata sarcastica.» Menziono qui il suo nome soprattutto per un’altra ragione; perché una volta sfogò il suo disprezzo per ciò che chiamava «il mestiere del bidello» nella forma di una domanda retorica rivolta a un ragazzo: «Perché i ragazzi vengono mandati a scuola, Robinson?» Robinson, con gli occhi bassi e un’aria di offensiva virtù, rispose fiocamente: «Per imparare, signore.» «No, ragazzo, no,» disse il vecchio gentiluomo scuotendo il capo. «Fu perché un giorno a colazione il Sig. Robinson disse alla Sig.ra Robinson: ‘Mia cara, dobbiamo fare qualcosa per quel ragazzo. È una seccatura per me ed è una seccatura per te ed è una vera piaga per i domestici.’» Poi, con un indescrivibile eccesso di macinante e stridente disprezzo: «‘Così Pagheremo Un Uomo Qualunque…’»
Dico che introduco questo antico aneddoto per un’altra ragione; ed è in parte perché vorrei suggerire un’altra risposta. Se mai il problema mi turbò nella mia fanciullezza, non mi spinse nella direzione dell’elevata moralità di Robinson. L’idea di essere venuto a scuola per lavorare era troppo Grottesca per offuscarmi la mente per un istante. Era anche in troppo ovvio contrasto con i fatti e col risultato. Ero assai affezionato ai miei amici; benché, come è comune a quell’età, fossi troppo affezionato a loro per esserne apertamente emotivo. Ma ricordo di essere giunto, quasi seriamente, alla conclusione che un ragazzo debba andare a scuola per studiare i caratteri dei suoi maestri. E credo ancora che ci fosse qualcosa di vero. Dopo tutto, il maestro è la prima persona adulta e istruita che il ragazzo giunge a vedere costantemente, dopo essere stato presentato in tenera età a suo padre e a sua madre. E i maestri della St. Paul’s erano assai interessanti; anche quelli di loro che non erano così palesemente eccentrici come il celebre signor Elam. Verso un individuo assai eminente, il mio debito personale è infinito; intendo lo storico della Rivolta Indiana e delle campagne di Cesare — il signor T. Rice Holmes. Egli riuscì, il cielo sa come, a penetrare attraverso il mio profondo e disperatamente consolidato Desiderio di apparire stupido; e a scoprire l’orribile segreto che io ero, dopo tutto, dotato del dono della ragione al di sopra dei bruti. Mi poneva d’improvviso domande a mille miglia dal soggetto in questione, e mi sorprendeva strappandomi l’ammissione di aver sentito parlare della Canzone di Rolando, o addirittura di aver letto un dramma o due di Shakespeare. Chiunque conosca qualcosa dello scolaro inglese di quell’epoca non immaginerà che al momento ci fosse alcun piacere in tale prominenza o distinzione. Eravamo tutti ossessionati da un orrore dell’esibirsi, che era forse l’unico principio morale coerente che possedessimo. C’era un ragazzo, ricordo, che era così pazzamente sensibile su questo punto d’Onore, che a stento sopportava di udire uno dei suoi amici rispondere correttamente a una domanda ordinaria. Sentiva che il suo compagno avrebbe davvero dovuto aver inventato qualche errore, nel generale interesse del Cameratismo. Quando la mia informazione sull’Epica francese mi fu strappata, malgrado i miei sforzi, egli si mise davvero la testa nel banco e vi fece cadere sopra il coperchio, gemendo in una generosa e impersonale vergogna ed esclamando debolmente e roco: «Oh, chiudila. … Oh, stai zitto!» Era un estremo esponente del principio; ma era un principio che io pienamente condividevo. Ricordo di correre a scuola in pura eccitazione ripetendo versi bellicosi di «Marmion» con appassionata enfasi ed esultanza; e poi entrare in classe e ripetere gli stessi versi nel modo esanime di una ghironda, sperando che non ci fosse nulla nella mia intonazione a indicare che distinguessi tra il senso di una parola e di un’altra.
Nessuno, credo, superò mai la mia guardia in questa faccenda tranne il signor T. R. Holmes e il signor R. F. Cholmeley, che in seguito divenne il maestro-tutore dei miei due intimi amici, e che, sono lieto di dire, si è spesso unito a noi negli anni successivi nelle nostre riunioni del ricordo. Ma, in un modo o nell’altro, una voce deve aver cominciato a circolare tra le autorità che non fossimo così sciocchi come sembravamo. Un giorno, con mia costernazione, l’Alto Maestro mi fermò per la strada e mi condusse via, ruggendo nelle mie orecchie assordate e sbigottite che avevo una facoltà letteraria che poteva approdare a qualcosa se qualcuno potesse darle solidità. Qualche tempo dopo, con mio terrore acquattato, egli tuonò a voce alta a un’intera folla di genitori e altri assurdi intrusi, in occasione di un giorno di premiazione, che il nostro giornaletto mostrava segni di considerevole talento, benché fosse una pubblicazione non ufficiale su cui egli «avrebbe esitato ad apporre il suo Imprimatur». Chissà come, sentimmo che sarebbe stato ancor più schiacciante se vi avesse apposto il suo Imprimatur. Suonava come il pollice di un gigante.
Frederick Walker, Preside di Manchester e in seguito Alto Maestro della St. Paul’s School, era, come la maggior parte della gente sa a questo punto, un uomo assai notevole. Era il genere d’uomo che può vivere negli aneddoti, come il Dr. Johnson; anzi per certi versi non era dissimile dal Dr. Johnson. Gli somigliava nel sorprendente volume della voce, nel volto pesante e nella figura, e in una certa tendenza a esplodere in ciò che non pareva esattamente il momento appropriato; parlava con perfetto buon Umore e razionalità e faceva tremare il tetto per ciò che pareva un’inezia. Nelle faccende essenziali, tuttavia, i suoi colpi ben assestati erano in genere del tutto giusti; e avevano perfino un carattere casereccio e popolare, che chissà come sapeva del nord del paese. È di lui che si narra la famosa storia che, quando una signora schizzinosa gli scrisse per chiedere quale fosse la posizione sociale dei ragazzi della sua scuola, egli rispose: «Signora, fintantoché vostro figlio si comporta bene e le rette sono pagate, non si porrà alcuna domanda sulla sua posizione sociale.»
One day I was frozen with astonishment to find my name in an announcement on the notice-board, saying that I was to be accorded the privileges of the highest form, though I did not belong to it. It produced in me a desire to be accorded the privileges and protection of the coal-cellar and never to come out again. At the same time I learned that a special branch of the highest form had actually been created for my two principal friends, in order that they might study for History Scholarships at the Universities. All this seemed like the very universe breaking up and turning topsy-turvy; and indeed all sorts of things happened about this time that seemed to be quite outside the laws of nature. I got a prize, for instance; what was called the Milton Prize for what was called a prize poem; I imagine it was about as bad as all other prize poems, but I am happy to say that I cannot recall a single syllable of it. I do, however recall the subject, not without a faint thrill of irony; for the subject was St. Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit who preached to the Chinese. I recall these things, so contrary to the previous course of my school life, because I am not sorry to be an exception to the modern tendency to reproach the old Victorian schoolmaster with stupidity and neglect and to represent the rising generation as a shining band of Shelleys inspired by light and liberty to rise. The truth is that in this case it was I who exhibited the stupidity; though I really think it was largely an affected stupidity. And certainly it was I who rejoiced in the neglect, and who asked for nothing better than to be neglected. It was, if anything, the authorities who dragged me, in my own despite, out of the comfortable and protected atmosphere of obscurity and failure. Personally, I was perfectly happy at the bottom of the class.
For the rest, I think the chief impression I produced, on most of the masters and many of the boys, was a pretty well-founded conviction that I was asleep. Perhaps what nobody knew, not even myself, was that I was asleep and dreaming. The dreams were not much more sensible or valuable than they commonly are in persons in such profound slumber; but they already had this obscure effect on my existence; that my mind was already occupied, though I myself was idle. Before forming the few special friendships of which I speak, I was somewhat solitary; not sharply unpopular or in any sense persecuted, but solitary. But though I was solitary, I was not sorry; and I think I can claim that I was not sulky. One effect of this was that my first acquaintances, as distinct from my ultimate friends, were odd and scrappy sort of people like myself. These individuals were accidents; one or two of them I fear were disasters. I remember one youth who made one appearance in my daily life, that puzzled me like a detective story. I cannot imagine how I came to cultivate his society; still less how he came to cultivate mine. For he was a brilliant mathematician, and must presumably have worked hard at mathematics; whereas I worked less at mathematics, if possible, than at anything else. Moreover, I was very untidy and he was very tidy, with a large clean collar and an Eton jacket, also a large head very neatly brushed but something odd and perhaps too mature about his froglike face. One day he asked me whether I could lend him a Hall & Knight’s Algebra. So far as enthusiasm for that study was concerned I could answer, “Thy need is greater than mine,” with all the gesture of Sir Philip Sidney; but I had to observe some minimum of attention to the mathematical class; so in lending him the book, I told him I should want it back some time next week. As the time approached, I was much mystified by the fact that I found it quite difficult to get it back. He gave evasive replies; he interposed postponements and hazy promises; till at last I quarrelled with him, using the words of action which are really commoner among schoolboys as words than as actions; but anyhow indicating that I should make an earnest effort to punch his head. To this threat, he ultimately capitulated; and eventually led me to his locker, which he reluctantly opened. And his locker was stuffed from top to bottom with about twenty-five identical copies of Hall & Knight’s Algebra, which he had presumably collected by similar arts from similar acquaintances. I believe he left the school later, without any particular scandal; and I hope the poor fellow recovered his mental balance somewhere else. I write in no superior spirit; I was quite capable myself at many early stages of going mad in a quiet way; but not by an exaggerated appetite for Hall & Knight’s Algebra.
There was another little boy with whom I walked to school in the same fortuitous fellowship; a very prim and proper little boy, as became the son of the venerable and somewhat ponderous clergyman who held one of the highest scholastic posts in the school. He also was very neat, he also was quite an industrious pupil; and he also had a peculiarity. He was the most fertile, fluent and really disinterested liar I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. There was nothing base or materialistic about his mendacity; he was not trying to cheat anybody or to get anything; he simply boasted like Baron Munchausen in quiet and even tones all the way from Holland Park to Hammersmith. He told the most staggering stories about himself, without lifting his voice or showing the faintest embarrassment; and there was nothing else notable about him at all. I have often wondered what became of him; and whether he followed his father into the Church. It may be retorted by the light-minded, that he may have fallen so low as to write stories, even crime stories, like myself; which some regard as almost tantamount to joining the criminal classes. But I do not believe any of his stories would be probable enough for fiction.
Un giorno rimasi impietrito dallo stupore nel trovare il mio nome in un annuncio sulla bacheca, che diceva che mi sarebbero stati accordati i privilegi della classe più alta, benché non vi appartenessi. Ciò produsse in me il Desiderio che mi fossero accordati i privilegi e la protezione della carbonaia, per non uscirne più. Nel medesimo momento appresi che un ramo speciale della classe più alta era stato effettivamente creato per i miei due principali amici, affinché essi potessero studiare per le Borse di Storia alle Università. Tutto ciò pareva come l’universo stesso che si sfascia e si capovolge; e in effetti ogni sorta di cose accadde intorno a quel tempo che parevano del tutto fuori dalle leggi della Natura. Vinsi un premio, per esempio; quello che si chiamava il Premio Milton per ciò che si chiamava una poesia da premio; immagino fosse cattiva più o meno come tutte le altre Poesie da premio, ma sono lieto di dire che non riesco a ricordarne una sola sillaba. Ricordo però il soggetto, non senza un debole brivido d’ironia; poiché il soggetto era San Francesco Saverio, il grande gesuita che predicò ai Cinesi. Rammento queste cose, così contrarie al corso precedente della mia vita scolastica, perché non mi spiace essere un’eccezione alla moderna tendenza a rimproverare al vecchio maestro vittoriano stupidità e negligenza e a rappresentare la generazione nascente come una splendente schiera di Shelley ispirati da luce e libertà a sorgere. La Verità è che in questo caso fui io a esibire la stupidità; benché io creda davvero che fosse in gran parte una stupidità affettata. E di certo fui io a rallegrarmi della negligenza, e a chiedere nulla di meglio che essere negletto. Furono, semmai, le autorità a trascinarmi, mio malgrado, fuori dalla comoda e protetta atmosfera dell’oscurità e del fallimento. Personalmente, ero perfettamente felice in fondo alla classe.
Del resto, credo che l’impressione principale che produssi, sulla maggior parte dei maestri e su molti dei ragazzi, fosse una convinzione piuttosto ben fondata che io dormissi. Forse ciò che nessuno sapeva, neppure io, era che io dormivo e sognavo. I Sogni non erano molto più sensati o preziosi di quanto lo siano comunemente in persone in un sonno così profondo; ma avevano già questo oscuro effetto sulla mia esistenza; che la mia mente era già occupata, benché io stesso fossi ozioso. Prima di stringere le poche speciali amicizie di cui parlo, ero alquanto solitario; non nettamente impopolare o in alcun senso perseguitato, ma solitario. Ma benché fossi solitario, non ero triste; e credo di poter affermare di non essere stato imbronciato. Un effetto di ciò fu che i miei primi conoscenti, come distinti dai miei ultimi amici, erano gente strana e sparuta come me. Questi individui erano incidenti; uno o due di essi temo fossero disastri. Ricordo un giovane che fece una comparsa nella mia vita quotidiana, che mi lasciò perplesso come una storia poliziesca. Non riesco a immaginare come giunsi a coltivare la sua compagnia; ancor meno come egli giunse a coltivare la mia. Poiché era un brillante matematico, e deve presumibilmente aver lavorato duramente in matematica; mentre io lavoravo di meno in matematica, se possibile, che in qualsiasi altra cosa. Per giunta, io ero assai disordinato ed egli assai ordinato, con un grande colletto pulito e una giacca da Eton, e anche una grande testa assai ordinatamente spazzolata ma qualcosa di strano e forse troppo maturo nel suo volto da rana. Un giorno mi chiese se potevo prestargli un’Algebra di Hall & Knight. Per quanto riguardava l’entusiasmo per quello studio potevo rispondere: «Il tuo bisogno è maggiore del mio», con tutto il gesto di Sir Philip Sidney; ma dovevo osservare un qualche minimo di attenzione alla classe di matematica; così, prestandogli il libro, gli dissi che l’avrei rivoluto in qualche momento della settimana seguente. Man mano che il tempo si avvicinava, ero assai sconcertato dal fatto che trovavo piuttosto difficile riaverlo. Egli mi dava risposte evasive; interponeva rinvii e vaghe promesse; finché alla fine litigai con lui, usando le parole d’azione che sono in realtà più comuni tra gli scolari come parole che come azioni; ma comunque indicando che avrei fatto uno zelante sforzo per prenderlo a pugni in testa. A questa minaccia, egli infine capitolò; e alla fine mi condusse al suo armadietto, che aprì con riluttanza. E il suo armadietto era stipato da cima a fondo con circa venticinque copie identiche dell’Algebra di Hall & Knight, che aveva presumibilmente raccolto con arti simili da conoscenti simili. Credo che lasciò la scuola più tardi, senza alcuno scandalo particolare; e spero che il poveretto abbia recuperato il suo equilibrio mentale da qualche altra parte. Non scrivo in spirito di superiorità; io stesso ero del tutto capace, in molti primi stadi, di impazzire in modo tranquillo; ma non per un esagerato appetito di Algebra di Hall & Knight.
C’era un altro ragazzino con cui camminavo a scuola nella stessa fortuita compagnia; un ragazzino assai compìto e per bene, come si conveniva al figlio del venerabile e alquanto ponderoso ecclesiastico che deteneva uno dei più alti incarichi scolastici della scuola. Anch’egli era assai ordinato, anch’egli era un allievo del tutto industrioso; e anch’egli aveva una peculiarità. Era il più fertile, fluente e davvero disinteressato bugiardo che io abbia mai avuto il piacere di conoscere. Non c’era nulla di vile o di materialistico nella sua mendacia; non cercava di imbrogliare nessuno o di ottenere alcunché; semplicemente si vantava come il Barone di Münchhausen con toni calmi e persino pacati per tutta la strada da Holland Park a Hammersmith. Raccontava le più sbalorditive storie su se stesso, senza alzare la voce o mostrare il più debole imbarazzo; e non c’era null’altro di notevole in lui affatto. Mi sono spesso chiesto che ne fu di lui; e se seguì suo padre nella Chiesa. Si potrà ribattere, dai frivoli, che egli può essere caduto tanto in basso da scrivere storie, persino storie di crimini, come me; il che alcuni considerano quasi equivalente a unirsi alle classi criminali. Ma non credo che alcuna delle sue storie sarebbe abbastanza probabile per la narrativa.
Perhaps the same chapter of accidents, that threw me first in the way of these human curiosities, was responsible for another social accident, of which I am very glad; for it led to my seeing both sides of a very difficult social question; about which a great deal of nonsense is talked on both sides; and the worst nonsense of all by those who talk as if there were no question at all. It must be explained that St. Paul’s School, in schoolboy language, was more than most others a school of “swots.” I need hardly clear myself of the charge of swottishness; and, of course, there were many lazy boys, and some almost as lazy as I. But the diligent type was in a larger proportion than is usual; for the school was chiefly celebrated for winning scholarships at the Universities, rather than for athletics or other forms of fame. And there was another reason why this particular type was conspicuous. To put the point in popular language, there were a great many swots partly because there were a great many Jews.
Oddly enough, I lived to have later on the name of an Anti-Semite; whereas from my first days at school I very largely had the name of a Pro-Semite. I made many friends among the Jews, and some of these I have retained as life-long friends; nor have our relations ever been disturbed by differences upon the political or social problem. I am glad that I began at this end; but I have not really ended any differently from the way in which I began. I held by instinct then, and I hold by knowledge now, that the right way is to be interested in Jews as Jews; and then to bring into greater prominence the very much neglected Jewish virtues, which are the complement and sometimes even the cause of what the world feels to be the Jewish faults. For instance, one of the great Jewish virtues is gratitude. I was criticised in early days for quixotry and priggishness in protecting Jews; and I remember once extricating a strange swarthy little creature with a hooked nose from being bullied, or rather being teased; for the worst torture really consisted of his being lightly tossed from one boy to another amid wild stares of wide-eyed scientific curiosity and questions like, “What is it?” and “Is it alive?” Thirty years afterwards, when that little goblin was a great grown bearded man, utterly remote from me in type and trade and interests and opinions, he had a sort of permanent fountain of thanks for that trifling incident, which was quite embarrassing. In the same way, I noted that strong family bond among the Jews which, as I recognized, was not merely disguised but denied among most normal schoolboys. Doubtless, I came to know the Jews because in this sense they were a little abnormal, as I was then becoming a little abnormal myself. Yet there is nothing I have come to count more normal, and nothing I desire more to restore to its normal place, than those two things; the family and the theory of thanks. And then, in the light of these virtues as seen from within, it was often possible to understand the origin and even the justification of much of the Anti-Semitic criticism from without. For it is often the very loyalty of the Jewish family which appears as disloyalty to the Christian state. As the reader will realise before the end, it was partly what I admired in private friends, especially in two brothers named Solomon, which I came ultimately to denounce in political enemies, in two brothers named Isaacs. The first were good by every standard, the second vulnerable even by their own standard: and yet they had the same virtue.
I am not at all ashamed of having asked Aryans to have more patience with Jews or for having asked Anglo-Saxons to have more patience with Jew-baiters. The whole problem of the two entangled cultures and traditions is much too deep and difficult, on both sides, to be decided impatiently. But I have very little patience with those who will not solve the problem, on the ground that there is no problem to solve. I cannot explain the Jews; but I certainly will not explain them away. Nor have the Jews a worse enemy than the sort of Jew sceptic who sometimes tries to explain himself away. I have seen a whole book full of alternative theories of the particular historic cause of such a delusion about a difference; that it came from mediaeval priests or was burnt into us by the Inquisition; that it was a tribal theory arising out of Teutonism; that it was revolutionary envy of the few Jews who happened to be the big bankers of Capitalism; that it was Capitalist resistance to the few Jews who happened to be the chief founders of Communism. All these separate theories are false in separate ways; as in forgetting that mediaeval heresy hunts spared Jews more and not less than Christians; or that Capitalism and Communism are so very nearly the same thing, in ethical essence, that it would not be strange if they did take leaders from the same ethnological elements. But broadly, the evasions are contrary to common sense; as they were contrary even to the common sense of a boy of thirteen. I do not believe that a crowd on a race-course is poisoned by mediaeval theology; or the navvies in a Mile End pub misled by the ethnology of Gobineau or Max Müller; nor do I believe that a mob of little boys fresh from the cricket-field or the tuckshop were troubled about Marxian economics or international finance. Yet all these people recognise Jews as Jews when they see them; and the schoolboys recognised them, not with any great hostility except in patches; but with the integration of instinct. What they saw was not Semites or Schismatics or capitalists or revolutionists, but foreigners; only foreigners that were not called foreigners. This did not prevent friendship and affection, especially in my own case; but then it never has prevented it in the case of ordinary foreigners. One of these early friends of mine, now Professor of Latin at University College, happened to have all the Jewish virtues, and also all the others there are; he afterwards became a member of the little club already described; and passed through Oxford with distinction; probably greater distinction than my other friends.
Forse lo stesso capitolo di incidenti che mi gettò per primo sulla via di queste curiosità umane fu responsabile di un altro incidente sociale, di cui sono assai lieto; poiché condusse a farmi vedere entrambi i lati di una questione sociale assai difficile; sulla quale una gran quantità di sciocchezze viene detta da entrambe le parti; e le peggiori sciocchezze di tutte da coloro che parlano come se non ci fosse alcuna questione affatto. Va spiegato che la St. Paul’s School, nel linguaggio scolastico, era più della maggior parte delle altre una scuola di «secchioni». Non ho bisogno di scagionarmi dall’accusa di secchioneria; e, s’intende, c’erano molti ragazzi pigri, e alcuni quasi pigri quanto me. Ma il tipo diligente era in proporzione più larga del solito; poiché la scuola era celebrata soprattutto per vincere borse di studio alle Università, piuttosto che per l’atletica o altre forme di fama. E c’era un’altra ragione per cui questo tipo particolare era cospicuo. Per esporre il punto in linguaggio popolare, c’erano moltissimi secchioni in parte perché c’erano moltissimi ebrei.
Curiosamente, vissi abbastanza da avere in seguito la fama di Antisemita; mentre dai miei primi giorni di scuola ebbi in gran parte la fama di Filosemita. Feci molti amici tra gli ebrei, e alcuni di questi li ho conservati come amici di tutta la vita; né le nostre relazioni sono mai state turbate da divergenze sul problema politico o sociale. Sono lieto di aver cominciato da questo capo; ma non ho davvero finito in modo diverso da come cominciai. Ritenevo per istinto allora, e ritengo per conoscenza ora, che la via giusta sia interessarsi agli ebrei in quanto ebrei; e poi portare in maggior rilievo le assai neglette virtù ebraiche, che sono il complemento e talvolta addirittura la causa di ciò che il mondo sente come i difetti ebraici. Per esempio, una delle grandi virtù ebraiche è la gratitudine. Fui criticato nei primi giorni per donchisciotteria e presunzione nel proteggere gli ebrei; e ricordo una volta di aver estratto una strana, scura creaturina dal naso adunco dall’essere angariata, o piuttosto derisa; poiché la peggiore tortura consisteva davvero nell’essere lievemente sballottato da un ragazzo all’altro fra sguardi selvaggi di sgranata curiosità scientifica e domande come «Che cos’è?» e «È vivo?» Trent’anni dopo, quando quel piccolo folletto era un grande adulto barbuto, del tutto remoto da me per tipo, mestiere, interessi e opinioni, egli aveva una sorta di perenne fontana di ringraziamenti per quel insignificante episodio, il che era piuttosto imbarazzante. Allo stesso modo, notai quel forte legame familiare tra gli ebrei che, come riconobbi, non solo era dissimulato ma negato tra la maggior parte dei normali scolari. Senza dubbio giunsi a conoscere gli ebrei perché in questo senso essi erano un po’ anomali, come io stesso stavo allora divenendo un po’ anomalo. Eppure non c’è nulla che io sia giunto a considerare più normale, e nulla che io Desideri di più ripristinare al suo normale posto, di quelle due cose; la famiglia e la teoria del ringraziamento. E poi, alla luce di queste virtù viste dall’interno, era spesso possibile comprendere l’origine e persino la giustificazione di gran parte della critica antisemita dall’esterno. Poiché è spesso proprio la lealtà della famiglia ebraica ad apparire come slealtà verso lo stato cristiano. Come il lettore comprenderà prima della fine, fu in parte ciò che ammiravo negli amici privati, specialmente in due fratelli di nome Solomon, che alla fine giunsi a denunciare nei nemici politici, in due fratelli di nome Isaacs. I primi erano buoni secondo ogni criterio, i secondi vulnerabili perfino secondo il loro stesso criterio: eppure avevano la stessa virtù.
Non mi vergogno affatto di aver chiesto agli Ariani di avere più pazienza con gli ebrei, o di aver chiesto agli Anglosassoni di avere più pazienza con gli aizzatori antiebraici. L’intero problema delle due culture e tradizioni ingarbugliate è troppo profondo e difficile, da entrambe le parti, per essere deciso con impazienza. Ma ho ben poca pazienza con coloro che non vogliono risolvere il problema, con la scusa che non c’è alcun problema da risolvere. Non riesco a spiegare gli ebrei; ma di certo non li spiegherò via. Né gli ebrei hanno peggior nemico del genere di ebreo scettico che talvolta cerca di spiegare via se stesso. Ho visto un intero libro pieno di teorie alternative sulla particolare causa storica di una simile illusione riguardo a una differenza; che essa venisse da preti medievali o ci fosse impressa a fuoco dall’Inquisizione; che fosse una teoria tribale nata dal Teutonismo; che fosse invidia rivoluzionaria per i pochi ebrei che si dava il caso fossero i grandi banchieri del Capitalismo; che fosse resistenza capitalista verso i pochi ebrei che si dava il caso fossero i principali fondatori del Comunismo. Tutte queste teorie separate sono false in modi separati; come nel dimenticare che le cacce all’eresia medievali risparmiavano gli ebrei più e non meno dei cristiani; o che il Capitalismo e il Comunismo sono così assai vicini alla stessa cosa, nell’essenza etica, che non sarebbe strano se traessero i loro capi dagli stessi elementi etnologici. Ma in generale, le evasioni sono contrarie al buonsenso; come erano contrarie perfino al buonsenso di un ragazzo di tredici anni. Non credo che una folla su un ippodromo sia avvelenata dalla teologia medievale; o gli sterratori in un pub di Mile End fuorviati dall’etnologia di Gobineau o di Max Müller; né credo che una masnada di ragazzini appena usciti dal campo di cricket o dalla drogheria si preoccupasse dell’economia marxista o della finanza internazionale. Eppure tutta questa gente riconosce gli ebrei come ebrei quando li vede; e gli scolari li riconoscevano, non con grande ostilità tranne che a tratti; ma con l’integrazione dell’istinto. Ciò che essi vedevano non erano Semiti o Scismatici o capitalisti o rivoluzionari, ma stranieri; solo stranieri che non venivano chiamati stranieri. Ciò non impediva l’Amicizia e l’affetto, specialmente nel mio caso; ma d’altronde non l’ha mai impedito nel caso degli stranieri comuni. Uno di questi miei primi amici, ora Professore di Latino all’University College, si dava il caso avesse tutte le virtù ebraiche, e anche tutte le altre che esistono; egli in seguito divenne membro del piccolo circolo già descritto; e passò per Oxford con distinzione; probabilmente maggiore distinzione dei miei altri amici.
Most of the members of our little club, however, thus passed on to the older Universities and were promising figures either on the academic or social and political side; two of them being Presidents of the Oxford and two of the Cambridge Union. Oldershaw, characteristically enough, was almost instantly found immersed and entangled in the establishment of yet another unofficial paper, called the J.C.R., in which were not a few memorable curiosities of literature; including the first work of a pen then unknown to me, but recognisable enough now in lines like, “We slumbered on the firelit ground beside the guns in Burgundy.” Bentley, on being requested by a poetical lady to write something suitable to Wordsworth’s Seat, did not relax his rigid flippancy and composed the simple lines that end:
It seems a pity certainly That two such men as we By such a trifle as the Grave Should separated be. ‘Twas ever thus; we might have had A pleasant afternoon, But Man is always born too late Or else he dies too soon.
while Lawrence Solomon, the learned Jewish friend of whom I have spoken, wrote about the best of the parodies of FitzGerald’s Omar, then a fashionable theme, warning undergraduates not to expect a Blue or a First: “For these were not for me; how should they be for you?” As a fact, I think he did get a First; but all of them must have lived to realise the further moral:
For them that win and them that lose the game For you, for me, the ending is the same, To climb the stairs to our old College room Look o’er the door; and see another’s name.
There seemed a general tendency of these schoolfellows of mine to excel in light verse; Fordham, who went to Cambridge, has written many satiric lyrics which have been published and many satiric dramas which ought to be published. If I wind up here some of the stories of my old friends, it is not because I dismiss them from my memories, but because I must admit a multitude of much less interesting people into my memoirs. One contrast in their subsequent careers has always struck me as a curious case of the incalculable individuality and freewill of man. A friend of Fordham, normal, virile and ambitious, popular rather in the sense of fashionable, always struck me as the sort of man who could wear a uniform in camp or court, serving the obvious virtues. When the Great War came, he became an uncompromising and unconventional Pacifist agitator. Another, a friend of Vernède, one of those rare spiritual types in which a Puritan tradition has really flowered into a full Hellenic culture, is the most unselfish man I ever knew in my life, of the sort that is still unsatisfied even with its own unselfishness. I should say he was something rather like a saint; but I should never have been surprised if he had been a Conscientious Objector. As a fact, he went to the Front in a flash like fire; and had his leg shot off in his first battle.
But all this time very queer things were groping and wrestling inside my own undeveloped mind; and I have said nothing of them in this chapter; for it was the sustained and successful effort of most of my school life to keep them to myself. I said farewell to my friends when they went up to Oxford and Cambridge; while I, who was at that time almost wholly taken up with the idea of drawing pictures, went to an Art School and brought my boyhood to an end.
La maggior parte dei membri del nostro piccolo circolo, tuttavia, passarono così alle Università più antiche ed erano figure promettenti sia sul versante accademico sia su quello sociale e politico; due di loro essendo Presidenti dell’Unione di Oxford e due di quella di Cambridge. Oldershaw, abbastanza tipicamente, fu quasi all’istante trovato immerso e invischiato nella fondazione di un altro giornale non ufficiale, chiamato il J.C.R., in cui c’erano non poche memorabili curiosità letterarie; comprese le prime opere di una penna allora a me ignota, ma abbastanza riconoscibile ora in versi come: «Sonnecchiavamo sul suolo illuminato dal fuoco accanto ai cannoni in Borgogna.» Bentley, essendogli stato richiesto da una signora poetica di scrivere qualcosa di adatto al Seggio di Wordsworth, non allentò la sua rigida frivolezza e compose i semplici versi che finiscono:
Sembra davvero un peccato Che due uomini come noi Da un’inezia quale la Tomba Debbano essere separati. Fu sempre così; avremmo potuto avere Un piacevole pomeriggio, Ma l’Uomo nasce sempre troppo tardi O altrimenti muore troppo presto.
mentre Lawrence Solomon, il dotto amico ebreo di cui ho parlato, scrisse la migliore delle parodie dell’Omar di FitzGerald, allora tema alla moda, ammonendo gli studenti a non aspettarsi un Blue o un First: «Poiché questi non erano per me; come dovrebbero essere per te?» In effetti, credo che egli prese davvero un First; ma tutti loro devono aver vissuto abbastanza da rendersi conto dell’ulteriore morale:
Per chi vince e per chi perde la partita Per te, per me, la fine è la stessa, Salire le scale fino alla nostra vecchia stanza del College Guardare sopra la porta; e vedere il nome di un altro.
Sembrava esserci una tendenza generale di questi miei compagni di scuola a eccellere nel verso leggero; Fordham, che andò a Cambridge, ha scritto molte liriche satiriche che sono state pubblicate e molti drammi satirici che dovrebbero essere pubblicati. Se qui riavvolgo alcune delle storie dei miei vecchi amici, non è perché li dismetta dai miei ricordi, ma perché devo ammettere una moltitudine di persone assai meno interessanti nelle mie memorie. Un contrasto nelle loro successive carriere mi ha sempre colpito come un curioso caso dell’incalcolabile individualità e libero arbitrio dell’uomo. Un amico di Fordham, normale, virile e ambizioso, popolare piuttosto nel senso di alla moda, mi colpì sempre come il genere d’uomo che poteva indossare un’uniforme in campo o a Corte, servendo le ovvie virtù. Quando venne la Grande Guerra, egli divenne un intransigente e anticonvenzionale agitatore Pacifista. Un altro, amico di Vernède, uno di quei rari tipi spirituali in cui una tradizione puritana è davvero fiorita in una piena cultura ellenica, è l’uomo più altruista che io abbia mai conosciuto in vita mia, del genere che è ancora insoddisfatto perfino del proprio altruismo. Direi che era qualcosa di piuttosto simile a un santo; ma non mi sarei mai sorpreso se fosse stato un Obiettore di Coscienza. In effetti, andò al Fronte in un lampo come Fuoco; e si fece portar via una gamba da un colpo nella sua prima battaglia.
Ma per tutto quel tempo cose assai strane brancolavano e lottavano dentro la mia stessa mente non ancora sviluppata; e non ne ho detto nulla in questo capitolo; poiché fu lo sforzo sostenuto e riuscito di gran parte della mia vita scolastica tenerle per me. Dissi addio ai miei amici quando andarono a Oxford e a Cambridge; mentre io, che a quel tempo ero quasi interamente preso dall’idea di disegnare figure, andai a una Scuola d’Arte e portai la mia fanciullezza a una fine.
IV
HOW TO BE A LUNATIC
I deal here with the darkest and most difficult part of my task; the period of youth which is full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of Sin. And before I deal with it in any detail, it is necessary to make a prefatory explanation upon one point. In the matter of religion, I have been much concerned with controversies about rather provocative problems; and have finally adopted a position which to many is itself a provocation. I have grieved my well-wishers, and many of the wise and prudent, by my reckless course in becoming a Christian, an orthodox Christian, and finally a Catholic in the sense of a Roman Catholic. Now in most of the matters of which they chiefly disapprove, I am not in the least ashamed of myself. As an apologist I am the reverse of apologetic. So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated. I am very proud of what people call priestcraft; since even that accidental term of abuse preserves the mediaeval truth that a priest, like every other man, ought to be a craftsman. I am very proud of what people call Mariolatry; because it introduced into religion in the darkest ages that element of chivalry which is now being belatedly and badly understood in the form of feminism. I am very proud of being orthodox about the mysteries of the Trinity or the Mass; I am proud of believing in the Confessional; I am proud of believing in the Papacy.
But I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of knowing the Devil. I made his acquaintance by my own fault; and followed it up along lines which, had they been followed further, might have led me to devil-worship or the devil knows what. On this doctrine, at least, there is, mingling with my knowledge, no shadow of self-satisfaction any more than of self-deception. On this one matter, a man may well be intellectually right only through being morally wrong. I am not impressed by the ethical airs and graces of sceptics on most of the other subjects. I am not over-awed by a young gentleman saying that he cannot submit his intellect to dogma; because I doubt whether he has even used his intellect enough to define dogma. I am not impressed very seriously by those who call Confession cowardly; for I gravely doubt whether they themselves would have the courage to go through with it. But when they say, “Evil is only relative. Sin is only negative. There is no positive badness; it is only the absence of positive goodness”—then I know that they are talking shallow balderdash only because they are much better men than I; more innocent and more normal and more near to God.
What I may call my period of madness coincided with a period of drifting and doing nothing; in which I could not settle down to any regular work. I dabbled in a number of things; and some of them may have had something to do with the psychology of the affair. I would not for a moment suggest it as a cause, far less as an excuse, but it is a contributory fact that among these dabblings in this dubious time, I dabbled in Spiritualism without having even the decision to be a Spiritualist. Indeed I was, in a rather unusual manner, not only detached but indifferent. My brother and I used to play with planchette, or what the Americans call the ouija board; but we were among the few, I imagine, who played in a mere spirit of play. Nevertheless I would not altogether rule out the suggestion of some that we were playing with fire; or even with hell-fire. In the words that were written for us there was nothing ostensibly degrading, but any amount that was deceiving. I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify, with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lies may be larks or they may be lures to the imperilled soul or they may be a thousand other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.
I will give one or two examples. We asked planchette, in our usual random fashion, what advice it would give to an acquaintance of ours, a solid and rather dull Member of Parliament who had the misfortune to be an authority on education. Planchette wrote down with brazen promptitude (in these later times it was always very prompt, though not always very clear) the simple words, “Get a divorce.” The wife of the politician was so respectable, and I will add so hideous, that the materials of a scandalous romance seemed to be lacking. So we sternly enquired of our familiar spirit what the devil he meant; possibly an appropriate invocation. The result was rather curious. It wrote down very rapidly an immensely and indeed incredibly long word, which was at first quite illegible. It wrote it again; it wrote it four or five times; it was always quite obviously the same word; and towards the end it was apparent that it began with the three letters “0. R. R.” I said, “This is all nonsense; there is no word in the English language beginning 0. R. R., let alone a word as long as that.” Finally it tried again and wrote the word out quite clearly; and it ran, “Orriblerevelationsinighlife”.
IV
COME ESSERE UN PAZZO
Tratto qui la parte più oscura e difficile del mio compito; il periodo della giovinezza che è pieno di dubbi e morbosità e tentazioni; e che, benché nel mio caso principalmente soggettivo, ha lasciato per sempre nella mia mente una certezza sulla solidità oggettiva del Peccato. E prima di trattarlo in un qualunque dettaglio, è necessario fare una spiegazione preliminare su un punto. In materia di religione, mi sono molto occupato di controversie su problemi piuttosto provocatori; e ho infine adottato una posizione che per molti è essa stessa una provocazione. Ho afflitto i miei benevoli, e molti dei saggi e prudenti, col mio sconsiderato corso nel divenire cristiano, un cristiano ortodosso, e infine cattolico nel senso di cattolico romano. Ora, nella maggior parte delle cose che essi disapprovano maggiormente, non mi vergogno minimamente di me stesso. Come apologeta sono l’opposto dell’apologetico. Per quanto un uomo possa essere orgoglioso di una religione radicata nell’Umiltà, sono assai orgoglioso della mia religione; sono specialmente orgoglioso di quelle parti di essa che sono più comunemente chiamate superstizione. Sono orgoglioso di essere incatenato da dogmi antiquati e schiavizzato da credi morti (come i miei amici giornalisti ripetono con tanta pertinacia), poiché so assai bene che sono i credi eretici a essere morti, e che è solo il dogma ragionevole a vivere abbastanza a lungo da essere chiamato antiquato. Sono assai orgoglioso di ciò che la gente chiama pretismo; poiché perfino quell’accidentale termine d’ingiuria conserva la medievale Verità che un prete, come ogni altro uomo, dovrebbe essere un artigiano. Sono assai orgoglioso di ciò che la gente chiama Mariolatria; perché introdusse nella religione, nei secoli più oscuri, quell’elemento di cavalleria che ora viene tardivamente e malamente compreso nella forma del femminismo. Sono assai orgoglioso di essere ortodosso sui misteri della Trinità o della Messa; sono orgoglioso di credere nel Confessionale; sono orgoglioso di credere nel Papato.
Ma non sono orgoglioso di credere nel Diavolo. Per metterla più correttamente, non sono orgoglioso di conoscere il Diavolo. Feci la sua conoscenza per mia colpa; e la seguii lungo linee che, se fossero state seguite oltre, avrebbero potuto condurmi al culto del diavolo o al diavolo sa cosa. Su questa dottrina, almeno, non c’è, mescolata alla mia conoscenza, alcuna ombra di autocompiacimento più di quanta ce ne sia di autoinganno. Su quest’unica faccenda, un uomo può ben avere intellettualmente ragione solo per il fatto di avere moralmente torto. Non sono impressionato dalle arie e dalle grazie etiche degli scettici su gran parte degli altri argomenti. Non sono soggiogato da un giovane gentiluomo che dice di non poter sottomettere il proprio intelletto al dogma; perché dubito che egli abbia perfino usato il proprio intelletto abbastanza da definire il dogma. Non sono impressionato molto seriamente da coloro che chiamano vile la Confessione; poiché dubito gravemente che essi stessi avrebbero il Coraggio di andare fino in fondo. Ma quando dicono: «Il male è solo relativo. Il peccato è solo negativo. Non c’è cattiveria positiva; è solo l’assenza di bontà positiva» — allora so che stanno dicendo sciocchezze superficiali solo perché sono uomini assai migliori di me; più innocenti e più normali e più vicini a Dio.
Ciò che posso chiamare il mio periodo di Follia coincise con un periodo di deriva e di ozio; in cui non riuscivo a stabilirmi in alcun lavoro regolare. Mi dilettavo in un certo numero di cose; e alcune di esse possono aver avuto qualcosa a che fare con la psicologia della faccenda. Non lo suggerirei per un momento come causa, ancor meno come scusa, ma è un fatto concomitante che tra questi diletti, in quel dubbio periodo, mi dilettai di Spiritismo senza avere neppure la decisione di essere uno Spiritista. In effetti io ero, in un modo piuttosto insolito, non solo distaccato ma indifferente. Mio fratello e io eravamo soliti giocare con la planchette, o ciò che gli americani chiamano la tavola ouija; ma eravamo tra i pochi, immagino, che giocavano in un mero spirito di gioco. Ciononostante non escluderei del tutto il suggerimento di alcuni che stessimo giocando col Fuoco; o addirittura col fuoco dell’inferno. Nelle parole che venivano scritte per noi non c’era nulla di ostensibilmente degradante, ma quantità infinite di ingannevole. Vidi abbastanza della cosa da poter testimoniare, con completa certezza, che accade qualcosa che non è, nel senso ordinario, naturale, o prodotto dalla normale e cosciente volontà umana. Se sia prodotto da qualche forza subconscia ma pur sempre umana, o da qualche potere, buono, cattivo o indifferente, esterno all’umanità, io stesso non tenterei di deciderlo. L’unica cosa che dirò con completa fiducia, riguardo a quel potere mistico e invisibile, è che dice bugie. Le bugie possono essere burle o possono essere lusinghe per l’Anima in pericolo, o possono essere mille altre cose; ma qualunque cosa siano, non sono verità sull’altro mondo; o del resto su questo mondo.
Darò uno o due esempi. Chiedemmo alla planchette, alla nostra solita maniera casuale, quale consiglio avrebbe dato a un nostro conoscente, un solido e piuttosto ottuso Membro del Parlamento che aveva la disgrazia di essere un’autorità in fatto di Educazione. La planchette scrisse con sfacciata prontezza (in questi tempi più tardi era sempre assai pronta, benché non sempre assai chiara) le semplici parole: «Ottieni un divorzio.» La moglie del politico era così rispettabile, e aggiungerò così orrenda, che i materiali di un Romanzo scandaloso parevano mancare. Così chiedemmo severamente al nostro spirito familiare che diavolo intendesse; forse un’invocazione appropriata. Il risultato fu piuttosto curioso. Scrisse assai rapidamente una parola immensamente e in verità incredibilmente lunga, che dapprima era del tutto illeggibile. La scrisse di nuovo; la scrisse quattro o cinque volte; era sempre in modo palese la stessa parola; e verso la fine fu evidente che cominciava con le tre lettere «0. R. R.» Dissi: «È tutta una sciocchezza; non c’è parola nella lingua inglese che cominci con 0. R. R., tanto meno una parola lunga come quella.» Alla fine riprovò e scrisse la parola con perfetta chiarezza; e diceva: «Orriblirivelazioninellaltasocietà».
If it was our subconsciousness, our subconsciousness at least had a simple sense of humour. But that it was our subconsciousness rather than our consciousness (if it was not something outside both) is proved by the practical fact that we did go on puzzling over the written word, when it was again and again rewritten, and really never had a notion of what it was, until it burst upon us at last. Nobody who knew us, I think, would suppose us capable of playing such a long and solemn and silly deception on each other. We also, like our subconsciousness, had a sense of humour. But cases of this kind fill me with wonder and a faint alarm, when I consider the number of people who seem to be taking spirit communications seriously, and founding religions and moral philosophies upon them. There would indeed have been some Orrible Revelations in Igh Life, and some Orrible Revelations about our own mental state and moral behaviour, if we had trotted off to the M.P. with our little message from the higher sphere.
Here is another example of the same thing. My father, who was present while my brother and I were playing the fool in this fashion, had a curiosity to see whether the oracle could answer a question about something that he knew and we did not. He therefore asked the maiden name of the wife of an uncle of mine in a distant country; a lady whom we of the younger generation had never known. With the lightning decision of infallibility, the spirit pen said, “Manning”. With equal decision my father said, “Nonsense”. We then reproached our tutelary genius with its lamentable romancing and its still more lamentable rashness. The spirit, never to be beaten, wrote down the defiant explanation, “Married before”. And to whom, we asked with some sternness, had our remote but respected aunt been secretly married before. The inspired instrument instantly answered, “Cardinal Manning”.
Now I will pause here in passing to ask what exactly would have happened to me and my social circle, what would have ultimately been the state of my mind or my general conception of the world in which I lived, if I had taken these spiritual revelations as some spiritualists seem to take some spiritual revelations; in short, if we had taken them seriously? Whether this sort of thing be the pranks of some Puck or Poltergeist, or the jerks of some subliminal sense, or the mockery of demons or anything else, it obviously is not true in the sense of trustworthy. Anybody who had trusted it as true would have landed very near to a lunatic asylum. And when it comes to selecting a spiritual philosophy, among the sects and schools of the modern world these facts can hardly be entirely forgotten. Curiously enough, as I have already recorded, Cardinal Manning had crossed my path as a sort of flaming wraith even in my childhood. Cardinal Manning’s portrait hangs now at the end of my room as a symbol of a spiritual state which many would call my second childhood. But anyone would admit that both states are rather saner than my condition would have been, had I begun to dig up The Crime of the Cardinal, by delving in the distant past of a colonial aunt.
Well, even the guidance of higher and wiser intelligences in a better world did not drive me quite so raving mad as that. But I have sometimes fancied since that this practice, of the true psychology of which we really know so little, may possibly have contributed towards the disturbed or even diseased state of brooding and idling through which I passed at the time. I would not dogmatise either way; it is possible that it had nothing to do with it; it is possible that the whole thing was merely mechanical or accidental. I would leave planchette with a playful farewell, giving her the benefit of the doubt; I would allow that she may have been a joke or a fancy or a fairy or anything else; with the proviso that I would not touch her again with a barge-pole. There are other aspects, concerning things much more my own fault, in which a barge-pole would have been useful; but I may as well finish here the trail of my merely trivial and accidental relations to psychical research; as there will be no need to return to that aspect of it; and I should never think of judging it seriously by such trifles. This progress of the preternatural has gone on spreading and strengthening through my whole life. Indeed my life happens to cover the precise period of the real change; not realised by those occupied only with later changes or alternative spiritual solutions. When I was quite a boy, practically no normal person of education thought that a ghost could possibly be anything but a turnip-ghost; a thing believed in by nobody but the village idiot. When I was a young man, practically every person with a large circle had one or two friends with a fancy for what would still have been called mediums and moonshine. When I was middle-aged, great men of science of the first rank like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge claimed to have studied spirits as they might have studied spiders, and discovered ectoplasm exactly as they discovered protoplasm. At the time I write, the thing has grown into a considerable religious movement, by the activity of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, much less of a scientist, but much more of a journalist. I hope nobody will think me such a fool as to offer these fragments of random experience as affecting the real controversy. In the controversy, indeed, through most of my life, I have defended Spiritualism against scepticism; though I should now naturally defend Catholicism even against Spiritualism. But in the times of which I am writing, little crossed our path except stray stories; and the phantoms were sometimes rather phantasmal. There was some talk of wraiths or presences precipitated into distant places, which included a story about a man seen going into a public house who afterwards testified that he had not been present in the body in any such place or for any such errand. There were plenty of other and more plausible stories, which my brother and I repeated with a sort of vague vicarious excitement, without any definite deduction or doctrine; but my father, whose placid Victorian agnosticism on the point we strove in vain to pierce, would listen to a roll of spiritual revelations and shake his head and say, “Ah, it s all very well to talk about these lights and trumpets and voices; but I pin my faith to the man who said he didn’t go into the public-house.”
Se era la nostra subcoscienza, la nostra subcoscienza aveva quanto meno un semplice senso dell’Umorismo. Ma che fosse la nostra subcoscienza piuttosto che la nostra coscienza (se non era qualcosa al di fuori di entrambe) è provato dal fatto pratico che continuammo a lambiccarci su la parola scritta, quando fu riscritta più e più volte, e davvero non avemmo mai idea di che cosa fosse, finché non ci esplose infine dinanzi. Nessuno che ci conoscesse, credo, ci supporrebbe capaci di giocare un così lungo e solenne e sciocco Inganno l’uno all’altro. Anche noi, come la nostra subcoscienza, avevamo un senso dell’Umorismo. Ma casi di questo genere mi riempiono di Stupore e di un debole allarme, quando considero il numero di persone che paiono prendere sul serio le comunicazioni degli spiriti, e fondare religioni e filosofie morali su di esse. Ci sarebbero state in verità certe Orribili Rivelazioni nell’Alta Società, e certe Orribili Rivelazioni sul nostro stesso stato mentale e comportamento morale, se ce ne fossimo andati trotterellando dal deputato con il nostro piccolo messaggio dalla sfera superiore.
Ecco un altro esempio della stessa cosa. Mio padre, che era presente mentre mio fratello e io facevamo i Buffoni a quel modo, ebbe la curiosità di vedere se l’oracolo potesse rispondere a una domanda su qualcosa che egli sapeva e noi no. Chiese pertanto il nome da nubile della moglie di uno zio mio in un paese lontano; una signora che noi della generazione più giovane non avevamo mai conosciuto. Con la fulminea decisione dell’infallibilità, la penna dello spirito disse: «Manning». Con eguale decisione mio padre disse: «Sciocchezze». Rimproverammo allora al nostro genio tutelare il suo lamentevole romanzare e la sua ancor più lamentevole avventatezza. Lo spirito, mai da battere, scrisse la sfrontata spiegazione: «Sposata prima». E con chi, chiedemmo con una certa severità, era stata la nostra remota ma rispettata zia segretamente sposata prima. L’ispirato strumento rispose all’istante: «Il Cardinale Manning».
Ora mi fermerò qui di sfuggita a chiedere che cosa esattamente mi sarebbe accaduto, a me e alla mia cerchia sociale, quale sarebbe stato infine lo stato della mia mente o della mia concezione generale del mondo in cui vivevo, se avessi preso queste rivelazioni spirituali come alcuni spiritisti paiono prendere certe rivelazioni spirituali; in breve, se le avessimo prese sul serio? Che questo genere di cosa siano le birbonate di qualche Folletto o Poltergeist, o gli scatti di qualche senso subliminale, o la beffa di demoni o qualsiasi altra cosa, palesemente non è vero nel senso di attendibile. Chiunque vi avesse creduto come vero sarebbe atterrato assai vicino a un manicomio. E quando si tratta di scegliere una filosofia spirituale, tra le sette e le scuole del mondo moderno questi fatti non possono essere del tutto dimenticati. Curiosamente, come ho già registrato, il Cardinale Manning aveva attraversato il mio cammino come una sorta di fiammeggiante spettro perfino nella mia infanzia. Il ritratto del Cardinale Manning pende ora al fondo della mia stanza come simbolo di uno stato spirituale che molti chiamerebbero la mia seconda infanzia. Ma chiunque ammetterebbe che entrambi gli stati sono piuttosto più sani di quanto sarebbe stata la mia condizione, se avessi cominciato a dissotterrare Il Crimine del Cardinale, scavando nel remoto passato di una zia coloniale.
Ebbene, perfino la guida di intelligenze più alte e più sagge in un mondo migliore non mi fece impazzire fino a quel punto di delirio. Ma da allora ho talvolta immaginato che questa pratica, della cui vera psicologia sappiamo davvero così poco, possa forse aver contribuito allo stato turbato o persino malato di rimuginio e di ozio in cui trascorsi in quel periodo. Non vorrei dogmatizzare in un senso o nell’altro; è possibile che non abbia avuto nulla a che fare con ciò; è possibile che l’intera cosa fosse meramente meccanica o accidentale. Congederei la planchette con un giocoso addio, concedendole il beneficio del Dubbio; ammetterei che possa essere stata uno scherzo o una fantasia o una fata o qualsiasi altra cosa; con la clausola che non la toccherei di nuovo neppure con una pertica. Ci sono altri aspetti, riguardanti cose assai più per mia colpa, in cui una pertica sarebbe stata utile; ma tanto vale che io concluda qui la scia delle mie relazioni meramente banali e accidentali con la ricerca psichica; poiché non ci sarà bisogno di tornare a quell’aspetto di essa; e non penserei mai di giudicarla seriamente da simili inezie. Questo progredire del preternaturale è andato diffondendosi e rafforzandosi per tutta la mia vita. In effetti la mia vita si dà il caso copra proprio il periodo del vero mutamento; non colto da coloro che si occupano solo di mutamenti successivi o di alternative soluzioni spirituali. Quand’ero appena un ragazzo, praticamente nessuna persona normale d’istruzione pensava che un Fantasma potesse essere alcunché di diverso da un Fantasma di rapa; una cosa creduta da nessuno tranne l’idiota del villaggio. Quand’ero un giovane, praticamente ogni persona con una larga cerchia aveva uno o due amici con un debole per ciò che si sarebbe ancora chiamato medium e chiacchiere. Quand’ero di mezza età, grandi uomini di scienza di primo rango come Sir William Crookes e Sir Oliver Lodge pretendevano di aver studiato gli spiriti come avrebbero studiato i ragni, e scoperto l’ectoplasma esattamente come scoprirono il protoplasma. Nel momento in cui scrivo, la cosa è cresciuta in un considerevole movimento religioso, per l’attività del defunto Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, assai meno uno scienziato, ma assai più un giornalista. Spero che nessuno mi creda tanto sciocco da offrire questi frammenti di esperienza casuale come influenti sulla vera controversia. Nella controversia, in effetti, per gran parte della mia vita, ho difeso lo Spiritismo contro lo scetticismo; benché ora naturalmente difenderei il Cattolicesimo anche contro lo Spiritismo. Ma nei tempi di cui scrivo, poco attraversava il nostro cammino tranne storie sparse; e i fantasmi erano talvolta piuttosto fantasmatici. Si parlava di spettri o presenze precipitate in luoghi lontani, tra cui una storia su un uomo visto entrare in un locale pubblico che in seguito testimoniò di non essere stato presente in corpo in un tale luogo o per una tale commissione. C’erano gran quantità di altre e più plausibili storie, che mio fratello e io ripetevamo con una sorta di vaga eccitazione vicaria, senza alcuna precisa deduzione o dottrina; ma mio padre, il cui placido agnosticismo vittoriano sul punto ci sforzavamo invano di trafiggere, ascoltava un rotolo di rivelazioni spirituali e scuoteva il capo e diceva: «Ah, è facile parlare di queste luci e trombe e voci; ma io affido la mia Fede all’uomo che disse di non essere entrato nel locale pubblico.»
Most of this happened when I was at the art school; but even when I had left it, this very casual connection was continued, in a queer way, by the coincidence that I worked for a short time in the office of a publisher who rather specialised in spiritualistic and theosophical literature, known under the general title of the occult. It was not entirely my fault, if it was not the fault of the real spiritualists or other real spirits, if I blundered into rather queer and uncomfortable corners of Spiritualism. On my first day in the office I had my first insight into the occult; for I was very vague about the business, as about most other businesses. I knew we had just published a big and vigorously boomed book of the Life and Letters of the late Dr. Anna Kingsford, of whom I had never heard, though many of our customers seemed to have heard of hardly anybody else. My full enlightenment came when a distraught lady darted into the office and began to describe her most complex spiritual symptoms and to demand the books most suited to her complaint, which I was quite incompetent to select. I timidly offered the monumental Life and Letters; but she shrank away with something like a faint shriek. “No, no,” she cried, “I mustn’t! Anna Kingsford says I mustn’t.” Then, with more control, “Anna Kingsford told me this morning that I must not read her Life; it would be very bad for me, she said, to read her Life.” I ventured to say, or stammer, with all the crudity of common speech, “But Anna Kingsford is dead.” “She told me this morning,” repeated the lady, “that I must not read the book.” “Well,” I said, “I hope Dr. Kingsford hasn’t been giving that advice to many people; it would be rather bad for the business. It seems rather malicious of Dr. Kingsford.”
I soon found that malicious was a mild word for Dr. Anna Kingsford. With all respect to her shade, which is to me the shadow of a shade, I should have said then, and I think I should say now, that the more charitable word was “mad.” I mention the matter here because, while it involves no contradiction of the cosmic theory of Spiritualism, it does illustrate the accident by which I bumped into a queer sort of Spiritualist; and it has some relation to a more general view of reason and religion. The lady celebrated in this book was at least queer. Her boast was that she had killed a number of men merely by thinking about them; her excuse was that they were men who defended vivisection. She also had very visionary but very intimate interviews with various eminent public men, apparently in places of torment; I remember one with Mr. Gladstone, in which a discussion about Ireland and the Sudan was interrupted by Mr. Gladstone gradually growing red-hot from inside. “Feeling that he would wish to be alone,” said Dr. Anna Kingsford with delicacy, “I passed out”; and she must now, I fear, pass out of this fragmentary narrative. I hope I do her no injustice; I am fairly sure she was full of many generous enthusiasms; but I pin my faith, as my father would say, to that fine tact and sense of social decorum, which told her that turning completely red-hot is what no gentleman would desire to do in the presence of a lady.
On the whole, the jolliest Spiritualist I ever met, at least until long afterwards, and the psychic enquirer for whom I felt the most immediate sympathy, was a man who firmly believed that he had once got a successful tip for the Derby out of some medium somewhere, and was still pursuing mediums for information of the same kind. I suggested to him that he should purchase The Pink ‘un and turn it into a paper combining the two interests, and sold at every bookstall under the name of The Sporting and Spiritual Times. This, I said, could not fail to lift bookmakers and jockeys into a loftier sphere of spiritual contemplation, not to mention owners, who probably need it quite as much; while it would give to Spiritualism a sound, shrewd and successful business side, vastly increase its popularity, and give to some of its followers an indefinable air of contact with concrete objective matters and what is coarsely called common sense, which some of them, as I felt at the time, seemed in some fashion to lack. I need not speculate on it here.
For the rest, while I am on the topic, I may assure the reader that I have never experienced anything called psychical, which might be a desperate excuse for my subsequent belief in the things called spiritual. I have hardly happened to strike even the queer psychic coincidences that strike almost anybody; unless we count the story treasured in my household as that of the Wraith of Sarolea. Dr. Sarolea, that fiery Flemish Professor of French, is certainly one of the most striking men I have known; but he never struck my path till long afterwards; but it is undoubtedly the fact that we were expecting him to dinner and my wife beheld the unmistakable long figure and pointed beard from a window; after which he vanished utterly from the landscape. What made the story really creepy was that just afterwards a very young Scotsman appeared at the door, asking for Dr. Sarolea. The Scotsman remained to dinner; but not the wraith. He was to have come down with the wraith; who (as it turned out afterwards) had awaited him with some irritation at the National Liberal Club. One theory was that his rage had precipitated his astral body down to Beaconsfield, but was spent just before he reached the house. Another obvious theory, which my more materialistic mind naturally preferred, was that he had been murdered by the young man and hidden in the pond in my garden; but subsequent detective search found this to be unsound. I only mention my alternative theory, which I very much prefer, because it is impossible to mention Dr. Sarolea, even at this premature stage of the story, without saying something about him. Dr. Sarolea is one of the most learned linguists in Europe; he learns a new language every week or so. His library is one of the wonders of the world, not to say the monstrosities of the world. When last I saw him he gave me the impression of buying the neighbouring houses right and left to find room for his library. What, I asked myself, what is more probable than that a man of this sort should find himself in later life in the exact position of Faust? And what is more reasonable, what more probable, than that Mephistopheles should have met him at the corner of the road as he came up from Beaconsfield station; and propounded the old contract, by which, with a single blast of magic, he should be turned into the handsome young man who a moment later was knocking at my door? This psychic theory would be supported by the fact that the young man is now doing well in politics; and quite unshaken, of course, by the fact that Dr. Sarolea (I am happy to say) is still alive and active in Edinburgh. The only difficulty about it is one which also affects my triumphant theory that Shakespeare wrote Bacon (controversially far stronger than the converse), which paralysed my father’s faith in the story of the public-house; and leads me to suspect that this rather odd incident was one of those fairly ordinary oddities; as when we mistake a stranger for a friend; and then meet the friend afterwards. In short, the only objection to my complete and convincing psychic theory is that I do not believe a word of it.
Gran parte di ciò accadde quando ero alla scuola d’arte; ma perfino dopo che l’ebbi lasciata, questo assai casuale legame continuò, in un modo strano, per la coincidenza che lavorai per un breve periodo nell’ufficio di un editore che si specializzava piuttosto in letteratura spiritista e teosofica, nota sotto il titolo generale di occulto. Non fu del tutto colpa mia, se non fu colpa dei veri spiritisti o di altri veri spiriti, se inciampai in angoli piuttosto strani e scomodi dello Spiritismo. Il mio primo giorno in ufficio ebbi la mia prima incursione nell’occulto; poiché ero assai vago sull’attività, come sulla maggior parte delle altre attività. Sapevo che avevamo appena pubblicato un grande e vigorosamente strombazzato libro della Vita e Lettere della defunta Dott.ssa Anna Kingsford, di cui non avevo mai sentito parlare, benché molti dei nostri clienti paressero non aver sentito parlare quasi di nessun altro. La mia piena illuminazione venne quando una signora sconvolta si precipitò nell’ufficio e cominciò a descrivere i suoi più complessi sintomi spirituali e a chiedere i libri più adatti al suo disturbo, che io ero del tutto incompetente a scegliere. Le offrii timidamente la monumentale Vita e Lettere; ma lei si ritrasse con qualcosa come un debole strillo. «No, no,» esclamò, «non devo! Anna Kingsford dice che non devo.» Poi, con più controllo, «Anna Kingsford mi ha detto stamattina che non devo leggere la sua Vita; sarebbe assai male per me, ha detto, leggere la sua Vita.» Osai dire, o balbettare, con tutta la crudezza del linguaggio comune: «Ma Anna Kingsford è morta.» «Me l’ha detto stamattina,» ripeté la signora, «che non devo leggere il libro.» «Ebbene,» dissi, «spero che la Dott.ssa Kingsford non abbia dato questo consiglio a molta gente; sarebbe piuttosto male per gli affari. Sembra piuttosto malevolo da parte della Dott.ssa Kingsford.»
Scoprii presto che malevolo era una parola blanda per la Dott.ssa Anna Kingsford. Con tutto il rispetto per la sua ombra, che per me è l’ombra di un’ombra, avrei dovuto dire allora, e credo che dovrei dire ora, che la parola più caritatevole era «pazza». Menziono la faccenda qui perché, pur non implicando alcuna contraddizione della teoria cosmica dello Spiritismo, essa illustra l’accidente per cui mi imbattei in uno strano tipo di Spiritista; e ha una qualche relazione con una visione più generale della ragione e della religione. La signora celebrata in questo libro era quanto meno strana. Il suo vanto era di aver ucciso un certo numero di uomini semplicemente pensando a loro; la sua scusa era che erano uomini che difendevano la vivisezione. Ella aveva anche colloqui assai visionari ma assai intimi con vari eminenti uomini pubblici, apparentemente in luoghi di tormento; ne ricordo uno con il signor Gladstone, in cui una discussione sull’Irlanda e sul Sudan fu interrotta dal signor Gladstone che gradualmente diveniva rovente dall’interno. «Sentendo che avrebbe voluto restare solo,» disse la Dott.ssa Anna Kingsford con delicatezza, «uscii»; ed ella deve ora, temo, uscire da questa frammentaria narrazione. Spero di non farle alcuna ingiustizia; sono abbastanza sicuro che fosse piena di molti generosi entusiasmi; ma affido la mia Fede, come direbbe mio padre, a quel fine tatto e senso del decoro sociale, che le diceva che diventare del tutto roventi è ciò che nessun gentiluomo Desidererebbe fare alla presenza di una signora.
Nel complesso, lo Spiritista più gioviale che io abbia mai incontrato, almeno fino a molto tempo dopo, e il ricercatore psichico per cui provai la più immediata simpatia, fu un uomo che credeva fermamente di aver una volta ottenuto una vincente soffiata per il Derby da qualche medium da qualche parte, e stava ancora inseguendo medium per informazioni dello stesso genere. Gli suggerii di acquistare Il Pink ‘un e trasformarlo in un giornale che combinasse i due interessi, e venduto a ogni edicola sotto il nome di The Sporting and Spiritual Times. Questo, dissi, non poteva mancare di elevare allibratori e fantini in una sfera più elevata di contemplazione spirituale, per non dire dei proprietari, che probabilmente ne hanno bisogno quanto loro; mentre avrebbe dato allo Spiritismo un lato commerciale solido, accorto e di successo, ne avrebbe accresciuto immensamente la popolarità, e avrebbe dato ad alcuni dei suoi seguaci un’indefinibile aria di contatto con concrete faccende oggettive e con ciò che rozzamente si chiama buonsenso, di cui alcuni di loro, come sentivo al momento, parevano in qualche modo mancare. Non ho bisogno di speculare su ciò qui.
Del resto, mentre sono sull’argomento, posso assicurare al lettore che non ho mai sperimentato alcunché chiamato psichico, che potrebbe essere una disperata scusa per la mia successiva credenza nelle cose chiamate spirituali. Non mi è quasi mai capitato di incappare neppure nelle strane coincidenze psichiche che colpiscono quasi chiunque; a meno che non si conti la storia custodita nella mia famiglia come quella dello Spettro di Sarolea. Il Dott. Sarolea, quel focoso Professore fiammingo di francese, è di certo uno degli uomini più notevoli che io abbia conosciuto; ma egli non attraversò mai il mio cammino fino a molto tempo dopo; ma è indubbiamente un fatto che lo aspettavamo a cena e mia moglie scorse l’inconfondibile lunga figura e la barba appuntita da una finestra; dopodiché egli svanì del tutto dal paesaggio. Ciò che rese la storia davvero raccapricciante fu che subito dopo un giovanissimo scozzese comparve alla porta, chiedendo del Dott. Sarolea. Lo scozzese rimase a cena; ma non lo spettro. Doveva essere venuto giù con lo spettro; il quale (come risultò in seguito) lo aveva atteso con una certa irritazione al National Liberal Club. Una teoria era che la sua rabbia avesse precipitato il suo corpo astrale giù a Beaconsfield, ma si fosse esaurita proprio prima che raggiungesse la casa. Un’altra ovvia teoria, che la mia mente più materialistica naturalmente preferiva, era che egli fosse stato assassinato dal giovane e nascosto nello stagno del mio Giardino; ma una successiva ricerca poliziesca scoprì che ciò era infondato. Menziono la mia teoria alternativa, che preferisco assai, solo perché è impossibile menzionare il Dott. Sarolea, anche a questo stadio prematuro della storia, senza dire qualcosa di lui. Il Dott. Sarolea è uno dei più dotti linguisti d’Europa; impara una nuova lingua ogni settimana o giù di lì. La sua biblioteca è una delle meraviglie del mondo, per non dire delle mostruosità del mondo. L’ultima volta che lo vidi mi diede l’impressione di comprare le case vicine a destra e a sinistra per trovare spazio per la sua biblioteca. Che cosa, mi chiesi, che cosa è più probabile del fatto che un uomo di questo genere si ritrovi più tardi nella vita nell’esatta posizione di Faust? E che cosa è più ragionevole, che cosa più probabile, del fatto che Mefistofele lo abbia incontrato all’angolo della Strada mentre saliva dalla stazione di Beaconsfield; e gli abbia proposto l’antico contratto, per cui, con un solo soffio di Magia, egli sarebbe stato tramutato nel bel giovane che un momento dopo bussava alla mia porta? Questa teoria psichica sarebbe sostenuta dal fatto che il giovane sta ora facendo carriera in politica; e del tutto non scossa, s’intende, dal fatto che il Dott. Sarolea (sono lieto di dire) è ancora vivo e attivo a Edimburgo. L’unica difficoltà al riguardo è una che affligge anche la mia trionfante teoria che Shakespeare scrisse Bacone (controversialmente assai più forte della converse), che paralizzò la Fede di mio padre nella storia del locale pubblico; e mi induce a sospettare che questo piuttosto strano incidente fosse una di quelle stramberie abbastanza ordinarie; come quando scambiamo uno sconosciuto per un amico; e poi incontriamo l’amico in seguito. In breve, l’unica obiezione alla mia completa e convincente teoria psichica è che non ne credo una parola.
All this, of course, happened ages afterwards: I only mention it here in order to disclaim any intention of taking my psychic experience seriously. But touching that early period directly described in this chapter, I have the same reason for alluding to the topic. I merely begin with this example of amateur psychical research, because the very fact that I indulged in it without reason and without result, that I did not come to any conclusion, or really even try to come to any conclusion, illustrates the fact that this is a period of life in which the mind is merely dreaming and drifting; and often drifting onto very dangerous rocks.
In this chapter, the period covered is roughly that of my going to an art school and is doubtless also coloured by the conditions of such a place. There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature. Moreover those who work are, I will not say the least intelligent, but, by the very nature of the case, for the moment the most narrow; those whose keen intelligence is for the time narrowed to a strictly technical problem. They do not want to be discursive and philosophical; because the trick they are trying to learn is at once incommunicable and practical; like playing the violin Thus philosophy is generally left to the idle; and it is generally a very idle philosophy. In the time of which I write it was also a very negative and even nihilistic philosophy. And though I never accepted it altogether, it threw a shadow over my mind and made me feel that the most profitable and worthy ideas were, as it were on the defensive. I shall have more to say of this aspect of the matter later on; the point is for the moment that an art school can be a very idle place and that I was then a very idle person.
Art may be long but schools of art are short and very fleeting, and there have been five or six since I attended an art school. Mine was the time of Impressionism; and nobody dared to dream there could be such a thing as Post-Impressionism or Post-Post-Impressionism. The very latest thing was to keep abreast of Whistler and take him by the white forelock, as if he were Time himself. Since then that conspicuous white forelock has rather faded into a harmony of white and grey and what was once so young has in its turn grown hoary. But I think there was a spiritual significance in Impressionism, in connection with this age as the age of scepticism. I mean that it illustrated scepticism in the sense of subjectivism. Its principal was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow. In one sense the Impressionist sceptic contradicted the poet who said he had never seen a purple cow. He tended rather to say that he had only seen a purple cow; or rather that he had not seen the cow but only the purple. Whatever may be the merits of this method of art, there is obviously something highly subjective and sceptical about it as a method of thought. It naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all. The philosophy of Impressionism is necessarily close to the philosophy of Illusion. And this atmosphere also tended to contribute, however indirectly, to a certain mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon me; and I think upon many others.
What surprises me in looking back on youth, and even on boyhood, is the extreme rapidity with which it can think its way back to fundamental things; and even to the denial of fundamental things. At a very early age I had thought my way back to thought itself. It is a very dreadful thing to do; for it may lead to thinking that there is nothing but thought. At this time I did not very clearly distinguish between dreaming and waking; not only as a mood but as a metaphysical doubt, I felt as if everything might be a dream. It was as if I had myself projected the universe from within, with its trees and stars; and that is so near to the notion of being God that it is manifestly even nearer to going mad. Yet I was not mad, in any medical or physical sense; I was simply carrying the scepticism of my time as far as it would go. And I soon found it would go a great deal further than most of the sceptics went. While dull atheists came and explained to me that there was nothing but matter, I listened with a sort of calm horror of detachment, suspecting that there was nothing but mind. I have always felt that there was something thin and third-rate about materialists and materialism ever since. The atheist told me so pompously that he did not believe there was any God; and there were moments when I did not even believe there was any atheist.
And as with mental, so with moral extremes. There is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly I could imagine the maddest, when I had never committed the mildest crime. Something may have been due to the atmosphere of the Decadents, and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism; but I am not disposed to dwell much on that defence; I suspect I manufactured most of my morbidities for myself. But anyhow, it is true that there was a time when I had reached that condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde, that “Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing I am”. I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde; but I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination. As Bunyan, in his morbid period, described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, I had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; plunging in deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide. I had never heard of Confession, in any serious sense, in those days; but that is what is really needed in such cases. I fancy they are not uncommon cases. Anyhow, the point is here that I dug quite low enough to discover the devil; and even in some dim way to recognise the devil. At least I never, even in this first vague and sceptical stage, indulged very much in the current arguments about the relativity of evil or the unreality of sin. Perhaps, when I eventually emerged as a sort of theorist, and was described as an Optimist, it was because I was one of the few people in that world of diabolism who really believed in devils.
Tutto ciò, s’intende, accadde secoli dopo: lo menziono qui solo per declinare ogni intenzione di prendere sul serio la mia esperienza psichica. Ma toccando quel primo periodo direttamente descritto in questo capitolo, ho la stessa ragione per alludere all’argomento. Comincio semplicemente con questo esempio di ricerca psichica dilettantesca, perché proprio il fatto che vi indulsi senza ragione e senza risultato, che non giunsi ad alcuna conclusione, o davvero neppure tentai di giungere ad alcuna conclusione, illustra il fatto che questo è un periodo della vita in cui la mente meramente sogna e va alla deriva; e spesso va alla deriva su scogli assai pericolosi.
In questo capitolo, il periodo coperto è grossomodo quello del mio andare a una scuola d’arte ed è senza dubbio anche colorato dalle condizioni di un tale luogo. Non c’è nulla di più difficile da imparare della pittura e nulla di cui la maggior parte della gente si dia meno pena di imparare. Una scuola d’arte è un luogo dove circa tre persone lavorano con febbrile energia e tutti gli altri oziano a un grado che avrei concepito Irraggiungibile dalla Natura umana. Per giunta coloro che lavorano sono, non dirò i meno intelligenti, ma, per la stessa Natura del caso, per il momento i più angusti; coloro la cui acuta intelligenza è per il momento ristretta a un problema strettamente tecnico. Non vogliono essere digressivi e filosofici; perché il trucco che stanno cercando di imparare è a un tempo incomunicabile e pratico; come suonare il violino. Così la filosofia è in genere lasciata agli oziosi; ed è in genere una filosofia assai oziosa. Nel periodo di cui scrivo era anche una filosofia assai negativa e persino nichilista. E benché io non l’accettassi mai del tutto, essa gettò un’ombra sulla mia mente e mi fece sentire che le idee più proficue e degne erano, per così dire, sulla difensiva. Avrò più da dire su questo aspetto della faccenda più avanti; il punto è per il momento che una scuola d’arte può essere un luogo assai ozioso e che io ero allora una persona assai oziosa.
L’arte può essere lunga, ma le scuole d’arte sono brevi e assai fugaci, e ce ne sono state cinque o sei da quando frequentai una scuola d’arte. La mia fu l’epoca dell’Impressionismo; e nessuno osava sognare che vi potesse essere una cosa come il Post-Impressionismo o il Post-Post-Impressionismo. L’ultimissima novità era tenere il passo con Whistler e prenderlo per il bianco ciuffo frontale, come se fosse il Tempo stesso. Da allora quel cospicuo ciuffo bianco è piuttosto sbiadito in un’armonia di bianco e grigio e ciò che una volta era così giovane è a sua volta divenuto canuto. Ma credo che ci fosse un significato spirituale nell’Impressionismo, in connessione con quest’età come età dello scetticismo. Intendo che esso illustrava lo scetticismo nel senso del soggettivismo. Il suo principio era che, se tutto ciò che si poteva vedere di una mucca era una linea bianca e un’ombra purpurea, dovevamo rendere soltanto la linea e l’ombra; in un certo senso dovevamo credere soltanto nella linea e nell’ombra, piuttosto che nella mucca. In un certo senso lo scettico Impressionista contraddiceva il poeta che disse di non aver mai visto una mucca purpurea. Egli tendeva piuttosto a dire di aver visto soltanto una mucca purpurea; o piuttosto che non aveva visto la mucca ma soltanto il purpureo. Quali che siano i meriti di questo metodo dell’arte, c’è palesemente qualcosa di altamente soggettivo e scettico in esso come metodo di pensiero. Esso si presta naturalmente al suggerimento metafisico che le cose esistano solo in quanto le percepiamo, o che le cose non esistano affatto. La filosofia dell’Impressionismo è necessariamente vicina alla filosofia dell’Illusione. E anche quest’atmosfera tendeva a contribuire, per quanto indirettamente, a un certo umore d’irrealtà e di sterile isolamento che si posò in quel periodo su di me; e credo su molti altri.
Ciò che mi sorprende nel ripensare alla giovinezza, e persino alla fanciullezza, è l’estrema rapidità con cui essa può ripensare fino alle cose fondamentali; e persino fino alla negazione delle cose fondamentali. In età assai precoce avevo ripensato fino al pensiero stesso. È una cosa assai terribile da fare; poiché può condurre a pensare che non ci sia nulla se non il pensiero. In quel periodo non distinguevo assai chiaramente tra il sognare e il vegliare; non solo come umore ma come Dubbio metafisico, sentivo come se tutto potesse essere un sogno. Era come se avessi io stesso proiettato l’universo dall’interno, coi suoi alberi e le sue stelle; e ciò è così vicino alla nozione di essere Dio che è palesemente ancor più vicino all’impazzire. Eppure non ero pazzo, in alcun senso medico o fisico; portavo semplicemente lo scetticismo del mio tempo fin dove poteva arrivare. E scoprii presto che sarebbe arrivato assai più lontano di quanto la maggior parte degli scettici arrivasse. Mentre ottusi atei venivano a spiegarmi che non c’era nulla se non la materia, ascoltavo con una sorta di calmo orrore di distacco, sospettando che non ci fosse nulla se non la mente. Ho sempre sentito che c’era qualcosa di esile e di terz’ordine riguardo ai materialisti e al materialismo da allora. L’ateo mi disse così pomposamente che non credeva ci fosse alcun Dio; e ci furono momenti in cui io non credevo neppure ci fosse alcun ateo.
E come con gli estremi mentali, così con quelli morali. C’è qualcosa di davvero minaccioso nel pensiero di quanto rapidamente potevo immaginare il più folle, quando non avevo mai commesso il più mite crimine. Qualcosa può essere dovuto all’atmosfera dei Decadenti, e ai loro perpetui accenni agli orrori lussuriosi del paganesimo; ma non sono incline a soffermarmi molto su quella difesa; sospetto di aver fabbricato la maggior parte delle mie morbosità da me. Ma comunque, è vero che ci fu un periodo in cui avevo raggiunto quella condizione di anarchia morale interiore, in cui un uomo dice, con le parole di Wilde, che «Atys col coltello macchiato di sangue sarebbe meglio della cosa che sono». Non ho in verità mai sentito la più debole Tentazione verso la particolare Follia di Wilde; ma potevo in quel periodo immaginare le peggiori e più sfrenate sproporzioni e distorsioni di una passione più normale; il punto è che l’intero umore era sopraffatto e oppresso da una sorta di congestione dell’Immaginazione. Come Bunyan, nel suo periodo morboso, si descrisse come spinto a proferire bestemmie, io avevo un soverchiante impulso a registrare o disegnare idee e immagini orribili; sprofondando sempre più in giù come in un cieco suicidio spirituale. Non avevo mai sentito parlare della Confessione, in alcun senso serio, in quei giorni; ma è questo ciò che davvero occorre in tali casi. Immagino che non siano casi rari. Comunque, il punto è qui che scavai abbastanza in basso da scoprire il diavolo; e persino in qualche modo oscuro da riconoscere il diavolo. Almeno non indulsi mai, neppure in questo primo vago e scettico stadio, troppo negli argomenti correnti sulla relatività del male o sull’irrealtà del peccato. Forse, quando alla fine emersi come una sorta di teorico, e fui descritto come Ottimista, fu perché ero una delle poche persone in quel mondo di diabolismo che credevano davvero nei diavoli.
In truth, the story of what was called my Optimism was rather odd. When I had been for some time in these, the darkest depths of the contemporary pessimism, I had a strong inward impulse to revolt; to dislodge this incubus or throw off this nightmare. But as I was still thinking the thing out by myself, with little help from philosophy and no real help from religion, I invented a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own. It was substantially this; that even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing. Even if the very daylight were a dream, it was a day-dream; it was not a nightmare. The mere fact that one could wave one’s arms and legs about (or those dubious external objects in the landscape which were called one’s arms and legs) showed that it had not the mere paralysis of a nightmare. Or if it was a nightmare, it was an enjoyable nightmare. In fact, I had wandered to a position not very far from the phrase of my Puritan grandfather, when he said that he would thank God for his creation if he were a lost soul. I hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks. I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all; not, like Henley for my unconquerable soul (for I have never been so optimistic about my own soul as all that) but for my own soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered. This way of looking at things, with a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude, was of course, to some extent assisted by those few of the fashionable writers who were not pessimists; especially by Walt Whitman, by Browning and by Stevenson; Browning’s “God must be glad one loves his world so much”, or Stevenson’s “belief in the ultimate decency of things”. But I do not think it is too much to say that I took it in a way of my own; even if it was a way I could not see clearly or make very clear. What I meant, whether or no I managed to say it, was this; that no man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy. There were other aspects of this feeling, and other arguments about it, to which I shall have to return. Here it is only a necessary part of the narrative; as it involves the fact that, when I did begin to write, I was full of a new and fiery resolution to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age.
Thus, among the juvenile verses I began to write about this time was one called “The Babe Unborn”, which imagined the uncreated creature crying out for existence and promising every virtue if he might only have the experience of life. Another conceived the scoffer as begging God to give him eyes and lips and a tongue that he might mock the giver of them; a more angry version of the same fancy. And I think it was about this time that I thought of the notion afterwards introduced into a tale called Manalive; of a benevolent being who went about with a pistol, which he would suddenly point at a pessimist, when that philosopher said that life was not worth living. This was not printed until long afterwards; but the verses were collected into a little volume; and my father was so imprudent as to help me to get them published under the title of The Wild Knight. And this is an important part of the story, in so far as any part of the story is important, because it did involve my introduction to literature and even to literary men.
My little volume of verse was reviewed with warm and almost overwhelming generosity by Mr. James Douglas, then almost entirely known as a leading literary critic. Impetuosity as well as generosity was always one of Mr. Douglas’s most attractive qualities. And he insisted, for some reason, on affirming positively that there was no such person as G. K. Chesterton; that the name was obviously a nom de plume; that the work was obviously not that of a novice but a successful writer; and finally that it could be none other than Mr. John Davidson. This naturally brought an indignant denial from Mr. John Davidson. That spirited poet very legitimately thanked the Lord that he had never written such nonsense; and I for one very heartily sympathised with him. Not very long afterwards, when Mr. John Lane had accepted the manuscript of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, I was lunching with that publisher and fell into a very pleasant conversation with a fair-haired young man on my left, a little older than myself. A more odd-looking man, a little like an elf, bald, black-haired and with a Mephistophelean tuft and monocle, joined in the conversation across the table; and we found that we agreed on a large number of literary subjects and formed, I think I may say, a lasting liking for each other. It was only afterwards that I discovered that the first man was Mr. James Douglas and the second man was Mr. John Davidson.
I am here advancing my story along the literary line, to a point which I have not yet reached on other lines that were rather political or social; but, for the sake of convenience, I may as well complete this part of my rather erratic development here. Perhaps the next most important accident that favoured me, and brought me into relation with the world of letters, was the fact that I wrote a long review on a book about Stevenson; perhaps the first of the rather stupid books written to belittle Stevenson. I defended Stevenson with so much vehemence, not to say violence, that I had the good fortune to attract the attention of very distinguished writers who, though themselves certainly neither violent nor vehement, were very specially Stevensonian. I received a charming letter, and later a great deal of hospitality and encouragement, from Sir Sidney Colvin; to whose house I often went, where I had the pleasure of meeting the lady who was afterwards Lady Colvin, and where I heard Stephen Phillips read aloud his play of “Ulysses”. Nobody could have been more magnanimous and considerate than Colvin always was to me; but I think we could never have been at one, as he was at one with Stevenson or even Stephen Phillips. For, except on the subject of Stevenson, we differed upon every subject in earth and heaven; he was both Imperialist in politics and Rationalist in religion; and with all his frigid refinement, he was whatever he was with an unquenchable pertinacity. He hated Radicals and Christian mystics and romantic sympathisers with small nationalities, and in fact everything that I had any tendency to be. But the same link of the love of Stevenson attached me a little later to another very eminent man of letters; Sir Edmund Gosse. In some way I always felt far more at home with Sir Edmund Gosse; because he despised all opinions and not merely my opinions. He had an extraordinary depth of geniality in his impartial cynicism. He had the art of snubbing without sneering. We always felt that he had not enjoyed snubbing but the snub itself, as a sort of art for art’s sake, a million miles from any personal malice. It was all the more artistic because of the courtly and silken manner that he commonly assumed. I was very fond of him; and it gives me great happiness to think that one of the last things he must have done was to write me a letter thanking me for another and much later vindication of Stevenson, in a book I wrote long afterwards, indeed only a few years ago. In this letter he said of Stevenson, with a very powerful simplicity coming from such a man, “I loved him; I love him still.” I have no right to use such strong terms in my case; but I feel something like that about Gosse.
In Verità, la storia di ciò che si chiamò il mio Ottimismo fu piuttosto strana. Quando fui stato per qualche tempo in queste, le più oscure profondità del pessimismo contemporaneo, ebbi un forte impulso interiore a ribellarmi; a dislocare questo incubo o a scrollarmi di dosso questo incubo. Ma poiché stavo ancora elaborando la cosa da me, con poco aiuto dalla filosofia e nessun vero aiuto dalla religione, inventai una rudimentale e raffazzonata teoria mistica tutta mia. Era sostanzialmente questa; che perfino la mera esistenza, ridotta ai suoi limiti più primari, era abbastanza straordinaria da essere eccitante. Qualsiasi cosa era magnifica in confronto al nulla. Anche se la luce stessa del giorno fosse stata un sogno, era un sogno a occhi aperti; non era un incubo. Il mero fatto che si potessero agitare le braccia e le gambe (o quei dubbi oggetti esterni nel paesaggio che venivano chiamati le proprie braccia e gambe) mostrava che non aveva la mera paralisi di un incubo. O se era un incubo, era un incubo godibile. In effetti, ero approdato a una posizione non molto lontana dalla frase di mio nonno puritano, quando disse che avrebbe ringraziato Dio per la sua creazione se fosse stato un’anima perduta. Mi aggrappavo ai resti della religione con un solo esile filo di ringraziamento. Ringraziavo quali che fossero gli dèi, non come Swinburne, perché nessuna vita vive per sempre, ma perché una qualunque vita fosse vissuta affatto; non, come Henley, per la mia indomabile Anima (poiché non sono mai stato così ottimista sulla mia stessa Anima fino a quel punto) ma per la mia stessa Anima e il mio stesso Corpo, anche se potevano essere sconfitti. Questo modo di guardare le cose, con una sorta di mistico minimo di gratitudine, fu, s’intende, in una certa misura aiutato da quei pochi degli scrittori alla moda che non erano pessimisti; specialmente da Walt Whitman, da Browning e da Stevenson; il «Dio dev’essere lieto che si ami tanto il suo mondo» di Browning, o la «fede nell’ultima decenza delle cose» di Stevenson. Ma non credo sia troppo dire che lo presi in un modo mio; anche se era un modo che non riuscivo a vedere chiaramente o a rendere assai chiaro. Ciò che intendevo, che riuscissi o no a dirlo, era questo; che nessun uomo sa quanto sia ottimista, anche quando si chiama pessimista, perché non ha davvero misurato le profondità del suo debito verso ciò che lo creò e lo mise in grado di chiamarsi alcunché. Sul fondo dei nostri cervelli, per così dire, c’era un dimenticato bagliore o scoppio di stupore per la nostra stessa esistenza. L’oggetto della vita artistica e spirituale era scavare per questa sommersa aurora di Stupore; così che un uomo seduto su una sedia potesse d’improvviso capire di essere davvero vivo, ed essere felice. C’erano altri aspetti di questo sentimento, e altri argomenti al riguardo, su cui dovrò tornare. Qui esso è solo una parte necessaria della narrazione; poiché comporta il fatto che, quando cominciai davvero a scrivere, ero pieno di una nuova e infuocata risoluzione di scrivere contro i Decadenti e i Pessimisti che governavano la cultura dell’età.
Così, tra i versi giovanili che cominciai a scrivere in quel periodo ce n’era uno intitolato «Il Bimbo Non Nato», che immaginava la creatura increata gridare per l’esistenza e promettere ogni virtù se potesse solo avere l’esperienza della vita. Un altro concepiva lo schernitore come supplicante Dio di dargli occhi e labbra e una lingua per poter schernire chi glieli dava; una versione più adirata della stessa fantasia. E credo che fu in quel periodo che pensai alla nozione poi introdotta in un racconto chiamato Manalive; di un essere benevolo che andava in giro con una Pistola, che d’improvviso puntava contro un pessimista, quando quel filosofo diceva che la vita non valeva la pena di essere vissuta. Questo non fu stampato che molto tempo dopo; ma i versi furono raccolti in un volumetto; e mio padre fu così imprudente da aiutarmi a farli pubblicare col titolo di The Wild Knight. E questa è una parte importante della storia, in quanto qualsiasi parte della storia sia importante, perché comportò davvero la mia introduzione alla letteratura e persino agli uomini di lettere.
Il mio volumetto di versi fu recensito con calorosa e quasi soverchiante generosità dal signor James Douglas, allora conosciuto quasi interamente come un critico letterario di primo piano. L’impetuosità oltre che la generosità fu sempre una delle qualità più attraenti del signor Douglas. Ed egli insistette, per qualche ragione, nell’affermare positivamente che non esisteva alcuna persona come G. K. Chesterton; che il nome era palesemente uno pseudonimo; che l’opera non era palesemente quella di un novizio ma di uno scrittore di successo; e infine che non poteva essere altri che il signor John Davidson. Ciò naturalmente portò un’indignata smentita da parte del signor John Davidson. Quello spirito poetico assai legittimamente ringraziò il Signore di non aver mai scritto simili sciocchezze; e io per primo simpatizzai assai di cuore con lui. Non molto tempo dopo, quando il signor John Lane ebbe accettato il manoscritto di The Napoleon of Notting Hill, stavo pranzando con quell’editore e caddi in una conversazione assai piacevole con un giovane dai capelli biondi alla mia sinistra, un po’ più vecchio di me. Un uomo dall’aspetto più strano, un po’ simile a un elfo, calvo, dai capelli neri e con un ciuffo mefistofelico e un monocolo, si unì alla conversazione dall’altra parte del tavolo; e scoprimmo di concordare su un gran numero di soggetti letterari e formammo, credo di poter dire, una duratura simpatia l’uno per l’altro. Fu solo in seguito che scoprii che il primo uomo era il signor James Douglas e il secondo uomo era il signor John Davidson.
Sto qui facendo avanzare la mia storia lungo la linea letteraria, fino a un punto che non ho ancora raggiunto su altre linee che erano piuttosto politiche o sociali; ma, per comodità, tanto vale che io completi qui questa parte del mio piuttosto erratico sviluppo. Forse il successivo più importante accidente che mi favorì, e mi mise in relazione col mondo delle lettere, fu il fatto che scrissi una lunga recensione su un libro su Stevenson; forse il primo dei libri piuttosto stupidi scritti per sminuire Stevenson. Difesi Stevenson con tanta veemenza, per non dire violenza, che ebbi la buona sorte di attirare l’attenzione di scrittori assai distinti che, benché essi stessi di certo né violenti né veementi, erano in modo assai speciale stevensoniani. Ricevetti una lettera incantevole, e più tardi una gran quantità di ospitalità e di incoraggiamento, da Sir Sidney Colvin; alla cui casa andavo spesso, dove ebbi il piacere di incontrare la signora che fu in seguito Lady Colvin, e dove udii Stephen Phillips leggere ad alta voce il suo dramma «Ulisse». Nessuno avrebbe potuto essere più magnanimo e premuroso di quanto Colvin fosse sempre con me; ma credo che non avremmo mai potuto essere d’accordo, come egli era d’accordo con Stevenson o persino con Stephen Phillips. Poiché, tranne che sul soggetto di Stevenson, differivamo su ogni soggetto in terra e in cielo; egli era sia Imperialista in politica sia Razionalista in religione; e con tutta la sua frigida raffinatezza, egli era qualunque cosa fosse con un’inestinguibile pertinacia. Odiava i Radicali e i mistici cristiani e i romantici simpatizzanti delle piccole nazionalità, e in effetti tutto ciò che io avessi una qualche tendenza a essere. Ma lo stesso legame dell’Amore per Stevenson mi legò un poco più tardi a un altro assai eminente uomo di lettere; Sir Edmund Gosse. In qualche modo mi sentii sempre assai più a mio agio con Sir Edmund Gosse; perché egli disprezzava tutte le opinioni e non meramente le mie opinioni. Aveva una straordinaria profondità di cordialità nel suo imparziale cinismo. Aveva l’arte di dare rimbrotti senza sogghignare. Sentivamo sempre che non aveva goduto del rimbrotto ma del rimbrotto stesso, come una sorta di arte per l’arte, a un milione di miglia da ogni malizia personale. Era tanto più artistico per il modo cortese e serico che comunemente assumeva. Ero assai affezionato a lui; e mi dà gran felicità pensare che una delle ultime cose che egli deve aver fatto fu scrivermi una lettera per ringraziarmi di un’altra e assai più tarda rivendicazione di Stevenson, in un libro che scrissi molto tempo dopo, in effetti solo pochi anni fa. In questa lettera egli disse di Stevenson, con una potentissima semplicità proveniente da un tale uomo: «Lo amavo; lo amo ancora.» Non ho alcun diritto di usare termini così forti nel mio caso; ma sento qualcosa di simile riguardo a Gosse.
About this time I discovered the secret of amiability in another person with a rather misleading reputation for acidity. Mr. Max Beerbohm asked me to lunch; and I have ever since known that he is himself the most subtle of his paradoxes. A man with his reputation might well find offence in the phrase amiability; I can only explain to so scholarly a wit that I put it in Latin or French because I dare not put it in English. Max played in the masquerade of his time, which he has described so brilliantly; and he dressed or overdressed the part. His name was supposed to be a synonym for Impudence; for the undergraduate who exhibited the cheek of a guttersnipe in the garb of a dandy. He was supposed to blow his own trumpet with every flourish of self-praise; countless stories were told about the brazen placidity of his egoism. How, when he had hardly written anything more than a few schoolboy essays, he bound them under the stately title of “The Works of Max Beerbohm.” How he projected a series of biographies called “Brothers of Great Men;” the first volume being “Herbert Beerbohm Tree.” And the first moment I heard his voice, or caught sight of the expression of his eyes, I knew that all this was the flat contrary of the truth. Max was and is a remarkably humble man, for a man of his gifts and his period. I have never known him, by a single phrase or intonation, claim to know more or judge better than he does; or indeed half so much or so well as he does. Most men spread themselves a little in conversation, and have their unreal victories and vanities; but he seems to me more moderate and realistic about himself than about anything else. He is more sceptical about everything than I am, by temper; but certainly he does not indulge in the base idolatry of believing in himself. On this point I wish I were so good a Christian as he. I hope, for the sake of his official or public personality, that he will manage to live down this last affront. But the people who could not see this fact, because an intelligent undergraduate enjoyed an intellectual rag, have something to learn about the possible combination of humility and humour.
Finally, a crown of what I can only call respectability came to me from the firm of Macmillan; in the form of a very flattering invitation to write the study of Browning for the English Men of Letters Series. It had just arrived when I was lunching with Max Beerbohm, and he said to me in a pensive way: “A man ought to write on Browning while he is young.” No man knows he is young while he is young. I did not know what Max meant at the time; but I see now that he was right; as he generally is. Anyhow, I need not say that I accepted the invitation to write a book on Browning. I will not say that I wrote a book on Browning; but I wrote a book on love, liberty, poetry, my own views on God and religion (highly undeveloped), and various theories of my own about optimism and pessimism and the hope of the world; a book in which the name of Browning was introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art, or at any rate with some decent appearance of regularity. There were very few biographical facts in the book, and those were nearly all wrong. But there is something buried somewhere in the book; though I think it is rather my boyhood than Browning’s biography.
I have pursued this literary part of my own biography in advance of the rest. But long before this it was apparent that the centre of gravity in my existence had shifted from what we will (for the sake of courtesy) call Art to what we will (for the sake of courtesy) call Literature. The agent in this change of intention was, in the first instance, my friend Ernest Hodder Williams, afterwards the head of the well-known publishing firm. He was attending Latin and English lectures at University College while I was attending, or not attending, to the art instructions of the Slade School. I joined him in following the English course; and for this reason I am able to boast myself among the many pupils who are grateful to the extraordinarily lively and stimulating learning of Professor W.P. Ker. Most of the other students were studying for examinations; but I had not even that object in this objectless period of my life. The result was that I gained an entirely undeserved reputation for disinterested devotion to culture for its own sake; and I once had the honour of constituting the whole of Professor Ker’s audience. But he gave as thorough and thoughtful a lecture as I have ever heard given, in a slightly more colloquial style; asked me some questions about my reading; and, on my mentioning something from the poetry of Pope, said with great satisfaction, “Ah, I see you have been well brought up.” Pope had much less than justice from that generation of the admirers of Shelley and Swinburne. Hodder Williams and I often talked about literature, following on these literary lectures; and he conceived a fixed notion that I could write; a delusion which he retained to the day of his death. In consequence of this, and in connection with my art studies, he gave me some books on art to review for the Bookman, the famous organ of his firm and family. I need not say that having entirely failed to learn how to draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I had discovered the easiest of all professions; which I have pursued ever since.
When I look back on these things, and indeed on my life generally, the thing that strikes me most is my extraordinary luck. I have already pleaded for the merits of the Moral Tale; but it is against all the proper principles that even any such measure of good fortune should have come to the Idle Apprentice. In the case of my association with Hodder Williams, it was against all reason that so unbusinesslike a person should have so businesslike a friend. In the case of the choice of a trade, it was outrageously unjust that a man should succeed in becoming a journalist merely by failing to become an artist. I say a trade and not a profession; for the only thing I can say for myself, in connection with both trades, is that I was never pompous about them. If I have had a profession, at least I have never been a professor. But in another sense there was about these first stages an element of luck, and even of accident. I mean that my mind remained very much abstracted and almost stunned; and these opportunities were merely things that happened to me, almost like calamities. To say that I was not ambitious makes it sound far too like a virtue, when it really was a not very disgraceful defect; it was that curious blindness of youth which we can observe in others and yet never explain in ourselves. But, above all, I mention it here also because it was connected with the continuity of that unresolved riddle of the mind, which I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The essential reason was that my eyes were turned inwards rather than outwards; giving my moral personality, I should imagine, a very unattractive squint. I was still oppressed with the metaphysical nightmare of negations about mind and matter, with the morbid imagery of evil, with the burden of my own mysterious brain and body; but by this time I was in revolt against them; and trying to construct a healthier conception of cosmic life, even if it were one that should err on the side of health. I even called myself an optimist, because I was so horribly near to being a pessimist. It is the only excuse I can offer. All this part of the process was afterwards thrown up in the very formless form of a piece of fiction called The Man Who Was Thursday. The title attracted some attention at the time; and there were many journalistic jokes about it. Some, referring to my supposed festive views, affected to mistake it for “The Man Who Was Thirsty.” Others naturally supposed that Man Thursday was the black brother of Man Friday. Others again, with more penetration, treated it as a mere title out of topsy-turveydom; as if it had been “The Woman Who Was Half-past Eight,” or “The Cow Who Was Tomorrow Evening.” But what interests me about it was this; that hardly anybody who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was “A Nightmare,” and the answer to a good many critical questions.
In quel periodo scoprii il segreto dell’amabilità in un’altra persona con una reputazione piuttosto fuorviante di acidità. Il signor Max Beerbohm mi invitò a pranzo; e da allora ho sempre saputo che egli è esso stesso il più sottile dei suoi paradossi. Un uomo con la sua reputazione potrebbe ben trovare offensiva la parola amabilità; posso solo spiegare a un arguto tanto erudito che la metto in latino o in francese perché non oso metterla in inglese. Max recitò nella mascherata del suo tempo, che egli ha descritto così brillantemente; e vestì o sopravvestì la parte. Il suo nome era ritenuto sinonimo di Impudenza; per lo studente universitario che esibiva la sfacciataggine di un monello nell’abito di un dandy. Si riteneva che suonasse la propria tromba a ogni svolazzo di autolode; si raccontavano innumerevoli storie sulla sfrontata placidità del suo egoismo. Come, quando aveva scritto a stento poco più di qualche saggio scolastico, li rilegasse sotto il maestoso titolo di «Le Opere di Max Beerbohm». Come progettasse una serie di biografie chiamata «Fratelli di Grandi Uomini»; il primo volume essendo «Herbert Beerbohm Tree». E il primo momento in cui udii la sua voce, o scorsi l’espressione dei suoi occhi, seppi che tutto questo era il piatto contrario della Verità. Max era ed è un uomo notevolmente umile, per un uomo dei suoi doni e del suo periodo. Non l’ho mai conosciuto, con una sola frase o intonazione, pretendere di sapere di più o giudicare meglio di quanto faccia; o in verità neppure la metà o tanto bene quanto fa. La maggior parte degli uomini si spande un poco in conversazione, e ha le sue irreali vittorie e vanità; ma egli mi pare più moderato e realistico su se stesso che su qualsiasi altra cosa. È più scettico su tutto di me, per temperamento; ma di certo non indulge nella bassa idolatria di credere in se stesso. Su questo punto vorrei essere un buon cristiano quanto lui. Spero, per il bene della sua personalità ufficiale o pubblica, che egli riesca a sopravvivere a quest’ultimo affronto. Ma le persone che non riuscivano a vedere questo fatto, perché uno studente universitario intelligente si godeva uno spasso intellettuale, hanno qualcosa da imparare sulla possibile combinazione di Umiltà e Umorismo.
Infine, una Corona di ciò che posso solo chiamare rispettabilità mi venne dalla ditta Macmillan; nella forma di un invito assai lusinghiero a scrivere lo studio su Browning per la English Men of Letters Series. Era appena arrivato quando stavo pranzando con Max Beerbohm, ed egli mi disse in modo pensoso: «Un uomo dovrebbe scrivere su Browning mentre è giovane.» Nessun uomo sa di essere giovane mentre è giovane. Non capii che cosa intendesse Max al momento; ma vedo ora che aveva ragione; come in genere ha. Comunque, non ho bisogno di dire che accettai l’invito a scrivere un libro su Browning. Non dirò che scrissi un libro su Browning; ma scrissi un libro sull’Amore, sulla libertà, sulla poesia, sulle mie stesse vedute su Dio e sulla religione (altamente non sviluppate), e varie teorie mie sull’ottimismo e sul pessimismo e sulla Speranza del mondo; un libro in cui il nome di Browning era introdotto di tanto in tanto, potrei quasi dire con considerevole arte, o quanto meno con una certa decente apparenza di regolarità. C’erano pochissimi fatti biografici nel libro, e quelli erano quasi tutti sbagliati. Ma c’è qualcosa di sepolto da qualche parte nel libro; benché credo sia piuttosto la mia fanciullezza che la Biografia di Browning.
Ho perseguito questa parte letteraria della mia stessa Biografia in anticipo sul resto. Ma molto prima di questo era evidente che il centro di gravità della mia esistenza si era spostato da ciò che chiameremo (per amor di cortesia) Arte a ciò che chiameremo (per amor di cortesia) Letteratura. L’agente in questo mutamento d’intenzione fu, in prima istanza, il mio amico Ernest Hodder Williams, in seguito il capo della ben nota casa editrice. Frequentava lezioni di latino e d’inglese all’University College mentre io frequentavo, o non frequentavo, le istruzioni d’arte della Slade School. Mi unii a lui nel seguire il corso d’inglese; e per questa ragione posso vantarmi tra i molti allievi che sono grati alla straordinariamente vivace e stimolante dottrina del Professor W.P. Ker. La maggior parte degli altri studenti studiava per gli esami; ma io non avevo neppure quell’obiettivo in questo periodo senza scopo della mia vita. Il risultato fu che guadagnai una reputazione del tutto immeritata di disinteressata devozione alla cultura per il suo stesso bene; e una volta ebbi l’Onore di costituire l’intero uditorio del Professor Ker. Ma egli tenne una lezione tanto accurata e ponderata quanto mai ne abbia udita tenere, in uno stile lievemente più colloquiale; mi pose alcune domande sulle mie letture; e, al mio menzionare qualcosa dalla poesia di Pope, disse con grande soddisfazione: «Ah, vedo che siete stato ben educato.» Pope ebbe assai meno di giustizia da quella generazione di ammiratori di Shelley e Swinburne. Hodder Williams e io parlavamo spesso di letteratura, di seguito a queste lezioni letterarie; ed egli concepì la ferma nozione che io sapessi scrivere; una delusione che conservò fino al giorno della sua Morte. In conseguenza di ciò, e in connessione coi miei studi d’arte, mi diede alcuni libri sull’arte da recensire per il Bookman, il famoso organo della sua ditta e famiglia. Non ho bisogno di dire che, avendo interamente fallito nell’imparare a disegnare o dipingere, sfornai abbastanza agevolmente alcune critiche dei punti più deboli di Rubens o dei talenti mal diretti di Tintoretto. Avevo scoperto la più facile di tutte le professioni; che ho perseguito da allora.
Quando ripenso a queste cose, e in verità alla mia vita in generale, la cosa che mi colpisce di più è la mia straordinaria fortuna. Ho già perorato i meriti del Racconto Morale; ma è contro tutti i giusti princìpi che perfino una tale misura di buona sorte sia toccata all’Apprendista Sfaticato. Nel caso della mia associazione con Hodder Williams, era contro ogni ragione che una persona così poco pratica negli affari avesse un amico così pratico negli affari. Nel caso della scelta di un mestiere, era oltraggiosamente ingiusto che un uomo riuscisse a divenire giornalista solo per non essere riuscito a divenire Artista. Dico un mestiere e non una professione; poiché l’unica cosa che posso dire per me stesso, in connessione con entrambi i mestieri, è che non fui mai pomposo su di essi. Se ho avuto una professione, almeno non sono mai stato un professore. Ma in un altro senso c’era intorno a questi primi stadi un elemento di fortuna, e persino di accidente. Intendo che la mia mente rimase assai distratta e quasi stordita; e queste opportunità erano semplicemente cose che mi accadevano, quasi come calamità. Dire che non ero ambizioso lo fa suonare fin troppo simile a una virtù, quando era in realtà un difetto non molto disonorevole; era quella curiosa cecità della giovinezza che possiamo osservare negli altri eppure mai spiegare in noi stessi. Ma, soprattutto, lo menziono qui anche perché era connesso con la continuità di quell’irrisolto Enigma della mente, che menzionai all’inizio di questo capitolo. La ragione essenziale era che i miei occhi erano rivolti all’interno piuttosto che all’esterno; conferendo alla mia personalità morale, immagino, uno strabismo assai poco attraente. Ero ancora oppresso dall’ incubo metafisico di negazioni sulla mente e sulla materia, dalla morbosa immaginifica del male, dal fardello del mio stesso misterioso cervello e Corpo; ma a questo punto ero in rivolta contro di essi; e cercavo di costruire una più sana concezione della vita cosmica, anche se fosse una che dovesse errare dal lato della salute. Mi chiamavo persino ottimista, perché ero così orribilmente vicino a essere pessimista. È l’unica scusa che posso offrire. Tutta questa parte del processo fu in seguito gettata nella assai informe forma di un pezzo di narrativa chiamato The Man Who Was Thursday. Il titolo attirò una certa attenzione al momento; e vi furono molti scherzi giornalistici al riguardo. Alcuni, riferendosi alle mie presunte vedute festose, finsero di scambiarlo per «The Man Who Was Thirsty» [L’uomo che aveva sete]. Altri naturalmente supposero che l’Uomo Giovedì fosse il fratello nero dell’Uomo Venerdì. Altri ancora, con più penetrazione, lo trattarono come un mero titolo da mondo alla rovescia; come se fosse stato «La Donna che Era Le Otto e Mezzo», o «La Mucca che Era Domani Sera». Ma ciò che mi interessa al riguardo era questo; che quasi nessuno che guardasse il titolo pareva mai aver guardato il sottotitolo; che era «Un Incubo», e la risposta a parecchie questioni critiche.
I pause upon the point here, because it is of some importance to the understanding of that time. I have often been asked what I mean by the monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in that story; and some have suggested, and in one sense not untruly, that he was meant for a blasphemous version of the Creator. But the point is that the whole story is a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the ’90s; and the ogre who appears brutal but is also cryptically benevolent is not so much God, in the sense of religion or irreligion, but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism. So far as the story had any sense in it, it was meant to begin with the picture of the world at its worst and to work towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black as it was already painted. I explained that the whole thing was thrown out in the nihilism of the ’90s in the dedicatory lines which I wrote to my friend Bentley, who had been through the same period and problems; asking rhetorically: “Who shall understand but you?” In reply to which a book-reviewer very sensibly remarked that if nobody understood the book except Mr. Bentley, it seemed unreasonable to ask other people to read it.
But I speak of it here because, though it came at the beginning of the story, it was destined to take on another meaning before the end of it. Without that distant sequel, the memory may appear as meaningless as the book; but for the moment I can only leave on record here the two facts to which I managed somehow and in some sense to testify. First, I was trying vaguely to found a new optimism, not on the maximum but the minimum of good. I did not so much mind the pessimist who complained that there was so little good. But I was furious, even to slaying, with the pessimist who asked what was the good of good. And second, even in the earliest days and even for the worst reasons, I already knew too much to pretend to get rid of evil. I introduced at the end one figure who really does, with a full understanding, deny and defy the good. Long afterwards Father Ronald Knox told me, in his whimsical manner, that he was sure that the rest of the book would be used to prove that I was a Pantheist and a Pagan, and that the Higher Critics of the future would easily show that the episode of the Accuser was an interpolation by priests.
This was not the case; in fact it was quite the other way. At this time I should have been quite as annoyed as anybody else for miles round, if I had found a priest interfering with my affairs or interpolating things in my manuscript. I put that statement into that story, testifying to the extreme evil (which is merely the unpardonable sin of not wishing to be pardoned), not because I had learned it from any of the million priests whom I had never met, but because I had learned it from myself. I was already quite certain that I could if I chose cut myself off from the whole life of the universe. My wife, when asked who converted her to Catholicism, always answers, “the devil”.
But all that was so long afterwards, that it has no relation to the groping and guesswork philosophy of the story in question. I would much rather quote a tribute from a totally different type of man, who was nevertheless one of the very few men who, for some reason or other, have ever made head or tail of this unfortunate romance of my youth. He was a distinguished psychoanalyst, of the most modern and scientific sort. He was not a priest; far from it; we might say, like the Frenchman asked if he had lunched on the boat, “au contraire”. He did not believe in the Devil; God forbid, if there was any God to forbid. But he was a very keen and eager student of his own subject; and he made my hair stand on end by saying that he had found my very juvenile story useful as a corrective among his morbid patients; especially the process by which each of the diabolical anarchs turns out to be a good citizen in disguise. “I know a number of men who nearly went mad,” he said quite gravely, “but were saved because they had really understood The Man Who Was Thursday.” He must have been rather generously exaggerative; he may have been mad himself, of course; but then so was I. But I confess it flatters me to think that, in this my period of lunacy, I may have been a little useful to other lunatics.
Mi fermo sul punto qui, perché è di una certa importanza per la comprensione di quel periodo. Mi è stato spesso chiesto che cosa intendessi con il mostruoso orco da pantomima chiamato Domenica in quella storia; e alcuni hanno suggerito, e in un senso non falsamente, che fosse inteso come una versione blasfema del Creatore. Ma il punto è che l’intera storia è un incubo delle cose, non come sono, ma come parevano al giovane semi-pessimista degli anni ‘90; e l’orco che appare brutale ma è anche criptamente benevolo non è tanto Dio, nel senso della religione o dell’irreligione, ma piuttosto la Natura come appare al panteista, il cui panteismo sta lottando per uscire dal pessimismo. Per quanto la storia avesse un qualche senso in sé, era inteso a cominciare con l’immagine del mondo al suo peggio e a lavorare verso il suggerimento che l’immagine non fosse così nera come già era dipinta. Spiegai che l’intera cosa era gettata fuori nel nichilismo degli anni ‘90 nei versi dedicatori che scrissi al mio amico Bentley, che era passato attraverso lo stesso periodo e gli stessi problemi; chiedendo retoricamente: «Chi comprenderà se non tu?» In risposta a ciò un recensore osservò assai sensatamente che se nessuno comprendeva il libro tranne il signor Bentley, pareva irragionevole chiedere ad altre persone di leggerlo.
Ma ne parlo qui perché, benché venisse all’inizio della storia, era destinato ad assumere un altro significato prima della fine di essa. Senza quel remoto seguito, la Memoria può apparire priva di significato come il libro; ma per il momento posso solo lasciare a verbale qui i due fatti a cui riuscii chissà come e in qualche senso a testimoniare. Primo, cercavo vagamente di fondare un nuovo ottimismo, non sul massimo ma sul minimo del bene. Non mi spiaceva tanto il pessimista che si lamentava che ci fosse così poco bene. Ma ero furioso, fino all’omicidio, con il pessimista che chiedeva quale fosse il bene del bene. E secondo, perfino nei primissimi giorni e perfino per le peggiori ragioni, sapevo già troppo per fingere di sbarazzarmi del male. Introdussi alla fine una figura che davvero, con piena comprensione, nega e sfida il bene. Molto tempo dopo Padre Ronald Knox mi disse, alla sua maniera capricciosa, che era sicuro che il resto del libro sarebbe stato usato per dimostrare che io ero un Panteista e un Pagano, e che gli Alti Critici del futuro avrebbero facilmente mostrato che l’episodio dell’Accusatore era un’interpolazione dei preti.
Non era così; anzi era proprio il contrario. In quel periodo sarei stato altrettanto irritato di chiunque altro per miglia intorno, se avessi trovato un prete a interferire coi miei affari o a interpolare cose nel mio manoscritto. Misi quell’affermazione in quella storia, testimoniando l’estremo male (che è meramente il peccato imperdonabile di non voler essere perdonati), non perché l’avessi imparato da alcuno del milione di preti che non avevo mai incontrato, ma perché l’avevo imparato da me stesso. Ero già del tutto certo che avrei potuto, se avessi scelto, tagliarmi fuori dall’intera vita dell’universo. Mia moglie, quando le si chiede chi la convertì al Cattolicesimo, risponde sempre: «il diavolo».
Ma tutto ciò avvenne così molto tempo dopo, che non ha alcuna relazione con la brancolante e congetturale filosofia della storia in questione. Preferirei di gran lunga citare un tributo da un tipo d’uomo del tutto diverso, che era nondimeno uno dei pochissimi uomini che, per qualche ragione o l’altra, abbiano mai capito qualcosa di questo sfortunato Romanzo della mia giovinezza. Era un distinto psicoanalista, del più moderno e scientifico genere. Non era un prete; tutt’altro; potremmo dire, come il francese cui si chiese se avesse pranzato sulla barca, «au contraire». Non credeva nel Diavolo; Dio non voglia, se c’era un qualche Dio a non volerlo. Ma era uno studioso assai acuto e zelante del proprio soggetto; e mi fece rizzare i capelli dicendo che aveva trovato la mia assai giovanile storia utile come correttivo tra i suoi pazienti morbosi; specialmente il processo per cui ciascuno degli anarchici diabolici si rivela essere un buon cittadino in incognito. «Conosco un certo numero di uomini che quasi impazzirono,» disse assai gravemente, «ma furono salvati perché avevano davvero compreso The Man Who Was Thursday.» Deve essere stato piuttosto generosamente esagerato; può darsi che fosse egli stesso pazzo, s’intende; ma d’altronde lo ero anch’io. Ma confesso che mi lusinga pensare che, in questo mio periodo di follia, io possa essere stato un po’ utile ad altri folli.
V
NATIONALISM AND NOTTING HILL
At this point of the story I must for a moment go back in order to go on. In the previous pages I have said a good deal about Art, both in the home and the school; of the art I lost by my own fault or gained by my father’s merit; of the gratitude I owe to the amateur and the apology I owe to the art-master; of all I was taught without learning it, and all I learnt without anybody teaching it. But in a sketch of the period, this predominance of Art is rather out of proportion to the contemporary position of Science. It was true that I could never exactly be called a scientific character; and even as between the Classical and Modern sides of my old school, I should always have chosen rather to idle at Greek than to idle at Chemistry. But science was in the air of all that Victorian world, and children and boys were affected by the picturesque aspects of it. Several of my father’s cronies were scientific either in their hobbies or their profession; one of them, a very delightful schoolmaster named Alexander Watherston, carried about with him a geological hammer, with which he would detach fossils from rocks or walls, to my intense delight; so that the very name of a geological hammer still suggests something primal and poetic like the hammer of Thor. My mother’s brother, Beaumont Grosjean, was an analytical chemist by calling, and a man stuffed with humour; I can recall how he professed to have proved by analysis the purity of one single product of current commerce; which was Nubian Blacking; I believe it no longer exists; so I can be neither reproached nor rewarded for the advertisement. But he was so captivated with this one case of commercial probity that he used the name as a moral term of eulogy, saying “No man could have behaved in a more Nubian fashion,” or, “Perhaps as Nubian an action as ever did honour to human nature.” It was the same scientific uncle who told me various fairy-tales of science, which I regret to say that I believed much less than the fairy-tales of fairyland. Thus he told me that when I jumped off a chair, the earth jumped towards me. At the time I took it for granted that this was a lie; or at any rate a joke. What Einstein has done with it now is another story—or perhaps another joke. But I mention science and the scientific uncle for another reason here.
I am just old enough to remember in infancy the world before telephones. And I remember that my father and my uncle fitted up the first telephone I ever saw with their own metal and chemicals, a miniature telephone reaching from the top bedroom under the roof to the remote end of the garden. I was really impressed imaginatively by this; and I do not think I have ever been so much impressed since by any extension of it. The point is rather important in the whole theory of imagination. It did startle me that a voice should sound in the room when it was really as distant as the next street. It would hardly have startled me more if it had been as distant as the next town. It does not startle me any more if it is as distant as the next continent. The miracle is over. Thus I admired even the large scientific things most on a small scale. So I always found that I was much more attracted by the microscope than the telescope. I was not overwhelmed in childhood, by being told of remote stars which the sun never reached, any more than in manhood by being told of an empire on which the sun never set. I had no use for an empire that had no sunsets. But I was inspired and thrilled by looking through a little hole at a crystal like a pin’s head; and seeing it change pattern and colour like a pigmy sunset.
I have already picked two quarrels with better men than myself, who were enthusiasts for childish romance, upon the reality of the romance of childhood. First, I disagree with them when they treat the infantile imagination as a sort of dream; whereas I remember it rather as a man dreaming might remember the world where he was awake. And second, I deny that children have suffered under a tyranny of moral tales. For I remember the time when it would have seemed the most hideous tyranny to take my moral tales away from me. And, in order to make this clear, I must contradict yet another common assumption in the romantic description of the dawn of life. The point is not very easy to explain; indeed I have spent the greater part of my life in an unsuccessful attempt to explain it. Upon the cartloads of ill-constructed books in which I have completely failed to do so, I have no desire to dwell. But perhaps, as a general definition, this might be useful; or, if not as a definition, at least as a suggestion. From the first vaguely, and of late more and more clearly, I have felt that the world is conceiving liberty as something that merely works outwards. And I have always conceived it as something that works inwards.
The ordinary poetic description of the first dreams of life is a description of mere longing for larger and larger horizons. The imagination is supposed to work towards the infinite; though in that sense the infinite is the opposite of the imagination. For the imagination deals with an image. And an image is in its nature a thing that has an outline and therefore a limit. Now I will maintain, paradoxical as it may seem, that the child does not desire merely to fall out of the window, or even to fly through the air or to be drowned in the sea. When he wishes to go to other places, they are still places; even if nobody has ever been there. But in truth the case is much stronger than that. It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively in love with limits. He uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving-stones. He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving-stones, in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself. I played that kind of game with myself all over the mats and boards and carpets of the house; and, at the risk of being detained during His Majesty’s pleasure, I will admit that I often play it still. In that sense I have constantly tried to cut down the actual space at my disposal; to divide and subdivide, into these happy prisons, the house in which I was quite free to run wild. And I believe that there is in this psychological freak a truth without which the whole modern world is missing its main opportunity. If we look at the favourite nursery romances, or at least if we have the patience to look at them twice, we shall find that they all really support this view; even when they have largely been accepted as supporting the opposite view. The charm of Robinson Crusoe is not in the fact that he could find his way to a remote island; but in the fact that he could not find any way of getting away from it. It is that fact which gives an intensive interest and excitement to all the things that he had with him on the island; the axe and the parrot and the guns and the little hoard of grain. The tale of Treasure Island is not the record of a vague desire to go on a sea voyage for one’s health. It ends where it began; and it began with Stevenson drawing a map of the island, with all its bays and capes cut out as clearly as fretwork. And the eternal interest of the Noah’s Ark, considered as a toy, consists in its complete suggestion of compactness and isolation; of creatures so comically remote and fantastic being all locked up in one box; as if Noah had been told to pack up the sun and moon with his luggage. In other words, it is exactly the same game that I have played myself, by piling all the things I wanted on a sofa, and imagining that the carpet around me was the surrounding sea.
V
NAZIONALISMO E NOTTING HILL
A questo punto della storia devo per un momento tornare indietro per poter andare avanti. Nelle pagine precedenti ho detto parecchio sull’Arte, tanto in casa quanto a scuola; dell’arte che persi per colpa mia o che guadagnai per merito di mio padre; della gratitudine che devo al dilettante e delle scuse che devo al maestro d’arte; di tutto ciò che mi fu insegnato senza che lo imparassi, e di tutto ciò che imparai senza che nessuno me lo insegnasse. Ma in uno schizzo del periodo, questo predominio dell’Arte è alquanto sproporzionato rispetto alla posizione che la Scienza occupava allora. È vero che non avrei mai potuto essere definito propriamente un carattere scientifico; e persino nella scelta fra il ramo Classico e quello Moderno della mia vecchia scuola, avrei sempre preferito oziare sul greco piuttosto che oziare sulla chimica. Ma la scienza era nell’aria di tutto quel mondo vittoriano, e i bambini e i ragazzi ne subivano gli aspetti pittoreschi. Parecchi degli amiconi di mio padre erano scienziati o per passione o per professione; uno di loro, un maestro di scuola oltremodo delizioso di nome Alexander Watherston, portava sempre con sé un martello da geologo, con il quale staccava fossili da rocce o muri, con mia intensa gioia; sicché il nome stesso di martello da geologo mi suggerisce ancora qualcosa di primordiale e poetico, come il martello di Thor. Il fratello di mia madre, Beaumont Grosjean, era chimico analitico di professione, e un uomo pieno di umorismo; ricordo come sosteneva di aver dimostrato mediante analisi la purezza di un unico prodotto del commercio corrente; e cioè il Lucido Nubiano; credo non esista più; sicché non posso essere né biasimato né ricompensato per la pubblicità. Ma era così affascinato da questo unico caso di probità commerciale che usava il nome come termine morale di elogio, dicendo «Nessun uomo avrebbe potuto comportarsi in maniera più nubiana», oppure «Forse un’azione tanto nubiana quanto mai ne fece onore alla natura umana». Era lo stesso zio scienziato che mi raccontava varie fiabe della scienza, alle quali, mi duole dirlo, credevo assai meno che alle fiabe del paese delle fate. Così mi diceva che quando saltavo giù da una sedia, era la terra a saltare verso di me. All’epoca davo per scontato che si trattasse di una menzogna; o comunque di uno scherzo. Ciò che Einstein ne ha fatto ora è un’altra storia — o forse un altro scherzo. Ma qui menziono la scienza e lo zio scienziato per un’altra ragione.
Sono abbastanza vecchio da ricordare, nell’infanzia, il mondo prima dei telefoni. E ricordo che mio padre e mio zio approntarono il primo telefono che io abbia mai visto con i loro stessi metalli e prodotti chimici, un telefono in miniatura che andava dalla camera più alta sotto il tetto fino all’estremità remota del giardino. Ne fui davvero colpito nell’immaginazione; e non credo di essere mai più stato colpito, da allora, da alcun suo perfezionamento. Il punto è piuttosto importante nell’intera teoria dell’immaginazione. Mi trasalì davvero che una voce risuonasse nella stanza quando in realtà era lontana quanto la via accanto. Non mi avrebbe trasalito molto di più se fosse stata lontana quanto la città accanto. Non mi trasale più affatto se è lontana quanto il continente accanto. Il miracolo è finito. Così ammiravo persino le grandi cose scientifiche soprattutto in piccola scala. Così scoprii sempre di essere assai più attratto dal microscopio che dal telescopio. Non fui sopraffatto, nell’infanzia, nel sentirmi parlare di stelle remote che il sole non raggiungeva mai, più di quanto lo fossi, da adulto, nel sentirmi parlare di un impero su cui il sole non tramontava mai. Non sapevo che farmene di un impero senza tramonti. Ma fui ispirato ed elettrizzato dal guardare attraverso un piccolo foro un cristallo grande come una capocchia di spillo; e vederlo mutare disegno e colore come un tramonto pigmeo.
Ho già intavolato due dispute con uomini migliori di me, entusiasti del romanzesco infantile, sulla realtà del romanzesco dell’infanzia. Primo, dissento da loro quando trattano l’immaginazione infantile come una sorta di sogno; mentre io la ricordo piuttosto come un uomo che sogna potrebbe ricordare il mondo in cui era desto. E secondo, nego che i bambini abbiano sofferto sotto la tirannia dei racconti morali. Poiché ricordo l’epoca in cui mi sarebbe sembrata la più orrenda tirannia che mi togliessero i miei racconti morali. E, per rendere questo chiaro, devo contraddire ancora un’altra assunzione comune nella descrizione romantica dell’alba della vita. Il punto non è molto facile da spiegare; anzi ho passato la maggior parte della mia vita in un tentativo fallito di spiegarlo. Sui carichi interi di libri mal costruiti in cui ho completamente fallito nel farlo, non ho alcun desiderio di soffermarmi. Ma forse, come definizione generale, questo potrebbe tornare utile; o, se non come definizione, almeno come suggerimento. Dapprima vagamente, e negli ultimi tempi sempre più chiaramente, ho sentito che il mondo sta concependo la libertà come qualcosa che opera meramente verso l’esterno. E io l’ho sempre concepita come qualcosa che opera verso l’interno.
L’ordinaria descrizione poetica dei primi sogni della vita è una descrizione del mero anelito a orizzonti sempre più vasti. Si suppone che l’immaginazione operi verso l’infinito; benché in quel senso l’infinito sia l’opposto dell’immaginazione. Poiché l’immaginazione ha a che fare con un’immagine. E un’immagine è per sua natura una cosa che ha un contorno e dunque un limite. Ora sosterrò, per quanto paradossale possa sembrare, che il bambino non desidera semplicemente di cadere dalla finestra, né persino di volare per l’aria o di annegare in mare. Quando desidera andare in altri luoghi, essi sono pur sempre luoghi; anche se nessuno vi è mai stato. Ma in verità il caso è assai più forte di così. È evidente dalla faccia stessa dei fatti che il bambino è positivamente innamorato dei limiti. Usa la propria immaginazione per inventare limiti immaginari. La bambinaia e la governante non gli hanno mai detto che è suo dovere morale calpestare le pietre alterne del selciato. Egli priva deliberatamente questo mondo di metà delle sue pietre da selciato, per esultare in una sfida che ha lanciato a se stesso. Io facevo quel genere di gioco con me stesso su tutte le stuoie, le assi e i tappeti della house; e, a rischio di essere trattenuto durante il beneplacito di Sua Maestà, ammetterò che spesso lo faccio ancora. In quel senso ho costantemente cercato di restringere lo spazio effettivo a mia disposizione; di dividere e suddividere, in queste felici prigioni, la house in cui ero perfettamente libero di correre a briglia sciolta. E credo che in questa bizzarria psicologica vi sia una verità senza la quale l’intero mondo moderno sta perdendo la sua occasione principale. Se guardiamo ai romanzi prediletti della camera dei bambini, o almeno se abbiamo la pazienza di guardarli due volte, scopriremo che tutti sostengono davvero questa tesi; anche quando sono stati largamente accolti come sostenitori della tesi opposta. Il fascino di Robinson Crusoe non sta nel fatto che egli poté trovare la via verso un’isola remota; bensì nel fatto che non poté trovare via alcuna per andarsene da essa. È questo fatto che conferisce un interesse e un’eccitazione intensi a tutte le cose che aveva con sé sull’isola; l’ascia e il pappagallo e i fucili e la piccola scorta di grano. Il racconto de L’isola del tesoro non è la cronaca di un vago desiderio di andare per un viaggio in mare per la propria salute. Finisce dove è cominciato; e cominciò con Stevenson che disegnava una mappa dell’isola, con tutte le sue baie e i suoi capi ritagliati con la nettezza di un traforo. E l’eterno interesse dell’Arca di Noè, considerata come giocattolo, consiste nella sua completa suggestione di compattezza e isolamento; di creature così comicamente remote e fantastiche tutte rinchiuse in una sola scatola; come se a Noè fosse stato detto di impacchettare il sole e la luna insieme al bagaglio. In altre parole, è esattamente lo stesso gioco che ho giocato io stesso, ammucchiando tutte le cose che volevo su un divano, e immaginando che il tappeto intorno a me fosse il mare circostante.
This game of self-limitation is one of the secret pleasures of life. As it says in the little manuals about such sports, the game is played in several forms. One very good way of playing it is to look at the nearest bookcase, and wonder whether you would find sufficient entertainment in that chance collection, even if you had no other books. But always it is dominated by this principle of division and restriction; which begins with the game played by the child with the paving-stones. I dwell upon it here because it must be understood as something real and rooted, so far as I am concerned, in order that the other views I have offered about these things may make any sort of sense. If anybody chooses to say that I have founded all my social philosophy on the antics of a baby, I am quite satisfied to bow and smile.
It is really relevant to insist that I do not know at what exact stage of my childhood or my youth the idea consolidated as a sort of local patriotism. A child has by the light of nature (or perhaps some better light) an idea of fortifying and defending things; of saying that he is the king of the castle, but of being rather glad than otherwise that it is such a small castle. But as it is my whole thesis that there is something very real behind all these first movements of the mind, I do not think I was ever surprised to find that this instinct corresponded to an idea. Only, by a rather curious coincidence in my life, it had only just developed as a private idea, when I found it clinched and supported by a public idea. If I have since gone back to public ideas, or to the outside of my existence, I have tried to explain that the most important part of it had long been in the inside of my life; perhaps a long time before I found it there.
I was one day wandering about the streets in that part of North Kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me. I felt that London was already too large and loose a thing to be a city in the sense of a citadel. It seemed to me even larger and looser than the British Empire. And something irrationally arrested and pleased my eye about the look of one small block of little lighted shops, and I amused myself with the supposition that these alone were to be preserved and defended, like a hamlet in a desert. I found it quite exciting to count them and perceive that they contained the essentials of a civilisation, a chemist’s shop, a bookshop, a provision merchant for food and public-house for drink. Lastly, to my great delight, there was also an old curiosity shop bristling with swords and halberds; manifestly intended to arm the guard that was to fight for the sacred street. I wondered vaguely what they would attack or whither they would advance. And looking up, I saw grey with distance but still seemingly immense in altitude, the tower of the Waterworks close to the street where I was born. It suddenly occurred to me that capturing the Waterworks might really mean the military stroke of flooding the valley; and with that torrent and cataract of visionary waters, the first fantastic notion of a tale called The Napoleon of Notting Hill rushed over my mind.
I have never taken my books seriously; but I take my opinions quite seriously. I do not mention my fortunately forgotten romance because I wish to emulate the academic seriousness of Mr. Dodgson, who noted the exact conditions of time and landscape in which it first occurred to him that the Snark was after all a Boojum. But this detail of memory has to do with much more practical things. It happens to be the only way of explaining what was very soon to be my position in quite practical politics. It must first be clearly understood that contemporary politics, even in the common sense my own politics, were all driving or drifting exactly the other way. The two great movements during my youth and early manhood were Imperialism and Socialism. They were supposed to be fighting each other; and so doubtless they did, in the sense of waving Red Flags against Union Jacks. But as compared with those dim gropings in my own imagination, the two things were in union; at least as much in union as the Union Jack. Both believed in unification and centralisation on a large scale. Neither could have seen any meaning in my own fancy for having things on a smaller and smaller scale. That fancy itself was indeed too indistinct and instinctive as yet to suggest an alternative theory; and in some vague way I accepted the fashionable theories. I read Kipling and was attracted in many ways, though repelled in others. I called myself a Socialist; because the only alternative to being a Socialist was not being a Socialist. And not being a Socialist was a perfectly ghastly thing. It meant being a small-headed and sneering snob, who grumbled at the rates and the working-classes; or some hoary horrible old Darwinian who said the weakest must go to the wall. But in my heart I was a reluctant Socialist. I accepted the larger thing as the lesser evil—or even the lesser good.
Rather in the sense in which I was a reluctant Socialist, I was even ready to be a reluctant Imperialist. It was rather as the Mr. Burden of Mr. Belloc was a reluctant Imperialist; for indeed I inherited the tradition of an older business world, not unlike Mr. Burden’s. All my instincts told me that I could not entirely lose hold of patriotism; neither then nor at any later time had I any liking for what is commonly connoted by pacifism. I was willing to accept colonial adventure if it was the only way of protecting my country; just as I was willing to accept collectivist organisation if it was the only way of protecting my poorer fellow-citizens. I was willing that Britain should boast of having an empire, if she really had nothing better to boast of. I was willing to let Mr. Sidney Webb look after the poor, if nobody else would look after them, or if (as seemed to be assumed as an axiom of social science) it was quite impossible for them to look after themselves. But nothing of my heart or my imagination went with these wide generalisations; and something inside me was always subconsciously burrowing in the very opposite direction. I remained in this vague but not entirely unhealthy state of mind, hung between an inward instinct I could not follow and an outward expansion I did not really wish to follow, until something happened in the outer world which not only woke me from my dreams like a thunder-clap, but like a lightning-flash revealed me to myself. In 1895 came the Jameson Raid and a year or two afterwards the war with the two Republics of South Africa.
Questo gioco dell’auto-limitazione è uno dei piaceri segreti della vita. Come dicono i manualetti su tali passatempi, il gioco si pratica in diverse forme. Un modo molto buono di giocarlo è guardare la libreria più vicina e chiedersi se troveresti sufficiente svago in quella raccolta casuale, quand’anche non avessi altri libri. Ma esso è sempre dominato da questo principio di divisione e restrizione; che comincia con il gioco praticato dal bambino con le pietre del selciato. Mi ci soffermo qui perché deve essere inteso come qualcosa di reale e radicato, per quel che mi riguarda, affinché le altre opinioni che ho offerto su queste cose possano avere un qualche senso. Se qualcuno vuol dire che ho fondato tutta la mia filosofia sociale sulle bizze di un neonato, mi accontento pienamente di inchinarmi e sorridere.
È davvero pertinente insistere sul fatto che non so a quale esatto stadio della mia infanzia o della mia giovinezza l’idea si consolidò come una sorta di patriottismo locale. Un bambino possiede, per il lume della natura (o forse per qualche lume migliore), l’idea di fortificare e difendere le cose; di dire che egli è il re del castello, ma di rallegrarsi anziché no che sia un castello così piccolo. Ma poiché tutta la mia tesi è che c’è qualcosa di molto reale dietro tutti questi primi moti della mente, non credo di essere mai stato sorpreso di scoprire che questo istinto corrispondeva a un’idea. Solo che, per una coincidenza piuttosto curiosa della mia vita, essa si era appena sviluppata come idea privata, quando la trovai suggellata e sostenuta da un’idea pubblica. Se da allora sono tornato alle idee pubbliche, ovvero all’esterno della mia esistenza, ho cercato di spiegare che la parte più importante di essa era stata a lungo nell’interno della mia vita; forse molto tempo prima che ve la trovassi.
Un giorno vagavo per le strade in quella parte di North Kensington, raccontandomi storie di sortite e assedi feudali, alla maniera di Walter Scott, e cercando vagamente di applicarle al deserto di mattoni e calce intorno a me. Sentivo che London era già una cosa troppo vasta e sciolta per essere una città nel senso di una cittadella. Mi pareva persino più vasta e più sciolta dell’Impero Britannico. E qualcosa arrestò e compiacque irrazionalmente il mio occhio nell’aspetto di un piccolo isolato di botteghe illuminate, e mi divertii con la supposizione che queste sole dovessero essere preservate e difese, come un villaggio in un deserto. Trovai davvero eccitante contarle e accorgermi che contenevano gli elementi essenziali di una civiltà, una farmacia, una libreria, un droghiere per il cibo e un’osteria — public-house — per il bere. Infine, con mia grande gioia, c’era anche un vecchio negozio di curiosità irto di spade e alabarde; manifestamente destinate ad armare la guardia che doveva combattere per la strada sacra. Mi chiesi vagamente cosa avrebbero attaccato o verso dove avrebbero avanzato. E alzando lo sguardo, vidi, grigia per la distanza ma ancora apparentemente immensa in altezza, la torre della Centrale dell’Acqua vicino alla strada dove ero nato. Mi venne d’un tratto in mente che catturare la Centrale dell’Acqua avrebbe potuto davvero significare il colpo militare di allagare la valle; e con quel torrente e quella cateratta di acque visionarie, la prima fantastica idea di un racconto intitolato Il Napoleone di Notting Hill mi si riversò nella mente.
Non ho mai preso sul serio i miei libri; ma prendo assai sul serio le mie opinioni. Non menziono il mio fortunatamente dimenticato romanzo perché desideri emulare la serietà accademica del signor Dodgson, che annotò le esatte condizioni di tempo e di paesaggio nelle quali gli venne per la prima volta in mente che lo Snark era in fin dei conti un Boojum. Ma questo dettaglio della memoria ha a che fare con cose assai più pratiche. Si dà il caso che sia l’unico modo di spiegare quella che ben presto sarebbe stata la mia posizione nella politica del tutto pratica. Bisogna dapprima capire con chiarezza che la politica contemporanea, persino, nel senso comune, la mia stessa politica, andavano tutte spingendo o andando alla deriva esattamente nell’altra direzione. I due grandi movimenti durante la mia giovinezza e la prima età adulta furono l’Imperialismo e il Socialismo. Si supponeva che combattessero l’uno contro l’altro; e senza dubbio così fecero, nel senso di sventolare Bandiere Rosse contro Union Jack. Ma paragonate a quei fiochi brancolamenti nella mia stessa immaginazione, le due cose erano in unione; almeno tanto in unione quanto la Union Jack. Entrambe credevano nell’unificazione e nella centralizzazione su vasta scala. Nessuna delle due avrebbe potuto vedere un qualsiasi senso nel mio proprio ghiribizzo di avere le cose su scala sempre più piccola. Quel ghiribizzo stesso era invero ancora troppo indistinto e istintivo per suggerire una teoria alternativa; e in qualche modo vago accettavo le teorie alla moda. Leggevo Kipling ed ero attratto in molti sensi, benché respinto in altri. Mi definivo Socialista; perché l’unica alternativa all’essere Socialista era il non essere Socialista. E non essere Socialista era una cosa perfettamente spaventosa. Significava essere uno snob dalla testa piccola e sogghignante, che borbottava contro le imposte e le classi lavoratrici; oppure qualche orribile e canuto vecchio darwiniano che diceva che il più debole deve andare al muro. Ma nel mio cuore ero un Socialista riluttante. Accettavo la cosa più grande come il male minore — o persino come il bene minore.
Piuttosto nel senso in cui ero un Socialista riluttante, ero persino pronto a essere un Imperialista riluttante. Era piuttosto come il signor Burden del signor Belloc era un Imperialista riluttante; poiché in verità avevo ereditato la tradizione di un mondo degli affari più antico, non dissimile da quello del signor Burden. Tutti i miei istinti mi dicevano che non potevo perdere del tutto la presa sul patriottismo; né allora né in alcun tempo posteriore ebbi mai simpatia per ciò che comunemente si connota col pacifismo. Ero disposto ad accettare l’avventura coloniale se era l’unico modo di proteggere il mio paese; proprio come ero disposto ad accettare l’organizzazione collettivista se era l’unico modo di proteggere i miei concittadini più poveri. Ero disposto a che la Britannia si vantasse di possedere un impero, se davvero non aveva nulla di meglio di cui vantarsi. Ero disposto a lasciare che il signor Sidney Webb si prendesse cura dei poveri, se nessun altro se ne fosse preso cura, o se (come pareva si assumesse come assioma della scienza sociale) fosse del tutto impossibile che se ne prendessero cura da sé. Ma nulla del mio cuore o della mia immaginazione andava con queste ampie generalizzazioni; e qualcosa dentro di me scavava sempre inconsciamente nella direzione esattamente opposta. Rimasi in questo stato d’animo vago ma non del tutto malsano, sospeso tra un istinto interiore che non potevo seguire e un’espansione esteriore che non desideravo davvero seguire, finché nel mondo esterno accadde qualcosa che non solo mi svegliò dai miei sogni come un tuono, ma come un lampo di fulmine mi rivelò a me stesso. Nel 1895 venne l’Incursione di Jameson e un anno o due dopo la guerra con le due Repubbliche del Sud Africa.
The nation seemed solid for the war. It was far more eager for the South African War than it was afterwards for the Great War. The latter was obviously much more crucial, and in my opinion much more just. But it did not produce that particular impression of a unanimous shout of applause such as marked the campaign for the extinction of President Kruger’s Dutch state. Crowds would doubtless cry both against Kruger and Kaiser; but the Kaiser with his moustaches never became so popular a caricature as the President with his chinbeard. The name became indeed a general term for anything exotic and alien; and a too elegant poet with long curly hair and velvet knee-breeches would be hailed by the apt and descriptive cry of “Kruger!” But the apparent unity covered more influential and instructive groups. Journalism and politics were for the policy of Annexation. Most of the newspapers followed the Daily Mail in its morals if not in its manners. The Liberal Imperialists practically took the lead in the Liberal Party, so that even the opposition could hardly oppose. And it must always be remembered that these pro-war politicians were those who were later charged with moderation or (very absurdly) with anti-patriotism during the war of 1914; Asquith and Haldane and Grey. It seemed that all moderate men were on what was called the patriotic side. I knew little of politics then; and to me the unity seemed greater than it was; but it was very great. I saw all the public men and public bodies, the people in the street, my own middle-class and most of my family and friends, solid in favour of something that seemed inevitable and scientific and secure. And I suddenly realised that I hated it; that I hated the whole thing as I had never hated anything before.
What I hated about it was what a good many people liked about it. It was such a very cheerful war. I hated its confidence, its congratulatory anticipations, its optimism of the Stock Exchange. I hated its vile assurance of victory. It was regarded by many as an almost automatic process like the operation of a natural law; and I have always hated that sort of heathen notion of a natural law. As the war proceeded, indeed, it began to be dimly felt that it was proceeding and not progressing. When the British had many unexpected failures and the Boers many unexpected successes, there was a change in the public temper, and less of optimism and indeed little but obstinacy. But the note struck from the first was the note of the inevitable; a thing abhorrent to Christians and to lovers of liberty. The blows struck by the Boer nation at bay, the dash and dazzling evasions of De Wet, the capture of a British general at the very end of the campaign, sounded again and again the opposite note of defiance; of those who, as I wrote later in one of my first articles, “disregard the omens and disdain the stars”. And all this swelled up within me into vague images of a modern resurrection of Marathon or Thermopylae; and I saw again my recurring dream of the unscalable tower and the besieging citizens; and began to draw out the rude outlines of my little romance of London. But above all, perhaps, what began to repel me about the atmosphere of the adventure was something insincere about the most normal part of the national claim; the suggestion of something like a rescue of our exiled representatives, the commercial citizens of Johannesburg, who were commonly called the Outlanders. As this would have been the most sympathetic plea if it was genuine, it was the more repulsive if it was hypocritical.
For this was the best case for the war; that if the Boers were fighting for their country, the British were fighting for their countrymen. Only there was rather a queer look about some of the portraits of their countrymen. It was constantly asserted that an Englishman named Edgar had been murdered; but no portrait of Edgar was published, because it happened that he was entirely black. Other portraits were published; other Outlanders were paraded and they were of other tints and shades. We began to guess that the people the Boers called Outlanders were often people whom the British would call Outsiders. Their names were symbolic as their noses. I remember waiting with a Pro-Boer friend in the midst of a Jingo mob outside the celebrated Queen’s Hall Meeting which ended in a free fight. My friend and I adopted a method of patriotic parody or reductio ad absurdum. We first proposed three cheers for Chamberlain, then three cheers for Rhodes, and then by degrees for more and more dubious and demi-naturalised patriots. We actually did get an innocent cheer for Beit. We got a more wavering cheer for Eckstein. But when it came to our impulsive appeal to the universal popularity of Albu, the irony of our intention was discovered; and the fight began. I found myself in a pugilistic encounter with an Imperialistic clerk, whose pugilism was at least no more scientific than my own. While this encounter (one of many other surrounding conflicts) was proceeding, another Imperialist must have abstracted my watch; the last I ever troubled to possess. He at any rate believed in the Policy of Annexation.
I was called a Pro-Boer and, unlike some Pro-Boers, I was very proud of the title. It expressed exactly what I meant much better than its idealistic synonyms. Some intellectuals indignantly repudiated the term, and said they were not Pro-Boers but only lovers of peace or pacifists. But I emphatically was a Pro-Boer, and I emphatically was not a pacifist. My point was that the Boers were right in fighting; not that anybody must be wrong in fighting. I thought that their farmers were perfectly entitled to take to horse and rifle in defence of their farms, and their little farming commonwealth, when it was invaded by a more cosmopolitan empire at the command of very cosmopolitan financiers. As no less an authority than Mr. Discobolus says in Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes, I thought so then and I think so still. But this sort of militant sympathy naturally separated those who thought as I did from our colleagues who were mere anti-militarists. The consequence was not unimportant to me personally. It was that I found I belonged to a minority of a minority. Most of those who not unnaturally sympathised with the British, disapproved of us for sympathising with the Boers. Most of those who sympathised with the Boers disapproved of us for sympathising with them for the wrong reasons. Indeed, I do not know whether the Jingo or the Pacifist found us the more offensive and objectionable. It was in this rather quaint condition that I naturally gravitated towards a friendship which has since played so considerable a part in my life, public as well as private.
La nazione sembrava compatta a favore della guerra. Era assai più smaniosa per la Guerra Sudafricana di quanto lo fu poi per la Grande Guerra. Quest’ultima era ovviamente assai più cruciale, e a mio parere assai più giusta. Ma non produsse quella particolare impressione di un unanime grido di applauso quale segnò la campagna per l’estinzione dello Stato olandese del Presidente Kruger. Le folle senza dubbio avrebbero gridato tanto contro Kruger quanto contro il Kaiser; ma il Kaiser con i suoi baffi non divenne mai una caricatura tanto popolare quanto il Presidente con la sua barbetta al mento. Il nome divenne anzi un termine generale per tutto ciò che era esotico e straniero; e un poeta troppo elegante dai lunghi capelli ricci e dai calzoni al ginocchio di velluto sarebbe stato accolto dall’appropriato e descrittivo grido di «Kruger!». Ma l’apparente unità copriva gruppi più influenti e istruttivi. Il giornalismo e la politica erano per la politica dell’Annessione. La maggior parte dei giornali seguiva il Daily Mail nella sua morale se non nelle sue maniere. Gli Imperialisti Liberali presero praticamente la guida del Partito Liberale, sicché persino l’opposizione poteva a stento opporsi. E bisogna sempre ricordare che questi politici favorevoli alla guerra furono quelli che più tardi vennero accusati di moderazione o (molto assurdamente) di antipatriottismo durante la guerra del 1914; Asquith e Haldane e Grey. Pareva che tutti gli uomini moderati fossero da quella che veniva chiamata la parte patriottica. Sapevo allora poco di politica; e a me l’unità sembrava maggiore di quanto fosse; ma era assai grande. Vedevo tutti gli uomini pubblici e i corpi pubblici, la gente per strada, la mia stessa classe media e la maggior parte della mia famiglia e dei miei amici, compatti a favore di qualcosa che sembrava inevitabile e scientifico e sicuro. E d’un tratto mi resi conto che lo odiavo; che odiavo l’intera faccenda come non avevo mai odiato nulla prima.
Ciò che ne odiavo era ciò che moltissima gente ne amava. Era una guerra così molto allegra. Ne odiavo la fiducia, le anticipazioni congratulatorie, l’ottimismo da Borsa Valori. Ne odiavo la vile certezza della vittoria. Era considerata da molti come un processo quasi automatico, simile all’operare di una legge naturale; e ho sempre odiato quella specie di nozione pagana di una legge naturale. Man mano che la guerra procedeva, invero, cominciò a sentirsi oscuramente che procedeva e non progrediva. Quando i Britannici ebbero molti insuccessi inattesi e i Boeri molti successi inattesi, vi fu un mutamento nell’umore pubblico, e meno ottimismo e invero poco più che ostinazione. Ma la nota battuta fin dal principio fu la nota dell’inevitabile; una cosa aborrita dai cristiani e dagli amanti della libertà. I colpi vibrati dalla nazione Boera con le spalle al muro, gli scatti e le abbaglianti evasioni di De Wet, la cattura di un generale britannico proprio alla fine della campagna, suonarono ripetutamente la nota opposta della sfida; di coloro che, come scrissi più tardi in uno dei miei primi articoli, «disprezzano i presagi e sdegnano le stelle». E tutto questo si gonfiava dentro di me in vaghe immagini di una moderna resurrezione di Maratona o delle Termopili; e vidi di nuovo il mio ricorrente sogno della torre inespugnabile e dei cittadini assedianti; e cominciai a tracciare i rozzi contorni del mio piccolo romanzo di London. Ma soprattutto, forse, ciò che cominciò a ripugnarmi nell’atmosfera dell’avventura era qualcosa di insincero riguardo alla parte più normale della rivendicazione nazionale; l’insinuazione di qualcosa come un salvataggio dei nostri rappresentanti esiliati, i cittadini commercianti di Johannesburg, che venivano comunemente chiamati gli Outlanders. Poiché questa sarebbe stata la perorazione più simpatica se fosse stata genuina, tanto più era ripugnante se era ipocrita.
Poiché questo era il miglior argomento a favore della guerra; che se i Boeri combattevano per il loro paese, i Britannici combattevano per i loro connazionali. Solo che c’era un aspetto piuttosto strano in alcuni dei ritratti di questi loro connazionali. Si asseriva di continuo che un inglese di nome Edgar era stato assassinato; ma nessun ritratto di Edgar venne pubblicato, perché si dava il caso che fosse interamente nero. Altri ritratti vennero pubblicati; altri Outlanders furono messi in mostra ed erano di altre tinte e sfumature. Cominciammo a intuire che le persone che i Boeri chiamavano Outlanders erano spesso persone che i Britannici avrebbero chiamato Outsiders. I loro nomi erano simbolici quanto i loro nasi. Ricordo di aspettare con un amico Pro-Boero in mezzo a una folla sciovinista fuori dalla celebre Adunata della Queen’s Hall che finì in una rissa. Il mio amico e io adottammo un metodo di parodia patriottica, o reductio ad absurdum. Proponemmo dapprima tre urrà per Chamberlain, poi tre urrà per Rhodes, e poi a gradi per patrioti sempre più dubbi e semi-naturalizzati. Riuscimmo effettivamente a strappare un innocente urrà per Beit. Ottenemmo un urrà più esitante per Eckstein. Ma quando si arrivò al nostro impulsivo appello all’universale popolarità di Albu, l’ironia della nostra intenzione venne scoperta; e la rissa cominciò. Mi ritrovai in uno scontro pugilistico con un impiegato imperialista, il cui pugilato era per lo meno non più scientifico del mio. Mentre questo scontro (uno di molti altri conflitti circostanti) era in corso, un altro imperialista dev’essersi sottratto il mio orologio; l’ultimo che io mi sia mai preoccupato di possedere. Egli, in ogni caso, credeva nella Politica dell’Annessione.
Fui chiamato Pro-Boero e, a differenza di alcuni Pro-Boeri, ero molto fiero del titolo. Esprimeva esattamente ciò che intendevo assai meglio dei suoi sinonimi idealistici. Alcuni intellettuali ripudiavano indignati il termine, e dicevano di non essere Pro-Boeri bensì solo amanti della pace o pacifisti. Ma io ero enfaticamente un Pro-Boero, e non ero enfaticamente un pacifista. Il mio punto era che i Boeri avevano ragione a combattere; non che chiunque dovesse aver torto a combattere. Pensavo che i loro contadini fossero perfettamente titolati a prendere il cavallo e il fucile in difesa delle loro fattorie, e del loro piccolo commonwealth agricolo, quando esso veniva invaso da un impero più cosmopolita al comando di finanzieri assai cosmopoliti. Come dice un’autorità non inferiore al signor Discobolus nelle Filastrocche del Nonsenso di Lear, così pensavo allora e così penso ancora. Ma questo genere di simpatia militante separava naturalmente coloro che la pensavano come me dai nostri colleghi che erano meri antimilitaristi. La conseguenza non fu priva d’importanza per me personalmente. Fu che scoprii di appartenere a una minoranza di una minoranza. La maggior parte di coloro che, non innaturalmente, simpatizzavano con i Britannici, ci disapprovavano perché simpatizzavamo con i Boeri. La maggior parte di coloro che simpatizzavano con i Boeri ci disapprovavano perché simpatizzavamo con loro per le ragioni sbagliate. Invero, non so se lo sciovinista o il pacifista ci trovasse più offensivi e riprovevoli. Fu in questa condizione piuttosto bizzarra che gravitai naturalmente verso un’amicizia che da allora ha giocato una parte così considerevole nella mia vita, pubblica come privata.
My friends had just come down from Oxford, Bentley from Merton and Oldershaw from “the House”, where they had figured prominently in a group of young Liberals opposed in varying degrees to the current Imperialism; a group containing many names sufficiently famous afterwards; John Simon, now the well-known statesman and advocate, and Francis Hirst, the economist. Soon after our reunion in London, I went to meet Lucian Oldershaw at a little restaurant in Soho. It was in the days before everybody had discovered the whereabouts of Soho; and these small French eating-houses were only valued by a few gourmets on the ground that they were still places where it was possible to eat. I have never been anything so refined as a gourmet; so I am happy to say that I am still quite capable of being a glutton. My ignorance of cookery is such that I can even eat the food in the most fashionable and expensive hotels in London. Sometimes, in those luxurious halls, inhabited by the heroes and heroines of Oppenheim and Edgar Wallace, the food is just a shade too bad even for me. But those who really prefer eating good cutlets and omelets to living on gilt plaster and pantomime footmen had already found their way to delightful little dens off Leicester Square, where in those days a man could get a half-bottle of perfectly good red wine for sixpence. To one of these I went to meet my friend, who entered the place followed by a sturdy man with a stiff straw hat of the period tilted over his eyes, which emphasized the peculiar length and strength of his chin. He had a high-shouldered way of wearing a coat so that it looked like a heavy overcoat, and instantly reminded me of the pictures of Napoleon; and, for some vague reason, especially of the pictures of Napoleon on horseback. But his eyes, not without anxiety, had that curious distant keenness that is seen in the eyes of sailors; and there was something about his walk that has even been compared to a sailor’s roll. Long afterwards the words found their way into verse which expressed a certain consciousness of the combination, and of the blend of nations in his blood.
Almighty God will surely say, St. Michael, who is this that stands With Ireland in his doubtful eyes And Perigord between his hands, And on his arm the stirrup-thongs And in his gait the narrow seas And on his mouth Burgundian songs And in his heart the Pyrenees?
He sat down heavily on one of the benches and began to talk at once about some controversy or other; I gathered that the question was whether it could be reasonably maintained that King John was the best English king. He judicially decided in the negative; but, by the standards of Mrs. Markham’s History of England (to which he was much attached) he let the Plantagenet off lightly. After all, John had been a Regent, and no medieval Regent was a success. He went on talking, as he has, to my great pleasure and stimulation, gone on talking ever since. For this was Hilaire Belloc, already famous as an orator at Oxford where he was always pitted against another brilliant speaker, named F. E. Smith, who later became Lord Birkenhead. Belloc was supposed to represent Radicalism and Smith Toryism; but the contrast between them was more vital, and would have survived the reversing of the labels. Indeed the two characters and careers might stand as a study and problem in the meaning of failure and success.
As Belloc went on talking, he every now and then volleyed out very provocative parentheses on the subject of religion. He said that an important Californian lawyer was coming to England to call on his family, and had put up a great candle to St. Christopher praying that he might be able to make the voyage. He declared that he, Belloc, was going to put up an even bigger candle in the hope that the visitor would not make the voyage. “People say what’s the good of doing that?” he observed explosively. “I don’t know what good it does. I know it’s a thing that’s done. Then they say it can’t do any good—and there you have Dogma at once.” All this amused me very much, but I was already conscious of a curious undercurrent of sympathy with him, which many of those who were equally amused did not feel. And when, on that night and many subsequent nights, we came to talking about the War, I found that the subconscious sympathy had something of a real significance. I have had occasion to say, somewhere or other, that I am an Anti-Vivisectionist and an Anti-Anti-Vivisectionist. Something of the same mystery united our minds; we were both Pro-Boers who hated Pro-Boers. Perhaps it would be truer to say that we hated a certain number of unimaginative, unhistorical anti-militarists who were too pedantic to call themselves Pro-Boers. Perhaps it would be truer still to say that it was they who hated us. But anyhow that was the first link in the alliance. Though his military imagination flung its battle-line far across history from the Roman Legions to the last details of the guns of Gravelotte, and mine was a parochial fancy of an impossible skirmish in Notting Hill, we knew that the moral of the fable and the facts was the same; and when I finished my Cockney fantasy, I dedicated it to him. It was from that dingy little Soho cafe, as from a cave of witchcraft, that there emerged the quadruped, the twiformed monster Mr. Shaw has nicknamed the Chesterbelloc.
It would be grossly unjust to suggest that all or most of the antiwar party were like the prigs I have mentioned; though few of them of course were military in the Bellocian manner. And to one group of them I have a permanent gratitude; the Oxford group which I have already mentioned; and which included my own friends from Oxford. This group was just then enabled to achieve a very important work; which will probably be not without an ultimate effect on history. It managed to buy the old Radical weekly paper The Speaker and run it with admirable spirit and courage in rather a new mood of Radicalism; what some of its enemies might have called a romantic Radicalism. Its editor was Mr. J. L. Hammond, who was afterwards, with his wife, to do so great an historical service as the author of studies on the English Labourer in the last few centuries. He certainly was the last man in the world to be accused of a smug materialism or a merely tame love of peace. No indignation could have been at once more fiery and more delicate, in the sense of discriminating. And I knew that he also understood the truth, when I heard him say the words which so many would have misunderstood; “Imperialism is worse than Jingoism. A Jingo is a noisy fellow, who may happen to make a noise on the right side. But the Imperialist is the direct enemy of liberty.” That was exactly what I meant; the Boers might be making a noise (with Mauser rifles) but I thought it was a noise on the right side. It was at about the same time, and by the same connection, that I was able to begin making a very small noise on the right side myself. As I note elsewhere, the very first articles of mine to appear publicly were art reviews in the Bookman; and the original responsibility of letting me loose in the literary world lies with my friend the late Sir Ernest Hodder Williams. But the first connected series of articles, the first regular job in support of a regular cause, was made possible for me by Hammond and his friends of the new Speaker. It was there that I wrote, along with many pugnacious political articles, a series of casual essays afterwards republished as The Defendant. The name of Defendant is the only thing I cannot defend. It was certainly a quite incorrect and illogical use of language. The papers were in defence of various other things, such as Penny Dreadfuls and Skeletons. But a defendant does not properly mean a person defending other things. It means a person defending himself; and I should be the last to defend anything so indefensible.
I miei amici erano appena scesi da Oxford, Bentley da Merton e Oldershaw da «the House», dove avevano figurato in modo cospicuo in un gruppo di giovani Liberali avversi in vario grado all’Imperialismo corrente; un gruppo che conteneva molti nomi divenuti poi abbastanza famosi; John Simon, ora il ben noto statista e avvocato, e Francis Hirst, l’economista. Poco dopo la nostra riunione a London, andai a incontrare Lucian Oldershaw in un piccolo ristorante di Soho. Erano i giorni prima che tutti avessero scoperto dove si trovava Soho; e queste piccole trattorie francesi erano apprezzate solo da pochi buongustai in ragione del fatto che erano ancora luoghi dove era possibile mangiare. Non sono mai stato nulla di così raffinato come un buongustaio; sicché sono felice di dire che sono ancora del tutto capace di essere un ghiottone. La mia ignoranza in fatto di cucina è tale che posso persino mangiare il cibo negli alberghi più alla moda e più costosi di London. Talvolta, in quelle sale lussuose, abitate dagli eroi e dalle eroine di Oppenheim e di Edgar Wallace, il cibo è appena una sfumatura troppo cattivo persino per me. Ma coloro che davvero preferiscono mangiare buone cotolette e frittate al vivere di stucco dorato e camerieri da pantomima avevano già trovato la via verso deliziosi piccoli antri presso Leicester Square, dove a quei tempi si poteva avere una mezza bottiglia di vino rosso perfettamente buono per sei pence. Verso uno di questi mi recai per incontrare il mio amico, che entrò nel locale seguito da un uomo robusto con un rigido cappello di paglia dell’epoca inclinato sugli occhi, il che sottolineava la peculiare lunghezza e forza del suo mento. Aveva un modo di portare la giacca con le spalle alte, sicché sembrava un pesante soprabito, e mi ricordò all’istante i ritratti di Napoleone; e, per qualche vaga ragione, specialmente i ritratti di Napoleone a cavallo. Ma i suoi occhi, non senza ansia, avevano quella curiosa e distante acutezza che si vede negli occhi dei marinai; e c’era qualcosa nella sua andatura che è stata persino paragonata al rollio di un marinaio. Molto tempo dopo le parole trovarono la via del verso che esprimeva una certa consapevolezza della combinazione, e della mescolanza di nazioni nel suo sangue.
Onnipotente Iddio dirà di certo, San Michele, chi è costui che sta Con l’Irlanda nei suoi occhi incerti E il Périgord fra le sue mani, E sul braccio le staffe di cuoio E nel passo i mari angusti E sulla bocca canti borgognoni E nel cuore i Pirenei?
Si sedette pesantemente su una delle panche e cominciò subito a parlare di una controversia o dell’altra; capii che la questione era se si potesse ragionevolmente sostenere che Giovanni fosse stato il miglior re inglese. Egli decise giudizialmente per il no; ma, secondo i criteri della Storia d’Inghilterra della signora Markham (alla quale era molto affezionato), lasciò andar via il Plantageneto con lieve pena. Dopotutto, Giovanni era stato un Reggente, e nessun Reggente medievale fu un successo. Continuò a parlare, come ha continuato a parlare, con mio grande piacere e stimolo, da allora in poi. Poiché costui era Hilaire Belloc, già famoso come oratore a Oxford, dove veniva sempre contrapposto a un altro brillante conferenziere, di nome F. E. Smith, che più tardi divenne Lord Birkenhead. Si supponeva che Belloc rappresentasse il Radicalismo e Smith il Torismo; ma il contrasto fra loro era più vitale, e sarebbe sopravvissuto al rovesciamento delle etichette. Invero i due caratteri e le due carriere potrebbero valere come studio e problema sul significato del fallimento e del successo.
Mentre Belloc continuava a parlare, ogni tanto scagliava parentesi assai provocatorie sul tema della religione. Disse che un importante avvocato californiano stava venendo in Inghilterra a far visita alla sua famiglia, e aveva acceso un gran cero a San Cristoforo pregando di poter compiere il viaggio. Dichiarò che lui, Belloc, avrebbe acceso un cero ancora più grande nella speranza che il visitatore non compisse il viaggio. «La gente dice: che serve fare una cosa simile?» osservò con tono esplosivo. «Non so a che serva. So che è una cosa che si fa. Poi dicono che non può servire a nulla — ed ecco che hai subito il Dogma.» Tutto questo mi divertì moltissimo, ma ero già cosciente di una curiosa corrente sotterranea di simpatia per lui, che molti di coloro che si divertivano ugualmente non provavano. E quando, quella notte e molte notti successive, giungemmo a parlare della Guerra, scoprii che la simpatia inconscia aveva qualcosa di un reale significato. Ho avuto occasione di dire, qua o là, di essere un Antivivisezionista e un Anti-antivivisezionista. Qualcosa dello stesso mistero univa le nostre menti; eravamo entrambi Pro-Boeri che odiavano i Pro-Boeri. Forse sarebbe più vero dire che odiavamo un certo numero di antimilitaristi privi d’immaginazione e di senso storico, troppo pedanti per definirsi Pro-Boeri. Forse sarebbe ancora più vero dire che erano loro a odiare noi. Ma comunque quello fu il primo anello dell’alleanza. Benché la sua immaginazione militare scagliasse la propria linea di battaglia lontano attraverso la storia, dalle Legioni Romane agli ultimi dettagli dei cannoni di Gravelotte, e la mia fosse un parrocchiale ghiribizzo di un’impossibile scaramuccia a Notting Hill, sapevamo che la morale della Favola e quella dei fatti erano la stessa; e quando terminai la mia fantasia cockney, gliela dedicai. Fu da quel piccolo e squallido caffè di Soho, come da una Caverna di stregoneria, che emerse il quadrupede, il biforme Mostro che il signor Shaw ha soprannominato il Chesterbelloc.
Sarebbe grossolanamente ingiusto suggerire che tutti o la maggior parte del partito contrario alla guerra fossero come i saccenti che ho menzionato; benché pochi di loro, naturalmente, fossero militari alla maniera bellociana. E a un gruppo di loro provo una gratitudine permanente; il gruppo di Oxford che ho già menzionato; e che includeva i miei stessi amici di Oxford. Questo gruppo fu allora in grado di compiere un’opera assai importante; che probabilmente non sarà priva di un effetto ultimo sulla storia. Riuscì a comprare il vecchio settimanale radicale The Speaker e a condurlo con ammirevole spirito e coraggio in un modo piuttosto nuovo di Radicalismo; quello che alcuni dei suoi nemici avrebbero potuto chiamare un Radicalismo romantico. Il suo direttore era il signor J. L. Hammond, che più tardi, insieme alla moglie, avrebbe reso un così grande servigio storico come autore di studi sul Lavoratore inglese negli ultimi secoli. Egli era certamente l’ultimo uomo al mondo da accusare di un compiaciuto materialismo o di un amore meramente mansueto per la pace. Nessuna indignazione avrebbe potuto essere al tempo stesso più ardente e più delicata, nel senso di discriminante. E capii che anch’egli comprendeva la verità, quando lo udii pronunciare le parole che tanti avrebbero frainteso: «L’Imperialismo è peggiore dello Sciovinismo. Uno sciovinista è un tizio chiassoso, che può darsi faccia chiasso dalla parte giusta. Ma l’Imperialista è il nemico diretto della libertà.» Era esattamente ciò che intendevo io; i Boeri forse facevano chiasso (con i fucili Mauser) ma pensavo che fosse un chiasso dalla parte giusta. Fu all’incirca nello stesso tempo, e per la medesima connessione, che fui in grado di cominciare a fare io stesso un chiasso assai piccolo dalla parte giusta. Come noto altrove, i primissimi articoli miei ad apparire pubblicamente furono recensioni d’arte sul Bookman; e la responsabilità originaria di lasciarmi libero nel mondo letterario spetta al mio amico il defunto Sir Ernest Hodder Williams. Ma la prima serie coerente di articoli, il primo impiego regolare a sostegno di una causa regolare, mi fu resa possibile da Hammond e dai suoi amici del nuovo Speaker. Fu lì che scrissi, insieme a molti combattivi articoli politici, una serie di saggi occasionali ripubblicati poi come The Defendant. Il nome di Defendant è l’unica cosa che non posso difendere. Era certamente un uso della lingua del tutto scorretto e illogico. Gli scritti erano in difesa di varie altre cose, come i Penny Dreadful e gli Scheletri. Ma un defendant non significa propriamente una persona che difende altre cose. Significa una persona che difende se stessa; e io sarei l’ultimo a difendere qualcosa di così indifendibile.
It was by the same political connection that I was drawn still further into politics, as well as still further into journalism. The next turning-point of my journalistic fate was the purchase of the Daily News by the Pro-Boer Liberals; for it had belonged up to this moment, like practically every Liberal daily paper, to the Liberal Imperialists. A group of Liberals, of whom Mr. George Cadbury was the principal capitalist and the late Mr. R. C. Lehmann the principal practical journalist, appointed as literary editor my friend Mr. Archibald Marshall, who in his turn had the rashness to appoint me as a regular weekly contributor. Here I wrote an article every Saturday for many years; I was described, in the phrase of the time, as having a Saturday pulpit, rather like a Sunday pulpit. Whatever were the merits of the sermon, it is probable that I had a larger congregation than I have ever had before or since. And I occupied it until I gave it up long afterwards, at another political crisis, the story of which I shall have to tell on a later page.
I began to see a little of the leading politicians, though they seldom talked politics; and I imagine that politicians seldom do. I had already interviewed Lord Morley, when I was given the commission in the English Men of Letters which he edited; and I had been struck by something indescribable which has marked most public men of his profession. He was quite friendly and simple, and I am sure quite sincere; but he was in a manner cautious; and conscious of the possibility that his followers might lead him further than he wished to go. He spoke with a certain fatherly admiration of my friends of the Pro-Boer party, Hammond and Hirst and the rest; but he seemed to warn me that they were too fiery; and I did not want to be warned, being myself on fire. In short, he was a wise and good man; but he was not what numberless and nameless admirers would have thought him; he was not a clear intellectual fanatic; a foe of compromise; a sheer democrat called Honest John. He was a Front-Bench man, though a good one. The same applied to most of the Front-Bench men I have known; and I am glad to say I knew mostly the good ones. I had great joy out of the hearty humours of old Asquith, the late Lord Oxford; and though our conversations were light and even flippant, he was one who rose gloriously to flippancy. Once when he appeared in Court dress, on some superbly important occasion, an uncontrollable impulse of impertinence led me to ask whether the Court sword would really come out of its sheath. “Oh, yes,” he said, shaking a shaggily frowning head at me, “Do not provoke me.” But he also had about the fundamentals of politics and ethics this curious quality of vagueness, which I have found so often in men holding high responsibilities. He did not mind answering a silly question about a sword; but if it had been a sensible question about a super-tax, he would have adopted, however genially, a fencing sort of swordsmanship. He would have faintly felt that he was being heckled, and almost been disposed to ask for notice of that question. I have a difficulty in not darkening the fine shade that I intended; he was very public, as public men go; but they all seem to become hazier as they mount higher. It is the young and unknown who have decisive doctrines and sharply declared intentions. I once expressed it by saying, I think with some truth, that politicians have no politics.
As a fact, the one Front-Bench man who seemed in the days of my youth still eternally young was for me, in those days, on the opposite Front-Bench. The wonderful thing about George Wyndham was that he had come through political life without losing his political opinions, or indeed any opinions. Precisely what gave him such a genius for friendship was that life had left in him so much of himself; so much of his youth; so much even of his childhood. He might never have been a Cabinet Minister; he might have been any common literary or artistic fellow, with a soul to save and some dim and secretive ideas about saving it. He was not always trying, like Charles Augustus Fortescue, “to take a judgment broad and wide”; he had prejudices and private dogmas for which he would fight like a private person. When once or twice the talk of Mr. Asquith turned to religious matters, I found he was fully satisfied with that sort of broad idealism, that rather diluted “essence of Christianity” which is often sincere but seldom significant of any special social decision. But George Wyndham was an Anglo-Catholic as an individual, and would have practised his religion in any state of life. There was about him that edge, like the edge of a sword, which I cannot help preferring to being knocked down with a spiritual sandbag.
George Wyndham had all sorts of odd and original notions; and one of his eccentricities was to set a subject for conversation and ask for opinions all round, as if it were an examination or a game. One day I remember he sternly announced “Japan,” and asked me to start with a few words. I said: “I distrust Japan because it is imitating us at our worst. If it had imitated the Middle Ages or the French Revolution, I could understand; but it is imitating factories and materialism. It is like looking in the mirror and seeing a monkey.” He held up his hand like a master of the ceremonies, “That will do. That is enough;” and passed on to the next, who was I think Major, now General Seeley; who said he distrusted Japan for certain Imperial reasons connected with our Colonies and national defence. Then Mr. Winston Churchill said that what amused him was that as long as Japan was beautiful and polite, people treated it as barbarous; and now it had become ugly and vulgar, it was treated with respect, or words to that effect. Then Charles Masterman, in his manner of luxuriant gloom, said the Japs were Huns who would sweep us off the earth; that they were much stronger and more skilful than we, and were also detestable. Then one or two others spoke, expressing the same negative view, and then Wyndham, in his whimsical way, wound up with one of his extraordinary historical theories (of which he had a large selection) and said the Hairy Ainu was the cousin of the European and had been conquered by these horrid Mongols. “I do think,” he said gravely, “that we ought to come to the rescue of the Hairy Ainu.” And then somebody said with simple wonder; “Look here; we’ve been all round the table; and every manjack of us, for some reason serious or otherwise, seems to hate the Japanese. Why are we not only allies of the Japanese, but forbidden to say a word against them in any of the newspapers? Why is it the fashion or convention to praise the Japs everywhere and all the time?” But at that, I think, Mr. Churchill smiled the inscrutable smile of the statesman; and that veil of vagueness, of which I have spoken, seemed to descend upon everybody; and we never had an answer to the question, either then or since.
Fu per la medesima connessione politica che venni trascinato ancora più addentro nella politica, come pure ancora più addentro nel giornalismo. La successiva svolta del mio destino giornalistico fu l’acquisto del Daily News da parte dei Liberali Pro-Boeri; poiché fino a quel momento esso era appartenuto, come praticamente ogni quotidiano liberale, agli Imperialisti Liberali. Un gruppo di Liberali, di cui il signor George Cadbury era il principale capitalista e il defunto signor R. C. Lehmann il principale giornalista pratico, nominò come direttore letterario il mio amico signor Archibald Marshall, il quale a sua volta ebbe la temerarietà di nominare me collaboratore fisso settimanale. Qui scrissi un articolo ogni sabato per molti anni; venivo descritto, nella frase dell’epoca, come uno che aveva un pulpito del sabato, piuttosto simile a un pulpito della domenica. Quali che fossero i meriti del sermone, è probabile che avessi una congregazione più numerosa di quanta ne abbia mai avuta prima o dopo. E lo occupai finché non vi rinunciai molto tempo dopo, a un’altra crisi politica, la cui storia dovrò raccontare in una pagina successiva.
Cominciai a vedere un poco i politici di primo piano, benché raramente parlassero di politica; e immagino che i politici lo facciano di rado. Avevo già intervistato Lord Morley, quando mi fu affidato l’incarico nella collana degli English Men of Letters che egli dirigeva; ed ero stato colpito da qualcosa di indescrivibile che ha contrassegnato la maggior parte degli uomini pubblici della sua professione. Era del tutto amichevole e semplice, e sono certo del tutto sincero; ma era in un certo modo cauto; e cosciente della possibilità che i suoi seguaci potessero condurlo più oltre di quanto desiderasse andare. Parlò con una certa paterna ammirazione dei miei amici del partito Pro-Boero, Hammond e Hirst e gli altri; ma parve mettermi in guardia che erano troppo ardenti; e io non volevo essere messo in guardia, essendo io stesso in fiamme. Insomma, era un uomo saggio e buono; ma non era ciò che innumerevoli e anonimi ammiratori avrebbero creduto; non era un limpido fanatico intellettuale; un nemico del compromesso; un puro democratico chiamato l’Onesto John. Era un uomo del Banco di Governo, benché uno buono. Lo stesso valeva per la maggior parte degli uomini del Banco di Governo che ho conosciuto; e sono lieto di dire che conobbi per lo più quelli buoni. Ebbi grande gioia dagli spassosi umori del vecchio Asquith, il defunto Lord Oxford; e benché le nostre conversazioni fossero leggere e persino frivole, egli era uno di quelli che si sollevavano gloriosamente all’altezza della frivolezza. Una volta, quando comparve in abito di Corte, in qualche occasione superbamente importante, un incontrollabile impulso d’impertinenza mi indusse a chiedere se la Spada di Corte sarebbe davvero uscita dal fodero. «Oh, sì», disse, scuotendo verso di me una testa dal cipiglio irsuto, «Non provocarmi.» Ma anch’egli aveva, riguardo ai fondamenti della politica e dell’etica, questa curiosa qualità di vaghezza, che ho trovato così spesso negli uomini che rivestono alte responsabilità. Non gli spiaceva rispondere a una sciocca domanda su una Spada; ma se fosse stata una sensata domanda su una sovrattassa, avrebbe adottato, per quanto gioviale, una sorta di scherma difensiva. Avrebbe vagamente sentito di essere incalzato, e sarebbe stato quasi disposto a chiedere di essere avvertito in anticipo di quella domanda. Ho difficoltà a non oscurare la fine sfumatura che intendevo; egli era molto pubblico, per quanto lo siano gli uomini pubblici; ma tutti sembrano farsi più nebulosi via via che salgono più in alto. Sono i giovani e gli ignoti ad avere dottrine decisive e intenzioni nettamente dichiarate. Una volta lo espressi dicendo, credo con una certa verità, che i politici non hanno politica.
Di fatto, l’unico uomo del Banco di Governo che ai giorni della mia giovinezza sembrava ancora eternamente giovane era per me, in quei giorni, sul Banco di Governo opposto. La cosa meravigliosa di George Wyndham era che aveva attraversato la vita politica senza perdere le proprie opinioni politiche, né in verità alcuna opinione. Precisamente ciò che gli dava un tale genio per l’amicizia era che la vita aveva lasciato in lui tanto di se stesso; tanto della sua giovinezza; tanto persino della sua infanzia. Poteva non essere mai stato un Ministro del Gabinetto; poteva essere stato un qualunque comune tipo letterario o artistico, con un’anima da salvare e qualche idea vaga e segreta sul modo di salvarla. Non stava sempre cercando, come Charles Augustus Fortescue, «di assumere un giudizio ampio e largo»; aveva pregiudizi e dogmi privati per i quali avrebbe combattuto come una persona privata. Quando una o due volte la conversazione del signor Asquith volse a questioni religiose, trovai che egli era pienamente soddisfatto di quella specie di ampio idealismo, di quell’«essenza del Cristianesimo» piuttosto diluita che è spesso sincera ma di rado significativa di una qualche particolare decisione sociale. Ma George Wyndham era un anglo-cattolico come individuo, e avrebbe praticato la sua religione in qualsiasi stato di vita. C’era in lui quel filo tagliente, come il filo di una Spada, che non posso fare a meno di preferire all’essere abbattuto con un sacco di sabbia spirituale.
George Wyndham aveva ogni sorta di nozioni bizzarre e originali; e una delle sue eccentricità era di fissare un tema di conversazione e chiedere pareri tutt’intorno, come se fosse un esame o un gioco. Un giorno ricordo che annunciò severamente «Il Giappone», e mi chiese di cominciare con qualche parola. Io dissi: «Diffido del Giappone perché ci sta imitando nel nostro peggio. Se avesse imitato il Medioevo o la Rivoluzione Francese, potrei capire; ma sta imitando le fabbriche e il materialismo. È come guardarsi nello specchio e vedere una scimmia.» Egli alzò la mano come un maestro di cerimonie: «Basta così. Basta»; e passò al successivo, che era, credo, il Maggiore, ora Generale, Seeley; il quale disse di diffidare del Giappone per certe ragioni imperiali connesse con le nostre Colonie e la difesa nazionale. Poi il signor Winston Churchill disse che ciò che lo divertiva era che finché il Giappone era bello e cortese, la gente lo trattava da barbaro; e ora che era diventato brutto e volgare, veniva trattato con rispetto, o parole a quell’effetto. Poi Charles Masterman, nella sua maniera di lussureggiante tetraggine, disse che i giapponesi erano Unni che ci avrebbero spazzati via dalla terra; che erano assai più forti e abili di noi, ed erano anche detestabili. Poi uno o due altri parlarono, esprimendo lo stesso parere negativo, e poi Wyndham, alla sua maniera stravagante, concluse con una delle sue straordinarie teorie storiche (delle quali aveva un ampio assortimento) e disse che l’Ainu Peloso era il cugino dell’europeo ed era stato conquistato da questi orridi Mongoli. «Penso davvero», disse gravemente, «che dovremmo correre in soccorso dell’Ainu Peloso.» E allora qualcuno disse con semplice stupore: «Sentite un po’; abbiamo fatto tutto il giro del tavolo; e ognuno di noi, per qualche ragione seria o d’altro genere, pare odiare i giapponesi. Perché non solo siamo alleati dei giapponesi, ma ci è proibito dire una sola parola contro di loro in qualsiasi giornale? Perché è la moda o la convenzione lodare i giapponesi ovunque e in ogni momento?» Ma a quel punto, credo, il signor Churchill sorrise dell’imperscrutabile sorriso dello statista; e quel velo di vaghezza, di cui ho parlato, parve calare su tutti; e non avemmo mai una risposta alla domanda, né allora né da allora.
Charles Masterman, of whom I have just spoken, was a very remarkable man. He was also a very subtle and curious character; and many of my own best friends entirely misunderstood and underrated him. It is true that as he rose higher in politics, the veil of the politician began to descend a little on him also; but he became a politician from the noblest bitterness on behalf of the poor; and what was blamed in him was the fault of much more ignoble men. What was blamable, as distinct from what was blamed, in him was due to two things; he was a pessimistic official. He had had a dark Puritan upbringing and retained a sort of feeling of the perversity of the gods; he said to me, “I am the sort of man who goes under a hedge to eat an apple.” But he was also an organiser and liked governing; only his pessimism made him think that government had always been bad, and was now no worse than usual. Therefore, to men on fire for reform, he came to seem an obstacle and an official apologist; but the last thing he really wanted was to apologise for anything. He had a startling insight into character, and a way of suddenly expressing it, so that it braced rather than hurt. As Oldershaw once said to me, “His candour is beautiful.” But his melancholy made him contented, where happier men were discontented. His pessimism did the worst work of optimism. In person he was long, loose and lounging; and nearly as untidy as I was.
Apart from these various glimpses of various parties, my main work was on the Daily News, then practically controlled by Mr. Cadbury with Mr. A. G. Gardiner as its well-read and sympathetic editor: and I only dimly appreciated what I now see to have been the process by which the press came to be run like a big business. I remember gazing blankly at the poky little entrance being replaced by a revolving door; then a novelty to me, though probably to nobody else. It reminded me vaguely of a cattle-gate, and I remember asking old Mr. Cadbury whether it was meant to keep cows out of the office. He laughed immensely at this simple jest, having himself an attractive simplicity; but the incident is connected chiefly in my mind with a jest rather less Arcadian. There was working in the office a very prominent journalist of the Nonconformist culture, who took himself so seriously that in any crowd of common men he was certain to be taken frivolously. I am ashamed to say that I circulated, about this bland and blameless publicist, a legend that the mechanical structure of the new door was the key to the mystery of his permanent presence in the office. Again and again he had been thrown out, but with such ill-judged violence that the swinging portal swung him back again into the interior. The more unerring the aim, the more violent the energy, with which old Mr. Cadbury flung him towards the frontsteps, the more certain was his successful contributor to turn up smiling and be swept back to his office and his desk. Thus, I would say, having even then a tendency to moralise along such lines, every mechanical improvement brings a new problem with it. I do not demand faith in the fable, but I have not been discouraged in the moral, by seeing motoring lead to massacre, aviation destroy cities and machines increase unemployment.
Generally, meanwhile, I began to see something of the political world, and especially that allied to our own wing of the Liberal Party; notably in the enjoyment of the hospitality which the late Mr. Cadbury used to extend to large gatherings of his contributors and friends. It was an entertaining experience, especially when it illustrated, as it generally did, the very varied elements of which our party was made up. It was at one of these house-parties of the Cadburys that I first met a man for whom I had a very great regard, apart from the fact that his company was always amusing; I mean Will Crooks, for it always jarred against his whole solid personality to refer to him as Mr. Crooks. I have known a great many Labour members, and liked most of them; quite as much at any rate as Liberal members. The Labour members I knew covered every type from frigid Cambridge dons to eccentric English and Scottish aristocrats. Will Crooks was the only Labour leader I ever knew who reminded me for a single moment of the English labouring classes. His humour really was the humour of an omnibus conductor or a railway porter; and that sort of humour is a much more powerful and real thing than most modern forms of education or eloquence. His criticism on beholding a company of advanced Socialist intellectuals was not that they gave too concentrated a power to the abstraction of the State, or that they followed an impossible ideal unsupported by self-interest, but that, as he put it, “They got no backs to their ‘eads.” His wife also was as representative as a Roman matron; and it is in connection with her that I specially recall the curious clash of types and cultures that went on even inside our own political party. I remember an ethereal little lady with pale blue eyes and pale green garments, who was the wife of a well-known Anti-War journalist. She had a touching timidity in advancing her ideas; but, when they were advanced, they were a very serious business indeed. I remember that Mr. Noel Buxton, whose acquaintance I made about this time, was describing in an animated and amusing fashion the scurry and scamper of his life while contesting a seat at the election. In a dreadful hour, he happened to use the expression; “I just had time to snatch a cutlet—”; and the prophetess in the green garments was goaded, by the god within her, to speak. When Buxton had left the room she did so.
“Do you think that was really necessary?” she said with a painful fixity, like one in a trance. “Man is no better for a cutlet. Man does not really need cutlets.”
Charles Masterman, di cui ho appena parlato, era un uomo assai notevole. Era anche un carattere assai sottile e curioso; e molti dei miei migliori amici lo fraintesero e lo sottovalutarono del tutto. È vero che, man mano che si sollevava più in alto nella politica, anche su di lui cominciò a calare un poco il velo del politico; ma egli divenne politico dalla più nobile amarezza in nome dei poveri; e ciò che gli veniva biasimato era la colpa di uomini assai più ignobili. Ciò che era biasimevole, distinto da ciò che gli veniva biasimato, in lui era dovuto a due cose; era un funzionario pessimista. Aveva avuto una cupa educazione puritana e conservava una sorta di sentimento della perversità degli dèi; mi disse: «Sono il genere d’uomo che va sotto una siepe a mangiare una mela.» Ma era anche un organizzatore e amava governare; solo che il suo pessimismo gli faceva pensare che il governo fosse sempre stato cattivo, e che ora non fosse peggiore del solito. Perciò, agli uomini in fiamme per la Riforma, egli finiva col sembrare un ostacolo e un apologeta ufficiale; ma l’ultima cosa che davvero voleva era scusare alcunché. Aveva una sorprendente capacità di penetrazione del carattere, e un modo di esprimerla di colpo, tale da rinfrancare anziché ferire. Come Oldershaw una volta mi disse: «Il suo candore è bello.» Ma la sua malinconia lo rendeva contento, là dove uomini più felici erano scontenti. Il suo pessimismo faceva il peggior lavoro dell’ottimismo. Di persona era lungo, sciolto e indolente; e quasi tanto disordinato quanto lo ero io.
A parte questi vari scorci di vari partiti, il mio lavoro principale era sul Daily News, allora praticamente controllato dal signor Cadbury con il signor A. G. Gardiner come suo colto e comprensivo direttore: e apprezzavo solo oscuramente quello che ora vedo essere stato il processo per cui la stampa arrivò a essere condotta come un grande affare. Ricordo di fissare inebetito il misero piccolo ingresso mentre veniva sostituito da una porta girevole; allora una novità per me, benché probabilmente per nessun altro. Mi ricordava vagamente un cancello per bestiame, e ricordo di aver chiesto al vecchio signor Cadbury se fosse fatta per tenere le vacche fuori dall’ufficio. Egli rise smisuratamente a questa semplice facezia, avendo lui stesso un’attraente semplicità; ma l’episodio è connesso soprattutto nella mia mente con una facezia piuttosto meno arcadica. Lavorava nell’ufficio un giornalista assai eminente della cultura anticonformista, che prendeva se stesso tanto sul serio che in qualsiasi folla di uomini comuni era certo di venir preso alla leggera. Mi vergogno a dire che feci circolare, su questo blando e irreprensibile pubblicista, una leggenda secondo cui la struttura meccanica della nuova porta era la chiave del mistero della sua permanente presenza nell’ufficio. Ripetutamente egli era stato buttato fuori, ma con una violenza così mal calibrata che il battente girevole lo faceva rientrare rotante nell’interno. Quanto più infallibile la mira, quanto più violenta l’energia con cui il vecchio signor Cadbury lo scagliava verso i gradini d’ingresso, tanto più certo era il suo fortunato collaboratore di rispuntare sorridente e di essere spazzato di nuovo fino al suo ufficio e alla sua scrivania. Così, direi io, avendo già allora una tendenza a moralizzare lungo tali linee, ogni perfezionamento meccanico porta con sé un nuovo problema. Non pretendo fede nella Favola, ma non sono stato scoraggiato nella morale, nel vedere l’automobile condurre al massacro, l’aviazione distruggere città e le macchine accrescere la disoccupazione.
In generale, nel frattempo, cominciai a vedere qualcosa del mondo politico, e specialmente di quello alleato alla nostra stessa ala del Partito Liberale; segnatamente nel godimento dell’ospitalità che il defunto signor Cadbury era solito estendere a grandi raduni dei suoi collaboratori e amici. Era un’esperienza divertente, specialmente quando illustrava, come generalmente faceva, gli elementi assai svariati di cui il nostro partito era composto. Fu a una di queste feste in casa dei Cadbury che incontrai per la prima volta un uomo per il quale nutrivo un grandissimo riguardo, a parte il fatto che la sua compagnia era sempre spassosa; intendo Will Crooks, poiché stonava sempre con tutta la sua solida personalità riferirsi a lui come al signor Crooks. Ho conosciuto moltissimi deputati laburisti, e la maggior parte mi è piaciuta; per lo meno quanto i deputati liberali. I deputati laburisti che conobbi coprivano ogni tipo, dai gelidi docenti di Cambridge agli eccentrici aristocratici inglesi e scozzesi. Will Crooks era l’unico leader laburista che io abbia mai conosciuto che mi ricordasse anche solo per un istante le classi lavoratrici inglesi. Il suo umorismo era davvero l’umorismo di un bigliettaio d’omnibus o di un facchino di stazione; e quella specie di umorismo è una cosa assai più potente e reale della maggior parte delle forme moderne di istruzione o di eloquenza. La sua critica alla vista di una compagnia di intellettuali socialisti avanzati non era che dessero un potere troppo concentrato all’astrazione dello Stato, o che seguissero un impossibile ideale non sorretto dall’interesse personale, bensì che, come diceva lui, «Non c’hanno la nuca alle teste.» Anche sua moglie era rappresentativa quanto una matrona romana; ed è in connessione con lei che ricordo in modo speciale il curioso cozzo di tipi e di culture che si consumava persino all’interno del nostro stesso partito politico. Ricordo un’eterea signorina dagli occhi celeste pallido e dagli abiti verde pallido, che era la moglie di un ben noto giornalista Antibellicista. Aveva una toccante timidità nell’avanzare le proprie idee; ma, quando erano avanzate, erano una faccenda davvero molto seria. Ricordo che il signor Noel Buxton, di cui feci la conoscenza all’incirca in quel tempo, stava descrivendo in modo animato e spassoso la fretta e la corsa della sua vita mentre contendeva un seggio all’elezione. In un’ora terribile, gli capitò di usare l’espressione: «Ebbi appena il tempo di afferrare una cotoletta —»; e la profetessa dagli abiti verdi fu spronata, dal dio dentro di lei, a parlare. Quando Buxton ebbe lasciato la stanza, lo fece.
«Pensa che fosse davvero necessario?» disse con una dolorosa fissità, come chi è in trance. «L’uomo non è migliore per una cotoletta. L’uomo non ha davvero bisogno di cotolette.»
At this point she received hearty, one might almost say heavy support, from what was probably an unexpected quarter.
“No, my dear,” said Mrs. Crooks in resounding tones, “A man doesn’t want a cutlet! What’s the good of a cutlet? What a man wants is a good chump chop or a bit of the under-cut; and I’d see he got it.”
The other lady sighed; it was not quite what she had meant; and she was obviously a little alarmed to advance again against her large and solid opponent and be felled to the earth with a mutton-bone. But that little comedy of cross-purposes has always remained in my memory, as a perfect parable of the two kinds of Simple Life, the false and the true.
The vegetarian lady was really a very charming lady; but a very serious lady. Almost immediately after the above incident, I had to take her in to dinner. We passed through the conservatory, and merely in order to change the subject, in a flippant fashion I pointed to an insect-eating plant and said,
“Don’t you vegetarians feel remorse when you look at that? You live by devouring harmless plants; and here is a plant that actually devours animals. Surely it is a just judgment. It is the revenge of the vegetable world.”
She looked at me with staring blue eyes that were absolutely grave and unsmiling. “Oh,” she said, “But I don’t approve of revenge.”
This, I need hardly say, shattered and prostrated me altogether; I could only murmur in a vague and sullen manner that of course, if she didn’t believe in revenge, what was Christianity coming to, or words to that effect. But she long lingered in my thoughts and her type of thinking has run through all my life and times, like a thread of pale green and blue.
I mixed myself in politics also in other ways; I can hardly say in more practical ways. For the politics were not very practical politics—at least, not when I practised them. Charles Masterman used to swear with derisive gusto that when we went canvassing together, he went all down one side of a street and up most of the other, and found me in the first house, still arguing the philosophy of government with the first householder. This was perhaps unduly darkened by a jovial pessimism which belonged to Charles Masterman. But it is perfectly true that I began electioneering under the extraordinary delusion that the object of canvassing is conversion. The object of canvassing is counting. The only real reason for people being pestered in their own houses by party agents is quite unconnected with the principles of the party (which are often a complete mystery to the agents): it is simply that the agents may discover from the words, manner, gesticulations, oaths, curses, kicks or blows of the householder, whether he is likely to vote for the party candidate, or not to vote at all. I learnt this lesson gradually myself; from a vast variety of human faces and gestures revealed by the opening of front-doors. My friend Oldershaw and I went down together to canvass for a Liberal candidate in the country. It seems strange now to remember that, in our innocence, we did not know anything about him except that he was a Liberal candidate. He was, so far as my knowledge goes, a perfectly worthy and respectable gentleman; but as we passed through that and many other political elections a curious and obscure feeling began to grow in my mind. At the time I was not even conscious of it; even now I do not know how to describe that cold and creeping suggestion of the subconsciousness. When it ultimately rose to the surface and shaped itself, long afterwards in other campaigns, into a half articulate question, I think the question was, “Why is the candidate nearly always the worst duffer on his own platform?” To these elections and by-elections, to which I went in many places, many other speakers also went, always more eloquent and, then at least, much better known than I. There were on the platform men like John Simon and Belloc who spoke as well as it is possible to speak, probably better than they have ever spoken since. And all the time, as often as not, the man we were sending up specially to speak, in the supreme court of Parliament, could not speak at all. He was some solid and dressy tailor’s dummy, with a single eye-glass or waxed moustaches, who repeated exactly the same dull formula at every separate meeting. There is something interesting, as a matter of psychology, in this unconfessed half-consciousness in the mind of youth that things are not really right, even while the will and the convictions are ready to shout with loyalty to their perfect and universal rightness. Looking back on it now, after those other political experiences of Marconi days, which I shall have to describe later, I know exactly what it was I felt; I also know exactly what it was I did not understand. I know that what runs modern politics is money; and that the superiority of the fool in the frock-coat over Belloc and Simon simply consisted in the fact that he was richer than they were. But I was then quite innocent of all these things; and especially in the case of the first Liberal candidate I worked for, I shouted with sustained enthusiasm and fidelity. The extraordinary thing, about the first candidate I worked for, is that he got in.
But though I fear I was not of much use to the electioneering, it was ultimately of some use to me; as I saw more of the country life than a Londoner like myself had yet imagined, and encountered not a few entertaining country types. I remember at another election a sturdy old woman of Somerset, with a somewhat menacing and almost malevolent stare, who informed me on her own doorstep that she was a Liberal and I could not see her husband, because he was still a Tory. She then informed me that she had been twice married before, and both her husbands had been Tories when they married her, but had become Liberals afterwards. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder towards the invisible Conservative within and said, “I’ll have him ready by the ‘lection.” I was not permitted to penetrate further into this cavern of witchcraft, where she manufactured Liberals out of the most unpromising materials; and (it would appear) destroyed them afterwards. But she was only one of a number of such quaint and forcible rustics whom I encountered in my political travels. Nor indeed were they the only things that I encountered. For all this funny little fuss of politics was in this case spread out like a sprawling sham fight, or the manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain, over that enormous area of noble hills and valleys which had seen so many vaster struggles in the past, reaching back to that aboriginal struggle of the Pagans and the Christians which is the genesis of all our history. And such primitive things were probably already working their way to the surface of my own mind; things that I afterwards attempted to throw into very inadequate but at least more elemental and universal literary form. For I remember the faint and hazy inspiration that troubled me one evening on the road, as I looked beyond the little hamlet, patched so incongruously with a few election posters, and saw hung upon the hills, as if it were hung upon the heavens, remote as a pale cloud and archaic as a gigantic hieroglyph; the White Horse.
A questo punto ella ricevette un cordiale, si potrebbe quasi dire pesante appoggio, da quello che era probabilmente un fronte inatteso.
«No, mia cara», disse la signora Crooks con tono squillante, «Un uomo non vuole una cotoletta! A che serve una cotoletta? Ciò che un uomo vuole è una buona braciola di lombata o un pezzo del sottofiletto; e io farei in modo che l’avesse.»
L’altra signora sospirò; non era proprio ciò che aveva inteso; ed era evidentemente un poco allarmata all’idea di avanzare di nuovo contro la sua grande e solida avversaria e di essere abbattuta a terra con un osso di montone. Ma quella piccola commedia di equivoci è sempre rimasta nella mia memoria, come una perfetta parabola dei due generi di Vita Semplice, il falso e il vero.
La signora vegetariana era davvero una signora molto affascinante; ma una signora molto seria. Quasi immediatamente dopo l’episodio suddetto, mi toccò accompagnarla a tavola. Attraversammo la serra, e semplicemente per cambiare argomento, in modo frivolo indicai una pianta insettivora e dissi:
«Non provate voi vegetariani rimorso quando guardate quella? Voi vivete divorando piante innocue; ed ecco una pianta che divora effettivamente animali. Di certo è un giusto giudizio. È la vendetta del mondo vegetale.»
Ella mi guardò con quegli sbarrati occhi celesti che erano assolutamente gravi e senza sorriso. «Oh», disse, «Ma io non approvo la vendetta.»
Questo, non ho quasi bisogno di dirlo, mi fracassò e mi prostrò del tutto; potei soltanto mormorare in modo vago e imbronciato che, naturalmente, se ella non credeva nella vendetta, dove sarebbe andato a finire il Cristianesimo, o parole a quell’effetto. Ma ella indugiò a lungo nei miei pensieri e il suo tipo di pensiero è corso attraverso tutta la mia vita e i miei tempi, come un filo di verde e celeste pallido.
Mi immischiai nella politica anche in altri modi; posso difficilmente dire in modi più pratici. Poiché la politica non era una politica molto pratica — almeno, non quando la praticavo io. Charles Masterman era solito giurare con derisorio gusto che, quando andavamo insieme a fare propaganda porta a porta, egli percorreva tutto un lato di una strada e la maggior parte dell’altro, e mi trovava nella prima casa, ancora a discutere la filosofia del governo con il primo padrone di casa. Questo era forse indebitamente oscurato da un gioviale pessimismo che apparteneva a Charles Masterman. Ma è perfettamente vero che cominciai la campagna elettorale sotto la straordinaria illusione che l’oggetto della propaganda porta a porta fosse la conversione. L’oggetto della propaganda è il conteggio. L’unica vera ragione per cui la gente viene molestata nelle proprie case dagli agenti di partito è del tutto slegata dai principi del partito (che sono spesso un completo mistero per gli agenti): è semplicemente che gli agenti possano scoprire dalle parole, dai modi, dalle gesticolazioni, dalle imprecazioni, dalle maledizioni, dai calci o dai colpi del padrone di casa, se egli sia probabile che voti per il candidato del partito, oppure che non voti affatto. Appresi questa lezione gradualmente da me; da una vasta varietà di volti e gesti umani rivelati dall’aprirsi delle porte d’ingresso. Il mio amico Oldershaw e io andammo insieme in campagna a fare propaganda per un candidato liberale. Sembra strano ora ricordare che, nella nostra innocenza, non sapevamo nulla di lui se non che era un candidato liberale. Egli era, per quanto ne so, un gentiluomo perfettamente degno e rispettabile; ma mentre attraversavamo quella e molte altre elezioni politiche, un curioso e oscuro sentimento cominciò a crescere nella mia mente. All’epoca non ne ero neppure cosciente; anche ora non so come descrivere quel freddo e strisciante suggerimento del subconscio. Quando esso alla fine salì alla superficie e si diede forma, molto tempo dopo in altre campagne, in una domanda semiarticolata, credo che la domanda fosse: «Perché il candidato è quasi sempre il peggior incapace del suo stesso palco?» A queste elezioni ed elezioni suppletive, alle quali mi recai in molti luoghi, andavano anche molti altri oratori, sempre più eloquenti e, allora almeno, assai più conosciuti di me. C’erano sul palco uomini come John Simon e Belloc che parlavano tanto bene quanto è possibile parlare, probabilmente meglio di quanto abbiano mai parlato da allora. E per tutto il tempo, come non di rado accadeva, l’uomo che stavamo mandando su appositamente per parlare, nella suprema corte del Parlamento, non sapeva parlare affatto. Era qualche solido e azzimato manichino da sarto, con un monocolo o baffi impomatati, che ripeteva esattamente la stessa scialba formula a ogni singolo comizio. C’è qualcosa d’interessante, come dato di psicologia, in questa inconfessata semiconsapevolezza nella mente della gioventù che le cose non siano davvero come dovrebbero, persino mentre la volontà e le convinzioni sono pronte a gridare con lealtà la loro perfetta e universale correttezza. Ripensandoci ora, dopo quelle altre esperienze politiche dei giorni di Marconi, che dovrò descrivere più avanti, so esattamente cos’era ciò che provavo; so anche esattamente cos’era ciò che non capivo. So che ciò che governa la politica moderna è il denaro; e che la superiorità dello Sciocco in redingote su Belloc e Simon consisteva semplicemente nel fatto che egli era più ricco di loro. Ma allora ero del tutto innocente di tutte queste cose; e specialmente nel caso del primo candidato liberale per cui lavorai, gridavo con sostenuto entusiasmo e fedeltà. La cosa straordinaria, riguardo al primo candidato per cui lavorai, è che venne eletto.
Ma benché io tema di non essere stato di molta utilità alla campagna elettorale, essa fu in ultimo di qualche utilità a me; poiché vidi più della vita di campagna di quanto un londinese come me avesse ancora immaginato, e incontrai non pochi divertenti tipi rustici. Ricordo a un’altra elezione una robusta vecchia del Somerset, con uno sguardo alquanto minaccioso e quasi malevolo, che mi informò sulla sua stessa soglia di casa che lei era Liberale e che non potevo vedere suo marito, perché lui era ancora un Tory. Mi informò poi che si era già sposata due volte prima, e che entrambi i suoi mariti erano stati Tory quando l’avevano sposata, ma erano diventati Liberali in seguito. Puntò il pollice all’indietro sopra la spalla verso l’invisibile Conservatore all’interno e disse: «Ve lo preparerò per le ‘lezioni.» Non mi fu concesso di penetrare oltre in questa caverna di stregoneria, dove ella fabbricava Liberali dai materiali più impromettenti; e (a quanto pareva) li distruggeva in seguito. Ma ella era solo una fra un certo numero di tali bizzarri e vigorosi campagnoli che incontrai nei miei viaggi politici. Né in verità erano essi le uniche cose che incontrai. Poiché tutto questo buffo piccolo trambusto della politica era in questo caso disteso come una scomposta battaglia simulata, o come le manovre sulla Piana di Salisbury, sopra quell’enorme distesa di nobili colline e valli che avevano visto nel passato tante lotte assai più vaste, risalendo fino a quella lotta aboriginale dei Pagani e dei Cristiani che è la genesi di tutta la nostra storia. E cose così primitive stavano probabilmente già facendosi strada verso la superficie della mia stessa mente; cose che in seguito tentai di gettare in una forma letteraria assai inadeguata ma per lo meno più elementare e universale. Poiché ricordo la fioca e nebbiosa ispirazione che mi turbò una sera sulla Strada, mentre guardavo al di là del piccolo villaggio, rattoppato in modo così incongruo con qualche manifesto elettorale, e vidi appeso sulle colline, come se fosse appeso ai cieli, remoto come una pallida nube e arcaico come un gigantesco geroglifico; il Cavallo Bianco — the White Horse.
I only mention it here because there will be some misunderstanding even of my accidental and amateurish intervention in politics, if it is not understood that our political idealism, unpopular as it was, was felt inwardly as national and not as international. It was that which was a permanent source of irritation and misunderstanding, both within and without the political party. To us it seemed obvious that Patriotism and Imperialism were not only not the same thing, but very nearly opposite things. But it did not seem obvious, but very puzzling, to the great majority of healthy patriots and innocent Imperialists. It seemed equally puzzling to a great many anti-patriots and anti-Imperialists. Towards the end of this period, we published a book intended to explain our rather peculiar position; it was called England a Nation; it was edited by Oldershaw and had contributions by Masterman and myself and others. One of the contributions came from an Irish Nationalist member, my friend Hugh Law; and it was about this time, naturally enough, that I began to see something of the Irish Nationalists and to feel a strong and special sympathy with Irish Nationalism. Of this I may say more in another place; it is sufficient to remark here that it is to me a considerable satisfaction to think that I have always felt it the first duty of a real English patriot to sympathise with the passionate patriotism of Ireland; that I expressed it through the worst times of her tragedy and have not lost it in her triumph.
Curiously enough, however, my sharpest memory of the puzzle of this patriotic paradox, and the difficulty of making others see what to me was so obvious, is not connected with Ireland or with England; but, of all places in the world, with Germany. Some time after all these events, I had to visit Frankfurt, where I took on rather casually the task of lecturing on English literature to a congress of German schoolmasters. We discussed Walter Scott’s Marmion and other metrical romances; we sang English songs over German beer, and had a very pleasant time. But there was already stirring, even among those mild and amiable Germans, something that was not so pleasant; and though they expressed it quite politely, I suddenly found myself once more in the same difficulty about the national and the imperial notion. For, speaking to some of them at large about literature, as to a merely cosmopolitan world of culture, I touched on this preference of mine for what some consider a narrower national idea. I found that they also were puzzled; they assured me, with that gravity with which Germans alone can repeat what they regard as a platitude, that Imperialismus and Patriotismus were the same thing. When they discovered that I did not like Imperialismus, even for my own country, a very curious expression came into their eyes, and a still more curious notion seems to have come into their heads. They formed the extraordinary idea that I was an internationalist indifferent, or even hostile, to English interests. Perhaps they thought Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an alias of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Anyhow, they began to talk more openly, but still vaguely; and there grew gradually on my consciousness the conviction that these extraordinary people really thought that I might accept or approve, on some toshy ethnological or sociological ground or other, the extension of the Teutonic Race at the expense even of the impotence or absorption of my own land. It was a somewhat difficult situation; for they said nothing definite that I had any right to resent; it was merely that I felt in the atmosphere a pressure and a threat. It was Der Tag. After thinking a moment, I said, “Well, gentlemen, if it ever came to anything like that, I think I should have to refer you to the poem of Scott that we have been discussing.” And I gravely repeated the answer of Marmion, when King James says that they may meet again in war as far south as Tamworth Castle.
Much honour’d were my humble home, If in its halls King James should come; But Nottingham has archers good, And Yorkshire men are stern of mood; Northumbrian prickers wild and rude. … And many a banner will be torn, And many a knight to earth be borne, And many a sheaf of arrows spent, Ere Scotland’s King shall cross the Trent.
I looked at them and they at me, and I think they understood; and there rose up like an enormous shadow over that drinking-hall the terror of things to be.
Ne faccio menzione qui soltanto perché vi sarà qualche fraintendimento perfino sul mio intervento, accidentale e dilettantesco, nella politica, se non si comprende che il nostro idealismo politico, per quanto impopolare, era sentito nell’intimo come nazionale e non come internazionale. Fu proprio questo a costituire una fonte permanente d’irritazione e di equivoco, tanto dentro quanto fuori del partito politico. A noi pareva ovvio che Patriottismo e Imperialismo non solo non fossero la stessa cosa, ma fossero quasi cose opposte. Non pareva ovvio, invece, ma assai sconcertante, alla grande maggioranza dei sani patrioti e degli innocenti imperialisti. E pareva altrettanto sconcertante a moltissimi anti-patrioti e anti-imperialisti. Verso la fine di questo periodo pubblicammo un libro destinato a spiegare la nostra posizione piuttosto singolare; s’intitolava England a Nation; era curato da Oldershaw e conteneva contributi di Masterman, miei e di altri. Uno dei contributi veniva da un membro nazionalista irlandese, il mio amico Hugh Law; e fu press’a poco in quel tempo, com’è naturale, che cominciai a frequentare i nazionalisti irlandesi e a provare una forte e speciale simpatia per il nazionalismo irlandese. Di ciò forse dirò di più altrove; qui basti osservare che è per me una considerevole soddisfazione pensare di aver sempre sentito come primo dovere di un vero patriota inglese il simpatizzare con l’appassionato patriottismo dell’Irlanda; di averlo espresso attraverso i tempi peggiori della sua tragedia e di non averlo perduto nel suo trionfo.
Curiosamente, tuttavia, il mio più acuto ricordo dell’enigma di questo paradosso patriottico, e della difficoltà di far vedere agli altri ciò che a me pareva tanto ovvio, non è legato all’Irlanda o all’Inghilterra; bensì, fra tutti i luoghi del mondo, alla Germania. Qualche tempo dopo tutti questi avvenimenti, mi trovai a dover visitare Francoforte, dove assunsi con una certa disinvoltura l’incarico di tenere conferenze sulla letteratura inglese a un congresso di maestri di scuola tedeschi. Discutemmo del Marmion di Walter Scott e di altri romanzi in versi; cantammo canzoni inglesi davanti alla birra tedesca, e trascorremmo un tempo assai piacevole. Ma già si agitava, perfino tra quei tedeschi miti e affabili, qualcosa che non era altrettanto piacevole; e benché lo esprimessero con tutta cortesia, mi ritrovai d’un tratto ancora una volta nella medesima difficoltà a proposito della nozione nazionale e di quella imperiale. Poiché, parlando con alcuni di loro in termini generali di letteratura, come a un mondo di cultura meramente cosmopolita, accennai a questa mia predilezione per quella che taluni considerano un’idea nazionale più angusta. Scoprii che anch’essi erano sconcertati; mi assicurarono, con quella gravità con cui i tedeschi soli sanno ripetere ciò che reputano un luogo comune, che Imperialismus e Patriotismus erano la stessa cosa. Quando scoprirono che a me non piaceva l’Imperialismus, nemmeno per il mio paese, una espressione assai curiosa affiorò nei loro occhi, e una nozione ancor più curiosa parve affiorare nelle loro teste. Si formarono la straordinaria idea che io fossi un internazionalista indifferente, o addirittura ostile, agli interessi inglesi. Forse pensarono che Gilbert Keith Chesterton fosse uno pseudonimo di Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Comunque sia, cominciarono a parlare più apertamente, ma sempre vagamente; e crebbe a poco a poco nella mia coscienza la convinzione che quelle persone straordinarie credessero davvero che io potessi accettare o approvare, su qualche fasulla base etnologica o sociologica, l’estensione della Razza Teutonica a spese perfino dell’impotenza o dell’assorbimento della mia stessa terra. Era una situazione alquanto imbarazzante; poiché non dicevano nulla di preciso che io avessi il diritto di risentire; era soltanto che avvertivo nell’atmosfera una pressione e una minaccia. Era Der Tag. Dopo aver riflettuto un istante, dissi: «Ebbene, signori, se mai si dovesse arrivare a qualcosa di simile, credo che dovrei rimandarvi al poema di Scott di cui abbiamo discusso». E ripetei con gravità la risposta di Marmion, quando re Giacomo dice che potranno incontrarsi di nuovo in guerra fin tanto a sud quanto il Castello di Tamworth.
Molto onorata sarebbe la mia umile dimora, Se nelle sue sale re Giacomo venisse; Ma Nottingham ha buoni arcieri, E gli uomini dello Yorkshire sono d’animo severo; Selvaggi e rudi i predoni del Northumberland. … E molti stendardi saranno lacerati, E molti cavalieri atterrati, E molti fasci di frecce consumati, Prima che il re di Scozia varchi il Trent.
Li guardai ed essi guardarono me, e credo che abbiano compreso; e si levò come un’enorme ombra su quella sala del bere il terrore delle cose a venire.
VI
THE FANTASTIC SUBURB
When I was a young journalist on the Daily News, I wrote in some article or other the sentence, “Clapham, like every other city, is built on a volcano.” When I opened the paper next day, I found the words confronting me, “Kensington, like every other city, is built on a volcano.” It did not matter, of course, but I was a little puzzled and mentioned it to my immediate superior in the office, as if it were some freak of a fanciful compositor. But he glowered at me in a heavy and resentful manner, which would alone be a confession of guilt, if there were any guilt, and said rather sulkily, “Why should it be Clapham?” And then, as if throwing off the mask, “Well, I live at Clapham.” And he, knowing that I lived at Kensington, had bitterly transferred to that royal borough what he imagined to be a taunt.
“But I was glorifying Clapham!” I cried pathetically, “I was showing it as epical and elemental and founded in the holy flame.” “You think you’re funny, don’t you?” he said. “I think I’m right,” I said, making that modest claim not for the last time; and then, not for the last but perhaps for the first time, the terrible truth dawned upon me.
If you said in a Basque village or a Bavarian town that the place was romantic, some might draw the dreadful deduction that you were an artist, and therefore possibly a madman; but nobody would have any particular reason to doubt that the madman meant what he said. But the citizen of Clapham could not believe that I meant what I said. The patriot of Clapham could not find it credible or conceivable that any remark about Clapham could be anything but a sneer at Clapham. He could not even say the word so that the first syllable of “Clapham” sounded like the last syllable of “thunderclap”. There was utterly veiled from his sight the visionary Clapham, the volcanic Clapham, what I may be allowed to put upon the cosmic map as Thunderclapham. I assured him again and again, almost with tears, that I was warmly sympathetic with any sensitive feelings he might have, if he was really proud of Clapham. But that was exactly the horrid secret. He was not proud or Clapham. The Clapham patriot was ashamed of Clapham.
That Clapham journalist, who glowered at me, has been the problem of my life. He has haunted me at every turn and corner like a shadow, as if he were a blackmailer or a murderer. It was against him that I marshalled the silly pantomime halberdiers of Notting Hill and all the rest. In other words, everything I have thought and done grew originally out of that problem which seemed to me a paradox. I shall have to refer to many problems in these pages, if they are to be truthful pages; and to glance at solutions with some of which the reader may agree, with some of which he may very violently disagree. But I will ask him to remember throughout that this was the primary problem for me, certainly in order of time and largely in order of logic. It was the problem of how men could be made to realise the wonder and splendour of being alive, in environments which their own daily criticism treated as dead-alive, and which their imagination had left for dead. It is normal for a man to boast if he can, or even when he can’t, that he is a citizen of no mean city. But these men had really resigned themselves to being citizens of mean cities; and on every side of us the mean cities stretched far away beyond the horizon; mean in architecture, mean in costume, mean even in manners; but, what was the only thing that really mattered, mean in the imaginative conception of their own inhabitants. These mean cities were indeed supposed to be the component parts of a very great city; but in the thoughts of most modern people, the great city has become a journalistic generalisation, no longer imaginative and very nearly imaginary. On the other hand, the modern mode of life, only professing to be prosaic, pressed upon them day and night and was the real moulder of their minds. This, I say by way of preliminary guide or direction, was what originally led me into certain groups or movements and away from others.
What was called my medievalism was simply that I was very much interested in the historic meaning of Clapham Common. What was called my dislike of Imperialism was a dislike of making England an Empire, in the sense of something more like Clapham Junction. For my own visionary Clapham consisted of houses standing still; and not of trucks and trains rattling by; and I did not want England to be a sort of cloakroom or clearing-house for luggage labelled exports and imports. I wanted real English things that nobody else could import and that we enjoyed too much to export. And this was present even in the last and most disputed phase of change. I came to admit that some sort of universality, another sort of universality, would be needed before such places could really become shrines or sacred sites. In short, I eventually concluded, rightly or wrongly, that Clapham could not now be made mystical by the Clapham Sect. But I say it with the greatest respect for that old group of philanthropists, who devoted themselves to the cause of the remote negroes; the sect that did so much to liberate Africa; the Clapham Sect, that did so little to liberate Clapham.
Now it is essential to realise one fact following on the shadowy epic of Clapham and Kensington; that tale of two cities. It is necessary to insist that in those days, when Clapham was Clapham, London was Clapham; nay, Kensington was Clapham. I mean that, at this particular date, the general appearance of London was more plain and prosaic than it is now. There were indeed beautiful corners of Georgian and Regency architecture in many parts of London, and nowhere more than in Kensington. There are some still. But though there was some trace of the older movements in art, there was as yet no trace of the new ones. Morris had broken out here and there like a rash, in the form of wallpapers; but the very dullest phase of dead Victorianism was in most of the wallpapers and nearly all the walls. But London was already unthinkably large, in comparison with its few last relics of eighteenth-century elegance or its first faint signals of aesthetic revival. And that huge thing was a hideous thing, as a whole. The landscape of London was a thing of flat-chested houses, blank windows, ugly iron lamp-posts and vulgar vermilion pillar-boxes; and as yet, of very little else.
VI
IL FANTASTICO SOBBORGO
Quand’ero un giovane giornalista al Daily News, scrissi in qualche articolo o l’altro la frase: «Clapham, come ogni altra città, è costruita su un vulcano.» Quando aprii il giornale il giorno dopo, trovai le parole che mi fronteggiavano: «Kensington, come ogni altra città, è costruita su un vulcano.» Non aveva importanza, s’intende, ma io ero un po’ perplesso e lo menzionai al mio immediato superiore in ufficio, come se fosse un capriccio di un fantasioso compositore. Ma egli mi fulminò con lo sguardo in modo pesante e risentito, il che già di per sé sarebbe una confessione di Colpa, se ci fosse una qualche Colpa, e disse piuttosto imbronciato: «Perché dovrebbe essere Clapham?» E poi, come gettando via la maschera: «Ebbene, io abito a Clapham.» Ed egli, sapendo che io abitavo a Kensington, aveva amaramente trasferito a quel regale borgo ciò che immaginava fosse un dileggio.
«Ma io stavo glorificando Clapham!» esclamai pateticamente, «La mostravo come epica ed elementare e fondata nella santa fiamma.» «Ti credi spiritoso, vero?» disse. «Credo di avere ragione,» dissi, avanzando quella modesta pretesa non per l’ultima volta; e poi, non per l’ultima ma forse per la prima volta, la terribile Verità mi si fece luce.
Se dicessi in un villaggio basco o in una cittadina bavarese che il luogo era romantico, alcuni potrebbero trarre la spaventosa deduzione che voi foste un Artista, e perciò forse un pazzo; ma nessuno avrebbe alcuna particolare ragione di dubitare che il pazzo intendesse ciò che diceva. Ma il cittadino di Clapham non poteva credere che io intendessi ciò che dicevo. Il patriota di Clapham non poteva trovare credibile o concepibile che un qualunque commento su Clapham potesse essere alcunché se non un sogghigno verso Clapham. Non riusciva neppure a pronunciare la parola in modo che la prima sillaba di «Clapham» suonasse come l’ultima sillaba di «thunderclap» [tuono]. Del tutto velata alla sua vista era la Clapham visionaria, la Clapham vulcanica, ciò che mi sia concesso di apporre sulla mappa cosmica come Thunderclapham. Gli assicurai più e più volte, quasi con le Lacrime, che simpatizzavo calorosamente con qualunque sentimento sensibile egli potesse avere, se davvero era orgoglioso di Clapham. Ma era esattamente quello l’orribile segreto. Non era orgoglioso di Clapham. Il patriota di Clapham si vergognava di Clapham.
Quel giornalista di Clapham, che mi fulminò con lo sguardo, è stato il problema della mia vita. Mi ha perseguitato a ogni svolta e a ogni angolo come un’Ombra, come se fosse un ricattatore o un assassino. Fu contro di lui che schierai i buffi alabardieri da pantomima di Notting Hill e tutto il resto. In altre parole, tutto ciò che ho pensato e fatto crebbe originariamente da quel problema che mi pareva un Paradosso. Dovrò riferirmi a molti problemi in queste pagine, se devono essere pagine veritiere; e accennare a soluzioni con alcune delle quali il lettore può concordare, con alcune delle quali può assai violentemente dissentire. Ma gli chiederò di ricordare per tutto il tempo che questo era il primo problema per me, di certo in ordine di tempo e in gran parte in ordine di logica. Era il problema di come si potesse indurre gli uomini a rendersi conto della Meraviglia e dello splendore dell’essere vivi, in ambienti che la loro stessa critica quotidiana trattava come mezzi morti, e che la loro Immaginazione aveva lasciato per morti. È normale per un uomo vantarsi, se può, o anche quando non può, di essere cittadino di una città non spregevole. Ma questi uomini si erano davvero rassegnati a essere cittadini di città spregevoli; e da ogni lato di noi le città spregevoli si stendevano lontano oltre l’orizzonte; spregevoli nell’architettura, spregevoli nel costume, spregevoli persino nei modi; ma, ciò che era l’unica cosa che davvero importava, spregevoli nella concezione immaginativa dei loro stessi abitanti. Queste città spregevoli si supponeva in verità fossero le parti componenti di una assai grande Città; ma nei pensieri della maggior parte della gente moderna, la grande Città è divenuta una generalizzazione giornalistica, non più immaginativa e quasi immaginaria. D’altra parte, il moderno modo di vita, professandosi solo prosaico, premeva su di loro giorno e notte ed era il vero plasmatore delle loro menti. Questo, dico a mo’ di guida o direzione preliminare, era ciò che originariamente mi condusse in certi gruppi o movimenti e lontano da altri.
Ciò che si chiamò il mio medievalismo era semplicemente che ero assai interessato al significato storico di Clapham Common. Ciò che si chiamò la mia avversione all’Imperialismo era un’avversione a fare dell’Inghilterra un Impero, nel senso di qualcosa di più simile a Clapham Junction. Poiché la mia stessa visionaria Clapham consisteva di case che stavano ferme; e non di carri e treni che sferragliavano; e non volevo che l’Inghilterra fosse una sorta di guardaroba o deposito di smistamento per bagagli etichettati esportazioni e importazioni. Volevo vere cose inglesi che nessun altro potesse importare e che godevamo troppo per esportarle. E ciò era presente perfino nell’ultima e più contestata fase del mutamento. Giunsi ad ammettere che una qualche sorta di universalità, un’altra sorta di universalità, sarebbe stata necessaria prima che tali luoghi potessero davvero diventare santuari o siti sacri. In breve, conclusi infine, a torto o a ragione, che Clapham non poteva ora essere resa mistica dalla Setta di Clapham. Ma lo dico col più grande rispetto per quel vecchio gruppo di filantropi, che si dedicarono alla causa dei remoti negri; la setta che fece tanto per liberare l’Africa; la Setta di Clapham, che fece così poco per liberare Clapham.
Ora è essenziale rendersi conto di un fatto conseguente all’ombroso Epos di Clapham e Kensington; quel racconto di due città. È necessario insistere che in quei giorni, quando Clapham era Clapham, Londra era Clapham; anzi, Kensington era Clapham. Intendo che, a questa particolare data, l’aspetto generale di Londra era più semplice e prosaico di quanto sia ora. C’erano in verità angoli bellissimi di architettura georgiana e Regency in molte parti di Londra, e in nessun luogo più che a Kensington. Ce ne sono ancora alcuni. Ma benché ci fosse qualche traccia dei movimenti più antichi nell’arte, non c’era ancora alcuna traccia di quelli nuovi. Morris era eruttato qua e là come un’eruzione cutanea, nella forma di carte da parati; ma la fase più insulsa del morto vittorianesimo era nella maggior parte delle carte da parati e in quasi tutte le pareti. Ma Londra era già impensabilmente grande, in confronto ai suoi pochi ultimi resti d’eleganza settecentesca o ai suoi primi deboli segnali di rinascita estetica. E quella cosa enorme era una cosa orrenda, nel complesso. Il paesaggio di Londra era una cosa di case dal petto piatto, finestre vuote, brutti lampioni di ferro e volgari cassette postali vermiglie; e, per ora, ben poco altro.
If I have at all suggested the modest virtues of my own middle-class group and family, it will be obvious already, I hope, that we were as ugly as the railings and lamp-posts between which we walked. I mean that our dress and furniture were as yet untouched by anything “arty”, in spite of a quite decently informed interest in art. We were even further from Bohemia than from Belgravia. When my mother said that we had never been respectable, she rather meant that we had never been dressy than that we had never been dowdy. By comparison with the aestheticism that has since crawled across London, we were all of us distinctly dowdy. It was the more so in my own family, because my father and my brother and I were negligent about externals we regarded as normal. We were careless in wearing careful clothes. The aesthetes were careful in wearing careless clothes. I wore an ordinary coat; it was due merely to undesigned friction or attrition if it became rather an extraordinary coat. The Bohemian wore a slouch-hat; but he did not slouch in it. I slouched in a top-hat; a shocking bad hat, but not one designed to shock the bourgeois. I was myself, in that sense, entirely bourgeois. Sometimes that hat, or something like the ghost of it, makes a spectral reappearance still, and is extracted from the dustbin or the pawnshop or the British Museum, to figure at the King’s Garden-Party. Of course, it may not be the same one. The great original was certainly more suited to a scarecrow in a kitchen-garden than to a guest in a king’s garden. But the point is that we never thought about the fashions, or the conventions, sufficiently seriously either to fulfil them or to defy them. My father was in a hundred happy and fruitful ways an amateur; but in no way at all a dilettante. And as this memoir must concern his much less estimable descendant, who actually went to an art-school, he may at least be allowed to boast that, if he failed to be an artist, he never tried to be an aesthete.
In short, the reader (if any) must not be misled at this stage by that Falstaffian figure in a brigand’s hat and cloak, which has appeared in many caricatures. That figure was a later work of art; though the artist was not merely the caricaturist; but a lady artist touched on as lightly as possible in this very Victorian narrative. That caricature merely commemorates what the female genius could do with the most unpromising materials. But when I was a boy or a bachelor, my dress and appearance were just like everybody else’s, only worse. My madness, which was considerable, was wholly within. But that madness was more and more moving in the direction of some vague and visionary revolt against the prosaic flatness of a nineteenth-century city and civilization; an imaginative impatience with the cylindrical hats and the rectangular houses; in short, that movement of the mind I have already associated with the Napoleon of Notting Hill and the imperfect patriot of Clapham. I had perhaps got no further than the feeling that those imprisoned in these inhuman outlines were human beings; that it was a bad thing that living souls should be thus feebly and crudely represented by houses like ill-drawn diagrams of Euclid, or streets and railways like dingy sections of machinery. I remember speaking to Masterman, very early in our acquaintance, as we watched the harassed crowds pouring through the passages of the Underground to the iron and symbolic Inner Circle, and quoting the words of Kipling about the disabled battleship:-
For it is not meet that English stock Should bide in the heart of an eight-day clock The death they may not see.
But I always retained a dim sense of something sacred in English stock, or in human stock, which separated me from the mere pessimism of the period. I never doubted that the human beings inside the houses were themselves almost miraculous; like magic and talismanic dolls, in whatever ugly dolls’-houses. For me, those brown brick boxes were really Christmas boxes. For, after all, Christmas boxes often came tied up in brown paper; and the jerry-builders’ achievements in brown brick were often extremely like brown paper.
To sum up, I accepted my environment and the practical fact that all hats and houses were like our hats and houses; and that this Cockney cosmos, so far as a Cockney could see, stretched away to the ends of the earth. For this reason, it fell out, as a rather determining accident, that I first saw as from afar, the first fantastic signal of something new and as yet far from fashionable; something like a new purple patch on that grey stretch of streets. It would not be remarkable now, but it was remarkable then. In those days I had the habit of walking over very wide stretches and circles of London; I always walked to and from my first art-school in St. John’s Wood; and it will give some hint or now London has altered to say that I commonly walked from Kensington to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and for a great part of the way in the middle of the road. One day I had turned my aimless steps westward, through the tangles of Hammersmith Broadway and along the road that goes to Kew, when I turned for some reason, or more likely without a reason, into a side street and straggled across the dusty turf through which ran a railway, and across the railway one of those disproportionately high bridges which bestride such narrow railway-lines like stilts. By a culmination of futility, I climbed up to this high and practically unused bridge; it was evening, and I think it was then I saw in the distance of that grey landscape, like a ragged red cloud of sunset, the queer artificial village of Bedford Park.
It is difficult, as I have said, to explain how there was then something fanciful about what is now so familiar. That sort of manufactured quaintness is now hardly even quaint; but at that time it was even queer. Bedford Park did look like what it partially professed to be; a colony for artists who were almost aliens; a refuge for persecuted poets and painters hiding in their red-brick catacombs or dying behind their red-brick barricades, when the world should conquer Bedford Park. In that somewhat nonsensical sense, it is rather Bedford Park that has conquered the world. Today, model cottages, council houses and arty-crafty shops—tomorrow, for all I know, prisons and workhouses and madhouses may present (outside) that minimum of picturesqueness, which was then considered the preposterous pose of those addicted to painting pictures. Certainly, if the clerk in Clapham had then been actually presented with such a fantastic cottage, he might have thought that the fairytale house was really a madhouse. This aesthetic experiment was quite recent; it had some elements of real co-operative and corporative independence; its own stores and post-office and church and inn. But the whole was vaguely under the patronage of old Mr. Comyns-Carr, who was not only regarded as the patriarch or the oldest inhabitant, but in some sense as the founder and father of the republic. He was not really so very old; but then the republic was very new; much newer than the new republic of Mr. Mallock, though filled with philosophical gossip of much the same sort, over which the patriarch benevolently beamed and brooded. At least, to quote a literary phrase then much quoted, he was older than the rocks which he sat among, or the roofs he sat under; and we might well have murmured another contemporary tag, a little vaguely perhaps, from memory:-
Se ho in qualche modo suggerito le modeste virtù del mio stesso gruppo e della mia famiglia della classe media, sarà già ovvio, lo spero, che eravamo brutti quanto le ringhiere e i lampioni tra cui camminavamo. Intendo che il nostro abbigliamento e il nostro mobilio erano ancora intoccati da qualsiasi cosa «artistica», malgrado un interesse per l’arte abbastanza decorosamente informato. Eravamo perfino più lontani dalla Bohème che da Belgravia. Quando mia madre diceva che non eravamo mai stati rispettabili, intendeva piuttosto che non eravamo mai stati eleganti che non fossimo mai stati sciatti. In confronto all’estetismo che è da allora strisciato per Londra, eravamo tutti noi decisamente sciatti. Lo era ancor più nella mia stessa famiglia, perché mio padre e mio fratello e io eravamo negligenti riguardo agli esterni che consideravamo normali. Eravamo trascurati nell’indossare abiti curati. Gli esteti erano curati nell’indossare abiti trascurati. Io indossavo una giacca ordinaria; era dovuto meramente a inintenzionale attrito o logorio se essa diveniva una giacca piuttosto straordinaria. Il bohémien indossava un cappello a tesa floscia; ma non ci si affloscava dentro. Io mi afflosciavo in un cilindro; un pessimo cappello, ma non uno concepito per scioccare il borghese. Ero io stesso, in quel senso, interamente borghese. Talvolta quel cappello, o qualcosa come il Fantasma di esso, fa ancora una spettrale ricomparsa, e viene estratto dalla pattumiera o dal banco dei pegni o dal British Museum, per figurare al Garden-Party del Re. Naturalmente, può non essere lo stesso. Il grande originale era di certo più adatto a uno spaventapasseri in un orto che a un ospite nel giardino di un re. Ma il punto è che non pensammo mai alle mode, o alle convenzioni, abbastanza seriamente né per adempierle né per sfidarle. Mio padre era in cento modi felici e fruttuosi un dilettante; ma in nessun modo affatto un dilettante da salotto. E poiché questo memoir deve riguardare il suo assai meno stimabile discendente, che andò davvero a una scuola d’arte, gli sia almeno concesso di vantarsi che, se fallì nell’essere un Artista, non tentò mai di essere un esteta.
In breve, il lettore (se ce n’è alcuno) non deve essere fuorviato a questo stadio da quella figura falstaffiana in cappello e mantello da brigante, che è comparsa in molte caricature. Quella figura fu un’opera d’arte più tarda; benché l’Artista non fosse meramente il caricaturista; ma una Artista donna sfiorata il più lievemente possibile in questa assai vittoriana narrazione. Quella caricatura commemora meramente ciò che il genio femminile poteva fare coi materiali più poco promettenti. Ma quando ero ragazzo o scapolo, il mio abbigliamento e il mio aspetto erano proprio come quelli di tutti gli altri, solo peggiori. La mia Follia, che era considerevole, era tutta interiore. Ma quella Follia si muoveva sempre più nella direzione di una qualche vaga e visionaria rivolta contro la prosaica piattezza di una città e civiltà ottocentesca; un’immaginativa impazienza coi cappelli cilindrici e le case rettangolari; in breve, quel movimento della mente che ho già associato con il Napoleone di Notting Hill e l’imperfetto patriota di Clapham. Non ero forse andato oltre la sensazione che coloro imprigionati in questi disumani contorni fossero esseri umani; che fosse una brutta cosa che anime viventi fossero così debolmente e crudamente rappresentate da case simili a diagrammi di Euclide mal disegnati, o strade e ferrovie simili a squallide sezioni di macchinari. Ricordo di aver parlato con Masterman, assai presto nella nostra conoscenza, mentre osservavamo le folle affannate riversarsi attraverso i passaggi della Metropolitana verso la ferrea e simbolica Inner Circle, e di aver citato le parole di Kipling sulla corazzata inabile:—
Poiché non è giusto che ceppo inglese Debba dimorare nel cuore di un orologio da otto giorni La Morte che essi non possono vedere.
Ma conservai sempre un vago senso di qualcosa di sacro nel ceppo inglese, o nel ceppo umano, che mi separava dal mero pessimismo del periodo. Non dubitai mai che gli esseri umani dentro le case fossero essi stessi quasi miracolosi; come bambole magiche e talismaniche, in qualunque brutta casa di bambole. Per me, quelle scatole di mattoni bruni erano davvero scatole natalizie. Poiché, dopo tutto, le scatole natalizie venivano spesso legate in carta bruna; e le imprese dei costruttori raffazzonati in mattoni bruni erano spesso estremamente simili a carta bruna.
Per riassumere, accettai il mio ambiente e il fatto pratico che tutti i cappelli e le case erano come i nostri cappelli e le nostre case; e che questo cosmo Cockney, per quanto un Cockney potesse vedere, si stendeva fino alle estremità della terra. Per questa ragione, càpitò, come un piuttosto determinante accidente, che vidi per la prima volta come da lontano il primo fantastico segnale di qualcosa di nuovo e ancora ben lungi dall’essere alla moda; qualcosa come una nuova macchia purpurea su quella grigia distesa di strade. Non sarebbe notevole ora, ma era notevole allora. In quei giorni avevo l’abitudine di camminare su assai ampie distese e cerchi di Londra; camminavo sempre da e verso la mia prima scuola d’arte a St. John’s Wood; e darà qualche accenno di come Londra sia mutata il dire che comunemente camminavo da Kensington alla Cattedrale di St. Paul, e per gran parte del tragitto in mezzo alla Strada. Un giorno avevo volto i miei passi senza meta verso ovest, attraverso i grovigli di Hammersmith Broadway e lungo la Strada che va a Kew, quando svoltai per qualche ragione, o più probabilmente senza ragione, in una via laterale e vagai attraverso il polveroso prato tra cui correva una ferrovia, e attraverso la ferrovia uno di quei ponti sproporzionatamente alti che scavalcano tali strette linee ferroviarie come su trampoli. Per un culmine di futilità, salii fino a questo alto e praticamente inutilizzato ponte; era sera, e credo fu allora che vidi in lontananza di quel grigio paesaggio, come una lacera nuvola rossa di tramonto, lo strano villaggio artificiale di Bedford Park.
È difficile, come ho detto, spiegare come ci fosse allora qualcosa di fantasioso in ciò che è ora così familiare. Quel genere di manufatta pittoreschezza è ora appena persino pittoresco; ma a quel tempo era persino strano. Bedford Park sembrava davvero ciò che in parte professava di essere; una colonia per artisti che erano quasi alieni; un rifugio per poeti e pittori perseguitati che si nascondevano nelle loro catacombe di mattoni rossi o morivano dietro le loro barricate di mattoni rossi, quando il mondo dovesse conquistare Bedford Park. In quel senso alquanto insensato, è piuttosto Bedford Park ad aver conquistato il mondo. Oggi, cottage modello, case popolari e botteghe d’arte e artigianato — domani, per quanto ne so, prigioni e ospizi e manicomi possono presentare (all’esterno) quel minimo di pittoresco, che allora era considerato l’assurda posa di coloro dediti al dipingere quadri. Di certo, se all’impiegato di Clapham fosse allora stato effettivamente presentato un tale fantastico cottage, egli avrebbe potuto pensare che la casa da fiaba fosse in realtà un manicomio. Questo esperimento estetico era assai recente; aveva alcuni elementi di reale indipendenza cooperativa e corporativa; i suoi propri magazzini e ufficio postale e chiesa e locanda. Ma il tutto era vagamente sotto il patronato del vecchio signor Comyns-Carr, che non era solo considerato il patriarca o il più vecchio abitante, ma in un certo senso il fondatore e padre della repubblica. Non era davvero così molto vecchio; ma d’altronde la repubblica era assai nuova; assai più nuova della nuova repubblica del signor Mallock, benché piena di pettegolezzo filosofico assai dello stesso genere, su cui il patriarca benevolmente irradiava e rimuginava. Quanto meno, per citare una frase letteraria allora assai citata, egli era più vecchio delle rocce fra cui sedeva, o dei tetti sotto cui sedeva; e avremmo ben potuto mormorare un altro motto contemporaneo, un po’ vagamente forse, dalla Memoria:—
Match me this marvel, save where aesthetes are, A rose-red suburb half as old as Carr.
But though I think we all felt, if subconsciously, something dreamily theatrical about the thing, that it was partly a dream and partly a joke, it was not merely a fraud. Intelligent people will insinuate themselves even into an intelligentsia; and important people lived there quietly rather than importantly. Professor Yorke Powell, the distinguished historian, paraded there his long leonine beard and menacing and misleading eyebrows; and Dr. Todhunter, the eminent Celtic scholar, represented the Irish colony in the battles of culture. And in the same connection, if it was a place of shadows it could hardly be called a place of shams, when it contained one who is still perhaps the greatest poet writing in our tongue. There is always something fanciful about the conjunction of the world that the poet sees and the place he lives in; the fancy that the great golden lions of Blake roared and roamed in a small court off the Strand, or that Camberwell may have been haunted by Sordello, couched like a lion and expressing himself rather like a sphinx. And it amuses me to think that under those toy trees and gimcrack gables there was already passing a pageant of strange gods and the head-dresses of forgotten priests and the horns of holy unicorns and the wrinkled sleep of Druidic vegetation, and all the emblems of a new heraldry of the human imagination.
William Butler Yeats might seem as solitary as an eagle; but he had a nest. Wherever there is Ireland there is the Family; and it counts for a great deal. If the reader requires a test, let him ask why there is still a habit of calling this great and often grim genius “Willie Yeats”. Nobody, to my knowledge, talks about “Jackie Masefield”, or “Alfie Noyes”, or (what might be misunderstood by the light-minded) “Ruddy Kipling”. But in the case of Yeats, such familiarity might seem singularly incongruous with his tastes and temper; and analogous to talking of the great Gulliver as “Johnny Swift”. His own tone and temper, in public as well as private expression, is of a fastidiousness the very reverse of such familiarity.
There is no fool can call me friend And I may drink at the journey’s end With Landor and with Donne.
I mention it merely as a point of impersonal description, without pronouncing on the problem; it takes all sorts to make a world. I daresay that there are a good many fools who can call me a friend and also (a more chastening thought) a good many friends who can call me a fool. But in Yeats that fastidiousness is not only sincere but essentially noble, being full of a fine anger against the victory of baser over better things, leading him to call the terrible words over the great grave in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “the noblest epitaph in history.” The reason why, in spite of all this, the largest possible assembly and assortment of fools is probably at this moment calling poor Yeats “Willie,” at any rate behind his back, is to be found in the curious corporate stamp always left by the Irish family as a whole. The intensity and individualism of genius itself could never wash out of the world’s memories the general impression of Willie and Lily and Lolly and Jack; names cast backwards and forwards in a unique sort of comedy of Irish wit, gossip, satire, family quarrels and family pride. I knew the family more or less as a whole in those days; and for long afterward knew and admired those sisters of the poet who maintained in the Cuala industry a school of decoration and drapery not unworthy of the great lines about the heavens’ embroidered cloths. W. B. is perhaps the best talker I ever met, except his old father who alas will talk no more in this earthly tavern, though I hope he is still talking in Paradise. Among twenty other qualities, he had that rare but very real thing, entirely spontaneous style. The words will not come pouring out, any more than the bricks that make a great building come pouring out; they are simply arranged like lightning; as if a man could build a cathedral as quickly as a conjurer builds a house of cards. A long and elaborately balanced sentence, with dependent clauses alternative or antithetical, would flow out of such talkers with every word falling into its place, quite as immediately and innocently as most people would say it was a fine day or a funny business in the papers. I can still remember old Yeats, that graceful greybeard, saying in an offhand way about the South African War, “Mr. Joseph Chamberlain has the character, as he has the face, of the shrewish woman who ruins her husband by her extravagance; and Lord Salisbury has the character, as he has the face, of the man who is so ruined.” That style, or swift construction of a complicated sentence, was the sign of a lucidity now largely lost. You will find it in the most spontaneous explosions of Dr. Johnson. Since then some muddled notion has arisen that talking in that complete style is artificial; merely because the man knows what he means and means to say it. I know not from what nonsense world the notion first came; that there is some connection between being sincere and being semi-articulate. But it seems to be a notion that a man must mean what he says, because he breaks down even in trying to say it; or that he must be a marvel of power and decision, because he discovers in the middle of a sentence that he does not know what he was going to say. Hence the conversation of current comedy; and the pathetic belief that talk may be endless, so long as no statement is allowed to come to an end.
Yeats affected me strongly, but in two opposite ways; like the positive and negative poles of a magnet. It is necessary to explain what I mean, not so much for the sake of my own groping notions at this time, as for the sake of explaining the peculiarity of the period; about which most critics seem to be completely wrong at the present time. There was much in Victorian ideas that I dislike and much that I respect; but there was nothing whatever about Victorian ideas corresponding to what is now called Victorian. I am actually old enough to remember the Victorian Age; and it was almost a complete contrast to all that is now connoted by that word. It had all the vices that are now called virtues; religious doubt, intellectual unrest, a hungry credulity about new things, a complete lack of equilibrium. It also had all the virtues that are now called vices; a rich sense of romance, a passionate desire to make the love of man and woman once more what it was in Eden, a strong sense of the absolute necessity of some significance in human life. But everything that everybody tells me now about the Victorian atmosphere I feel instantly to be false, like a fog, which merely shuts out a vista. And in nothing is this more true than in the particular truth I must now try to describe.
Eguagliami questa meraviglia, salvo là dove sono gli esteti, Un sobborgo rosso-rosa vecchio la metà di Carr.
Ma benché credo che tutti sentissimo, se pur subconsciamente, qualcosa di sognantemente teatrale nella cosa, che era in parte un sogno e in parte uno scherzo, non era una mera frode. Le persone intelligenti si insinuano perfino in un’intellighenzia; e persone importanti vivevano là tranquillamente piuttosto che in modo importante. Il Professor Yorke Powell, il distinto storico, sfoggiava là la sua lunga barba leonina e le sue sopracciglia minacciose e fuorvianti; e il Dott. Todhunter, l’eminente studioso celtico, rappresentava la colonia irlandese nelle battaglie della cultura. E nella stessa connessione, se era un luogo di ombre non poteva a stento essere chiamato un luogo di finzioni, quando conteneva uno che è ancora forse il più grande poeta che scriva nella nostra lingua. C’è sempre qualcosa di fantasioso nella congiunzione del mondo che il poeta vede e del luogo in cui vive; la fantasia che i grandi leoni d’oro di Blake ruggissero e vagassero in una piccola Corte al riparo dello Strand, o che Camberwell possa essere stata infestata da Sordello, accovacciato come un Leone ed esprimentesi piuttosto come una sfinge. E mi diverte pensare che sotto quegli alberi giocattolo e quei frontoni pacchiani stava già passando un corteo di strani dèi e dei copricapi di preti dimenticati e delle corna di sacri unicorni e del rugoso Sonno della vegetazione druidica, e di tutti gli emblemi di una nuova araldica dell’Immaginazione umana.
William Butler Yeats poteva sembrare solitario come un’aquila; ma aveva un nido. Dovunque c’è l’Irlanda c’è la Famiglia; e conta molto. Se il lettore richiede una prova, che si chieda perché c’è ancora l’abitudine di chiamare questo grande e spesso arcigno genio «Willie Yeats». Nessuno, per quanto ne so, parla di «Jackie Masefield», o «Alfie Noyes», o (ciò che potrebbe essere frainteso dai frivoli) «Ruddy Kipling». Ma nel caso di Yeats, tale familiarità potrebbe sembrare singolarmente incongrua coi suoi gusti e col suo temperamento; e analoga al parlare del grande Gulliver come «Johnny Swift». Il suo tono e temperamento, nell’espressione pubblica oltre che privata, è di una schizzinosità proprio l’opposto di tale familiarità.
Non c’è sciocco che possa chiamarmi amico E potrò bere alla fine del Viaggio Con Landor e con Donne.
Lo menziono meramente come un punto di descrizione impersonale, senza pronunciarmi sul problema; ci vuole di tutto per fare un mondo. Oserei dire che c’è parecchia gente sciocca che può chiamarmi amico e anche (un pensiero più mortificante) parecchi amici che possono chiamarmi sciocco. Ma in Yeats quella schizzinosità non è solo sincera ma essenzialmente nobile, essendo piena di una fine collera contro la vittoria delle cose più basse su quelle migliori, che lo induce a chiamare le terribili parole sulla grande Tomba nella Cattedrale di St. Patrick, «il più nobile epitaffio della storia.» La ragione per cui, malgrado tutto questo, la più larga possibile assemblea e assortimento di sciocchi sta probabilmente in questo momento chiamando il povero Yeats «Willie», quanto meno dietro le sue spalle, è da trovarsi nella curiosa impronta corporativa sempre lasciata dalla famiglia irlandese nel suo insieme. L’intensità e l’Individualismo del genio stesso non poterono mai lavar via dalle memorie del mondo l’impressione generale di Willie e Lily e Lolly e Jack; nomi lanciati avanti e indietro in una unica sorta di Commedia di arguzia irlandese, pettegolezzo, Satira, liti familiari e orgoglio familiare. Conoscevo la famiglia più o meno nel suo insieme in quei giorni; e per molto tempo dopo conobbi e ammirai quelle sorelle del poeta che mantenevano nell’industria di Cuala una scuola di decorazione e drappeggio non indegna dei grandi versi sui «drappi ricamati dei cieli». W. B. è forse il miglior conversatore che io abbia mai incontrato, tranne il suo vecchio padre che ahimè non parlerà più in questa taverna terrena, benché io speri che stia ancora parlando in Paradiso. Tra venti altre qualità, aveva quella rara ma assai reale cosa, lo stile interamente spontaneo. Le parole non vengono giù a fiotti, non più di quanto i mattoni che fanno un grande edificio vengano giù a fiotti; sono semplicemente disposte come un Fulmine; come se un uomo potesse costruire una Cattedrale rapidamente come un prestigiatore costruisce una casa di carte. Una lunga ed elaboratamente bilanciata frase, con proposizioni dipendenti alternative o antitetiche, fluiva da tali conversatori con ogni parola che cadeva al suo posto, tanto immediatamente e innocentemente quanto la maggior parte della gente direbbe che è una bella giornata o una faccenda buffa sui giornali. Ricordo ancora il vecchio Yeats, quel grazioso barbagrigia, dire in modo noncurante a proposito della Guerra Sudafricana: «Il signor Joseph Chamberlain ha il carattere, come ha il volto, della donna bisbetica che rovina il marito con la sua stravaganza; e Lord Salisbury ha il carattere, come ha il volto, dell’uomo che è così rovinato.» Quello stile, o rapida costruzione di una frase complicata, era il segno di una lucidità ora in gran parte perduta. La troverete nelle più spontanee esplosioni del Dott. Johnson. Da allora è sorta una qualche confusa nozione che parlare in quello stile completo sia artificiale; meramente perché l’uomo sa ciò che intende e intende dirlo. Non so da quale mondo di nonsenso venne per la prima volta la nozione; che ci sia qualche connessione tra l’essere sincero e l’essere semi-articolato. Ma pare essere una nozione secondo cui un uomo deve intendere ciò che dice, perché crolla perfino nel tentare di dirlo; o che egli debba essere un prodigio di potenza e decisione, perché scopre a metà di una frase di non sapere ciò che stava per dire. Di qui la conversazione della Commedia corrente; e la patetica credenza che il parlare possa essere senza fine, purché a nessuna affermazione sia permesso di giungere a una fine.
Yeats mi influenzò fortemente, ma in due modi opposti; come i poli positivo e negativo di una calamita. È necessario spiegare che cosa intendo, non tanto per amor delle mie stesse brancolanti nozioni in quel periodo, quanto per amor di spiegare la peculiarità del periodo; sul quale la maggior parte dei critici pare essere completamente in errore al presente tempo. C’era molto nelle idee vittoriane che detesto e molto che rispetto; ma non c’era proprio nulla nelle idee vittoriane corrispondente a ciò che ora si chiama vittoriano. Sono davvero abbastanza vecchio da ricordare l’Età Vittoriana; ed era quasi un completo contrasto con tutto ciò che è ora connotato da quella parola. Aveva tutti i vizi che ora si chiamano virtù; il Dubbio religioso, l’irrequietezza intellettuale, un’affamata credulità per le cose nuove, una completa mancanza di equilibrio. Aveva anche tutte le virtù che ora si chiamano vizi; un ricco senso del Romanzo, un appassionato Desiderio di rendere l’Amore di uomo e donna di nuovo ciò che era in Eden, un forte senso dell’assoluta necessità di un qualche significato nella vita umana. Ma tutto ciò che tutti mi dicono ora sull’atmosfera vittoriana sento all’istante essere falso, come una nebbia, che meramente sbarra una veduta. E in nulla è più vero che nella particolare Verità che devo ora tentare di descrivere.
The general background of all my boyhood was agnostic. My own parents were rather exceptional, among people so intelligent, in believing at all in a personal God or in personal immortality. I remember when my friend Lucian Oldershaw, who introduced me to this Bohemian colony, said to me suddenly, looking back on the tired lessons in the Greek Testament at St. Paul’s School, “Of course, you and I were taught our religion by agnostics;” and I, suddenly seeing the faces of all my schoolmasters, except one or two eccentric clergymen, knew that he was right. It was not specially our generation, it was much more the previous generation, that was agnostic after the fashion of Huxley. It was the period of which Mr. H. G. Wells, a sportive but spiritual child of Huxley, wrote truly enough that it was “full of the ironical silences that follow great controversies;” and in that controversy, Huxley had been superficially successful. So successful, that Mr. Wells, in the same passage, went so far as to say that the Bishops, “socially so much in evidence, are intellectually in hiding.” … How dear and distant it all seems! I have lived to see biological controversies, in which it is much truer to say that the official Darwinians are in hiding. The “silence” following on the first evolutionary controversy was a good deal more “ironical” than Mr. Wells was then aware. But then certainly the silence seemed to be one of religion defeated; a desert of materialism. Men no more expected the myriad mystical reactions now moving all nations than the flat-chested mansions of Pimlico and Bloomsbury had expected to see spreading through the land the crested roofs and cranky chimneys of Bedford Park.
But it was not in this that Bedford Park was eccentric. There was nothing new or odd about not having a religion. Socialism, mostly upon the rather wallpaper pattern of Morris, was a relatively new thing. Socialism, in the style of Bernard Shaw and the Fabians, was a rising thing. But agnosticism was an established thing. We might almost say that agnosticism was an established church. There was a uniformity of unbelief, like the Elizabethan demand for uniformity of belief; not among eccentric people, but simply among educated people. And, above all, among the educated people older than myself.
There were, indeed, fine fighting atheists. But they were mostly fighting something else besides theism. There could be no more virile or valiant type of them than my old friend Archie MacGregor, the artist, who was fighting the Boer War. As we agreed on this, we fell into a strong companionship; but even in those days, I realised that his atheism was not really revolutionary in the matter of morals. It was just the other way. It was not any “new morality,” but very decidedly the “old morality” that he was defending against Imperialism, merely on the ground that it was murder and theft. He was defending against the new ethic of Nietzsche the old ethic of Naboth. This, Mr. Wells and the Fabians saw with typical lucidity; that the sentimental Socialists were inconsistent, in saying that a peasant has no right to a field, but a peasantry has a right to an oilfield. Mr. Wells is not really a pacifist any more than a militarist; but the only sort of war he thinks right is the only sort of war I think wrong. Anyhow, broadly speaking, it is a complete mistake to suppose that the rebels who denounced Church and Chapel were those who denounced Empire and Army. The divisions cut across; but they cut mainly the other way. A fighting Pro-Boer like MacGregor was in as much of a minority among atheists as among artists; even in Bedford Park. I soon discovered that, when I emerged into the larger world of artists and literary men. No two men could have been more opposite than Henley and Colvin; and I was later to be in some sense a witness to the duel they fought over the dead body of Stevenson. But they were both stubborn materialists and they were both stubborn militarists. The truth is that for most men about this time Imperialism, or at least patriotism, was a substitute for religion. Men believed in the British Empire precisely because they had nothing else to believe in. Those beacon-fires of an imperial insularity shot a momentary gleam over the dark landscape of the Shropshire Lad; though I fear that many innocent patriots did not perceive the Voltairean sneer in the patriotic lines: “Get you the sons your fathers got, and God will save the Queen.” My present prejudices would be satisfied by saying that the last decay of Protestantism took the form of Prussianism.
But I am here describing myself as I was, when pure and unpolluted by such prejudices. And what I wish to attest, merely as a witness to the fact, is that the background of all that world was not merely atheism, but atheist orthodoxy, and even atheist respectability. That was quite as common in Belgravia as in Bohemia. That was above all normal in Suburbia; and only for that reason in this particular eccentric suburb. In that suburb, the type of the time was not a man like Archie MacGregor but a man like St. John Hankin. And the point is that a man like St. John Hankin was not eccentric but centric. He was a pessimist, which is something more atheistic than an atheist; he was a fundamental sceptic, that is a man without fundamentals; he was one who disbelieved in Man much more than he did in God; he despised democracy even more than devotion; he was professedly without enthusiasms of any kind; but in all this he was centric. He was very near to the centre of the culture and philosophy of London at that time. He was a man of real talent; and the memory of some of his amusing literary travesties still remains. I did not dislike him, though many did; but I did in a sense despair of him, as he despaired of everything. But it is entirely typical of the time that his pessimism managed to appear in Punch; and that, almost alone amid those ragged or ridiculous or affected artistic costumes, he always wore evening-dress. He had a low opinion of the world, but he was a man of the world; and especially of the world as it was then.
Lo sfondo generale di tutta la mia fanciullezza era agnostico. I miei stessi genitori erano piuttosto eccezionali, tra gente così intelligente, nel credere affatto in un Dio personale o in una Immortalità personale. Ricordo quando il mio amico Lucian Oldershaw, che mi introdusse a questa colonia bohémien, mi disse d’improvviso, ripensando alle stanche lezioni sul Testamento greco alla St. Paul’s School: «Naturalmente, tu e io fummo istruiti nella nostra religione da agnostici;» e io, vedendo d’improvviso i volti di tutti i miei maestri, tranne uno o due ecclesiastici eccentrici, seppi che aveva ragione. Non era in modo speciale la nostra generazione, era assai più la generazione precedente, a essere agnostica secondo la moda di Huxley. Era il periodo di cui il signor H. G. Wells, un giocoso ma spirituale Figlio di Huxley, scrisse abbastanza veritieramente che era «pieno degli ironici silenzi che seguono le grandi controversie;» e in quella controversia, Huxley era stato superficialmente vittorioso. Così vittorioso, che il signor Wells, nello stesso passo, arrivò fino a dire che i Vescovi, «socialmente così tanto in evidenza, sono intellettualmente nascosti.» … Quanto caro e distante tutto ciò sembra! Sono vissuto abbastanza da vedere controversie biologiche, in cui è assai più vero dire che i Darwiniani ufficiali sono nascosti. Il «Silenzio» seguente alla prima controversia evoluzionistica era assai più «ironico» di quanto il signor Wells fosse allora consapevole. Ma allora di certo il Silenzio pareva essere uno di religione sconfitta; un Deserto di materialismo. Gli uomini non si aspettavano più le miriadi di mistiche reazioni che ora muovono tutte le nazioni di quanto le ville dal petto piatto di Pimlico e Bloomsbury si fossero aspettate di veder diffondersi per il paese i tetti crestati e i camini balzani di Bedford Park.
Ma non era in questo che Bedford Park era eccentrica. Non c’era nulla di nuovo o strano nel non avere una religione. Il Socialismo, per lo più sul piuttosto tappezziero modello di Morris, era una cosa relativamente nuova. Il Socialismo, nello stile di Bernard Shaw e dei Fabiani, era una cosa nascente. Ma l’agnosticismo era una cosa stabilita. Potremmo quasi dire che l’agnosticismo era una chiesa stabilita. C’era un’uniformità di miscredenza, come la richiesta elisabettiana di uniformità di credenza; non tra persone eccentriche, ma semplicemente tra persone istruite. E, soprattutto, tra le persone istruite più vecchie di me.
C’erano, in verità, bravi atei combattivi. Ma per lo più combattevano qualcos’altro oltre al teismo. Non poteva esserci tipo più virile o valoroso di essi del mio vecchio amico Archie MacGregor, l’Artista, che combatteva la Guerra Boera. Poiché concordavamo su questo, cademmo in una forte compagnia; ma perfino in quei giorni, mi resi conto che il suo ateismo non era davvero rivoluzionario in fatto di morale. Era proprio il contrario. Non era una qualche «nuova moralità», ma assai decisamente la «vecchia moralità» che egli difendeva contro l’Imperialismo, meramente sulla base che era omicidio e furto. Difendeva contro la nuova etica di Nietzsche la vecchia etica di Nabot. Questo, il signor Wells e i Fabiani videro con tipica lucidità; che i Socialisti sentimentali erano incoerenti, nel dire che un contadino non ha diritto a un campo, ma un contadinato ha diritto a un giacimento di petrolio. Il signor Wells non è davvero un pacifista più di quanto sia un militarista; ma l’unica sorta di guerra che egli ritiene giusta è l’unica sorta di guerra che io ritengo sbagliata. Comunque, in generale, è un completo errore supporre che i ribelli che denunciavano la Chiesa e la Cappella fossero quelli che denunciavano l’Impero e l’Esercito. Le divisioni si intersecavano; ma tagliavano principalmente nell’altro senso. Un Pro-Boero combattivo come MacGregor era in una minoranza altrettanto grande tra gli atei quanto tra gli artisti; perfino a Bedford Park. Scoprii presto ciò, quando emersi nel più vasto mondo degli artisti e degli uomini di lettere. Due uomini non avrebbero potuto essere più opposti di Henley e Colvin; e io ero più tardi destinato a essere in un certo senso testimone del duello che essi combatterono sul corpo morto di Stevenson. Ma erano entrambi ostinati materialisti ed erano entrambi ostinati militaristi. La Verità è che per la maggior parte degli uomini in quel periodo l’Imperialismo, o quanto meno il patriottismo, era un sostituto della religione. Gli uomini credevano nell’Impero Britannico proprio perché non avevano null’altro in cui credere. Quei fuochi di segnalazione di un’insularità imperiale gettarono un momentaneo bagliore sul buio paesaggio dello Shropshire Lad; benché io tema che molti innocenti patrioti non percepissero il sogghigno volterriano nei versi patriottici: «Generate i figli che i vostri padri generarono, e Dio salverà la Regina.» I miei presenti pregiudizi sarebbero soddisfatti dal dire che l’ultimo Decadimento del Protestantesimo prese la forma del Prussianesimo.
Ma sto qui descrivendo me stesso come ero, quando puro e non inquinato da simili pregiudizi. E ciò che voglio attestare, meramente come testimone del fatto, è che lo sfondo di tutto quel mondo non era meramente ateismo, ma ortodossia atea, e persino rispettabilità atea. Ciò era altrettanto comune a Belgravia quanto in Bohème. Ciò era soprattutto normale in Suburbia; e solo per quella ragione in questo particolare eccentrico sobborgo. In quel sobborgo, il tipo dell’epoca non era un uomo come Archie MacGregor ma un uomo come St. John Hankin. E il punto è che un uomo come St. John Hankin non era eccentrico ma centrico. Era un pessimista, che è qualcosa di più ateistico di un ateo; era uno scettico fondamentale, cioè un uomo senza fondamenti; era uno che diffidava dell’Uomo assai più di quanto diffidasse di Dio; disprezzava la democrazia persino più della devozione; era dichiaratamente privo di entusiasmi di ogni sorta; ma in tutto questo era centrico. Era assai vicino al centro della cultura e della filosofia di Londra in quel periodo. Era un uomo di reale talento; e la Memoria di alcune delle sue divertenti parodie letterarie rimane ancora. Non mi era antipatico, benché lo fosse a molti; ma in un certo senso disperavo di lui, come egli disperava di ogni cosa. Ma è del tutto tipico del periodo che il suo pessimismo riuscisse ad apparire su Punch; e che, quasi solo tra quei laceri o ridicoli o affettati costumi artistici, egli indossasse sempre l’abito da sera. Aveva una bassa opinione del mondo, ma era un uomo di mondo; e specialmente del mondo com’era allora.
Now against this drab background of dreary modern materialism, Willie Yeats was calmly walking about as the Man Who Knew the Fairies. Yeats stood for enchantment; exactly where Hankin stood for disenchantment. But I very specially rejoiced in the fighting instinct which made the Irishman so firm and positive about it. He was the real original rationalist who said that the fairies stand to reason. He staggered the materialists by attacking their abstract materialism with a completely concrete mysticism; “Imagination!” he would say with withering contempt; “There wasn’t much imagination when Farmer Hogan was dragged out of bed and thrashed like a sack of potatoes—that they did, they had ‘um out;” the Irish accent warming with scorn; “they had ‘um out and thumped ‘um; and that’s not the sort of thing that a man wants to imagine.” But the concrete examples were not only a comedy; he used one argument which was sound, and I have never forgotten it. It is the fact that it is not abnormal men like artists, but normal men like peasants, who have borne witness a thousand times to such things; it is the farmers who see the fairies. It is the agricultural labourer who calls a spade a spade who also calls a spirit a spirit; it is the woodcutter with no axe to grind, except for woodcutting, who will say he saw a man hang on a gallows and afterwards hang round it as a ghost. It is all very well to say we ought not to believe in the ghost on an ignorant man’s evidence. But we should hang the man on the gallows on the same man’s evidence.
I was all for fighting for Willie Yeats and his fairies against materialism. I was especially for fighting for Willie Yeats and his farmers against the mechanical urban materialism. But already a further complication had arisen, which I must try to explain; not only to explain myself, but to explain the whole development of the poetry and the period. There had already appeared in that world the beginnings of a reaction against materialism; something analogous to what has since appeared in the form of Spiritualism. It has even taken the yet more defiant form of Christian Science, which denied the existence of the body merely because its enemies had denied the existence of the soul. But the form it took first, or most generally, in the world of which I speak, was the thing commonly called Theosophy; also sometimes called Esoteric Buddhism. It is probable that I must here allow at least for the allegation of a prejudice. If it existed, it was not an orthodox or a religious or even a pious prejudice. I was myself almost entirely Pagan and Pantheist. When I disliked Theosophy I had no Theology. Perhaps I did not dislike Theosophy, but only Theosophists. It is certainly true, I am afraid, whatever the failure in charity, that I did dislike some Theosophists. But I did not dislike them because they had erroneous doctrines, when I myself had no doctrines; or because they had no claim to be Christians, when in fact they would have claimed Christianity, among other things, much more confidentiy than I could myself. I disliked them because they had shiny pebbly eyes and patient smiles. Their patience mostly consisted of waiting for others to rise to the spiritual plane where they themselves already stood. It is a curious fact, that they never seemed to hope that they might evolve and reach the plane where their honest green-grocer already stood. They never wanted to hitch their own lumbering waggon to a soaring cabman; or see the soul of their charwoman like a star beckon to the spheres where the immortals are. Yet I suspect that I am unjust to these people in their real personalities. I fancy it was a combination of three things; Asia and Evolution and the English lady; and I think they would be nicer separate.
Now Yeats was not in the least like these Theosophical ladies; nor did he follow or seek out their special spiritual prophetess, Mrs. Besant, who was a dignified, ladylike, sincere, idealistic egoist. He sought out Madam Blavatsky, who was a coarse, witty, vigorous, scandalous old scally-wag; and I admire his taste. But I do think that this particular Oriental twist led him a dance, when he followed the fakirs and not the fairies. I shall not be misunderstood if I say of that great man that he is bewitched; that is, that Madam Blavatsky was a witch.
For whether or no Yeats was bewitched, it is certain that Yeats was not deceived. He was not taken in by the theosophical smile; or all that shining, or rather shiny, surface of optimism. He, having a more penetrating mind, had already penetrated to the essential pessimism that lies behind that Asiatic placidity; and it is arguable that the pessimism was not so depressing as the optimism. Anyhow, while those highly refined English ladies were stepping from star to star, as from stair to stair, he knew enough of what was meant by the Sorrowful Wheel, to realise that this starry stairway was uncommonly like a treadmill. The more feverish of my friends, in this circle, used to go and sit in rooms full of images of Buddha to calm themselves; though I myself never needed any image of Buddha to encourage me to do nothing or to go to sleep. But Yeats knew something of the mind and not only the face of Buddha; and if he would never have used such Tennysonian terms, he knew that it meant for his own mind, if calm at all, if any calm, a calm despair. In the scheme of mysticism to which he more and more tended after his first more fortunate adventures among farmers and fairies, the ancient religions stood more and more for the idea that the secret of the sphinx is that she has no secret. The veil of Isis was more and more merely the veil of Maya; illusion, ending with the last illusion that the veil of Isis is rent; the last and worst illusion that we are really disillusioned. He said to me once, apropos of somebody’s disappointment about something achieved, “You would not get out of your chair and walk across the room, if Nature had not her bag of illusions.” Then he added, as if against a silent protest, “It isn’t a very cheerful philosophy that everything is illusion.” It was not. I cannot answer for the fairies, but I doubt whether the farmers accepted it; and there was something in one half-grown Cockney journalist which entirely refused to accept it. So that I found myself in this odd double attitude towards the poet, agreeing with him about the fairytales on which most people disagreed with him, and disagreeing with him about the philosophy on which most people agreed with him, though in a much muddier and more prosaic way. Thus, when I read that wonderful poetical play, Land of Heart’s Desire, produced soon after at the Abbey Theatre, I was conscious of the sharp sensation, not so much that I disbelieved in the fairies, as that I disagreed with them. Though I had then no more notion of being a Catholic than of being a Cannibal, my sympathies were all for the Family against the Fairy. They were even then for the priest against the fairy. In all that magic burst of music, there was only one thing said by the fairy with which I fully and entirely sympathised; and that was the line: “I am tired of winds and waters and pale lights.” I do not think I have anything to alter in the sentence of literary criticism that I wrote long after: “There is only one thing against the Land of Heart’s Desire; the heart does not desire it.” Yet I admired the play almost passionately as a play; and in the debates of mere literature, always defended it against stupid jokes about the Celtic Twilight uttered by those who preferred the London Fog. So, later on, when I was on the Daily News, I defended, against the dramatic critic, the dramatic merit of a later play, which is full of good things; the play called Where There Is Nothing There Is God. But I was all groping and groaning and travailing with an inchoate and half-baked philosophy of my own, which was very nearly the reverse of the remark that where there is nothing there is God. The truth presented itself to me, rather, in the form that where there is anything there is God. Neither statement is adequate in philosophy; but I should have been amazed to know how near in some ways was my Anything to the Ens of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Ora, contro questo scialbo sfondo di tetro materialismo moderno, Willie Yeats camminava con calma come l’Uomo Che Conosceva le Fate. Yeats stava per l’incanto; esattamente dove Hankin stava per il disincanto. Ma io mi rallegravo in modo assai speciale dell’istinto combattivo che rendeva l’irlandese così fermo e positivo al riguardo. Era il vero originale razionalista che diceva che le fate stanno a ragione. Sbalordiva i materialisti attaccando il loro astratto materialismo con un misticismo del tutto concreto; «Immaginazione!» diceva con appassito disprezzo; «Non c’era molta immaginazione quando Farmer Hogan fu tirato giù dal letto e bastonato come un sacco di patate — quello fecero, lo tirarono fuori;» l’accento irlandese scaldandosi di scherno; «lo tirarono fuori e lo picchiarono; e non è il genere di cosa che un uomo vorrebbe immaginare.» Ma gli esempi concreti non erano soltanto una Commedia; egli usava un argomento che era valido, e non l’ho mai dimenticato. È il fatto che non sono uomini anomali come gli artisti, ma uomini normali come i contadini, ad aver testimoniato mille volte simili cose; sono i contadini a vedere le fate. È il bracciante agricolo che chiama pane il pane e vino il vino a chiamare anche uno spirito uno spirito; è il Taglialegna senza secondi fini, tranne quello di tagliar legna, a dire di aver visto un uomo pendere da una forca e in seguito aggirarsi intorno a essa come un Fantasma. È facile dire che non dovremmo credere nel Fantasma sulla testimonianza di un uomo ignorante. Ma impiccheremmo l’uomo alla forca sulla testimonianza dello stesso uomo.
Ero tutto per combattere per Willie Yeats e le sue fate contro il materialismo. Ero specialmente per combattere per Willie Yeats e i suoi contadini contro il meccanico materialismo urbano. Ma era già sorta un’ulteriore complicazione, che devo tentare di spiegare; non solo per spiegare me stesso, ma per spiegare l’intero sviluppo della poesia e del periodo. Erano già apparsi in quel mondo gli inizi di una reazione contro il materialismo; qualcosa di analogo a ciò che è da allora apparso nella forma dello Spiritismo. Ha persino preso la forma ancor più sfidante della Christian Science, che negava l’esistenza del Corpo meramente perché i suoi nemici avevano negato l’esistenza dell’Anima. Ma la forma che prese per prima, o più in generale, nel mondo di cui parlo, era la cosa comunemente chiamata Teosofia; anche talvolta chiamata Buddismo Esoterico. È probabile che io debba qui concedere quanto meno l’accusa di un pregiudizio. Se esisteva, non era un pregiudizio ortodosso o religioso o persino pio. Io stesso ero quasi interamente Pagano e Panteista. Quando mi era antipatica la Teosofia non avevo alcuna Teologia. Forse non mi era antipatica la Teosofia, ma solo i Teosofi. È di certo vero, temo, qualunque sia il fallimento nella Carità, che alcuni Teosofi mi erano antipatici. Ma non mi erano antipatici perché avevano dottrine erronee, quando io stesso non avevo dottrine; o perché non avevano alcuna pretesa di essere cristiani, quando in effetti avrebbero rivendicato il Cristianesimo, tra le altre cose, assai più fiduciosamente di quanto potessi io stesso. Mi erano antipatici perché avevano occhi lucidi e ciottolosi e sorrisi pazienti. La loro pazienza consisteva per lo più nell’attendere che altri salissero al piano spirituale dove essi stessi già stavano. È un fatto curioso, che non parevano mai sperare di poter evolvere e raggiungere il piano dove il loro onesto verduraio già stava. Non volevano mai agganciare il proprio pesante carro a un cocchiere che si librava; o vedere l’Anima della loro donna delle pulizie come una stella far cenno alle sfere dove sono gli immortali. Eppure sospetto di essere ingiusto verso questa gente nelle loro reali personalità. Immagino fosse una combinazione di tre cose; l’Asia e l’Evoluzione e la signora inglese; e credo che sarebbero più simpatiche separate.
Ora Yeats non era minimamente simile a queste signore Teosofiche; né seguiva o cercava la loro speciale profetessa spirituale, la signora Besant, che era una dignitosa, distinta, sincera, idealistica egoista. Egli cercò Madame Blavatsky, che era una rozza, arguta, vigorosa, scandalosa vecchia canaglia; e ammiro il suo gusto. Ma credo davvero che questa particolare torsione orientale lo trascinasse in un Ballo, quando seguì i fachiri e non le fate. Non sarò frainteso se dico di quel grand’uomo che è stregato; cioè, che Madame Blavatsky era una Strega.
Poiché, che Yeats fosse stregato o no, è certo che Yeats non era ingannato. Non si lasciava abbindolare dal sorriso teosofico; o da tutta quella splendente, o piuttosto lucida, superficie di ottimismo. Egli, avendo una mente più penetrante, aveva già penetrato fino all’essenziale pessimismo che sta dietro quella placidità asiatica; ed è sostenibile che il pessimismo non fosse così deprimente quanto l’ottimismo. Comunque, mentre quelle signore inglesi altamente raffinate salivano di stella in stella, come di scalino in scalino, egli sapeva abbastanza di ciò che si intendeva con la Dolorosa Ruota, da rendersi conto che questa stellare scalinata era straordinariamente simile a un mulino da tortura. I più febbrili dei miei amici, in questa cerchia, erano soliti andare a sedersi in stanze piene di immagini di Buddha per calmarsi; benché io stesso non abbia mai avuto bisogno di alcuna immagine di Buddha per incoraggiarmi a non far nulla o ad andare a dormire. Ma Yeats conosceva qualcosa della mente e non solo del volto di Buddha; e se non avrebbe mai usato tali termini tennysoniani, sapeva che per la sua stessa mente significava, se calma affatto, se qualche calma, una calma Disperazione. Nello schema di misticismo verso cui egli sempre più tendeva dopo le sue prime più fortunate avventure tra contadini e fate, le antiche religioni stavano sempre più per l’idea che il segreto de La Sfinge è che essa non ha alcun segreto. Il velo di Iside era sempre più meramente il velo di Maya; illusione, che finiva con l’ultima illusione che il velo di Iside sia squarciato; l’ultima e peggiore illusione che noi siamo davvero disillusi. Egli mi disse una volta, a proposito della delusione di qualcuno per qualcosa di realizzato: «Non ti alzeresti dalla tua sedia e non attraverseresti la stanza, se la Natura non avesse il suo sacco d’illusioni.» Poi aggiunse, come contro una silenziosa protesta: «Non è una filosofia molto allegra che tutto sia illusione.» Non lo era. Non posso rispondere per le fate, ma dubito che i contadini l’accettassero; e c’era qualcosa in un mezzo-cresciuto giornalista Cockney che rifiutava del tutto di accettarlo. Cosicché mi ritrovai in questo strano Duplice atteggiamento verso il poeta, concordando con lui sulle fiabe su cui la maggior parte della gente dissentiva da lui, e dissentendo da lui sulla filosofia su cui la maggior parte della gente concordava con lui, benché in modo assai più fangoso e prosaico. Così, quando lessi quel meraviglioso dramma poetico, Land of Heart’s Desire, prodotto poco dopo al Teatro dell’Abbazia, ero consapevole dell’acuta sensazione, non tanto di non credere nelle fate, quanto di dissentire da esse. Benché io non avessi allora più idea di essere un Cattolico che di essere un Cannibale, le mie simpatie erano tutte per la Famiglia contro la Fata. Erano perfino allora per il prete contro la fata. In tutto quel magico scoppio di musica, c’era solo una cosa detta dalla fata con cui simpatizzai pienamente e interamente; ed era il verso: «Sono stanca di venti e acque e pallide luci.» Non credo di aver nulla da mutare nella sentenza di critica letteraria che scrissi molto tempo dopo: «C’è solo una cosa contro Land of Heart’s Desire; il cuore non lo Desidera.» Eppure ammirai il dramma quasi appassionatamente come dramma; e nei dibattiti di mera letteratura, lo difesi sempre contro gli sciocchi scherzi sul Crepuscolo Celtico proferiti da coloro che preferivano la Nebbia di Londra. Così, più tardi, quando ero al Daily News, difesi, contro il critico drammatico, il merito drammatico di un dramma successivo, che è pieno di cose buone; il dramma chiamato Where There Is Nothing There Is God. Ma ero tutto un brancolare e gemere e travagliare con una inchoata e semicotta filosofia tutta mia, che era assai vicina al rovescio dell’osservazione che dove non c’è nulla c’è Dio. La Verità mi si presentava, piuttosto, nella forma che dove c’è qualcosa c’è Dio. Nessuna delle due affermazioni è adeguata in filosofia; ma sarei stato stupito di sapere quanto vicino in certi modi fosse il mio Qualcosa all’Ens di San Tommaso d’Aquino.
There was a debating-club in Bedford Park, on which I first tried my crude ideas with even cruder rhetoric. It deserved better treatment. It was frightful fun. It was called the “I.D.K.”; and an awful seal of secrecy was supposed to attach to the true meaning of the initials. Perhaps the Theosophists did really believe that it meant India’s Divine Karma. Possibly the Socialists did interpret it as “Individualists Deserve Kicking”. But it was a strict rule of the club that its members should profess ignorance of the meaning of its name; in the manner of the Know-Nothing movement in American politics. The stranger, the mere intruder into the sacred village, would ask, “But what does I.D.K. mean?”; and the initiate was expected to shrug his shoulders and say, “I don’t know,” in an offhand manner; in the hope that it would not be realised that, in a seeming refusal to reply, he had in fact replied. I know not whether this motto was symbolic of the agnosticism of men like Hankin or the mysticism of men like Yeats. But both points of view were, of course, present; and I think they pretty well divided that intellectual world between them. Certainly I always preferred the Celtic Twilight to the materialistic midnight. I had more sympathy with the magician’s cloak that clothed the man who believed in magic, or the dark elf-locks of the poet who had really something to tell us about elves, than with the black clothes and blank shirt-front of the sort of man who seemed to proclaim that the modern world, even when it is festive, is only the more funereal. What I did not realise was that there was a third angle, and a very acute angle, which was capable of piercing with the sharpness, and some would say the narrowness of a sword.
The secretary of this debating-club always proved her efficiency by entirely refusing to debate. She was one of a family of sisters, with one brother, whom I had grown to know through the offices of Oldershaw; and they had a cousin on the premises, who was engaged to a German professor and permanently fascinated by the subject of German fairytales. She was naturally attracted also to the Celtic fairytales that were loose in the neighbourhood; and one day she came back glowing with the news that Willie Yeats had cast her horoscope, or performed some such occult rite, and told her that she was especially under the influence of the moon. I happened to mention this to a sister of the secretary, who had only just returned to the family circle, and she told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that she hated the moon.
I talked to the same lady several times afterwards; and found that this was a perfectly honest statement of the fact. Her attitude on this and other things might be called a prejudice; but it could not possibly be called a fad, still less an affectation. She really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle of which I was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand, she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical. She practised gardening; in that curious Cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it. She was a queer card. She wore a green velvet dress barred with grey fur, which I should have called artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an attractive face, which I should have called elvish, but that she hated all the talk about elves. But what was arresting and almost blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. She never knew what was meant by being “under the influence” of Yeats or Shaw or Tolstoy or anybody else. She was intelligent, with a great love of literature, and especially of Stevenson. But if Stevenson had walked into the room and explained his personal doubts about personal immortality, she would have regretted that he should be wrong upon the point; but would otherwise have been utterly unaffected. She was not at all like Robespierre, except in a taste for neatness in dress; and yet it is only in Mr. Belloc’s book on Robespierre that I have ever found any words that describe the unique quality that cut her off from the current culture and saved her from it. “God had given him in his mind a stone tabernacle in which certain great truths were preserved imperishable.”
I saw a good deal of her later on, on various social occasions of the district; she was a witness to the grand and grotesque occasion on which I rode a bicycle for the first and last time; attired in the frock-coat and top hat of the period on the tennis lawn at Bedford Park. Believe it or not (as the great newspapers say when they tell lies based on ignorance of the elements of history) but it is true that I rode round and round the tennis-court with a complete natural balance, only disturbed by the intellectual problem of how I could possibly get off; eventually I fell off; I did not notice what happened to my hat, but then I seldom did. The image of that monstrous revolving ride has often recurred to me, as indicating that something odd must have happened to me about that time. The lady in question worked very hard as secretary of an educational society in London; and I formed the impression then, which I have not lost, that the worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease working; the racketing of trains and trams and the slow return to remote homes. She was a very alert person, and normally quite the reverse of absent-minded; but she told me once with some remorse that she had been so tired that she had left her parasol in the waiting room of a railway-station. We thought no more of it for the moment; but as I walked home that night, by my custom, from Bedford Park to Kensington, very nearly in the middle of the night, I happened to see the identical railway-station stand up black and bulky against the moonlight; and I committed my first and last crime; which was burglary, and very enjoyable. The station, or that part of the station, seemed to be entirely locked up; but I knew exactly the whereabouts of the waiting-room in question; and I found the shortest cut to it was to climb up the steep grassy embankment and crawl under the platform out upon the line; I then clambered onto the platform and recovered the parasol. As I returned by the same route (still in the battered top hat and the considerably deranged frock-coat) I stared up at the sky and found myself filled with all sorts of strange sensations. I felt as if I had just fallen from the moon, with the parasol for a parachute. Anyhow, as I looked back up the tilt of turf grey in the moonshine, like unearthly lunar grasses I did not share the lady’s impiety to the patroness of lunatics.
It was fortunate, however, that our next most important meeting was not under the sign of the moon but of the sun. She has often affirmed, during our later acquaintance, that if the sun had not been shining to her complete satisfaction on that day, the issue might have been quite different. It happened in St. James’s Park; where they keep the ducks and the little bridge, which has been mentioned in no less authoritative a work than Mr. Belloc’s Essay on Bridges, since I find myself quoting that author once more. I think he deals in some detail, in his best topographical manner, with various historic sites on the Continent; but later relapses into a larger manner, somewhat thus: “The time has now come to talk at large about Bridges. The longest bridge in the world is the Forth Bridge, and the shortest bridge in the world is a plank over a ditch in the village of Loudwater. The bridge that frightens you most is the Brooklyn Bridge, and the bridge that frightens you least is the bridge in St. James’s Park.” I admit that I crossed that bridge in undeserved safety; and perhaps I was affected by my early romantic vision of the bridge leading to the princess’s tower. But I can assure my friend the author that the bridge in St. James’s Park can frighten you a good deal.
C’era un circolo di dibattito a Bedford Park, sul quale provai per la prima volta le mie rozze idee con una retorica ancor più rozza. Meritava trattamento migliore. Era spaventosamente divertente. Si chiamava l’«I.D.K.»; e un tremendo sigillo di segretezza si supponeva si attaccasse al vero significato delle iniziali. Forse i Teosofi credevano davvero che significasse Il Divino Karma dell’India. Forse i Socialisti lo interpretavano come «Gli Individualisti Meritano Calci» [Individualists Deserve Kicking]. Ma era una rigida regola del circolo che i suoi membri professassero ignoranza del significato del suo nome; alla maniera del movimento Know-Nothing nella politica americana. Lo straniero, il mero intruso nel sacro villaggio, avrebbe chiesto: «Ma che cosa significa I.D.K.?»; e ci si aspettava che l’iniziato scrollasse le spalle e dicesse: «Non lo so» [I Don’t Know], in modo noncurante; nella speranza che non ci si rendesse conto che, in un apparente rifiuto di rispondere, egli aveva in effetti risposto. Non so se questo motto fosse simbolico dell’agnosticismo di uomini come Hankin o del misticismo di uomini come Yeats. Ma entrambi i punti di vista erano, s’intende, presenti; e credo che essi dividessero abbastanza bene tra loro quel mondo intellettuale. Di certo preferii sempre il Crepuscolo Celtico alla mezzanotte materialistica. Avevo più simpatia col mantello del mago che vestiva l’uomo che credeva nella Magia, o coi neri riccioli elfici del poeta che aveva davvero qualcosa da dirci sugli elfi, che coi neri abiti e lo sparato bianco del genere d’uomo che pareva proclamare che il mondo moderno, anche quando è festoso, è solo tanto più funereo. Ciò di cui non mi rendevo conto era che c’era un terzo angolo, e un assai acuto angolo, che era capace di trafiggere con l’affilatezza, e alcuni direbbero la strettezza, di una Spada.
La segretaria di questo circolo di dibattito provava sempre la sua efficienza rifiutandosi interamente di dibattere. Era una di una famiglia di sorelle, con un fratello, che ero giunto a conoscere attraverso gli uffici di Oldershaw; e avevano una cugina sul posto, che era fidanzata con un professore tedesco e permanentemente affascinata dal soggetto delle fiabe tedesche. Era naturalmente attratta anche dalle fiabe celtiche che erano in circolazione nel vicinato; e un giorno tornò raggiante con la notizia che Willie Yeats le aveva tratto l’oroscopo, o compiuto un qualche simile rito occulto, e le aveva detto che era specialmente sotto l’influenza della Luna. Mi càpitò di menzionare questo a una sorella della segretaria, che era appena tornata al circolo familiare, ed ella mi disse nel modo più normale e senza pretese che odiava la Luna.
Parlai alla stessa signora diverse volte in seguito; e scoprii che questa era una dichiarazione perfettamente onesta del fatto. Il suo atteggiamento su questo e altre cose poteva chiamarsi un pregiudizio; ma non poteva assolutamente chiamarsi una fissazione, ancor meno un’affettazione. Aveva davvero un’ostinata obiezione a tutte quelle forze naturali che parevano essere sterili o senza scopo; le dispiacevano i venti sonori che parevano non andare da nessuna parte; non le importava molto del mare, uno spettacolo di cui io ero assai amante; e per lo stesso istinto era contro la Luna, che diceva sembrasse un imbecille. D’altra parte, aveva una sorta di affamato appetito per tutte le cose fruttuose come i campi e i giardini e qualsiasi cosa connessa con la produzione; riguardo a cui era del tutto pratica. Praticava il giardinaggio; in quella curiosa cultura Cockney sarebbe stata del tutto pronta a praticare l’agricoltura; e sullo stesso perverso principio, praticava effettivamente una religione. Questo era qualcosa di del tutto inspiegabile sia per me sia per l’intera pignola cultura in cui viveva. Un numero qualunque di persone proclamava religioni, principalmente religioni orientali, le analizzava o discuteva su di esse; ma che qualcuno potesse considerare la religione come una cosa pratica al pari del giardinaggio era qualcosa di del tutto nuovo per me e, per i suoi vicini, nuovo e incomprensibile. Era stata, per un accidente, allevata nella scuola di un convento anglo-cattolico; e per tutto quel mondo agnostico o mistico, praticare una religione era assai più sconcertante del professarla. Era una carta strana. Indossava un abito di velluto verde barrato di pelliccia grigia, che avrei chiamato artistico, se non fosse che odiava tutto il parlare d’arte; e aveva un volto attraente, che avrei chiamato elfico, se non fosse che odiava tutto il parlare di elfi. Ma ciò che era arrestante e quasi agghiacciante in lei, in quell’atmosfera sociale, non era tanto che lo odiasse, quanto che ne fosse interamente non toccata. Non seppe mai che cosa si intendesse con l’essere «sotto l’influenza» di Yeats o Shaw o Tolstoj o chiunque altro. Era intelligente, con un grande Amore per la letteratura, e specialmente per Stevenson. Ma se Stevenson fosse entrato nella stanza e avesse spiegato i suoi personali dubbi sulla personale Immortalità, ella si sarebbe rammaricata che egli fosse in errore sul punto; ma per il resto ne sarebbe stata del tutto non toccata. Non era affatto simile a Robespierre, tranne che in un gusto per l’ordine nel vestire; eppure è solo nel libro del signor Belloc su Robespierre che ho mai trovato parole che descrivano l’unica qualità che la tagliava fuori dalla cultura corrente e la salvava da essa. «Dio le aveva dato nella mente un tabernacolo di pietra in cui certe grandi verità erano preservate imperiture.»
La vidi parecchio in seguito, in varie occasioni sociali del distretto; fu testimone della grandiosa e Grottesca occasione in cui montai in bicicletta per la prima e ultima volta; agghindato nella redingote e nel cilindro del periodo sul prato da tennis di Bedford Park. Ci crediate o no (come dicono i grandi giornali quando raccontano bugie basate sull’ignoranza degli elementi della storia) ma è vero che girai in tondo e in tondo per il campo da tennis con un completo equilibrio naturale, disturbato solo dal problema intellettuale di come potessi mai scendere; alla fine caddi giù; non notai che cosa accadde al mio cappello, ma d’altronde raramente lo notavo. L’immagine di quella mostruosa cavalcata rotante mi è spesso ricorsa, come indicante che qualcosa di strano deve essermi accaduto intorno a quel tempo. La signora in questione lavorava assai duramente come segretaria di una società educativa a Londra; e mi formai allora l’impressione, che non ho perduto, che il peggio del lavoro al giorno d’oggi sia ciò che accade alla gente quando cessa di lavorare; lo sferragliare di treni e tram e il lento ritorno a remote case. Era una persona assai vigile, e normalmente proprio il contrario di distratta; ma mi disse una volta con un certo rimorso che era stata così stanca da aver lasciato il parasole nella sala d’attesa di una stazione ferroviaria. Non ci pensammo più per il momento; ma mentre camminavo verso casa quella notte, secondo la mia usanza, da Bedford Park a Kensington, quasi in mezzo alla notte, mi càpitò di vedere l’identica stazione ferroviaria ergersi nera e massiccia contro il chiaro di luna; e commisi il mio primo e ultimo crimine; che fu un furto con scasso, e assai godibile. La stazione, o quella parte della stazione, pareva essere interamente sbarrata; ma sapevo esattamente dove si trovava la sala d’attesa in questione; e scoprii che la scorciatoia più breve era arrampicarsi su per la ripida scarpata erbosa e strisciare sotto la banchina fuori sulla linea; mi arrampicai poi sulla banchina e recuperai il parasole. Mentre tornavo per la stessa via (ancora nel malconcio cilindro e nella considerevolmente scomposta redingote) fissai il cielo e mi ritrovai colmo di ogni sorta di strane sensazioni. Mi sentii come se fossi appena caduto dalla Luna, col parasole per paracadute. Comunque, mentre guardavo indietro su per il declivio di zolla grigio nel chiaro di luna, come ultraterrene erbe lunari, non condividevo l’empietà della signora verso la patrona dei lunatici.
Fu fortunato, però, che il nostro successivo più importante incontro non fosse sotto il segno della Luna ma del sole. Ella ha spesso affermato, durante la nostra successiva conoscenza, che se il sole non avesse brillato di suo completo gradimento quel giorno, l’esito avrebbe potuto essere del tutto diverso. Accadde a St. James’s Park; dove tengono le anatre e il piccolo ponte, che è stato menzionato in un’opera non meno autorevole del Saggio del signor Belloc sui Ponti, dato che mi ritrovo a citare quell’autore ancora una volta. Credo che egli tratti in un certo dettaglio, nella sua migliore maniera topografica, di vari siti storici sul Continente; ma poi ricade in una maniera più ampia, press’a poco così: «È giunto il momento di parlare in generale dei Ponti. Il più lungo ponte del mondo è il Forth Bridge, e il più corto ponte del mondo è un’asse sopra un fosso nel villaggio di Loudwater. Il ponte che vi spaventa di più è il Brooklyn Bridge, e il ponte che vi spaventa di meno è il ponte a St. James’s Park.» Ammetto di aver attraversato quel ponte in immeritata sicurezza; e forse fui influenzato dalla mia precoce romantica visione del ponte che conduceva alla torre della principessa. Ma posso assicurare al mio amico l’autore che il ponte a St. James’s Park può spaventarvi parecchio.
VII
THE CRIME OF ORTHODOXY
I used to say that my autobiography ought to consist of a series of short stories like those about Sherlock Holmes; only that his were astonishing examples of observation, and mine astonishing examples of lack of observation. In short, they were to be “Adventures” concerned with my absence of mind, instead of his presence of mind. One, I remember was called “The Adventure of the Pro-Boer’s Corkscrew”, and commemorated the fact that I once borrowed a corkscrew from Hammond and found myself trying to open my front-door with it, with my latch-key in the other hand. Few will believe my statement, but it is none the less true that the incident came before and not after the more appropriate use of the corkscrew. I was perfectly sober; probably I should have been more vigilant if I had been drunk. Another anecdote, expanded into “The Adventure of the Astonished Clerk”, accused me of having asked for a cup of coffee instead of a ticket at the booking-office of a railway station, and doubtless I went on to ask the waitress politely for a third single to Battersea. I am not particularly proud of this characteristic, for I think that presence of mind is far more really poetical than absence of mind. But I only mention it, at this stage, because it introduces a character who played a considerable part in the fortunes of my friends and myself; and who, in the absorbing narrative of “The Adventure of the Curate’s Trousers”, was cast for the important part of the curate.
I cannot remember exactly where my brother or I first met the Rev. Conrad Noel. I rather fancy it was at some strange club where somebody was lecturing on Nietzsche; and where the debaters (by typical transition) passed from the gratifying thought that Nietzsche attacked Christianity to the natural inference that he was a True Christian. And I admired the common sense of a curate, with dark curly hair and a striking face, who got up and pointed out that Nietzsche would be even more opposed to True Christianity than to False Christianity, supposing there were any True Christianity to oppose. I learned that the curate’s name was Noel, but in many ways his intervention was symbolic of my experience of that strange world. That Intelligentsia of the artistic and vaguely anarchic clubs was indeed a very strange world. And the strangest thing about it, I fancy, was that, while it thought a great deal about thinking, it did not think. Everything seemed to come at second or third hand; from Nietzsche or Tolstoy or Ibsen or Shaw; and there was a pleasant atmosphere of discussing all these things, without any particular sense of responsibility for coming to any conclusion on them. The company often included really clever people, like Mr. Edgar Jepson, who always seemed as if he had strayed out of Society to smile mysteriously in Bohemia. Here and there it would include a man who had not only cleverness but strong traditional beliefs, which he kept largely to himself; like my old friend Louis McQuilland, who was long content to appear as a modern of the club called the Moderns, dealing in detached epigrams of the Wilde and Whistler fashion; and guarding within him all the time a flame of pure Catholic faith and burning Irish Nationalism, which never appeared save when those sacred things were challenged. But I think it profoundly significant, as a matter of intellectual instincts, that he preferred the almost avowed nonsense of the Decadents to the more high-minded and heretical earnestness of the Fabians. He once said in his wrath, on the occasion of the hundredth eulogy on Candida or Arms and the Man, something which ran (if I remember right) in a Scriptural form, “Stay me with Hitchens, comfort me with Beerbohm; for I am sick of Shaw.”
But a large section of the Intelligentsia seemed wholly devoid of Intelligence. As was perhaps natural, those who pontificated most pompously were often the most windy and hollow. I remember a man with a long beard and a deep booming voice who proclaimed at intervals, “What we need is Love,” or, “All we require is Love,” like the detonations of a heavy gun. I remember another radiant little man who spread out his fingers and said, “Heaven is here! It is now!” which seemed a disturbing thought under the circumstances. There was an aged, aged man who seemed to live at one of these literary clubs; and who would hold up a large hand at intervals and preface some fairly ordinary observation by saying, “A Thought.” One day Jepson, I think, goaded beyond endurance, is said to have exploded with the words, “But, good God, man, you don’t call that a thought, do you?” But that was what was the matter with not a few of these thinkers. A sort of Theosophist said to me, “Good and evil, truth and falsehood, folly and wisdom are only aspects of the same upward movement of the universe.” Even at that stage it occurred to me to ask, “Supposing there is no difference between good and bad, or between false and true, what is the difference between up and down?”
Now there was one thing that I began to note, as I noted on that minor occasion of the debate on Nietzsche. All that clique, in praising the Ibsenite and Shavian drama, was of course very contemptuous of the old Victorian drama. It sneered steadily at the stock types of old farces; at the drawling guardmen and grotesque grocers of Caste or Our Boys. But there was one old farcical type that had become far more false; and that was the comic curate of The Private Secretary: the simpleton who “did not like London” and asked for a glass of milk and a Bath-Bun. And many of the sceptics in that highly scientific world had not, by any means, outgrown the Victorian joke about the curate. Having myself been trained, first on the farce about the curate, and then on the scepticism about the priest, I was quite ready to believe that a dying superstition was represented by such feeble persons. As a fact, I found that they were very often by far the ablest and most forcible persons. In debate after debate I noticed the same thing happen that I have already noted in the debate on Nietzsche. It was the farcical curate, it was the feebleminded clergyman, who got up and applied to the wandering discussion at least some sort of test of some sort of truth; who showed all the advantages of having been tolerably trained in some sort of system of thinking. Dreadful seeds of doubt began to be sown in my mind. I was almost tempted to question the accuracy of the anticlerical legend; nay, even the accuracy of the farce of The Private Secretary. It seemed to me that the despised curates were rather more intelligent than anybody else; that they, alone in that world of intellectualism, were trying to use their intellects. For that reason I begin such adventures with the Adventure of the Curate’s Trousers. For that reason I mention first Mr. Conrad Noel. He had no Bath-Bun. He did not confine himself to a glass of milk. Nobody, with the smallest knowledge of him, could truthfully say that he did not like London.
VII
IL DELITTO DELL’ORTODOSSIA
Ero solito dire che la mia autobiografia dovrebbe consistere in una serie di racconti brevi come quelli su Sherlock Holmes; con la sola differenza che i suoi erano stupefacenti esempi di spirito d’osservazione, e i miei stupefacenti esempi di mancanza d’osservazione. In breve, dovevano essere «Avventure» che avevano per oggetto la mia assenza di spirito, invece della sua presenza di spirito. Una, ricordo, si intitolava «L’avventura del cavatappi del filoboero», e commemorava il fatto che una volta presi in prestito un cavatappi da Hammond e mi ritrovai a tentare di aprirci la porta di casa, con la chiave nell’altra mano. Pochi crederanno a quel che dico, ma è nondimeno vero che l’episodio venne prima e non dopo l’uso più appropriato del cavatappi. Ero perfettamente sobrio; probabilmente sarei stato più vigile se fossi stato ubriaco. Un altro aneddoto, ampliato in «L’avventura dell’impiegato sbalordito», mi accusava di aver chiesto una tazza di caffè invece di un biglietto allo sportello di una stazione ferroviaria, e senza dubbio passai poi a chiedere cortesemente alla cameriera un terzo biglietto di sola andata per Battersea. Non vado particolarmente fiero di questa caratteristica, poiché ritengo che la presenza di spirito sia davvero assai più poetica dell’assenza di spirito. Ma la menziono, a questo punto, soltanto perché introduce un personaggio che ebbe una parte considerevole nelle vicende dei miei amici e mie; e che, nell’avvincente racconto de «L’avventura dei calzoni del curato», fu destinato all’importante parte del curato.
Non riesco a ricordare con esattezza dove io o mio fratello incontrammo per la prima volta il reverendo Conrad Noel. Mi pare fosse in qualche strano circolo dove qualcuno teneva una conferenza su Nietzsche; e dove i disputanti (per tipica transizione) passavano dal gratificante pensiero che Nietzsche attaccasse il Cristianesimo alla naturale deduzione che egli fosse un Vero Cristiano. E ammirai il buon senso di un curato, dai capelli scuri e ricci e dal volto notevole, che si alzò e fece osservare come Nietzsche sarebbe stato ancora più avverso al Vero Cristianesimo che al Falso Cristianesimo, ammesso che vi fosse un qualche Vero Cristianesimo da avversare. Appresi che il nome del curato era Noel, ma per molti versi il suo intervento fu emblematico della mia esperienza di quello strano mondo. Quell’intellighenzia dei circoli artistici e vagamente anarchici era davvero un mondo assai strano. E la cosa più strana di esso, mi pare, era che, pur pensando moltissimo al pensare, non pensava. Tutto sembrava giungere di seconda o terza mano; da Nietzsche o da Tolstoj o da Ibsen o da Shaw; e regnava una piacevole atmosfera nel discutere tutte queste cose, senza alcun particolare senso di responsabilità di giungere a una qualche conclusione al riguardo. La compagnia comprendeva spesso persone davvero brillanti, come il signor Edgar Jepson, che pareva sempre essersi smarrito fuori dalla Buona Società per sorridere misteriosamente nella Bohème. Qua e là vi era compreso un uomo che aveva non soltanto ingegno ma solide convinzioni tradizionali, che teneva in gran parte per sé; come il mio vecchio amico Louis McQuilland, che a lungo si accontentò di apparire come un moderno del circolo detto dei Moderni, trattando in epigrammi staccati alla maniera di Wilde e Whistler; e custodendo dentro di sé per tutto il tempo una fiamma di pura fede cattolica e di ardente nazionalismo irlandese, che non affiorava mai se non quando quelle cose sacre venivano messe in discussione. Ma ritengo profondamente significativo, in fatto di istinti intellettuali, che egli preferisse le quasi dichiarate assurdità dei Decadenti alla più nobile ed eretica serietà dei Fabiani. Disse una volta, nell’ira, in occasione del centesimo elogio di Candida o di Le armi e l’uomo, qualcosa che suonava (se ben ricordo) in forma scritturale: «Sostenetemi con Hitchens, confortatemi con Beerbohm; poiché son malato di Shaw».
Ma gran parte dell’intellighenzia sembrava del tutto priva di intelligenza. Come forse era naturale, coloro che pontificavano più pomposamente erano spesso i più vacui e cavernosi. Ricordo un uomo dalla lunga barba e dalla voce profonda e rimbombante che proclamava a intervalli: «Ciò di cui abbiamo bisogno è l’Amore», oppure: «Tutto ciò che ci occorre è l’Amore», come le detonazioni di un pezzo d’artiglieria pesante. Ricordo un altro ometto radioso che allargava le dita e diceva: «Il Paradiso è qui! È adesso!», il che pareva un pensiero inquietante date le circostanze. C’era un uomo vecchio, vecchissimo, che pareva vivere in uno di questi circoli letterari; e che levava a intervalli una grossa mano e faceva precedere qualche osservazione piuttosto ordinaria dicendo: «Un Pensiero». Un giorno Jepson, mi pare, spinto oltre ogni sopportazione, si dice sia esploso con le parole: «Ma, santo cielo, amico mio, non chiamerete mica quello un pensiero, vero?». Ma era proprio questo il guaio di non pochi di quei pensatori. Una sorta di teosofo mi disse: «Bene e male, verità e falsità, follia e saggezza sono soltanto aspetti dello stesso moto ascendente dell’universo». Già a quello stadio mi venne fatto di chiedere: «Ammesso che non vi sia differenza tra bene e male, o tra falso e vero, quale differenza c’è tra su e giù?».
Ora, c’era una cosa che cominciai a notare, come avevo notato in quella minore occasione del dibattito su Nietzsche. Tutta quella cricca, nel lodare il dramma ibseniano e shaviano, era naturalmente assai sprezzante verso il vecchio dramma vittoriano. Sogghignava di continuo sui tipi convenzionali delle vecchie farse; sulle guardie strascicanti e sui grotteschi droghieri di Caste o di Our Boys. Ma c’era un vecchio tipo farsesco che era divenuto assai più falso; ed era il comico curato di The Private Secretary: il sempliciotto che «non amava Londra» e chiedeva un bicchiere di latte e una focaccina di Bath. E molti degli scettici di quel mondo altamente scientifico non avevano affatto superato la vittoriana barzelletta sul curato. Essendo io stesso stato educato, prima sulla farsa del curato, e poi sullo scetticismo verso il sacerdote, ero ben disposto a credere che una superstizione morente fosse rappresentata da persone così fiacche. Di fatto, scoprii che erano spessissimo di gran lunga le persone più capaci e incisive. In dibattito dopo dibattito notai accadere la stessa cosa che ho già rilevato nel dibattito su Nietzsche. Era il farsesco curato, era l’ecclesiastico ottuso, che si alzava e applicava alla discussione divagante almeno una qualche sorta di verifica di una qualche sorta di verità; che mostrava tutti i vantaggi dell’essere stato discretamente educato a un qualche sistema di pensiero. Terribili semi di dubbio cominciarono a essere seminati nella mia mente. Fui quasi tentato di mettere in dubbio l’accuratezza della leggenda anticlericale; anzi, perfino l’accuratezza della farsa di The Private Secretary. Mi sembrava che i disprezzati curati fossero piuttosto più intelligenti di chiunque altro; che essi, soli in quel mondo di intellettualismo, cercassero di usare il proprio intelletto. Per questa ragione inizio tali avventure con l’Avventura dei calzoni del curato. Per questa ragione menziono per primo il signor Conrad Noel. Egli non aveva focaccina di Bath. Non si limitava a un bicchiere di latte. Nessuno, con la più piccola conoscenza di lui, avrebbe potuto dire con verità che non amasse Londra.
Conrad Noel, the son of a poet and the grandson of a peer, had all the incalculable elements of the eccentric aristocrat; the sort of eccentric aristocrat who so often figures as a particularly destructive democrat. That great gentleman, Cunninghame Graham, whom I knew more slightly but always respected profoundly, was the same sort of uncompromising rebel; but he had a sort of Scottish seriousness similar to Spanish seriousness; while Noel’s humour was half English and half Irish but always mainly humorous. He delighted, of course, in shocking people and taking a rise out of them. I remember how he used to say, shaking his head with an air of brooding concentration: “Ah, how little people know about the work of a clergyman’s life; such demands on him! Such distracting and different duties! All the afternoon behind the scenes at the Butterfly Theatre, talking to Poppy Pimpernel; all the evening doing a pub-crawl with Jack Bootle; back to the club after dinner, etc.” As a matter of fact, he occupied much of his time with things perhaps equally fantastic but more intellectual. He had a love of nosing out the headquarters of incredible or insane sects; and wrote an amusing record of them called Byways of Belief. He had a special affection for an old gentleman with long grey whiskers, living in the suburbs; whose name, it appeared, was King Solomon David Jesus. This prophet was not afraid to protest, as a prophet should, against what he considered the pomps and vanities of this world. He began the interview by coldly rebuking Conrad Noel for having sent in a visiting-card inscribed, “Rev. Conrad Noel”; since all such official titles were abolished in the New Dispensation. Conrad delicately insinuated, in self-defence, that there seemed to be something about calling oneself Solomon David Jesus, which might raise rather grave problems of identity and a somewhat formidable historical comparison. And anyhow, an old gentleman who called himself King could hardly insist on such severe republican simplicity. However, the monarch explained that his title had been given him by an actual voice speaking out of the sky; and the Rev. Conrad admitted that he could not claim that his visiting-card had been thus written at dictation.
Sometimes, instead of his visiting the New Religions, the New Religions visited him, which was rather more alarming. He and his wife, a very charming little lady whose demureness was perhaps a little deceptive, had gone out to a matinee and came back to find ten Doukhobors eating their tea. Doukhobors, it may be explained to those who have had no such happy visitations, are a sect of Russian Pacifists and practical Communists, who believe in living by mutual hospitality. It is a curious and mystifying circumstance, by the way, that while the Doukhobors lived in Russia and had differences with a foreign authority, they invariably behaved themselves like a band of saints and according to the highest pattern of primitive Christians; but when they crossed to Canada, and came under a British authority, they were strangely demoralised, and degenerated into dangerous fanatics who used to go about stealing horses out of carts and cows out of sheds; because they disapproved of the captivity of animals. Anyhow, Conrad Noel, who certainly would not have thought the worse of them for defying either the Russian or the British Empire, had met a member of this sect somewhere; and I suppose in some hazy and hearty fashion invited him to pay a call some day. He was there with nine others like unto himself, stowing away the muffins and macaroons; and explaining that they would be delighted to pay for so ample and sumptuous a meal; but unfortunately, they did not approve of money. “If, however,” explained the Primitive Christian, “there is any small form of service”—any domestic assistance they could offer in return, they would be delighted thus to discharge the debt. Then was a light of battle to be seen in the eye of Mrs. Conrad Noel, who proceeded in quiet tones to tell them all the things she would undoubtedly like done; there were a great many of them, more than I can recall; but I have a general impression that carrying the grand piano up five floors onto the roof, or carting the billiard-table to the other end of the garden, were typical of the class of tasks to which the tottering and staggering Doukhobors were directed, by that gentle but vindictive lady. It is to be feared that none of them came to the house of that hospitable Christian Socialist again; except indeed one isolated Doukhobor, who struck out a line for himself; for the simple domestic toil with which he paid for his meal consisted in going into Noel’s study and altering Noel’s sermon; blacking out whole passages of it and inserting sentiments of a more unimpeachably Doukhobor tendency. In his case, I suspect that Mr. Noel, as well as Mrs. Noel, began to have doubts about the Doukhobor ideal.
But Mr. Noel certainly never lost his belief in what may be called the Russian Communist ideal; though he would have been as astonished as anybody else if he had been told then of the fortunes that lay before Russian Communism. Here, however, I am chiefly concerned with him as an example of my preliminary prevailing impression of how stupid the anti-clericals were and how much more relatively intelligent the clerics were. From this time also, dates the first faint beginnings of my own divergence from the merely Communist to what is called the Distributist ideal. It was, after all, only the further sub-division of my Notting Hill romance from the street to the house; but it was solidified by Belloc, my Irish friends and my French holidays. But I fancy the first spark flew when a Theosophist, at a drawing-room meeting, was droning on about the immorality of Christians who believed in the Forgiveness of Sins; since there was only Karma, by which we reap what we sow. “If that window is broken,” he said mournfully, “our host [Sir Richard Stapley] might pardon it; but the window will still be broken.” Whereupon a spectacled baldish little curate, quite unknown to me, jumped up and said, “But it isn’t wrong to break a window. It’s only wrong because it’s Stapley’s window; and if he doesn’t mind, why should anybody else?”
Conrad Noel, figlio di un poeta e nipote di un pari del regno, aveva tutti gli imprevedibili elementi dell’aristocratico eccentrico; quel genere di aristocratico eccentrico che così spesso figura come democratico particolarmente distruttivo. Quel gran signore, Cunninghame Graham, che conoscevo più superficialmente ma che rispettai sempre profondamente, era lo stesso tipo di ribelle intransigente; ma egli aveva una sorta di serietà scozzese simile alla serietà spagnola; mentre lo humour di Noel era metà inglese e metà irlandese, ma sempre soprattutto umoristico. Si dilettava, naturalmente, a scandalizzare la gente e a prenderla in giro. Ricordo come soleva dire, scuotendo il capo con un’aria di cupa concentrazione: «Ah, quanto poco la gente sa del lavoro nella vita di un ecclesiastico; che pretese su di lui! Che doveri disparati e stravaganti! Tutto il pomeriggio dietro le quinte del Butterfly Theatre, a chiacchierare con Poppy Pimpernel; tutta la sera a fare il giro delle osterie con Jack Bootle; ritorno al circolo dopo cena, eccetera». In realtà, egli occupava gran parte del suo tempo con cose forse ugualmente fantastiche ma più intellettuali. Aveva la passione di fiutare le sedi di incredibili o folli sette; e ne scrisse un divertente resoconto intitolato Byways of Belief. Nutriva un affetto speciale per un vecchio signore dai lunghi favoriti grigi, che viveva in periferia; il cui nome, a quanto pareva, era King Solomon David Jesus. Questo profeta non aveva paura di protestare, come un profeta deve, contro quelle che egli considerava le pompe e le vanità di questo mondo. Egli aprì il colloquio rimproverando freddamente Conrad Noel per aver mandato un biglietto da visita con l’iscrizione «Rev. Conrad Noel»; poiché tutti tali titoli ufficiali erano aboliti nella Nuova Dispensazione. Conrad insinuò con delicatezza, a propria difesa, che vi pareva essere qualcosa, nel chiamarsi Solomon David Jesus, che poteva sollevare problemi di identità piuttosto gravi e un confronto storico alquanto formidabile. E comunque, un vecchio signore che si faceva chiamare King difficilmente poteva esigere una così severa semplicità repubblicana. Tuttavia, il monarca spiegò che il suo titolo gli era stato conferito da una voce reale che parlava dal cielo; e il rev. Conrad ammise di non poter pretendere che il proprio biglietto da visita fosse stato scritto sotto dettatura.
A volte, invece che egli far visita alle Nuove Religioni, erano le Nuove Religioni a far visita a lui, il che era piuttosto più allarmante. Egli e sua moglie, una signora minuta assai deliziosa la cui compostezza era forse un poco ingannevole, erano usciti per una matinée e al ritorno trovarono dieci Duchobori che facevano merenda. I Duchobori, si può spiegare a chi non abbia avuto sì felici visitazioni, sono una setta di pacifisti russi e comunisti pratici, che credono nel vivere di reciproca ospitalità. È una curiosa e sconcertante circostanza, per inciso, che finché i Duchobori vivevano in Russia ed erano in dissidio con un’autorità straniera, si comportavano invariabilmente come una schiera di santi e secondo il più alto modello dei primi cristiani; ma quando passarono in Canada, e finirono sotto un’autorità britannica, furono stranamente demoralizzati, e degenerarono in fanatici pericolosi che andavano in giro a rubare cavalli dai carri e vacche dalle stalle; perché disapprovavano la cattività degli animali. Ad ogni modo, Conrad Noel, che di certo non li avrebbe stimati meno per aver sfidato l’impero russo o quello britannico, aveva incontrato un membro di questa setta da qualche parte; e suppongo che in qualche modo vago e cordiale lo avesse invitato a fargli visita un giorno o l’altro. Ed eccolo lì con altri nove suoi pari, che facevano sparire i muffin e i macaron; e spiegavano che sarebbero stati lietissimi di pagare per un pasto così abbondante e sontuoso; ma sfortunatamente non approvavano il denaro. «Se, tuttavia», spiegò il Cristiano Primitivo, «vi fosse una qualche piccola forma di servizio»—una qualche assistenza domestica che potessero offrire in cambio, sarebbero stati lieti di saldare così il debito. Allora una luce di battaglia si poté scorgere negli occhi della signora Conrad Noel, che procedette con toni pacati a elencar loro tutte le cose che senza dubbio le sarebbe piaciuto veder fatte; erano moltissime, più di quante ne possa rammentare; ma ho la generale impressione che portare il pianoforte a coda su per cinque piani fino al tetto, o trascinare il tavolo da biliardo all’altro capo del giardino, fossero tipici della categoria di compiti a cui i vacillanti e barcollanti Duchobori vennero indirizzati, da quella gentile ma vendicativa signora. C’è da temere che nessuno di loro tornò più alla casa di quel caritatevole socialista cristiano; salvo, in verità, un Duchoboro isolato, che si tracciò una via tutta sua; poiché la semplice fatica domestica con cui pagò il suo pasto consistette nell’entrare nello studio di Noel e alterarne il sermone; cancellandone interi passi e inserendo sentimenti di tendenza più inoppugnabilmente duchobora. Nel suo caso, sospetto che il signor Noel, così come la signora Noel, cominciassero a nutrire dubbi sull’ideale duchoboro.
Ma il signor Noel non perse certo mai la sua fede in ciò che si può chiamare l’ideale comunista russo; benché sarebbe stato stupito quanto chiunque altro se gli fosse stato detto allora delle sorti che attendevano il comunismo russo. Qui, tuttavia, mi occupo di lui soprattutto come esempio della mia preliminare, prevalente impressione di quanto stupidi fossero gli anticlericali e quanto relativamente più intelligenti fossero i chierici. Da questo tempo datano anche i primi deboli inizi della mia divergenza dall’ideale meramente comunista verso ciò che si chiama l’ideale distributista. Era, dopotutto, soltanto l’ulteriore suddivisione del mio romanzesco sogno di Notting Hill dalla strada alla casa; ma fu consolidato da Belloc, dai miei amici irlandesi e dalle mie vacanze francesi. Ma immagino che la prima scintilla scoccò quando un teosofo, a un ricevimento in salotto, blaterava sull’immoralità dei cristiani che credevano nel Perdono dei Peccati; poiché esisteva soltanto il Karma, per cui raccogliamo ciò che seminiamo. «Se quella finestra è rotta», disse mestamente, «il nostro ospite [Sir Richard Stapley] potrà perdonarlo; ma la finestra resterà pur sempre rotta». Al che un curato dagli occhiali e un po’ calvo, del tutto sconosciuto a me, saltò su e disse: «Ma non è male rompere una finestra. È male soltanto perché è la finestra di Stapley; e se a lui non importa, perché dovrebbe importare a chiunque altro?».
Anyhow, it was when I was staying with Conrad Noel, afterwards famous as the parson who flew the Red Flag from his church at Thaxted in Essex, that I happened to be dressing for dinner and made the (it seems to me) very excusable error of mistaking his black clerical trousers for my evening ones. I trust I violated no grave ecclesiastical law, relative to the unlawful assumption of priestly vestments; but Conrad Noel himself was always fairly casual in the matter of costume. The world thought him a very Bohemian sort of clergyman, as it now thinks him a very Bolshevist sort of clergyman. The world would be wiser if it realised that, in spite of this, he was and is a very unworldly sort of clergyman; and much too unworldly to be judged rightly by the world. I did not always agree with his attitude, and I do not now altogether agree with his politics; but I have always known that he glowed with conviction and the simplicity of the fighting spirit. But in those days his external eccentricity was more provocative than is a red rag to a bull or a red flag to a bully. He delighted in making the quaintest combinations of costume made up of the clerical, the artistic and the proletarian. He took great pleasure in appearing in correct clerical clothes, surmounted with a sort of hairy or furry cap, making him look like an aesthetic rat-catcher. I had the pleasure of walking with him, thus attired, right across the vast stretch of South London, starting from Blackfriars Bridge and going on till we saw the green hills beyond Croydon; a very interesting expedition too rarely undertaken by those from the richer side of the river. I also remember one occasion when I was walking away from some meeting with him and with Dr. Percy Dearmer, then chiefly famous as an authority on the history of ritual and of vestments. Dr. Dearmer was in the habit of walking about in a cassock and biretta which he had carefully reconstructed as being of exactly the right pattern for an Anglican or Anglo-Catholic priest; and he was humorously grieved when its strictly traditional and national character was misunderstood by the little boys in the street. Somebody would call out, “No Popery,” or “To hell with the Pope,” or some other sentiment of larger and more liberal religion. And Percy Dearmer would sternly stop them and say, “Are you aware that this is the precise costume in which Latimer went to the stake?”
Meanwhile my own costume, however calamitous, was the result rather of accident than design; but this was sometime later and my wife had already disguised me as far as possible in the large hat and cloak familiar to caricaturists. But it was also at a sufficiently early date in English history for frock-coats to be worn on formal occasions. I had taken off the cloak and retained the frock-coat and the wide hat; and I must have borne a more or less formless resemblance to a Boer missionary. Thus I walked innocently down the street, with the hairy cap of the aesthetic rat-catcher on one side and the ceremonial biretta and cassock of Bishop Latimer on the other. And Charles Masterman, who always wore conventional clothes in an unconventional manner, a top-hat on the back of his head and an umbrella flourished with derisive gestures, walked behind and pointed at the three of us as we unconsciously filled the pavement and cried aloud, “Could you see three backs like that anywhere in God’s creation?”
I mention this fringe of eccentricity, even of eccentricity in dress, upon the border of the Anglo-Catholic party in the Anglican Church, because it really had a great deal to do with the beginning of the process by which Bohemian journalists, like my brother and myself, were drawn towards the serious consideration of the theory of a Church. I was considerably influenced by Conrad Noel; and my brother, I think, even more so.
I have said very little of my brother so far, in spite of the great part he played in my boyhood and youth; and the omission has been due to anything in the world except oblivion. My brother was much too remarkable a person not to have a chapter to himself. And I have decided, not without thought, that he will be best presented at full length when the time comes to deal with his very vital effect on modern history, and the whole story of the campaign against political corruption. But it is relevant here to remark that he differed from me at the very beginning; and not least in beginning his questions at the beginning. I always retained a sort of lingering loyalty or vague sympathy with the traditions of the past; so that, even during the period when I practically believed in nothing, I believed in what some have called “the wish to believe.” But my brother at the beginning did not even wish to believe; or at least did not wish to admit that he wished to believe. He adopted the extreme attitude of antagonism, and almost of anarchism; largely, no doubt, out of a reaction and as a result of our interminable arguments, or rather argument. For we really devoted all our boyhood to one long argument, unfortunately interrupted by meal-times, by school-times, by work hours and many such irritating and irrelevant frivolities. But though he was ready at first to take up the cudgels for anarchism or atheism or anything, he had the sort of mind in which anarchism or atheism could survive anything except the society of anarchists and atheists. He had far too lucid and lively a mind not to be bored with materialism as maintained by materialists. This negative reaction against negation, however, might not have carried him far, if the positive end of the magnet had not begun to attract him; in the person of personalities like Conrad Noel. It was certainly through that eccentric cleric that my brother began to cease to be anything so barren as a mere anti-clerical. I remember that, when conventional people complained of Noel’s wild ways, or attributed to him worse things of which he certainly was not guilty, my brother Cecil answered them by quoting the words of the man healed of blindness in the Gospel: “Whether the man be a sinner or no, I know not; but this I know; that whereas I was blind, now I see.”
Ad ogni modo, fu mentre alloggiavo da Conrad Noel, in seguito famoso come il parroco che issò la Bandiera Rossa dalla sua chiesa a Thaxted, nell’Essex, che mi capitò di vestirmi per la cena e commisi l’errore (a me pare) assai scusabile di scambiare i suoi calzoni neri da ecclesiastico per i miei da sera. Confido di non aver violato alcuna grave legge ecclesiastica, relativa all’illecita assunzione delle vesti sacerdotali; ma Conrad Noel stesso era sempre piuttosto disinvolto in fatto di abbigliamento. Il mondo lo riteneva un ecclesiastico assai bohémien, come ora lo ritiene un ecclesiastico assai bolscevico. Il mondo sarebbe più saggio se comprendesse che, nonostante ciò, egli era ed è un ecclesiastico assai poco mondano; e troppo poco mondano per essere giudicato rettamente dal mondo. Non sempre concordavo col suo atteggiamento, e nemmeno ora concordo del tutto con la sua politica; ma ho sempre saputo che egli ardeva di convinzione e della semplicità dello spirito combattivo. Ma a quei tempi la sua eccentricità esteriore era più provocatoria di quanto sia un drappo rosso per un toro o una Bandiera rossa per un prepotente. Si dilettava a comporre le più bizzarre combinazioni di abbigliamento fatte di elementi clericali, artistici e proletari. Provava gran piacere ad apparire in corretti abiti clericali, sormontati da una sorta di berretto peloso o di pelliccia, che gli davano l’aria di un acchiappatopi estetizzante. Ebbi il piacere di camminare con lui, così agghindato, attraverso tutta la vasta distesa della Londra meridionale, partendo da Blackfriars Bridge e proseguendo finché scorgemmo le verdi colline oltre Croydon; una spedizione assai interessante troppo di rado intrapresa da chi viene dalla sponda più ricca del fiume. Ricordo anche un’occasione in cui mi allontanavo da qualche riunione con lui e col dottor Percy Dearmer, allora famoso soprattutto come autorità in materia di storia del rito e dei paramenti. Il dottor Dearmer aveva l’abitudine di andare in giro in tonaca e berretta che aveva accuratamente ricostruito come essendo esattamente del giusto modello per un sacerdote anglicano o anglo-cattolico; ed era comicamente afflitto quando il carattere strettamente tradizionale e nazionale di essa veniva frainteso dai monelli per strada. Qualcuno gridava: «Abbasso il papismo», o «Al diavolo il Papa», o qualche altro sentimento di più larga e liberale religione. E Percy Dearmer li fermava severamente e diceva: «Siete consapevoli che questo è precisamente il costume col quale Latimer salì al rogo?».
Nel frattempo il mio costume, per quanto calamitoso, era il risultato più del caso che del disegno; ma questo avvenne alquanto più tardi, quando mia moglie mi aveva già camuffato per quanto possibile nel grande cappello e nel mantello familiari ai caricaturisti. Ma era anche a una data abbastanza remota nella storia inglese perché le finanziere si portassero nelle occasioni formali. Mi ero tolto il mantello e avevo tenuto la finanziera e il largo cappello; e dovevo recare una più o meno informe somiglianza a un missionario boero. Così camminavo innocentemente per la strada, col peloso berretto dell’acchiappatopi estetizzante da un lato e la cerimoniale berretta e tonaca del vescovo Latimer dall’altro. E Charles Masterman, che indossava sempre abiti convenzionali in maniera anticonvenzionale, un cilindro sulla nuca e un ombrello brandito con gesti derisori, camminava dietro e ci additava tutti e tre mentre inconsapevolmente riempivamo il marciapiede e gridava a gran voce: «Si potrebbero mai vedere tre schiene come quelle in tutto il creato di Dio?».
Menziono questa frangia di eccentricità, perfino di eccentricità nel vestire, ai margini del partito anglo-cattolico nella Chiesa anglicana, perché ebbe davvero molto a che fare con l’inizio del processo per cui giornalisti bohémien, come mio fratello e me, furono attratti verso la seria considerazione della teoria di una Chiesa. Fui considerevolmente influenzato da Conrad Noel; e mio fratello, credo, ancor più.
Ho detto assai poco di mio fratello finora, nonostante la gran parte che ebbe nella mia fanciullezza e giovinezza; e l’omissione è stata dovuta a tutto al mondo tranne che all’oblio. Mio fratello era una persona troppo notevole per non avere un capitolo tutto per sé. E ho deciso, non senza riflessione, che sarà presentato meglio per esteso quando verrà il tempo di trattare del suo effetto assai vitale sulla storia moderna, e dell’intera vicenda della campagna contro la corruzione politica. Ma è pertinente qui rilevare che egli differiva da me fin dal principio; e non da ultimo nel cominciare le sue domande dal principio. Io conservai sempre una sorta di persistente lealtà o vaga simpatia verso le tradizioni del passato; sicché, perfino durante il periodo in cui praticamente non credevo in nulla, credevo in ciò che alcuni hanno chiamato «il desiderio di credere». Ma mio fratello, al principio, non desiderava nemmeno credere; o almeno non desiderava ammettere che desiderasse credere. Adottò l’atteggiamento estremo dell’antagonismo, e quasi dell’anarchismo; in gran parte, senza dubbio, per reazione e come risultato dei nostri interminabili litigi, o piuttosto litigio. Poiché dedicammo davvero tutta la nostra fanciullezza a un unico lungo litigio, sfortunatamente interrotto dai pasti, dalle ore di scuola, dalle ore di lavoro e da molte altre irritanti e irrilevanti frivolezze. Ma benché egli fosse dapprima pronto a impugnare le armi per l’anarchismo o l’ateismo o qualsiasi cosa, aveva quel genere di mente in cui l’anarchismo o l’ateismo potevano sopravvivere a tutto tranne che alla compagnia degli anarchici e degli atei. Aveva una mente troppo lucida e vivace per non annoiarsi del materialismo come sostenuto dai materialisti. Questa reazione negativa contro la negazione, tuttavia, forse non lo avrebbe portato lontano, se l’estremità positiva della calamita non avesse cominciato ad attrarlo; nella persona di personalità come Conrad Noel. Fu certamente attraverso quell’eccentrico chierico che mio fratello cominciò a cessare di essere qualcosa di tanto sterile come un mero anticlericale. Ricordo che, quando persone convenzionali si lamentavano dei modi selvaggi di Noel, o gli attribuivano cose peggiori delle quali certamente non era colpevole, mio fratello Cecil rispondeva loro citando le parole dell’uomo guarito dalla cecità nel Vangelo: «Se quest’uomo sia un peccatore o no, io non so; ma una cosa so: che ero cieco e ora ci vedo».
The old High Church or Anglo-Catholic group, of which Conrad Noel represented the most revolutionary extreme and Percy Dearmer (at least at that time) the most historical and liturgical, was in fact a very fine body of men, to which I for one shall always feel a gratitude like that of my brother and the blind man in Scripture. Its leader, in so far as it had a leader among the higher branches of the Anglican system, was that most fascinating and memorable man, Henry Scott Holland, who moved among younger men like one much younger than they; unforgettable with his humorous frog’s face and great stature and voice of bull-like bellowing; as if he were the frog that had conquered the fable and really turned into a bull. In an abstract intellectual sense, of course, their leader was rather Dr. Gore; but anyone who knew his peculiar merits would expect him to seem a thinner and more shadowy figure in the background. Sometimes all of them assembled on one platform, especially on the platforms of the Christian Social Union, which I joined at a later date; and I hope that all who survive of those old friends, from whom I have been sundered in thought but never in sympathy, will forgive me if I recall here any of the follies that enlivened our friendship. I remember when about five or six of us addressed the astonished town of Nottingham, on what we considered to be its Christian duty towards the modern problem of industrial poverty. I remember the faces of the citizens of that great city while I spoke; and I regret to say that I recorded my impressions in some verses, supposed to represent the impressions of a Nottingham tradesman; they became something of a jest in our little circle and I quote them for the pleasure of recalling those old exhilarating days.
The Christian Social Union here Was very much annoyed; It seems there is some duty Which we never should avoid, And so they sing a lot of hymns To help the Unemployed.
Upon a platform at the end The speakers were displayed And Bishop Hoskins stood in front And hit a bell and said That Mr. Carter was to pray, And Mr. Carter prayed.
Then Bishop Gore of Birmingham He stood upon one leg And said he would be happier If beggars didn’t beg, And that if they pinched his palace It would take him down a peg.
He said that Unemployment Was a horror and a blight, He said that charities produced Servility and spite, And stood upon the other leg And said it wasn’t right.
And then a man named Chesterton Got up and played with water, He seemed to say that principles Were nice and led to slaughter And how we always compromised And how we didn’t orter.
Then Canon Holland fired ahead Like fifty cannons firing, We tried to find out what he meant With infinite enquiring, But the way he made the windows jump We couldn’t help admiring.
He said the human soul should be Ashamed of every sham, He said a man should constantly Ejaculate “I am” …when he had done, I went outside And got into a tram.
I rather prided myself on these lines, merely because they are, in the main, a very accurate report of the speeches; or of what the speeches probably appeared to be to the audience. And I also disinter them from their dust-bin because they remind me of a characteristic expression of Scott Holland, which I have since found to be a characteristic problem of human life. There was one verse of my doggerel verses which I have omitted, because it would certainly be misunderstood, as Scott Holland himself was misunderstood. He was a man of great clearness and great fairness of mind, and what he said always meant something and was a result of the unpopular sport of thinking. But he was also a man with a natural surge of laughter within him, so that his broad strong mouth seemed always to be shut down on it in a grimace of restraint. I remember that on this occasion he was urging what is probably the best argument for State intervention, tending in the general direction of State Socialism, which was common in the Christian Social Union and pronounced in the definite and defiant Christian Socialists, like Conrad Noel. He said that the Commonwealth, the social authority, was worthy of being regarded in a positive and not merely in a negative light; that we ought to be able to trust the things it did, and not to think only of the things it punished us for doing. The politician should be more than the policeman; he should produce and construct and not merely punish. At this point his immense internal enjoyment of a joke bubbled to the surface and he said, waving his hand to the rigid and respectable Nottingham audience, “Punishment is an exceptional instrument. After all, it is only occasionally that you and I feel that tap on the shoulder, and that gruff recommendation to ‘come along quietly.’ It is not every day of our lives that we are put in the dock and sentenced to some term of imprisonment. Most of our relations to Government are peaceable and friendly. Why, I suppose that even in this room there are quite half a dozen people who have never been in jail at all.” A ghastly stare was fixed on all the faces of the audience; and I have ever since seen it in my own dreams; for it has constituted a considerable part of my own problem.
I have never understood, from that day to this, any more than he did, why a solid argument is any less solid because you make the illustrations as entertaining as you can. What Holland was saying was perfectly sensible and philosophical. It was that the State exists to provide lamp-posts and schools, as well as gibbets and jails. But I strongly suspect that many, who were sufficiently intelligent not to imagine that he was mad, did imagine that he was flippant. And I myself have made in the course of a less useful life the same curious discovery. If you say that two sheep added to two sheep make four sheep, your audience will accept it patiently—like sheep. But if you say it of two monkeys, or two kangaroos, or two sea-green griffins, people will refuse to believe that two and two make four. They seem to imagine that you must have made up the arithmetic, just as you have made up the illustration of the arithmetic. And though they would actually know that what you say is sense, if they thought about it sensibly, they cannot believe that anything decorated by an incidental joke can be sensible. Perhaps it explains why so many successful men are so dull—or why so many dull men are successful.
Il vecchio gruppo dell’Alta Chiesa o anglo-cattolico, di cui Conrad Noel rappresentava l’estremo più rivoluzionario e Percy Dearmer (almeno a quel tempo) il più storico e liturgico, era in effetti una davvero eletta schiera di uomini, verso la quale io per primo proverò sempre una gratitudine come quella di mio fratello e del cieco nelle Scritture. Il suo capo, in quanto aveva un capo tra i rami più alti del sistema anglicano, era quell’uomo affascinante e memorabile fra tutti, Henry Scott Holland, che si muoveva tra gli uomini più giovani come uno assai più giovane di loro; indimenticabile con la sua comica faccia da rana e la grande statura e la voce dai muggiti taurini; come se fosse la rana che aveva vinto la favola ed era davvero diventata un toro. In senso astrattamente intellettuale, naturalmente, il loro capo era piuttosto il dottor Gore; ma chiunque conoscesse i suoi peculiari meriti si aspetterebbe che egli apparisse una figura più esile e più evanescente sullo sfondo. Talora si radunavano tutti su un unico palco, specialmente sui palchi della Christian Social Union, alla quale aderii in data più tarda; e spero che tutti i superstiti di quei vecchi amici, dai quali mi sono separato nel pensiero ma mai nella simpatia, mi perdoneranno se rievoco qui qualcuna delle follie che ravvivarono la nostra amicizia. Ricordo quando cinque o sei di noi arringarono la sbalordita città di Nottingham, su quello che consideravamo essere il suo dovere cristiano verso il moderno problema della povertà industriale. Ricordo le facce dei cittadini di quella grande città mentre parlavo; e mi dispiace dire che registrai le mie impressioni in alcuni versi, che si supponevano rappresentare le impressioni di un bottegaio di Nottingham; divennero una sorta di burla nel nostro piccolo circolo e li cito per il piacere di rammentare quei vecchi giorni esilaranti.
La Christian Social Union qui Fu oltremodo contrariata; Pare vi sia un dovere Da non schivar giammai, E allora cantano un mucchio d’inni Per aiutare i Disoccupati.
Su un palco in fondo alla sala Gli oratori erano schierati E il vescovo Hoskins stava davanti E batté una campana e disse Che il signor Carter avrebbe pregato, E il signor Carter pregò.
Poi il vescovo Gore di Birmingham Si resse su una gamba E disse che sarebbe stato più felice Se i mendichi non mendicassero, E che se gli sgraffignavano il palazzo Ciò l’avrebbe ridimensionato.
Disse che la Disoccupazione Era un orrore e una piaga, Disse che le carità producevano Servilismo e livore, E si resse sull’altra gamba E disse che non era giusto.
E poi un tale di nome Chesterton Si alzò e giocò con l’acqua, Parve dire che i princìpi Eran belli e menavano al macello E come sempre transigessimo E come non dovremmo mica.
Poi il canonico Holland partì a raffica Come cinquanta cannoni al fuoco, Cercammo di capire che intendesse Con infinite domande, Ma il modo in cui faceva sobbalzare i vetri Non potemmo che ammirarlo.
Disse che l’anima umana dovrebbe Vergognarsi d’ogni finzione, Disse che l’uomo dovrebbe di continuo Esclamare «Io sono» …quand’ebbe finito, uscii fuori E salii su un tram.
Andavo piuttosto fiero di questi versi, semplicemente perché sono, nel complesso, un resoconto assai fedele dei discorsi; o di ciò che i discorsi probabilmente apparivano all’uditorio. E li dissotterro anche dalla loro pattumiera perché mi ricordano un’espressione caratteristica di Scott Holland, che da allora ho trovato essere un caratteristico problema della vita umana. C’era una strofa dei miei versi da poetastro che ho omesso, perché sarebbe certamente fraintesa, come Scott Holland stesso fu frainteso. Egli era un uomo di grande chiarezza e grande equanimità di mente, e ciò che diceva significava sempre qualcosa ed era il frutto dell’impopolare sport del pensare. Ma era anche un uomo con un naturale flutto di risa dentro di sé, sicché la sua ampia e forte bocca sembrava sempre serrarvisi sopra in una smorfia di contenimento. Ricordo che in quell’occasione egli perorava quello che è probabilmente il miglior argomento a favore dell’intervento dello Stato, tendente nella direzione generale del socialismo di Stato, che era comune nella Christian Social Union e pronunciato nei decisi e sfidanti socialisti cristiani, come Conrad Noel. Diceva che il Commonwealth, l’autorità sociale, era degno di essere considerato in una luce positiva e non meramente negativa; che dovremmo essere in grado di fidarci delle cose che esso fa, e non pensare soltanto alle cose per cui esso ci punisce. Il politico dovrebbe essere più del poliziotto; dovrebbe produrre e costruire e non meramente punire. A questo punto il suo immenso godimento interiore per una battuta gorgogliò in superficie ed egli disse, agitando la mano verso il rigido e rispettabile uditorio di Nottingham: «La punizione è uno strumento eccezionale. Dopotutto, è solo di rado che voi e io sentiamo quel colpetto sulla spalla, e quel burbero invito a “venir via senza far storie”. Non è ogni giorno della nostra vita che veniamo messi sul banco degli imputati e condannati a qualche periodo di reclusione. La maggior parte dei nostri rapporti col Governo sono pacifici e amichevoli. Perbacco, suppongo che perfino in questa sala vi siano ben una mezza dozzina di persone che non sono mai state affatto in prigione». Uno sguardo raccapricciato si fissò su tutte le facce dell’uditorio; e da allora l’ho sempre rivisto nei miei sogni; poiché ha costituito una parte considerevole del mio problema.
Non ho mai capito, da quel giorno a oggi, più di quanto lo capisse lui, perché un solido argomento sia meno solido perché rendi gli esempi tanto divertenti quanto puoi. Ciò che Holland diceva era perfettamente sensato e filosofico. Era che lo Stato esiste per fornire lampioni e scuole, così come forche e prigioni. Ma sospetto fortemente che molti, che erano abbastanza intelligenti da non immaginare che egli fosse pazzo, immaginarono invece che fosse frivolo. E io stesso ho fatto nel corso di una vita meno utile la stessa curiosa scoperta. Se dici che due pecore aggiunte a due pecore fanno quattro pecore, il tuo uditorio l’accetterà con pazienza—come pecore. Ma se lo dici di due scimmie, o due canguri, o due grifoni verdemare, la gente si rifiuterà di credere che due più due faccia quattro. Pare che si immaginino che tu debba aver inventato l’aritmetica, proprio come hai inventato l’esempio dell’aritmetica. E benché sappiano di fatto che ciò che dici è sensato, se ci riflettessero sensatamente, non riescono a credere che qualcosa adornato da un’occasionale battuta possa essere sensato. Forse ciò spiega perché tanti uomini di successo siano così ottusi—o perché tanti uomini ottusi abbiano successo.
But I have also dwelt for a moment on such a meeting and such a group, because I am only too glad, in the light of after events, to testify to the pleasure with which I recall it. When people of many different parties talked of all High Churchmen as high and dry, when they used to talk of the dehumanised detachment of Charles Gore or the despairing depression of Charles Masterman, I had every motive to remember much better and brighter things; and to leave some little record here of how uproariously encouraging was the pessimism of Masterman, how subtly sympathetic the detachment of Dr. Gore. Good friends and very gay companions. … 0 anima humana naturaliter Christiana, whither were you marching so gallantly that you could not find the natural way?
But I have been carried far ahead of my narrative by these memories of the Anglo-Catholic group, and all the names that naturally follow the mention of the first name of Noel. When Noel first appeared on the horizon of my brother and myself, my brother was frankly anti-religious and I had no religion except the very haziest religiosity. And it is necessary in this chapter to say something of the tendencies by which I shifted nearer and nearer to the orthodox side; and eventually found myself, as I have described, in the very heart of a clerical group of canons and curates. My first introduction, in Sydney Smith’s phrase, came through very wild curates. Conrad Noel might have been the incarnate fulfilment of Sydney Smith’s vision or fancy; and indeed it so happened that, in his case, while the wild curate was in every sense singular, the wild curates were also in the plural. My old friend the Rev. A. L. Lilley now a Canon of Hereford, was then the vicar of a parish in Paddington Green; and his large and genial sympathies expressed themselves in the marked eccentricity of his assistant clergy. For he was one of the two or three Broad Churchmen I have known who were actually broad. His curates were a group which we irreverently referred to at one time as a menagerie; one, I remember, was of gigantic stature with fierce grey hair, eyebrows and moustaches very like Mark Twain. Another was a Syrian and actually, I believe, a runaway monk from some monastery in the desert. The third was Conrad Noel. I have sometimes thought it must have been rather amusing to be a faithful parishioner of Paddington Green.
But the question here is of the intellectual approach, even to so eccentric a borderland of orthodoxy. And the reader must once more reconcile himself, with a groan, to some brief references to real beliefs, and the thing which some call theory, and I call thought. In the purely religious sense, I was brought up among people who were Unitarians and Universalists, but who were well aware that a great many people around them were becoming agnostics or even atheists. Indeed there were two tendencies in what was called the emancipation of faith from the creeds and dogmas of the past. The two tendencies were in flatly contrary directions; and it is thoroughly typical of that world that they were both called by the same name. Both were supposed to be liberal theology or the religion of all sensible men. But, in fact, one half of the sensible men were more and more arguing that, because God was in His heaven, all must be right with the world; with this world or with the next. The other half of them were specially bent on showing that it was very doubtful if there was any God in any heaven, and that it was so certain to the scientific eye that all is not right with the world, that it would be nearer the truth to say that all is wrong with the world. One of these movements of progress led into the glorious fairyland of George Macdonald, the other led into the stark and hollowed hills of Thomas Hardy. The one school was specially insisting that God must be supremely perfect if He exists; the other that, if He exists, He must be grossly imperfect. And by the time I passed from boyhood to manhood, the pessimistic doubt had considerably clouded the optimistic dogma.
Now I think the first thing that struck me as startling was exactly this; that these two schools, which were logically in contradiction, were practically in combination. The idealistic theists and the realistic atheists were allies—against what? It has taken me about two-thirds of my life to find out the answer to that question. But when I first noticed it, the question seemed quite unanswerable; and, what was queerer still, to the people themselves it did not seem even questionable. I myself had sat at the feet of that large-hearted and poetic orator, Stopford Brooke, and I long accepted the sort of optimistic theism that he taught; it was substantially the same as that which I had learnt since childhood under the glamorous mysticism of George Macdonald. It was full and substantial faith in the Fatherhood of God, and little could be said against it, even in theological theory, except that it rather ignored the free-will of man. Its Universalism was a sort of optimistic Calvinism. But, anyhow, that was my first faith, before anything that could really be called my first doubt. But what struck me as extraordinary, even at first, was that these optimists seemed to be in the same camp as the pessimists. To my simple mind, it seemed that there could be no connection except contradiction, between the man whose whole faith was in the Fatherhood of God, and the man who said there was no God or the man who said that God was no Father. I pointed out something of the sort, long afterwards, when liberal literary critics were supposed to class together the philosophies of Meredith and Hardy. It seemed to me obvious that Meredith maintains on the whole that Nature is to be trusted, and Hardy that Nature is not to be trusted. To my innocent mind, these two ideas seemed a little inconsistent. I had not yet discovered the higher synthesis which connects them. For the higher synthesis which connects them consists in wearing liberty ties and curiously shaped beards and hats and meeting in cultured clubs where they drink coffee, or (in darker and more disreputable dens) cocoa. That is the only connection there is between the ideas; but it took me a long time to find it out. These sceptical doctrinaires do not recognise each other by the doctrines. They recognise each other by the beard or the clothes, as the lower animals know each other by the fur or the smell.
Ma mi sono anche soffermato un istante su una tale riunione e un tale gruppo, perché sono fin troppo lieto, alla luce degli eventi successivi, di testimoniare il piacere con cui la rammento. Quando persone di molti diversi partiti parlavano di tutti gli uomini dell’Alta Chiesa come di gente altezzosa e arida, quando solevano parlare del disumanizzato distacco di Charles Gore o della disperante depressione di Charles Masterman, avevo ogni motivo di ricordare cose assai migliori e più luminose; e di lasciare qui qualche piccola testimonianza di quanto fragorosamente incoraggiante fosse il pessimismo di Masterman, quanto sottilmente comprensivo il distacco del dottor Gore. Buoni amici e compagni assai gioviali. … 0 anima humana naturaliter Christiana, verso dove marciavi così gagliardamente da non riuscire a trovare la via naturale?
Ma sono stato trascinato assai avanti rispetto alla mia narrazione da questi ricordi del gruppo anglo-cattolico, e da tutti i nomi che naturalmente seguono la menzione del primo nome, quello di Noel. Quando Noel apparve per la prima volta sull’orizzonte mio e di mio fratello, mio fratello era francamente antireligioso e io non avevo religione alcuna se non la più nebulosa religiosità. Ed è necessario in questo capitolo dire qualcosa delle tendenze per le quali mi spostai sempre più vicino al versante ortodosso; e alla fine mi ritrovai, come ho descritto, nel cuore stesso di un gruppo clericale di canonici e curati. La mia prima introduzione, per usare la frase di Sydney Smith, venne attraverso curati assai selvaggi. Conrad Noel avrebbe potuto essere l’incarnato compimento della visione o fantasia di Sydney Smith; e in effetti accadde che, nel suo caso, mentre il curato selvaggio era in ogni senso singolare, i curati selvaggi erano anche al plurale. Il mio vecchio amico, il rev. A. L. Lilley, ora canonico di Hereford, era allora il vicario di una parrocchia a Paddington Green; e le sue ampie e geniali simpatie si esprimevano nella marcata eccentricità del suo clero assistente. Poiché egli era uno dei due o tre uomini della Chiesa Larga che ho conosciuto ad essere davvero larghi. I suoi curati erano un gruppo cui ci riferivamo irriverentemente a un certo tempo come a un serraglio; uno, ricordo, era di statura gigantesca, con feroci capelli grigi, sopracciglia e baffi assai simili a Mark Twain. Un altro era un siriano e in effetti, credo, un monaco fuggito da qualche monastero nel deserto. Il terzo era Conrad Noel. Ho talvolta pensato che dovesse essere piuttosto divertente essere un fedele parrocchiano di Paddington Green.
Ma la questione qui è dell’approccio intellettuale, anche a una così eccentrica terra di confine dell’ortodossia. E il lettore deve ancora una volta rassegnarsi, con un gemito, a qualche breve accenno a fedi reali, e a quella cosa che alcuni chiamano teoria, e io chiamo pensiero. In senso puramente religioso, fui allevato tra persone che erano unitariane e universaliste, ma che erano ben consapevoli che moltissime persone attorno a loro stavano diventando agnostiche o perfino atee. In verità c’erano due tendenze in ciò che veniva chiamato l’emancipazione della fede dai credi e dai dogmi del passato. Le due tendenze erano in direzioni nettamente contrarie; ed è del tutto tipico di quel mondo che fossero entrambe chiamate con lo stesso nome. Entrambe si supponevano essere teologia liberale o la religione di tutti gli uomini di buon senso. Ma, in realtà, una metà degli uomini di buon senso andava sempre più sostenendo che, poiché Dio era nel Suo cielo, tutto doveva andar bene con il mondo; con questo mondo o con l’altro. L’altra metà di essi si applicava specialmente a mostrare che era assai dubbio se vi fosse un qualche Dio in un qualche cielo, e che era così certo all’occhio scientifico che tutto non va bene con il mondo, che sarebbe stato più vicino alla verità dire che tutto va male con il mondo. Uno di questi movimenti di progresso conduceva nel glorioso regno delle fate di George Macdonald, l’altro conduceva tra le brulle e incavate colline di Thomas Hardy. Una scuola insisteva specialmente che Dio doveva essere supremamente perfetto se esiste; l’altra che, se esiste, doveva essere grossolanamente imperfetto. E col volgere del tempo, quando passai dalla fanciullezza alla virilità, il pessimistico dubbio aveva considerevolmente offuscato l’ottimistico dogma.
Ora, credo che la prima cosa che mi colpì come sorprendente fosse esattamente questa; che queste due scuole, che erano logicamente in contraddizione, erano praticamente in combinazione. I teisti idealisti e gli atei realisti erano alleati—contro che cosa? Mi ci sono voluti circa due terzi della mia vita per trovare la risposta a quella domanda. Ma quando la notai per la prima volta, la domanda pareva del tutto senza risposta; e, cosa ancor più strana, alle persone stesse non pareva nemmeno degna di domanda. Io stesso ero stato ai piedi di quell’oratore magnanimo e poetico, Stopford Brooke, e a lungo accettai quella sorta di teismo ottimistico che egli insegnava; era sostanzialmente lo stesso di quello che avevo appreso fin dalla fanciullezza sotto l’affascinante misticismo di George Macdonald. Era una piena e sostanziale fede nella Paternità di Dio, e poco si poteva dire contro di essa, anche in teoria teologica, se non che ignorava piuttosto il libero arbitrio dell’uomo. Il suo universalismo era una sorta di calvinismo ottimistico. Ma, comunque, quella fu la mia prima fede, prima di qualsiasi cosa che si potesse davvero chiamare il mio primo dubbio. Ma ciò che mi colpì come straordinario, perfino sulle prime, fu che questi ottimisti sembravano stare nello stesso campo dei pessimisti. Alla mia mente semplice, pareva che non potesse esservi altra connessione che la contraddizione, tra l’uomo la cui intera fede era nella Paternità di Dio, e l’uomo che diceva che non c’era Dio o l’uomo che diceva che Dio non era affatto Padre. Feci notare qualcosa del genere, assai tempo dopo, quando ci si aspettava che i critici letterari liberali accomunassero le filosofie di Meredith e Hardy. Mi sembrava ovvio che Meredith sostenga nel complesso che alla Natura ci si debba affidare, e Hardy che alla Natura non ci si debba affidare. Alla mia mente innocente, queste due idee sembravano un po’ incoerenti. Non avevo ancora scoperto la superiore sintesi che le connette. Poiché la superiore sintesi che le connette consiste nel portare cravatte alla liberty e barbe e cappelli di curiosa foggia e nel riunirsi in circoli colti dove bevono caffè, o (in covi più oscuri e più malfamati) cacao. È l’unica connessione che vi sia tra le idee; ma mi ci volle un lungo tempo per scoprirlo. Questi scettici dottrinari non si riconoscono l’un l’altro dalle dottrine. Si riconoscono l’un l’altro dalla barba o dagli abiti, come gli animali inferiori si conoscono l’un l’altro dal pelo o dall’odore.
I suppose I have got a dogmatic mind. Anyhow, even when I did not believe in any of the things called dogmas, I assumed that people were sorted out into solid groups by the dogmas they believed or disbelieved. I supposed that the Theosophists all sat in the same hall because they all believed in Theosophy. I supposed the Theistic Church believed in Theism. I supposed that the atheists all combined because they disbelieved in Theism. I imagined that the Ethical Societies consisted entirely of people who believed in Ethics but not in theology or even religion. I have come to the conclusion that I was largely mistaken in this idea. I believe now that the congregations of these semi-secular chapels consist largely of one vast and vague sea of wandering doubters, with their wandering doubts, who may be found one Sunday seeking a solution from the Theists and another Sunday from the Theosophists. They may be scattered among many such chapels; they are only connected by the convention of unconventionality, which is connoted by “not going to church.” I will give two incidents as examples of what I mean; though they are separated by a long interval of years. In the very early days of which I am now speaking, before I ever dreamed of being myself attached to any formal system of faith, I used to wander about to many assemblies giving lectures, or what were politely called lectures. I may remark that my suspicion was confirmed, by the fact that I very often saw the same people in quite different congregations; especially a worried looking man with dark anxious eyes, and a very aged Jew with a long white beard and a smile carved immutably, like that of an Egyptian image.
On one occasion I had been lecturing to an Ethical Society, when I happened to see on the wall a portrait of Priestley, the great Unitarian of a hundred years ago. I remarked that it was a very fine engraving; and one of the faithful, to whom I was speaking, replied that it had probably been hung there because the place was quite recently a Unitarian chapel; I think he said only a few years before. I was considerably intrigued, knowing that the old Unitarians were as dogmatic as Moslems on the one point of the One God, and that the ethical group were as undogmatic as any agnostics upon that particular dogma. “That is very interesting,” I said. “May I ask whether the whole of your society abandoned Theism all at once and in a body?”
“Well, no,” he replied rather hazily, “I don’t fancy it was exactly like that. I rather think the fact was that our leaders wanted very much to have Dr. Stanton Coit as a preacher, and he wouldn’t come unless the thing was simply an Ethical Society.”
Of course I cannot answer for the accuracy of what the gentleman said, as I did not know him from Adam; but in any case my point here concerns the cloudy condition of the mind of the ordinary audiences, and not of the actual lecturers or leaders. Dr. Stanton Coit himself, for instance, had a perfectly clear idea of an ethic unsupported by theology. But, taking this typical member of the movement, there is something rather extraordinary about what had actually happened, or what he seriously supposed had actually happened. By this theory, God Almighty had been dropped out of the whole business, as a concession to Dr. Stanton Coit. It was generally felt, apparently, that it would be really rather churlish not to meet him on a little thing like that. Now it happened that, years afterwards, a friend of mine enquired after the fortunes of this particular Ethical Society, and was informed that its congregation was somewhat diminished. The reason given was that the distinguished ethical lecturer could hardly be expected to be so active as he had been in earlier days; and that in consequence a number of his followers had now “gone off to listen to Maude Royden.” Now Miss Maude Royden, whatever may be counted controversial in her position, certainly professes to be enough of an orthodox Christian to play the part of a loyal Anglican, and even of an Anglican parson. So that the truly astonishing history of this school of thought, if we regard it as a school of thought, was more or less as follows. They began by believing in the Creation but not the Incarnation. For the sake of Dr. Coit they ceased to believe in the Creation. And for the sake of Miss Royden they agreed to believe in the Creation and the Incarnation as well. The truth of the matter is, I imagine, that these particular people never did believe or disbelieve in anything. They liked to go and hear stimulating lecturers; and they had a vague preference, almost impossible to reduce to any definable thesis, for those lecturers who were supposed to be in some way heterodox and unconventional. And having since had longer and larger opportunities of watching the general drift of such people, and having seen the dark-eyed doubter and the patriarchal Jew in more and more motley and incongruous assemblies, I have come to the conclusion that there never were any large schools of thought, so separate and so static as I innocently imagined in my youth. I have been granted, as it were, a sort of general view or vision of all that field of negation and groping and curiosity. And I saw pretty much what it all really meant. There was no Theistic Church; there was no Theosophical Brotherhood; there were no Ethical Societies; there were no New Religions. But I saw Israel scattered on the hills as sheep that have not a shepherd; and I saw a large number of the sheep run about bleating eagerly in whatever neighbourhood it was supposed that a shepherd might be found.
Amid all this scattered thinking, sometimes not unfairly to be called scatter-brained thinking, I began to piece together the fragments of the old religious scheme; mainly by the various gaps that denoted its disappearance. And the more I saw of real human nature, the more I came to suspect that it was really rather bad for all these people that it had disappeared. Many of them held, and still hold, very noble and necessary truths in the social and secular area. But even these it seemed to me they held less firmly than they might have done, if there had been anything like a fundamental principle of morals and metaphysics to support them. Men who believed ardently in altruism were yet troubled by the necessity of believing with even more religious reverence in Darwinism, and even in the deductions from Darwinism about a ruthless struggle as the rule of life. Men who naturally accepted the moral equality of mankind yet did so, in a manner, shrinkingly, under the gigantic shadow of the Superman of Nietzsche and Shaw. Their hearts were in the right place; but their heads were emphatically in the wrong place, being generally poked or plunged into vast volumes of materialism and scepticism, crabbed, barren, servile and without any light of liberty or of hope.
Suppongo di avere una mente dogmatica. Ad ogni modo, anche quando non credevo in nessuna delle cose chiamate dogmi, davo per scontato che le persone si dividessero in gruppi compatti a seconda dei dogmi in cui credevano o non credevano. Supponevo che i teosofi sedessero tutti nella stessa sala perché credevano tutti nella Teosofia. Supponevo che la Chiesa Teista credesse nel Teismo. Supponevo che gli atei si unissero tutti perché non credevano nel Teismo. Immaginavo che le Società Etiche fossero composte interamente di persone che credevano nell’Etica ma non nella teologia né tantomeno nella religione. Sono giunto alla conclusione di essermi in gran parte sbagliato in questa idea. Ora credo che le congregazioni di queste cappelle semi-laiche consistano in gran parte di un solo vasto e vago mare di dubbiosi erranti, coi loro erranti dubbi, che una domenica li puoi trovare a cercare una soluzione presso i Teisti e un’altra domenica presso i Teosofi. Possono essere sparsi tra molte di tali cappelle; li unisce soltanto la convenzione dell’anticonvenzionalità, che è connotata dal «non andare in chiesa». Darò due episodi come esempi di ciò che intendo; benché siano separati da un lungo intervallo di anni. Nei primissimi giorni di cui ora parlo, prima ancora che sognassi di essere io stesso legato a un qualsiasi sistema formale di fede, solevo andarmene in giro a molte assemblee tenendo conferenze, o ciò che veniva cortesemente chiamato conferenze. Posso rilevare che il mio sospetto fu confermato dal fatto che assai spesso vedevo le stesse persone in congregazioni del tutto diverse; specialmente un uomo dall’aria preoccupata, con scuri occhi ansiosi, e un ebreo assai attempato con una lunga barba bianca e un sorriso scolpito immutabilmente, come quello di un’immagine egizia.
In un’occasione avevo tenuto una conferenza a una Società Etica, quando mi capitò di scorgere sulla parete un ritratto di Priestley, il grande unitariano di cent’anni fa. Osservai che era un’incisione assai bella; e uno dei fedeli, cui parlavo, replicò che probabilmente era stata appesa lì perché il locale era stato, fino a poco tempo prima, una cappella unitariana; credo dicesse solo pochi anni prima. Fui considerevolmente incuriosito, sapendo che i vecchi unitariani erano dogmatici come musulmani sull’unico punto dell’Unico Dio, e che il gruppo etico era indogmatico quanto qualsiasi agnostico su quel particolare dogma. «È molto interessante», dissi. «Posso chiedere se l’intera vostra società abbandonò il Teismo tutta in una volta e in blocco?»
«Be’, no», replicò piuttosto vagamente, «non credo fosse esattamente così. Piuttosto ho l’impressione che il fatto fosse che i nostri dirigenti desideravano moltissimo avere il dottor Stanton Coit come predicatore, ed egli non voleva venire a meno che la cosa non fosse semplicemente una Società Etica».
Naturalmente non posso garantire l’esattezza di ciò che il signore disse, poiché non lo conoscevo affatto; ma in ogni caso il mio punto qui riguarda la condizione nebulosa della mente degli uditori comuni, e non dei conferenzieri o dei dirigenti effettivi. Il dottor Stanton Coit stesso, per esempio, aveva un’idea perfettamente chiara di un’etica non sostenuta dalla teologia. Ma, prendendo questo tipico membro del movimento, c’è qualcosa di piuttosto straordinario in ciò che era realmente accaduto, o in ciò che egli seriamente supponeva fosse realmente accaduto. Secondo questa teoria, Dio Onnipotente era stato eliminato da tutta la faccenda, come concessione al dottor Stanton Coit. In generale si sentiva, a quanto pare, che sarebbe stato davvero piuttosto sgarbato non venirgli incontro su una piccola cosa come quella. Ora accadde che, anni dopo, un mio amico si informò delle sorti di questa particolare Società Etica, e fu informato che la sua congregazione si era alquanto assottigliata. La ragione addotta era che non ci si poteva certo aspettare che il distinto conferenziere etico fosse così attivo come lo era stato nei primi tempi; e che di conseguenza un certo numero dei suoi seguaci era ora «andato via ad ascoltare Maude Royden». Ora, Miss Maude Royden, qualunque cosa possa reputarsi controversa nella sua posizione, certamente professa di essere cristiana abbastanza ortodossa da fare la parte di una leale anglicana, e perfino di un parroco anglicano. Sicché la davvero sbalorditiva storia di questa scuola di pensiero, se la consideriamo una scuola di pensiero, fu più o meno come segue. Cominciarono col credere nella Creazione ma non nell’Incarnazione. Per amore del dottor Coit cessarono di credere nella Creazione. E per amore di Miss Royden acconsentirono a credere nella Creazione e anche nell’Incarnazione, così come pure. La verità della faccenda è, immagino, che queste particolari persone non credettero né non credettero mai in nulla. Amavano andare ad ascoltare conferenzieri stimolanti; e avevano una vaga preferenza, quasi impossibile da ridurre a una qualsiasi tesi definibile, per quei conferenzieri che si supponevano essere in qualche modo eterodossi e anticonvenzionali. E avendo da allora avuto più lunghe e più ampie occasioni di osservare la deriva generale di tali persone, e avendo visto il dubbioso dagli occhi scuri e l’ebreo patriarcale in assemblee sempre più variopinte e incongrue, sono giunto alla conclusione che non vi furono mai grandi scuole di pensiero, così separate e così statiche come innocentemente immaginavo in gioventù. Mi è stata concessa, per così dire, una sorta di veduta o visione d’insieme di tutto quel campo di negazione e di brancolamento e di curiosità. E vidi più o meno che cosa tutto ciò significasse davvero. Non c’era nessuna Chiesa Teista; non c’era nessuna Fratellanza Teosofica; non c’erano Società Etiche; non c’erano Nuove Religioni. Ma vidi Israele disperso sui monti come pecore che non hanno pastore; e vidi un gran numero di pecore correre qua e là belando avidamente in qualsiasi vicinanza si supponesse potersi trovare un pastore.
In mezzo a tutto questo pensiero sparso, talvolta non a torto definibile pensiero scervellato, cominciai a rimettere insieme i frammenti del vecchio schema religioso; principalmente per mezzo delle varie lacune che ne denotavano la scomparsa. E più vedevo la reale natura umana, più venivo a sospettare che fosse davvero piuttosto un male per tutte queste persone che essa fosse scomparsa. Molte di esse detenevano, e ancora detengono, verità assai nobili e necessarie nell’ambito sociale e secolare. Ma perfino queste, mi pareva, le detenevano meno saldamente di quanto avrebbero potuto, se ci fosse stato qualcosa come un principio fondamentale di morale e di metafisica a sostenerle. Uomini che credevano ardentemente nell’altruismo erano nondimeno turbati dalla necessità di credere con ancor più religiosa reverenza nel darwinismo, e perfino nelle deduzioni tratte dal darwinismo su una spietata lotta come regola della vita. Uomini che accettavano naturalmente l’uguaglianza morale del genere umano lo facevano nondimeno, in un certo modo, con riluttanza, sotto la gigantesca ombra del Superuomo di Nietzsche e di Shaw. I loro cuori erano al posto giusto; ma le loro teste erano decisamente al posto sbagliato, essendo generalmente cacciate o immerse in vasti volumi di materialismo e scetticismo, arcigni, sterili, servili e privi di ogni luce di libertà o di speranza.
I began to examine more exactly the general Christian theology which many execrated and few examined. I soon found that it did in fact correspond to many of these experiences of life; that even its paradoxes corresponded to the paradoxes of life. Long afterwards Father Waggett (to mention another very able man of the old Anglo-Catholic group), once said to me, as we stood on the Mount of Olives in view of Gethsemane and Aceldama, “Well, anyhow, it must be obvious to anybody that the doctrine of the Fall is the only cheerful view of human life.” It is indeed obvious to me; but the thought passed over me at the moment, that a very large proportion of that old world of sceptical sects and cliques, to which I had once belonged, would find it a much more puzzling paradox than the paradoxes of Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. I will not develop the argument here, which I have so often developed elsewhere; I merely mention it to suggest my general sense, even at this stage, that the old theological theory seemed more or less to fit into experience, while the new and negative theories did not fit into anything, least of all into each other. It was about this time that I had published some studies on contemporary writers, such as Kipling and Shaw and Wells; and feeling that each of them erred through an ultimate or religious error, I gave the book the title of Heretics. It was reviewed by Mr. G. S. Street, the very delightful essayist, who casually used the expression that he was not going to bother about his theology until I had really stated mine. With all the solemnity of youth, I accepted this as a challenge; and wrote an outline of my own reasons for believing that the Christian theory, as summarised in the Apostles’ Creed, would be found to be a better criticism of life than any of those that I had criticised. I called it Orthodoxy, but even at the time I was very much dissatisfied with the title. It sounded a thinnish sort of thing to be defending through thick and thin. Even then I fancy I had a dim foreshadowing that I should have to find some better name for it before I died. As it was, the only interesting effect of the title, or the book, that I ever heard of, occurred on the frontiers of Russia. There I believe the Censor, under the old Russian regime, destroyed the book without reading it. From its being called Orthodoxy, he naturally inferred that it must be a book on the Greek Church. And from its being a book on the Greek Church, he naturally inferred that it must be an attack on it.
But there did remain one rather vague virtue about the title, from my point of view; that it was provocative. And it is an exact test of that extraordinary modern society that it really was provocative. I had begun to discover that, in all that welter of inconsistent and incompatible heresies, the one and only really unpardonable heresy was orthodoxy. A serious defence of orthodoxy was far more startling to the English critic than a serious attack on orthodoxy was to the Russian censor. And through this experience I learned two very interesting things, which serve to divide all this part of my life into two distinct periods. Very nearly everybody, in the ordinary literary and journalistic world, began by taking it for granted that my faith in the Christian creed was a pose or a paradox. The more cynical supposed that it was only a stunt. The more generous and loyal warmly maintained that it was only a joke. It was not until long afterwards that the full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really thought the thing was true. And I have found, as I say, that this represents a real transition or border-line in the life of the apologists. Critics were almost entirely complimentary to what they were pleased to call my brilliant paradoxes; until they discovered that I really meant what I said. Since then they have been more combative; and I do not blame them.
I first made this discovery at a dinner-party, in connection with another controversy, which must be mentioned because it is relevant here. I think it was a dinner given by the staff of the Clarion, the important and popular Socialist paper of the period, then edited by Mr. Robert Blatchford; a veteran whom I pause to salute across the ages, hoping he will not count me less friendly if I recall these battles of the distant past. As I shall explain in a moment, I had just had a very pugnacious public argument with Mr. Blatchford, which, as I was then a comparatively young though relatively rising journalist, was naturally a landmark in my life. But I remember that there was, sitting next to me at this dinner, one of those very refined and rather academic gentlemen from Cambridge who seemed to form so considerable a section of the rugged stalwarts of Labour. There was a cloud on his brow, as if he were beginning to be puzzled about something; and he said suddenly, with abrupt civility, “Excuse my asking, Mr. Chesterton, of course I shall quite understand if you prefer not to answer, and I shan’t think any the worse of it, you know, even if it’s true. But I suppose I’m right in thinking you don’t really believe in those things you’re defending against Blatchford?” I informed him with adamantine gravity that I did most definitely believe in those things I was defending against Blatchford. His cold and refined face did not move a visible muscle; and yet I knew in some fashion it had completely altered. “Oh, you do,” he said, “I beg your pardon. Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know.” And he went on eating his (probably vegetarian) meal. But I was sure that for the rest of the evening, despite his calm, he felt as if he were sitting next to a fabulous griffin.
That this stage may be understood, it must be realised what the things I was defending against Blatchford were. It was not a question of some abstract theological thesis, like the definition of the Trinity or the dogmas of Election or Effectual Grace. I was not yet so far gone in orthodoxy as to be so theological as all that. What I was defending seemed to me a plain matter of ordinary human morals. Indeed it seemed to me to raise the question of the very possibility of any morals. It was the question of Responsibility, sometimes called the question of Free Will, which Mr. Blatchford had attacked in a series of vigorous and even violent proclamations of Determinism; all apparently founded on having read a little book or pamphlet by Professor Haeckel. The question had a great many amusing or arresting aspects; but the point of it in this place is what I have already suggested. It was not that I began by believing in supernormal things. It was that the unbelievers began by disbelieving even in normal things. It was the secularists who drove me to theological ethics, by themselves destroying any sane or rational possibility of secular ethics. I might myself have been a secularist, so long as it meant that I could be merely responsible to secular society. It was the Determinist who told me, at the top of his voice, that I could not be responsible at all. And as I rather like being treated as a responsible being, and not as a lunatic let out for the day, I began to look around for some spiritual asylum that was not merely a lunatic asylum.
Cominciai a esaminare più esattamente la generale teologia cristiana che molti esecravano e pochi esaminavano. Ben presto scoprii che essa corrispondeva di fatto a molte di queste esperienze della vita; che perfino i suoi paradossi corrispondevano ai paradossi della vita. Assai tempo dopo, padre Waggett (per menzionare un altro uomo assai valente del vecchio gruppo anglo-cattolico) mi disse una volta, mentre stavamo sul Monte degli Ulivi in vista del Getsemani e dell’Aceldama: «Be’, comunque, dev’essere ovvio a chiunque che la dottrina della Caduta è l’unica visione allegra della vita umana». È in effetti ovvio a me; ma in quel momento mi passò per la mente il pensiero che una assai larga porzione di quel vecchio mondo di sette e cricche scettiche, a cui un tempo ero appartenuto, lo troverebbe un paradosso assai più sconcertante dei paradossi di Oscar Wilde e di Bernard Shaw. Non svilupperò qui l’argomento, che ho così spesso sviluppato altrove; lo menziono soltanto per suggerire la mia generale sensazione, anche a questo stadio, che la vecchia teoria teologica sembrasse più o meno adattarsi all’esperienza, mentre le teorie nuove e negative non si adattavano a nulla, meno che mai l’una all’altra. Fu all’incirca in questo tempo che avevo pubblicato alcuni studi su scrittori contemporanei, come Kipling e Shaw e Wells; e sentendo che ciascuno di essi errava attraverso un errore ultimo o religioso, diedi al libro il titolo di Heretics. Fu recensito dal signor G. S. Street, il delizioso saggista, che casualmente usò l’espressione che non si sarebbe preoccupato della propria teologia finché io non avessi davvero esposto la mia. Con tutta la solennità della giovinezza, accettai questo come una sfida; e scrissi un abbozzo delle mie ragioni per credere che la teoria cristiana, come riassunta nel Credo degli Apostoli, si sarebbe rivelata una critica della vita migliore di qualsiasi di quelle che avevo criticato. Lo chiamai Orthodoxy, ma già al tempo ero assai insoddisfatto del titolo. Suonava come una cosuccia esile da difendere a spada tratta. Già allora, mi pare, ebbi un vago presentimento che avrei dovuto trovarle un nome migliore prima di morire. Così com’era, l’unico effetto interessante del titolo, o del libro, di cui abbia mai sentito parlare, si verificò alle frontiere della Russia. Là, credo, il Censore, sotto il vecchio regime russo, distrusse il libro senza leggerlo. Dal fatto che si chiamava Orthodoxy, dedusse naturalmente che dovesse essere un libro sulla Chiesa greca. E dal fatto che fosse un libro sulla Chiesa greca, dedusse naturalmente che dovesse essere un attacco a essa.
Ma rimaneva pur sempre una virtù piuttosto vaga in quel titolo, dal mio punto di vista; ed era che risultava provocatorio. Ed è una prova esatta di quella straordinaria società moderna che risultasse davvero provocatorio. Avevo cominciato a scoprire che, in tutto quel guazzabuglio di eresie incoerenti e incompatibili, l’unica e sola eresia davvero imperdonabile era l’ortodossia. Una seria difesa dell’ortodossia era assai più sorprendente per il critico inglese di quanto un serio attacco all’ortodossia lo fosse per il censore russo. E attraverso questa esperienza appresi due cose assai interessanti, che servono a dividere tutta questa parte della mia vita in due periodi distinti. Quasi tutti, nell’ordinario mondo letterario e giornalistico, cominciavano col dare per scontato che la mia fede nel credo cristiano fosse una posa o un paradosso. I più cinici supponevano che fosse soltanto un’esibizione a effetto. I più generosi e leali sostenevano con calore che fosse soltanto uno scherzo. Fu solo assai tempo dopo che l’intero orrore della verità esplose su di loro; la vergognosa verità che io ritenevo davvero che la cosa fosse vera. E ho riscontrato, come dico, che ciò rappresenta una reale transizione o linea di confine nella vita degli apologisti. I critici erano quasi interamente elogiativi verso quelli che si compiacevano di chiamare i miei brillanti paradossi; finché scoprirono che intendevo davvero ciò che dicevo. Da allora sono stati più combattivi; e non li biasimo.
Feci questa scoperta per la prima volta a una cena, in relazione a un’altra controversia, che va menzionata perché è qui pertinente. Credo fosse una cena offerta dalla redazione del Clarion, l’importante e popolare giornale socialista dell’epoca, allora diretto dal signor Robert Blatchford; un veterano che mi fermo a salutare attraverso i secoli, sperando che non mi consideri meno amico se rievoco queste battaglie del lontano passato. Come spiegherò tra un momento, avevo appena avuto una assai battagliera disputa pubblica col signor Blatchford, la quale, essendo io allora un giornalista comparativamente giovane per quanto relativamente emergente, fu naturalmente una pietra miliare nella mia vita. Ma ricordo che c’era, seduto accanto a me a questa cena, uno di quei signori assai raffinati e piuttosto accademici di Cambridge che sembravano formare una sezione così considerevole dei rudi e robusti campioni del Lavoro. C’era una nube sulla sua fronte, come se cominciasse a essere perplesso su qualcosa; e disse d’improvviso, con brusca cortesia: «Scusi se glielo chiedo, signor Chesterton, naturalmente capirò benissimo se preferisce non rispondere, e non ne penserò affatto peggio, sa, anche se fosse vero. Ma suppongo di aver ragione nel pensare che lei non creda davvero in quelle cose che sta difendendo contro Blatchford?». Lo informai con adamantina gravità che io credevo assai decisamente in quelle cose che difendevo contro Blatchford. Il suo volto freddo e raffinato non mosse un muscolo visibile; eppure sapevo che in qualche modo si era completamente alterato. «Oh, ci crede», disse, «le chiedo scusa. Grazie. È tutto ciò che volevo sapere». E continuò a mangiare il suo pasto (probabilmente vegetariano). Ma ero certo che per il resto della serata, malgrado la sua calma, si sentì come se fosse seduto accanto a un favoloso grifone.
Perché questo stadio possa essere compreso, si deve capire quali fossero le cose che difendevo contro Blatchford. Non era questione di qualche astratta tesi teologica, come la definizione della Trinità o i dogmi dell’Elezione o della Grazia Efficace. Non ero ancora così avanti nell’ortodossia da essere teologico fino a quel punto. Ciò che difendevo mi pareva una semplice questione di ordinaria morale umana. Anzi mi pareva sollevare la questione della possibilità stessa di una qualunque morale. Era la questione della Responsabilità, talvolta chiamata la questione del Libero Arbitrio, che il signor Blatchford aveva attaccato in una serie di vigorose e perfino violente proclamazioni di Determinismo; tutte apparentemente fondate sull’aver letto un libriccino o opuscolo del professor Haeckel. La questione aveva moltissimi aspetti divertenti o avvincenti; ma il suo punto, in questa sede, è quello che ho già suggerito. Non era che io cominciassi col credere in cose sovrannaturali. Era che i miscredenti cominciavano col non credere perfino in cose normali. Furono i laicisti a spingermi verso l’etica teologica, distruggendo essi stessi ogni sana o razionale possibilità di un’etica laica. Avrei potuto io stesso essere un laicista, finché ciò significava che potevo essere responsabile semplicemente verso la società laica. Fu il Determinista a dirmi, a squarciagola, che non potevo essere affatto responsabile. E poiché mi piace piuttosto essere trattato come un essere responsabile, e non come un pazzo lasciato libero per un giorno, cominciai a guardarmi attorno in cerca di qualche asilo spirituale che non fosse semplicemente un manicomio.
On that day, in short, I escaped from an error, which still entangles many better men than myself. There is still a notion that the agnostic can remain secure of this world, so long as he does not wish to be what is called “other-worldly.” He can be content with common sense about men and women, so long as he is not curious of mysteries about angels and archangels. It is not true. The questions of the sceptic strike direct at the heart of this our human life; they disturb this world, quite apart from the other world; and it is exactly common sense that they disturb most. There could not be a better example than this queer appearance, in my youth, of the determinist as a demagogue; shouting to a mob of millions that no man ought to be blamed for anything he did, because it was all heredity and environment. Logically, it would stop a man in the act of saying “Thank you” to somebody for passing the mustard. For how could he be praised for passing the mustard, if he could not be blamed for not passing the mustard? I know it can be maintained that fatalism makes no difference to the facts of our life. Some say that fatalists can still go on punishing or blaming. Some say (professing, with no little humour, to be humanitarian) that they can leave off blaming but still go on punishing. But if determinism made no difference, why should Blatchford thunder furiously from a pulpit about the difference it made? The explanation was to be found in Blatchford himself. He was a very normal man to have come by so abnormal a heresy; an old soldier with brown Italian eyes and a walrus moustache and full of the very sentiments that soldiers have and Socialists generally have not. He was a firm patriot and not a little of a Tory; certainly very much of a Protectionist. But this Determinism appealed to him through another very normal sentiment; the sentiment of undiluted compassion. He called his book of Determinist pamphlets a plea “for the Underdog.” And it was obvious that he thought throughout of the sort of poor and disreputable and often oppressed person who can really be called the underdog. To him, and to many other men of healthy but vague modern sentiment, the notion of a sinner really connected itself entirely with the notion of a drunkard or a thieving tramp or some sort of scallywag at war with society. In the grossly unjust social system we suffer, it is probable enough that many of these really are punished unjustly; that some ought not to be punished at all; that some, perhaps, are really not responsible at all. And Blatchford, seeing them driven to prison in droves, felt neither more nor less than a pity for the weak and the unfortunate; which was, at the worst, a slightly lopsided exaggeration of Christian charity. He was so anxious to forgive that he denied the need of forgiveness.
And I awaken from all these dreams of the past suddenly, and with something like a shout of laughter. For the next episode in my life was one of helping certain friends and reformers to fix the terrible truth called Responsibility, not on tramps or drunkards, but on the rulers of the State and the richest men in the Empire. I was trying to put a chain and collar of Responsibility, not on the Underdog, but on the Top-dog. And the next thing that I was to hear about Blatchford was that he also, bursting with indignation, was demanding justice, punishment, vengeance almost without pardon, upon other strong tyrants who had trampled on the weak; and was fiercely nailing the arrogant princes of Prussia with Responsibility for the invasion of Belgium. So do paper sophistries go up in a great fire.
Quel giorno, insomma, sfuggii a un errore che tuttora irretisce molti uomini migliori di me. Sopravvive ancora l’idea che l’agnostico possa restare padrone sicuro di questo mondo, purché non desideri essere ciò che si chiama «ultraterreno». Egli può accontentarsi del buon senso circa gli uomini e le donne, purché non si faccia curioso dei misteri intorno agli angeli e agli arcangeli. Non è vero. Le domande dello scettico colpiscono dritte al cuore di questa nostra vita umana; scompigliano questo mondo, indipendentemente dall’altro; ed è proprio il buon senso ciò che più di tutto scompigliano. Non vi potrebbe essere esempio migliore di quella strana apparizione, negli anni della mia giovinezza, del determinista fattosi demagogo, che urlava a una folla di milioni di uomini che nessuno dovrebbe essere biasimato per alcunché avesse fatto, poiché tutto era eredità e ambiente. Logicamente, ciò dovrebbe arrestare un uomo nell’atto di dire «Grazie» a qualcuno che gli ha passato la mostarda. Poiché come si potrebbe lodarlo per aver passato la mostarda, se non lo si potesse biasimare per non averla passata? So bene che si può sostenere che il fatalismo non muti nulla nei fatti della nostra vita. Alcuni dicono che i fatalisti possono continuare tranquillamente a punire o a biasimare. Altri dicono (professandosi, con non poco umorismo, umanitari) che possono smettere di biasimare ma continuare a punire. Ma se il determinismo non facesse alcuna differenza, perché mai Blatchford avrebbe dovuto tuonare furibondo da un pulpito circa la differenza che esso faceva? La spiegazione era da cercarsi in Blatchford stesso. Era un uomo assai normale per essere approdato a un’eresia tanto anomala; un vecchio soldato dagli occhi bruni all’italiana e i baffi da tricheco, colmo di quei medesimi sentimenti che i soldati hanno e che i socialisti in genere non hanno. Era un fermo patriota e non poco conservatore; certamente più che mai protezionista. Ma questo Determinismo lo attraeva attraverso un altro sentimento assai normale: il sentimento della compassione più pura. Chiamò il suo libro di opuscoli deterministici un’arringa «in favore dell’ultimo». Ed era evidente che egli pensava per tutto il tempo a quella sorta di persona povera, malfamata e spesso oppressa che si può davvero dire l’ultimo. Per lui, e per molti altri uomini di sentimenti moderni sani ma vaghi, la nozione di peccatore si collegava interamente alla nozione dell’ubriacone o del vagabondo ladruncolo o di qualche scapestrato in guerra con la società. Nel sistema sociale grossolanamente ingiusto in cui viviamo, è assai probabile che molti di costoro siano davvero puniti ingiustamente; che alcuni non dovrebbero essere puniti affatto; che alcuni, forse, non siano davvero responsabili di nulla. E Blatchford, vedendoli trascinati in prigione a frotte, non provava né più né meno che pietà per i deboli e gli sventurati; il che era, nel peggiore dei casi, un’esagerazione un po’ sbilenca della carità cristiana. Era così ansioso di perdonare che negava la necessità stessa del perdono.
E da tutti questi sogni del passato mi ridesto d’un tratto, e con qualcosa che somiglia a uno scoppio di risa. Poiché l’episodio successivo della mia vita fu quello di aiutare certi amici e riformatori a inchiodare la terribile verità chiamata Responsabilità, non ai vagabondi o agli ubriaconi, ma ai governanti dello Stato e agli uomini più ricchi dell’Impero. Cercavo di mettere una catena e un collare di Responsabilità non all’ultimo, ma al primo. E la cosa successiva che mi accadde di sentire su Blatchford fu che anch’egli, scoppiando d’indignazione, reclamava giustizia, castigo, vendetta quasi senza perdono, contro altri forti tiranni che avevano calpestato i deboli; e inchiodava ferocemente gli arroganti principi di Prussia con la Responsabilità dell’invasione del Belgio. Così i sofismi di carta se ne vanno in un gran incendio.
VIII
FIGURES IN FLEET STREET
The profound problem of how I ever managed to fall on my feet in Fleet Street is a mystery; at least it is still a mystery to me. It used to be said by critics that falling on my feet was only a preliminary to standing on my head. But in fact Fleet Street, not to mention my head, was a rather seasick and earthquaky sort of thing to stand on. On the whole, I think I owe my success (as the millionaires say) to having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the exact opposite. For what they all told me was that the secret of success in journalism was to study the particular journal and write what was suitable to it. And, partly by accident and ignorance and partly through the real rabid certainties of youth, I cannot remember that I ever wrote any article that was at all suitable to any paper.
On the contrary, I think I became a sort of comic success by contrast. I have a notion that the real advice I could give to a young journalist, now that I am myself an old journalist, is simply this: to write an article for the Sporting Times and another for the Church Times, and put them into the wrong envelopes. Then, if the article were accepted and were reasonably intelligent, all the sporting men would go about saying to each other, “Great mistake to suppose there isn’t a good case for us; really brainy fellows say so;” and all the clergymen would go about saying to each other, “Rattling good writing on some of our religious papers; very witty fellow.” This is perhaps a little faint and fantastic as a theory; but it is the only theory upon which I can explain my own undeserved survival in the journalistic squabble of the old Fleet Street. I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old Daily News and told them all about French cafés and Catholic cathedrals; and they loved it, because they had never heard of them before. I wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old Clarion and defended medieval theology and all the things their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit. What is really the matter, with almost every paper, is that it is much too full of things suitable to the paper. But in these later days of the solidification of journalism, like everything else, into trusts and monopolies, there seems to be even less likelihood of anyone repeating my rare and reckless and unscrupulous manoeuvre; of anyone waking up to find himself famous as the only funny man on the Methodist Monthly; or the only serious man on Cocktail Comics.
Anyhow, all will agree that I was an accident in Fleet Street. Some will say a fatal accident, such as is proclaimed on the placards of Fleet Street. But Fleet Street itself was full of such accidents; it might have been called the Street of Accident, as a man whom I am proud to have first met there afterwards called it the Street of Adventure. Philip Gibbs himself accentuated that intellectual incongruity which was the comedy of the place; he carried a curious air of being the right man in the wrong place. His fine falcon face, with its almost unearthly refinement, seemed set in a sort of fastidious despair about ever making it the right place. This was long before he gained his great distinctions as a war correspondent; but he dealt in the same detached way with the other great wars in the past. He had been studying the struggle between the great men of the French Revolution; and had concentrated on what seemed to me an unbalanced yet delicate detestation of Camille Desmoulins. He summoned him before a tribunal of earnest talk, in my presence; and all the time he was talking, I thought how like he looked to those high-minded, hatchet-faced, hard humanitarian idealists among the great revolutionists whom he criticised. David should have painted his profile. I begin with that impression of Gibbs precisely because his figure did seem so detached and cleancut against the background. But I myself was only the background; it was lightly alleged that I could by myself have constituted a back scene. In other words, I belonged to the old Bohemian life of Fleet Street; which has since been destroyed, not by the idealism of detachment, but by the materialism of machinery. A newspaper proprietor in later years assured me that it was a slander on journalism to tell all these tales about taverns and ragged pressmen and work and recreation coming at random at all hours of the night. “A newspaper office is now exactly like any other place of business,” he said with a radiant smile; and I agreed with a groan. The very name of Bohemia has faded from the map of London as it has faded from the map of Europe. I have never understood why the new diplomacy abandoned that old and noble national name, which was among the things that were not lost on Mohacs Field; but it would seem that in both cases the best things are lost in victory and not in defeat. At least I know that I should have been annoyed if, in order to gain with doubtful judgment another strip of territory, I had been suddenly asked to talk about England as West Saxony; and that is what has happened to the long epic of Serbia, now described as North Slavia. I remember when it was announced that Bohemia was to cease to exist, at the very moment when it came into existence. It was to be called Czechoslovakia; and I went about asking people in Fleet Street whether this change was to be applied to the metaphorical Bohemia of our own romantic youth. When the wild son disturbed the respectable household, was it to be said, “I wish Tom would get out of his Czechoslovakian ways,” or, when Fleet Street grew riotous, “I hate these rowdy Czechoslovakian parties.” But the question is merely fanciful; for there is very little left in Fleet Street that its worst enemies could call Czechoslovakian. The newspaper proprietor was perfectly right in his facts; journalism is now conducted like any other business. It is conducted as quietly, as soberly, as sensibly as the office of any successful moneylender or moderately fraudulent financier. To such persons, it will indeed seem idle if I recall that the old taverns in which men drank, or the old courts in which they starved, were often full of starving poets and drunken scholars; and all sorts of perverse personalities who sometimes even tried to tell the truth; men of the type of old Crosland, that queer cantankerous man, who hated so many things (including me) but had often justified his great farewell, in which he said bitterly that he had:
VIII
FIGURE DI FLEET STREET
Il profondo problema di come io sia mai riuscito a cadere in piedi in Fleet Street resta un mistero; almeno lo è ancora per me. I critici solevano dire che il cadere in piedi non era per me che il preludio al mettermi a testa in giù. Ma in verità Fleet Street, per non parlare della mia testa, era un appoggio piuttosto ondeggiante e sismico. Nel complesso, credo di dovere il mio successo (come dicono i milionari) all’aver ascoltato con rispetto e piuttosto con timidezza i consigli migliori, dati da tutti i migliori giornalisti che avevano conseguito il miglior tipo di successo nel giornalismo; e poi all’essermene andato a fare esattamente il contrario. Perché ciò che tutti mi dicevano era che il segreto del successo nel giornalismo stava nello studiare quella particolare testata e scrivere ciò che le si confaceva. E, in parte per caso e ignoranza e in parte per le vere e rabbiose certezze della giovinezza, non ricordo di aver mai scritto un solo articolo che fosse minimamente adatto a un qualsiasi giornale.
Al contrario, credo di essere diventato una specie di successo comico per contrasto. Ho l’impressione che il vero consiglio che potrei dare a un giovane giornalista, ora che io stesso sono un vecchio giornalista, sia semplicemente questo: scrivere un articolo per lo Sporting Times e un altro per il Church Times, e infilarli nelle buste sbagliate. Allora, se l’articolo fosse accettato e ragionevolmente intelligente, tutti gli sportivi andrebbero dicendo l’un l’altro: «Grande errore supporre che non ci sia una buona causa per noi; lo dicono davvero i cervelli fini»; e tutti i preti andrebbero dicendo l’un l’altro: «Scrittura magnifica su certi nostri giornali religiosi; un tale spiritosissimo». Questa forse è teoria un po’ fiacca e fantastica; ma è la sola teoria con cui io possa spiegare la mia immeritata sopravvivenza nella baruffa giornalistica della vecchia Fleet Street. Scrivevo su un organo anticonformista come il vecchio Daily News e raccontavo loro tutto dei caffè francesi e delle cattedrali cattoliche; e ne andavano matti, perché non ne avevano mai sentito parlare prima. Scrivevo su un robusto organo laburista come il vecchio Clarion e difendevo la teologia medievale e tutte le cose di cui i loro lettori non avevano mai sentito parlare; e i lettori non si curavano di me un briciolo. Ciò che davvero non va, in quasi ogni giornale, è che è troppo pieno di cose adatte al giornale. Ma in questi ultimi giorni della solidificazione del giornalismo, come di ogni altra cosa, in trust e monopoli, pare esserci ancor meno probabilità che qualcuno ripeta la mia rara e temeraria e spregiudicata manovra; che qualcuno si svegli famoso come l’unico uomo di spirito del Methodist Monthly; o l’unico uomo serio di Cocktail Comics.
Comunque sia, tutti converranno che io fui un incidente in Fleet Street. Alcuni diranno un incidente mortale, di quelli proclamati sui manifesti di Fleet Street. Ma Fleet Street stessa era piena di simili incidenti; la si sarebbe potuta chiamare la Via dell’Incidente, come un uomo che sono fiero di avervi incontrato per la prima volta la chiamò poi la Via dell’Avventura. Philip Gibbs stesso accentuava quella incongruità intellettuale che era la commedia del luogo; portava un curioso aspetto di essere l’uomo giusto nel posto sbagliato. Il suo bel volto di falco, con la sua raffinatezza quasi ultraterrena, pareva fissato in una sorta di schizzinosa disperazione che quel posto potesse mai diventare quello giusto. Ciò avveniva molto prima che egli conquistasse le sue grandi glorie come corrispondente di guerra; ma trattava allo stesso modo distaccato le altre grandi guerre del passato. Aveva studiato la lotta fra i grandi uomini della Rivoluzione francese; e si era concentrato su quella che a me pareva un’ingiusta ma delicata avversione per Camille Desmoulins. Lo convocò davanti a un tribunale di grave conversazione, alla mia presenza; e per tutto il tempo in cui parlava, io pensavo quanto egli somigliasse a quegli idealisti nobili di mente, dal volto affilato, dall’umanitarismo duro, fra i grandi rivoluzionari che criticava. David avrebbe dovuto dipingerne il profilo. Comincio da quell’impressione di Gibbs proprio perché la sua figura appariva tanto distaccata e netta contro lo sfondo. Ma io stesso ero soltanto lo sfondo; si insinuava scherzosamente che da solo avrei potuto costituire una scenografia di fondo. In altre parole, appartenevo alla vecchia vita bohémienne di Fleet Street; da allora distrutta, non dall’idealismo del distacco, ma dal materialismo delle macchine. Un editore di giornali, in anni più recenti, mi assicurò che era una calunnia sul giornalismo raccontare tutte quelle storie di taverne e di squattrinati uomini di penna e di lavoro e svago che venivano a caso a ogni ora della notte. «Una redazione ora è esattamente come qualunque altro luogo d’affari», disse con un sorriso radioso; e io convenni con un gemito. Il nome stesso di Boemia è svanito dalla carta di Londra come è svanito dalla carta d’Europa. Non ho mai capito perché la nuova diplomazia abbia abbandonato quel vecchio e nobile nome nazionale, che fu tra le cose non perdute sul campo di Mohács; ma parrebbe che in entrambi i casi le cose migliori si perdano nella vittoria e non nella sconfitta. Almeno so che mi sarei seccato se, per guadagnare con dubbio giudizio un’altra striscia di territorio, mi fosse stato d’improvviso chiesto di parlare dell’Inghilterra come del Wessex; ed è ciò che è accaduto alla lunga epopea della Serbia, ora descritta come Slavia del Nord. Ricordo quando fu annunciato che la Boemia avrebbe cessato di esistere, proprio nel momento in cui veniva all’esistenza. Doveva chiamarsi Cecoslovacchia; e io andavo domandando alla gente di Fleet Street se questo cambiamento andasse applicato anche alla Boemia metaforica della nostra romantica giovinezza. Quando il figlio scapestrato turbava la famiglia rispettabile, si sarebbe forse detto: «Vorrei che Tom la smettesse con questi modi cecoslovacchi», oppure, quando Fleet Street si faceva turbolenta: «Detesto queste chiassose feste cecoslovacche». Ma la questione è puramente fantasiosa; perché ben poco resta in Fleet Street che perfino i suoi peggiori nemici potrebbero definire cecoslovacco. L’editore aveva perfettamente ragione nei fatti; il giornalismo è ora condotto come qualunque altro affare. È condotto altrettanto quietamente, sobriamente, sensatamente quanto lo studio di un usuraio di successo o di un finanziere moderatamente truffaldino. A tali persone parrà davvero ozioso se io ricordo che le vecchie taverne in cui gli uomini bevevano, o le vecchie corti in cui morivano di fame, erano spesso piene di poeti affamati e di dotti ubriachi; e di ogni sorta di personalità perverse che talvolta cercavano perfino di dire la verità; uomini del tipo del vecchio Crosland, quello strano uomo litigioso, che odiava tante cose (me compreso) ma aveva spesso giustificato il suo grande commiato, in cui diceva amaramente di avere:
… trod the path to hell, But there were many things he might have sold And did not sell.
For one thing, it was always said of him that he nearly died of hunger in Fleet Street with a volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in his pocket.
A man of that impossible sort, of finer spiritual culture and, therefore, of less fame or success, was Johnston Stephen, who was, I am proud to say, my friend. He was of the great Scottish family, of Leslie Stephen and of “J.K.S.”; and he was quite as wise as the one and as witty as the other. But he had a certain distinction very difficult to define; the world with which he dealt simplified it by saying he was mad. I should prefer to say that he could not completely digest anything; he refused things of which he thoroughly approved at the last moment, with a movement like that of a bucking horse. Sometimes his objection was profound enough, and always illuminated by an idea; but he lacked the power of final adherence. He once made to me the very sensible remark, “The only little difficulty that I have about joining the Catholic Church is that I do not think I believe in God. All the rest of the Catholic system is so obviously right and so obviously superior to anything else, that I cannot imagine anyone having any doubt about it.” And I remember that he was grimly gratified when I told him, at a later stage of my own beliefs, that real Catholics are intelligent enough to have this difficulty; and that St. Thomas Aquinas practically begins his whole argument by saying, “Is there a God? Apparently not.” But, I added, it was my experience that entering into the system even socially brought an ever-increasing certitude upon the original question. For the rest, while a fierily patriotic Scotsman, he had too much of such sympathy to be popular with many Scots. I remember when he was asked whether the Church was not corrupt and crying out for the Reformation, he answered with disconcerting warmth, “Who can doubt it? How horrible must have been the corruption which could have tolerated for so long three Catholic priests like John Knox and John Calvin and Martin Luther.”
Somebody ought to have written a life of Stephen or collected his literary remains; which were left to vanish as journalistic remains. I once had a notion of doing it myself; it is one of the many duties I have neglected. There was an essay on Burns in my brother’s paper, the New Witness, which was so much better than most essays on Burns, or essays on anything, that it might have made a man’s name if the man had been on the make. He remains to me as a great monument of the futility of the present condition of fame, which is merely fashion. He had indeed violent freaks of temperament; but these did not in the old days extinguish a man like Swift or a man like Landor. If he is remembered in no better way, it is well that I should dedicate this passing note to his memory. He has long since discovered the answer to his only religious difficulty.
All these extremes were too extreme to be typical; the fine fanatic who said what he liked and died; the mere snob or sneak who said what he was told to say and lived, if you can call it living. But it is only fair to Fleet Street to say that there were some who kept their intellectual independence, and yet kept their connection with the working machine of journalism; mostly by having a wide range of variety in their work, and because monopoly was not yet so uniform as to prevent them having some choice of masters; even if it were already a choice of tyrants. Perhaps the most brilliant of these, who might without exaggeration be called the Queen of Fleet Street, was a lady with whom I have the great honour to be connected; I mean the wife of my brother Cecil. She has always managed to remain a freelance, or the Joan of Arc of a whole company of freelances, though there is one field especially in which her banner has now been displayed to all. She always had a hundred irons in the fire; though only one of her fires is now so big as to be a bonfire and a beacon. Everyone has heard of the Cecil Houses, in which homeless women find that real hospitality, human and humorous, which was incredibly absent from the previous priggish philanthropy; and nearly everyone has read about their origin, in her own astounding book which records her own astounding adventure. She went out without a penny to live among the penniless; and brought back our only authoritative account of such a life. But not everybody understands that flame of angry charity which resents the poor being pestered even more than their being neglected; hating the selfishness of the sweater, but hating more the spiritual pride peculiar to the spy. She has sympathy with Communists, as I have, and perhaps points of agreement I have not. But I know that she stands, first, for the privacy of the poor who are allowed no privacy. She fights after all, as I do, for the private property of those who have none.
It marked a sort of sublimation of the Fleet Street spirit in my sister-in-law that, within healthy limits, she not only could do everything, but she would do anything. Her work was patch-work of the wildest and most bizarre description; and she was almost continuously in a state of hilarious irony in contemplation of its contrast. She would turn easily from a direct and demagogic, though quite tragically sincere, appeal in a Sunday paper against official oppression of poor mothers to an almost cynical modern criticism of the most sophisticated modern plays. She would finish a hard controversial comment on the Marconi Case, full of facts and figures, for the Eye-Witness, and lightly turn to the next chapter in a shamelessly melodramatic and Victorian serial, full of innocent heroines and infamous villains, for “Fireside Romances,” or “Wedding Bells.” It was of her that the story was told that, having driven whole teams of plotters and counter-plotters successfully through a serious Scotch newspaper, she was pursuing one of the side-plots for a few chapters, when she received a telegram from the editor, “You have left your hero and heroine tied up in a cavern under the Thames for a week, and they are not married.”
… calcato il sentiero dell’inferno, Ma vi erano molte cose che avrebbe potuto vendere E non vendé.
Tanto per dirne una, si diceva sempre di lui che per poco non fosse morto di fame in Fleet Street con in tasca un volume dei Sonetti di Shakespeare.
Un uomo di quell’impossibile specie, di più fine cultura spirituale e, perciò, di minor fama o successo, era Johnston Stephen, il quale, sono fiero di dirlo, fu mio amico. Apparteneva alla grande famiglia scozzese, quella di Leslie Stephen e di «J.K.S.»; ed era saggio come l’uno e arguto come l’altro. Ma aveva una certa distinzione assai difficile da definire; il mondo con cui aveva a che fare la semplificava dicendo che era pazzo. Preferirei dire che non riusciva a digerire completamente nulla; rifiutava all’ultimo momento cose che pure approvava a fondo, con un movimento simile a quello di un cavallo che scarta. Talvolta la sua obiezione era abbastanza profonda, e sempre illuminata da un’idea; ma gli mancava la forza dell’adesione finale. Mi fece una volta l’osservazione assai sensata: «La sola piccola difficoltà che ho circa l’entrare nella Chiesa cattolica è che non credo di credere in Dio. Tutto il resto del sistema cattolico è così evidentemente giusto e così evidentemente superiore a ogni altra cosa, che non riesco a immaginare come qualcuno possa averne alcun dubbio». E ricordo che egli fu cupamente compiaciuto quando gli dissi, a uno stadio più avanzato delle mie proprie credenze, che i veri cattolici sono abbastanza intelligenti da avere questa difficoltà; e che san Tommaso d’Aquino praticamente comincia tutto il suo argomento dicendo: «C’è un Dio? A quanto pare no». Ma, aggiunsi, era mia esperienza che l’entrare nel sistema anche solo socialmente portasse una certezza sempre crescente sulla questione originaria. Per il resto, pur essendo scozzese focosamente patriottico, aveva troppo di tale simpatia per essere popolare fra molti Scozzesi. Ricordo che, interrogato se la Chiesa non fosse corrotta e non reclamasse a gran voce la Riforma, rispose con sconcertante calore: «Chi può dubitarne? Quanto orribile dev’essere stata la corruzione che poté tollerare per tanto tempo tre preti cattolici come John Knox e John Calvin e Martin Lutero».
Qualcuno avrebbe dovuto scrivere una vita di Stephen o raccogliere i suoi resti letterari; che furono lasciati svanire come resti giornalistici. Ebbi una volta l’idea di farlo io stesso; è uno dei molti doveri che ho trascurato. C’era un saggio su Burns nel giornale di mio fratello, il New Witness, tanto migliore della maggior parte dei saggi su Burns, o dei saggi su qualsiasi cosa, che avrebbe potuto fare il nome di un uomo, se quell’uomo fosse stato uomo d’arrivismo. Egli resta per me un grande monumento della futilità della presente condizione della fama, che non è che moda. Aveva davvero violenti capricci di temperamento; ma questi, ai vecchi tempi, non spegnevano un uomo come Swift o un uomo come Landor. Se non è ricordato in miglior modo, è bene che io dedichi questa nota di passaggio alla sua memoria. Egli ha da tempo scoperto la risposta alla sua sola difficoltà religiosa.
Tutti questi estremi erano troppo estremi per essere tipici; il bel fanatico che diceva ciò che gli piaceva e moriva; il mero snob o vigliacco che diceva ciò che gli veniva ordinato di dire e viveva, se così si può chiamare il vivere. Ma è giusto rendere a Fleet Street il merito di dire che vi furono alcuni che conservarono la loro indipendenza intellettuale, e insieme mantennero il loro legame con la macchina operante del giornalismo; per lo più avendo un’ampia varietà nel loro lavoro, e perché il monopolio non era ancora tanto uniforme da impedire loro una certa scelta di padroni; anche se già era una scelta di tiranni. Forse la più brillante di costoro, che senza esagerazione si potrebbe chiamare la Regina di Fleet Street, era una signora con cui ho il grande onore di essere imparentato; intendo la moglie di mio fratello Cecil. È sempre riuscita a restare una battitrice libera, o la Giovanna d’Arco di un’intera compagnia di battitori liberi, benché vi sia un campo in particolare in cui ora il suo vessillo è stato spiegato agli occhi di tutti. Ha sempre avuto cento ferri sul fuoco; benché ora soltanto uno dei suoi fuochi sia tanto grande da essere un falò e un faro. Tutti hanno sentito parlare delle Case Cecil, in cui donne senza tetto trovano quella vera ospitalità, umana e umoristica, che era incredibilmente assente dalla precedente filantropia pedante; e quasi tutti hanno letto della loro origine, nel suo stesso libro sbalorditivo che registra la sua stessa sbalorditiva avventura. Uscì senza un soldo per vivere fra i senza soldo; e riportò l’unico nostro resoconto autorevole di una vita simile. Ma non tutti comprendono quella fiamma di sdegnata carità che si risente del fatto che i poveri vengano importunati ancor più che trascurati; odiando l’egoismo dello sfruttatore, ma odiando di più la superbia spirituale propria della spia. Ella prova simpatia per i comunisti, come me, e forse ha punti d’accordo che io non ho. Ma so che sta, prima di tutto, per la privatezza dei poveri, ai quali non è concessa alcuna privatezza. Ella combatte, in fin dei conti, come me, per la proprietà privata di coloro che non ne hanno.
Segnava una sorta di sublimazione dello spirito di Fleet Street nella mia cognata il fatto che, entro sani limiti, ella non solo sapeva far tutto, ma faceva qualsiasi cosa. Il suo lavoro era un rappezzo della più selvaggia e bizzarra descrizione; ed ella era quasi di continuo in uno stato di ilare ironia nella contemplazione del suo contrasto. Passava con disinvoltura da un diretto e demagogico, benché tragicamente sincero, appello su un giornale della domenica contro l’oppressione ufficiale delle povere madri a una critica quasi cinica e modernissima delle più sofisticate opere teatrali moderne. Terminava un duro commento polemico sul Caso Marconi, pieno di fatti e cifre, per l’Eye-Witness, e passava con leggerezza al capitolo successivo di un romanzo a puntate spudoratamente melodrammatico e vittoriano, pieno di eroine innocenti e di infami furfanti, per «Fireside Romances» o «Wedding Bells». Fu di lei che si raccontò la storia che, avendo condotto con successo intere squadre di cospiratori e controcospiratori attraverso un serio giornale scozzese, stava seguendo una delle trame secondarie per qualche capitolo, quando ricevette un telegramma dal direttore: «Avete lasciato il vostro eroe e la vostra eroina legati in una caverna sotto il Tamigi per una settimana, e non sono sposati».
It was in connection with this last line of journalistic adventure that an incident occurred of greater public, indeed of a certain historic importance. It is not only a landmark in the history of the law, but it throws a lurid light on that curious lawlessness which, in many modern matters, seems to be the principal effect of law. My sister-in-law was contributing to a Sunday paper in serial form one of these gravely, not to say brazenly, romantic romances. In this case something brazen, in the sense of something theatrical and even pantomimic, was perfectly appropriate to the theme, for the villain on whom the tale revolved was represented as a theatrical producer on a colossal scale like that of Cochran or Reinhardt. He was represented as doing various unscrupulous things, as is the humble duty of a bad man in what is only meant to be a good story; but not otherwise of any extraordinary depravity, and even adorned with something of the magnanimity suitable to melodrama. I fear I have forgotten his name; perhaps, as the sequel will prove, it is just as well. But let us suppose, for the sake of argument or narrative, that his name in the story was Arthur Mandeville. Now it so happened that there floated about somewhere in the great dust-cloud of atoms drifting round theatrical circles and occasionally or indirectly connected with theatrical or semi-theatrical enterprises, utterly unknown to anybody connected with the serial or the Sunday paper, a private individual whose name actually was Arthur Mandeville. He was not even an actor in any sense of an actor in action; he was certainly not a manager in any ordinary sense of having any theatre to manage; he was no more in any position remotely resembling that of the man in the story than he was the Sultan or the President of the United States. But he was a man who had once, in a series of other small enterprises, paid salaries to some small company of performers and given some small show somewhere. This man brought an action for heavy damages against the paper, on the ground of a malicious and vindictive blasting of his private reputation; and he won it.
The extraordinary thing was that nobody, from first to last, pretended that there had been any attack upon this man at all. The judge, in giving his judgment in the man’s favour, upon the law of the matter, repeatedly declared that it had been proved up to the hilt that the lady who wrote the story had never even heard of the gentleman who she was supposed to have pursued with her envenomed darts. But the judge was none the less convinced that, as the law stood, the two coincidences of the name and of some shadowy and temporary point of contact with a similar profession, were enough to constitute a case of libel. A considerable section of the literary world awoke to this state of affairs in a condition of not unnatural alarm. It looked as if the trade of the novelist might well be classed among the dangerous trades, if he could not casually call the drunken sailor by the name of Jack Robinson, without some danger of being fined and sold up by all the Jack Robinsons who may happen to be sailing, or to have sailed, all the seas of the world. The ancient question of what should be done with the drunken sailor, if he invariably took a fancy to avenging himself legally upon anybody who should say “Jack Robinson,” gave rise to some considerable literary and journalistic discussion at the time.
I remember, in the course of the controversy, that I suggested that we should have to fall back on some alternative to names, such as numbers, in describing the ringing repartees leading up to the duel in which the subtle and crafty 7991 died upon the sword of the too-impetuous 3893; or the vows breathed by the passionate lips of 771 in the ear of 707. But another way of evading the difficulty, to which I was much more attached, was that of equipping all the characters with names so extraordinary, that it was practically impossible that they could be the real names of any real people anywhere; and by way of illustration I wrote a moving love-scene between Bunchusa Blutterspangle and Splitcat Chintzibobs. Fortunately, for general journalistic convenience, my proposals were not accepted; and a much more practical proposal, invented by my sister-in-law, was carried out with complete success. She republished the whole story in book form; and before doing so went round to a number of leading literary men of the day, especially those she knew best, and obtained their permission to use their names for all the characters in the book; retaining her own name, as a graceful acknowledgment, as the name of the original villain. Anyone curious enough to look up that curiosity of literature, will find the most famous persons figuring on every other page in the humblest or most improbable capacities; a dear old stage-door keeper of the name of Bernard Shaw, a cabman known to his comrades in the cab-shelter as Barry Pain, and many others whom I forget. Some little time afterwards, I think, this extraordinary condition of the law was altered, in a typically English manner; that is, not by anything so logical and pedantic as a new law, but simply by another judge saying that the law meant the exact opposite of what the first judge had said it meant. But this queer little affair has some relevance to more real problems that arose, when we found ourselves more seriously engaged in the same strange field of modern British legalism.
There is no Law of Libel. That is why everybody is so much afraid of it. That is why it is so tremendously and tragically and comically typical of a certain spirit that now fills all our social life and institutions; a spirit at once ingenious and evasive. Strange as it will sound, this is the English way of maintaining a Terror. The Latins, when they do it, do it by rigidity; but we actually do it by laxity. In plain words, we increase the terror of law, by adding to it all the terrors of lawlessness. The machine is felt to be dangerous, not so much because it strikes by rule, as because it strikes at random. Or, at any rate, so far as any opponent looking for logical protection from it can calculate, it strikes at random. This is more true of almost all our laws than of any other laws in Christendom. But even lawyers would almost admit that it has come to be very like the truth about the law of libel. Some definitions of libel are so strict that nobody could really apply them; other parallel definitions are so loose that nobody could imagine to whom they could apply. The result is that libel, if nothing else, has become a mere weapon to crush any criticism of the powers that now rule the State.
Fu in connessione con quest’ultima linea di avventura giornalistica che avvenne un incidente di più vasta rilevanza pubblica, anzi di una certa importanza storica. È non solo una pietra miliare nella storia del diritto, ma getta una luce sinistra su quella curiosa illegalità che, in molte faccende moderne, pare essere l’effetto principale della legge. Mia cognata stava fornendo a un giornale della domenica, a puntate, uno di quei romanzi gravemente, per non dire sfacciatamente, romantici. In questo caso qualcosa di sfacciato, nel senso di qualcosa di teatrale e perfino pantomimico, era perfettamente appropriato al tema, poiché il malvagio su cui ruotava la vicenda era rappresentato come un impresario teatrale su scala colossale, alla Cochran o alla Reinhardt. Era rappresentato mentre compiva varie azioni prive di scrupoli, come è l’umile dovere di un cattivo in ciò che vuole essere solo una buona storia; ma non altrimenti di alcuna straordinaria depravazione, e perfino adorno di quella magnanimità adatta al melodramma. Temo di averne dimenticato il nome; forse, come il seguito proverà, è altrettanto bene. Ma supponiamo, per amor d’argomento o di narrazione, che il suo nome nella storia fosse Arthur Mandeville. Ora avvenne che vagasse in qualche punto della grande nube di polvere di atomi alla deriva attorno agli ambienti teatrali e occasionalmente o indirettamente connessi con imprese teatrali o semiteatrali, del tutto ignoto a chiunque avesse a che fare col romanzo o col giornale della domenica, un privato individuo il cui nome era realmente Arthur Mandeville. Non era neppure un attore in alcun senso di attore in azione; non era certo un impresario in alcun senso ordinario dell’avere un teatro da dirigere; non era in alcuna posizione lontanamente somigliante a quella dell’uomo della storia più di quanto lo fosse il Sultano o il Presidente degli Stati Uniti. Ma era un uomo che una volta, in una serie di altre piccole imprese, aveva pagato stipendi a una piccola compagnia di attori e dato uno spettacolino da qualche parte. Costui intentò un’azione per gravi danni contro il giornale, sulla base di una maliziosa e vendicativa distruzione della sua reputazione privata; e la vinse.
La cosa straordinaria fu che nessuno, dal primo all’ultimo, pretese che vi fosse stato un qualche attacco contro quest’uomo. Il giudice, nel dare la sua sentenza a favore dell’uomo, quanto al diritto della cosa, ripetutamente dichiarò che era stato provato fino in fondo che la signora che aveva scritto la storia non aveva mai neppure sentito nominare il gentiluomo che si supponeva ella avesse perseguitato coi suoi dardi avvelenati. Ma il giudice era nondimeno convinto che, per come stava la legge, le due coincidenze del nome e di un vago e temporaneo punto di contatto con una professione simile bastavano a costituire un caso di diffamazione. Una parte considerevole del mondo letterario si destò a questo stato di cose in una condizione di non innaturale allarme. Pareva che il mestiere del romanziere potesse bene essere annoverato fra i mestieri pericolosi, se egli non poteva chiamare a caso l’ubriaco marinaio col nome di Gianni Pinco, senza qualche pericolo di essere multato e mandato in rovina da tutti i Gianni Pinco che per caso si trovassero a navigare, o avessero navigato, tutti i mari del mondo. L’antica questione di che cosa fare dell’ubriaco marinaio, se egli invariabilmente si mettesse in testa di vendicarsi legalmente su chiunque dicesse «Gianni Pinco», diede origine a una considerevole discussione letteraria e giornalistica in quel tempo.
Ricordo che, nel corso della polemica, suggerii che avremmo dovuto ripiegare su qualche alternativa ai nomi, come i numeri, nel descrivere le squillanti battute che conducono al duello in cui il sottile e astuto 7991 morì sulla spada del troppo impetuoso 3893; o i voti sussurrati dalle labbra appassionate del 771 all’orecchio del 707. Ma un altro modo di eludere la difficoltà, cui io ero assai più affezionato, era quello di dotare tutti i personaggi di nomi così straordinari da rendere praticamente impossibile che potessero essere i veri nomi di persone reali in qualsiasi luogo; e a mo’ d’illustrazione scrissi una commovente scena d’amore fra Bunchusa Blutterspangle e Splitcat Chintzibobs. Per fortuna, a generale comodità giornalistica, le mie proposte non furono accettate; e una proposta assai più pratica, inventata da mia cognata, fu attuata con completo successo. Ella ripubblicò l’intera storia in forma di libro; e prima di farlo si recò da un certo numero di eminenti uomini di lettere dell’epoca, specialmente quelli che conosceva meglio, e ottenne il loro permesso di usare i loro nomi per tutti i personaggi del libro; conservando il proprio nome, come garbato riconoscimento, come nome del malvagio originale. Chiunque abbastanza curioso da andare a cercare quella curiosità letteraria troverà le persone più famose figurare a pagine alterne nelle capacità più umili o improbabili; un caro vecchio custode della porta di teatro col nome di Bernard Shaw, un cocchiere noto ai suoi compagni al rifugio delle carrozze come Barry Pain, e molti altri che dimentico. Qualche tempo dopo, credo, questa straordinaria condizione della legge fu mutata, in modo tipicamente inglese; cioè, non per mezzo di qualcosa di così logico e pedantesco come una nuova legge, ma semplicemente perché un altro giudice disse che la legge significava esattamente il contrario di ciò che il primo giudice aveva detto che significasse. Ma questa strana faccenduola ha una certa rilevanza per problemi più reali che sorsero, quando ci trovammo più seriamente impegnati nello stesso strano campo del legalismo britannico moderno.
Non esiste una Legge sulla Diffamazione. Ecco perché tutti ne hanno tanta paura. Ecco perché è così tremendamente e tragicamente e comicamente tipica di un certo spirito che ora riempie tutta la nostra vita sociale e le nostre istituzioni; uno spirito insieme ingegnoso ed evasivo. Per strano che suoni, questo è il modo inglese di mantenere un Terrore. I Latini, quando lo fanno, lo fanno con la rigidità; ma noi lo facciamo di fatto con la lassità. In parole povere, aumentiamo il terrore della legge, aggiungendovi tutti i terrori dell’illegalità. La macchina è sentita come pericolosa, non tanto perché colpisce secondo regola, quanto perché colpisce a caso. O, in ogni caso, per quanto un avversario in cerca di protezione logica possa calcolare, essa colpisce a caso. Questo è più vero di quasi tutte le nostre leggi che di qualsiasi altra legge della cristianità. Ma perfino i giuristi ammetterebbero quasi che è giunta a somigliare assai alla verità sulla legge della diffamazione. Alcune definizioni di diffamazione sono così severe che nessuno potrebbe davvero applicarle; altre definizioni parallele sono così lasche che nessuno potrebbe immaginare a chi potrebbero applicarsi. Il risultato è che la diffamazione, se non altro, è diventata una mera arma per schiacciare qualsiasi critica ai poteri che ora reggono lo Stato.
All this must be kept in mind, when we come to more crucial and exciting events in connection with the Eyewitness; I only mention this incident here to indicate the lively manner in which the lady in question conducted the endless comedy of Fleet Street. In connection with the paper above mentioned, of which my brother was first the sub-editor and then the editor, there were a hundred such anecdotes and amusing episodes. I fancy I can trace the lady’s hand, as well as the editor’s, in one of the most admirably absurd correspondences I have ever seen in the columns of journalism. It all began, if I remember right, with my brother writing something about the meeting between H. G. Wells and Booker Washington, the famous Negro publicist in America, in which some doubt was thrown on how far Mr. Wells understood the difficulties of Mr. Washington, and by inference those of the White South in which he worked. This view was enforced and exaggerated in a letter dated from Bexley, which warned everybody of the real dangers of racial admixture and intermarriage; it was signed “White Man.” This produced a fiery letter from Mr. Wells, humorously headed, “The White Man of Bexley,” as if the man were a sort of monster. Mr. Wells said he did not know what life was like “among the pure whites of Bexley,” but that elsewhere meeting people did not always mean marrying them; “The etiquette is calmer.” Then, I think, a real Negro intervened in the debate about his nature and destiny; and signed his letter, “Black Man.” Then came a more detached query, I should guess from some Brahmin or Parsee student at some college, pointing out that the racial problem was not confined to the races of Africa; and asking what view was taken of intermarriage with the races of Asia. He signed his letter “Brown Man.” Finally, there appeared a letter, of which I remember almost every word; for it was short and simple and touching in its appeal to larger and more tolerant ideals. It ran, I think, as follows:
“Sir, May I express my regret that you should continue a correspondence which causes considerable pain to many innocent persons who, by no fault of their own, but by the iron laws of nature, inherit a complexion uncommon among their fellow-creatures and attractive only to the elite. Surely we can forget all these differences; and, whatever our race or colour, work hand in hand for the broadening of the brotherhood of humanity. Yours faithfully, Mauve Man with Green Spots.”
This correspondence then ceased.
There were indeed other correspondences which seemed as if they would never cease. To few correspondents was given such power as that of the Mauve Man to paralyse all others with a sense that it was impossible to say or do any more. Some of these controversies are referred to in other connections in this book; some of them, like my own intermittent controversy with Mr. Bernard Shaw, have been going on at intervals for the greater part of our lives. But the controversy to which my sister-in-law was most deeply and warmly committed, as being connected with the work that has since made her so deservedly famous, was the protection of the homes of the poor, especially against an interference more insulting than indifference: the great uniting indignation of our otherwise often diverse group.
She was married to my brother just before he went to the War, in a little Roman Catholic church off Fleet Street; for he was already of that communion. He was twice invalided home; he volunteered three times for the Front and the third time met his death. In another chapter I shall deal with him more individually, and especially with that rarer sort of courage which he showed in politics, under instant threats of imprisonment and ruin. While in the trenches he wrote an excellent History of America and a bacchanalian ballade addressed to his fellow-soldiers, and having the refrain, “It was in Fleet Street that I learnt to drink.” Even his Bohemian loyalty to the legend of the Street of Adventure would hardly have stretched itself to saying, “It was in Fleet Street that I learnt to think.” For indeed he learnt to think in the nursery; and he was one of those who carry a sort of innocence of intellectual intensity through all things in life, whether they are in Fleet Street or at the Front. And my thoughts go back to poor Stephen and many noble madmen I knew, who had that quality, when I recall those lines one of our friends wrote about the Fanatic, or the man who wanted to keep his word; “That great word that every man gave God before his life began;” and who also, it will be remembered, “Had two witnesses to swear he kept it once in Berkeley Square; where hardly anything survives.” For though my brother was the most good-humoured person I ever knew, and could live in good fellowship with absolutely anybody, not only the merely dirty but the really vulgar, what was really deepest in him was a steep and even staggering obstinacy.
He kept his word as none but he Could keep it; and as did not we, And round him while he kept his word Today’s diseased and faithless herd, A moment loud, a moment strong, But foul for ever, rolled along.
Tutto ciò va tenuto a mente, quando giungeremo a eventi più cruciali ed eccitanti in connessione con l’Eyewitness; menziono soltanto questo incidente qui per indicare la vivace maniera in cui la signora in questione conduceva l’infinita commedia di Fleet Street. In connessione col giornale sopra menzionato, di cui mio fratello fu prima vicedirettore e poi direttore, vi furono cento aneddoti simili ed episodi divertenti. Mi pare di poter rintracciare la mano della signora, non meno bene di quella del direttore, in una delle corrispondenze più mirabilmente assurde che io abbia mai visto sulle colonne del giornalismo. Tutto cominciò, se ben ricordo, con mio fratello che scriveva qualcosa sull’incontro fra H. G. Wells e Booker Washington, il famoso pubblicista negro d’America, in cui si gettava qualche dubbio su quanto il signor Wells comprendesse le difficoltà del signor Washington, e per implicazione quelle del Sud bianco in cui egli lavorava. Questa opinione fu rafforzata ed esagerata in una lettera datata da Bexley, che avvertiva tutti dei reali pericoli della commistione razziale e dei matrimoni misti; era firmata «Uomo Bianco». Ciò produsse una focosa lettera del signor Wells, umoristicamente intitolata «L’Uomo Bianco di Bexley», come se l’uomo fosse una sorta di mostro. Il signor Wells disse di non sapere com’era la vita «fra i bianchi puri di Bexley», ma che altrove incontrare la gente non significava sempre sposarla; «L’etichetta è più calma». Poi, credo, un vero negro intervenne nel dibattito sulla sua natura e il suo destino; e firmò la sua lettera «Uomo Nero». Poi venne una domanda più distaccata, immagino da qualche studente bramino o parsi in qualche college, che faceva notare come il problema razziale non fosse confinato alle razze dell’Africa; e chiedeva quale opinione si avesse dei matrimoni misti con le razze dell’Asia. Firmò la sua lettera «Uomo Bruno». Infine, apparve una lettera, di cui ricordo quasi ogni parola; poiché era breve e semplice e commovente nel suo appello a ideali più ampi e tolleranti. Diceva, credo, così:
«Signore, Posso io esprimere il mio rammarico che voi continuiate una corrispondenza che causa considerevole dolore a molte innocenti persone che, per nessuna colpa loro, ma per le ferree leggi della natura, ereditano una carnagione non comune fra i loro simili e attraente soltanto per l’élite. Sicuramente possiamo dimenticare tutte queste differenze; e, quale che sia la nostra razza o il nostro colore, lavorare mano nella mano per l’allargamento della fratellanza dell’umanità. Vostro devotissimo, Uomo Malva con Macchie Verdi.»
Questa corrispondenza allora cessò.
Vi furono in verità altre corrispondenze che parevano non voler mai cessare. A pochi corrispondenti fu dato un tale potere quale quello dell’Uomo Malva di paralizzare tutti gli altri con la sensazione che fosse impossibile dire o fare alcunché di più. Alcune di queste controversie sono richiamate in altre connessioni in questo libro; alcune di esse, come la mia intermittente controversia col signor Bernard Shaw, sono andate avanti a intervalli per la maggior parte della nostra vita. Ma la controversia cui mia cognata fu più profondamente e calorosamente impegnata, essendo connessa col lavoro che l’ha poi resa così meritatamente famosa, era la protezione delle case dei poveri, specialmente contro un’interferenza più oltraggiosa dell’indifferenza: il grande sdegno unificante del nostro gruppo altrimenti spesso disparato.
Ella sposò mio fratello poco prima che egli andasse alla Guerra, in una piccola chiesa cattolica romana presso Fleet Street; poiché egli apparteneva già a quella comunione. Fu due volte rimandato a casa ferito; si offrì volontario tre volte per il fronte e la terza volta trovò la sua morte. In un altro capitolo mi occuperò di lui più individualmente, e specialmente di quel più raro tipo di coraggio che egli mostrò in politica, sotto immediate minacce di carcere e di rovina. Mentre era in trincea scrisse un’eccellente Storia d’America e una ballata bacchica indirizzata ai suoi commilitoni, col ritornello: «Fu in Fleet Street che imparai a bere». Perfino la sua bohémienne lealtà alla leggenda della Via dell’Avventura difficilmente si sarebbe spinta fino a dire: «Fu in Fleet Street che imparai a pensare». Poiché in verità egli imparò a pensare nella stanza dei bambini; ed era uno di coloro che portano una sorta di innocenza d’intensità intellettuale attraverso tutte le cose della vita, siano esse in Fleet Street o al fronte. E i miei pensieri ritornano al povero Stephen e ai molti nobili folli che conobbi, i quali avevano quella qualità, quando rammento quei versi che uno dei nostri amici scrisse sul Fanatico, ovvero l’uomo che voleva mantenere la parola; «Quella grande parola che ogni uomo diede a Dio prima che la sua vita cominciasse»; e il quale anche, si ricorderà, «Aveva due testimoni pronti a giurare che la mantenne una volta a Berkeley Square; dove quasi nulla sopravvive». Poiché, benché mio fratello fosse la persona più bonaria che io abbia mai conosciuto, e potesse vivere in buona compagnia con assolutamente chiunque, non solo con i meramente sporchi ma con i davvero volgari, ciò che era davvero più profondo in lui era una ripida e perfino sconcertante ostinazione.
Mantenne la parola come nessuno tranne lui Poteva mantenerla; e come noi non facemmo, E intorno a lui mentre manteneva la parola L’odierno gregge malato e senza fede, Un momento chiassoso, un momento forte, Ma per sempre immondo, rotolava avanti.
IX
THE CASE AGAINST CORRUPTION
My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end; for I am sure that he argued energetically with the soldiers among whom he died, in the last glory of the Great War. It is reported of me that when I was told that I possessed a brother, my first thought went to my own interminable taste for reciting verses, and that I said, “That’s all right; now I shall always have an audience.” If I did say this, I was in error. My brother was by no means disposed to be merely an audience; and frequently forced the function of an audience upon me. More frequently still, perhaps, it was a case of there being simultaneously two orators and no audience. We argued throughout our boyhood and youth until we became the pest of our whole social circle. We shouted at each other across the table, on the subject of Parnell or Puritanism or Charles the First’s head, until our nearest and dearest fled at our approach, and we had a desert around us. And though it is not a matter of undiluted pleasure to recall having been so horrible a nuisance, I am rather glad in other ways that we did so early thrash out our own thoughts on almost all the subjects in the world. I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarrelled.
Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument. Anyhow, our argument was never interrupted until it began to reach its conclusion in the proper form; which is conviction. I do not say that at any particular moment either of us would have admitted being in error; but as a matter of fact, it was through that incessant process of disagreement that we came at last to agree. He began as a more mutinous sort of Pagan, a special enemy of the Puritan, a defender of Bohemian enjoyments, sociable but entirely secular. I began with more disposition to defend in a vague way the Victorian idealism, and even to say a word for Puritan religion, chiefly from a dim subconscious sympathy with any sort or religion. But in fact, by a process of elimination, we came more and more to think that the same sort of non-Puritan religion was the more plausible and promising; and to end eventually, but quite independently, in the same Church. I think it was a good thing that we had tested every link of logic by mutual hammering. I will even add something that sounds too like a boast; though it is meant to be a tribute. I will say that the man who had got used to arguing with Cecil Chesterton has never since had any reason to fear an argument with anybody.
The editor of the New Statesman, an acute critic of quite a different school from ours, said to me a little while ago, “Your brother was the very finest debater I have ever heard or heard of”, and such editors, of course, had known all the politicians and popular speakers. The qualities of his speaking were those of logic and lucidity combined with a sort of violent and startling courage. Indeed, he illustrated what I think is a common error on the subject of logic. The logician is too often presented as a prig; as a thin and frigid person of a pallid complexion. Both in experience and history, I have generally found that it was very full-blooded and warm-hearted people who had that gift of clear and connected thought. Charles Fox was like that; Danton was like that; and Cecil Chesterton was certainly like that. He had all that I have described as the Chesterton simplicity and steadiness in his personal relations; his affections were particularly fixed and tranquil; but in battle he had a sort of bull-necked pugnacity and intolerance. He did not seem to wish to live and leave a fallacy alive; he certainly could not leave a fallacy alone. The development of his political ideas was for a time decidedly divergent from my own. When I went to work with the Pro-Boers of the Daily News, and generally upheld the Liberal cause, though rather more romantically than many Liberals, he gravitated to a sort of practical Tory Democracy, which was more and more permeated by the Socialism of Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw. He eventually became an active and effective member of the Fabian Executive. But what was much more important, he had within him a living and most menacing sort of intolerance; a hatred of the real corruptions and hypocrisies of modern politics and an extraordinary idea of telling the truth.
I have already indicated that I myself, though I believed in Liberalism, was finding it dimly difficult to believe in Liberals. It would be truer, perhaps, to say that I was finding it difficult to believe in politics; because the reality seemed almost unreal, as compared with the reputation or the report. I could give twenty instances to indicate what I mean; but they would be no more than indications, because the doubt itself was doubtful. I remember going to a great Liberal club, and walking about in a large crowded room, somewhere at the end of which a bald gentleman with a beard was reading something from a manuscript in a low voice. It was hardly unreasonable that we did not listen to him, because we could not in any case have heard; but I think a very large number of us did not even see him. We shifted and shunted about and collided with each other; I met various friends of mine and exchanged a few words; Bentley and Belloc and Hammond and the rest. We talked in an ordinary fashion; it is possible, though not certain, that one or other of us asked carelessly what was supposed to be happening in the other corner of the large hall. Then we drifted away together, talking about important things, or things which seemed to us important.
Next morning I saw across the front of my Liberal paper in gigantic headlines the phrase: “Lord Spencer Unfurls the Banner.” Under this were other remarks, also in large letters, about how he had blown the trumpet for Free Trade and how the blast would ring through England and rally all the Free-Traders. It did appear, on careful examination, that the inaudible remarks which the old gentleman had read from the manuscript were concerned with economic arguments for Free Trade; and very excellent arguments too, for all I know. But the contrast between what that orator was to the people who heard him, and what he was to the thousands of newspaper readers who did not hear him, was so huge a hiatus and disproportion that I do not think I ever quite got over it. I knew henceforward what was meant, or what might be meant, by a Scene in the House, or a Challenge from the Platform, or any of those sensational events which take place in the newspapers and nowhere else.
IX
L’ACCUSA CONTRO LA CORRUZIONE
Mio fratello, Cecil Edward Chesterton, nacque quando io avevo circa cinque anni; e, dopo una breve pausa, cominciò a discutere. Continuò a discutere fino alla fine; poiché sono certo che discusse energicamente con i soldati fra i quali morì, nell’ultima gloria della Grande Guerra. Si racconta di me che, quando mi fu detto che avevo un fratello, il mio primo pensiero corse al mio interminabile gusto di recitare versi, e che dissi: «Va benissimo; ora avrò sempre un pubblico». Se davvero lo dissi, ero in errore. Mio fratello non era affatto disposto a essere semplicemente un pubblico; e frequentemente imponeva a me la funzione di pubblico. Più frequentemente ancora, forse, era il caso che vi fossero simultaneamente due oratori e nessun pubblico. Discutemmo per tutta la nostra fanciullezza e giovinezza finché non diventammo la peste dell’intero nostro giro sociale. Ci gridavamo l’un l’altro attraverso la tavola, sul tema di Parnell o del Puritanesimo o della testa di Carlo I, finché i nostri più cari e prossimi non fuggivano al nostro avvicinarsi, e avevamo un deserto intorno a noi. E benché non sia un piacere schietto il ricordare di essere stato una così orribile molestia, sono per altri versi piuttosto lieto che abbiamo così presto sviscerato i nostri propri pensieri su quasi tutti gli argomenti del mondo. Sono lieto di pensare che per tutti quegli anni non smettemmo mai di discutere; e mai una volta litigammo.
Forse la principale obiezione a un litigio è che interrompe una discussione. Comunque sia, la nostra discussione non fu mai interrotta finché non cominciò a raggiungere la sua conclusione nella forma dovuta; che è la convinzione. Non dico che in un dato momento l’uno o l’altro di noi avrebbe ammesso di essere in errore; ma in effetti fu attraverso quell’incessante processo di disaccordo che giungemmo alla fine ad accordarci. Egli cominciò come un Pagano più ribelle, nemico speciale del Puritano, difensore dei godimenti bohémien, socievole ma interamente laico. Io cominciai con maggiore disposizione a difendere in modo vago l’idealismo vittoriano, e perfino a spendere una parola per la religione puritana, principalmente per una fosca simpatia subconscia verso qualsiasi sorta di religione. Ma in effetti, per un processo di eliminazione, giungemmo sempre più a pensare che lo stesso genere di religione non puritana fosse la più plausibile e promettente; e a finire infine, ma del tutto indipendentemente, nella stessa Chiesa. Penso che fu una buona cosa aver messo alla prova ogni anello della logica col mutuo martellare. Aggiungerò perfino qualcosa che suona troppo come un vanto; benché intenda essere un tributo. Dirò che l’uomo che si è abituato a discutere con Cecil Chesterton non ha da allora mai avuto motivo di temere una discussione con chicchessia.
Il direttore del New Statesman, un acuto critico di scuola assai diversa dalla nostra, mi disse poco tempo fa: «Vostro fratello fu il più fine dibattitore che io abbia mai udito o di cui abbia mai sentito parlare»; e tali direttori, naturalmente, avevano conosciuto tutti i politici e i popolari oratori. Le qualità del suo eloquio erano quelle della logica e della lucidità unite a una sorta di violento e sorprendente coraggio. Anzi, egli illustrava quello che ritengo un errore comune sul tema della logica. Il logico è troppo spesso presentato come un pedante; come una persona sottile e frigida, dalla carnagione pallida. Sia nell’esperienza sia nella storia, ho generalmente trovato che erano persone assai piene di sangue e di calore di cuore ad avere quel dono del pensiero chiaro e connesso. Charles Fox era così; Danton era così; e Cecil Chesterton era certamente così. Aveva tutta quella che ho descritto come la semplicità e la costanza dei Chesterton nelle sue relazioni personali; i suoi affetti erano particolarmente fissi e tranquilli; ma in battaglia aveva una sorta di combattività e intolleranza dal collo taurino. Non pareva desiderare di vivere e lasciare in vita una fallacia; certamente non poteva lasciare una fallacia in pace. Lo sviluppo delle sue idee politiche fu per un certo tempo decisamente divergente dal mio. Quando io andai a lavorare coi Pro-Boeri del Daily News, e generalmente sostenni la causa liberale, sebbene in modo piuttosto più romantico di molti liberali, egli gravitò verso una sorta di pratica Democrazia Tory, che fu sempre più permeata dal Socialismo di Sidney Webb e Bernard Shaw. Divenne infine membro attivo ed efficace dell’Esecutivo Fabiano. Ma ciò che era assai più importante, egli aveva dentro di sé un vivo e assai minaccioso tipo di intolleranza; un odio per le reali corruzioni e ipocrisie della politica moderna e una straordinaria idea di dire la verità.
Ho già indicato che io stesso, benché credessi nel Liberalismo, trovavo oscuramente difficile credere nei Liberali. Sarebbe più vero, forse, dire che trovavo difficile credere nella politica; perché la realtà pareva quasi irreale, in confronto alla reputazione o al resoconto. Potrei dare venti esempi per indicare ciò che intendo; ma non sarebbero più che indizi, perché il dubbio stesso era dubbioso. Ricordo di essere andato a un grande club liberale, e di aver girato per un ampio salone affollato, in fondo al quale, da qualche parte, un signore calvo con la barba leggeva qualcosa da un manoscritto a bassa voce. Non era troppo irragionevole che non lo ascoltassimo, perché in ogni caso non avremmo potuto udirlo; ma credo che un gran numero di noi non lo vedesse nemmeno. Ci spostavamo e smistavamo di qua e di là e ci urtavamo l’un l’altro; incontrai vari miei amici e scambiai qualche parola; Bentley e Belloc e Hammond e gli altri. Parlavamo in modo ordinario; è possibile, benché non certo, che l’uno o l’altro di noi chiedesse con noncuranza che cosa si supponesse stesse accadendo nell’altro angolo del grande salone. Poi ci allontanammo insieme, parlando di cose importanti, o di cose che a noi parevano importanti.
La mattina dopo vidi in cima al mio giornale liberale, in titoli giganteschi, la frase: «Lord Spencer Spiega il Vessillo». Sotto vi erano altre osservazioni, anch’esse a grandi lettere, su come egli avesse soffiato nella tromba per il Libero Scambio e su come lo squillo avrebbe risuonato per tutta l’Inghilterra e raccolto tutti i liberoscambisti. Sembrava proprio, a un esame attento, che le inudibili osservazioni che il vecchio signore aveva letto dal manoscritto riguardassero argomenti economici in favore del Libero Scambio; e ottimi argomenti per giunta, per quanto ne so. Ma il contrasto fra ciò che quell’oratore era per la gente che lo udiva, e ciò che era per le migliaia di lettori di giornali che non lo udivano, era un iato e una sproporzione così enormi che non credo di averli mai del tutto superati. Seppi d’allora in poi cosa si intendesse, o cosa si potesse intendere, per una Scena alla Camera, o una Sfida dalla Tribuna, o qualunque di quegli eventi sensazionali che hanno luogo sui giornali e in nessun altro posto.
This sense of unreality in the party struggle, which was gradually growing upon me, grew much more swiftly on my brother and my friend Belloc; because they were by temperament of a more rapid and resolute sort. They entered into a sort of partnership for the study of the question; and the outcome of that partnership was a book which had a considerable effect; though at that time, of course, it was mostly an effect of irritation or incredulity. They collaborated in a work called The Party System; of which the general thesis was that there were really no Parties, though there certainly was a system. The system, according to this view, was essentially one of rotation; but of rotation revolving on a central group, which really consisted of the leading politicians on both sides; or, as they were called for convenience in the book, “The Front Benches.” An unreal conflict was kept up for the benefit of the public, and to a certain extent with the innocent assistance of the rank and file; but the Leader of the House was more truly in partnership with the Leader of the Opposition than either of them were with their own followers, let alone their own constituents. This was the thesis maintained in the book; and for the moment its immediate importance in this narrative is not so much concerned with its truth or falsehood as with the personal results arising from the alliance of its two authors. For the point of view attracted sufficient attention to lead a few supporters to launch a weekly paper; of which Belloc was the editor and Cecil Chesterton the sub-editor; and to which I contributed first an occasional and eventually a weekly article.
There had never been anything like the Eye-Witness in England before; certainly not within the memory of the oldest men then living. Nor indeed has there ever been anything like it in England since. But its novelty and originality cannot be measured by those who can only compare it with what has happened in England since. It is a paradox palpably true that an original thing cannot at once be successful and still seem original. We can never appreciate how startling it might sound to be told that the earth was round, if we had really and invariably thought it was flat. By this time, so to speak, its roundness has become more flat than its flatness. It has become a dull platitude and only the denial of it would disturb us. So it is with political revolutions; and so it was with the considerable revolution introduced by the Eye-Witness in English journalism. Nobody can measure the change who was not brought up, as I was, in the ordinary newspaper-reading middle-class of the Victorian Age. We need not argue here about all that may be said for and against the idealism, or the optimism, or the sentimentalism, or the hypocrisy or the virtue of the Victorian Age. It is enough to say that it rested solidly on some social convictions, that were not only conventions. One of them was the belief that English politics were not only free from political corruption, but almost entirely free from personal motives about money. It was a point of patriotic pride that set a limit to the fiercest movements of party anger. I can remember that old Tories like my grandfather would actually pause in the full sweep of their denunciations of the demoniac conduct of Mr. Gladstone, to wave away the faintest suggestion that there could be any fiends rending the souls of our statesmen less erected, as Milton says, than the fiends of ambition or jealousy; “Heaven forbid that I should suggest that any English Prime Minister …” No; Frenchmen might have discovered the negotiable value of coins of the realm; Italians and Austrians might think it well worthwhile to double their income; the statesmen of Bulgaria or Bolivia might have some notion of the meaning of money; but English politicians passed their lives in an absent-minded trance, like that of Mr. Skimpole; kept their eyes fixed on the fixed stars, never enquired whether politics had made them richer or poorer; and received their salaries with a start of surprise.
Well, for good or evil, that is all dead. And what killed it was primarily the journalistic explosion called the Eye-Witness; and especially its dealing with the Marconi Case and the question of the Sale of Peerages. In one sense indeed, as I shall suggest in a moment, the world fell far short of following up the lead of those particular leaders; and there has been nothing since recalling their pointed and personal denunciations. But the general tone has entirely altered. Everybody is familiar with jeers against politicians, jokes about political payments, journalistic allusions to the sale of honours or the Secret Party Fund; above all, nobody is now shocked by them. Perhaps it would be better if they were shocked, or in other words shamed by them. If they were ashamed of them, they might possibly make some attempt to alter them. For that is the weak side of the ultimate result of the revelations. The object of the Eye-Witness was to make the English public know and care about the peril of political corruption. It is now certain that the public does know. It is not so certain that the public does care. And we may well warn the more cynical and realistic generation around us not to be too confident in its superiority to the hoodwinked and humbug-ridden nineteenth century. I know that my Victorian uncles did not know how England is really governed. But I have a strong suspicion that if my Victorian uncles had known, they would have been horrified and not amused; and they would have put a stop to it somehow. Nobody is trying to put a stop to it now.
It is the fashion to divide recent history into Pre-War and Post-War conditions. I believe it is almost as essential to divide them into the Pre-Marconi and Post-Marconi days. It was during the agitations upon that affair that the ordinary English citizen lost his invincible ignorance; or, in ordinary language, his innocence. And as I happened to play a part, secondary indeed, but definite, in the quarrel about this affair, and as in any case anything that my brother did was of considerable importance to me and my affairs, it will be well to pause for a moment upon this peculiar business; which was at the time, of course, systematically misrepresented and which is still very widely misunderstood. I think it probable that centuries will pass before it is seen clearly and in its right perspective; and that then it will be seen as one of the turning-points in the whole history of England and the world.
Questo senso d’irrealtà nella lotta di partito, che gradualmente cresceva in me, crebbe assai più rapidamente in mio fratello e nel mio amico Belloc; perché essi erano per temperamento di specie più rapida e risoluta. Entrarono in una sorta di società per lo studio della questione; e il risultato di quella società fu un libro che ebbe un effetto considerevole; benché a quel tempo, naturalmente, fosse per lo più un effetto d’irritazione o di incredulità. Collaborarono a un’opera intitolata Il Sistema dei Partiti; la cui tesi generale era che non vi erano realmente Partiti, benché vi fosse certamente un sistema. Il sistema, secondo questa veduta, era essenzialmente uno di rotazione; ma di rotazione ruotante attorno a un gruppo centrale, che consisteva realmente dei politici di punta di ambo le parti; o, come venivano chiamati per comodità nel libro, «I Banchi di Testa». Un conflitto irreale veniva mantenuto a beneficio del pubblico, e in una certa misura con l’innocente assistenza della truppa; ma il Capo della Camera era più veramente in società col Capo dell’Opposizione di quanto entrambi lo fossero coi loro propri seguaci, per non parlare dei loro propri elettori. Questa era la tesi sostenuta nel libro; e per il momento la sua immediata importanza in questa narrazione non riguarda tanto la sua verità o falsità quanto i risultati personali derivanti dall’alleanza dei suoi due autori. Poiché il punto di vista attrasse abbastanza attenzione da indurre alcuni sostenitori a lanciare un settimanale; di cui Belloc era il direttore e Cecil Chesterton il vicedirettore; e a cui io contribuii dapprima con un articolo occasionale e infine settimanale.
Non c’era mai stato nulla di simile all’Eye-Witness in Inghilterra prima; certo non a memoria dei più vecchi uomini allora viventi. Né in verità c’è mai stato nulla di simile in Inghilterra da allora. Ma la sua novità e originalità non possono essere misurate da chi può solo confrontarlo con ciò che è accaduto in Inghilterra da allora. È un paradosso palpabilmente vero che una cosa originale non può a un tempo aver successo e sembrare ancora originale. Non possiamo mai apprezzare quanto sorprendente potesse suonare l’essere informati che la terra era rotonda, se avessimo davvero e invariabilmente pensato che fosse piatta. Ormai, per così dire, la sua rotondità è divenuta più piatta della sua piattezza. È divenuta una scialba banalità e solo la sua negazione ci turberebbe. Così è delle rivoluzioni politiche; e così fu della considerevole rivoluzione introdotta dall’Eye-Witness nel giornalismo inglese. Nessuno può misurare il cambiamento che non sia stato allevato, come lo fui io, nell’ordinaria classe media lettrice di giornali dell’età vittoriana. Non occorre qui discutere di tutto ciò che si può dire a favore e contro l’idealismo, o l’ottimismo, o il sentimentalismo, o l’ipocrisia o la virtù dell’età vittoriana. Basti dire che essa poggiava solidamente su alcune convinzioni sociali, che non erano solo convenzioni. Una di esse era la credenza che la politica inglese fosse non solo libera dalla corruzione politica, ma quasi interamente libera da moventi personali legati al denaro. Era un punto di orgoglio patriottico che poneva un limite ai più feroci moti dell’ira di partito. Ricordo che vecchi Tory come mio nonno si fermavano di fatto nel pieno slancio delle loro denunce della condotta demoniaca del signor Gladstone, per scacciare via il più tenue accenno che potesse esservi qualche demone a dilaniare le anime dei nostri statisti meno eretti, come dice Milton, dei demoni dell’Ambizione o della Gelosia; «Dio non voglia che io suggerisca che un qualche Primo Ministro inglese…». No; i Francesi potevano aver scoperto il valore negoziabile delle monete del regno; Italiani e Austriaci potevano ritenere ben valesse la pena di raddoppiare il proprio reddito; gli statisti di Bulgaria o Bolivia potevano avere qualche nozione del significato del denaro; ma i politici inglesi passavano la vita in una trance sbadata, come quella del signor Skimpole; tenevano gli occhi fissi sulle fisse stelle, non domandavano mai se la politica li avesse fatti più ricchi o più poveri; e ricevevano i loro stipendi con un sussulto di sorpresa.
Ebbene, per il bene o per il male, tutto ciò è morto. E ciò che lo uccise fu primariamente l’esplosione giornalistica chiamata Eye-Witness; e specialmente il suo trattare il Caso Marconi e la questione della Vendita dei Titoli Nobiliari. In un senso, invero, come suggerirò tra un momento, il mondo restò assai al di sotto del seguire l’esempio di quei particolari capi; e non c’è stato nulla da allora che rammenti le loro denunce puntute e personali. Ma il tono generale è interamente mutato. Tutti hanno familiarità con gli scherni contro i politici, le battute sui pagamenti politici, le allusioni giornalistiche alla vendita di onorificenze o al Fondo Segreto di Partito; soprattutto, nessuno se ne scandalizza più. Forse sarebbe meglio se se ne scandalizzassero, o in altre parole se ne vergognassero. Se se ne vergognassero, forse potrebbero tentare in qualche modo di mutarli. Poiché questo è il lato debole del risultato ultimo delle rivelazioni. Lo scopo dell’Eye-Witness era di far sì che il pubblico inglese conoscesse e si curasse del pericolo della corruzione politica. È ora certo che il pubblico conosce. Non è così certo che il pubblico si curi. E possiamo bene ammonire la generazione più cinica e realistica intorno a noi a non essere troppo sicura della propria superiorità sull’ingannato e imbonito diciannovesimo secolo. So che i miei zii vittoriani non sapevano come l’Inghilterra sia realmente governata. Ma ho il forte sospetto che se i miei zii vittoriani l’avessero saputo, ne sarebbero stati inorriditi e non divertiti; e vi avrebbero posto fine in qualche modo. Nessuno cerca di porvi fine ora.
È di moda dividere la storia recente in condizioni Prebelliche e Postbelliche. Credo sia quasi altrettanto essenziale dividerle in giorni Pre-Marconi e Post-Marconi. Fu durante le agitazioni su quella faccenda che l’ordinario cittadino inglese perse la sua invincibile ignoranza; ovvero, in linguaggio ordinario, la sua innocenza. E poiché mi capitò di recitare una parte, secondaria in verità ma precisa, nella disputa su quella faccenda, e poiché in ogni caso tutto ciò che mio fratello faceva era di considerevole importanza per me e per i miei affari, sarà bene fermarci un momento su questa peculiare faccenda; che fu in quel tempo, naturalmente, sistematicamente travisata e che è ancora assai largamente fraintesa. Ritengo probabile che passeranno secoli prima che sia vista chiaramente e nella sua giusta prospettiva; e che allora sarà vista come uno dei punti di svolta in tutta la storia dell’Inghilterra e del mondo.
There are various legends about it. One is, for instance, the legend that we denounced certain Cabinet Ministers because they gambled on the Stock Exchange. It is likely enough that we did make fun of a man like Mr. Lloyd George, who made himself the mouthpiece of the Nonconformist Conscience and called on all the chapels to show forth the old fighting Puritan spirit, when he appeared in a transaction uncommonly like a gamble; just as we should denounce a politician who drank champagne and tried to start a campaign of Prohibition. But we should not denounce him for drinking champagne but for prohibiting champagne. Similarly, we should not denounce a Puritan politician for gambling, so much as for talking as if nobody could ever gamble. My brother, I need not say, was not likely to be shocked at anybody indulging in a bet or a wager; though he might possibly have recommended him to do a flutter on the Derby or the Oaks rather than on the Stock Exchange. But, as a fact, the whole notion that the question was one of merely doing a flutter is a fiction. It is a fiction, which was put up by the politicians at the time, as a mask for the fact. The charge against the Marconi Ministers was that they received a tip, or were “let in on the ground-floor,” as the financial phrase goes, by a government contractor whose contract was at the time being considered or accepted by the Government. In fact, on the face of it at any rate, there were all the conditions that go to make up what is commonly called “a secret commission.” Whether the acceptance of the tip did or did not affect the acceptance of the contract might be argued; but the question at issue was one of a contract and a tip, and not of an ordinary little flutter in stocks and shares. The pivotal fact of the position, of course, was that the Government contractor was the brother of one of these members of the Government. The very extraordinary monopoly which the Government then granted to the Marconi Company was in fact granted to its managing director, Mr. Godfrey Isaacs, the brother of Sir Rufus Isaacs, then the Attorney General. These facts alone justified at least enquiry; and the first efforts of all the politicians were directed to preventing any enquiry at all.
Until the editor of the Eye-Witness forced the politicians to reveal something, the politicians had begun by protesting that there was nothing whatever to reveal. Mr. Lloyd George spoke of mere rumours, by implication of baseless rumours, “passing from one foul lip to another.” The particular Samuel who happened to be doing a Ministerial job at the moment got up and gratuitously asserted that none of his colleagues had ever had any financial connection with this company; alluding in a distant manner to the Marconi Company. Sir Rufus Isaacs made the same distant denial in almost the same words; in fact he drew quite a quaint picture of the far-off, the almost frigid relations between himself and Mr. Godfrey Isaacs; and spoke of having once met his brother “at a family function,” and heard for the first time of the success of his government contract. Meanwhile my brother, who had succeeded to the full editorship of the paper and renamed it the New Witness, continued a confessedly violent, not to say abusive attack on the Isaacses, but latterly and largely on the previous career of Mr. Godfrey Isaacs as a promoter of ephemeral companies. Eventually, Mr. Godfrey Isaacs prosecuted my brother for the personal libel on himself; much to my brother’s delight. It is a rather remarkable fact that on the very day that my brother’s reply was received, announcing that he intended to justify or prove his statement, the politicians took the first step towards telling some of the truth. The step may at first sight seem odd. It consisted of prosecuting for libel a French paper called Le Matin.
It seems odd; because there were some very conspicuous English papers to be prosecuted. There was the New Witness, roaring aloud week after week to be prosecuted. There was the Morning Post, which said many things nearly as strong; there was Mr. Maxse, in the National Review, who said things quite as strong. I was myself so much amused with the inconsequence of this foreign diversion that I published some verses in the New Witness beginning:
I am so swift to seize affronts My spirit is so high Whoever has insulted me Some foreigner must die. I made a claim for damage (For the Times has called me ‘thief’) Against a paper in Alsace A paper called Le Juif. And when the Morning Post unearthed Some murders I’d devised A Polish organ of finance At once apologised. … I know it sounds confusing But, as Mr. Lammle said, The anger of a gentleman Is boiling in my head.
The actual method, of course, is by this time familiar enough. Some fool who has got the facts wrong is always prosecuted, instead of the serious critics who have got the facts right. And, in the case of Le Matin, the occasion was merely used as an opportunity for the Ministers involved to give their own version of the real facts before it was too late. To the profound astonishment and distress of many, they admitted that, in spite of the reassuring remarks in Parliament, they had in fact received a large number of shares from the American branch of the Marconi Company. Most of the loyal Liberals who followed them were rather flabbergasted; but in the ordinary Party press the matter was duly whitewashed. Of course, the ordinary Tory press would have done exactly the same with an ordinary Tory scandal, of which there were quite as many. But I should like to name and record here, honoris causa and for the credit of himself and the true Radical creed, the name of the late H. W. Massingham, the editor of The Nation, who alone in such a crisis spoke and acted like a man. He was as devoted to the Party of Peace, Retrenchment and Reform, as any of the others; but his devotion took the form of an instant appreciation of its moral danger. He came home from the Matin explanation, shaken and horror-stricken, and he printed in his paper the words, “Political corruption is the Achilles heel of Liberalism.”
Vi sono varie leggende su di essa. Una è, ad esempio, la leggenda che noi denunciammo certi ministri del Gabinetto perché giocavano in Borsa. È abbastanza probabile che facessimo dello spirito su un uomo come il signor Lloyd George, che si fece portavoce della Coscienza anticonformista e chiamò tutte le cappelle a mostrare l’antico spirito puritano combattente, quando egli apparve in una transazione stranamente simile a una scommessa; proprio come denunceremmo un politico che bevesse champagne e cercasse d’avviare una campagna proibizionista. Ma non lo denunceremmo per aver bevuto champagne bensì per aver proibito lo champagne. Similmente, non denunceremmo un politico puritano tanto per aver giocato d’azzardo, quanto per aver parlato come se nessuno potesse mai giocare d’azzardo. Mio fratello, non occorre dirlo, non era tipo da scandalizzarsi che qualcuno si concedesse una scommessa o una puntata; benché forse gli avrebbe raccomandato di tentare la sorte al Derby o alle Oaks piuttosto che in Borsa. Ma, in effetti, tutta l’idea che la questione fosse quella del mero tentare la sorte è una finzione. È una finzione, montata dai politici in quel tempo, come maschera del fatto. L’accusa contro i Ministri Marconi era che essi avevano ricevuto una soffiata, o erano stati «fatti entrare al pianterreno», come dice la frase finanziaria, da un appaltatore del governo il cui contratto era in quel tempo al vaglio o in via d’accettazione da parte del Governo. In effetti, almeno di primo acchito, vi erano tutte le condizioni che compongono ciò che comunemente si chiama «una commissione segreta». Se l’accettazione della soffiata influenzasse o no l’accettazione del contratto poteva discutersi; ma la questione in gioco era quella di un contratto e di una soffiata, e non di un ordinario piccolo tentar la sorte in azioni e titoli. Il fatto cardine della posizione, naturalmente, era che l’appaltatore del Governo era il fratello di uno di questi membri del Governo. Lo straordinarissimo monopolio che il Governo concesse allora alla Compagnia Marconi fu in effetti concesso al suo direttore generale, il signor Godfrey Isaacs, fratello di Sir Rufus Isaacs, allora Procuratore Generale. Questi fatti da soli giustificavano almeno un’indagine; e i primi sforzi di tutti i politici furono diretti a impedire qualsiasi indagine.
Finché il direttore dell’Eye-Witness non costrinse i politici a rivelare qualcosa, i politici avevano cominciato col protestare che non c’era assolutamente nulla da rivelare. Il signor Lloyd George parlò di meri pettegolezzi, per implicazione di pettegolezzi infondati, «che passavano da un labbro immondo a un altro». Quel particolare Samuel che si trovava a fare un lavoretto ministeriale in quel momento si alzò e gratuitamente asserì che nessuno dei suoi colleghi aveva mai avuto alcun legame finanziario con questa compagnia; alludendo in maniera distante alla Compagnia Marconi. Sir Rufus Isaacs fece la stessa distante negazione quasi con le stesse parole; anzi tracciò un quadro alquanto singolare dei lontani, dei quasi frigidi rapporti fra sé e il signor Godfrey Isaacs; e parlò di aver incontrato una volta suo fratello «a una funzione di famiglia», e di aver appreso per la prima volta del successo del suo contratto col governo. Nel frattempo mio fratello, che era succeduto alla piena direzione del giornale e l’aveva ribattezzato New Witness, continuava un attacco confessatamente violento, per non dire ingiurioso, contro gli Isaacs, ma ultimamente e largamente sulla precedente carriera del signor Godfrey Isaacs come promotore di società effimere. Alla fine, il signor Godfrey Isaacs querelò mio fratello per la diffamazione personale contro di sé; con grande gioia di mio fratello. È un fatto piuttosto notevole che proprio il giorno in cui fu ricevuta la risposta di mio fratello, che annunciava la sua intenzione di giustificare o provare le sue affermazioni, i politici mossero il primo passo verso il dire una parte della verità. Il passo può a prima vista sembrare strano. Consistette nel querelare per diffamazione un giornale francese chiamato Le Matin.
Sembra strano; perché c’erano alcuni giornali inglesi assai cospicui da querelare. C’era il New Witness, che ruggiva a gran voce settimana dopo settimana per essere querelato. C’era il Morning Post, che diceva molte cose quasi altrettanto forti; c’era il signor Maxse, nella National Review, che diceva cose del tutto altrettanto forti. Io stesso mi divertii tanto dell’inconseguenza di questa diversione forestiera che pubblicai alcuni versi nel New Witness, che cominciavano:
Sono così pronto a cogliere gli affronti Il mio spirito è così altero Chiunque mi abbia insultato Qualche straniero deve morire. Avanzai una richiesta di danni (Poiché il Times mi ha chiamato «ladro») Contro un giornale in Alsazia Un giornale chiamato Le Juif. E quando il Morning Post dissotterrò Certi delitti da me macchinati Un organo polacco di finanza Si scusò all’istante. … So che suona confuso Ma, come disse il signor Lammle, L’ira di un gentiluomo Mi ribolle in testa.
Il metodo effettivo, naturalmente, è ormai abbastanza familiare. Si querela sempre qualche sciocco che ha sbagliato i fatti, invece dei seri critici che hanno i fatti giusti. E, nel caso di Le Matin, l’occasione fu semplicemente usata come opportunità per i Ministri coinvolti di dare la propria versione dei fatti reali prima che fosse troppo tardi. Con profondo stupore e sconforto di molti, ammisero che, nonostante le rassicuranti osservazioni in Parlamento, avevano in effetti ricevuto un gran numero di azioni dalla filiale americana della Compagnia Marconi. La maggior parte dei fedeli Liberali che li seguivano rimasero piuttosto sbigottiti; ma nell’ordinaria stampa di Partito la faccenda fu debitamente insabbiata. Naturalmente, l’ordinaria stampa Tory avrebbe fatto esattamente lo stesso con un ordinario scandalo Tory, dei quali ce n’erano proprio altrettanti. Ma vorrei nominare e registrare qui, honoris causa e per il merito di sé stesso e del vero credo radicale, il nome del defunto H. W. Massingham, direttore di The Nation, il quale solo in una tale crisi parlò e agì da uomo. Era devoto al Partito della Pace, del Risparmio e della Riforma, quanto qualunque altro; ma la sua devozione prese la forma di un immediato apprezzamento del suo pericolo morale. Tornò a casa dalle spiegazioni del Matin, scosso e atterrito dall’orrore, e stampò nel suo giornale le parole: «La corruzione politica è il tallone d’Achille del Liberalismo».
Attempts were made afterwards to justify all this inconsistency and contradiction, by explaining that the shares had been taken in the American branch of the enterprise and that the Parliamentary explanations had only referred to “this Company.” I must confess that I should feel very much more charity towards the fiction, if it were not for the explanation. I might easily forget and forgive, after all these years, if the politicians said they had lied as schoolboys lie, out of loyalty to their own class or club; and under certain conventions of Parliamentary self-defence; I might even think that this conventional fidelity was not so much merely dishonourable as a perverted form of honour. But if they say that a statement of that sort was not fiction, because the word “American” was suppressed, then (I grieve to say) I could only conclude that they did not know the meaning of truth. The test is perfectly simple. Suppose they had got up and told the whole simple truth saying, “These Ministers have shares in American but not in English Marconis,” the result would have been a shock; which they meant to avoid and did avoid. In other words, on their own theory of their own action, they meant to deceive and did deceive. That they deceived by a verbal equivocation of the double sense of “this Company” does not make it better, but worse. However, all their moral ideas were in such confusion that we need not necessarily even believe their explanation of their explanation. Their real reason may even have been better than their false excuse; and their lie may have been more loyal than they had the courage to confess.
Another legend about the Marconi Case, floating about like a cloud and obscuring its true outline, is this notion that my brother being convicted and fined the rather nominal sum of £100 was a legal answer to the attack on the Marconi Ministers. This is, as the lawyers say, a question of law as well as fact; and in both it is quite false. Mr. Justice Phillimore, who was opposed to our case in a degree rather beyond the limits of the judicial, was nevertheless a very lucid and precise lawyer; and he left no doubt on this point whatever. In his summing up, he said most emphatically that the jury had nothing whatever to do with the question of whether the politicians had improperly dabbled in Marconis; that their verdict was not to answer that political question one way or the other; that they were concerned solely with whether the individual Godfrey Isaacs, in his career as a company-promoter previous to the Marconi Case, had been unfairly described by the individual Cecil Chesterton. The jury were strongly instructed to find, and did find, that the description of the company-promoter was wrong. But the jury did not find, and were expressly told that they were not competent to find, that the conduct of the Marconi Ministers was right.
Whatever Godfrey Isaacs was really like, he is dead now; and I certainly am not going back to dig up the poor fellow’s defunct companies. There are perhaps only two things to be added to that personal part of the story; and I think they are both worth adding. One is that it is supremely characteristic of my brother that, while he undoubtedly used all the violent vocabulary of Cobbett in attacking Godfrey Isaacs and the rest, he had not in fact the faintest grain of malice, or even irritation. He always spoke of the brothers Isaacs and their set, in private conversation, with perfect good-humour and charity; allowing for their Jewish virtues of family loyalty and the rest, and even finding excuses for the other politicians; though it is extremely typical of the real attitude of our group, which was accused of fanatical Anti-Semitism, that he was always more ready to excuse the Jews than the Gentiles. That is another of the legends about the Marconi Case; that it was an attack on Jews. As Mr. Belloc said, in giving evidence, anybody less like a Jew than Mr. Lloyd George it would be difficult to imagine. And there is to be added to this a curious and ironic conclusion of the matter; for many years after my brother received the Last Sacraments and died in a hospital in France, his old enemy, Godfrey Isaacs, died very shortly after having been converted to the same universal Catholic Church. No one would have rejoiced more than my brother; or with less bitterness or with more simplicity. It is the only reconciliation; and it can reconcile anybody. Requiescat in pace.
Finally, it may be worth noting that the last and least worthy of the legends about the Marconi Case was a notion, which I found floating about at one time, that my brother and Mr. Belloc had parted company on the matter, because Mr. Belloc in his evidence had referred the examiners to my brother as responsible editor of the later issues of the paper. As one who was inside all the councils, and was naturally prejudiced if anything on my brother’s side, I may testify that there was never a word of truth in this supposed division or desertion. The policy of my brother, claiming to answer all questions himself, may have been wise or unwise; I myself had my doubts about its wisdom. But such as it was, it was adopted by him in consultation with Mr. Belloc, as a part of their common policy; and on my suggestion, my brother afterwards inserted a note in the paper explaining this simple fact. The result was simple and significant. The Commission never dared to call him at all. For the rest, the political scandal was treated like all other political scandals. A Parliamentary Commission was appointed and reported that everything was very nice; a Minority Report was issued which reported that some things were not quite so nice; and political life (if you can call it life) went on as before. But what makes me laugh is the thought of the poor puzzled, honest and indignant Tories, who read the Morning Post and imagined that a Tory chivalry was storming the fortress of corrupt Radicalism, when they read the Parliamentary Debates on the subject; and especially the passage in which Arthur Balfour said that they must judge men like Lloyd George (whom they knew so well and loved so much) more leniently than they would judge a common outsider. The poor Primrose League must have been horribly mystified by the problem of this mildness on the Front Benches. They would have found the answer to the problem in a book called The Party System.
Si tentò in seguito di giustificare tutta questa incoerenza e contraddizione, spiegando che le azioni erano state prese nella filiale americana dell’impresa e che le spiegazioni parlamentari si erano riferite soltanto a «questa Compagnia». Devo confessare che sentirei assai più carità verso la finzione, se non fosse per la spiegazione. Potrei facilmente dimenticare e perdonare, dopo tutti questi anni, se i politici dicessero di aver mentito come mentono gli scolari, per lealtà alla loro propria classe o al loro club; e sotto certe convenzioni di autodifesa parlamentare; potrei perfino pensare che questa convenzionale fedeltà non fosse tanto meramente disonorevole quanto una forma pervertita di onore. Ma se dicono che una dichiarazione di quel tipo non fu finzione, perché la parola «americana» fu soppressa, allora (mi addolora dirlo) potrei solo concludere che non conoscevano il significato della verità. La prova è perfettamente semplice. Supponiamo che si fossero alzati a dire tutta la semplice verità dicendo: «Questi Ministri hanno azioni delle Marconi americane ma non di quelle inglesi», il risultato sarebbe stato uno shock; che essi intendevano evitare e evitarono. In altre parole, secondo la loro stessa teoria della loro stessa azione, intendevano ingannare e ingannarono. Che ingannassero mediante un equivoco verbale sul doppio senso di «questa Compagnia» non lo rende migliore, ma peggiore. Comunque, tutte le loro idee morali erano in tale confusione che non abbiamo neppur necessità di credere alla loro spiegazione della loro spiegazione. La loro vera ragione può perfino essere stata migliore della loro falsa scusa; e la loro menzogna può essere stata più leale di quanto essi avessero il coraggio di confessare.
Un’altra leggenda sul Caso Marconi, fluttuante come una nube e oscurante il suo vero contorno, è questa nozione che mio fratello, essendo stato condannato e multato per la somma piuttosto nominale di 100 sterline, fosse una risposta legale all’attacco contro i Ministri Marconi. Questa è, come dicono i giuristi, una questione tanto di diritto quanto di fatto; e in entrambi è del tutto falsa. Il giudice Phillimore, che era contrario alla nostra causa in un grado piuttosto oltre i limiti del giudiziario, era nondimeno un giurista assai lucido e preciso; e non lasciò alcun dubbio su questo punto. Nel suo riassunto, disse assai enfaticamente che la giuria non aveva assolutamente nulla a che fare con la questione se i politici si fossero indebitamente dilettati con le Marconi; che il loro verdetto non doveva rispondere a quella questione politica in un senso o nell’altro; che essi si occupavano unicamente del fatto se l’individuo Godfrey Isaacs, nella sua carriera come promotore di società precedente al Caso Marconi, fosse stato ingiustamente descritto dall’individuo Cecil Chesterton. La giuria fu fortemente istruita a stabilire, e stabilì, che la descrizione del promotore di società era erronea. Ma la giuria non stabilì, e le fu espressamente detto che non era competente a stabilire, che la condotta dei Ministri Marconi fosse giusta.
Quale che Godfrey Isaacs fosse realmente, egli è ora morto; e io certo non tornerò a dissotterrare le defunte società del pover’uomo. Vi sono forse solo due cose da aggiungere a quella parte personale della storia; e credo che valga la pena aggiungerle entrambe. Una è che è supremamente caratteristico di mio fratello che, mentre indubbiamente usò tutto il violento vocabolario di Cobbett nell’attaccare Godfrey Isaacs e il resto, egli non aveva in effetti il più tenue granello di malizia, o perfino d’irritazione. Parlava sempre dei fratelli Isaacs e del loro giro, in privata conversazione, con perfetto buon umore e carità; tenendo conto delle loro virtù ebraiche di lealtà familiare e del resto, e perfino trovando scuse per gli altri politici; benché sia estremamente tipico del reale atteggiamento del nostro gruppo, che fu accusato di fanatico antisemitismo, che egli fosse sempre più pronto a scusare gli Ebrei che i Gentili. Questa è un’altra delle leggende sul Caso Marconi; che fosse un attacco agli Ebrei. Come disse il signor Belloc, deponendo, sarebbe difficile immaginare qualcuno meno simile a un Ebreo del signor Lloyd George. E a questo va aggiunta una curiosa e ironica conclusione della faccenda; poiché molti anni dopo che mio fratello ebbe ricevuto gli Ultimi Sacramenti e fu morto in un ospedale in Francia, il suo vecchio nemico, Godfrey Isaacs, morì assai poco dopo essersi convertito alla medesima universale Chiesa cattolica. Nessuno se ne sarebbe rallegrato più di mio fratello; o con minor amarezza o con maggior semplicità. È la sola riconciliazione; e può riconciliare chiunque. Requiescat in pace.
Infine, può valere la pena di notare che l’ultima e meno degna delle leggende sul Caso Marconi fu una nozione, che trovai fluttuante a un certo momento, secondo cui mio fratello e il signor Belloc si erano separati sulla faccenda, perché il signor Belloc nella sua deposizione aveva rimandato gli esaminatori a mio fratello quale direttore responsabile dei numeri più recenti del giornale. Come uno che era dentro tutti i consigli, ed era naturalmente prevenuto semmai in favore di mio fratello, posso testimoniare che non vi fu mai una parola di verità in questa supposta divisione o diserzione. La linea di mio fratello, che pretendeva di rispondere lui stesso a tutte le domande, poteva essere saggia o insensata; io stesso avevo i miei dubbi sulla sua saggezza. Ma tale quale era, fu da lui adottata in consultazione col signor Belloc, come parte della loro comune linea; e su mio suggerimento, mio fratello in seguito inserì una nota nel giornale che spiegava questo semplice fatto. Il risultato fu semplice e significativo. La Commissione non osò mai convocarlo. Per il resto, lo scandalo politico fu trattato come tutti gli altri scandali politici. Fu nominata una Commissione Parlamentare che riferì che tutto era assai bello; fu emessa una Relazione di Minoranza che riferì che alcune cose non erano proprio così belle; e la vita politica (se così si può chiamare la vita) proseguì come prima. Ma ciò che mi fa ridere è il pensiero dei poveri sconcertati, onesti e indignati Tory, che leggevano il Morning Post e immaginavano che una cavalleria Tory stesse assaltando la fortezza del corrotto Radicalismo, quando lessero i Dibattiti Parlamentari sul tema; e specialmente il passo in cui Arthur Balfour disse che essi dovevano giudicare uomini come Lloyd George (che conoscevano così bene e amavano così tanto) più clementemente di quanto avrebbero giudicato un comune estraneo. La povera Primrose League dev’essere stata orribilmente disorientata dal problema di questa mitezza sui Banchi di Testa. Avrebbero trovato la risposta al problema in un libro intitolato Il Sistema dei Partiti.
Soon after the affair had concluded, as such affairs always conclude in modern England, with a formal verdict and a whitewashing committee, all our politics and practical life were turned upside down by the external earthquake of the Great War. There was not so complete a disconnection as some suppose; for Prussia was partly encouraged to attack by a gross exaggeration of the seriousness, I will not say of the Orangeman, but certainly of the seriousness with which the Englishman really regards the Orangeman. And that threat of civil war from Northern Ireland was very largely lashed into extravagance, as an expedient for proving that the Party System did mean something after all. For a very long time past, the Irish Question had been the only life in the English Parliament. It was alive because it was concerned with religion, or with two religions; and when the Irish question was withdrawn, the English Parliamentary Party System visibly fell to pieces. But there were other ways in which the issue of corruption continued to affect the country in wartime; not least in the Dope Scandal and in the fact that firms did brazenly continue to trade with the enemy. But in truth, the evil connection went back further than that. As a fact, it goes back to the very beginning of the War, though few people even began to understand it until long afterwards.
If I were asked who produced or precipitated the Great War (in the instant sense that he prevented it being prevented), I should give an answer that would surprise nearly all sections of opinion, and almost certainly surprise the man himself. I should not say the Kaiser; for that simplification was only one of the series of British bogeys like Kruger before or Mussolini afterwards; though I am quite certain the evil originally arose with the power of Prussia. Still less should I say the Czar of Russia or some Slavonic fanatic who committed a crime at Sarajevo. Long after the acts and attitudes of all these people were recognised, it would have been perfectly possible to avoid the war; and nearly everybody wanted to avoid it. I should say that the fire-eater, who precipitated it when others might have prevented it, was some sort of worthy Quaker of the type of old Mr. Cadbury, whom I knew and served in my youth.
And it all arose out of the existence of the Party System; or rather, in a sense, out of the non-existence of the Party System. When the public theory of a thing is different from the practical reality of that thing, there is always a convention of silence that cannot be broken; there are things that must not be said in public. The fact concealed in this case exactly illustrated the thesis of the book called, The Party System; that there were not two real parties ruling alternately, but one real group, “the Front Benches,” ruling all the time. The fact here was that the foreign policy of Asquith and Grey did not vitally differ from that which would have been pursued by Balfour and Bonar Law. All were patriots upon this point; all were, in my personal opinion, right; but anyhow, all thought that England would have to intervene if Germany threatened France. They all thought so; and if they had all said so, and said so months before, Germany would never have challenged the power of such an alliance. My brother and many millions more would be walking about alive.
The Liberal leaders could not say so; not for fear of the Liberty Party, let alone the people; but for fear of the particular and powerful forces which supported the Liberal Party; and therefore supported the Party System. And under the conditions of our party politics, a party is supported not so much by fighting as by funds. They are called, heaven knows why, in a most extraordinary metaphor, “the sinews of war.” They are provided by the sale of peerages to rich men and all sorts of ignominious methods; but there is no question of such methods here. Many such party supporters, and certainly Mr. Cadbury, were in complete good faith, especially about supporting Peace. But very many of them were Quakers, simply because the Quakers happened to possess a minority of millionaires, a group much smaller but much richer than the Liberal Party as a whole. And the very constitution of modern party politics is such that a government has to placate such supporters, and profess to represent their ideals or prejudices, or whatever we happen to think them. In short, the whole thing was and is a plutocracy; but it was not specially in this case the fault of this group of plutocrats.
That increasing number of intellectuals, who are content to say that Democracy has been a failure, miss the point of the far more disastrous calamity that Plutocracy has been a success. I mean it has been the only sort of success it could be; for Plutocracy has no philosophy or morals or even meaning; it can only be a material success, that is, a base success. Plutocracy can only mean the success of plutocrats in being plutocrats. But this they enjoyed until a short time ago, when an economic judgment shook them like an earthquake. With Democracy the cast is exactly the reverse. We may say, with some truth, that Democracy has failed; but we shall only mean that Democracy has failed to exist. It is nonsense to say that the complicated but centralised Capitalist States of the last hundred years have suffered from an extravagant sense of the equality of men or the simplicity of manhood. At most we might say that the civic theory has provided a sort of legal fiction, behind which a rich man could rule a civilisation where he could once rule a city; or a usurer throw his net over six nations, where he once threw it over one village. But there is no stronger proof of the fact that it emphatically is plutocracy, and most emphatically is not democracy, that has caused popular institutions to become unpopular, than this example of the pull of the Pacifists upon the Liberal Government just before the Great War. It is only necessary to ask exactly how much such extreme Pacifists counted in the Party Fund, and how much they counted in the Party.
For no electioneering agent, however active and anxious, would have got into an abnormal panic about the votes of the Quakers. He would have given them the normal attention that he would give to the votes of the Plymouth Brethren or the Peculiar People, who would very probably have the habit of voting Liberal. There are not enough individual Quakers to create a landslide of votes at a General Election. By the nature of modern politics, and nobody’s fault in particular, the whole point and pivot of the situation was not the large proportion of men who were Quakers, but the large proportion of Quakers who were millionaires. And since this situation is bad at its best, as with Quakers who were sincere in their Pacifism, we can hardly think too badly of so bad a situation at its worst. At its worst it meant that the worst sort of traitors could and did trade with the enemy throughout the War, that the worst sort of profiteers could and did blackmail their own country for bloodsucking profits in the worst hour of her peril, that the worst sort of politicians could play any game they liked with the honour of England and the happiness of Europe, if they were backed and boomed by some vulgar monopolist millionaire; and these insolent interests nearly brought us to a crash in the supreme crisis of our history; because Parliament had come to mean only a secret government by the rich.
So ended the last considerable attempt to purge Parliament, or the ancient institution of the English. Some years before a similar attempt had been made in France, inspired by the chivalry of Déroulède, who acted much in the military and Christian spirit of Belloc and my brother. That also had failed; and Parliaments continued to prosper; that is they continued to rot. We have lived to see the last phase; when the revolt against that rot in representative institutions broke out further south, in the very gates of Rome; and it did not fail. But it has brought with it changes not wholly comforting to one who loves liberty and the ancient English conception of a Free Parliament. I am proud to have been among those who tried to save it, even if it was too late.
Poco dopo che la faccenda si fu conclusa, come tali faccende sempre si concludono nell’Inghilterra moderna, con un verdetto formale e un comitato d’insabbiamento, tutta la nostra politica e vita pratica furono sconvolte dal terremoto esterno della Grande Guerra. Non vi fu una disconnessione così completa come alcuni suppongono; poiché la Prussia fu in parte incoraggiata ad attaccare da una grossolana esagerazione della gravità, non dirò dell’Orangista, ma certo della gravità con cui l’Inglese realmente considera l’Orangista. E quella minaccia di guerra civile dall’Irlanda del Nord fu in gran parte gonfiata fino alla stravaganza, come espediente per provare che il Sistema dei Partiti significasse in fondo qualcosa. Per un assai lungo tempo passato, la Questione Irlandese era stata l’unica vita nel Parlamento inglese. Era viva perché riguardava la religione, o due religioni; e quando la questione irlandese fu ritirata, il Sistema dei Partiti parlamentari inglese visibilmente andò in pezzi. Ma vi furono altri modi in cui la questione della corruzione continuò a colpire il paese in tempo di guerra; non ultimo nello Scandalo della Droga e nel fatto che certe ditte sfacciatamente continuarono a commerciare col nemico. Ma in verità, la malvagia connessione risaliva più indietro di questo. In effetti, risale all’inizio stesso della Guerra, benché pochi cominciassero a comprenderlo se non assai dopo.
Se mi si chiedesse chi produsse o precipitò la Grande Guerra (nel senso immediato che egli impedì che venisse impedita), darei una risposta che sorprenderebbe quasi tutte le fazioni d’opinione, e quasi certamente sorprenderebbe l’uomo stesso. Non direi il Kaiser; poiché quella semplificazione fu soltanto una della serie di spauracchi britannici come Kruger prima o Mussolini dopo; benché io sia del tutto certo che il male originariamente sorse col potere della Prussia. Ancor meno direi lo Zar di Russia o qualche fanatico slavo che commise un crimine a Sarajevo. Molto dopo che gli atti e gli atteggiamenti di tutte queste persone furono riconosciuti, sarebbe stato perfettamente possibile evitare la guerra; e quasi tutti volevano evitarla. Direi che il mangiatore di fuoco, che la precipitò quando altri avrebbero potuto impedirla, fu una sorta di degno Quacchero del tipo del vecchio signor Cadbury, che io conobbi e servii in gioventù.
E tutto ciò nacque dall’esistenza del Sistema dei Partiti; o meglio, in un senso, dalla non esistenza del Sistema dei Partiti. Quando la teoria pubblica di una cosa è diversa dalla realtà pratica di quella cosa, vi è sempre una convenzione di Silenzio che non può essere infranta; vi sono cose che non devono essere dette in pubblico. Il fatto celato in questo caso illustrava esattamente la tesi del libro intitolato Il Sistema dei Partiti; che non vi erano due reali partiti che governavano alternativamente, ma un solo gruppo reale, «i Banchi di Testa», che governava tutto il tempo. Il fatto qui era che la politica estera di Asquith e Grey non differiva vitalmente da quella che sarebbe stata perseguita da Balfour e Bonar Law. Erano tutti patrioti su questo punto; tutti avevano, secondo la mia personale opinione, ragione; ma comunque, tutti pensavano che l’Inghilterra avrebbe dovuto intervenire se la Germania avesse minacciato la Francia. Tutti lo pensavano; e se tutti l’avessero detto, e detto mesi prima, la Germania non avrebbe mai sfidato il potere di una tale alleanza. Mio fratello e molti altri milioni sarebbero in giro vivi.
I capi liberali non potevano dirlo; non per paura del Partito Liberale, per non parlare del popolo; ma per paura delle particolari e potenti forze che sostenevano il Partito Liberale; e perciò sostenevano il Sistema dei Partiti. E sotto le condizioni della nostra politica di partito, un partito è sostenuto non tanto dal combattere quanto dai fondi. Essi sono chiamati, il cielo sa perché, in una metafora oltremodo straordinaria, «i nervi della guerra». Sono forniti dalla vendita di titoli nobiliari a uomini ricchi e da ogni sorta di metodi ignominiosi; ma non c’è questione di tali metodi qui. Molti di tali sostenitori del partito, e certo il signor Cadbury, erano in completa buona fede, specialmente riguardo al sostenere la Pace. Ma moltissimi di essi erano Quaccheri, semplicemente perché i Quaccheri si trovavano a possedere una minoranza di milionari, un gruppo molto più piccolo ma molto più ricco del Partito Liberale nel suo insieme. E la costituzione stessa della moderna politica di partito è tale che un governo deve placare tali sostenitori, e professare di rappresentare i loro ideali o pregiudizi, o comunque ci capiti di chiamarli. In breve, tutta la cosa era ed è una plutocrazia; ma non era specialmente in questo caso colpa di questo gruppo di plutocrati.
Quel numero crescente di intellettuali, che si accontentano di dire che la Democrazia è stata un fallimento, mancano il punto della calamità assai più disastrosa che la Plutocrazia è stata un successo. Intendo dire che è stata il solo tipo di successo che poteva essere; poiché la Plutocrazia non ha filosofia né morale né perfino significato; può essere solo un successo materiale, cioè un successo vile. La Plutocrazia può significare soltanto il successo dei plutocrati nell’essere plutocrati. Ma questo essi lo godettero fino a poco tempo fa, quando un giudizio economico li scosse come un terremoto. Con la Democrazia la sorte è esattamente inversa. Possiamo dire, con una certa verità, che la Democrazia ha fallito; ma vorremo solo intendere che la Democrazia ha fallito nell’esistere. È un’assurdità dire che i complicati ma centralizzati Stati capitalisti degli ultimi cent’anni abbiano sofferto di un senso stravagante dell’uguaglianza degli uomini o della semplicità della virilità. Tutt’al più potremmo dire che la teoria civica ha fornito una sorta di finzione legale, dietro la quale un uomo ricco poteva governare una civiltà là dove un tempo poteva governare una città; o un usuraio gettare la sua rete su sei nazioni, là dove un tempo la gettava su un solo villaggio. Ma non c’è prova più forte del fatto che è enfaticamente la plutocrazia, e assai enfaticamente non la democrazia, ad aver reso impopolari le istituzioni popolari, di questo esempio della pressione dei Pacifisti sul Governo liberale poco prima della Grande Guerra. Basta soltanto chiedere esattamente quanto tali estremi Pacifisti contassero nel Fondo di Partito, e quanto contassero nel Partito.
Poiché nessun agente elettorale, per attivo e ansioso che fosse, si sarebbe lasciato prendere da un panico anormale per i voti dei Quaccheri. Avrebbe dato loro la normale attenzione che avrebbe dato ai voti dei Fratelli di Plymouth o del Peculiar People, i quali assai probabilmente avrebbero avuto l’abitudine di votare Liberale. Non ci sono abbastanza Quaccheri individui da creare una valanga di voti a un’Elezione Generale. Per la natura della politica moderna, e per colpa di nessuno in particolare, tutto il punto e il perno della situazione non era la larga proporzione di uomini che erano Quaccheri, ma la larga proporzione di Quaccheri che erano milionari. E poiché questa situazione è cattiva nel migliore dei casi, come coi Quaccheri che erano sinceri nel loro Pacifismo, difficilmente possiamo pensare troppo male di una situazione così cattiva nel peggiore. Nel peggiore dei casi significava che la peggiore specie di traditori poteva commerciare, e commerciò, col nemico durante tutta la Guerra, che la peggiore specie di profittatori poteva ricattare, e ricattò, il proprio paese per profitti sanguisughi nell’ora peggiore del suo pericolo, che la peggiore specie di politici poteva giocare qualunque gioco le piacesse con l’onore dell’Inghilterra e la felicità dell’Europa, se erano appoggiati e reclamizzati da qualche volgare milionario monopolista; e questi insolenti interessi per poco non ci portarono a un crollo nella suprema crisi della nostra storia; perché il Parlamento era giunto a significare soltanto un governo segreto da parte dei ricchi.
Così finì l’ultimo considerevole tentativo di purgare il Parlamento, ovvero l’antica istituzione degli Inglesi. Alcuni anni prima un simile tentativo era stato fatto in Francia, ispirato dalla cavalleria di Déroulède, che agì assai nello spirito militare e cristiano di Belloc e di mio fratello. Anche quello era fallito; e i Parlamenti continuarono a prosperare; cioè continuarono a marcire. Abbiamo vissuto per vedere l’ultima fase; quando la rivolta contro quel marciume nelle istituzioni rappresentative scoppiò più a sud, alle porte stesse di Roma; e non fallì. Ma ha portato con sé cambiamenti non del tutto confortanti per uno che ami la libertà e l’antica concezione inglese di un Libero Parlamento. Sono fiero di essere stato fra coloro che cercarono di salvarlo, anche se era troppo tardi.
X
FRIENDSHIP AND FOOLERY
There are some who complain of a man for doing nothing; there are some, still more mysterious and amazing, who complain of having nothing to do. When actually presented with some beautiful blank hours or days, they will grumble at their blankness. When given the gift of loneliness, which is the gift of liberty, they will cast it away; they will destroy it deliberately with some dreadful game with cards or a little ball. I speak only for myself; I know it takes all sorts to make a world; but I cannot repress a shudder when I see them throwing away their hard-won holidays by doing something. For my own part, I never can get enough Nothing to do. I feel as if I had never had leisure to unpack a tenth part of the luggage of my life and thoughts. I need not say that there is nothing particularly misanthropic in my desire for isolation; quite the other way. In my morbid boyhood, as I have said, I was sometimes, in quite a horrible sense, solitary in society. But in my manhood, I have never felt more sociable than I do in solitude.
I have already figured here as a lunatic; and have now only to add that I have occasionally been a happy lunatic as well as an unhappy one. And as I have mentioned the joy of solitude, it will be suitably erratic to proceed at once to the joy of many jokes with many companions; and above all, it will be well to begin with the best of all my companionships. I am not going to describe my honeymoon, at some of the more comic incidents of which I have already glanced. After we were married, my wife and I lived for about a year in Kensington, the place of my childhood; but I think we both knew that it was not to be the real place of our abode. I remember that we strolled out one day, for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a journey into the void, a voyage deliberately objectless. I saw a passing omnibus labelled “Hanwell” and, feeling this to be an appropriate omen, we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray station, which I entered and asked the man in the ticket-office where the next train went to. He uttered the pedantic reply, “Where do you want to go to?” And I uttered the profound and philosophical rejoinder, “Wherever the next train goes to.” It seemed that it went to Slough; which may seem to be singular taste, even in a train. However, we went to Slough, and from there set out walking with even less notion of where we were going. And in that fashion we passed through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort of village, and stayed at an inn called The White Hart. We asked the name of the place and were told that it was called Beaconsfield (I mean of course that it was called Beconsfield and not Beaconsfield), and we said to each other, “This is the sort of place where some day we will make our home.”
The things that come back to me in my memory, as most worth doing and worth remembering, are all sorts of absurd interludes and escapades with my companions, full of their conversation and coloured with their characters. Belloc still awaits a Boswell. His vivacious and awakening personality has shown all the continuity of Dr. Johnson’s; and though he has had personal sorrow and in later years not a little solitude, he was fully entitled to say, like the man in his own song,
For you that took the all in all, the things you left were three, A loud voice for singing and clear eyes to see And a spouting fount of life within that never yet has dried.
Bentley or Conrad Noel were characters who could have been put into any comedy; and the levities of Maurice Baring were worthy of some fantastic macaroni or incroyable of the eighteenth century.
Among the memories that are blown back to me, as by a wind over the Downs, is that of the winter day when Belloc dragged us through Sussex to find the source of the Arun. The company included his wife and mine; none of us had been long married, and perhaps we knew less than we do now of the diversity of human temperaments, not to say temperatures. He and I were fond of cold weather; my wife and his wife, who was a very charming Californian, were not. We did find the place where the Arun rose in the hills; and it was indeed, of all the sights I have seen, one of the most beautiful; I might almost say the most classical. For it rose in a (partly frozen) pool in a small grove of slender trees, silver with the frost, that looked somehow like the pale and delicate pillars of a temple. But I think the ladies, though both of them sensitive to scenery, looked on that cold paradise with something of a cold eye. When this began to be discovered, Belloc instantly proposed the remedy of hot rum, in large tumblers at an adjoining inn; and we were puzzled by the fact that the remedy was regarded with almost as much distaste as the disease. However, we ourselves, who did not feel the cold, heartily consumed the rum; and Belloc, who has always had a trick of repeating scraps of recently discovered verse, which happened to please him, would volley out at intervals the lines of Miss Coleridge:
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise And the doors stood open at our feast; When there passed us a woman with the west in her eyes And a man with his back to the east.
There is no doubt, so far as we were concerned, that we were young and were merry; but I have sometimes doubted since whether we were very, very wise.
We then returned to Belloc’s house; where he rather neutralised the effects of the restoring warmth, by continually flinging open the door and rushing out to a telescope in the garden (it was already a frosty starlight) and loudly hallooing to the ladies to come and see God making energy. His wife declined, in terms of not a little humour; to which he retorted cheerfully:
X
AMICIZIA E BUFFONERIA
Vi sono alcuni che si lamentano di un uomo perché non fa nulla; ve ne sono altri, ancor più misteriosi e stupefacenti, che si lamentano di non aver nulla da fare. Quando siano effettivamente presentati con qualche bella ora o giornata vuota, brontoleranno per la loro vacuità. Quando venga loro dato il dono della solitudine, che è il dono della libertà, lo getteranno via; lo distruggeranno deliberatamente con qualche terribile gioco di carte o con una pallina. Parlo solo per me stesso; so che ci vuole di tutto per fare un mondo; ma non posso reprimere un brivido quando li vedo buttar via le loro ferie sudate facendo qualcosa. Da parte mia, non riesco mai ad avere abbastanza Niente da fare. Mi sento come se non avessi mai avuto agio di disfare la decima parte del bagaglio della mia vita e dei miei pensieri. Non occorre dire che non c’è nulla di particolarmente misantropico nel mio desiderio d’isolamento; anzi tutto il contrario. Nella mia morbosa fanciullezza, come ho detto, ero talvolta, in un senso addirittura orribile, solitario in mezzo alla società. Ma nella mia età adulta, non mi sono mai sentito più socievole di quanto mi senta in solitudine.
Ho già figurato qui come lunatico; e devo ora solo aggiungere che sono stato occasionalmente un lunatico felice non meno che uno infelice. E poiché ho menzionato la gioia della solitudine, sarà convenientemente erratico procedere subito alla gioia di molti scherzi con molti compagni; e soprattutto, sarà bene cominciare dalla migliore di tutte le mie compagnie. Non descriverò la mia luna di miele, ad alcuni dei cui episodi più comici ho già accennato. Dopo che ci sposammo, mia moglie e io vivemmo per circa un anno a Kensington, il luogo della mia fanciullezza; ma credo che entrambi sapessimo che non sarebbe stato il vero luogo della nostra dimora. Ricordo che uscimmo a passeggio un giorno, per una sorta di seconda luna di miele, e ci mettemmo in viaggio nel vuoto, una traversata deliberatamente senza meta. Vidi passare un omnibus con l’insegna «Hanwell» e, sentendo che era un presagio appropriato, vi salimmo e lo lasciammo da qualche parte a una stazione a caso, in cui entrai e domandai all’uomo della biglietteria dove andasse il prossimo treno. Egli pronunciò la pedantesca risposta: «Dove volete andare?». E io pronunciai la profonda e filosofica replica: «Dovunque vada il prossimo treno». Sembrò che andasse a Slough; il che può parere un gusto singolare, perfino in un treno. Comunque, andammo a Slough, e di lì partimmo a piedi con ancor minor nozione di dove andassimo. E in tal modo attraversammo l’ampio e quieto crocevia di una sorta di villaggio, e ci fermammo a una locanda chiamata The White Hart. Chiedemmo il nome del luogo e ci fu detto che si chiamava Beaconsfield (intendo naturalmente che si chiamava Beconsfield e non Beaconsfield), e ci dicemmo l’un l’altro: «Questo è il tipo di posto dove un giorno faremo la nostra casa».
Le cose che mi ritornano nella memoria, come le più degne di esser fatte e di esser ricordate, sono ogni sorta di assurdi interludi e scappatelle con i miei compagni, pieni della loro conversazione e colorati dei loro caratteri. Belloc attende ancora un Boswell. La sua vivace e risvegliante personalità ha mostrato tutta la continuità di quella del Dr. Johnson; e benché egli abbia avuto dolori personali e negli anni più recenti non poca solitudine, aveva pieno diritto di dire, come l’uomo della sua stessa canzone:
Per te che prendesti il tutto per tutto, le cose che lasciasti furono tre, Una voce sonora per cantare e occhi limpidi per vedere E una zampillante fonte di vita dentro che non s’è ancora mai seccata.
Bentley o Conrad Noel erano personaggi che avrebbero potuto essere messi in qualunque commedia; e le leggerezze di Maurice Baring erano degne di qualche fantastico maccherone o incroyable del diciottesimo secolo.
Fra i ricordi che mi vengono risospinti indietro, come da un vento sopra le Downs, c’è quello del giorno d’inverno in cui Belloc ci trascinò attraverso il Sussex a cercare la sorgente dell’Arun. La compagnia comprendeva sua moglie e la mia; nessuno di noi era sposato da molto, e forse sapevamo meno di quanto sappiamo ora della diversità dei temperamenti umani, per non dire delle temperature. Egli e io eravamo amanti del freddo; mia moglie e sua moglie, che era una californiana assai affascinante, no. Trovammo davvero il luogo dove l’Arun sgorgava fra le colline; ed era invero, di tutti gli spettacoli che ho visto, uno dei più belli; direi quasi il più classico. Poiché sgorgava in una pozza (parzialmente gelata) in un piccolo boschetto di alberi snelli, argentei di brina, che parevano in qualche modo i pallidi e delicati pilastri di un tempio. Ma credo che le signore, benché entrambe sensibili al paesaggio, guardassero quel gelido paradiso con qualcosa di un gelido occhio. Quando ciò cominciò a scoprirsi, Belloc propose all’istante il rimedio del rum caldo, in grandi bicchieroni a una locanda attigua; e restammo sconcertati dal fatto che il rimedio fosse considerato con quasi altrettanto disgusto della malattia. Comunque, noi stessi, che non sentivamo il freddo, consumammo di cuore il rum; e Belloc, che ha sempre avuto il vezzo di ripetere frammenti di versi da poco scoperti, che gli fossero piaciuti, sparava a intervalli i versi di Miss Coleridge:
Eravamo giovani, eravamo allegri, eravamo assai assai saggi E le porte stavano aperte al nostro banchetto; Quando ci passò accanto una donna con l’ovest negli occhi E un uomo con la schiena all’oriente.
Non v’è alcun dubbio, per quanto ci riguarda, che fossimo giovani ed allegri; ma ho talvolta da allora dubitato se fossimo assai, assai saggi.
Tornammo poi alla casa di Belloc; dove egli piuttosto neutralizzò gli effetti del calore ristoratore, spalancando di continuo la porta e precipitandosi fuori a un telescopio nel giardino (era già una gelida notte stellata) e chiamando a gran voce le signore a venire a vedere Dio che fabbrica energia. Sua moglie declinò, in termini di non poco umorismo; al che egli ribatté allegramente:
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise And the doors stood open at our feast; When there passed us a woman with the west in her eyes And a man with his back to the east.
Needless to say, however, his hospitality terminated with a magnificent feast with wine, and all ended in a glow of gaiety; but there lingers a sort of legend of that day in winter, when some of us were so much more interested in the barometer than the telescope. The feminine aspect of the story was afterwards embodied in an echo of the everlasting refrain:
We were cold, we were bitter, we were very nearly dead, And the doors stood open by desire, And there faced us a woman with a cold in her head And a man with his back to the fire.
Those are the sort of silly things that come back to me in memory; and a real life of anybody would almost entirely consist of them. But a real life of anybody is a very difficult thing to write; and as I have failed two or three times in trying to do it to other people, I am under no illusion that I can really do it to myself. I remember another rather ridiculous private incident which had more of what is called public interest. For it involved the meeting of Belloc and a very famous and distinguished author; and I think the meeting was the most comic comedy of cross-purposes that ever happened in the world. One could write books about its significance, social, national, international and historic. It had in it all sorts of things; including the outside and the inside of England. And yet as an anecdote it would probably seem pointless, so subtle and penetrating is the point.
One summer we took a house at Rye, that wonderful inland island, crowned with a town as with a citadel, like a hill in a mediaeval picture. It happened that the house next to us was the old oak-panelled mansion which had attracted, one might almost say across the Atlantic, the fine aquiline eye of Henry James. For Henry James, of course, was an American who had reacted against America; and steeped his sensitive psychology in everything that seemed most antiquatedly and aristocratically English. In his search for the finest shades among the shadows of the past, one might have guessed that he would pick out that town from all towns and that house from all houses. It had been the seat of a considerable patrician family of the neighbourhood, which had long ago decayed and disappeared. It had, I believe, rows of family portraits, which Henry James treated as reverently as family ghosts. I think in a way he really regarded himself as a sort of steward or custodian of the mysteries and secrets of a great house, where ghosts might have walked with all possible propriety. The legend says (I never learned for certain if it was true) that he had actually traced that dead family-tree until he found that there was far away in some manufacturing town, one unconscious descendant of the family, who was a cheerful and commonplace commercial clerk. And it is said that Henry James would ask this youth down to his dark ancestral house, and receive him with funereal hospitality, and I am sure with comments of a quite excruciating tact and delicacy. Henry James always spoke with an air which I can only call gracefully groping; that is not so much groping in the dark in blindness as groping in the light in bewilderment, through seeing too many avenues and obstacles. I would not compare it, in the unkind phrase of Mr. H. G. Wells, to an elephant trying to pick up a pea. But I agree that it was like something with a very sensitive and flexible proboscis, feeling its way through a forest of facts; to us often invisible facts. It is said, I say, that these thin straws of sympathy and subtlety were duly split for the benefit of the astonished commerical gentleman, while Henry James, with his bowed dome-like head, drooped with unfathomable apologies and rendered a sort of silent account of his stewardship. It is also said that the commercial gentleman thought the visit a great bore and the ancestral home a hell of a place; and probably fidgeted about with a longing to go out for a B and S and the Pink ‘Un.
Whether this tale be true or not, it is certain that Henry James inhabited the house with all the gravity and loyalty of the family ghost; not without something of the oppressive delicacy of a highly cultured family butler. He was in point of fact a very stately and courteous old gentleman; and, in some social aspects especially, rather uniquely gracious. He proved in one point that there was a truth in his cult of tact. He was serious with children. I saw a little boy gravely present him with a crushed and dirty dandelion. He bowed; but he did not smile. That restraint was a better proof of the understanding of children than the writing of What Maisie Knew. But in all relations of life he erred, if he erred, on the side of solemnity and slowness; and it was this, I suppose, that got at last upon the too lively nerves of Mr. Wells; who used, even in those days, to make irreverent darts and dashes through the sombre house and the sacred garden and drop notes to me over the garden wall. I shall have more to say of Mr. H. G. Wells and his notes later; here we are halted at the moment when Mr. Henry James heard of our arrival in Rye and proceeded (after exactly the correct interval) to pay his call in state.
Needless to say, it was a very stately call of state; and James seemed to fill worthily the formal frock-coat of those far-off days. As no man is so dreadfully well-dressed as a well-dressed American, so no man is so terribly well-mannered as a well-mannered American. He brought his brother William with him, the famous American philosopher; and though William James was breezier than his brother when you knew him, there was something finally ceremonial about this idea of the whole family on the march. We talked about the best literature of the day; James a little tactfully, myself a little nervously. I found he was more strict than I had imagined about the rules of artistic arrangement; he deplored rather than depreciated Bernard Shaw, because plays like Getting Married were practically formless. He said something complimentary about something of mine; but represented himself as respectfully wondering how I wrote all I did. I suspected him of meaning why rather than how. We then proceeded to consider gravely the work of Hugh Walpole, with many delicate degrees of appreciation and doubt; when I heard from the front-garden a loud bellowing noise resembling that of an impatient foghorn. I knew, however, that it was not a fog-horn; because it was roaring out, “Gilbert! Gilbert!” and was like only one voice in the world; as rousing as that recalled in one of its former phrases, of those who
Eravamo giovani, eravamo allegri, eravamo assai assai saggi E le porte stavano aperte al nostro banchetto; Quando ci passò accanto una donna con l’ovest negli occhi E un uomo con la schiena all’oriente.
Inutile dire, tuttavia, che la sua ospitalità terminò con un magnifico banchetto innaffiato di vino, e tutto si concluse in un bagliore di gaiezza; ma persiste una sorta di leggenda di quel giorno d’inverno, quando alcuni di noi erano assai più interessati al barometro che al telescopio. L’aspetto femminile della storia fu poi incarnato in un’eco dell’eterno ritornello:
Eravamo freddi, eravamo amareggiati, eravamo quasi morti, E le porte stavano aperte per desiderio, E ci stava di fronte una donna con un raffreddore in testa E un uomo con la schiena al fuoco.
Quelle sono le sorta di sciocchezze che mi ritornano nella memoria; e una vera vita di chiunque consisterebbe quasi interamente di esse. Ma una vera vita di chiunque è cosa assai difficile da scrivere; e poiché ho fallito due o tre volte nel tentare di farlo con altre persone, non mi illudo di poterlo davvero fare con me stesso. Ricordo un altro incidente privato piuttosto ridicolo che ebbe di più di ciò che si chiama interesse pubblico. Poiché coinvolse l’incontro di Belloc con un autore assai famoso e distinto; e credo che l’incontro sia stata la più comica commedia di equivoci che sia mai avvenuta al mondo. Se ne potrebbero scrivere libri sul suo significato, sociale, nazionale, internazionale e storico. Vi era dentro ogni sorta di cose; compreso l’esterno e l’interno dell’Inghilterra. Eppure come aneddoto sembrerebbe probabilmente privo di senso, tanto sottile e penetrante è il senso.
Un’estate prendemmo una casa a Rye, quella meravigliosa isola interna, coronata da una cittadina come da una cittadella, come una collina in un quadro medievale. Avvenne che la casa accanto alla nostra fosse la vecchia magione rivestita di pannelli di quercia che aveva attratto, si potrebbe quasi dire attraverso l’Atlantico, il bell’occhio aquilino di Henry James. Poiché Henry James, naturalmente, era un americano che aveva reagito contro l’America; e aveva impregnato la sua sensibile psicologia di tutto ciò che pareva più antiquatamente e aristocraticamente inglese. Nella sua ricerca delle più fini sfumature fra le ombre del passato, si sarebbe potuto indovinare che egli avrebbe scelto quella cittadina fra tutte le cittadine e quella casa fra tutte le case. Era stata la sede di una considerevole famiglia patrizia del vicinato, che da lungo tempo era decaduta e scomparsa. Aveva, credo, file di ritratti di famiglia, che Henry James trattava con la stessa reverenza dei fantasmi di famiglia. Credo che in un certo modo egli davvero si considerasse una sorta di intendente o custode dei misteri e dei segreti di una grande casa, dove i fantasmi avrebbero potuto camminare con ogni possibile decoro. La leggenda dice (non ho mai saputo con certezza se fosse vera) che egli avesse effettivamente rintracciato quell’albero genealogico defunto finché non scoprì che vi era, lontano lontano in qualche cittadina manifatturiera, un inconsapevole discendente della famiglia, che era un allegro e comunissimo impiegato di commercio. E si dice che Henry James invitasse questo giovane giù nella sua oscura casa avita, e lo ricevesse con funerea ospitalità, e sono certo con osservazioni di un tatto e di una delicatezza addirittura strazianti. Henry James parlava sempre con un’aria che posso solo chiamare graziosamente brancolante; non tanto un brancolare nel buio per cecità quanto un brancolare nella luce per smarrimento, per il vedere troppe vie e troppi ostacoli. Non la paragonerei, con la sgarbata frase del signor H. G. Wells, a un elefante che tenti di raccogliere un pisello. Ma convengo che fosse come qualcosa dotato di una proboscide assai sensibile e flessibile, che si facesse strada attraverso una foresta di fatti; per noi spesso fatti invisibili. Si dice, dico, che questi sottili fili di simpatia e di sottigliezza fossero debitamente spaccati a beneficio dello stupefatto signore di commercio, mentre Henry James, con la sua testa china a cupola, si chinava con insondabili scuse e rendeva una sorta di silenzioso conto della sua intendenza. Si dice anche che il signore di commercio trovasse la visita un gran seccatura e la casa avita un posto infernale; e probabilmente si dimenasse col desiderio di uscire per un brandy con seltz e il Pink ‘Un.
Che questo racconto sia vero o no, è certo che Henry James abitava la casa con tutta la gravità e la lealtà del fantasma di famiglia; non senza qualcosa dell’opprimente delicatezza di un maggiordomo di famiglia di alta cultura. Era in effetti un vecchio signore assai maestoso e cortese; e, sotto alcuni aspetti sociali in particolare, piuttosto unicamente affabile. Provò in un punto che vi era una verità nel suo culto del tatto. Era serio con i bambini. Vidi un bambinetto presentargli con gravità un dente di leone schiacciato e sudicio. Egli si inchinò; ma non sorrise. Quel ritegno era una miglior prova della comprensione dei bambini che la stesura di Ciò che sapeva Maisie. Ma in tutte le relazioni della vita egli errava, se errava, dalla parte della solennità e della lentezza; e fu questo, suppongo, che finalmente irritò i nervi troppo vivaci del signor Wells; il quale soleva, perfino in quei giorni, fare irriverenti scatti e sfrecciate attraverso la tetra casa e il sacro giardino e lasciarmi bigliettini oltre il muro del giardino. Avrò più cose da dire sul signor H. G. Wells e i suoi bigliettini più avanti; qui ci fermiamo al momento in cui il signor Henry James udì del nostro arrivo a Rye e procedette (dopo esattamente il corretto intervallo) a farci la sua visita in pompa.
Inutile dire che fu una visita assai maestosa e cerimoniosa; e James pareva riempire degnamente la formale marsina di quei giorni lontani. Come nessun uomo è così spaventosamente ben vestito quanto un americano ben vestito, così nessun uomo è così terribilmente ben educato quanto un americano ben educato. Portò con sé suo fratello William, il famoso filosofo americano; e benché William James fosse più gioviale del fratello quando lo si conosceva, vi era qualcosa di infine cerimoniale in questa idea dell’intera famiglia in marcia. Parlammo della miglior letteratura del giorno; James un po’ con tatto, io un po’ con nervosismo. Trovai che era più severo di quanto avessi immaginato circa le regole della disposizione artistica; deplorava piuttosto che disprezzava Bernard Shaw, perché opere come Sposarsi erano praticamente informi. Disse qualcosa di lusinghiero su qualcosa di mio; ma si rappresentò come rispettosamente chiedendosi come facessi a scrivere tutto ciò che scrivevo. Lo sospettai di intendere perché piuttosto che come. Procedemmo poi a considerare con gravità l’opera di Hugh Walpole, con molti delicati gradi di apprezzamento e di dubbio; quando udii dal giardino antistante un forte muggito somigliante a quello di un’impaziente sirena da nebbia. Sapevo però che non era una sirena da nebbia; perché ruggiva «Gilbert! Gilbert!» ed era simile a una sola voce al mondo; travolgente come quella rammentata in una delle sue precedenti frasi, di coloro che
Heard Ney shouting to the guns to unlimber And hold the Beresina Bridge at night.
I knew it was Belloc, probably shouting for bacon and beer; but even I had no notion of the form or guise under which he would present himself.
I had every reason to believe that he was a hundred miles away in France. And so, apparently, he had been; walking with a friend of his in the Foreign Office, a co-religionist of one of the old Catholic families; and by some miscalculation they had found themselves in the middle of their travels entirely without money. Belloc is legitimately proud of having on occasion lived, and being able to live, the life of the poor. One of the Ballades of the Eye-Witness, which was never published, described tramping abroad in this fashion:
To sleep and smell the incense of the tar, To wake and watch Italian dawns aglow And underneath the branch a single star, Good Lord, how little wealthy people know.
In this spirit they started to get home practically without money. Their clothes collapsed and they managed to get into some workmen’s slops. They had no razors and could not afford a shave. They must have saved their last penny to recross the sea; and then they started walking from Dover to Rye; where they knew their nearest friend for the moment resided. They arrived, roaring for food and drink and derisively accusing each other of having secretly washed, in violation of an implied contract between tramps. In this fashion they burst in upon the balanced tea-cup and tentative sentence of Mr. Henry James.
Henry James had a name for being subtle; but I think that situation was too subtle for him. I doubt to this day whether he, of all men, did not miss the irony of the best comedy in which he ever played a part. He had left America because he loved Europe, and all that was meant by England or France; the gentry, the gallantry, the traditions of lineage and locality, the life that had been lived beneath old portraits in oak-panelled rooms. And there, on the other side of the tea-table, was Europe, was the old thing that made France and England, the posterity of the English squires and the French soldiers; ragged, unshaven, shouting for beer, shameless above all shades of poverty and wealth; sprawling, indifferent, secure. And what looked across at it was still the Puritan refinement of Boston; and the space it looked across was wider than the Atlantic.
It is only fair to say that my two friends were at the moment so disreputable that even an English inn-keeper was faintly at fault in his unfailing nose for gentlemen. He knew they were not tramps; but he had to rally his powers of belief to become completely convinced that they were a Member of Parliament and an official at the Foreign Office. But, though he was a simple and even stupid man, I am not sure that he did not know more about it than Henry James. The fact that one of my friends insisted on having a bottle of port decanted and carrying it through the streets of Rye, like a part of a religious procession, completely restored his confidence in the class to which such lunatics belonged. I have always been haunted by the contradictions of that comedy; and if I could ever express all that was involved in it, I should write a great book on international affairs. I do not say I should become the champion of an Anglo-American Alliance; for any fool can do that, and indeed generally does. But I should begin to suggest something which is often named and has never been even remotely approached: an Anglo-American Understanding.
In those days down at Rye, as I have said, I saw something of Mr. H. G. Wells, and learnt to appreciate that in him which I think made him rebel against the atmosphere of Henry James; though Henry James did really appreciate that quality in Wells. Indeed, Henry James expressed it as well as it could be expressed by saying, “Whatever Wells writes is not only alive, but kicking.” It seems rather unfortunate that, after this, it should have been Henry James who was kicked. But I can sympathise in some ways with H. G’s mutiny against the oak-panelling and the ghosts. What I have always liked about Wells is his vigorous and unaffected readiness for a lark. He was one of the best men in the world with whom to start a standing joke; though perhaps he did not like it to stand too long after it was started. I remember we worked a toy-theatre together with a pantomime about Sidney Webb. I also remember that it was we who invented the well-known and widespread national game of Gype. All sorts of variations and complications were invented in connection with Gype. There was Land Gype and Water Gype. I myself cut out and coloured pieces of cardboard of mysterious and significant shapes, the instruments of Table Gype; a game for the little ones. It was even duly settled what disease threatened the over-assiduous player; he tended to suffer from Gype’s Ear. My friends and I introduced allusions to the fashionable sport in our articles; Bentley successfully passed one through the Daily News and I through some other paper. Everything was in order and going forward; except the game itself, which has not yet been invented.
I can understand a man like Wells feeling that Henry James would show a certain frigidity towards Gype; and for the sacred memory of Gype I can excuse his reaction; but I have always thought that he reacted too swiftly to everything; possibly as a part of the swiftness of his natural genius. I have never ceased to admire and sympathise; but I think he has always been too much in a state of reaction. To use the name which would probably annoy him most, I think he is a permanent reactionary. Whenever I met him, he seemed to be coming from somewhere, rather than going anywhere. He always had been a Liberal, or had been a Fabian, or had been a friend of Henry James or Bernard Shaw. And he was so often nearly right, that his movements irritated me like the sight of somebody’s hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore. But I think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
Udirono Ney gridare ai cannoni di sganciarsi E tenere il Ponte della Beresina nella notte.
Sapevo che era Belloc, probabilmente a gran voce reclamante pancetta e birra; ma perfino io non avevo nozione della forma o della guisa sotto cui egli si sarebbe presentato.
Avevo ogni ragione di credere che fosse a cento miglia di distanza in Francia. E così, a quanto pare, era stato; camminando con un suo amico del Foreign Office, un correligionario di una delle vecchie famiglie cattoliche; e per qualche calcolo errato si erano trovati in mezzo ai loro viaggi interamente senza denaro. Belloc è legittimamente fiero di aver all’occasione vissuto, ed essere capace di vivere, la vita dei poveri. Una delle Ballate dell’Eye-Witness, che non fu mai pubblicata, descriveva il vagabondare all’estero in tal modo:
Dormire e fiutare l’incenso del catrame, Destarsi e mirare le albe italiane fiammeggianti E sotto il ramo una sola stella, Buon Dio, quanto poco sanno i ricchi.
In questo spirito essi si misero in cammino per tornare a casa praticamente senza denaro. I loro abiti si sfasciarono e riuscirono a infilarsi in certi camicioni da operai. Non avevano rasoi e non potevano permettersi una rasatura. Devono aver risparmiato il loro ultimo soldo per riattraversare il mare; e poi si misero a camminare da Dover a Rye; dove sapevano risiedere per il momento il loro amico più vicino. Arrivarono, reclamando a gran voce cibo e bevanda e accusandosi beffardamente l’un l’altro di essersi segretamente lavati, in violazione di un contratto implicito fra vagabondi. In tal foggia irruppero sulla tazza di tè in equilibrio e la frase tentativa del signor Henry James.
Henry James aveva fama di essere sottile; ma credo che quella situazione fosse troppo sottile per lui. Dubito fino a oggi che egli, fra tutti gli uomini, non abbia mancato l’ironia della miglior commedia in cui abbia mai recitato una parte. Aveva lasciato l’America perché amava l’Europa, e tutto ciò che era significato dall’Inghilterra o dalla Francia; la nobiltà, la galanteria, le tradizioni di lignaggio e di località, la vita che era stata vissuta sotto vecchi ritratti in stanze rivestite di quercia. E là, dall’altro lato del tavolino da tè, c’era l’Europa, c’era la vecchia cosa che fece la Francia e l’Inghilterra, la posterità degli squire inglesi e dei soldati francesi; cenciosa, non rasata, reclamante a gran voce la birra, spudorata al di sopra di ogni gradazione di povertà e di ricchezza; sdraiata, indifferente, sicura. E ciò che la guardava di rimpetto era ancora la puritana raffinatezza di Boston; e lo spazio che la separava era più ampio dell’Atlantico.
È solo giusto dire che i miei due amici erano in quel momento così poco raccomandabili che perfino un locandiere inglese fu lievemente in fallo nel suo infallibile fiuto per i gentiluomini. Sapeva che non erano vagabondi; ma dovette radunare le sue forze di credenza per convincersi completamente che erano un Membro del Parlamento e un funzionario del Foreign Office. Ma, benché fosse un uomo semplice e perfino stupido, non sono sicuro che egli non ne sapesse più di Henry James. Il fatto che uno dei miei amici insistesse per avere una bottiglia di porto decantata e la portasse per le vie di Rye, come parte di una processione religiosa, restaurò completamente la sua fiducia nella classe a cui simili lunatici appartenevano. Sono sempre stato ossessionato dalle contraddizioni di quella commedia; e se mai potessi esprimere tutto ciò che vi era implicato, scriverei un grande libro sugli affari internazionali. Non dico che diventerei il campione di un’Alleanza anglo-americana; poiché qualunque sciocco può farlo, e in effetti generalmente lo fa. Ma comincerei a suggerire qualcosa che è spesso nominato e non è mai stato neppur lontanamente accostato: un’Intesa anglo-americana.
In quei giorni giù a Rye, come ho detto, vidi qualcosa del signor H. G. Wells, e imparai ad apprezzare in lui ciò che credo lo facesse ribellare contro l’atmosfera di Henry James; benché Henry James apprezzasse davvero quella qualità in Wells. Anzi, Henry James la espresse così bene come si potesse esprimere dicendo: «Qualunque cosa Wells scriva non è solo viva, ma scalcia». Pare piuttosto sfortunato che, dopo questo, dovesse essere Henry James a essere preso a calci. Ma posso in certo modo simpatizzare con l’ammutinamento di H. G. contro i pannelli di quercia e i fantasmi. Ciò che mi è sempre piaciuto di Wells è la sua vigorosa e schietta prontezza a uno scherzo. Era uno degli uomini migliori al mondo con cui avviare uno scherzo ricorrente; benché forse non gli piacesse che durasse troppo a lungo dopo essere stato avviato. Ricordo che facemmo funzionare insieme un teatrino di marionette con una pantomima su Sidney Webb. Ricordo anche che fummo noi a inventare il ben noto e diffuso gioco nazionale del Gype. Ogni sorta di varianti e complicazioni furono inventate in connessione col Gype. C’era il Gype di Terra e il Gype d’Acqua. Io stesso ritagliai e colorai pezzi di cartone di forme misteriose e significative, gli strumenti del Gype da Tavolo; un gioco per i più piccini. Fu perfino debitamente stabilito quale malattia minacciasse il giocatore troppo assiduo; egli tendeva a soffrire dell’Orecchio di Gype. I miei amici e io introducevamo allusioni allo sport alla moda nei nostri articoli; Bentley ne fece passare felicemente una attraverso il Daily News e io attraverso qualche altro giornale. Tutto era in ordine e procedeva; tranne il gioco stesso, che non è ancora stato inventato.
Posso capire un uomo come Wells che senta che Henry James avrebbe mostrato una certa freddezza verso il Gype; e per la sacra memoria del Gype posso scusare la sua reazione; ma ho sempre pensato che egli reagisse troppo rapidamente a ogni cosa; forse come parte della rapidità del suo genio naturale. Non ho mai cessato di ammirarlo e simpatizzare con lui; ma credo che egli sia sempre stato troppo in uno stato di reazione. Per usare il nome che probabilmente lo seccherebbe di più, credo che egli sia un reazionario permanente. Ogniqualvolta lo incontravo, pareva venire da qualche parte, piuttosto che andare da qualche parte. Egli era sempre stato un Liberale, o era stato un Fabiano, o era stato amico di Henry James o di Bernard Shaw. Ed era così spesso quasi nel giusto, che i suoi movimenti mi irritavano come la vista del cappello di qualcuno perpetuamente ributtato a riva dal mare e mai giunto a toccare la sabbia. Ma credo che egli pensasse che lo scopo dell’aprire la mente sia semplicemente aprire la mente. Mentre io sono inguaribilmente convinto che lo scopo dell’aprire la mente, come dell’aprire la bocca, sia richiuderla su qualcosa di solido.
The name of Mr. H. G. Wells has already inevitably suggested the name of Mr. Bernard Shaw; and it is a mere accident of the arrangement of this book that he has not figured in it fairly prominently from the first. As I have explained on an earlier page, I myself began with an acceptance of Socialism; simply because it seemed at the time the only alternative to the dismal acceptance of Capitalism. I have also noted that my brother, who took Socialism more seriously or at least more scientifically, became a recognised influence in the Fabian Society and was at that time much more familiar with G. B. S. than I. He was also by the nature of the case, much more in agreement with him. My principal experience, from first to last, has been in argument with him. And it is worth remarking that I have learned to have a warmer admiration and affection out of all that argument than most people get out of agreement. Bernard Shaw, unlike some whom I have had to consider here, is seen at his best when he is antagonistic. I might say that he is seen at his best when he is wrong. Or rather, everything is wrong about him but himself.
I began arguing with Mr. Bernard Shaw in print almost as early as I began doing anything. It was about my Pro-Boer sympathies in the South African War. Those who do not understand what the Fabian political philosophy was may not realise that the leading Fabians were nearly all Imperialists. Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb were in that matter strong Imperialists; Hubert Bland was a still stronger Imperialist; my brother was as strong an Imperialist as Hubert Bland. And even Bernard Shaw, though retaining a certain liberty to chaff everybody, was quite definitely an Imperialist, as compared with myself and my friends the Pro-Boers. Since then a legend has arisen, especially among his stupidest opponents, that Mr. Bernard Shaw is an impudent Irish revolutionary who has always been Anti-British. The truth is that Mr. Bernard Shaw has always been a great deal too Pro-British. The play of John Bull’s Other Island is a great deal too Pro-British. It makes the Other Island a great deal too much John Bull’s. It credits the English business man with a success in Ireland that he has never had. It suggests indeed that the success is almost due to the stupidity. But in fact the attempts of men like Balfour and Birrell and Wyndham and Morley to rule Ireland might be much more truly described as a brilliant failure than a stupid success. The point was not that stupid men made something out of it, but that clever men made nothing. So it was in this old and determining crisis of the war with the Dutch Republic. As compared with Belloc or myself, Bernard Shaw was definitely in favour of the South African War. At any rate, he was very definitely in favour of the South African Peace, the particular Pax Britannica that was aimed at by the South African War. It was the same, for that matter, with Mr. H. G. Wells; then a sort of semi-detached Fabian. He went out of his way to scoff at the indignation of the Pro-Boers against the Concentration Camps. Indeed he still maintains, while holding all wars indefensible, that this is the only sort of war to be defended. He says that great wars between great powers are absurd, but that it might be necessary, in policing the planet, to force backward peoples to open their resources to cosmopolitan commerce. In other words, he defends the only sort of war I thoroughly despise, the bullying of small states for their oil or gold; and he despises the only sort of war that I really defend, a war of civilisations and religions, to determine the moral destiny of mankind.
I say this as a compliment to the Fabians. I say it as a compliment to their consistency, as well as contradiction of their controversial views. They were and are quite right, holding their views about centralisation, to be on the side of the Big Battalions and the Big Businesses. It is the sentimental Socialists (as Mr. Wells quite truly points out) who are inconsistent, in saying that a peasant has no right to a corn-field, but a peasantry has a right to an oil-field. It is they who are the more nebulous thinkers when they defend small nationalities but not small properties; more nebulous but sometimes much nicer. There is only a thin sheet of paper between the Imperialist and the Internationalist; and the first Fabians had the lucidity to see the fact. Most of the other Socialists have preferred sheets of paper, and they have grown thinner and thinner sheets.
In the same way Mr. Bernard Shaw has been highly flattered by the false charges brought against him; especially the general charge of being a sort of Irish rebel. Anyone who remembers those old times knows that he was, if anything, the very reverse. It was a part of the Fabian cult of commonsense to regard Irish nationalism as a narrow sentimentalism, distracting men from the main business of socialising the resources of the whole world. But I only note this error here to emphasise the fact that my controversy with G. B. S., both logically and chronologically, is from the beginning. Since then I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world; and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity. I have defended the institution of the family against his Platonist fancies about the State. I have defended the institutions of Beef and Beer against his hygienic severity of vegetarianism and total abstinence. I have defended the old Liberal notion of nationalism against the new Socialist notion of internationalism. I have defended the cause of the Allies against the perverse sympathy felt by pacifists for the militarism of the Central Empires. I have defended what I regard as the sacred limitations of Man against what he regards as the soaring illimitability of Superman. Indeed it was in this last matter of Man and Superman that I felt the difference to become most clear and acute; and we had many discussions upon it with all sides. It was my friend Lucian Oldershaw who announced his intention of writing an answer to “Man and Superman,” called “Shaw and Oldershaw.”
Il nome del signor H. G. Wells ha già inevitabilmente suggerito il nome del signor Bernard Shaw; ed è un mero accidente della disposizione di questo libro che egli non vi abbia figurato piuttosto prominentemente fin dal principio. Come ho spiegato in una pagina precedente, io stesso cominciai con un’accettazione del Socialismo; semplicemente perché pareva a quel tempo la sola alternativa alla scialba accettazione del Capitalismo. Ho anche notato che mio fratello, che prese il Socialismo più seriamente o almeno più scientificamente, divenne un’influenza riconosciuta nella Società Fabiana ed era a quel tempo assai più familiare con G. B. S. di me. Egli era anche, per la natura del caso, assai più d’accordo con lui. La mia principale esperienza, dal primo all’ultimo, è stata nella discussione con lui. E vale la pena osservare che ho imparato ad avere un’ammirazione e un affetto più caldi da tutta quella discussione di quanto la maggior parte della gente ottenga dall’accordo. Bernard Shaw, a differenza di alcuni che ho dovuto considerare qui, si vede al suo meglio quando è antagonista. Direi che si vede al suo meglio quando ha torto. O meglio, tutto è sbagliato in lui tranne lui stesso.
Cominciai a discutere col signor Bernard Shaw in stampa quasi da quando cominciai a fare qualcosa. Fu a proposito delle mie simpatie Pro-Boere nella Guerra sudafricana. Coloro che non capiscono quale fosse la filosofia politica fabiana potrebbero non rendersi conto che i Fabiani di punta erano quasi tutti imperialisti. Il signore e la signora Sidney Webb erano in quella faccenda forti imperialisti; Hubert Bland era un imperialista ancor più forte; mio fratello era un imperialista forte quanto Hubert Bland. E perfino Bernard Shaw, pur conservando una certa libertà di canzonare chiunque, era assai decisamente imperialista, in confronto a me e ai miei amici Pro-Boeri. Da allora è sorta una leggenda, specialmente fra i suoi oppositori più stupidi, che il signor Bernard Shaw sia un impudente rivoluzionario irlandese che è sempre stato antibritannico. La verità è che il signor Bernard Shaw è sempre stato fin troppo pro-britannico. Il dramma L’altra isola di John Bull è fin troppo pro-britannico. Rende l’Altra Isola fin troppo di John Bull. Accredita all’uomo d’affari inglese un successo in Irlanda che egli non ha mai avuto. Suggerisce anzi che il successo sia quasi dovuto alla stupidità. Ma in effetti i tentativi di uomini come Balfour e Birrell e Wyndham e Morley di governare l’Irlanda potrebbero essere assai più veracemente descritti come un brillante fallimento che come uno stupido successo. Il punto non era che uomini stupidi ne cavassero qualcosa, ma che uomini intelligenti non ne cavassero nulla. Così fu in questa vecchia e determinante crisi della guerra con la Repubblica olandese. In confronto a Belloc o a me stesso, Bernard Shaw era decisamente in favore della Guerra sudafricana. In ogni caso, era assai decisamente in favore della Pace sudafricana, la particolare Pax Britannica mirata dalla Guerra sudafricana. Era lo stesso, del resto, col signor H. G. Wells; allora una sorta di Fabiano semi-distaccato. Egli si prese la briga di irridere l’indignazione dei Pro-Boeri contro i campi di concentramento. Anzi egli tuttora sostiene, pur ritenendo indifendibili tutte le guerre, che questo è il solo tipo di guerra da difendere. Dice che le grandi guerre fra grandi potenze sono assurde, ma che potrebbe essere necessario, nel controllare il pianeta, costringere i popoli arretrati ad aprire le loro risorse al commercio cosmopolita. In altre parole, egli difende il solo tipo di guerra che io profondamente disprezzo, il tiranneggiare piccoli stati per il loro petrolio o il loro oro; e disprezza il solo tipo di guerra che io davvero difendo, una guerra di civiltà e di religioni, per determinare il destino morale dell’umanità.
Dico questo come un complimento ai Fabiani. Lo dico come un complimento alla loro coerenza, non meno che come contraddizione delle loro vedute polemiche. Essi avevano ed hanno del tutto ragione, tenendo le loro vedute sulla centralizzazione, a stare dalla parte dei Grandi Battaglioni e dei Grandi Affari. Sono i socialisti sentimentali (come il signor Wells assai veracemente osserva) a essere incoerenti, nel dire che un contadino non ha diritto a un campo di grano, ma un contadiname ha diritto a un giacimento petrolifero. Sono loro i pensatori più nebulosi quando difendono le piccole nazionalità ma non le piccole proprietà; più nebulosi ma talvolta assai più simpatici. Non c’è che un sottile foglio di carta fra l’imperialista e l’internazionalista; e i primi Fabiani ebbero la lucidità di vedere il fatto. La maggior parte degli altri socialisti hanno preferito fogli di carta, e li hanno fatti sempre più sottili.
Allo stesso modo il signor Bernard Shaw è stato assai lusingato dalle false accuse mossegli; specialmente l’accusa generale di essere una sorta di ribelle irlandese. Chiunque ricordi quei vecchi tempi sa che egli era, semmai, l’esatto contrario. Era parte del culto fabiano del buon senso considerare il nazionalismo irlandese come un angusto sentimentalismo, che distoglieva gli uomini dal principale affare di socializzare le risorse del mondo intero. Ma noto qui questo errore solo per sottolineare il fatto che la mia controversia con G. B. S., sia logicamente sia cronologicamente, viene fin dall’inizio. Da allora ho discusso con lui su quasi ogni argomento del mondo; e siamo sempre stati su fronti opposti, senza affettazione né animosità. Ho difeso l’istituzione della famiglia contro le sue fantasie platoniche sullo Stato. Ho difeso le istituzioni del Manzo e della Birra contro la sua igienica severità di vegetarianismo e astinenza totale. Ho difeso la vecchia nozione liberale di nazionalismo contro la nuova nozione socialista di internazionalismo. Ho difeso la causa degli Alleati contro la perversa simpatia provata dai pacifisti per il militarismo degli Imperi Centrali. Ho difeso quelle che considero le sacre limitazioni dell’Uomo contro ciò che egli considera l’illimitabilità svettante del Superuomo. Anzi fu in quest’ultima faccenda dell’Uomo e del Superuomo che sentii la differenza divenire più chiara e acuta; e avemmo molte discussioni su di essa con tutte le parti. Fu il mio amico Lucian Oldershaw ad annunciare la sua intenzione di scrivere una risposta a «Uomo e Superuomo», intitolata «Shaw e Oldershaw».
For in fact all these differences come back to a religious difference; indeed I think all differences do. I did not know myself, at the beginning, what the religious difference was; still less what the religion was. But the difference is this; that the Shavians believe in evolution exactly as the old Imperialists believed in expansion. They believe in a great growing and groping thing like a tree; but I believe in the flower and the fruit; and the flower is often small. The fruit is final and in that sense finite; it has a form and therefore a limit. There has been stamped upon it an image, which is the crown and consummation of an aim; and the mediaeval mystics used the same metaphor and called it Fruition. And as applied to man, it means this; that man has been made more sacred than any superman or super-monkey; that his very limitations have already become holy and like a home; because of that sunken chamber in the rocks, where God became very small.
I have dwelt on this long duel that I may end with the right salute to the duellist. It is not easy to dispute violently with a man for twenty years, about sex, about sin, about sacraments, about personal points of honour, about all the most sacred or delicate essentials of existence, without sometimes being irritated or feeling that he hits unfair blows or employs discreditable ingenuities. And I can testify that I have never read a reply by Bernard Shaw that did not leave me in a better and not a worse temper or frame of mind; which did not seem to come out of inexhaustible fountains of fair-mindedness and intellectual geniality; which did not savour somehow of that native largeness which the philosopher attributed to the Magnanimous Man. It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as much as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.
Thus it happened that, while there are few of my contemporaries I like better, we have met more in public than in private; and generally upon platforms; especially upon platforms where we were put up to fight each other, like two knock-about comedians. And indeed he has his eccentricities, rather perhaps to be called consistencies, which often hamper conventional conviviality. Even hostesses, let alone hosts, are sometimes puzzled by a gentleman who has rather more horror of tea than of wine or beer. When I have met him among my more festive friends, he has always stood up starkly for his negative ideals, sometimes to the point of defiance. Among the more joyful of the memories that I am stirring in this chapter were many of the moonstruck banquets given by Mr. Maurice Baring; who in such matters might well have a chapter to himself. The trouble is that I fear the chapter would be found incredible and cast discredit on the rest of this laborious but reliable narrative. It is not for me to do justice here to the godlike joy of life that induced a gentleman to celebrate his fiftieth birthday in a Brighton hotel at midnight by dancing a Russian dance with inconceivable contortions and then plunging into the sea in evening dress. It were not wholly wise perhaps to tell the whole story of that great supper-party in a vast tent in a garden in Westminster; after which eggs were boiled in Sir Herbert Tree’s hat (because it was the most chic and shining of the hats of the company); and I remember indulging in a wild fencing match with real swords against a gentleman who was, fortunately, more intoxicated than I. The whole of that great occasion was actually recorded in cold blood, of all places in the world, in a French newspaper. The reason was that a little French journalist, after making a placid and witty speech full of compliments, had then indulged for the rest of the evening in the treacherous Gallic trick of strict temperance. I remember that his article (which was highly unreliable), began with the words, “‘I denounce Shaw. He is sober.’ Who said these words? These were the words of George Wells;” and continued in an equally personal vein. But it is really true, and I know that Shaw would think it merely consistent and creditable, that he himself got up and sternly protested and then stalked out of the room as a seventeenth-century Puritan might have left a tavern full of Cavaliers.
But even the most sincere seventeenth-century Puritan was in error in supposing that Cavaliers could not be sincere, and even serious. He may often have classed with mere roysterers men of the quality of Donne or Herbert or Sir Thomas Browne. There was a great deal of wisdom as well as wit over the nuts and wine in those riots of my youth; and not only outstanding wisdom but outstanding virtue. It is a coincidence that I have already symbolised such virtue in the surname of Herbert. Maurice Baring himself has recorded in a noble elegy the virtues of the Herbert of his own generation; the second Auberon Herbert, son of the eccentric Individualist, who afterwards inherited the title of Lord Lucas. He was assuredly the good cavalier. Every man was the better for meeting him, in however Bacchanalian an environment; courage and frankness and the love of freedom stood out of him like staring signals, though he was entirely modest and natural; and the battered party name of Liberal meant something so long as he was alive. His courage was of the queerest quality; casual and as it were, in a quiet way, crazy. He had a wooden leg or foot, having lost the use of one limb in the South African War; and I have known him climb out of the window at the top of a dizzy tower of flats and crawl somehow like a fly to the next window, without railing or balcony or any apparent foothold; and having re-entered by the next window climb out again by the next, so weaving a sort of winding pattern round the top of the building. This story is strictly true; but there were a great many legends in that circle, the growth of which it was amusing to watch. I once smashed an ordinary tumbler at Herbert’s table, and an ever-blossoming tradition sprang up that it had been a vessel of inconceivable artistic and monetary value, its price perpetually mounting into millions and its form and colour taking on the glories of the Arabian Nights. From this incident (and from the joyful manner in which Baring trampled like an elephant among the fragments of the crystal) arose a catchword used by many of us in many subsequent controversies, in defence of romantic and revolutionary things; the expression: “I like the noise of breaking glass.” I made it the refrain of a ballade which began:
Poiché in effetti tutte queste differenze si riconducono a una differenza religiosa; anzi credo che tutte le differenze lo facciano. Non sapevo io stesso, all’inizio, quale fosse la differenza religiosa; ancor meno quale fosse la religione. Ma la differenza è questa; che gli Shaviani credono nell’evoluzione esattamente come i vecchi imperialisti credevano nell’espansione. Credono in una grande cosa crescente e brancolante come un albero; ma io credo nel fiore e nel frutto; e il fiore è spesso piccolo. Il frutto è finale e in tal senso finito; ha una forma e perciò un limite. Vi è stata impressa un’immagine, che è la corona e il coronamento di uno scopo; e i mistici medievali usarono la stessa metafora e la chiamarono Fruizione. E applicato all’uomo, ciò significa questo; che l’uomo è stato reso più sacro di qualunque superuomo o super-scimmia; che le sue stesse limitazioni sono già divenute sante e simili a una casa; a causa di quella camera infossata nella roccia, dove Dio si fece piccolissimo.
Mi sono soffermato su questo lungo duello per poter finire col giusto saluto al duellante. Non è facile disputare violentemente con un uomo per vent’anni, sul sesso, sul peccato, sui sacramenti, su punti personali d’onore, su tutti i più sacri o delicati essenziali dell’esistenza, senza essere talvolta irritati o sentire che egli colpisce colpi sleali o impiega ingegnosità poco onorevoli. E posso testimoniare che non ho mai letto una replica di Bernard Shaw che non mi lasciasse in un temperamento o uno stato d’animo migliore e non peggiore; che non paresse sgorgare da inesauribili fontane di equanimità e di genialità intellettuale; che non sapesse in qualche modo di quella nativa grandezza che il filosofo attribuiva all’Uomo Magnanimo. È necessario dissentire da lui quanto io dissento, per poterlo ammirare quanto io lo ammiro; e sono fiero di lui come nemico ancor più che come amico.
Così avvenne che, mentre vi sono pochi dei miei contemporanei che io preferisca a lui, ci siamo incontrati più in pubblico che in privato; e generalmente su palchi; specialmente su palchi dove eravamo messi a combattere l’un l’altro, come due comici da avanspettacolo. E in effetti egli ha le sue eccentricità, forse piuttosto da chiamarsi coerenze, che spesso intralciano la convivialità convenzionale. Perfino le padrone di casa, per non dire i padroni di casa, sono talvolta sconcertate da un gentiluomo che ha piuttosto più orrore del tè che del vino o della birra. Quando l’ho incontrato fra i miei amici più festosi, egli ha sempre difeso ostinatamente i suoi ideali negativi, talvolta fino alla sfida. Fra le più gioiose delle memorie che sto rimestando in questo capitolo ve n’erano molte dei banchetti lunatici offerti dal signor Maurice Baring; il quale in tali faccende potrebbe ben avere un capitolo tutto suo. Il guaio è che temo che il capitolo verrebbe trovato incredibile e getterebbe discredito sul resto di questa laboriosa ma affidabile narrazione. Non tocca a me rendere qui giustizia alla divina gioia di vivere che indusse un gentiluomo a celebrare il suo cinquantesimo compleanno in un albergo di Brighton a mezzanotte danzando una danza russa con inconcepibili contorsioni e poi tuffandosi in mare in abito da sera. Non sarebbe del tutto saggio forse raccontare l’intera storia di quel gran banchetto in una vasta tenda in un giardino a Westminster; dopo il quale furono bollite uova nel cappello di Sir Herbert Tree (perché era il più chic e splendente dei cappelli della compagnia); e ricordo di essermi concesso un selvaggio incontro di scherma con spade vere contro un gentiluomo che era, per fortuna, più ubriaco di me. L’intera di quella grande occasione fu effettivamente registrata a sangue freddo, nel posto meno pensabile del mondo, in un giornale francese. La ragione era che un giornalistino francese, dopo aver fatto un placido e arguto discorso pieno di complimenti, si era poi concesso per il resto della serata il perfido trucco gallico della stretta temperanza. Ricordo che il suo articolo (che era altamente inattendibile) cominciava con le parole: «“Io denuncio Shaw. È sobrio.” Chi disse queste parole? Queste furono le parole di George Wells»; e proseguiva in vena altrettanto personale. Ma è davvero vero, e so che Shaw lo giudicherebbe soltanto coerente e lodevole, che egli stesso si alzò e severamente protestò e poi uscì impettito dalla stanza come un puritano del diciassettesimo secolo avrebbe potuto lasciare una taverna piena di Cavalieri.
Ma perfino il più sincero puritano del diciassettesimo secolo errava nel supporre che i Cavalieri non potessero essere sinceri, e perfino seri. Egli può spesso aver accomunato ai meri gozzoviglianti uomini della qualità di Donne o Herbert o Sir Thomas Browne. Vi era una gran dose di saggezza non meno che di arguzia sulle noci e sul vino in quei bagordi della mia giovinezza; e non solo saggezza eminente ma virtù eminente. È una coincidenza che io abbia già simboleggiato tale virtù nel cognome di Herbert. Maurice Baring stesso ha registrato in una nobile elegia le virtù dell’Herbert della sua propria generazione; il secondo Auberon Herbert, figlio dell’eccentrico individualista, che poi ereditò il titolo di Lord Lucas. Egli era assuredamente il buon cavaliere. Ogni uomo era migliore per averlo incontrato, per quanto bacchico fosse l’ambiente; il coraggio e la franchezza e l’amore della libertà risaltavano da lui come segnali fissi, benché egli fosse interamente modesto e naturale; e il malconcio nome di partito di Liberale significò qualcosa finché egli fu in vita. Il suo coraggio era della più bizzarra qualità; casuale e, per così dire, in modo quieto, folle. Aveva una gamba o un piede di legno, avendo perso l’uso di un arto nella Guerra sudafricana; e l’ho visto arrampicarsi fuori dalla finestra in cima a una vertiginosa torre di appartamenti e strisciare in qualche modo come una mosca fino alla finestra successiva, senza ringhiera o balcone o alcun apparente appiglio; e, rientrato dalla finestra successiva, arrampicarsi di nuovo fuori dalla successiva, tessendo così una sorta di tortuoso disegno attorno alla cima dell’edificio. Questa storia è rigorosamente vera; ma vi erano moltissime leggende in quella cerchia, la cui crescita era divertente osservare. Ruppi una volta un ordinario bicchiere alla tavola di Herbert, e sorse una tradizione sempre fiorente che fosse stato un recipiente d’inconcepibile valore artistico e monetario, il cui prezzo perpetuamente saliva a milioni e la cui forma e colore assumevano le glorie delle Mille e una notte. Da questo incidente (e dal gioioso modo in cui Baring calpestava come un elefante i frammenti del cristallo) sorse un motto usato da molti di noi in molte successive controversie, in difesa di cose romantiche e rivoluzionarie; l’espressione: «Mi piace il rumore del vetro che si rompe». Ne feci il ritornello di una ballata che cominciava:
Prince, when I took your goblet tall And smashed it with inebriate care, I knew not how from Rome and Gaul You gained it; I was unaware It stood by Charlemagne’s great chair And served St. Peter at High Mass. … I’m sorry if the thing was rare; I like the noise of breaking glass.
It is only just to our happy company to say that we did not confine ourselves to saying or singing our own lyrics; though Belloc was generally ready to oblige; and the loud and roaring but none the less pathetic song with the chorus:
And the Gates of Heaven are opening wide To let poor Hilary in
was first heard, I think, at one of these quiet evenings for mutual edification and culture. But we must have sung a vast number of the finest songs in the English language, by poets ancient and modern; and a legend persists that, when Herbert had rooms not far from Buckingham Palace, we sang “Drake’s Drum” with such passionate patriotism that King Edward the Seventh sent in a request for the noise to stop.
I was mainly led to the mention of these idle though agreeable memories, by remarking that his quite unaffected aversion to this sort of thing marked the Puritanic element in Bernard Shaw. He is probably still regarded by many as a buffoon; as a fact he has far too little sympathy with mere buffoonery. His austerity in such things is so much a part of his personality and purity of aim, that one can hardly wish it altered; but the truth remains that the Puritan cannot understand the morality and religion of the Cavalier. In most matters I have found myself rather more in sympathy with Mr. Bernard Shaw than with Mr. H. G. Wells, the other genius of the Fabians, warmly as I admire them both. But, in this matter. Wells was more of my sort than Shaw. Wells does understand the glow and body of good spirits, even when they are animal spirits; and he understands the Saturnalia in which the senator can sometimes relax like the slave. Even here, however, there is a distinction. Shaw has plenty of appetite for adventure; but in his case it would be most welcome as open air adventure. He would not see the fun of cellars or smugglers’ caves; but require a levity in some sense celestial in the literal sense of being sub divo. To put it shortly. Wells would understand larking; but Shaw would only understand skylarking.
I was destined to see some of his skylarking on one occasion at least; and to be privileged to play the fool with him far from the political platform, if not so very far from the theatrical stage. It began by Bernard Shaw coming down to my house in Beaconsfield, in the heartiest spirits and proposing that we should appear together, disguised as Cowboys, in a film of some sort projected by Sir James Barrie. I will not describe the purpose or character of the performance; because nobody ever discovered it; presumably with the exception of Sir James Barrie. But throughout the proceedings, even Barrie had rather the appearance of concealing his secret from himself. All I could gather was that two other well-known persons, Lord Howard de Walden and Mr. William Archer, the grave Scottish critic and translator of Ibsen, had also consented to be Cowboys. “Well,” I said, after a somewhat blank pause of reflection, “God forbid that anyone should say I did not see a joke, if William Archer could see it.” Then after a pause I asked, “But what is the joke?” Shaw replied with hilarious vagueness that nobody knew what the joke was. That was the joke.
I found that the mysterious proceeding practically divided itself into two parts. Both were pleasantly conspiratorial in the manner of Mr. Oppenheim or Mr. Edgar Wallace. One consisted of an appointment in a sort of abandoned brickfield somewhere in the wilds of Essex; in which spot, it was alleged, our cowpunching costumes were already concealed. The other consisted of an invitation to supper at the Savoy, to “talk things over” with Barrie and Granville Barker. I kept both these melodramatic assignations; and though neither of them threw any light upon what we were supposed to be doing, they were both very amusing in their way and rather different from what might have been expected. We went down to the waste land in Essex and found our Wild West equipment. But considerable indignation was felt against William Archer; who, with true Scottish foresight, arrived there first and put on the best pair of trousers. They were indeed a magnificent pair of fur trousers; while the other three riders of the prairie had to be content with canvas trousers. A running commentary upon this piece of individualism continued throughout the afternoon; while we were being rolled in barrels, roped over faked precipices and eventually turned loose in a field to lasso wild ponies, which were so tame that they ran after us instead of our running after them, and nosed in our pockets for pieces of sugar. Whatever may be the strain on credulity, it is also a fact that we all got onto the same motor-bicycle; the wheels of which were spun round under us to produce the illusion of hurtling like a thunderbolt down the mountain-pass. When the rest finally vanished over the cliffs clinging to the rope, they left me behind as a necessary weight to secure it; and Granville Barker kept on calling out to me to Register Self-Sacrifice and Register Resignation, which I did with such wild and sweeping gestures as occurred to me; not, I am proud to say, without general applause. And all this time Barrie, with his little figure behind his large pipe, was standing about in an impenetrable manner; and nothing could extract from him the faintest indication of why we were being put through these ordeals. Never had the silencing effects of the Arcadia Mixture appeared to me more powerful or more unscrupulous. It was as if the smoke that rose from that pipe was a vapour not only of magic, but of black magic.
Principe, quando presi il tuo alto calice E lo mandai in frantumi con ebbra cura, Non sapevo come da Roma e dalla Gallia Lo avessi ottenuto; ignoravo Che stette accanto al gran seggio di Carlomagno E servì san Pietro all’Alta Messa. … Mi spiace se la cosa era rara; Mi piace il rumore del vetro che si rompe.
È solo giusto verso la nostra felice compagnia dire che non ci limitavamo a dire o cantare le nostre proprie liriche; benché Belloc fosse generalmente pronto a compiacere; e la sonora e ruggente ma non per questo meno patetica canzone col ritornello:
E le Porte del Cielo si stanno spalancando Per far entrare il povero Hilary
fu udita per la prima volta, credo, a una di queste quiete serate di mutua edificazione e cultura. Ma dobbiamo aver cantato un vasto numero delle più belle canzoni della lingua inglese, di poeti antichi e moderni; e persiste una leggenda che, quando Herbert aveva stanze non lontane da Buckingham Palace, cantammo «Drake’s Drum» con così appassionato patriottismo che re Edoardo VII mandò a chiedere che il rumore cessasse.
Fui condotto principalmente alla menzione di queste memorie oziose benché piacevoli, dall’osservare che la sua avversione del tutto schietta verso questo genere di cose segnava l’elemento puritanico in Bernard Shaw. Egli è probabilmente ancora considerato da molti un buffone; in effetti egli ha assai troppo poca simpatia per la mera buffoneria. La sua austerità in tali cose è tanto parte della sua personalità e purezza di scopo, che si può a stento desiderare che sia mutata; ma resta la verità che il Puritano non può capire la moralità e la religione del Cavaliere. Nella maggior parte delle faccende mi sono trovato piuttosto più in simpatia col signor Bernard Shaw che col signor H. G. Wells, l’altro genio dei Fabiani, per quanto calorosamente io ammiri entrambi. Ma, in questa faccenda, Wells era più del mio tipo di Shaw. Wells capisce sì il bagliore e il corpo del buon umore, anche quando è umore animale; e capisce i Saturnali in cui il senatore può talvolta rilassarsi come lo schiavo. Perfino qui, tuttavia, c’è una distinzione. Shaw ha abbondante appetito d’avventura; ma nel suo caso essa sarebbe assai gradita come avventura all’aria aperta. Egli non vedrebbe il divertimento delle cantine o delle grotte dei contrabbandieri; ma richiederebbe una leggerezza in qualche senso celeste nel senso letterale di essere sub divo. Per dirla in breve, Wells capirebbe il fare baldoria; ma Shaw capirebbe soltanto il fare le capriole in cielo.
Ero destinato a vedere qualcuna delle sue capriole in almeno un’occasione; e ad avere il privilegio di fare il buffone con lui lontano dal palco politico, se non tanto lontano dal palcoscenico teatrale. Cominciò con Bernard Shaw che scese giù alla mia casa a Beaconsfield, nel più caloroso stato d’animo e proponendo che comparissimo insieme, travestiti da Cowboy, in un film di qualche tipo progettato da Sir James Barrie. Non descriverò lo scopo o il carattere dello spettacolo; perché nessuno lo scoprì mai; presumibilmente con l’eccezione di Sir James Barrie. Ma per tutto il procedimento, perfino Barrie aveva piuttosto l’aspetto di celare il suo segreto a se stesso. Tutto ciò che riuscii a raccogliere fu che altre due ben note persone, Lord Howard de Walden e il signor William Archer, il grave critico scozzese e traduttore di Ibsen, avevano anch’essi acconsentito a essere Cowboy. «Ebbene», dissi, dopo una pausa di riflessione alquanto vuota, «Dio non voglia che qualcuno dica che io non seppi cogliere uno scherzo, se William Archer riuscì a coglierlo». Poi dopo una pausa domandai: «Ma qual è lo scherzo?». Shaw rispose con ilare vaghezza che nessuno sapeva quale fosse lo scherzo. Quello era lo scherzo.
Trovai che il misterioso procedimento praticamente si divideva in due parti. Entrambe erano piacevolmente cospiratorie alla maniera del signor Oppenheim o del signor Edgar Wallace. Una consisteva in un appuntamento in una sorta di fornace di mattoni abbandonata da qualche parte nelle selve dell’Essex; nel qual luogo, si asseriva, i nostri costumi da mandriani erano già nascosti. L’altra consisteva in un invito a cena al Savoy, per «discutere le cose» con Barrie e Granville Barker. Mantenni entrambi questi melodrammatici appuntamenti; e benché nessuno dei due gettasse alcuna luce su ciò che si supponeva stessimo facendo, furono entrambi assai divertenti a modo loro e piuttosto diversi da ciò che ci si sarebbe potuti aspettare. Scendemmo alla terra desolata dell’Essex e trovammo il nostro equipaggiamento del Selvaggio West. Ma si provò considerevole indignazione contro William Archer; il quale, con vera preveggenza scozzese, arrivò lì per primo e indossò il miglior paio di pantaloni. Erano invero un magnifico paio di pantaloni di pelliccia; mentre gli altri tre cavalieri della prateria dovettero accontentarsi di pantaloni di tela. Un commento continuo a questo pezzo d’Individualismo proseguì per tutto il pomeriggio; mentre venivamo rotolati in barili, calati con funi giù per finti precipizi e infine lasciati liberi in un campo a prendere al lazo pony selvaggi, che erano così mansueti da correre dietro a noi invece che noi a loro, e frugavano nelle nostre tasche in cerca di zollette di zucchero. Quale che sia lo sforzo sulla credulità, è anche un fatto che salimmo tutti sulla stessa motocicletta; le cui ruote venivano fatte girare sotto di noi per produrre l’illusione di sfrecciare come un fulmine giù per il passo montano. Quando gli altri infine svanirono oltre le scogliere aggrappati alla fune, mi lasciarono indietro come peso necessario a tenerla; e Granville Barker continuava a gridarmi di Registrare Autosacrificio e di Registrare Rassegnazione, cosa che feci con gesti così selvaggi e ampi come mi vennero in mente; non, sono fiero di dirlo, senza applauso generale. E per tutto questo tempo Barrie, con la sua piccola figura dietro la sua grande pipa, se ne stava in giro in maniera impenetrabile; e nulla poté estorcergli il più tenue indizio del perché venissimo sottoposti a queste prove. Mai gli effetti silenzianti dell’Arcadia Mixture mi erano apparsi più potenti o più privi di scrupoli. Era come se il fumo che saliva da quella pipa fosse un vapore non solo di Magia, ma di nera Magia.
But the other half of the mystery was, if possible, more mysterious. It was all the more mysterious because it was public, not to say crowded. I went to the Savoy supper under the impression that Barrie and Barker would explain to a small party some small part of the scheme. Instead of that I found the stage of the Savoy Theatre thronged with nearly everybody in London, as the Society papers say when they mean everybody in Society. From the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith to the yellowest and most cryptic Oriental attache, they were all there, dining at little tables and talking about everything but the matter in hand. At least they were all there except Sir James Barrie; who on this occasion made himself almost completely invisible. Towards the end of the meal. Sir Edward Elgar casually remarked to my wife, “I suppose you know you’re being filmed all this time.”
From what I know of the lady, it is unlikely that she was brandishing a champagne-bottle or otherwise attracting social attention; but some of them were throwing bread about and showing marked relaxation from the cares of State. Then the Original Four, whom destiny had selected for a wild western life, were approached with private instructions, which worked out in public as follows. The stage was cleared and the company adjourned to the auditorium, where Bernard Shaw harangued them in a furious speech, with savage gesticulations denouncing Barker and Barrie and finally drawing an enormous sword. The other three of us rose at this signal, also brandishing swords, and stormed the stage, going out through the back scenery. And there We (whoever We were) disappear for ever from the record and reasonable understanding of mankind; for never from that day to this has the faintest light been thrown on the reasons of our remarkable behaviour. I have since heard in a remote and roundabout way certain vague suggestions, to the effect that there was some symbolical notion of our vanishing from real life and being captured or caught up into the film world of romance; being engaged through all the rest of the play in struggling to fight our way back to reality. Whether this was the idea I have never known for certain; I only know that I received immediately afterwards a friendly and apologetic note from Sir James Barrie, saying that the whole scheme was going to be dropped.
I do not know; but I have often wondered. And I have sometimes fancied that there was another sense, darker than my own fancy, in which the secret put in Barrie’s pipe had ended in smoke. There had really been a sort of unearthly unreality in all the levity of those last hours; like something high and shrill that might crack; and it did crack. I have sometimes wondered whether it was felt that this fantasy of fashionable London would appear incongruous with something that happened some days later. For what happened then was that a certain Ultimatum went out from the Austrian Government against Serbia. I rang up Maurice Baring at a further stage of that rapidly developing business; and I can remember the tones of his voice when he said, “We’ve got to fight. They’ve all got to fight. I don’t see how anybody can help it.”
If the Cowboys were indeed struggling to find the road back to Reality they found it all right.
Ma l’altra metà del mistero era, se possibile, ancor più misteriosa. Era tanto più misteriosa perché era pubblica, per non dire affollata. Andai alla cena del Savoy con l’impressione che Barrie e Barker avrebbero spiegato a un piccolo gruppo qualche piccola parte del piano. Invece di ciò trovai il palcoscenico del Savoy Theatre affollato di quasi tutti a Londra, come dicono i giornali mondani quando intendono tutti in società. Dal Primo Ministro, il signor Asquith, al più giallastro e criptico attaché orientale, erano tutti là, a cenare a piccoli tavoli e a parlare di ogni cosa tranne la faccenda in questione. Almeno erano tutti là tranne Sir James Barrie; il quale in questa occasione si rese quasi completamente invisibile. Verso la fine del pasto, Sir Edward Elgar osservò con noncuranza a mia moglie: «Suppongo sappiate che state venendo filmata per tutto questo tempo».
Da ciò che so della signora, è improbabile che stesse brandendo una bottiglia di champagne o altrimenti attirando l’attenzione sociale; ma alcuni di loro lanciavano pane in giro e mostravano un marcato rilassamento dalle cure di Stato. Poi i Quattro Originari, che il destino aveva selezionato per una selvaggia vita del West, furono avvicinati con istruzioni private, che si tradussero in pubblico come segue. Il palcoscenico fu sgombrato e la compagnia si trasferì nella platea, dove Bernard Shaw li arringò in un furioso discorso, con selvagge gesticolazioni denunciando Barker e Barrie e infine sguainando un’enorme spada. Noi altri tre ci alzammo a questo segnale, anch’noi brandendo spade, e prendemmo d’assalto il palcoscenico, uscendo attraverso le quinte del fondo. E là Noi (chiunque Noi fossimo) scompariamo per sempre dal registro e dalla ragionevole comprensione dell’umanità; poiché mai da quel giorno a oggi la più tenue luce è stata gettata sulle ragioni del nostro notevole comportamento. Ho da allora udito in modo remoto e tortuoso certi vaghi suggerimenti, secondo cui vi era qualche nozione simbolica del nostro svanire dalla vita reale ed essere catturati o risucchiati nel mondo cinematografico del Romanzo; impegnati per tutto il resto del dramma a lottare per aprirci la strada del ritorno alla realtà. Se fosse questa l’idea non l’ho mai saputo con certezza; so soltanto che ricevetti immediatamente dopo un amichevole e apologetico bigliettino da Sir James Barrie, che diceva che l’intero piano sarebbe stato abbandonato.
Non lo so; ma me lo sono spesso chiesto. E ho talvolta immaginato che vi fosse un altro senso, più oscuro della mia stessa fantasia, in cui il segreto messo nella pipa di Barrie fosse finito in fumo. Vi era stata davvero una sorta di ultraterrena irrealtà in tutta la leggerezza di quelle ultime ore; come qualcosa di alto e acuto che potesse incrinarsi; e si incrinò. Mi sono talvolta chiesto se si sentisse che questa fantasia della Londra alla moda sarebbe apparsa incongrua con qualcosa che accadde alcuni giorni dopo. Poiché ciò che accadde allora fu che un certo Ultimatum uscì dal Governo austriaco contro la Serbia. Telefonai a Maurice Baring a uno stadio più avanzato di quella faccenda in rapido sviluppo; e posso ricordare il tono della sua voce quando disse: «Dobbiamo combattere. Tutti devono combattere. Non vedo come chiunque possa impedirlo».
Se i Cowboy stavano davvero lottando per trovare la strada del ritorno alla Realtà, la trovarono senz’altro.
XI
I had been living, already for a long time, in the town of Beaconsfield in the County of Bucks; the town which some Colonials imagine to have been named after Lord Beaconsfield the politician. It is rather as if they thought that England had been named after Mr. England the pirate. I am almost tempted to add that I say it with an apology to pirates. I do not know for certain why Disraeli took his title from Beaconsfield, which he scarcely ever visited, rather than from Hughenden, where he lived. But I was told by old Lord Burnham, the founder of the Daily Telegraph, that (as the story ran) he had chosen the title originally intended for Burke, who did live at Beaconsfield and whose legend still clings in many ways to the place. Mr. Garvin, the editor of the Observer, lives in what was once the house of Burke’s agent and the oak-tree in my own garden was one of the line of trees that marked the limit of this land. I am glad that Mr. Garvin fits into that political landscape much better than I do; for I admire Burke in many things while disagreeing with him in nearly everything. But Mr. Garvin strikes me as being rather like Burke; in his Irish origin, in his English Conservatism, in his eloquence and gravity and something that can only be called urgency of mind. I once suggested to him that he should appear at a local festival as Burke and I as Fox; a part for which I have no claim except in circumference. But I hope there will never come a dark and difficult hour when political differences become personal, and Mr. Garvin begins to throw daggers about and say that our friendship is at an end.
I have lived in Beaconsfield from the time when it was almost a village to the time when, as the enemy profanely says, it is almost a suburb. It would be truer to say that the two things in some sense still exist side by side; and the popular instinct has recognised the division by actually talking about the Old Town and the New Town. I once planned a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in several volumes, which was to be called “The Two Barbers of Beaconsfield” and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For those two shops do indeed belong to two different civilisations. The hairdresser of the New Town belongs to the new world and has the spotlessness of the specialist; the other has what may be called the ambidexterity of the peasant, shaving (so to speak) with one hand while he stuffs squirrels or sells tobacco with the other. The latter tells me from his own recollection what happened in Old Beaconsfield; the former, or his assistants, tell me from the Daily Mail what has not happened in a wider world. But I suggest this comparison, merely as an introduction to a parallel matter of local interest; which happens to embody, better perhaps than any other emblem, all those large matters that are more than local. If I wanted to write a book about the whole of this great passage in the history of England, including the Great War and many other changes almost as great, I should write it in the form of a History of the Beaconsfield War Memorial.
The plain primary proposal was that a cross should be set up at the cross-roads. Before the discussion was half over there had entered into it the following subjects of debate: (1) The Position of Woman in the Modern World, (2) Prohibition and the Drink Question, (3) The Excellence or Exaggeration of the Cult of Athletics, (4) The Problem of Unemployment, Especially in Relation to Ex-Service Men, (5) The Question of Support for Hospitals and the General Claims of Surgery and Medicine, (6) The Justice of the War, (7) Above all, or rather under all, for it was in many ways masked or symbolically suggested, the great war of religion which has never ceased to divide mankind, especially since that sign was set up among them. Those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants of a little country town; the rector and the doctor and the bank manager and the respectable trades-men of the place, with a few hangers-on like myself, of the more disreputable professions of journalism or the arts. But the powers that were present there in the spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history; Mahomet was there and the Iconoclasts, who came riding out of the East to ruin the statues of Italy, and Calvin and Rousseau and the Russian anarchs and all the older England that is buried under Puritanism; and Henry the Third ordering the little images for Westminster and Henry the Fifth, after Agincourt, on his knees before the shrines of Paris. If one could really write that little story of that little place, it would be the greatest of historical monographs.
The first thing to note, as typical of the modern tone, is a certain effect of toleration which actually results in timidity. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it. There is a further qualification of some interest; that in this, as in many things, there is an immense intellectual superiority in the poor, and even in the ignorant. The cottagers of the Old Town either liked the Cross because it was Christian and said so, or else disliked the Cross because it was Popish and said so. But the leaders of the No-Popery Party were ashamed to talk No-Popery. They did not say in so many words that they thought a Crucifix a wicked thing; but they said, in any number of words, that they thought a parish pump or a public fountain or a municipal motor-bus a good thing. But the greater number of them tended to the proposal of a Club Building, especially for ex-service men; where the latter could have refreshment (that is where the Drink Question came in) or play games (that is where the Athletic Question came in) or possibly even share the Club on equal terms with their wives and women-folk (that is where the Wrongs of Women came in) and generally, in fact, enjoy all that we should desire ex-soldiers to enjoy, if there were really any chance of letting them do so. The scheme was in that sense admirable; but, as it proceeded, it became almost too admirable, in the original Latin sense of astonishing. Those who had propounded it called themselves, I need hardly say, the Practical Party. They justly condemned us of the other group as dreamers and mystical visionaries. They set to work to draw up their plans for the Club; and they were certainly plans of the most magnificent completeness. There were to be cricket-fields and football-fields and swimming-baths and golf-courses, for all I know. The incident has a primary moral, with reference to that strange modern notion about what is practical and constructive, which seems merely to mean what is large and largely advertised. By the end of the controversy the plan of the Practical Party had swelled to the ends of the earth and taken on the dimensions of Aladdin’s Palace. There was not the remotest chance of collecting subscriptions for such a scheme; at the rate it was developing it might run to millions. Meanwhile, the vision of the mere visionaries could be realised easily for a few hundred pounds.
XI
Vivevo già da lungo tempo nella cittadina di Beaconsfield nella Contea di Bucks; la cittadina che alcuni Coloniali immaginano sia stata chiamata così da Lord Beaconsfield il politico. È piuttosto come se pensassero che l’Inghilterra sia stata chiamata così dal signor England il pirata. Sono quasi tentato di aggiungere che lo dico con scuse ai pirati. Non so con certezza perché Disraeli prendesse il suo titolo da Beaconsfield, che egli quasi mai visitò, piuttosto che da Hughenden, dove viveva. Ma mi fu detto dal vecchio Lord Burnham, fondatore del Daily Telegraph, che (come narrava la storia) egli aveva scelto il titolo originariamente inteso per Burke, il quale davvero visse a Beaconsfield e la cui leggenda ancora aderisce in molti modi al luogo. Il signor Garvin, direttore dell’Observer, vive in quella che fu un tempo la casa dell’agente di Burke e la quercia nel mio proprio giardino era uno della fila di alberi che segnavano il limite di questa terra. Sono lieto che il signor Garvin si inserisca in quel paesaggio politico assai meglio di me; poiché ammiro Burke in molte cose pur dissentendo da lui in quasi tutto. Ma il signor Garvin mi colpisce come piuttosto simile a Burke; nella sua origine irlandese, nel suo conservatorismo inglese, nella sua eloquenza e gravità e in qualcosa che si può soltanto chiamare urgenza di mente. Gli suggerii una volta che egli comparisse a una festa locale come Burke e io come Fox; una parte per la quale non ho alcun titolo se non nella circonferenza. Ma spero che non giunga mai un’ora buia e difficile in cui le differenze politiche divengano personali, e il signor Garvin cominci a scagliare pugnali in giro e a dire che la nostra amicizia è finita.
Ho vissuto a Beaconsfield dal tempo in cui era quasi un villaggio al tempo in cui, come il nemico profanamente dice, è quasi un sobborgo. Sarebbe più vero dire che le due cose in certo senso ancora coesistono l’una accanto all’altra; e l’istinto popolare ha riconosciuto la divisione parlando effettivamente della Città Vecchia e della Città Nuova. Progettai una volta un’imponente ed esauriente opera sociologica, in vari volumi, che doveva intitolarsi «I Due Barbieri di Beaconsfield» e basarsi interamente sui discorsi dei due eccellenti cittadini da cui andavo a farmi radere. Poiché quelle due botteghe appartengono davvero a due diverse civiltà. Il parrucchiere della Città Nuova appartiene al nuovo mondo e ha l’immacolatezza dello specialista; l’altro ha ciò che si può chiamare l’ambidestria del contadino, radendo (per così dire) con una mano mentre impaglia scoiattoli o vende tabacco con l’altra. Quest’ultimo mi racconta dalla sua stessa memoria ciò che accadde nella Vecchia Beaconsfield; il primo, o i suoi assistenti, mi raccontano dal Daily Mail ciò che non è accaduto in un mondo più ampio. Ma suggerisco questo paragone soltanto come introduzione a una faccenda parallela d’interesse locale; che si dà il caso incarni, meglio forse di qualunque altro emblema, tutte quelle grandi faccende che sono più che locali. Se volessi scrivere un libro su tutto questo grande passaggio nella storia dell’Inghilterra, compresa la Grande Guerra e molti altri cambiamenti quasi altrettanto grandi, lo scriverei nella forma di una Storia del Memoriale di Guerra di Beaconsfield.
La semplice proposta iniziale era che una croce fosse eretta al crocevia. Prima che la discussione fosse a metà vi erano entrati i seguenti temi di dibattito: (1) La Posizione della Donna nel Mondo Moderno, (2) Il Proibizionismo e la Questione del Bere, (3) L’Eccellenza o l’Esagerazione del Culto dell’Atletica, (4) Il Problema della Disoccupazione, Specialmente in Relazione agli Ex Combattenti, (5) La Questione del Sostegno agli Ospedali e le Pretese Generali della Chirurgia e della Medicina, (6) La Giustizia della Guerra, (7) Soprattutto, o piuttosto al di sotto di tutto, poiché era in molti modi mascherata o simbolicamente suggerita, la grande guerra di religione che non ha mai cessato di dividere l’umanità, specialmente da quando quel segno fu eretto in mezzo a loro. Coloro che dibattevano la faccenda erano un piccolo gruppo di abitanti di una piccola cittadina di campagna; il rettore e il dottore e il direttore di banca e i rispettabili commercianti del luogo, con qualche parassita come me, delle professioni più poco raccomandabili del giornalismo o delle arti. Ma i poteri che erano presenti là in spirito venivano da tutte le età e da tutti i campi di battaglia della storia; Maometto era là e gli Iconoclasti, che vennero cavalcando dall’Oriente a rovinare le statue d’Italia, e Calvino e Rousseau e gli anarchici russi e tutta la più antica Inghilterra sepolta sotto il Puritanesimo; ed Enrico III che ordinava le piccole immagini per Westminster ed Enrico V, dopo Azincourt, in ginocchio davanti ai santuari di Parigi. Se si potesse davvero scrivere quella piccola storia di quel piccolo luogo, sarebbe la più grande delle monografie storiche.
La prima cosa da notare, come tipica del tono moderno, è un certo effetto di tolleranza che effettivamente si risolve in timidezza. Si potrebbe supporre che la libertà religiosa significhi che tutti sono liberi di discutere di religione. In pratica significa che a quasi nessuno è permesso di menzionarla. Vi è un’ulteriore precisazione di un certo interesse; che in questo, come in molte cose, vi è un’immensa superiorità intellettuale nei poveri, e perfino negli ignoranti. Gli abitanti dei cottage della Città Vecchia o amavano la croce perché era cristiana e lo dicevano, o detestavano la croce perché era papista e lo dicevano. Ma i capi del Partito No-Papismo si vergognavano di parlare di No-Papismo. Non dicevano con tante parole di ritenere un Crocifisso una cosa malvagia; ma dicevano, con un qualsiasi numero di parole, di ritenere una pompa parrocchiale o una fontana pubblica o un autobus municipale una cosa buona. Ma il maggior numero di essi propendeva per la proposta di un Edificio da Club, specialmente per gli ex combattenti; dove questi ultimi potessero avere ristoro (ed è qui che entrava la Questione del Bere) o giocare a giochi (ed è qui che entrava la Questione Atletica) o forse perfino condividere il Club a pari condizioni con le loro mogli e le loro donne (ed è qui che entravano i Torti delle Donne) e generalmente, in effetti, godere di tutto ciò che noi dovremmo desiderare che gli ex soldati godessero, se ci fosse davvero qualche possibilità di lasciarglielo fare. Il piano era in tal senso ammirevole; ma, mentre procedeva, divenne quasi troppo ammirevole, nel senso latino originale di stupefacente. Coloro che l’avevano proposto si chiamavano, non occorre dirlo, il Partito Pratico. Condannavano giustamente noi dell’altro gruppo come sognatori e mistici visionari. Si misero a redigere i loro piani per il Club; ed erano certo piani della più magnifica completezza. Vi dovevano essere campi da cricket e campi da calcio e piscine e campi da golf, per quanto ne so. L’incidente ha una morale primaria, con riferimento a quella strana nozione moderna su ciò che è pratico e costruttivo, che pare significare soltanto ciò che è grande e largamente reclamizzato. Alla fine della controversia il piano del Partito Pratico si era gonfiato fino ai confini della terra e aveva assunto le dimensioni del Palazzo di Aladino. Non c’era la più remota possibilità di raccogliere sottoscrizioni per un tale piano; al ritmo con cui si sviluppava poteva arrivare a milioni. Nel frattempo, la visione dei meri visionari poteva realizzarsi facilmente per poche centinaia di sterline.
And the second moral to the story is this; that the modern mind finds it very difficult to understand the idea of an aim or object. When I was speaking on behalf of the simple stone monument at the cross-roads, I quoted the excellent saying of Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, when his sister asks him, just before the ball, whether it would not be much more rational if conversation at a ball took the place of dancing; and he answers, “Much more rational, but not half so like a ball.” I pointed out that a parish-pump might seem to some more rational than a Cross, but it was not half so like a War Memorial. A club, or a hospital ward, or anything having its own practical purpose, policy and future, would not really be a War Memorial at all; it would not be in practice a memory of the War. If people thought it wrong to have a memory of the War, let them say so. If they did not approve of wasting money on a War Memorial, let us scrap the War Memorial and save the money. But to do something totally different which we wanted to do, on pretence of doing something else that we did not do, was unworthy of Homo sapiens and the dignity of that poor old anthropoid. I got some converts to my view; but I think that many still thought I was not practical; though in fact I was very specially practical, for those who understand what is really meant by a Pragma. The most practical test of the problem of unmemorial memorials was offered by the Rector of Beaconsfield, who simply got up and said, “We already have a ward in the Wycombe Hospital which was supposed to commemorate something. Can anybody here tell me what it commemorates?”
Anyhow, the Cross was the crux; and it is no pun but a plain truth to put it so. But the curious point is that few of those who found the Cross crucial would admit in so many words that it was crucial because it was the Cross. They advanced all sorts of alternative objections or made all sorts of alternative proposals. One lady wished to have a statue of a soldier, and I shuddered inwardly, knowing what such statues can be; fortunately another lady, with a nephew in the Navy, called out indignantly, “What about the sailors?” Whereupon the first lady said with hasty but hearty apology, “Oh, yes; and a sailor as well.” Whereupon a third lady, with a brother in the Air Force, proposed that this also should be included in the group; and the first lady with large and generous gestures accepted all and every addition of the kind; so that this magnificent sculptural monument was soon towering into tanks and toppling with aeroplanes. It seemed a little dangerous; but it was safer than a market-cross. Other objections to the latter symbol were adduced, probably to cover the real objection; such as the monument as an obstacle to traffic. The local doctor, an admirable physician but a sceptic of rather a schoolboy sort, observed warmly, “If you do stick up a thing like this, I hope you’ll stick a light on it, or all our cars will smash into it in the dark.” Whereupon my wife, who was then an ardent Anglo-Catholic, observed with an appearance of dreamy rapture, “Oh, yes! How beautiful! A lamp continually burning before the Cross!” Which was not exactly what the man of science had proposed; but it could not have been more warmly seconded.
Lastly, the most significant part of this social episode was the end of it. If anyone fails to realise how lasting, or lingering, in spite of everything, are the old social forms of England and its structure as an ancient aristocratic state, he could not do better than consider the last quiet and ironic ending of the great battle of the Beaconsfield War Memorial. There was a huge paper plebiscite in which hardly anybody knew what he was voting for, but which turned up somehow with a narrow numerical majority for the building of the Club. The Club, for which the practical majority had voted was never built. The Cross, for which the more mystical minority had largely forgotten to vote, was built. When the whole fuss of papers and public meetings was over, and everybody was thinking about other things, the rector of the parish raised a quiet subscription of his own among his own co-religionists and sympathisers; got enough money to put up a Cross and put it up. Meanwhile Lord Burnham, the chief landlord of the neighbourhood, equally casually informed the Ex-Service Men and their sympathisers that they could use a hall, which was his property, for their Club, if they liked, they appeared to be perfectly contented; and so far from demanding any other Club, seemed to have become fairly indifferent about the use of this one. So did the Great War pass over Beaconsfield, making the world safe for Democracy and the holding of any number of public meetings full of the revolutionary hopes of the Modern World; and so in the end the whole matter was decided at the private discretion of the Squire and Parson, as it was in the days of old.
There was a sequel, however, involving more serious things. A renewed shock went through the anti-clerical party on finding that the Cross was a Crucifix. This represented, to many amiable and professedly moderate Nonconformists and other Protestants, exactly that extra touch that they could not tolerate. The distinction is all the more clearly to be kept in mind because it is, on the face of it, an entirely irrational distinction. The sort of Evangelical who demands what he calls a Living Christ must surely find it difficult to reconcile with his religion an indifference to a Dying Christ; but anyhow one would think he would prefer it to a Dead Cross. To salute the Cross in that sense is literally to bow down to wood and stone; since it is only an image in stone of something that was made of wood. It is surely less idolatrous to salute the Incarnate God or His image; and the case is further complicated by the relation of the image to the other object. If a man were ready to wreck every statue of Julius Caesar, but also ready to kiss the sword that killed him, he would be liable to be misunderstood as an ardent admirer of Caesar. If a man hated to have a portrait of Charles the First, but rubbed his hands with joy at the sight of the axe that beheaded him, he would have himself to blame if he were regarded rather as a Roundhead than a Royalist. And to permit a picture of the engine of execution, while forbidding a picture of the victim, is just as strange and sinister in the case of Christ as in that of Caesar. And this illustrates something about the whole situation, which grew clearer and clearer to me about this time and initiated the next step of my life.
E la seconda morale della storia è questa; che la mente moderna trova assai difficile comprendere l’idea di uno scopo o di un oggetto. Quando parlavo in favore del semplice monumento di pietra al crocevia, citai l’eccellente detto del signor Bingley in Orgoglio e pregiudizio, quando sua sorella gli chiede, poco prima del ballo, se non sarebbe assai più razionale se la conversazione a un ballo prendesse il posto della danza; ed egli risponde: «Assai più razionale, ma non altrettanto simile a un ballo». Feci notare che una pompa parrocchiale potrebbe sembrare ad alcuni più razionale di una croce, ma non era altrettanto simile a un Memoriale di Guerra. Un club, o una corsia d’ospedale, o qualunque cosa avente il proprio scopo, la propria politica e il proprio futuro pratici, non sarebbe affatto realmente un Memoriale di Guerra; non sarebbe in pratica una memoria della Guerra. Se la gente riteneva sbagliato avere una memoria della Guerra, che lo dicesse. Se non approvavano lo sperperare denaro in un Memoriale di Guerra, buttiamo via il Memoriale di Guerra e risparmiamo il denaro. Ma fare qualcosa di totalmente diverso che volevamo fare, col pretesto di fare qualcos’altro che non facevamo, era indegno dell’Homo sapiens e della dignità di quel povero vecchio antropoide. Ottenni qualche convertito alla mia veduta; ma credo che molti pensassero ancora che io non fossi pratico; benché in effetti io fossi assai specialmente pratico, per coloro che capiscono ciò che realmente s’intende per un Pragma. La prova più pratica del problema dei memoriali immemori fu offerta dal Rettore di Beaconsfield, il quale semplicemente si alzò e disse: «Abbiamo già una corsia nell’Ospedale di Wycombe che doveva commemorare qualcosa. Qualcuno qui può dirmi che cosa commemora?».
Comunque, la croce era il nodo cruciale; e non è un bisticcio ma una semplice verità metterla così. Ma il punto curioso è che pochi di coloro che trovavano la croce cruciale avrebbero ammesso con tante parole che era cruciale perché era la croce. Avanzavano ogni sorta di obiezioni alternative o facevano ogni sorta di proposte alternative. Una signora desiderava avere una statua di un soldato, e io rabbrividii interiormente, sapendo cosa possano essere tali statue; per fortuna un’altra signora, con un nipote in Marina, esclamò indignata: «E i marinai?». Al che la prima signora disse con affrettata ma cordiale scusa: «Oh, sì; e un marinaio pure». Al che una terza signora, con un fratello nell’Aeronautica, propose che anche questo fosse incluso nel gruppo; e la prima signora con ampi e generosi gesti accettò ogni e qualsiasi aggiunta del genere; cosicché questo magnifico monumento scultoreo presto svettava in carri armati e traboccava di aeroplani. Sembrava un po’ pericoloso; ma era più sicuro di una croce di mercato. Furono addotte altre obiezioni a quest’ultimo simbolo, probabilmente per coprire la vera obiezione; come il monumento in quanto ostacolo al traffico. Il dottore locale, un ammirevole medico ma uno scettico di tipo piuttosto scolaresco, osservò con calore: «Se proprio piantate su una cosa come questa, spero che ci pianterete su una luce, o tutte le nostre auto ci si schianteranno contro al buio». Al che mia moglie, che era allora un’ardente anglo-cattolica, osservò con un’aria di sognante rapimento: «Oh, sì! Che bello! Una lampada che arde di continuo davanti alla croce!». Il che non era esattamente ciò che l’uomo di scienza aveva proposto; ma non avrebbe potuto essere più calorosamente appoggiato.
Infine, la parte più significativa di questo episodio sociale fu la sua fine. Se qualcuno non riesce a rendersi conto di quanto durevoli, o persistenti, malgrado tutto, siano le vecchie forme sociali dell’Inghilterra e la sua struttura di antico stato aristocratico, non potrebbe far di meglio che considerare l’ultima quieta e ironica conclusione della grande battaglia del Memoriale di Guerra di Beaconsfield. Vi fu un enorme plebiscito cartaceo in cui quasi nessuno sapeva per cosa stesse votando, ma che in qualche modo si concluse con una stretta maggioranza numerica per la costruzione del Club. Il Club, per cui la maggioranza pratica aveva votato, non fu mai costruito. La croce, per cui la minoranza più mistica aveva in gran parte dimenticato di votare, fu costruita. Quando tutto il baccano di carte e di riunioni pubbliche fu finito, e tutti pensavano ad altre cose, il rettore della parrocchia raccolse una quieta sottoscrizione propria fra i suoi propri correligionari e simpatizzanti; ottenne denaro sufficiente per erigere una croce e la eresse. Nel frattempo Lord Burnham, il principale proprietario terriero del vicinato, con pari noncuranza informò gli Ex Combattenti e i loro simpatizzanti che potevano usare un salone, che era sua proprietà, per il loro Club, se volevano; essi apparvero perfettamente contenti; e ben lungi dal reclamare qualunque altro Club, parvero divenire abbastanza indifferenti all’uso di questo. Così passò la Grande Guerra su Beaconsfield, rendendo il mondo sicuro per la Democrazia e per la tenuta di un qualsiasi numero di riunioni pubbliche piene delle speranze rivoluzionarie del Mondo Moderno; e così alla fine tutta la faccenda fu decisa a privata discrezione dello Squire e del Parroco, come si faceva ai tempi antichi.
Vi fu tuttavia un seguito, che coinvolgeva cose più serie. Uno shock rinnovato attraversò il partito anticlericale nello scoprire che la croce era un Crocifisso. Questo rappresentava, per molti amabili e dichiaratamente moderati anticonformisti e altri protestanti, esattamente quel tocco in più che non potevano tollerare. La distinzione va tenuta a mente tanto più chiaramente in quanto è, di per sé, una distinzione interamente irrazionale. Il tipo di Evangelico che reclama ciò che chiama un Cristo Vivente deve certamente trovar difficile conciliare con la sua religione un’indifferenza verso un Cristo Morente; ma comunque si penserebbe che egli lo preferirebbe a una Croce Morta. Salutare la croce in quel senso è letteralmente prostrarsi davanti al legno e alla pietra; poiché essa è soltanto un’immagine in pietra di qualcosa che era fatto di legno. È certo meno idolatrico salutare il Dio Incarnato o la Sua immagine; e il caso è ulteriormente complicato dalla relazione dell’immagine con l’altro oggetto. Se un uomo fosse pronto a distruggere ogni statua di Giulio Cesare, ma anche pronto a baciare la spada che lo uccise, rischierebbe di essere frainteso come un ardente ammiratore di Cesare. Se un uomo detestasse avere un ritratto di Carlo I, ma si fregasse le mani dalla gioia alla vista dell’ascia che lo decapitò, dovrebbe biasimare se stesso se fosse considerato piuttosto un Testa Rotonda che un Realista. E permettere un’immagine dello strumento di esecuzione, pur vietando un’immagine della vittima, è altrettanto strano e sinistro nel caso di Cristo quanto in quello di Cesare. E ciò illustra qualcosa su tutta la situazione, che mi divenne sempre più chiaro in questo periodo e diede inizio al passo successivo della mia vita.
Of that revolution in my life I shall write more fully later. But for the moment, in the particular connection under consideration, I will say this. The fact that, after all these alarums and excursions, and as the almost inconsequent outcome of so much fuss and turmoil, a carved crucifix does now actually stand in the heart of the little town that is my home, is naturally a source of intense and somewhat ironic joy to me. But, with quite undiminished sympathy and respect for my friends and neighbours who did actually set it up, there is a certain quality in the way in which it came, and the way in which it was accepted, that is not to me entirely acceptable. I do not want the crucifix to be a compromise, or a concession to the weaker brethren, or a makeweight or a by-product. I want it to be a blazon and a boast. I want there to be no more doubt about our all glorying in it than there would have been in any body of old Crusaders pitting the Cross against the Crescent. And if anyone wants to know my feelings about a point on which I touch rarely and with reluctance: the relation of the Church I left to the Church I joined, there is the answer as compact and concrete as a stone image. I do not want to be in a religion in which I am allowed to have a crucifix. I feel the same about the much more controversial question of the honour paid to the Blessed Virgin. If people do not like that cult, they are quite right not to be Catholics. But in people who are Catholics, or call themselves Catholics, I want the idea not only liked but loved and loved ardently, and above all proudly proclaimed. I want it to be what the Protestants are perfectly right in calling it; the badge and sign of a Papist. I want to be allowed to be enthusiastic about the existence of the enthusiasm; not to have my chief enthusiasm coldly tolerated as an eccentricity of myself. And that is why, with all the good will in the world, I cannot feel the crucifix at one end of the town as a substitute for the little Roman Catholic Church at the other.
But I have here introduced the War Memorial in connection with the other matter of the War. I have purposely approached the episode of the War from the wrong end. I have spoken first of certain problems that arose when it was all over; because it happens to illustrate certain peculiarities in my own position and experience. There are certain things to be said that can hardly be said except as by one regarding the War in retrospect; the problem involved had hardly arisen when we only saw it in prospect; and yet, unless I pass on to some such summary, all that I say on this subject may be much misunderstood; especially in the atmosphere that has been spreading during the last ten or twelve years.
I have always suffered from the disadvantage, among my solid and sturdy British countrymen, of not altering my opinions quickly enough. I have generally attempted, in a modest way, to have reasons for my opinions; and I have never been able to see why the opinions should change until the reasons change. If I were really a sturdy and stolid Briton, it would, of course, be enough for me that the fashions change. For that sort of sturdy Briton does not want to be consistent with himself; he only wants to be consistent with everybody else. But having what I am pleased to suppose a sort of political philosophy, I have in many matters retained my political opinions. I thought in the first days of the Home Rule quarrel that Ireland ought to be governed by Irish ideas. And I still think so, even when my fellow Liberals have made the shocking discovery that Irish ideas are ordinary Christian ideas. I thought that England’s action in the South African War was wrong; and I still think it was wrong. I thought that England’s action in the Great War was right; and I still think it was right. I did not learn my politics in the first case from the Daily Mail and I do not propose to learn any others in the second case from the Daily Express. In the first case, I thought and think that Jewish financial power should not dominate England. In the second case, I thought and think that Prussian militarism and materialism should not dominate Europe. Until I alter my view of these two principles, I can see no reason for altering my view of the practical applications of them. Obstinacy of this sort, founded on a cold insensibility to the fluctuations of the market and to all the weight which attaches to the opinions of the two or three men who own all the newspapers, has on the face of it all sorts of disadvantages in dividing an individual from his contemporaries. But it has some advantages; and one advantage is that the man can look, without division of heart or disturbance of mind, at the War Memorial of Beaconsfield.
For the whole point at issue is really there. The Memorial was set up, like the Monument after the Great Fire, to commemorate the fact that something had been saved out of the Great War. What was saved was Beaconsfield; just as what was saved was Britain; not an ideal Beaconsfield, not a perfect or perfectly progressing Beaconsfield, not a New Beaconsfield with gates of gold and pearl descending out of heaven from God; but Beaconsfield. A certain social balance, a certain mode of life, a certain tradition of morals and manners, some parts of which I regret, some parts of which I value, was in fact menaced by the fate of falling into a complete and perhaps permanent inferiority and impotence, as compared with another tradition and mode of life. It is all nonsense to say that in such a struggle defeat would not have been destruction, merely because it probably would not have been what is legally called annexation. States so defeated become vassal-states, retaining a merely formal independence, and in every vital matter steered by the diplomacy and penetrated by the culture of the conqueror. The men whose names are written on the Beaconsfield War Memorial died to prevent Beaconsfield being so immediately overshadowed by Berlin that all its reforms would be modelled on Berlin, all its products used for the international purposes of Berlin, even if the King of Prussia were not called in so many words the Suzerain of the King of England. They died to prevent it and they did prevent it. Let those who enjoy the thought insist that they died in vain.
Di quella rivoluzione nella mia vita scriverò più pienamente in seguito. Ma per il momento, nella particolare connessione in esame, dirò questo. Il fatto che, dopo tutti questi allarmi ed escursioni, e come risultato quasi inconseguente di tanto trambusto e tumulto, un crocifisso scolpito ora effettivamente si erga nel cuore della cittadina che è la mia casa, è naturalmente fonte per me di intensa e alquanto ironica gioia. Ma, con simpatia e rispetto del tutto immutati per i miei amici e vicini che effettivamente lo eressero, vi è una certa qualità nel modo in cui esso venne, e nel modo in cui fu accettato, che a me non è interamente accettabile. Non voglio che il crocifisso sia un compromesso, o una concessione ai fratelli più deboli, o un contrappeso o un sottoprodotto. Voglio che sia un blasone e un vanto. Voglio che non vi sia più dubbio sul fatto che tutti noi ce ne gloriamo di quanto ve ne sarebbe stato in un qualsiasi corpo di vecchi Crociati che opponevano la croce alla Mezzaluna. E se qualcuno vuol conoscere i miei sentimenti su un punto che tocco raramente e con riluttanza: la relazione fra la Chiesa che lasciai e la Chiesa in cui entrai, ecco la risposta compatta e concreta come un’immagine di pietra. Non voglio essere in una religione in cui mi è permesso avere un crocifisso. Provo lo stesso circa la questione assai più controversa dell’onore reso alla Beata Vergine. Se alla gente non piace quel culto, ha perfettamente ragione a non essere cattolica. Ma nelle persone che sono cattoliche, o si dicono cattoliche, voglio che l’idea sia non solo gradita ma amata e amata ardentemente, e soprattutto proclamata con orgoglio. Voglio che sia ciò che i Protestanti hanno perfettamente ragione di chiamarla; il distintivo e il segno di un Papista. Voglio che mi sia permesso essere entusiasta dell’esistenza dell’entusiasmo; non avere il mio principale entusiasmo freddamente tollerato come un’eccentricità mia. Ed ecco perché, con tutta la buona volontà del mondo, non posso sentire il crocifisso a un’estremità della cittadina come un sostituto della piccola chiesa cattolica romana all’altra.
Ma ho qui introdotto il Memoriale di Guerra in connessione con l’altra faccenda della Guerra. Ho di proposito accostato l’episodio della Guerra dal capo sbagliato. Ho parlato prima di certi problemi che sorsero quando fu tutto finito; perché si dà il caso illustrino certe peculiarità della mia stessa posizione ed esperienza. Vi sono certe cose da dire che difficilmente possono essere dette se non come da uno che guarda la Guerra in retrospettiva; il problema in questione era appena sorto quando la vedevamo solo in prospettiva; eppure, a meno che io non passi a qualche simile riepilogo, tutto ciò che dico su questo tema potrebbe essere assai frainteso; specialmente nell’atmosfera che si è andata diffondendo durante gli ultimi dieci o dodici anni.
Ho sempre sofferto dello svantaggio, fra i miei solidi e robusti compatrioti britannici, di non mutare le mie opinioni abbastanza rapidamente. Ho generalmente tentato, in modo modesto, di avere ragioni per le mie opinioni; e non ho mai potuto capire perché le opinioni dovrebbero cambiare finché non cambiano le ragioni. Se io fossi davvero un robusto e flemmatico Britanno, mi basterebbe, naturalmente, che cambino le mode. Poiché quel tipo di robusto Britanno non vuole essere coerente con se stesso; vuole solo essere coerente con tutti gli altri. Ma avendo quella che mi compiaccio di supporre una sorta di filosofia politica, ho in molte faccende conservato le mie opinioni politiche. Pensavo nei primi giorni della disputa sull’Autogoverno irlandese che l’Irlanda dovesse essere governata da idee irlandesi. E lo penso ancora, anche ora che i miei compagni Liberali hanno fatto la scioccante scoperta che le idee irlandesi sono ordinarie idee cristiane. Pensavo che l’azione dell’Inghilterra nella Guerra sudafricana fosse sbagliata; e penso ancora che fosse sbagliata. Pensavo che l’azione dell’Inghilterra nella Grande Guerra fosse giusta; e penso ancora che fosse giusta. Non imparai la mia politica nel primo caso dal Daily Mail e non mi propongo di impararne altra nel secondo caso dal Daily Express. Nel primo caso, pensavo e penso che il potere finanziario ebraico non dovrebbe dominare l’Inghilterra. Nel secondo caso, pensavo e penso che il militarismo e il materialismo prussiani non dovrebbero dominare l’Europa. Finché non muto la mia veduta di questi due principii, non vedo alcuna ragione per mutare la mia veduta delle loro applicazioni pratiche. Un’ostinazione di questa specie, fondata su una fredda insensibilità alle fluttuazioni del mercato e a tutto il peso che si attribuisce alle opinioni dei due o tre uomini che possiedono tutti i giornali, ha di per sé ogni sorta di svantaggi nel dividere un individuo dai suoi contemporanei. Ma ha alcuni vantaggi; e un vantaggio è che l’uomo può guardare, senza divisione di cuore o turbamento di mente, il Memoriale di Guerra di Beaconsfield.
Poiché tutto il punto in questione è realmente là. Il Memoriale fu eretto, come il Monumento dopo il Grande Incendio, a commemorare il fatto che qualcosa era stato salvato dalla Grande Guerra. Ciò che fu salvato fu Beaconsfield; proprio come ciò che fu salvato fu la Gran Bretagna; non una Beaconsfield ideale, non una Beaconsfield perfetta o perfettamente progrediente, non una Nuova Beaconsfield con porte d’oro e di perla che discendono dal cielo da Dio; ma Beaconsfield. Un certo equilibrio sociale, un certo modo di vita, una certa tradizione di morale e di costumi, alcune parti della quale rimpiango, alcune parti della quale apprezzo, era in effetti minacciata dal fato di cadere in una completa e forse permanente inferiorità e impotenza, in confronto a un’altra tradizione e modo di vita. È tutta un’assurdità dire che in una tale lotta la sconfitta non sarebbe stata distruzione, solo perché probabilmente non sarebbe stata ciò che legalmente si chiama annessione. Gli Stati così sconfitti divengono stati vassalli, che conservano una indipendenza meramente formale, e in ogni faccenda vitale guidati dalla diplomazia e penetrati dalla cultura del conquistatore. Gli uomini i cui nomi sono scritti sul Memoriale di Guerra di Beaconsfield morirono per impedire che Beaconsfield fosse così immediatamente adombrata da Berlino che tutte le sue riforme sarebbero state modellate su Berlino, tutti i suoi prodotti usati per gli scopi internazionali di Berlino, anche se il Re di Prussia non fosse stato chiamato con tante parole il Sovrano del Re d’Inghilterra. Morirono per impedirlo e lo impedirono. Che coloro cui piace il pensiero insistano pure che morirono invano.
Conflict came to a head in Europe because the Prussian was insufferable. What would he have been like if he, who was already insufferable, had been shown to be insuperable? What would the Kaiser, with his Mailed Fist and his boasts of being Attila and the leader of the Huns, even in time of peace, have been like if he had issued completely victorious out of a universal war? Yet that is the common-sense question to be asked, if we are asking whether it was worth while for men to fight and go on fighting. It is not the point to put wild and visionary questions about whether the world has been vastly improved by the War; whether Utopia or the New Jerusalem have come out of the War; to ask in that apocalyptic fashion what has come out of the War. We have come out of the War, and come out alive; England and Europe have come out of the War, with all their sins on their heads, confused, corrupted, degraded; but not dead. The only defensible war is a war of defence. And a war of defence, by its very definition and nature, is one from which a man comes back battered and bleeding and only boasting that he is not dead.
Those who now think too little of the Allied Cause are those who once thought too much of it. Those who are disappointed with the great defence of civilisation are those who expected too much of it. A rather unstable genius like Mr. H. G. Wells is typical of the whole contradiction. He began by calling the Allied effort, The War That Will End War. He has ended by saying, through his rather equivocal mask of Mr. Clissold, that it was no better than a forest fire and that it settled nothing. It is hard to say which of the two statements is the more absurd. It settled exactly what it set out to settle. But that was something rather more rational and modest than what Mr. Wells had settled that it was to settle. To tell a soldier defending his country that it is The War That Will End War is exactly like telling a workman, naturally rather reluctant to do his day’s work, that it is The Work That Will End Work. We never promised to put a final end to all war or all work or all worry. We only said that we were bound to endure something very bad because the alternative was something worse. In short, we said what every man on the defensive has to say. Mr. Brown is attacked by a burglar and manages to save his life and property. It is absurd to turn round on him and say, “After all, what has come out of the battle in the back-garden? It is the same old Septimus Brown, with the same face, the same trousers, the same temper a little uncertain at breakfast, the same taste for telling the anecdote about the bookmaker at Brighton.” It is absurd to complain that Mr. Brown has not been turned into a Greek god merely by being bashed on the head by a burglar. He had a right to defend himself; he had a right to save himself; and what he saved was himself, so far no better and no worse. If he had gone out to purify the world by shooting all possible burglars, it would not have been a defensive war. And it would not have been a defensible one.
That is what I mean by saying that for me the War Memorial of Beaconsfield commemorates the rescue of Beaconsfield; not of an ideal Beaconsfield, but of the real Beaconsfield. There are all sorts of things in such an English country town with which I do not agree; there are many which I have tried all my life to alter. I do not like the English landed system, with its absence of peasants and its predominance of squires; I do not like the formless religious compromise of Puritanism turning into Paganism; but I do not want it discredited and flattened out by Prussianism. The defence of its prestige and independence against an inhuman and heathen hegemony was just. But I am far from certain that a War to End War would have been just. I am far from certain that, even if anybody could prevent all protest or defiance under arms, offered by anybody anywhere under any provocation, it would not be an exceedingly wicked thing to do.
This interlude on the intellectual aspects of the War is necessary; because all I say about the passing details of the War period will be unmeaning, if it is assumed that I sympathise with the rather weak-minded reaction that is going on around us. At the first outbreak of the War I attended the conference of all the English men of letters, called together to compose a reply to the manifesto of the German professors. I at least, among all those writers, can say, “What I have written I have written.” I wrote several pamphlets against Prussia, which many would consider violent, though in that moment every one supported their violence. I am still perfectly prepared to support their truth. I hardly know of a word I would alter. I did not take my views from the fever of that fashion; nor with that fever have they passed away.
Immediately after the outbreak of War I was bowled over by a very bad illness, which lasted for many months and at one time came very near to ending so as to cut me off from all newspaper communications and this wicked world. The last thing I did while I was still on my feet, though already very ill, was to go to Oxford and speak to a huge packed mass of undergraduates in defence of the English Declaration of War. That night is a nightmare to me; and I remember nothing except that I spoke on the right side. Then I went home and went to bed, tried to write a reply to Bernard Shaw, of which about one paragraph may still exist, and was soon incapable of writing anything. The illness left certain results that prevented me, even when I had recovered, from doing anything more useful than writing. But I set to work to contribute as much as I could both to the general press and the Government Propaganda; of which there were several departments. And I may remark here that the conduct of the war, whether at home or abroad, was an excellent education for any writer, tending too much to theories, in that complex but concrete matter of the material of mankind; the mystery and inconsistency of man. Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper. And I must admit that I was astounded, when writing propagandist literature at the request of various Government Departments, at the small and spinsterish vanities and jealousies that seemed to divide those Departments; and the way in which they kept up their fussy formalities in the full glare of the Day of Judgment. The facts were really very much as they were so cleverly described by Mr. Arnold Bennett in his story of Lord Raingo. I could understand a man being a coward and running away from a German; I can understand, and I hope humbly might emulate, a man fighting and standing firm. But that any Englishman should behave as if it were not a fight between an Englishman and a German, but a fight between a Foreign Office clerk and a War Office clerk, is something that altogether escapes my imagination. I daresay every one of those Government officials would have died for England without any fuss at all. But he could not have it suggested that some two-penny leaflet should pass through another little cell in the huge hive of Whitehall, without making a most frightful fuss. I had imagined that I was, for the moment, of one body with Englishmen from whom I differed on the deepest vitals of the soul; one in that hour of death with atheists and pessimists and Manichean Puritans and even with Orangemen from Belfast. But the forms of the Circumlocution Office could still divide men whom neither God nor devil could put asunder. It was a small thing; but it was a part of that realisation of the real riddle of man, which is hidden from boys and comes only to men in their maturity; and which took on more and more the nature of a religious enlightenment; upon the true doctrine of Original Sin and of Human Dignity. It was part of that belated process of growing up, which must unfortunately precede the splendid attainment of second childhood.
Il conflitto giunse a un culmine in Europa perché il Prussiano era insopportabile. Come sarebbe stato se lui, che era già insopportabile, si fosse mostrato insuperabile? Come sarebbe stato il Kaiser, col suo Pugno Corazzato e i suoi vanti di essere Attila e il capo degli Unni, perfino in tempo di pace, se fosse uscito completamente vittorioso da una guerra universale? Eppure è questa la domanda di buon senso da porre, se ci chiediamo se valesse la pena per gli uomini combattere e continuare a combattere. Non è il punto porre domande selvagge e visionarie sul fatto se il mondo sia stato immensamente migliorato dalla Guerra; se l’Utopia o la Nuova Gerusalemme siano venute fuori dalla Guerra; chiedere in quel modo apocalittico che cosa sia venuto fuori dalla Guerra. Noi siamo venuti fuori dalla Guerra, e ne siamo usciti vivi; l’Inghilterra e l’Europa sono venute fuori dalla Guerra, con tutti i loro peccati sul capo, confuse, corrotte, degradate; ma non morte. La sola guerra difendibile è una guerra di difesa. E una guerra di difesa, per la sua stessa definizione e natura, è una da cui un uomo torna malconcio e sanguinante e si vanta soltanto di non essere morto.
Coloro che ora pensano troppo poco della Causa Alleata sono coloro che una volta ne pensavano troppo. Coloro che sono delusi dalla grande difesa della civiltà sono coloro che si aspettavano troppo da essa. Un genio piuttosto instabile come il signor H. G. Wells è tipico dell’intera contraddizione. Cominciò col chiamare lo sforzo alleato La Guerra che Porrà Fine alla Guerra. Ha finito col dire, attraverso la sua alquanto equivoca maschera del signor Clissold, che non fu di meglio di un incendio boschivo e che non risolse nulla. È difficile dire quale delle due affermazioni sia la più assurda. Risolse esattamente ciò che si era proposta di risolvere. Ma ciò era qualcosa di piuttosto più razionale e modesto di ciò che il signor Wells aveva stabilito dovesse risolvere. Dire a un soldato che difende il suo paese che questa è La Guerra che Porrà Fine alla Guerra è esattamente come dire a un operaio, naturalmente piuttosto riluttante a fare il suo lavoro quotidiano, che questo è Il Lavoro che Porrà Fine al Lavoro. Non abbiamo mai promesso di porre fine definitiva a ogni guerra o a ogni lavoro o a ogni preoccupazione. Dicemmo soltanto che eravamo costretti a sopportare qualcosa di assai brutto perché l’alternativa era qualcosa di peggiore. In breve, dicemmo ciò che ogni uomo sulla difensiva ha da dire. Il signor Brown è aggredito da uno scassinatore e riesce a salvare la vita e la proprietà. È assurdo rivolgersi a lui e dirgli: «Dopotutto, che cosa è venuto fuori dalla battaglia nel giardino sul retro? È lo stesso vecchio Septimus Brown, con la stessa faccia, gli stessi pantaloni, lo stesso temperamento un po’ incerto a colazione, lo stesso gusto di raccontare l’aneddoto sull’allibratore di Brighton». È assurdo lamentarsi che il signor Brown non sia stato trasformato in un dio greco solo per essere stato picchiato sulla testa da uno scassinatore. Egli aveva il diritto di difendersi; aveva il diritto di salvarsi; e ciò che salvò fu se stesso, finora né migliore né peggiore. Se fosse uscito a purificare il mondo sparando a tutti i possibili scassinatori, non sarebbe stata una guerra difensiva. E non sarebbe stata una guerra difendibile.
Questo è ciò che intendo dicendo che per me il Memoriale di Guerra di Beaconsfield commemora il salvataggio di Beaconsfield; non di una Beaconsfield ideale, ma della reale Beaconsfield. Vi sono ogni sorta di cose in una simile cittadina di campagna inglese con cui non sono d’accordo; ve ne sono molte che ho tentato tutta la vita di mutare. Non mi piace il sistema fondiario inglese, con la sua assenza di contadini e la sua predominanza di squire; non mi piace l’informe compromesso religioso del Puritanesimo che si tramuta in Paganesimo; ma non voglio che sia screditato e appiattito dal Prussianesimo. La difesa del suo prestigio e della sua indipendenza contro un’egemonia disumana e pagana era giusta. Ma sono tutt’altro che certo che una Guerra per Porre Fine alla Guerra sarebbe stata giusta. Sono tutt’altro che certo che, anche se qualcuno potesse impedire ogni protesta o sfida sotto le armi, offerta da chiunque in qualsiasi luogo sotto qualsiasi provocazione, non sarebbe una cosa oltremodo malvagia da fare.
Questo interludio sugli aspetti intellettuali della Guerra è necessario; perché tutto ciò che dico sui dettagli di passaggio del periodo della Guerra sarà privo di senso, se si suppone che io simpatizzi con la reazione piuttosto debole di mente che va avanti intorno a noi. Al primo scoppio della Guerra partecipai alla conferenza di tutti gli uomini di lettere inglesi, convocati insieme a comporre una risposta al manifesto dei professori tedeschi. Io almeno, fra tutti quegli scrittori, posso dire: «Ciò che ho scritto, l’ho scritto». Scrissi vari opuscoli contro la Prussia, che molti considererebbero violenti, benché in quel momento tutti sostenessero la loro violenza. Sono ancora perfettamente pronto a sostenerne la verità. Non conosco quasi una parola che muterei. Non presi le mie vedute dalla febbre di quella moda; né con quella febbre esse sono svanite.
Immediatamente dopo lo scoppio della Guerra fui abbattuto da una gravissima malattia, che durò molti mesi e a un certo momento giunse assai vicina a concludersi in modo da tagliarmi fuori da ogni comunicazione giornalistica e da questo malvagio mondo. L’ultima cosa che feci mentre ero ancora in piedi, benché già assai malato, fu andare a Oxford e parlare a un’enorme massa gremita di studenti in difesa della Dichiarazione di Guerra inglese. Quella notte è per me un incubo; e non ricordo nulla se non che parlai dalla parte giusta. Poi tornai a casa e andai a letto, tentai di scrivere una replica a Bernard Shaw, di cui forse esiste ancora circa un paragrafo, e fui presto incapace di scrivere alcunché. La malattia lasciò certi esiti che m’impedirono, anche quando fui guarito, di fare qualcosa di più utile dello scrivere. Ma mi misi al lavoro per contribuire quanto potevo sia alla stampa generale sia alla Propaganda del Governo; della quale vi erano vari dipartimenti. E posso osservare qui che la condotta della guerra, sia a casa sia all’estero, fu un’eccellente educazione per qualunque scrittore incline troppo alle teorie, in quella complessa ma concreta faccenda della materia dell’umanità; il mistero e l’incoerenza dell’uomo. L’uomo pare capace di grandi virtù ma non di piccole virtù; capace di sfidare il suo torturatore ma non di mantenere la calma. E devo ammettere che rimasi sbalordito, mentre scrivevo letteratura propagandistica su richiesta di vari Dipartimenti del Governo, dalle piccole e zitellesche vanità e gelosie che parevano dividere quei Dipartimenti; e dal modo in cui mantenevano le loro fastidiose formalità nel pieno bagliore del Giorno del Giudizio. I fatti erano davvero assai simili a quelli così abilmente descritti dal signor Arnold Bennett nella sua storia di Lord Raingo. Potevo capire un uomo che fosse un vigliacco e fuggisse da un tedesco; posso capire, e spero umilmente di poter emulare, un uomo che combatte e resta saldo. Ma che un qualsiasi Inglese si comporti come se non fosse una lotta fra un Inglese e un Tedesco, ma una lotta fra un impiegato del Foreign Office e un impiegato del War Office, è qualcosa che sfugge del tutto alla mia immaginazione. Oso dire che ognuno di quei funzionari del Governo sarebbe morto per l’Inghilterra senza il minimo baccano. Ma non poteva sopportare che si suggerisse che qualche volantino da due soldi passasse attraverso un’altra piccola cella nell’enorme alveare di Whitehall, senza fare il più spaventoso baccano. Avevo immaginato di essere, per il momento, di un solo corpo con gli Inglesi dai quali differivo nelle più profonde viscere dell’anima; uno in quell’ora di morte con atei e pessimisti e Puritani manichei e perfino con Orangisti di Belfast. Ma le forme dell’Ufficio Circonlocuzioni potevano ancora dividere uomini che né Dio né il diavolo potevano separare. Era una piccola cosa; ma era parte di quella realizzazione del vero Enigma dell’uomo, che è nascosta ai ragazzi e viene solo agli uomini nella loro maturità; e che assumeva sempre più la natura di un illuminamento religioso; sulla vera dottrina del Peccato Originale e della Dignità Umana. Era parte di quel tardivo processo di crescita, che deve purtroppo precedere lo splendido conseguimento della seconda fanciullezza.
When I first recovered full consciousness, in the final turn of my long sickness, I am told that I asked for Land and Water, in which Mr. Belloc had already begun his well-known series of War articles, the last of which I had read, or been able to understand, being the news of the new hope from the Marne. When I woke again to real things, the long battles before Ypres were over and the long trench war had begun. The nurse, knowing that I had long been incapable of really reading anything, gave me a copy of the paper at random, as one gives a doll to a sick child. But I suddenly asserted in a loud and clear voice that this was an old number dealing with the first attempt before Nancy; and that I wanted all the numbers of the paper that had appeared since the Battle of the Marne. My mind, such as it is, had suddenly become perfectly clear; as clear as it is now. That also was something of a lesson in the paradox of real things, so different from many modern and merely theatrical things. Since then I have known that everything is not a slow and graduated curve of evolution; but that there is in life and death an element of catastrophe that carries something of the fear of miracle.
At my clear and reiterated request, they brought me the whole huge file of the weekly paper; and I read it steadily through, understanding all the facts and figures and diagrams and calculations, and studying them so closely that I really felt at the end that I had not lost so very much of the general history of the War. I found that the pamphlets I had written were already in circulation, especially abroad; all the more successfully because in a sense secretly. My old friend Masterman, in charge of one Propaganda Department, told me with great pride that his enemies were complaining that no British propaganda was being pushed in Spain or Sweden. At this he crowed aloud with glee; for it meant that propaganda like mine was being absorbed without people even knowing it was propaganda. And I myself saw my very bellicose essay called “The Barbarism of Berlin” appearing as a quiet Spanish philosophical study called “The Concept of Barbarism.” The fools who baited Masterman would have published it with a Union Jack cover and a picture of the British Lion, so that hardly one Spaniard would read it, and no Spaniard would believe it. It was in matters of that sort that the rather subtle individuality of Masterman was so superior to his political surroundings. In many respects, as I have hinted, he suffered himself to sink too deeply into those surroundings. He allowed himself to be used as a Party hack by Party leaders who were in every way his inferiors. But all that dark humour that was deepest in him came out again, as he grinned over this attack on his success as an intellectual smuggler.
But I am rather proud of the fact that if I wrote a little book called “The Barbarism of Berlin,” I also wrote during the War a rather larger book called The Crimes of England. For I was vividly convinced of the folly of England merely playing the Pharisee in this moment of intense moral reality. I therefore wrote a book actually making a list of the real sins of the British Empire in modern history; and then pointing out that in every one of them, not only was the German Empire far worse, but the worst tendencies of Britain had actually been borrowed from Germany. It was a Pro-German policy, the support of the Protestant hero in Prussia or the Protestant princes of Hanover, that had involved us in our mortal quarrel with Ireland and in many worse things. All our recent Imperialism had been praise of Prussia, as an example and an excuse. Nevertheless, to write of the Crimes of England, under that naked title, was at that time liable to misunderstanding; and I believe that in some places the book was banned like a pacifist pamphlet. It was not very pacifist. But all this was to happen later. When I first recovered, I read up, as I have said, the facts of the War. And then, like one resuming the normal routine of his life, I started again to answer Mr. Bernard Shaw There is some foundation for the anecdote told in Colonel Repington’s memoirs; that Mr. Belloc and I went on talking through an air-raid and did not know it had begun. I am not sure at what stage we did eventually realise it; but I am quite sure we went on talking. I cannot quite see what else there was to do. But I remember the occasion very well; partly because it was the first air-raid that I had experienced, though I was going to and fro in London all through that period; and secondly because there were other circumstances, which Colonel Repington does not mention, which accentuated the ironic side of the abstractions of conversation and the actuality of bombs. It was at the house of Lady Juliet Duff; and among the guests was Major Maurice Baring, who had brought with him a Russian in uniform; who talked in such a way as to defy even the interruptions of Belloc, let alone of mere bombs. He talked French in a flowing monologue that suavely swept us all before it; and the things he said had a certain quality characteristic of his nation; a quality which many have tried to define, but which may best be simplified by saying that his nation appears to possess every human talent except common sense. He was an aristocrat, a landed proprietor, an officer in one of the crack regiments of the Czar, a man altogether of the old regime. But there was something about him that is the making of every Bolshevist; something I have felt in every Russian I ever met. I can only say that when he walked out of the door, one felt he might just as well have walked out of the window. He was not a Communist; but he was a Utopian; and his Utopia was far, far madder than any Communism. His practical proposal was that poets alone should be allowed to rule the world. He was himself, as he gravely explained, a poet. But he was so courteous and complimentary as to select me, as being also a poet, to be the absolute and autocratic governor of England. D’Annunzio was similarly enthroned to govern Italy. Anatole France was enthroned to govern France. I pointed out, in such French as could be interposed into such a mild torrent, that government required an idée générale and that the ideas of France and D’Annunzio were flatly opposed, rather to the disadvantage of any patriotic Frenchman. But he waved all such doubts away; he was sure that so long as the politicians were poets, or at any rate authors, they could never make any mistakes or fail to understand each other. Kings and magnates and mobs might collide in blind conflict; but literary men can never quarrel. It was somewhere about this stage in the new social structure that I began to be conscious of noises without (as they say in the stage directions) and then of the thrilling reverberations and the thunder of the war in heaven. Prussia, the Prince of the Air, was raining fire on the great city of our fathers; and whatever may be said against Prussia, she is not governed by poets. We went on talking, of course, with no alteration in the arrangements, except that the lady of the house brought down her baby from an upper floor; and still the great plan unfolded itself for the poetic government of the world. Nobody in such circumstances is entirely without passing thoughts of the possible end; and much has been written about ideal or ironic circumstances in which that end might come. But I could imagine few more singular circumstances, in which to find myself at the point of death, than sitting in a big house in Mayfair and listening to a mad Russian, offering me the Crown of England.
Quando ripresi per la prima volta piena coscienza, nella svolta finale della mia lunga malattia, mi si dice che chiesi Land and Water, su cui il signor Belloc aveva già cominciato la sua ben nota serie di articoli di Guerra, l’ultimo dei quali avevo letto, o ero stato in grado di comprendere, essendo la notizia della nuova speranza dalla Marna. Quando mi ridestai alle cose reali, le lunghe battaglie davanti a Ypres erano finite e la lunga guerra di trincea era cominciata. L’infermiera, sapendo che ero da lungo tempo incapace di leggere davvero alcunché, mi diede una copia del giornale a caso, come si dà una bambola a un bambino malato. Ma io d’improvviso asserii con voce forte e chiara che quello era un vecchio numero che trattava del primo tentativo davanti a Nancy; e che volevo tutti i numeri del giornale che erano apparsi dalla Battaglia della Marna. La mia mente, tale quale è, era d’improvviso divenuta perfettamente chiara; chiara come lo è ora. Anche quella fu qualcosa come una lezione sul paradosso delle cose reali, così diverse da molte cose moderne e meramente teatrali. Da allora ho saputo che non tutto è una lenta e graduata curva di evoluzione; ma che vi è nella vita e nella morte un elemento di catastrofe che porta con sé qualcosa del timore del miracolo.
Alla mia chiara e reiterata richiesta, mi portarono l’intero enorme fascicolo del settimanale; e lo lessi costantemente da cima a fondo, comprendendo tutti i fatti e le cifre e i diagrammi e i calcoli, e studiandoli così da vicino che sentii davvero alla fine di non aver perso poi molto della storia generale della Guerra. Trovai che gli opuscoli che avevo scritto erano già in circolazione, specialmente all’estero; tanto più efficacemente perché in un certo senso segretamente. Il mio vecchio amico Masterman, a capo di un Dipartimento di Propaganda, mi disse con grande orgoglio che i suoi nemici si lamentavano che nessuna propaganda britannica veniva spinta in Spagna o in Svezia. A ciò egli esultava a gran voce dalla gioia; poiché significava che una propaganda come la mia veniva assorbita senza che la gente sapesse nemmeno che era propaganda. E io stesso vidi il mio assai bellicoso saggio intitolato «La Barbarie di Berlino» apparire come un quieto studio filosofico spagnolo intitolato «Il Concetto di Barbarie». Gli sciocchi che tormentavano Masterman l’avrebbero pubblicato con una copertina con la Union Jack e un’immagine del Leone britannico, così che a stento uno spagnolo l’avrebbe letto, e nessuno spagnolo l’avrebbe creduto. Era in faccende di quel tipo che la piuttosto sottile individualità di Masterman era così superiore ai suoi dintorni politici. Sotto molti aspetti, come ho accennato, egli si lasciò affondare troppo profondamente in quei dintorni. Si lasciò usare come schiavo di Partito da capi di Partito che erano in ogni modo suoi inferiori. Ma tutto quell’oscuro umorismo che era più profondo in lui riemergeva, mentre sogghignava su questo attacco al suo successo come contrabbandiere intellettuale.
Ma sono piuttosto fiero del fatto che se scrissi un libriccino intitolato «La Barbarie di Berlino», scrissi anche durante la Guerra un libro piuttosto più grande intitolato I Crimini dell’Inghilterra. Poiché ero vivamente convinto della follia dell’Inghilterra che si limitava a recitare il Fariseo in questo momento d’intensa realtà morale. Scrissi perciò un libro che effettivamente faceva una lista dei reali peccati dell’Impero britannico nella storia moderna; e poi faceva notare che in ognuno di essi, non solo l’Impero tedesco era assai peggiore, ma le peggiori tendenze della Gran Bretagna erano state effettivamente prese in prestito dalla Germania. Era stata una politica filo-tedesca, il sostegno all’Eroe protestante in Prussia o ai principi protestanti di Hannover, che ci aveva coinvolti nella nostra mortale disputa con l’Irlanda e in molte cose peggiori. Tutto il nostro recente imperialismo era stato lode della Prussia, come esempio e come scusa. Nondimeno, scrivere dei Crimini dell’Inghilterra, sotto quel nudo titolo, era a quel tempo passibile di fraintendimento; e credo che in alcuni luoghi il libro fosse bandito come un opuscolo pacifista. Non era troppo pacifista. Ma tutto questo doveva accadere più tardi. Quando mi ripresi la prima volta, mi documentai, come ho detto, sui fatti della Guerra. E poi, come uno che riprende la normale routine della sua vita, ricominciai a rispondere al signor Bernard Shaw. Vi è qualche fondamento per l’aneddoto raccontato nelle memorie del colonnello Repington; che il signor Belloc e io continuammo a parlare durante un’incursione aerea e non ci accorgemmo che era cominciata. Non sono sicuro a quale stadio infine ce ne accorgemmo; ma sono del tutto sicuro che continuammo a parlare. Non vedo bene cos’altro ci fosse da fare. Ma ricordo l’occasione assai bene; in parte perché fu la prima incursione aerea che sperimentai, benché andassi avanti e indietro per Londra per tutto quel periodo; e in secondo luogo perché vi erano altre circostanze, che il colonnello Repington non menziona, che accentuavano il lato ironico delle astrazioni della conversazione e l’attualità delle bombe. Era alla casa di Lady Juliet Duff; e fra gli ospiti vi era il maggiore Maurice Baring, che aveva portato con sé un russo in uniforme; il quale parlava in modo tale da sfidare perfino le interruzioni di Belloc, per non parlare delle mere bombe. Parlava francese in un fluente monologo che suavemente ci travolgeva tutti; e le cose che diceva avevano una certa qualità caratteristica della sua nazione; una qualità che molti hanno tentato di definire, ma che si può forse meglio semplificare dicendo che la sua nazione pare possedere ogni talento umano tranne il buon senso. Era un aristocratico, un proprietario terriero, un ufficiale in uno dei reggimenti scelti dello Zar, un uomo del tutto dell’ancien régime. Ma vi era qualcosa in lui che è la stoffa di ogni bolscevico; qualcosa che ho sentito in ogni russo che abbia mai incontrato. Posso solo dire che quando uscì dalla porta, si sentiva che sarebbe potuto altrettanto bene uscire dalla finestra. Non era un comunista; ma era un utopista; e la sua Utopia era assai, assai più folle di qualunque comunismo. La sua proposta pratica era che soltanto ai poeti dovesse essere permesso governare il mondo. Egli stesso era, come gravemente spiegò, un poeta. Ma fu così cortese e lusinghiero da selezionare me, in quanto anch’io poeta, per essere l’assoluto e autocratico governatore dell’Inghilterra. D’Annunzio fu similmente intronizzato a governare l’Italia. Anatole France fu intronizzato a governare la Francia. Feci notare, in quel francese che poteva essere interposto in un così mite torrente, che il governo richiedeva un’idée générale e che le idee di France e di D’Annunzio erano nettamente opposte, piuttosto a svantaggio di qualunque francese patriottico. Ma egli scacciò via tutti i tali dubbi; era sicuro che finché i politici fossero poeti, o comunque autori, non avrebbero mai potuto commettere errori o mancare di capirsi l’un l’altro. Re e magnati e folle potevano collidere in cieco conflitto; ma gli uomini di lettere non possono mai litigare. Fu circa a questo stadio della nuova struttura sociale che cominciai a essere conscio di rumori all’esterno (come si dice nelle didascalie di scena) e poi delle brividose riverberazioni e del tuono della guerra in cielo. La Prussia, il Principe dell’Aria, faceva piovere fuoco sulla grande città dei nostri padri; e checché si possa dire contro la Prussia, essa non è governata da poeti. Continuammo a parlare, naturalmente, senza alcuna alterazione negli accordi, tranne che la signora della casa portò giù il suo bambino da un piano superiore; e ancora il grande piano si dispiegava per il poetico governo del mondo. Nessuno in tali circostanze è del tutto senza pensieri passeggeri della possibile fine; e molto è stato scritto sulle circostanze ideali o ironiche in cui quella fine potrebbe venire. Ma potrei immaginare poche circostanze più singolari, in cui trovarmi al punto di morte, che il sedere in una grande casa a Mayfair e ascoltare un folle russo che mi offriva la Corona d’Inghilterra.
When he had gone, Belloc and I walked across the Park with the last rumblings still echoing in the sky, and heard the All Clear signal as we came out by Buckingham Gate, like the noise of trumpets of triumph. And we talked a little of the prospects of the War, which were then in the transition stage between the last peril and the last deliverance; and we parted, not without a certain belated emotion of excitement; and I went along Kensington High Road to my mother’s home.
Among the legends, not to say the lies, that became current about Belloc among people who knew nothing about him, was the legend that he was what was called an Optimist about the War; or that he exaggerated the German casualties in order to make out a case for mere comfort and reassurance. To anybody who knows Belloc this idea is grotesque in the last degree. To begin with, being an animal endowed with the power of thought, he is quite incapable of supposing it to matter whether you are an Optimist or a Pessimist upon a question of fact; or of recommending anybody to be bright and cheerful so that it will not rain tomorrow. Second, in so far as mood and emotion have their legitimate place in life, his mood and emotion are generally not optimistic enough. And third, those persons who have taken the trouble to go into the actual facts and figures about enemy mortality have agreed that his calculations were substantially correct and those of the other party wildly incorrect. The truth is that, at the very beginning of a novel type of trench warfare, everybody’s calculations were for a time incorrect; but his were corrected as early as anybody’s and were afterwards continually right while the opposite ones were continually wrong. For the rest, what threw out every scientific estimate of the war was a factor that was moral and not scientific; a standing instance of the change of all material things on the pivot of the human will. It was the revolt in Russia. Nobody worth speaking of predicted it; but Belloc himself said the wisest thing in a general fashion about affairs of the kind. In one of his articles in Land and Water, he must have rather puzzled many of his readers, I fear, by an elaborate historical reconstruction of the outlook on the future, in the mind of a Greek official in Byzantium, at the beginning of the sixth century, calculating and combining all the forces of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. He noted how much a man might think he had accounted for all the possibilities, the danger of a religious split between East and West, the danger of the barbarian raids on Gaul or Britain, the situation in Africa and Spain, and so on; and then say he had in his hand all the materials of change. “At that moment, far away in a little village of Arabia, Mahomet was eighteen years old.”
I need not dwell further on that old and idle quarrel; if the men who ranted about Optimism are remembered at all in serious history, they will be remembered because they quarrelled with Belloc. They were the half-educated proprietors of the Yellow Press of that time, who were annoyed with him for certain relevant remarks he had made about the Sale of Peerages. But it is worth pausing upon for a moment in order to emphasise what was certainly true of all my friends, and I think of all the worthier friends of England; that we never based our convictions on small-minded swagger about Success; that we worked for victory while being entirely ready for defeat; and we never predicted anything about the end of the war, or any other future event; Belloc least of all; as when I heard him say in the first of his London lectures; “It is no part of any speaker or writer to talk about victories being made certain beforehand by this or that. God alone gives victory.”
There is another aspect of the way in which the Yellow Press spread panic and political mutiny and called them patriotism and journalistic enterprise. It was apparently supposed that England was in need of being prodded on from behind. My friend Bentley, doing excellent work on the Daily Telegraph, described it more truly as England being stabbed in the back. The Daily Telegraph, indeed, during those days of fever, did an admirable work of medicinal and moral sanitation. But for me and my little group the quarrel had another effect; that we were, in very varying proportions, fighting upon two fronts; regarding the Hohenzollerns and the Harmsworths as equally successful advertisers and equally unsuccessful statesmen. And it fell to me to give a full expression to this double attitude, for a reason that I could never in common conditions have forseen.
I became an editor. It would at any time have seemed to me about as probable or promising as that I should become a publisher or a banker or a leader-writer on The Times. But the necessity arose out of the continued existence of our little paper, the New Witness, which was passionately patriotic and Pro-Ally but as emphatically opposed to the Jingoism of the Daily Mail. There were not too many people who could be trusted to maintain these two distinct indignations, without combining them by the disgusting expedient of being moderate. There were not too many of such people; but I was in a manner one of them. And when my brother went to the Front, he left his paper in my hands, requesting me to edit it until he returned. But I went on editing it because he did not return. For my brother was destined to prove, in a dark hour of doom, that he alone of all the men of our time possessed the two kinds of courage that have nourished the nation; the courage of the forum and of the field. In the second case he suffered with thousands of men equally brave; in the first he suffered alone. For it is another example of the human irony that it seems easier to die in battle than to tell the truth in politics. Human nature is in any case a strange affair; and on the news of my brother’s death, I as editor of his paper was moved to an odd reaction which I cannot altogether explain, but which I could only express by writing an open letter to Rufus Isaacs, Lord Reading, upon the memories of our great Marconi quarrel. I tried to tell him, with all restraint, that I believed he had really acted against my nation, but in favour of his own blood; and that he who had talked, and doubtless despised even in talking, the tedious Parliamentary foolery about having once met his brother at a family function, had in truth acted throughout from those deep domestic loyalties that were my own tragedy in that hour. But I added, “You are far more unhappy; for your brother is still alive.”
It is strange, as I have said, that in a little while his brother was also dead and in the same religious confession as that of my own brother. So ended, symbolically enough, the great Marconi duel; and I continued the editing of my brother’s paper, if you can call it editing; and all the other financiers and politicians showed no signs of dying in any faith, or indeed of dying at all. The War worked to its end, in which so many lives were ended; the Germans made their last vast and vain assaults and Foch struck his final blow before Chalons, where Christendom had broken the Huns a thousand years before. But in England the politicians continued to beam benevolently upon us; new noblemen continued to spring into life from somewhat obscure commercial soils; there were any number of flourishing economic ventures, supported by forceful publicity and magnetic personality; and all the powers of the scientific mergers and newspaper combines, that now rule the State, rose slowly into their present power and peace. As the Ancient Mariner remarked, in a moment of melancholy comparison:
The many men so beautiful And they all dead did lie; And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.
Quando egli se ne fu andato, Belloc e io attraversammo il Parco con gli ultimi rombi ancora echeggianti nel cielo, e udimmo il segnale del cessato allarme mentre uscivamo presso Buckingham Gate, come il suono di trombe di trionfo. E parlammo un poco delle prospettive della Guerra, che erano allora nella fase di transizione fra l’ultimo pericolo e l’ultima liberazione; e ci separammo, non senza una certa tardiva emozione di eccitazione; e io percorsi Kensington High Road fino alla casa di mia madre.
Fra le leggende, per non dire le menzogne, che divennero correnti su Belloc fra persone che non sapevano nulla di lui, vi era la leggenda che egli fosse ciò che si chiamava un Ottimista sulla Guerra; o che esagerasse le perdite tedesche per costruire un caso di mero conforto e rassicurazione. Per chiunque conosca Belloc questa idea è grottesca al massimo grado. Per cominciare, essendo un animale dotato del potere del pensiero, egli è del tutto incapace di supporre che importi se tu sia un Ottimista o un Pessimista su una questione di fatto; o di raccomandare a chiunque di essere gaio e allegro affinché non piova domani. In secondo luogo, in quanto l’umore e l’emozione hanno il loro legittimo posto nella vita, il suo umore e la sua emozione generalmente non sono abbastanza ottimistici. E in terzo luogo, quelle persone che si sono prese la briga di entrare nei fatti e nelle cifre effettivi sulla mortalità nemica hanno convenuto che i suoi calcoli erano sostanzialmente corretti e quelli dell’altra parte selvaggiamente scorretti. La verità è che, al principio stesso di un tipo inedito di guerra di trincea, i calcoli di tutti furono per un certo tempo scorretti; ma i suoi furono corretti così presto come quelli di chiunque e furono in seguito continuamente giusti mentre quelli opposti erano continuamente sbagliati. Per il resto, ciò che sconvolse ogni stima scientifica della guerra fu un fattore che era morale e non scientifico; un esempio permanente del cambiamento di tutte le cose materiali sul perno della volontà umana. Fu la rivolta in Russia. Nessuno degno di menzione la predisse; ma Belloc stesso disse la cosa più saggia in modo generale su faccende del genere. In uno dei suoi articoli in Land and Water, egli deve aver piuttosto sconcertato molti dei suoi lettori, temo, con un’elaborata ricostruzione storica delle prospettive sul futuro, nella mente di un funzionario greco a Bisanzio, all’inizio del sesto secolo, che calcolava e combinava tutte le forze dell’Impero Romano e della Chiesa cattolica. Egli notava quanto un uomo potesse pensare di aver reso conto di tutte le possibilità, il pericolo di una spaccatura religiosa fra Oriente e Occidente, il pericolo delle incursioni barbariche sulla Gallia o sulla Britannia, la situazione in Africa e in Spagna, e così via; e poi dire di avere in mano tutti i materiali del cambiamento. «In quel momento, lontano lontano in un piccolo villaggio d’Arabia, Maometto aveva diciotto anni.»
Non occorre soffermarmi oltre su quella vecchia e oziosa disputa; se gli uomini che sbraitavano sull’Ottimismo sono ricordati affatto nella seria storia, saranno ricordati perché litigarono con Belloc. Erano i semi-istruiti proprietari della Stampa Gialla di quel tempo, che erano seccati con lui per certe pertinenti osservazioni che egli aveva fatto sulla Vendita dei Titoli Nobiliari. Ma vale la pena soffermarcisi un momento per sottolineare ciò che era certamente vero di tutti i miei amici, e credo di tutti i più degni amici dell’Inghilterra; che noi non basammo mai le nostre convinzioni su una gretta spavalderia riguardo al Successo; che lavorammo per la vittoria pur essendo interamente pronti alla sconfitta; e non predicemmo mai nulla sulla fine della guerra, o su qualsiasi altro evento futuro; Belloc meno di tutti; come quando lo udii dire nella prima delle sue conferenze di Londra: «Non è compito di alcun oratore o scrittore parlare di vittorie rese certe in anticipo da questo o quello. Dio solo dà la vittoria».
Vi è un altro aspetto del modo in cui la Stampa Gialla diffondeva panico e ammutinamento politico e li chiamava patriottismo e intraprendenza giornalistica. Si supponeva a quanto pare che l’Inghilterra avesse bisogno di essere pungolata da dietro. Il mio amico Bentley, che faceva un eccellente lavoro sul Daily Telegraph, lo descrisse più veracemente come l’Inghilterra pugnalata alla schiena. Il Daily Telegraph, invero, durante quei giorni di febbre, fece un ammirevole lavoro di risanamento medicinale e morale. Ma per me e il mio piccolo gruppo la disputa ebbe un altro effetto; che noi eravamo, in proporzioni assai variabili, in lotta su due fronti; considerando gli Hohenzollern e gli Harmsworth come pubblicitari egualmente di successo e statisti egualmente falliti. E toccò a me dare piena espressione a questo duplice atteggiamento, per una ragione che non avrei mai in condizioni ordinarie potuto prevedere.
Divenni direttore. Mi sarebbe in qualsiasi momento parso improbabile o promettente circa quanto che io diventassi editore o banchiere o articolista di fondo del Times. Ma la necessità sorse dalla continuata esistenza del nostro piccolo giornale, il New Witness, che era appassionatamente patriottico e Pro-Alleato ma altrettanto enfaticamente opposto al giingoismo del Daily Mail. Non c’erano troppe persone di cui ci si potesse fidare per mantenere queste due distinte indignazioni, senza combinarle col disgustoso espediente di essere moderati. Non c’erano troppe di tali persone; ma io ero in un certo modo una di esse. E quando mio fratello andò al fronte, lasciò il suo giornale nelle mie mani, chiedendomi di dirigerlo finché non fosse tornato. Ma continuai a dirigerlo perché egli non tornò. Poiché mio fratello era destinato a provare, in un’ora buia di rovina, che egli solo fra tutti gli uomini del nostro tempo possedeva i due tipi di coraggio che hanno nutrito la nazione; il coraggio del foro e quello del campo. Nel secondo caso egli soffrì con migliaia di uomini egualmente coraggiosi; nel primo soffrì solo. Poiché è un altro esempio dell’ironia umana che pare più facile morire in battaglia che dire la verità in politica. La natura umana è in ogni caso una strana faccenda; e alla notizia della morte di mio fratello, io come direttore del suo giornale fui mosso a una strana reazione che non posso del tutto spiegare, ma che potei solo esprimere scrivendo una lettera aperta a Rufus Isaacs, Lord Reading, sulle memorie della nostra grande disputa Marconi. Cercai di dirgli, con tutto il ritegno, che credevo che egli avesse davvero agito contro la mia nazione, ma in favore del suo proprio sangue; e che egli, che aveva detto, e indubbiamente disprezzato perfino nel dirlo, la tediosa buffoneria parlamentare sull’aver incontrato una volta suo fratello a una funzione di famiglia, aveva in verità agito per tutto il tempo da quelle profonde lealtà domestiche che erano la mia stessa tragedia in quell’ora. Ma aggiunsi: «Voi siete assai più infelice; poiché vostro fratello è ancora vivo».
È strano, come ho detto, che in breve tempo anche suo fratello fu morto e nella stessa confessione religiosa di quella del mio proprio fratello. Così finì, abbastanza simbolicamente, il grande duello Marconi; e io continuai la direzione del giornale di mio fratello, se così si può chiamare il dirigere; e tutti gli altri finanzieri e politici non mostrarono alcun segno di morire in una qualche fede, o invero di morire affatto. La Guerra lavorò verso la sua fine, in cui tante vite furono finite; i Tedeschi fecero i loro ultimi vasti e vani assalti e Foch vibrò il suo colpo finale davanti a Châlons, dove la cristianità aveva spezzato gli Unni mille anni prima. Ma in Inghilterra i politici continuarono a irraggiare benevolenza su di noi; nuovi nobili continuarono a sbocciare alla vita da suoli commerciali alquanto oscuri; vi furono un qualsiasi numero di fiorenti imprese economiche, sostenute da forte pubblicità e magnetica personalità; e tutti i poteri delle fusioni scientifiche e delle combinazioni giornalistiche, che ora reggono lo Stato, salirono lentamente al loro presente potere e alla loro presente pace. Come osservò il Vecchio Marinaio, in un momento di malinconico paragone:
I molti uomini così belli E tutti giacevano morti; E mille mila cose viscide Vivevano ancora; e così anch’io.
XII
SOME POLITICAL CELEBRITIES
On almost every occasion when I have met somebody, I have met somebody else. That is, I have met a private man who was oddly different from the public man. Even when the character was not the very contrary of the caricature, as outlined in the newspapers, I might employ a licence of language, by saying that it was even more contrary than a contrary. I mean that the relation was more subtle, and the reality on another plane; that when after long experience, I discovered with some amazement that a tribute was true, even when the truth was almost the opposite of the tribute. We all rejoiced, for instance, in the chorus of spontaneous tributes to the late King George the Fifth. And yet the very repetition of testimony, about the honesty of his public service, gave an indescribable impression of routine which made the impression incomplete. I only met him once myself, at the house of the late Lord Burnham, where he was shooting; and for what my impression is worth, he certainly did strike me as about as genuine a person as I ever met. But he was genuine in a rather unexpected way. He was not only honest but frank, and so free and easy in his likes and dislikes that he might have been called indiscreet. G.B.S. said truly of his public talks that they were indeed the King’s English; the private were also decidedly Plain English. He was anything but the supreme Permanent Official many eulogies implied; he was not like some reliable solicitor in whom family secrets are locked up, or some doctor congested with the silence of professional confidences; he was much more like a little sea-captain, who keeps a certain silence and etiquette on his quarterdeck; but plenty of anecdotes, not to say anathemas, in his cabin. But there is no substitute for meeting a man, even meeting him for an hour or two; it will always tell us when a real distortion of history or legend is beginning. And if it should ever happen that I hear before I die, among the new generations who never saw George the Fifth, that he is being either praised as a strong silent man, or depreciated as a stupid and empty man, I shall know that history has got the whole portrait wrong.
Sometimes I have had even briefer contacts, with even more curious surprises. I talked to the late Marquess Curzon for only about ten minutes, in an accidental crush, though I had been to his house once or twice; he did not seem to mind the crush; he did not even seem to mind the conversation, or to mind me; he was entirely pleasant and good-tempered. And he said the one thing out of a thousand that hardly anybody, including myself, would have expected Curzon to say. He said how heartily he agreed with me that the cries, catcalls, jokes and jeers of the mob at a public-meeting were very much wittier and more worth hearing than the speeches of statesmen from the platform. I had expressed this view in an Illustrated London News article; but he, who was so often the stateliest of statesmen on the most privileged of platforms, would not have occurred to me as the most ardent supporter of the rabble or the buffoon who championed it. Yet it is unquestionably true that he did on many occasions say and do things, that provoked and even created the popular legend of his unpopular attitude. He was the one and only example of an English aristocrat who presented himself as a Prussian aristocrat; and this is very odd, because English aristocrats may often be cynics but are not barbarians. In a word, they are more subtle; but I sometimes fancy that Curzon in some queer way was more subtle than that subtlety. Everyone knows that there was a sort of heroic artificiality about his bodily life; that he sustained his very posture with difficulty; and I suspect that something of that strain turned itself to a sort of stiff and swaggering joke. He came from Oxford when it was the fashion to be a pessimist in philosophy and a reactionary in politics; and rather as the artistic decadents made themselves out worse than they were, he made himself out more undemocratic than he was. It is typical that many of the tales against him are said to have been invented by himself. But in all that I am merely guessing, from a few words said to me by a man who could not have been as stupid as a Prussian; in other cases, in which I had limited but still longer intercourse, I have noticed the same contradiction.
My first illumination, about the contrast between a human being and his political portrait or caricature, came to me with the case of Lord Hugh Cecil. I believe I met him first at the house of Wilfrid Ward, whom I ought to have mentioned long before as an influence enlightening me in many ways; for he had written in the Dublin Review a most sympathetic critique of Orthodoxy, at a time when many of his world must have thought it a piece of rowdy paradox. He laid down the excellent critical test; that the critics could not understand what he liked, but he could understand what they disliked. “Truth can understand error; but error cannot understand Truth.” It was through his kindness that I was, at a later stage, made a member of the Synthetic Society, which was justly proud of its continuity with the Society in which the great Huxley could debate with the equally great Ward (called. God knows why, Ideal Ward), and in which I was privileged to meet several very pivotal persons, such as Baron von Hugel and my old friend Father Waggett of Palestinian days. But if it be asked why I mention it here, the answer is rather curious. For some reason, there were very few literary men in this group devoted to philosophy; except Wilfrid Ward himself, who was an excellent editor and expositor. But there were all the better sort of politicians, or those who might have been statesmen. There I met old Haldane, yawning with all his Hegelian abysses; who appeared to me as I must have appeared to a neighbour in a local debating-club, when he dismissed metaphysical depths and pointed at me, saying, “There is that Leviathan whom Thou hast made to take his sport therein.” But I never forgot that England betrayed him in charging him with betraying England. There also I met Balfour, obviously preferring any philosophers with any philosophies to his loyal followers of the Tory Party. Perhaps religion is not the opium of the people, but philosophy is the opium of the politicians. All of which brings me back to Lord Hugh Cecil.
XII
ALCUNE CELEBRITÀ POLITICHE
In quasi ogni occasione in cui ho incontrato qualcuno, ho incontrato qualcun altro. Cioè, ho incontrato un uomo privato che era stranamente diverso dall’uomo pubblico. Anche quando il carattere non era proprio il contrario della caricatura, come tratteggiata sui giornali, potrei impiegare una licenza di linguaggio, dicendo che era perfino più contrario di un contrario. Intendo dire che la relazione era più sottile, e la realtà su un altro piano; che quando, dopo lunga esperienza, scoprii con un certo stupore che un tributo era vero, anche quando la verità era quasi l’opposto del tributo. Ci rallegrammo tutti, ad esempio, del coro di spontanei tributi al defunto Re Giorgio V. Eppure la ripetizione stessa della testimonianza, sull’onestà del suo servizio pubblico, dava un’indescrivibile impressione di routine che rendeva l’impressione incompleta. Lo incontrai una sola volta di persona, alla casa del defunto Lord Burnham, dove egli era a caccia; e per quel che vale la mia impressione, egli certo mi colpì come circa la persona più genuina che io abbia mai incontrato. Ma era genuino in modo piuttosto inaspettato. Era non solo onesto ma franco, e così libero e disinvolto nelle sue simpatie e antipatie che lo si sarebbe potuto chiamare indiscreto. G.B.S. disse veracemente dei suoi discorsi pubblici che erano davvero l’inglese del Re; quelli privati erano anche decisamente inglese schietto. Egli era tutt’altro che il supremo Funzionario Permanente che molti elogi lasciavano intendere; non era come qualche affidabile procuratore in cui i segreti di famiglia sono rinchiusi, o qualche dottore congestionato dal silenzio delle confidenze professionali; era assai più simile a un piccolo capitano di mare, che mantiene un certo silenzio ed etichetta sul suo cassero; ma abbondanza di aneddoti, per non dire anatemi, nella sua cabina. Ma non c’è sostituto all’incontrare un uomo, anche solo incontrarlo per un’ora o due; ci dirà sempre quando una vera distorsione della storia o della leggenda sta cominciando. E se dovesse mai accadere che io oda, prima di morire, fra le nuove generazioni che non videro mai Giorgio V, che egli viene o lodato come un uomo forte e silenzioso, o denigrato come un uomo stupido e vuoto, saprò che la storia ha sbagliato tutto il ritratto.
Talvolta ho avuto contatti perfino più brevi, con sorprese perfino più curiose. Parlai col defunto Marchese Curzon per soli dieci minuti circa, in una calca accidentale, benché fossi stato a casa sua una o due volte; egli non parve badare alla calca; non parve nemmeno badare alla conversazione, o badare a me; era del tutto piacevole e di buon umore. E disse la sola cosa su mille che a stento chiunque, me compreso, si sarebbe aspettato che Curzon dicesse. Disse quanto cordialmente conveniva con me che le grida, i fischi, le battute e gli scherni della folla a una riunione pubblica erano assai più arguti e più degni d’esser uditi dei discorsi degli statisti dalla tribuna. Avevo espresso questa veduta in un articolo dell’Illustrated London News; ma egli, che era così spesso il più maestoso degli statisti sulla più privilegiata delle tribune, non mi sarebbe venuto in mente come il più ardente sostenitore della plebe o del buffone che la difendeva. Eppure è indiscutibilmente vero che egli in molte occasioni disse e fece cose che provocarono e perfino crearono la leggenda popolare del suo atteggiamento impopolare. Fu il solo e unico esempio di un aristocratico inglese che si presentava come un aristocratico prussiano; e ciò è assai strano, perché gli aristocratici inglesi possono spesso essere cinici ma non sono barbari. In una parola, sono più sottili; ma talvolta immagino che Curzon in qualche bizzarro modo fosse più sottile di quella sottigliezza. Tutti sanno che vi era una sorta di eroica artificiosità nella sua vita corporea; che egli sosteneva con difficoltà perfino la sua postura; e sospetto che qualcosa di quello sforzo si volgesse in una sorta di rigido e spavaldo scherzo. Egli veniva da Oxford quando era di moda essere pessimista in filosofia e reazionario in politica; e piuttosto come i decadenti artistici si facevano apparire peggiori di quel che erano, egli si faceva apparire più antidemocratico di quel che era. È tipico che molti dei racconti contro di lui siano stati, si dice, inventati da lui stesso. Ma in tutto ciò sto soltanto tirando a indovinare, da poche parole dettemi da un uomo che non poteva essere stupido come un prussiano; in altri casi, in cui ebbi un rapporto limitato ma pur più lungo, ho notato la stessa contraddizione.
La mia prima illuminazione, sul contrasto fra un essere umano e il suo ritratto o la sua caricatura politica, mi venne col caso di Lord Hugh Cecil. Credo di averlo incontrato la prima volta alla casa di Wilfrid Ward, che avrei dovuto menzionare molto prima come un’influenza che mi illuminava in molti modi; poiché egli aveva scritto nella Dublin Review una critica assai comprensiva di Orthodoxy, in un periodo in cui molti del suo mondo devono averla ritenuta un pezzo di chiassoso paradosso. Egli stabilì l’eccellente prova critica; che i critici non potevano capire ciò che a lui piaceva, ma egli poteva capire ciò che a loro dispiaceva. «La Verità può comprendere l’errore; ma l’errore non può comprendere la Verità.» Fu grazie alla sua cortesia che io fui, a uno stadio successivo, fatto membro della Società Sintetica, che era giustamente fiera della sua continuità con la Società in cui il grande Huxley poteva dibattere con l’egualmente grande Ward (chiamato, Dio sa perché, Ward l’Ideale), e in cui io ebbi il privilegio di incontrare parecchie persone assai cardinali, come il Barone von Hugel e il mio vecchio amico Padre Waggett dei giorni palestinesi. Ma se si chiede perché lo menzioni qui, la risposta è piuttosto curiosa. Per qualche ragione, vi erano assai pochi uomini di lettere in questo gruppo dedito alla filosofia; tranne Wilfrid Ward stesso, che era un eccellente direttore ed espositore. Ma vi erano tutti i migliori tipi di politici, ovvero coloro che avrebbero potuto essere statisti. Là incontrai il vecchio Haldane, che sbadigliava con tutti i suoi abissi hegeliani; il quale mi apparve come io devo essere apparso a un vicino in un circolo di dibattito locale, quando egli licenziò le profondità metafisiche e mi additò, dicendo: «Ecco quel Leviatano che Tu hai fatto per prendervi il suo sollazzo». Ma non dimenticai mai che l’Inghilterra lo tradì accusandolo di tradire l’Inghilterra. Là incontrai anche Balfour, che ovviamente preferiva qualsiasi filosofo con qualsiasi filosofia ai suoi leali seguaci del Partito Tory. Forse la religione non è l’oppio del popolo, ma la filosofia è l’oppio dei politici. Il che tutto mi riconduce a Lord Hugh Cecil.
In Liberal caricatures, and in all the letter-press of Liberalism generally, Lord Hugh Cecil was always depicted as a mediaeval ascetic; it was all very restrained and refined, or he might have been actually denounced as a saint. “F. C. G.” always depicted him in a long cassock and a very Italian-looking biretta; and something like a Gothic stained-glass window was introduced, if possible, as the sort of thing he carried about with him. I absorbed all these things in my simplicity; I could not even then feel so much horror of them as did the clientele of the Daily News; but that made it all the easier to believe that an obviously intellectual gentleman was really in love with mediaeval architecture and authority. And then I happened to meet Lord Hugh Cecil. I met him at the house of Wilfrid Ward, that great clearing-house of philosophies and theologies; for the vast and valuable work of Wilfrid Ward largely turned upon the very fact that he was more fully in sympathy with the Cecils and the Balfours and the rest than I myself could ever have been. I listened to Lord Hugh’s very lucid statements of his position; nobody who loves logic could be unimpressed by so logical a mind; and I formed a number of very definite impressions about him. One was that he had many quite individual ideas of his own; another that he regarded all such ideas, including his own, in what has been called a dry light. But the strongest impression I received, was that he was a Protestant. I was myself still a thousand miles from being a Catholic; but I think it was the perfect and solid Protestantism of Lord Hugh that fully revealed to me that I was no longer a Protestant. He was, and probably still is, the one real Protestant; for his religion is intensely real. From time to time, he startles the world he lives in by a stark and upstanding defence of the common Christian theology and ethics, in which all Protestants once believed. For the Protestant world in England today is a very curious and subtle thing, which it would not become me to criticise; but this may be said of it without offence, that while it is naturally a little disturbed by a Protestant accepting Catholicism, it is far more terribly disturbed by any Protestant who still preserves Protestantism. And then I thought of the dear old Radical caricatures of the mediaevalist in the cassock; and laughter came as a relief. Old Kensit was a Jesuit compared with Hugh Cecil; for anti-ritualism is only a riotous form of ritualism; and poor old Kensit actually had the simplicity to be photographed with a crucifix in his hand. I once thought it queer that a Cecil should become famous for a revolt against the Reformation. And I have lived to see such men accused by blatant Jingoism of protecting Germany, as once by blatant Radicalism of favouring Rome. But I lived to realise that Hugh Cecil has been as heroically loyal to his house as to his country. No man has been truer to a tradition than he to the tradition of that great Protestant England, which the genius of the founder of his family established.
It was George Wyndham who once confirmed this notion of mine, by noting what he called the extreme Individualism of Lord Hugh Cecil. The commercial character of that compact and patriotic England of recent centuries had much to do, for instance, with Lord Hugh Cecil being so stubborn a Free-Trader. For he is not only an Old Protestant; this chivalric Tory is also most emphatically an Old Radical. He would have been much more at home in the Manchester School than in the Middle Ages. And I have here dwelt so long on his name, with no other basis than having listened to his luminous conversation, because I do seriously think that he stands at the very centre of that recent civilisation today; and might be called the one strong pillar still upholding the England in which I was born. But George Wyndham’s ideas were always flowing in a different direction, as were my own; and they were in a sense marked or measured by our common feeling about this other Conservative statesman. For Wyndham was not a Conservative; he was a Tory; that is, he was capable of being a Jacobite, which is something as rebellious as a Jacobin. He did not merely wish to preserve Protestantism or Free Trade, or anything grown native to the nation; he wanted to revive things older and really more international. And my first impressions of the falsity of the Party System came to me, while I was still a Liberal journalist, in the realisation of how much I agreed with Wyndham and how much Wyndham disagreed with Cecil.
I first met George Wyndham at Taplow, at the house of Lord and Lady Desborough, who had long been very good friends to me as to many literary people of all colours and opinions; and I felt almost immediately that Wyndham’s opinions were at least of the same general colour as my own. And if ever there was a man of whom the word “colour” in his opinions and everything else, recurs naturally to the mind, it was he. He also suffered, of course, from the silly simplifications of the political comments and cartoons. Because he happened to have been in the army, he was always depicted as a drawling guardsman; and because he happened to be a handsome man, it was always insinuated that he was merely a ladies’ man. In most essential ways it was curiously untrue. Wyndham was very definitely what is called a man’s man. He was passionately fond of the particular things that ladies do not generally like; such as sitting up all night to pursue pertinaciously the same interminable argument, upon all sorts of points of detail and pure logic; so that he would not let his guests go till almost daybreak, unless he had settled to his own satisfaction the meaning of “T. T.” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets; or what were the private expectations of Chaucer touching the publication of Troilus and Cressida. He was not in any sense a dandy; but in so far as he did dress well, he was totally indifferent to how other men who were his friends might dress, which is another mark of purely masculine companionship. He was a good companion in sporting society as in literary society; but in neither was he anything like what is called a society man. He had huge sympathy with gypsies and tramps; and collected many men of letters (including myself) who looked rather like tramps. The inward generosity which gave a gusto or relish to all he did was really at the opposite extreme to all that mere polish, implied by those who slandered him by calling him “charming.” He had first written to me some congratulations upon a letter I had sent to the Westminster Gazette on Religious Education; in which, even at that early date, I suggested that many Anglicans felt that Christ is not entirely disconnected from His own Mother. Wyndham was supported in this by the deep natural mysticism of his wife; a woman not to be forgotten by anyone who ever knew her, and still less to be merely praised by anyone who adequately appreciated her. She always showed a most moving curiosity about where I had picked up this passion for what is called Mariolatry in this Protestant land; and I could assure her with truth, though without any complete explanation, that I had had it in some form from boyhood.
Nelle caricature liberali, e in tutta la letteratura a stampa del Liberalismo in genere, Lord Hugh Cecil era sempre raffigurato come un asceta medievale; era tutto assai contenuto e raffinato, altrimenti egli avrebbe potuto essere effettivamente denunciato come un santo. «F. C. G.» lo raffigurava sempre in una lunga tonaca e in una berretta dall’aspetto assai italiano; e qualcosa come una finestra gotica a vetri colorati veniva introdotta, se possibile, come il genere di cosa che egli portava con sé. Assorbii tutte queste cose nella mia semplicità; non potevo nemmeno allora provarne tanto orrore quanto la clientela del Daily News; ma ciò rendeva tanto più facile credere che un gentiluomo ovviamente intellettuale fosse davvero innamorato dell’architettura e dell’autorità medievali. E poi mi capitò d’incontrare Lord Hugh Cecil. Lo incontrai alla casa di Wilfrid Ward, quel grande centro di smistamento di filosofie e teologie; poiché la vasta e preziosa opera di Wilfrid Ward largamente si imperniava sul fatto stesso che egli era più pienamente in simpatia coi Cecil e coi Balfour e col resto di quanto io stesso avrei mai potuto essere. Ascoltai le assai lucide esposizioni della sua posizione da parte di Lord Hugh; nessuno che ami la logica potrebbe non essere colpito da una mente così logica; e mi formai un certo numero di impressioni assai definite su di lui. Una era che egli aveva molte idee del tutto individuali proprie; un’altra che egli considerava tutte tali idee, comprese le proprie, in ciò che è stato chiamato una luce asciutta. Ma la più forte impressione che ricevetti, fu che egli era un Protestante. Io stesso ero ancora a mille miglia dall’essere cattolico; ma credo che fu il perfetto e solido Protestantesimo di Lord Hugh a rivelarmi pienamente che io non ero più protestante. Egli era, e probabilmente è tuttora, l’unico vero Protestante; poiché la sua religione è intensamente reale. Di tanto in tanto, egli sbalordisce il mondo in cui vive con una netta ed eretta difesa della comune teologia ed etica cristiana, in cui tutti i Protestanti un tempo credevano. Poiché il mondo protestante in Inghilterra oggi è una cosa assai curiosa e sottile, che non mi si addirebbe criticare; ma questo si può dire di esso senza offesa, che mentre esso è naturalmente un po’ turbato da un Protestante che accetta il Cattolicesimo, è assai più terribilmente turbato da qualsiasi Protestante che ancora preservi il Protestantesimo. E poi pensai alle care vecchie caricature radicali del medievalista in tonaca; e la risata venne come un sollievo. Il vecchio Kensit era un gesuita in confronto a Hugh Cecil; poiché l’anti-ritualismo non è che una forma turbolenta di ritualismo; e il povero vecchio Kensit ebbe effettivamente la semplicità di farsi fotografare con un crocifisso in mano. Trovai una volta bizzarro che un Cecil dovesse diventare famoso per una rivolta contro la Riforma. E ho vissuto per vedere tali uomini accusati da un chiassoso giingoismo di proteggere la Germania, come un tempo da un chiassoso Radicalismo di favorire Roma. Ma ho vissuto per rendermi conto che Hugh Cecil è stato tanto eroicamente leale alla sua casata quanto al suo paese. Nessun uomo è stato più fedele a una tradizione di quanto egli lo sia stato alla tradizione di quella grande Inghilterra protestante, che il genio del fondatore della sua famiglia stabilì.
Fu George Wyndham a confermare una volta questa mia nozione, notando ciò che egli chiamava l’estremo Individualismo di Lord Hugh Cecil. Il carattere commerciale di quell’Inghilterra compatta e patriottica dei secoli recenti ebbe molto a che fare, ad esempio, col fatto che Lord Hugh Cecil fosse un liberoscambista così ostinato. Poiché egli è non solo un Vecchio Protestante; questo cavalleresco Tory è anche assai enfaticamente un Vecchio Radicale. Sarebbe stato assai più a casa nella Scuola di Manchester che nel Medioevo. E mi sono qui soffermato così a lungo sul suo nome, senza altra base che l’aver ascoltato la sua luminosa conversazione, perché penso seriamente che egli stia al centro stesso di quella recente civiltà oggi; e potrebbe essere chiamato l’unico forte pilastro che ancora sostiene l’Inghilterra in cui nacqui. Ma le idee di George Wyndham fluivano sempre in una diversa direzione, come le mie proprie; ed erano in un certo senso segnate o misurate dal nostro comune sentire su quest’altro statista conservatore. Poiché Wyndham non era un Conservatore; era un Tory; cioè, era capace di essere un Giacobita, che è qualcosa di ribelle quanto un Giacobino. Egli non desiderava semplicemente preservare il Protestantesimo o il Libero Scambio, o qualsiasi cosa cresciuta nativa alla nazione; voleva far rivivere cose più antiche e realmente più internazionali. E le mie prime impressioni della falsità del Sistema dei Partiti mi vennero, mentre ero ancora un giornalista liberale, nel rendermi conto di quanto io concordassi con Wyndham e di quanto Wyndham dissentisse da Cecil.
Incontrai George Wyndham la prima volta a Taplow, alla casa di Lord e Lady Desborough, che erano da lungo tempo assai buoni amici per me come per molti letterati di ogni colore e opinione; e sentii quasi immediatamente che le opinioni di Wyndham erano almeno dello stesso colore generale delle mie proprie. E se mai vi fu un uomo per cui la parola «colore», nelle sue opinioni e in ogni altra cosa, ricorra naturalmente alla mente, era lui. Anch’egli soffrì, naturalmente, delle sciocche semplificazioni dei commenti e delle vignette politiche. Poiché si dava il caso fosse stato nell’esercito, veniva sempre raffigurato come una guardia dalla parlata strascicata; e poiché si dava il caso fosse un bell’uomo, si insinuava sempre che egli fosse un mero uomo da salotto. Nei modi più essenziali ciò era curiosamente falso. Wyndham era assai decisamente ciò che si chiama un uomo virile. Era appassionatamente amante delle particolari cose che alle signore generalmente non piacciono; come lo stare svegli tutta la notte a perseguire pertinacemente lo stesso interminabile argomento, su ogni sorta di punti di dettaglio e di pura logica; cosicché egli non lasciava andare i suoi ospiti fin quasi all’alba, a meno che non avesse risolto con sua soddisfazione il significato di «T. T.» nei Sonetti di Shakespeare; o quali fossero le private aspettative di Chaucer riguardo alla pubblicazione di Troilo e Criseide. Non era in alcun senso un dandy; ma in quanto vestiva davvero bene, era del tutto indifferente a come altri uomini che erano suoi amici potessero vestire, il che è un altro segno di compagnia puramente maschile. Era un buon compagno nella società sportiva come nella società letteraria; ma in nessuna delle due era qualcosa di simile a ciò che si chiama un uomo di mondo. Aveva enorme simpatia per gli zingari e i vagabondi; e collezionava molti letterati (me compreso) che avevano piuttosto l’aspetto di vagabondi. La generosità interiore che dava gusto o sapore a tutto ciò che faceva era davvero all’estremo opposto di tutto quel mero lustro, sottinteso da coloro che lo calunniavano chiamandolo «affascinante». Egli mi aveva dapprima scritto alcune congratulazioni per una lettera che avevo inviato alla Westminster Gazette sull’Educazione Religiosa; nella quale, perfino a quella data così precoce, suggerivo che molti Anglicani sentivano che Cristo non è interamente sconnesso dalla Sua propria Madre. Wyndham era sostenuto in questo dal profondo misticismo naturale di sua moglie; una donna da non dimenticare da chiunque l’abbia mai conosciuta, e ancor meno da meramente lodare da chiunque l’abbia adeguatamente apprezzata. Ella mostrava sempre una curiosità assai commovente su dove io avessi raccattato questa passione per ciò che in questa terra protestante si chiama Mariolatria; e potevo assicurarle con verità, benché senza alcuna completa spiegazione, che l’avevo avuta in qualche forma fin dalla fanciullezza.
It was at Taplow, at the same time as my first meeting with Wyndham, that I also had my first meeting with the late Earl Balfour; but, though I talked to him fairly often on abstract things, I never came to know him thus personally and certainly never to understand him so well. I do not think he was a very easy person to understand. He was, of course, quite an easy person to misunderstand; having all those external features, whether of elegance or eccentricity, which go to make up a public character; that is, a political cartoon. But in his case the caricatures were even more wildly wide of the mark; and I think that the compliments were worse than the caricatures. His foes in the press depicted him as Miss Arthur; and his friends in the press referred to him gracefully as Prince Arthur; and I do not know which of the two was more misleading. There certainly was nothing feminine about him, in the unchivalrous sense in which that word is used for what is silly or weak or wavering; very much the other way. It is typical of these times that he was always criticised as a cloudy and confusing speaker, when he was in fact a remarkably clear speaker; and anybody could follow him who could follow an argument. Only to the Modern Mind it would seem that lucidity is more bewildering than mystification. As for the contemporary pictures of a drooping lily, they might as well have represented his uncle Lord Salisbury as a little broken snowdrop. But there was really something odd about Arthur Balfour. He was always most pleasant and amiable to me; but he had not the general reputation of being pleasant and amiable to everybody. For him alone might have been invented the true definition: “A gentleman is one who is never rude except intentionally.” But though he was perhaps an aristocrat to excess, he was not in the least like an ordinary excessive aristocrat. I have met many men of his rank; some arrogant gentlemen; and a few really offensive gentlemen. But they had the simplicity of vanity and ignorance; and the case of Balfour was not simple, as he was not the ordinary bad extreme, nor was he the ordinary good extreme; the good squire or even the good knight. Describing Arthur Balfour as Prince Arthur was far less true than describing George Wyndham as St. George. Wyndham really had that romantic or chivalric touch; in Balfour there was something else that I never understood. I have sometimes thought it was national rather than social. Charles II is often quoted as saying that Presbyterianism is no religion for a gentleman; it is less often quoted that he also said Anglicanism was no religion for a Christian. But it is odd that his brief and distorted memory of the Scots made him say that Presbyterianism is no religion for a gentleman, touching the one country where gentlemen were often Presbyterians. Scotland has been much modified by this Puritan creed long ruling among the nobles, like old Argyll of my boyhood’s time. And Balfour had something in his blood which I think was the cold ferocity of Calvinism; a bleak streak sometimes felt when the wind changes even in the breezy voyages of Stevenson. The comparison will show that this is without prejudice; for I had from childhood a romantic feeling about Scotland, even that cold flat eastern coast. It may not be believed, but I have played golf as a lad on the links a bowshot from Whittinghame, in the days when ordinary English people asked, “What is golf?” It came with a rush over the Border, like the blue bonnets, a year or two later; and grew fashionable largely because Arthur Balfour was the fashion. Whatever else it was, his spell was a Scottish spell; and his pride was a Scottish pride; and there was something hollow-eyed and headachy about his long fine head, which had nothing in it of the English squires; and suggested to me rather the manse than the castle. Also, as one who went to neither great University, and has many jolly friends from his, very unlike him, I may be allowed to hint that somehow one did think of him as a Cambridge man.
I have known practically nothing of politicians after the Age of Asquith and Balfour; but I had some knowledge of one other who is also a Scottish type and another sort of Scottish enigma. To me the mystery about Mr. James Ramsay MacDonald was this; that when I knew him slightly, in my youth, in the days when we were all Socialists, he had the name of being rather a cold and scientific exponent of Socialism; the more expansive and even emotional sort of eloquence seems to have developed late in life, in quite poetical speeches I have heard from him when we have since sat on the same platform, being supposed to do something to restore Rural England. But I remember when I was emotional and expansive, and full of early enthusiasm for Blatchford’s Merrie England, feeling in him a more than Fabian frigidity, as he said (neatly enough) that Blatchford’s popularisation was like a man fully explaining a motor-car by describing a wheelbarrow. On the later occasion, he was really deploring with me the ravages of the motor-car; though I can hardly picture him carrying rusticity so far as to be wheeled about like Mr. Pickwick in a wheelbarrow. But perhaps there was always something about him more suited to tranquil and traditional things. When he was still counted a revolutionary Labour leader with a red tie, I heard Balfour refer to him in Parliament with respectful regret; “confessing myself an admirer of the Parliamentary style of the honourable gentleman,” and somehow, when I heard those words, I think I knew that the man with the red tie was destined for a National Ministry. Even then, at least, he looked much more like an aristocrat than most aristocrats do.
But these statesmen were not the kind of men, or even the kind of Scotsmen, with whom I tended to linger. I felt much more kinship with the sort of Scot who, even when he was interested in politics, would never really be allowed in practical politics. A splendid specimen of this type of man was Cunninghame Graham. No Cabinet Minister would ever admire his Parliamentary style; though he had a much better style than any Cabinet Minister. Nothing could prevent Balfour being Prime Minister or MacDonald being Prime Minister; but Cunninghame Graham achieved the adventure of being Cunninghame Graham. As Bernard Shaw remarked, it is an achievement so fantastic that it would never be believed in a romance. Nor can it be said in this case, that the Scots are in a conspiracy to praise each other; for I grieve to say that I heard one of these great statesmen deliver a speech full of the noblest ideals with Cunninghame Graham at my elbow, muttering in my ear in a soft but fierce fashion: “I never could stand a Protestant sermon.”
Fu a Taplow, nello stesso momento del mio primo incontro con Wyndham, che ebbi anche il mio primo incontro col defunto Conte Balfour; ma, benché gli parlassi abbastanza spesso di cose astratte, non giunsi mai a conoscerlo così personalmente e certo mai a comprenderlo così bene. Non credo che egli fosse una persona assai facile da comprendere. Era, naturalmente, una persona assai facile da fraintendere; avendo tutti quei tratti esterni, di eleganza o di eccentricità, che concorrono a comporre un personaggio pubblico; cioè, una vignetta politica. Ma nel suo caso le caricature erano ancor più selvaggiamente lontane dal bersaglio; e credo che i complimenti fossero peggiori delle caricature. I suoi nemici nella stampa lo raffiguravano come Miss Arthur; e i suoi amici nella stampa si riferivano a lui con grazia come Principe Arthur; e non so quale dei due fosse più fuorviante. Non vi era certo nulla di femmineo in lui, nel senso poco cavalleresco in cui quella parola è usata per ciò che è sciocco o debole o vacillante; anzi tutto il contrario. È tipico di questi tempi che egli fosse sempre criticato come un oratore nuvoloso e confuso, quando egli era in effetti un oratore notevolmente chiaro; e chiunque poteva seguirlo che sapesse seguire un argomento. Solo che alla Mente Moderna parrebbe che la lucidità sia più sconcertante della Mistificazione. Quanto ai contemporanei ritratti di un giglio cadente, essi avrebbero potuto altrettanto bene rappresentare suo zio Lord Salisbury come un piccolo bucaneve spezzato. Ma vi era davvero qualcosa di strano in Arthur Balfour. Egli fu sempre assai piacevole e amabile con me; ma non aveva la generale reputazione di essere piacevole e amabile con tutti. Per lui solo avrebbe potuto essere inventata la vera definizione: «Un gentiluomo è uno che non è mai scortese se non intenzionalmente». Ma benché egli fosse forse un aristocratico all’eccesso, non era affatto simile a un ordinario aristocratico eccessivo. Ho incontrato molti uomini del suo rango; alcuni gentiluomini arroganti; e alcuni gentiluomini davvero offensivi. Ma essi avevano la semplicità della vanità e dell’ignoranza; e il caso di Balfour non era semplice, poiché egli non era l’ordinario cattivo estremo, né era l’ordinario buono estremo; il buon squire o perfino il buon cavaliere. Descrivere Arthur Balfour come Principe Arthur era assai meno vero che descrivere George Wyndham come San Giorgio. Wyndham aveva davvero quel tocco romantico o cavalleresco; in Balfour vi era qualcos’altro che non compresi mai. Ho talvolta pensato che fosse nazionale piuttosto che sociale. Carlo II è spesso citato per aver detto che il Presbiterianesimo non è religione per un gentiluomo; è meno spesso citato che egli disse anche che l’Anglicanesimo non era religione per un cristiano. Ma è strano che il suo breve e distorto ricordo degli Scozzesi gli facesse dire che il Presbiterianesimo non è religione per un gentiluomo, riguardo all’unico paese dove i gentiluomini erano spesso presbiteriani. La Scozia è stata assai modificata da questo credo puritano lungamente dominante fra i nobili, come il vecchio Argyll del tempo della mia fanciullezza. E Balfour aveva qualcosa nel suo sangue che credo fosse la fredda ferocia del Calvinismo; una gelida vena talvolta sentita quando il vento cambia perfino nei ventosi viaggi di Stevenson. Il paragone mostrerà che ciò è senza pregiudizio; poiché io ebbi dalla fanciullezza un sentimento romantico riguardo alla Scozia, perfino a quella fredda e piatta costa orientale. Può non essere creduto, ma ho giocato a golf da ragazzo sui campi a un tiro d’arco da Whittinghame, nei giorni in cui gli ordinari inglesi domandavano: «Cos’è il golf?». Esso venne con impeto oltre il Confine, come i berretti azzurri, un anno o due dopo; e crebbe alla moda largamente perché Arthur Balfour era la moda. Checché fosse altrimenti, il suo incantesimo era un incantesimo scozzese; e il suo orgoglio era un orgoglio scozzese; e vi era qualcosa di cavo negli occhi e di dolorante nella sua lunga fine testa, che non aveva nulla degli squire inglesi; e mi suggeriva piuttosto il presbiterio che il castello. Inoltre, come uno che non andò a nessuna delle due grandi Università, e ha molti allegri amici delle sue, assai diversi da lui, mi sia permesso accennare che in qualche modo si pensava a lui come a un uomo di Cambridge.
Non ho conosciuto praticamente nulla dei politici dopo l’età di Asquith e Balfour; ma ebbi qualche conoscenza di un altro che è anch’esso un tipo scozzese e un altro genere di enigma scozzese. Per me il mistero riguardo al signor James Ramsay MacDonald era questo; che quando lo conobbi appena, in gioventù, nei giorni in cui eravamo tutti socialisti, egli aveva fama di essere piuttosto un freddo e scientifico esponente del Socialismo; il tipo di eloquenza più espansivo e perfino emotivo pare essersi sviluppato tardi nella vita, in discorsi del tutto poetici che gli ho udito fare quando da allora ci siamo seduti sulla stessa tribuna, supposti a fare qualcosa per restaurare la Campagna Inglese. Ma ricordo quando io ero emotivo ed espansivo, e pieno di precoce entusiasmo per Merrie England di Blatchford, sentendo in lui una frigidità più che fabiana, mentre egli diceva (con abbastanza garbo) che la divulgazione di Blatchford era come un uomo che spiega pienamente un’automobile descrivendo una carriola. Nell’occasione successiva, egli deplorava davvero con me le devastazioni dell’automobile; benché io possa a stento immaginarlo portare la rusticità tanto in là da farsi condurre in giro come il signor Pickwick in una carriola. Ma forse vi fu sempre qualcosa in lui più adatto a cose tranquille e tradizionali. Quando era ancora considerato un rivoluzionario capo laburista con una cravatta rossa, udii Balfour riferirsi a lui in Parlamento con rispettoso rammarico; «confessandomi un ammiratore dello stile parlamentare dell’onorevole gentiluomo»; e in qualche modo, quando udii quelle parole, credo di aver saputo che l’uomo con la cravatta rossa era destinato a un Ministero Nazionale. Anche allora, almeno, egli aveva assai più l’aria di un aristocratico della maggior parte degli aristocratici.
Ma questi statisti non erano il genere di uomini, o perfino il genere di scozzesi, con cui io tendevo a indugiare. Sentivo assai più affinità col genere di scozzese che, anche quando era interessato alla politica, non sarebbe mai stato davvero ammesso nella politica pratica. Uno splendido esemplare di questo tipo d’uomo era Cunninghame Graham. Nessun Ministro del Gabinetto avrebbe mai ammirato il suo stile parlamentare; benché egli avesse uno stile assai migliore di qualunque Ministro del Gabinetto. Nulla poteva impedire a Balfour di essere Primo Ministro o a MacDonald di essere Primo Ministro; ma Cunninghame Graham conseguì l’avventura di essere Cunninghame Graham. Come osservò Bernard Shaw, è un conseguimento così fantastico che non sarebbe mai creduto in un Romanzo. Né si può dire in questo caso, che gli Scozzesi siano in cospirazione per lodarsi l’un l’altro; poiché mi addolora dire che udii uno di questi grandi statisti pronunciare un discorso pieno dei più nobili ideali con Cunninghame Graham al mio gomito, che mi mormorava all’orecchio in modo soave ma feroce: «Non ho mai potuto sopportare un sermone protestante».
There was a small row or scandal, connected with Cunninghame Graham and his candour in politics, which has always stuck in my memory as a symbol. It explains why I, for one, have always got on much better with revolutionists than with reformers; even when I entirely disagreed with the revolutions or entirely agreed with the reforms. In Ireland it would have been different; but in England, during most of my life, the revolutionists were always Socialists; and in theory, almost always State Socialists. And I had early begun to doubt, and later to deny, the Socialist or any other assumption that involved a complete confidence in the State. I think I had begun to doubt it ever since I met the statesmen. On the other hand, I really did agree with the Liberals on many definite points that had become part of the Liberal programme; such as Home Rule for Ireland and a democratic decentralisation many held to be the death of the Empire. But I always felt, and I still feel, more personal sympathy with a Communist like Conrad Noel than with a Liberal like John Simon; while recognising that both are in their own way sincere. I think the reason is that the revolutionists did, in a sense, judge the world; not justly like the saints; but independently like the saints. Whereas the reformers were so much a part of the world they reformed, that the worst of them tended to be snobs and even the best of them to be specialists. Some of the Liberal specialists, of the more frigid Cambridge type, did faintly irritate me; much more than any mere anarchist or atheist. They seemed so very negative and their criticism was a sort of nagging. One distinguished man, who happened to affect me in this way, was the late J. A. Hobson, not to be confounded with the S. G. Hobson whose excellent economic studies still enlighten our debates; but a most high-minded and public-spirited speaker and writer in his own right. I hesitate to name so honest and earnest a man in a critical spirit; but nobody who recalls, with whatever respect, that gaunt figure and keen and bitter countenance, will pretend that his own spirit was not supremely critical. He was one of the most independent and intelligent of the Liberal critics of Imperialism, and on that point I was wholly with the Liberals; I disliked Imperialism; and yet I almost liked it by the time that Hobson had finished speaking against it. And I remember one occasion when he took the chair at some meeting of or about Aborigines or the native races of the Empire; and he had Cunninghame Graham on his right, while I had the honour of sitting on the other side. Hobson made a very able political speech, but somehow it seemed to me to be a party speech; concerned more for Liberalism than Liberty. I may be wrong; anyhow, I missed something, as he picked holes in the British Empire until it consisted entirely of holes tied together with red tape. And then Cunninghame Graham began to speak; and I realised what was wanting. He painted a picture, a historical picture, like a pageant of Empires; talking of the Spanish Empire and the British Empire as things to be reviewed with an equal eye; as things which brave and brilliant men had often served with double or doubtful effects; he poured scorn on the provincial ignorance which supposes that Spanish Empire-builders or proconsuls had all been vultures of rapine or vampires of superstition; he declared that many of the Spanish, like many of the English, had been rulers of whom any Empire might be proud. And then he traced such figures against the dark and tragic background of those ancient human populations which they had so often either served or conquered in vain.
Now in the course of this speech Cunninghame Graham had occasion to say in passing, touching some local riot and crime; “I have never been able to feel myself that tyrannicide, in certain circumstances, is intrinsically and inevitably indefensible.” Will it be believed that there was immediately a horrible howling fuss about these words; that they were the only words of the speech that anybody bothered to remember; that these were only remembered as an execrable example of the frenzy of the foes of the Empire; and that all the funny people on that platform were lumped together as gory regicides who went about drinking the blood of kings? And all the time, I had been saying to myself that Cunninghame Graham at least had been fair to Empires as Empires—whereas J. A. Hobson had not been fair to the British Empire at all. There was nothing particularly unprecedented or preposterous in what the Scottish Socialist had said about tyrannicide, though we may disagree with it for particular moral or religious reasons. He only said what practically all the great Pagans would have said; what all the admirers of Hermodius and Aristogiton would have said; what many Renaissance theorists, Catholic and non-Catholic, would have said; what all the great French Revolutionists would have said; what practically all the classic poets and tragedians down to modern times would have said. It was no more than was implied in a hundred sacred pictures of Judith or a hundred secular praises of Brutus. But Mr. Hobson would have been shocked, I fear, at the faintest suggestion of the killing of an evil king; but he was not in the least shocked at the implied impossibility of the power of a good king, or the modern ignorance of all that men have meant by kingship.
It was the irritant of this irritation, which seemed to me a little local irritation, against any large views either of loyalty or liberty, that slowly estranged me from political liberalism. But it would not be fair to say so, without adding that I did know men, capable of working with the party, who were really full of something that was not liberalism but liberality. Two men of that type remain in my memory; and it is for their sake and in their sense that I say I am a Liberal. One was Augustine Birrell, who enlivened his politics through literature; and the other was the last Gladstonian, G. W. E. Russell, who did it by inheriting the very real religion of Gladstone. They were both very Victorian, as became their generation; but they inherited an appreciation of all the great Victorians, which covered a great variety. Birrell was a Nonconformist with a very rich comprehension of Newman. Russell was a High Churchman with a quite detached admiration of Matthew Arnold. And they both drew out of these deeper and wider things a certain rich repose in humour denied to the mere men of the Party System. I shall never forget the occasion when old Birrell, roused by the rather vulgar refinement of the popular Puritan press, as expressed by a suave editor who patronised the polysyllabic style of Dr. Johnson, rose like a white-maned lion at the dinner-table where the editor had spoken, and told him that if he wanted to understand the style of Dr. Johnson, he should consult the passage in which Dr. Johnson called somebody the son of a bitch. It was spat out with such virile anger that it sounded alarmingly like a personal remark. And I shall never forget the other occasion, in which Russell figured in what might seem the opposite fashion; for Russell was a sleek, slow-moving, heavy man and had the name of a sybarite; but he was never afraid of being in a minority; and he took the chair at a Pro-Boer dinner when Pro-Boers were most unpopular. At the end his health was proposed by Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the celebrated teetotal fanatic, or shall we say enthusiast, who was also a brave man, and could fight for the few. He was by this time an old man; and anyhow, by some accident, he confused the terms of the toast; calling it a vote of thanks; or what not. I only know that, for some reason, the last scene of this dinner is also astonishingly vivid in my memory. For Russell rose like some vast fish, gazing upwards insolently at the ceiling as he always did, and began: “This toast, which Sir Wilfrid Lawson seems to have a post-prandial difficulty in enunciating …”
There were many others, of course, who were complete exceptions to anything I have said here about the atmosphere of political Liberalism. One to whom I owe more than to most other people was Philip Wicksteed, the Dante lecturer; but there again, the modern mind had been broadened by a study of narrow mediaeval dogmas. But on the whole, I must confess that I reached a point of practical separation; I did not in the least desire to come any nearer to the imperialism of Curzon, or the cynical patriotism of Balfour, or the patriotic pacifism of Cecil; I am not a Conservative, whatever I am; I am certainly not a Unionist, whatever I am; but the general atmosphere of liberality was too illiberal to be endured.
Mr. Lloyd George’s Insurance Act roughly marks the moment of my disappearance; for I thought it a step to the Servile State; as legally recognising two classes of citizens; fixed as masters and servants. But a comic coincidence helped it; for I had just written The Flying Inn, containing a verse of violent abuse of Cocoa. After all these years, it can do no harm to mention that a Liberal editor wrote me a very sympathetic but rather sad letter, hoping that no personal attack was meant on some of the pillars of the Party. I assured him that my unaffected physical recoil from cocoa was not an attack on Mr. Cadbury; also that the Praise of Wine was a traditional thing not intended as an advertisement for Mr. Gilbey. So I left the Liberal paper and wrote for a Labour paper, which turned ferociously Pacifist when the War came: and since then I have been the gloomy and hated outcast you behold, cut off from the joys of all the political parties.
Vi fu un piccolo trambusto o scandalo, connesso con Cunninghame Graham e la sua franchezza in politica, che mi è sempre rimasto nella memoria come un simbolo. Spiega perché io, per uno, mi sia sempre trovato assai meglio con i rivoluzionari che con i riformatori; anche quando dissentivo interamente dalle rivoluzioni o concordavo interamente con le riforme. In Irlanda sarebbe stato diverso; ma in Inghilterra, durante la maggior parte della mia vita, i rivoluzionari erano sempre socialisti; e in teoria, quasi sempre socialisti di Stato. E io avevo presto cominciato a dubitare, e più tardi a negare, l’assunto socialista o qualsiasi altro assunto che implicasse una completa fiducia nello Stato. Credo di aver cominciato a dubitarne fin da quando incontrai gli statisti. D’altra parte, io davvero concordavo coi Liberali su molti punti definiti che erano divenuti parte del programma liberale; come l’Autogoverno per l’Irlanda e una democratica decentralizzazione che molti ritenevano la morte dell’Impero. Ma sentii sempre, e sento ancora, più simpatia personale con un comunista come Conrad Noel che con un liberale come John Simon; pur riconoscendo che entrambi sono a modo loro sinceri. Credo che la ragione sia che i rivoluzionari, in un certo senso, giudicavano il mondo; non giustamente come i santi; ma indipendentemente come i santi. Mentre i riformatori erano tanto parte del mondo che riformavano, che il peggiore di essi tendeva a essere uno snob e perfino il migliore di essi a essere uno specialista. Alcuni degli specialisti liberali, del tipo più frigido di Cambridge, mi irritavano davvero un poco; assai più di qualsiasi mero anarchico o ateo. Parevano così assai negativi e la loro critica era una sorta di brontolio assillante. Un uomo distinto, che si dava il caso mi colpisse in questo modo, era il defunto J. A. Hobson, da non confondere col S. G. Hobson i cui eccellenti studi economici ancora illuminano i nostri dibattiti; ma un oratore e scrittore assai nobile di mente e animato da spirito pubblico, a pieno titolo suo. Esito a nominare in spirito critico un uomo così onesto e serio; ma nessuno che rammenti, con qualunque rispetto, quella figura scarna e quel volto acuto e amaro, pretenderà che il suo proprio spirito non fosse supremamente critico. Egli era uno dei più indipendenti e intelligenti dei critici liberali dell’Imperialismo, e su quel punto io ero interamente coi Liberali; detestavo l’Imperialismo; eppure quasi mi piacque, quando Hobson ebbe finito di parlarne contro. E ricordo un’occasione in cui egli presiedette a una riunione di o su gli Aborigeni o le razze native dell’Impero; e aveva Cunninghame Graham alla sua destra, mentre io avevo l’onore di sedere dall’altro lato. Hobson fece un discorso politico assai abile, ma in qualche modo mi parve essere un discorso di partito; preoccupato più del Liberalismo che della Libertà. Posso sbagliarmi; comunque, mi mancò qualcosa, mentre egli faceva pertugi nell’Impero britannico finché non consistette interamente di pertugi legati insieme con nastro rosso. E poi Cunninghame Graham cominciò a parlare; e io mi resi conto di ciò che mancava. Egli dipinse un quadro, un quadro storico, come un corteo di Imperi; parlando dell’Impero spagnolo e dell’Impero britannico come cose da esaminare con occhio pari; come cose che uomini coraggiosi e brillanti avevano spesso servito con effetti duplici o dubbi; egli riversò scherno sulla provinciale ignoranza che suppone che i costruttori d’impero o i proconsoli spagnoli fossero stati tutti avvoltoi di rapina o vampiri di superstizione; dichiarò che molti degli spagnoli, come molti degli inglesi, erano stati governanti di cui qualsiasi Impero potrebbe essere fiero. E poi tracciò tali figure contro lo sfondo oscuro e tragico di quelle antiche popolazioni umane che essi avevano così spesso o servito o conquistato invano.
Ora nel corso di questo discorso Cunninghame Graham ebbe occasione di dire di passaggio, a proposito di qualche rivolta e delitto locale: «Non sono mai stato capace di sentire io stesso che il tirannicidio, in certe circostanze, sia intrinsecamente e inevitabilmente indifendibile». Si crederà che vi fu immediatamente un orribile chiasso ululante su queste parole; che esse furono le sole parole del discorso che qualcuno si curò di ricordare; che esse furono ricordate soltanto come un esecrabile esempio della frenesia dei nemici dell’Impero; e che tutte le buffe persone su quella tribuna furono ammassate insieme come sanguinari regicidi che andavano in giro bevendo il sangue dei re? E per tutto il tempo, io mi ero detto che Cunninghame Graham almeno era stato equo verso gli Imperi in quanto Imperi—mentre J. A. Hobson non era stato affatto equo verso l’Impero britannico. Non vi era nulla di particolarmente inaudito o assurdo in ciò che il socialista scozzese aveva detto sul tirannicidio, benché possiamo dissentirne per particolari ragioni morali o religiose. Egli non disse più di ciò che praticamente tutti i grandi Pagani avrebbero detto; ciò che tutti gli ammiratori di Armodio e Aristogitone avrebbero detto; ciò che molti teorici del Rinascimento, cattolici e non cattolici, avrebbero detto; ciò che tutti i grandi rivoluzionari francesi avrebbero detto; ciò che praticamente tutti i poeti e tragediografi classici fino ai tempi moderni avrebbero detto. Non era più di ciò che era implicato in cento sacre pitture di Giuditta o in cento profane lodi di Bruto. Ma il signor Hobson sarebbe stato scandalizzato, temo, al più tenue accenno all’uccisione di un re malvagio; ma non era affatto scandalizzato dall’implicita impossibilità del potere di un buon re, o dalla moderna ignoranza di tutto ciò che gli uomini hanno inteso per regalità.
Fu l’irritante di questa irritazione, che mi parve una piccola irritazione locale, contro qualsiasi ampia veduta di lealtà o di libertà, che lentamente mi estraniò dal liberalismo politico. Ma non sarebbe giusto dirlo, senza aggiungere che io conobbi davvero uomini, capaci di lavorare col partito, che erano davvero pieni di qualcosa che non era liberalismo ma liberalità. Due uomini di quel tipo restano nella mia memoria; ed è per amor loro e nel loro senso che dico di essere un Liberale. Uno era Augustine Birrell, che ravvivava la sua politica attraverso la letteratura; e l’altro era l’ultimo Gladstoniano, G. W. E. Russell, che lo faceva ereditando la assai reale religione di Gladstone. Erano entrambi assai vittoriani, come si conveniva alla loro generazione; ma ereditarono un apprezzamento di tutti i grandi Vittoriani, che copriva una grande varietà. Birrell era un anticonformista con una comprensione assai ricca di Newman. Russell era un Anglicano di Alta Chiesa con un’ammirazione del tutto distaccata di Matthew Arnold. Ed entrambi traevano da queste cose più profonde e più ampie un certo ricco riposo nell’umorismo negato ai meri uomini del Sistema dei Partiti. Non dimenticherò mai l’occasione in cui il vecchio Birrell, incollerito dalla piuttosto volgare raffinatezza della popolare stampa puritana, come espressa da un suave direttore che scimmiottava lo stile polisillabico del Dr. Johnson, si levò come un leone dalla bianca criniera alla tavola dove il direttore aveva parlato, e gli disse che se voleva capire lo stile del Dr. Johnson, dovrebbe consultare il passo in cui il Dr. Johnson chiamò qualcuno figlio di puttana. Fu sputato con tale virile ira che suonò allarmantemente come un’osservazione personale. E non dimenticherò mai l’altra occasione, in cui Russell figurò in ciò che potrebbe sembrare la maniera opposta; poiché Russell era un uomo liscio, lento nei movimenti, pesante e aveva fama di sibarita; ma non aveva mai paura di essere in minoranza; e presiedette a una cena Pro-Boera quando i Pro-Boeri erano oltremodo impopolari. Alla fine la sua salute fu brindata da Sir Wilfrid Lawson, il celebre fanatico astemio, o diciamo entusiasta, che era anche un uomo coraggioso, e sapeva battersi per i pochi. Egli era a quel tempo un vecchio; e comunque, per qualche accidente, confuse i termini del brindisi; chiamandolo un voto di ringraziamento; o non so cosa. So soltanto che, per qualche ragione, l’ultima scena di questa cena è anch’essa sorprendentemente vivida nella mia memoria. Poiché Russell si levò come un vasto pesce, fissando insolentemente il soffitto come faceva sempre, e cominciò: «Questo brindisi, che Sir Wilfrid Lawson pare avere una difficoltà post-prandiale a enunciare…».
Ve ne furono molti altri, naturalmente, che erano completamente eccezioni a tutto ciò che ho detto qui sull’atmosfera del Liberalismo politico. Uno a cui devo più che alla maggior parte delle altre persone era Philip Wicksteed, il conferenziere di Dante; ma anche là, la mente moderna era stata allargata da uno studio di angusti dogmi medievali. Ma nel complesso, devo confessare che raggiunsi un punto di pratica separazione; non desideravo affatto avvicinarmi di più all’imperialismo di Curzon, o al cinico patriottismo di Balfour, o al patriottico pacifismo di Cecil; non sono un Conservatore, qualunque cosa io sia; non sono certamente un Unionista, qualunque cosa io sia; ma la generale atmosfera di liberalità era troppo illiberale per essere sopportata.
L’Insurance Act del signor Lloyd George segna grossomodo il momento della mia scomparsa; poiché lo ritenni un passo verso lo Stato Servile; in quanto riconosceva legalmente due classi di cittadini; fissati come padroni e servitori. Ma una comica coincidenza vi contribuì; poiché avevo appena scritto La Taverna Volante, che conteneva un verso di violenta ingiuria contro il Cacao. Dopo tutti questi anni, non può nuocere menzionare che un direttore liberale mi scrisse una lettera assai comprensiva ma piuttosto triste, sperando che nessun attacco personale fosse inteso contro alcuni dei pilastri del Partito. Gli assicurai che il mio schietto ripulso fisico dal cacao non era un attacco al signor Cadbury; e anche che la Lode del Vino era una cosa tradizionale non intesa come pubblicità per il signor Gilbey. Così lasciai il giornale liberale e scrissi per un giornale laburista, che si volse ferocemente pacifista quando venne la Guerra: e da allora sono stato il cupo e odiato reietto che vedete, tagliato fuori dalle gioie di tutti i partiti politici.
XIII
SOME LITERARY CELEBRITIES
I am just old enough to remember what were called Penny Readings; at which the working-classes were supposed to have good literature read to them, because they were not then sufficiently educated to read bad journalism for themselves. As a boy, or even a child, I passed one evening in something curiously called the Progressive Hall; as if the very building could not stand still, but must move onward like an omnibus along the path of progress. There was a little chairman with eyeglasses, who was nervous; and a big stout staring schoolmaster called Ash, who was not at all nervous; and a programme of performers if not eminent no doubt excellent. Mr. Ash read “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in resounding tones; and the audience awaited eagerly the change to a violin solo. The chairman explained hastily that Signor Robinsoni was unfortunately unable to perform that evening, but Mr. Ash had kindly consented to read “The May Queen.” The next item on the programme was a song, probably called “Sea Whispers,” to be sung by Miss Smith accompanied by Miss Brown. But it was not sung by Miss Smith or accompanied by Miss Brown; because, as the chairman somewhat feverishly explained, they were unable to attend; but we were solaced by the announcement that Mr. Ash had kindly consented to read “The Lord of Burleigh.” At about this point a truly extraordinary thing occurred; extraordinary at any time, to any one who knows the patience and politeness of the English poor; still more astonishing in the less sophisticated poor of those distant days. There arose slowly in the middle of the room, like some vast leviathan arising from the ocean, a huge healthy simple-faced man, of the plastering profession, who said in tones as resounding as Mr. Ash’s, and far more hearty and human, “Well, I’ve just ‘ad about enough of this. Good evening, Mr. Ash; good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” And with a wave of universal benediction, he shouldered his way out of the Progressive Hall with an unaffected air of complete amiability and profound relief.
I hardly know why, but that giant has remained in my memory as the one original titan who first rebelled against the Victorians. And I still vastly prefer his colossal common sense and complete good humour to the often petty and sometimes spiteful sneers or sniggers of more recent and cultured critics against the Victorian conventions. But it has warned me that, both for good reasons and bad, there is now a tendency to regard some Victorians as bores, or at least the subject as a bore; and my own memory of men older than myself, in the world of letters, is necessarily a memory of the Victorians, if only of the late Victorians. Even in this respect, of course, the present fashion is very patchy and paradoxical. For instance, there seems to be a much more vivid interest in the lives of such literary men than in their literary works. Any amount is written and rewritten about the romance of Mr. and Mrs. Browning, in plays and pages of biography and gossip. But though their story is rewritten, I rather doubt whether Browning is re-read, or whether Mrs. Browning is read at all. There seem to be more details remembered out of the story of the Brontës than there are details remembered out of the Brontë stories. It is a queer ending for all the aesthetic talk about an artist being only important in his art. Queerest of all, there is more popularity for a book about a man like Palmerston, whose politics are quite dead, than for a book by a man like Carlyle, whose politics would seem partly applicable in these days of reaction and dictatorship. On the whole, despite the giant shadow of the plasterer, I can advance shamelessly as a late Victorian from under the very shadow of Queen Victoria; whose shadow never grows less.
The first great Victorian I ever met, I met very early, though only for a brief interview: Thomas Hardy. I was then a quite obscure and shabby young writer awaiting an interview with a publisher. And the really remarkable thing about Hardy was this; that he might have been himself an obscure and shabby young writer awaiting a publisher; even a new writer awaiting his first publisher. Yet he was already famous everywhere; he had written his first and finest novels culminating in Tess; he had expressed his queer personal pessimism in the famous passage about the President of the Immortals. He had already the wrinkle of worry on his elfish face that might have made a man look old; and yet, in some strange way, he seemed to me very young. If I say as young as I was, I mean as simply pragmatical and even priggish as I was. He did not even avoid the topic of his alleged pessimism; he defended it, but somehow with the innocence of a boys’ debating-club. In short, he was in a sort of gentle fuss about his pessimism, just as I was about my optimism. He said something like this: “I know people say I’m a pessimist; but I don’t believe I am naturally; I like a lot of things so much; but I could never get over the idea that it would be better for us to be without both the pleasures and the pains; and that the best experience would be some sort of sleep.” I have always had a weakness for arguing with anybody; and this involved all that contemporary nihilism against which I was then in revolt; and for about five minutes, in a publisher’s office, I actually argued with Thomas Hardy. I argued that nonexistence is not an experience; and there can be no question of preferring it or being satisfied with it. Honestly, if I had been quite simply a crude young man, and nothing else, I should have thought his whole argument very superficial and even silly. But I did not think him either superficial or silly.
For this was the rather tremendous truth about Hardy; that he had humility. My friends who knew him better have confirmed my early impression; Jack Squire told me that Hardy in his last days of glory as a Grand Old Man would send poems to the Mercury and offer to alter or withdraw them if they were not suitable. He defied the gods and dared the lightning and all the rest of it; but the great Greeks would have seen that there was no thunderbolt for him, because he had not «ubris» (greek) or insolence. For what heaven hates is not impiety but the pride of impiety. Hardy was blasphemous but he was not proud; and it is pride that is a sin and not blasphemy. I have been blamed for an alleged attack on Hardy, in a sketch of Victorian literature; it was apparently supposed that talking about the village atheist brooding on the village idiot was some sort of attack. But this is not an attack on Hardy; this is the defence of Hardy. The whole case for him is that he had the sincerity and simplicity of the village atheist; that is, that he valued atheism as a truth and not a triumph. He was the victim of that decay of our agricultural culture, which gave men bad religion and no philosophy. But he was right in saying, as he said essentially to me all those years ago, that he could enjoy things, including better philosophy or religion. There came back to me four lines, written by an Irish lady in my own little paper:
XIII
ALCUNE CELEBRITÀ LETTERARIE
Sono giusto abbastanza vecchio da ricordare quelle che si chiamavano Letture da un Penny; alle quali si supponeva che alle classi lavoratrici venisse letta buona letteratura, perché non erano allora sufficientemente istruite da leggere da sé il cattivo giornalismo. Da ragazzo, o perfino da bambino, passai una sera in qualcosa curiosamente chiamato la Progressive Hall; come se l’edificio stesso non potesse star fermo, ma dovesse muoversi avanti come un omnibus lungo il sentiero del progresso. C’era un piccolo presidente con gli occhialini, che era nervoso; e un grosso e corpulento maestro di scuola dallo sguardo fisso chiamato Ash, che non era affatto nervoso; e un programma di esecutori se non eminenti senza dubbio eccellenti. Il signor Ash lesse «La Carica della Brigata Leggera» in toni squillanti; e il pubblico attese avidamente il passaggio a un assolo di violino. Il presidente spiegò frettolosamente che il Signor Robinsoni era purtroppo impossibilitato a esibirsi quella sera, ma il signor Ash aveva gentilmente acconsentito a leggere «La Regina di Maggio». Il prossimo numero del programma era una canzone, probabilmente intitolata «Sussurri di Mare», da cantarsi da Miss Smith accompagnata da Miss Brown. Ma non fu cantata da Miss Smith né accompagnata da Miss Brown; perché, come il presidente alquanto febbrilmente spiegò, esse non poterono presentarsi; ma fummo consolati dall’annuncio che il signor Ash aveva gentilmente acconsentito a leggere «Il Signore di Burleigh». A questo punto avvenne una cosa davvero straordinaria; straordinaria in qualsiasi tempo, per chiunque conosca la pazienza e la cortesia dei poveri inglesi; ancor più stupefacente nei meno smaliziati poveri di quei giorni lontani. Si levò lentamente in mezzo alla sala, come un vasto leviatano che sorge dall’oceano, un enorme e sano uomo dal volto semplice, della professione di intonacatore, il quale disse in toni squillanti come quelli del signor Ash, e assai più cordiali e umani: «Ebbene, ne ho avuto giusto abbastanza di questa faccenda. Buonasera, signor Ash; buonasera, signore e signori». E con un cenno di universale benedizione, si fece largo a spallate fuori dalla Progressive Hall con un’aria schietta di completa amabilità e profondo sollievo.
Non so bene perché, ma quel gigante è rimasto nella mia memoria come l’unico originale titano che per primo si ribellò ai Vittoriani. E preferisco ancora immensamente il suo colossale buon senso e il suo completo buon umore agli spesso meschini e talvolta astiosi sogghigni o risatine di critici più recenti e colti contro le convenzioni vittoriane. Ma ciò mi ha avvertito che, per buone ragioni e cattive, vi è ora una tendenza a considerare alcuni Vittoriani come noiosi, o almeno il soggetto come una noia; e la mia stessa memoria di uomini più vecchi di me, nel mondo delle lettere, è necessariamente una memoria dei Vittoriani, se non altro dei tardo-vittoriani. Perfino in questo rispetto, naturalmente, la moda presente è assai irregolare e paradossale. Ad esempio, pare esservi un interesse assai più vivo per le vite di tali letterati che per le loro opere letterarie. Si scrive e riscrive a non finire sul Romanzo del signor e della signora Browning, in commedie e pagine di biografia e pettegolezzo. Ma benché la loro storia sia riscritta, piuttosto dubito se Browning sia riletto, o se la signora Browning sia letta affatto. Paiono esservi più dettagli ricordati della storia delle Brontë che dettagli ricordati delle storie delle Brontë. È una bizzarra conclusione per tutte le chiacchiere estetiche sul fatto che un Artista sia importante solo nella sua arte. Bizzarrissimo di tutto, vi è più popolarità per un libro su un uomo come Palmerston, la cui politica è del tutto morta, che per un libro di un uomo come Carlyle, la cui politica parrebbe in parte applicabile in questi giorni di reazione e dittatura. Nel complesso, malgrado l’ombra gigante dell’intonacatore, posso avanzarmi spudoratamente come un tardo-vittoriano da sotto l’ombra stessa della Regina Vittoria; la cui ombra non si fa mai più piccola.
Il primo grande Vittoriano che io abbia mai incontrato, lo incontrai assai presto, benché solo per un breve colloquio: Thomas Hardy. Ero allora un giovane scrittore del tutto oscuro e malandato in attesa di un colloquio con un editore. E la cosa davvero notevole di Hardy era questa; che egli avrebbe potuto essere lui stesso un giovane scrittore oscuro e malandato in attesa di un editore; perfino un nuovo scrittore in attesa del suo primo editore. Eppure era già famoso ovunque; aveva scritto i suoi primi e più belli romanzi culminanti in Tess; aveva espresso il suo bizzarro pessimismo personale nel famoso passo sul Presidente degli Immortali. Aveva già la ruga della preoccupazione sul suo volto elfico che avrebbe potuto far apparire vecchio un uomo; eppure, in qualche strano modo, mi parve assai giovane. Se dico giovane come lo ero io, intendo semplicistico e perfino pedante come lo ero io. Egli non evitava nemmeno il tema del suo presunto pessimismo; lo difendeva, ma in qualche modo con l’innocenza di un circolo di dibattito di ragazzi. Insomma, era in una sorta di gentile agitazione riguardo al suo pessimismo, proprio come lo ero io riguardo al mio ottimismo. Disse qualcosa come questo: «So che la gente dice che sono un pessimista; ma non credo di esserlo per natura; mi piacciono tantissime cose; ma non ho mai potuto superare l’idea che sarebbe meglio per noi essere senza sia i piaceri sia i dolori; e che la migliore esperienza sarebbe una sorta di sonno». Ho sempre avuto una debolezza per il discutere con chiunque; e ciò coinvolgeva tutto quel nichilismo contemporaneo contro cui io ero allora in rivolta; e per circa cinque minuti, nell’ufficio di un editore, discussi davvero con Thomas Hardy. Sostenni che la non esistenza non è un’esperienza; e non vi può essere questione di preferirla o di esserne soddisfatti. Onestamente, se io fossi stato semplicemente un rozzo giovane, e null’altro, avrei ritenuto tutto il suo argomento assai superficiale e perfino sciocco. Ma non lo ritenni né superficiale né sciocco.
Poiché questa era la piuttosto tremenda verità su Hardy; che egli aveva umiltà. I miei amici che lo conobbero meglio hanno confermato la mia precoce impressione; Jack Squire mi disse che Hardy nei suoi ultimi giorni di gloria come Grande Vecchio inviava poesie al Mercury e si offriva di modificarle o ritirarle se non fossero adatte. Egli sfidava gli dèi e osava la folgore e tutto il resto; ma i grandi Greci avrebbero visto che non vi era alcun fulmine per lui, perché egli non aveva «ubris» (greco) o insolenza. Poiché ciò che il cielo odia non è l’empietà ma l’orgoglio dell’empietà. Hardy era blasfemo ma non era orgoglioso; ed è l’orgoglio che è peccato e non la bestemmia. Sono stato biasimato per un presunto attacco a Hardy, in uno Schizzo di letteratura vittoriana; si suppose a quanto pare che parlare dell’ateo del villaggio che rimugina sull’idiota del villaggio fosse una sorta di attacco. Ma questo non è un attacco a Hardy; questa è la difesa di Hardy. Tutto il caso a suo favore è che egli aveva la sincerità e la semplicità dell’ateo del villaggio; cioè, che apprezzava l’ateismo come una verità e non un trionfo. Egli fu la vittima di quel declino della nostra cultura agricola, che diede agli uomini cattiva religione e nessuna filosofia. Ma aveva ragione nel dire, come mi disse essenzialmente tutti quegli anni fa, che poteva godere delle cose, comprese una miglior filosofia o religione. Mi tornarono in mente quattro versi, scritti da una signora irlandese nel mio piccolo giornale:
Who can picture the scene at the starry portals? Truly, imagination fails, When the pitiless President of the Immortals Shows unto Thomas the print of the nails?
I hope it is not profane to say that this hits the right nail on the head. In such a case, the second Thomas would do exactly what Prometheus and Satan never thought of doing; he would pity God.
I must leap a long stretch of years before I come to my meeting with the other great Victorian novelist so often bracketed with Hardy; for by that time I had made some sort of journalistic name, which was responsible for my wife and myself being invited to visit George Meredith. But even across the years, I felt the curious contrast. Hardy was a well, covered with the weeds of a stagnant period of scepticism, in my view; but with truth at the bottom of it; or anyhow with truthfulness at the bottom of it. But Meredith was a fountain. He had exactly the shock and shining radiation of a fountain in his own garden where he entertained us. He was already an old man, with the white pointed beard and the puff of white hair like thistle-down; but that also seemed to radiate. He was deaf; but the reverse of dumb. He was not humble; but I should never call him proud. He still managed to be a third thing, which is almost as much the opposite of being proud; he was vain. He was a very old man; and he was still magnificently vain. He had all those indescribable touches of a quite youthful vanity; even, for instance, to the point of preferring to dazzle women rather than men; for he talked the whole time to my wife rather than to me. We did not talk to him very much; partly because he was deaf but much more because he was not dumb. On an honest review, I doubt whether we could either of us have got in a word or two edgeways. He talked and talked, and drank ginger-beer, which he assured us with glorious gaiety he had learned to like quite as much as champagne.
Meredith was not only full of life, but he was full of lives. His vitality had that branching and begetting genius of the novelist, which is always inventing new stories about strange people. He was not like most old novelists; he was interested in what was novel. He did not live in the books he had written; he lived in the books he had not written. He described a number of novels that were really novel; especially one about the tragedy of Parnell. I do not think I agreed very much with his interpretation; for he held that Parnell might easily have recovered popularity, if he had been capable of wanting it; but that he was naturally secretive and solitary. But I doubt whether that Irish squire was really any more secretive than any number of speechless English squires, who were at the same moment conducting exactly the same sort of sex intrigue, and would have been equally angry and equally inarticulate if they had been discovered. Only they never were discovered. For there was no hope that the discovery might delay the deliverance of a Christian nation. But that was the quality that struck me personally about Meredith. Ever on the jump, he could jump to conclusions; so great a man could never be called superficial; but in a sense, being so swift means being superficial. Many cheap parodies of Sherlock Holmes have made him a blunderer; we have yet to read a real comedy of a Sherlock Holmes who was really clever with insufficient data. We talk of a devouring thirst for information; but real thirst does not devour but swallow. So Meredith, for instance, swallowed the current racial theory of dividing the nations by the Teuton and the Celt.
The name of James Barrie dates also from my youth, though of course he was younger than Meredith or Hardy; he has lived to be my very good friend; but he is of all friends the least egotistical; and I connect him largely with intensely interesting memories of these other men and their contemporaries. He remains especially as a witness to the greatness of Meredith; in a world which has rather strangely forgotten him; but he also told me many tales of the men I never met; such as Stevenson and Henley and Wilde; with Wells and Shaw I have dealt in another place in another connection. But there is one impression that has been left in my mind by such memories of such men; and that is the strangely fugitive character of the controversies even about the greatest literary men. Like anybody writing any memoirs, I find that my first difficulty is to convey how immensely important certain individuals appeared at certain epochs. For those men are no longer topics, even when they are still classics. I remember Barrie giving me a most amusing account of a violent scene of literary controversy, in which Henley hurled his crutch across the room and hit some other eminent literary critic in the stomach. That will illustrate a certain importance that seemed to attach to certain intellectual tastes and preferences. For this piece of creative critical self-expression was apparently provoked by the statement, during a discussion about Ibsen and Tolstoy, that one of these great men was great enough to hang the other on his watch-chain. But what strikes me as the grand and grim joke of the whole business, is that the narrator had apparently entirely forgotten whether Ibsen was to hang Tolstoy on his watch-chain or Tolstoy to hang Ibsen on his watch-chain. From which I venture to infer that neither of those giants now seems quite so gigantic to anybody as they then seemed to somebody.
But I have seen Sir James Barrie many times since, and could say many other things about him; only there is something in his own humorous self-effacement that seems to create round him a silence like his own. In the case of the elder Victorians, it was generally true that I met the man only once, upon a sort of privileged embassy; and such impressions may easily be illusions. If it was so in the case of Meredith, it was much more so in the case of Swinburne. For by the time I saw him, he was a sort of god in a temple, who could only be approached through a high-priest. I had a long conversation with Watts-Dunton and then a short conversation with Swinburne. Swinburne was quite gay and skittish, though in a manner that affected me strangely as spinsterish; but he had charming manners and especially the courtesy of a consistent cheerfulness. But Watts-Dunton, it must be admitted, was very serious indeed. It is said that he made the poet a religion; but what struck me as odd, even at the time, was that his religion seemed to consist largely of preserving and protecting the poet’s irreligion. He thought it essential that no great man should be contaminated with Christianity. He shook his head over Browning’s temptation to that creed… “Anybody so borné as poor Browning was.” He then referred me to his friend’s “Hertha” as the crest of his creation; “Then he was quite on top of the wave.” And I, who knew my Swinburne backwards, delighting in the poetry and already rather despising the philosophy, thought it was a queer metaphor to use about the real and sincere Swinburne:
Chi può raffigurare la scena ai portali stellati? Davvero, l’Immaginazione vien meno, Quando lo spietato Presidente degli Immortali Mostra a Thomas l’impronta dei chiodi?
Spero non sia profano dire che questo coglie il chiodo giusto sulla testa. In un tal caso, il secondo Thomas farebbe esattamente ciò che Prometeo e Satana non pensarono mai di fare; avrebbe pietà di Dio.
Devo saltare un lungo tratto di anni prima di giungere al mio incontro con l’altro grande romanziere vittoriano così spesso accostato a Hardy; poiché a quel tempo mi ero fatto una sorta di nome giornalistico, che fu responsabile del fatto che mia moglie e io fossimo invitati a visitare George Meredith. Ma perfino attraverso gli anni, sentii il curioso contrasto. Hardy era un pozzo, coperto delle erbacce di un periodo stagnante di scetticismo, a mio vedere; ma con la verità sul fondo; o comunque con la veridicità sul fondo. Ma Meredith era una fontana. Aveva esattamente lo scroscio e la scintillante irradiazione di una fontana nel suo proprio giardino dove ci ospitò. Era già un vecchio, con la bianca barba appuntita e il ciuffo di bianchi capelli come lanugine di cardo; ma anche quella pareva irradiare. Era sordo; ma il contrario di muto. Non era umile; ma non lo chiamerei mai orgoglioso. Riusciva ancora a essere una terza cosa, che è quasi altrettanto l’opposto dell’esser orgoglioso; era vanitoso. Era un uomo assai vecchio; ed era ancora magnificamente vanitoso. Aveva tutti quegli indescrivibili tocchi di una vanità del tutto giovanile; perfino, ad esempio, fino al punto di preferire abbagliare le donne piuttosto che gli uomini; poiché parlò per tutto il tempo a mia moglie piuttosto che a me. Non gli parlammo molto; in parte perché era sordo ma assai più perché non era muto. A un’onesta rassegna, dubito che nessuno dei due avrebbe potuto ficcarci due parole di traverso. Egli parlava e parlava, e beveva birra allo zenzero, che ci assicurò con gloriosa gaiezza di aver imparato ad amare proprio quanto lo champagne.
Meredith era non solo pieno di vita, ma pieno di vite. La sua vitalità aveva quel genio ramificante e generante del romanziere, che va sempre inventando nuove storie su strane persone. Non era come la maggior parte dei vecchi romanzieri; era interessato a ciò che era nuovo. Non viveva nei libri che aveva scritto; viveva nei libri che non aveva scritto. Descrisse un certo numero di romanzi che erano davvero nuovi; specialmente uno sulla tragedia di Parnell. Non credo di aver concordato molto con la sua interpretazione; poiché egli riteneva che Parnell avrebbe potuto facilmente riguadagnare popolarità, se fosse stato capace di volerla; ma che era per natura riservato e solitario. Ma dubito se quello squire irlandese fosse davvero più riservato di un qualsiasi numero di taciturni squire inglesi, che stavano nello stesso momento conducendo esattamente lo stesso tipo di intrigo sessuale, e sarebbero stati egualmente adirati ed egualmente inarticolati se fossero stati scoperti. Solo che essi non furono mai scoperti. Poiché non vi era alcuna speranza che la scoperta potesse ritardare la liberazione di una nazione cristiana. Ma quella era la qualità che mi colpì personalmente di Meredith. Sempre sul punto di saltare, egli poteva saltare a conclusioni; un uomo così grande non poteva mai essere chiamato superficiale; ma in un certo senso, l’essere così rapidi significa essere superficiali. Molte parodie da poco di Sherlock Holmes ne hanno fatto un pasticcione; dobbiamo ancora leggere una vera commedia di uno Sherlock Holmes che fosse davvero intelligente con dati insufficienti. Parliamo di una sete divorante d’informazione; ma la vera sete non divora bensì trangugia. Così Meredith, ad esempio, trangugiò la corrente teoria razziale di dividere le nazioni fra il Teutone e il Celta.
Il nome di James Barrie data anch’esso dalla mia giovinezza, benché naturalmente egli fosse più giovane di Meredith o di Hardy; è vissuto per essere il mio assai buon amico; ma è di tutti gli amici il meno egotistico; e lo collego largamente con memorie intensamente interessanti di questi altri uomini e dei loro contemporanei. Egli resta specialmente come testimone della grandezza di Meredith; in un mondo che l’ha piuttosto stranamente dimenticato; ma mi raccontò anche molti aneddoti degli uomini che non incontrai mai; come Stevenson e Henley e Wilde; di Wells e Shaw mi sono occupato in un altro luogo in un’altra connessione. Ma vi è un’impressione che è stata lasciata nella mia mente da tali memorie di tali uomini; ed è lo stranamente fuggevole carattere delle controversie perfino sui più grandi letterati. Come chiunque scriva memorie, trovo che la mia prima difficoltà è trasmettere quanto immensamente importanti certi individui apparissero a certe epoche. Poiché quegli uomini non sono più argomenti, anche quando sono ancora classici. Ricordo Barrie che mi dava un divertentissimo resoconto di una violenta scena di controversia letteraria, in cui Henley scagliò la sua stampella attraverso la stanza e colpì allo stomaco un altro eminente critico letterario. Ciò illustrerà una certa importanza che pareva connettersi a certi gusti e preferenze intellettuali. Poiché questo pezzo di creativa auto-espressione critica fu a quanto pare provocato dall’affermazione, durante una discussione su Ibsen e Tolstoj, che uno di questi grandi uomini era abbastanza grande da appendere l’altro alla sua catena dell’orologio. Ma ciò che mi colpisce come il grande e cupo scherzo di tutta la faccenda, è che il narratore aveva a quanto pare interamente dimenticato se fosse Ibsen a dover appendere Tolstoj alla sua catena dell’orologio o Tolstoj ad appendere Ibsen alla sua catena dell’orologio. Da ciò oso inferire che nessuno di quei giganti pare ora tanto gigantesco a chicchessia quanto allora pareva a qualcuno.
Ma ho visto Sir James Barrie molte volte da allora, e potrei dire molte altre cose su di lui; solo che vi è qualcosa nella sua umoristica auto-cancellazione che pare creare attorno a lui un silenzio simile al suo proprio. Nel caso dei più anziani Vittoriani, era generalmente vero che io incontrai l’uomo una sola volta, in una sorta di privilegiata ambasceria; e tali impressioni possono facilmente essere illusioni. Se fu così nel caso di Meredith, lo fu assai di più nel caso di Swinburne. Poiché quando lo vidi, egli era una sorta di dio in un tempio, cui ci si poteva avvicinare solo attraverso un sommo sacerdote. Ebbi una lunga conversazione con Watts-Dunton e poi una breve conversazione con Swinburne. Swinburne era del tutto gaio e frivolo, benché in una maniera che mi colpiva stranamente come zitellesca; ma aveva modi affascinanti e specialmente la cortesia di una costante allegria. Ma Watts-Dunton, va ammesso, era assai serio davvero. Si dice che egli facesse del poeta una religione; ma ciò che mi colpì come strano, perfino allora, era che la sua religione pareva consistere largamente nel preservare e proteggere l’irreligione del poeta. Egli riteneva essenziale che nessun grand’uomo dovesse essere contaminato dal Cristianesimo. Scosse il capo sulla Tentazione di Browning verso quel credo… «Chiunque così borné come lo era il povero Browning». Mi rimandò poi alla «Hertha» del suo amico come al culmine della sua creazione; «Allora era proprio in cima all’onda». E io, che conoscevo il mio Swinburne a menadito, deliziandomi della poesia e già piuttosto disprezzando la filosofia, pensai che fosse una bizzarra metafora da usare riguardo al reale e sincero Swinburne:
It is little enough that a man can save In the reach of life, in the tide of time, Who swims in sight of the great third wave, That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.
I did not think it had been crossed or climbed in the monstrously muddled pantheism of “Hertha”; in which a later Swinburne absurdly attempted to deduce a revolutionary ethic, of the right to resist wrongs, from a cosmic monism which could only mean that all things are equally wrong or right.
Of course, I have only noted here a name or two, because they are the most famous; I do not even say that they are the most worthy of fame. For instance, supposing that we each keep a private collection of our pet pessimists, I have always been more intellectually impressed by A. E. Housman than by Thomas Hardy. I do not mean that I have been impressed by anybody with the intellectual claims of pessimism, which I always thought was piffle as well as poison; but it seems to me that Housman has, more than Hardy, a certain authority of great English literature; which is all the more classic because its English is such very plain English. I could never quite digest Hardy as a poet, much as I admire him as a novelist; whereas Housman seems to me one of the one or two great classic poets of our time. I have had both friends and fellowship in discontent with the Socialists; indeed, I was not discontented with them about conditions with which they were discontented, but rather about the prospects with which they were contented. And there was a sort of official optimism, when the collectivist ticket-collector of the Fabian tram called out, “Next stop, Utopia,” at which something in me not merely heathen, was always stirred to a sympathy with the words of that high heathen genius:
The troubles of our proud and angry dust Are from eternity and shall not fail.
As everyone knows, the poet was also a professor, and one of the first authorities on the old Pagan literature. I cherish a story about him which happens to concern this double character of the classical and the poetical. It may be a familiar story; it may be a false story. It describes the start of an after-dinner speech he made at Trinity, Cambridge; and whoever made it or invented it had a superb sense of style. “This great College, of this ancient University, has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Person sober. And here am I, a better poet than Person, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, betwixt and between.” But Hardy and Housman, like Henley and Swinburne, and most of the other great men among my elders for that matter, produced on my mind a curious cloudy impression of being all one background of pagan pessimism; though what it was in the foreground, to which they were a background, I did not really know; or at least I was very vague. But some sense of sameness in these very varied persons and positions took the form, in my case, of making me wonder why they were so much divided into literary groups; and what the groups were for. I was puzzled by culture being cut up into sections that were not even sects. Colvin kept one court, which was very courtly; Henley kept another, which was not exactly courtly, or was full of rather rowdy courtiers; in the suburbs Swinburne was established as Sultan and Prophet of Putney, with Watts-Dunton as a Grand Vizier. And I could not make out what it was all about; the prophet was not really a commander of the faithful because there was no faith; and as for the doubt, it was equally common to all the rival groups of the age. I could not understand why it should matter so very much to Mr. Watts-Dunton, if Colvin chose to like one particular new poet or Henley chose to dislike another.
I have known one or two isolated cases also of the mere man of imagination. It is always difficult to give even an outline of men of this kind; precisely because an outline is always the line at which a thing touches other things outside itself. I have already suggested very vaguely, for instance, something of the position of W. B. Yeats; but that is precisely because Yeats does touch some things outside his own thoughts; and suggests controversies about Theosophy or Mythology or Irish politics. But he who is simply the imaginative man can only be found in the images he makes and not in the portraits of him that other people make. Thus I could mention a number of detached and definite things about Mr. Walter de la Mare; only that they would not, strictly speaking, be about him. I could say that he has a dark Roman profile rather like a bronze eagle, or that he lives in Taplow not far from Taplow Court, where I have met him and many other figures in the landscape of this story; or that he has a hobby of collecting minute objects, of the nature of ornaments, but hardly to be seen with the naked eye. My wife happens to have the same hobby of collecting tiny things as toys; though some have charged her with inconsistency on the occasion when she collected a husband. But she and de la Mare used to do a trade, worthy of Goblin Market, in these pigmy possessions. I could mention the fact that I once found a school, somewhere in the wilds of the Old Kent Road, if I remember right, where all the little girls preserved a sort of legend of Mr. de la Mare, as of a fairy uncle, because he had once lectured there ever so long ago. I’ve no idea what spells he may have worked on that remote occasion; but he had certainly in the words of an elder English poet, knocked ‘em in the Old Kent Road. But even a thing like this has not strictly speaking anything to do with the subject; the centre and fullness of the subject. And I have never been able to say anything that is, in that sense, about the subject. The nearest I could ever come to judging imaginative work would be simply to say this; that if I were a child, and somebody said to me no more than the two words Peacock Pie, I should pass through a certain transforming experience. I should not think of it especially as being a book. I should not even think of it as being a man; certainly not as something now so sadly familiar as a literary man. A sacramental instinct within me would give me the sense that there was somewhere and somehow a substance, gorgeously coloured and good to eat. Which is indeed the case. Nor would any doubts and differences about the theoretical or ethical edges of Mr. Yeats’s personality affect my appetite, even now that I am no longer a child, for the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun.
È ben poco ciò che un uomo può salvare Nella distesa della vita, nella marea del Tempo, Chi nuota in vista della grande terza onda, Che mai nuotatore varcherà o scalerà.
Non pensai che fosse stata varcata o scalata nel mostruosamente confuso panteismo di «Hertha»; in cui un più tardo Swinburne tentò assurdamente di dedurre un’etica rivoluzionaria, del diritto di resistere ai torti, da un monismo cosmico che poteva solo significare che tutte le cose sono egualmente sbagliate o giuste.
Naturalmente, ho notato qui solo un nome o due, perché sono i più famosi; non dico nemmeno che siano i più degni di fama. Ad esempio, supponendo che ciascuno di noi tenga una collezione privata dei suoi pessimisti prediletti, io sono sempre stato più intellettualmente colpito da A. E. Housman che da Thomas Hardy. Non intendo dire di essere stato colpito da chiunque con le pretese intellettuali del pessimismo, che ho sempre ritenuto una scempiaggine non meno che un veleno; ma mi pare che Housman abbia, più di Hardy, una certa autorità della grande letteratura inglese; che è tanto più classica in quanto il suo inglese è un inglese così assai semplice. Non riuscii mai del tutto a digerire Hardy come poeta, per quanto lo ammiri come romanziere; mentre Housman mi pare uno dei uno o due grandi poeti classici del nostro tempo. Ho avuto sia amici sia compagnia nella scontentezza coi Socialisti; anzi, non ero scontento di loro riguardo alle condizioni di cui essi erano scontenti, ma piuttosto riguardo alle prospettive di cui essi erano contenti. E vi era una sorta di ottimismo ufficiale, quando il collettivista bigliettaio del tram fabiano gridava: «Prossima fermata, Utopia», al che qualcosa in me non meramente pagano, si commuoveva sempre a una simpatia con le parole di quell’alto genio pagano:
I travagli della nostra fiera e adirata Polvere Vengono dall’Eternità e non verranno meno.
Come tutti sanno, il poeta era anche un professore, e una delle prime autorità sull’antica letteratura pagana. Custodisco una storia su di lui che si dà il caso riguardi questo duplice carattere del classico e del poetico. Può essere una storia familiare; può essere una storia falsa. Descrive l’inizio di un discorso dopocena che egli fece a Trinity, Cambridge; e chiunque lo fece o lo inventò aveva un superbo senso dello stile. «Questo grande College, di questa antica Università, ha visto certi strani spettacoli. Ha visto Wordsworth ubriaco e Person sobrio. Ed eccomi qui, poeta migliore di Person, e studioso migliore di Wordsworth, tra l’uno e l’altro». Ma Hardy e Housman, come Henley e Swinburne, e la maggior parte degli altri grandi uomini fra i miei anziani per quel che vale, producevano sulla mia mente una curiosa e nuvolosa impressione di essere tutti un solo sfondo di pessimismo pagano; benché ciò che vi fosse in primo piano, di cui essi erano lo sfondo, non lo sapessi davvero; o almeno ero assai vago. Ma un certo senso di uniformità in queste persone e posizioni assai varie prese la forma, nel mio caso, di farmi chiedere perché fossero così tanto divisi in gruppi letterari; e a cosa servissero i gruppi. Ero sconcertato dalla cultura tagliata in sezioni che non erano nemmeno sette. Colvin teneva una corte, che era assai cortese; Henley ne teneva un’altra, che non era esattamente cortese, o era piena di cortigiani piuttosto turbolenti; nei sobborghi Swinburne era insediato come Sultano e Profeta di Putney, con Watts-Dunton come Gran Visir. E non riuscivo a capire di cosa si trattasse; il profeta non era davvero un comandante dei fedeli perché non vi era alcuna fede; e quanto al dubbio, esso era egualmente comune a tutti i gruppi rivali dell’epoca. Non riuscivo a capire perché dovesse importare così tanto al signor Watts-Dunton, se Colvin sceglieva di amare un particolare nuovo poeta o Henley sceglieva di detestarne un altro.
Ho conosciuto anche uno o due casi isolati del mero uomo d’Immaginazione. È sempre difficile dare perfino un abbozzo di uomini di questo tipo; proprio perché un abbozzo è sempre la linea in cui una cosa tocca altre cose fuori di sé. Ho già suggerito assai vagamente, ad esempio, qualcosa della posizione di W. B. Yeats; ma ciò è proprio perché Yeats tocca davvero alcune cose fuori dei suoi propri pensieri; e suggerisce controversie sulla Teosofia o la Mitologia o la politica irlandese. Ma colui che è semplicemente l’uomo immaginativo può essere trovato solo nelle immagini che crea e non nei ritratti di lui che altre persone fanno. Così potrei menzionare un certo numero di cose staccate e definite sul signor Walter de la Mare; solo che esse non riguarderebbero, in senso stretto, lui. Potrei dire che egli ha un profilo scuro e romano piuttosto simile a un’aquila di bronzo, o che vive a Taplow non lontano da Taplow Court, dove l’ho incontrato e molte altre figure nel paesaggio di questa storia; o che ha un passatempo di collezionare oggetti minuti, della natura di ornamenti, ma a stento visibili a occhio nudo. Mia moglie si dà il caso abbia lo stesso passatempo di collezionare cosine come giocattoli; benché alcuni l’abbiano accusata d’incoerenza nell’occasione in cui collezionò un marito. Ma lei e de la Mare solevano fare un commercio, degno del Mercato dei Folletti, in questi possedimenti pigmei. Potrei menzionare il fatto che una volta trovai una scuola, da qualche parte nelle selve della Vecchia Kent Road, se ben ricordo, dove tutte le bambine conservavano una sorta di leggenda del signor de la Mare, come di uno zio fatato, perché egli vi aveva tenuto una conferenza tanto tanto tempo fa. Non ho idea di quali incantesimi egli abbia operato in quella remota occasione; ma certo, nelle parole di un più anziano poeta inglese, li aveva fatti fuori nella Vecchia Kent Road. Ma perfino una cosa come questa non riguarda, in senso stretto, il soggetto; il centro e la pienezza del soggetto. E non sono mai stato capace di dire alcunché che sia, in quel senso, sul soggetto. Il più vicino cui io possa mai giungere nel giudicare l’opera immaginativa sarebbe semplicemente dire questo; che se io fossi un bambino, e qualcuno mi dicesse non più delle due parole Peacock Pie, io passerei attraverso una certa esperienza trasformante. Non lo penserei specialmente come un libro. Non lo penserei nemmeno come un uomo; certo non come qualcosa ora così tristemente familiare come un letterato. Un istinto sacramentale dentro di me mi darebbe il senso che vi fosse da qualche parte e in qualche modo una sostanza, splendidamente colorata e buona da mangiare. Il che è invero il caso. Né alcun dubbio e differenza sui margini teorici o etici della personalità del signor Yeats influirebbero sul mio appetito, anche ora che non sono più un bambino, per le mele d’argento della Luna e le mele d’oro del sole.
The images of imaginative men are indisputable; and I never wanted to dispute about them. The ideas of logical and dogmatic men (especially the sceptics, those very dogmatic men) are disputable; and I always wanted to dispute about them. But I never wanted to dispute about tastes where there are no tests. I have never taken sides where there are neither tastes held in common nor theses held in controversy; and this has kept me out of many movements. But then I am conscious of a gap or defect in my mind about such matters. I always feel it yawning in me like an abyss (yawning is the correct description so far as I am concerned), when people tell me that something ought to be done for the sake of “the Drama”. I think Shaw’s Caesar & Cleopatra is a good drama; though to my ethical tastes it is both too Pacifist and too Imperialist. I think Are You a Mason? is a good drama; and my appreciation has nothing to do with a Popish suspicion about Masonry. But to talk about helping “the drama,” sounds to me like helping the typewriter or the printing press. It seems, to my simple mind, to depend a good deal on what comes out of it.
But among these literary figures, there was one figure whom I shall put last because I ought to put it first. It was the figure of a contemporary and companion of all that world of culture; a close friend of Meredith; an artist admired as artistic by the aesthetes and even by the decadents. But Alice Meynell, though she preferred to be aesthetic rather than anaesthetic, was no aesthete; and there was nothing about her that can decay. The thrust of life in her was like that of a slender tree with flowers and fruit for all seasons; and there was no drying up of the sap of her spirit, which was in ideas. She could always find things to think about; even on a sick bed in a darkened room, where the shadow of a bird on the blind was more than the bird itself, she said, because it was a message from the sun. Since she was so emphatically a craftsman, she was emphatically an artist and not an aesthete; above all, she was like that famous artist who said that he always mixed his paints with brains. But there was something else about her which I did not understand at the time, which set her apart as something separate from the time. She was strong with deep roots where all the Stoics were only stiff with despair; she was alive to an immortal beauty where all the Pagans could only mix beauty with mortality. And though she passed through my own life fitfully, and far more rarely than I could wish, and though her presence had indeed something of the ghostly gravity of a shadow and her passing something of the fugitive accident of a bird, I know now that she was not fugitive and she was not shadowy. She was a message from the Sun.
Le immagini degli uomini immaginativi sono indiscutibili; e io non ho mai voluto disputare su di esse. Le idee degli uomini logici e dogmatici (specialmente gli scettici, quegli uomini assai dogmatici) sono disputabili; e io ho sempre voluto disputare su di esse. Ma non ho mai voluto disputare su gusti dove non vi sono prove. Non ho mai preso parte dove non vi sono né gusti tenuti in comune né tesi tenute in controversia; e ciò mi ha tenuto fuori da molti movimenti. Ma poi sono conscio di una lacuna o di un difetto nella mia mente su tali faccende. La sento sempre spalancarsi in me come un abisso (spalancarsi è la corretta descrizione per quanto mi riguarda), quando la gente mi dice che qualcosa dovrebbe essere fatto per amore del «Teatro». Penso che il Cesare e Cleopatra di Shaw sia un buon dramma; benché per i miei gusti etici sia insieme troppo pacifista e troppo imperialista. Penso che Are You a Mason? sia un buon dramma; e il mio apprezzamento non ha nulla a che fare con un sospetto papista sulla Massoneria. Ma parlare di aiutare «il teatro», mi suona come aiutare la macchina da scrivere o la macchina da stampa. Pare, alla mia semplice mente, dipendere assai da ciò che ne viene fuori.
Ma fra queste figure letterarie, ve n’era una che metterò per ultima perché dovrei metterla per prima. Era la figura di una contemporanea e compagna di tutto quel mondo di cultura; un’intima amica di Meredith; un’Artista ammirata come artistica dagli esteti e perfino dai decadenti. Ma Alice Meynell, benché preferisse essere estetica piuttosto che anestetica, non era un’esteta; e non vi era nulla in lei che potesse decadere. Lo slancio della vita in lei era come quello di un albero snello con fiori e frutti per tutte le stagioni; e non vi era alcun inaridirsi della linfa del suo spirito, che era nelle idee. Ella poteva sempre trovare cose su cui pensare; perfino su un letto di malattia in una stanza oscurata, dove l’ombra di un uccello sulla tenda era più dell’uccello stesso, disse, perché era un messaggio dal sole. Poiché ella era così enfaticamente un’artigiana, era enfaticamente un’Artista e non un’esteta; soprattutto, era come quel famoso Artista che disse di mescolare sempre i suoi colori col cervello. Ma vi era qualcos’altro in lei che io non compresi allora, che la poneva a parte come qualcosa di separato dal tempo. Ella era forte con profonde radici là dove tutti gli Stoici erano solo rigidi di disperazione; era viva a un’immortale Bellezza là dove tutti i Pagani potevano solo mescolare la Bellezza con la Mortalità. E benché ella passasse attraverso la mia stessa vita a sprazzi, e assai più raramente di quanto potessi desiderare, e benché la sua presenza avesse davvero qualcosa della spettrale gravità di un’ombra e il suo trapasso qualcosa dell’accidente fuggevole di un uccello, so ora che ella non era fuggevole e non era ombrosa. Era un messaggio dal Sole.
XIV
PORTRAIT OF A FRIEND
Apart from vanity or mock modesty (which healthy people always use as jokes) my real judgment of my own work is that I have spoilt a number of jolly good ideas in my time. There is a reason for this; and it is really rather a piece of autobiography than of literary criticism. I think The Napoleon of Notting Hill was a book very well worth writing; but I am not sure that it was ever written. I think that a harlequinade like The Flying Inn was an extremely promising subject, but I very strongly doubt whether I kept the promise. I am almost tempted to say that it is still a very promising subject—for somebody else. I think the story called The Ball and the Cross had quite a good plot, about two men perpetually prevented by the police from fighting a duel about the collision of blasphemy and worship, or what all respectable people would call, “a mere difference about religion.” I believe that the suggestion that the modern world is organised in relation to the most obvious and urgent of all questions, not so much to answer it wrongly, as to prevent it being answered at all, is a social suggestion that really has a great deal in it; but I am much more doubtful about whether I got a great deal out of it, even in comparison with what could be got out of it. Considered as stories, in the sense of anecdotes, these things seem to me to have been more or less fresh and personal; but considered as novels, they were not only not as good as a real novelist would have made them, but they were not as good as I might have made them myself, if I had really even been trying to be a real novelist. And among many more abject reasons for not being able to be a novelist, is the fact that I always have been and presumably always shall be a journalist.
But it was not the superficial or silly or jolly part of me that made me a journalist. On the contrary, it is such part as I have in what is serious or even solemn. A taste for mere fun might have led me to a public-house, but hardly to a publishing-house. And if it led me to a publishing-house, for the publishing of mere nonsense-rhymes or fairytales, it could never thus have led me to my deplorable course of endless articles and letters in the newspapers. In short, I could not be a novelist; because I really like to see ideas or notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women. But I could be a journalist because I could not help being a controversialist. I do not even know if this would be called mock modesty or vanity, in the modern scale of values; but I do know that it is neither. It occurs to me that the best and most wholesome test, for judging how far mere incompetence or laziness, and how far a legitimate liking for direct democratic appeal, has prevented me from being a real literary man, might be found in a study of the man of letters I happen to know best; who had the same motives for producing journalism, and yet has produced nothing but literature.
In the days when Belloc was known to Bentley and Oldershaw, but not to me, when they were all together in the Radical group at Oxford, Belloc himself chiefly frequented a much smaller group which called itself the Republican Club. So far as I can make out, the Republican Club never consisted of more than four members, and generally of less; one or more of them having been solemnly expelled either for Toryism or for Socialism. This was the club which Belloc celebrated in the fine dedication of his first book; of which two lines have passed into some popular celebrity: “There’s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends;” but in the course of which he also described in more detail the ideals of this fastidious fellowship.
We kept the Rabelaisian plan We dignified the dainty cloisters With Natural Law, the Rights of Man, Song, Stoicism, Wine and Oysters.
We taught the art of writing things On men we still would like to throttle, And where to get the blood of kings At only half-a-crown a bottle.
Of the three other corners of this very Four-Square Gospel of Citizenship, that is of Belloc’s three constant colleagues in the old Republican club, one is still, I believe, a distinguished exile and official in Burma; or as his old friends loved to say with sour smiles of affectionate resignation, “a Satrap”; as if he had somehow Medised, or condescended to the oriental barbarism which we call Imperialism. I have no doubt that as a fact he was a happy and highly satisfactory Satrap; but he was the one member of the group whom I never met. The other two Republicans, who were Belloc’s most intimate friends at Oxford, have both in different ways played a considerable part in my own life. One was John Swinnerton Phillimore, son of the old Admiral whose name made a sort of background for the Kensington of my boyhood, afterwards Latin Professor at Glasgow University and one of the first classical authorities of his time; now, alas, only an ever-deepening memory. The other was Francis Yvon Eccles, the distinguished French scholar, whom I now meet all too seldom through his gravitation towards living in France.
Eccles, like Belloc, was the child of one French and one English parent; but there was a certain misleading comedy about the names, as if they had been interchanged like labels. For Eccles, who happened to have the English surname, looked much more like a Frenchman, and Belloc, with the French surname, looked much more like an Englishman; indeed he ended by being the one solitary but symbolic Englishman really looking like the traditional John Bull. It is true that he reached this traditional type through the possession of a square chin like that of the great Emperor of the French, and the subsequent assumption of side-whiskers to satisfy the conventions of the Spaniards. But the combined effect of these foreign influences was that he looked exactly like what all English farmers ought to look like; and was, as it were, a better portrait of Cobbett than Cobbett was. Moreover, the symbol was true; for the roots that hold him to the Downs and the deep ploughlands of South England were even deeper, so far as instinct is concerned, than the marble foundations of the abstract Republic of the Republican Club. I remember drinking a pot of beer with a publican not far from Horsham and mentioning my friend’s name; and the publican, who obviously had never heard of books or such bosh, merely said, “Farms a bit, doesn’t he?” and I thought how hugely flattered Belloc would be.
XIV
RITRATTO DI UN AMICO
A parte la vanità o la falsa modestia (che le persone sane usano sempre come scherzi) il mio reale giudizio sul mio proprio lavoro è che ho rovinato un certo numero di ottime idee nel mio tempo. Vi è una ragione per questo; ed è davvero piuttosto un pezzo di autobiografia che di critica letteraria. Penso che Il Napoleone di Notting Hill fosse un libro assai degno d’esser scritto; ma non sono sicuro che sia mai stato scritto. Penso che un arlecchinata come La Taverna Volante fosse un soggetto oltremodo promettente, ma dubito assai fortemente di aver mantenuto la promessa. Sono quasi tentato di dire che è ancora un soggetto assai promettente—per qualcun altro. Penso che la storia intitolata La Sfera e la Croce avesse una trama del tutto buona, su due uomini perpetuamente impediti dalla polizia di combattere un duello sulla collisione fra bestemmia e adorazione, o ciò che tutte le persone rispettabili chiamerebbero «una mera differenza di religione». Credo che il suggerimento che il mondo moderno sia organizzato in relazione alla più ovvia e urgente di tutte le questioni, non tanto per rispondervi in modo sbagliato, quanto per impedire che vi si risponda affatto, sia un suggerimento sociale che davvero ha molto in sé; ma sono assai più dubbioso sul fatto se io ne abbia cavato molto, anche in confronto a ciò che se ne potrebbe cavare. Considerate come storie, nel senso di aneddoti, queste cose mi paiono essere state più o meno fresche e personali; ma considerate come romanzi, non solo non erano buone come le avrebbe fatte un vero romanziere, ma non erano buone come avrei potuto farle io stesso, se avessi davvero anche solo tentato di essere un vero romanziere. E fra le molte ragioni più abiette per non essere capace di essere un romanziere, c’è il fatto che io sono sempre stato e presumibilmente sempre sarò un giornalista.
Ma non fu la parte superficiale o sciocca o gioviale di me a fare di me un giornalista. Al contrario, fu quella parte che ho in ciò che è serio o perfino solenne. Un gusto per il mero divertimento avrebbe potuto condurmi a una casa pubblica, ma difficilmente a una casa editrice. E se mi avesse condotto a una casa editrice, per la pubblicazione di mere filastrocche assurde o fiabe, non avrebbe mai potuto così condurmi al mio deplorevole corso di infiniti articoli e lettere sui giornali. In breve, non potevo essere un romanziere; perché mi piace davvero vedere le idee o le nozioni lottare nude, per così dire, e non travestite in mascherata da uomini e donne. Ma potevo essere un giornalista perché non potevo fare a meno di essere un polemista. Non so nemmeno se ciò verrebbe chiamato falsa modestia o vanità, nella scala di valori moderna; ma so che non è né l’una né l’altra. Mi viene in mente che la migliore e più salubre prova, per giudicare fino a che punto la mera incompetenza o pigrizia, e fino a che punto un legittimo gusto per il diretto appello democratico, mi abbiano impedito di essere un vero letterato, si potrebbe trovare in uno studio del letterato che si dà il caso io conosca meglio; il quale ebbe gli stessi moventi per produrre giornalismo, eppure non ha prodotto null’altro che letteratura.
Nei giorni in cui Belloc era conosciuto da Bentley e Oldershaw, ma non da me, quando erano tutti insieme nel gruppo radicale a Oxford, Belloc stesso frequentava principalmente un gruppo assai più piccolo che si chiamava il Club Repubblicano. Per quanto io possa capire, il Club Repubblicano non consistette mai di più di quattro membri, e generalmente di meno; uno o più di essi essendo stati solennemente espulsi o per Toryismo o per Socialismo. Questo era il club che Belloc celebrò nella bella dedica del suo primo libro; di cui due versi sono passati a una certa popolare celebrità: «Non v’è nulla che valga la spesa del conquistare tranne la risata e l’amore degli amici»; ma nel corso della quale egli descrisse anche più in dettaglio gli ideali di questo schizzinoso sodalizio.
Tenemmo il piano rabelaisiano Nobilitammo i delicati chiostri Con la Legge Naturale, i Diritti dell’Uomo, Canto, Stoicismo, Vino e Ostriche.
Insegnammo l’arte di scrivere cose Su uomini che ancora vorremmo strozzare, E dove ottenere il sangue dei re A solo mezza corona la bottiglia.
Dei tre altri angoli di questo assai Quadrato Vangelo di Cittadinanza, cioè dei tre costanti colleghi di Belloc nel vecchio Club Repubblicano, uno è ancora, credo, un distinto Esule e funzionario in Birmania; o come i suoi vecchi amici amavano dire con acri sorrisi di affettuosa Rassegnazione, «un Satrapo»; come se egli avesse in qualche modo Medizzato, o condisceso alla barbarie orientale che noi chiamiamo Imperialismo. Non ho alcun dubbio che in effetti egli fosse un felice e altamente soddisfacente Satrapo; ma era il solo membro del gruppo che io non incontrai mai. Gli altri due Repubblicani, che erano gli amici più intimi di Belloc a Oxford, hanno entrambi in modi diversi recitato una parte considerevole nella mia stessa vita. Uno era John Swinnerton Phillimore, figlio del vecchio Ammiraglio il cui nome fece una sorta di sfondo per la Kensington della mia fanciullezza, poi Professore di Latino all’Università di Glasgow e una delle prime autorità classiche del suo tempo; ora, ahimè, soltanto una memoria sempre più profonda. L’altro era Francis Yvon Eccles, il distinto studioso francese, che ora incontro fin troppo di rado a causa della sua gravitazione verso il vivere in Francia.
Eccles, come Belloc, era il figlio di un genitore francese e uno inglese; ma vi era una certa fuorviante commedia riguardo ai nomi, come se fossero stati scambiati come etichette. Poiché Eccles, che si dava il caso avesse il cognome inglese, sembrava assai più un francese, e Belloc, col cognome francese, sembrava assai più un inglese; anzi egli finì per essere il solo solitario ma simbolico inglese che davvero somigliasse al tradizionale John Bull. È vero che egli raggiunse questo tipo tradizionale attraverso il possesso di un mento quadrato come quello del grande Imperatore dei Francesi, e la successiva assunzione di basette per soddisfare le convenzioni degli Spagnoli. Ma l’effetto combinato di queste influenze straniere fu che egli sembrava esattamente come tutti i contadini inglesi dovrebbero sembrare; ed era, per così dire, un miglior ritratto di Cobbett di quanto Cobbett stesso lo fosse. Inoltre, il simbolo era vero; poiché le radici che lo legano alle Downs e alle profonde terre arate dell’Inghilterra meridionale erano perfino più profonde, per quanto concerne l’istinto, delle marmoree fondamenta dell’astratta Repubblica del Club Repubblicano. Ricordo di aver bevuto un boccale di birra con un oste non lontano da Horsham e di aver menzionato il nome del mio amico; e l’oste, che ovviamente non aveva mai sentito parlare di libri o simili sciocchezze, disse semplicemente: «Fa un po’ l’agricoltore, no?», e io pensai quanto Belloc ne sarebbe stato enormemente lusingato.
I knew Eccles in Fleet Street, from the first days of the old Pro-Boer Speaker, of which he was largely the literary adviser; yet it was always inevitable to think of him as sitting outside a café in Paris rather than London. His head, his hat, his arched eyebrows and wrinkled forehead of quite disinterested curiosity, his Mephistophelean tuft, his type of patient lucidity, were far more French than his friend with the French name. Whether or no these externals commonly correspond to characters, they certainly do not always correspond to careers. Thus, John Phillimore, the son of a sailor and coming largely of a family of sailors, himself looked very much more like a sailor than like a don. His dark compact figure and bright brown face might have been on any quarter-deck. On the other hand, by another such carnival comedy of exchange, I always thought that his cousin, who is, I believe, a distinguished Admiral looked much more like a don or a professor. But John Phillimore, as things fell out, had to be a rather unique sort of don; and at once a popular and a pugnacious professor. You could not conduct classes amid the racial and religious chaos of Glasgow, full of wild Highlanders and wild Irish, and young fanatical Communists and old fanatical Calvinists, without possessing some of the qualities of the quarter-deck. Most of the stories about Phillimore read like tales of mutiny on the high seas. It was shrewdly said of him that the effect of the word “gentlemen,” as said by him, was like the famous effect of the word “Quirites!”, as said by Caesar. On a similar occasion an insubordinate but intelligent Glasgow crowd seems to have instantly grasped the gratifying irony of his appeal, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! I have not yet ceased casting my pearls.”
The chief fact relevant to this chapter, however, is that Belloc’s career began with the ideals of the Republican Club. To those who talk about ideals, but do not think about ideas, it may seem odd that both he and Eccles have ended as strong Monarchists. But there is a thin difference between good despotism and good democracy; both imply equality, with authority; whether the authority be impersonal or personal. What both detest is oligarchy; even in its more human form of aristocracy, let alone its present repulsive form of plutocracy. Belloc’s first faith was in the impersonal authority of the Republic, and he concentrated on its return in the eighteenth century, but rather specially touching its military aspect. His first two books were the very fine monographs on the two most famous of the French Revolutionists; and he was, in that sense, very heartily revolutionary. But I mention the matter here for a special reason, in connection with something in which he was and is rather unique in this country; native and rooted as is his real relation to this country. I have already remarked that to know him well is to know that, as a man, he is English and not French. But there is another aspect in his curious case. In so far as he is a traditionalist, he is an English traditionalist. But when he was specially a revolutionist, he was in the very exact sense a French Revolutionist. And it might be roughly symbolised by saying that he was an English poet but a French soldier.
Now I thought I knew all about Revolutionists long before I met the representative of the Republican Club. I had talked to them in dirty taverns or untidy studios, or more depressing vegetarian hostels. I knew there were differences in cut and colour; and that some were more really revolutionary than others. I knew that some wore pale green neckties and gave lectures on decorative art; while some wore red neckties and made speeches on Trade Union platforms. I have sung “The Red Flag” in hearty chorus with the latter, and William Morris’s “England, Awake” in more refined accents with the former. And though I knew nothing of the comparison with another method, I did more and more realise, with an ever sinking heart, that for some reason we had not got a decent revolutionary song to our name; and that in the matter of producing any respectable sort of Hymn of Hate, my countrymen were a washout.
One weakness of these popular war-songs was that they were not war-songs. They never gave the faintest hint of how anybody could ever make war on anything. They were always waiting for the Dawn; without the least anticipation that they might be shot at dawn, or the least intelligent preparation for shooting anybody else at dawn. “England awake; the long long night is over; faint in the east behold the dawn appear.” They were all like that; they were all Songs Before Sunrise; as if the sun that rose on the just and the unjust did not also rise on the conquered and the conqueror. But the English revolutionary poet wrote as if he owned the sun and was certain to be the conqueror. In other words, I found that the Socialist idea of war was exactly like the Imperialist idea of war; and I was strengthened and deepened in my detestation of both of them. I have heard many arguments against the idea of a Class War; but the argument which discredits it for me is the fact that the Socialists, like the Imperialists, always assumed that they would win the war. I am no Fascist; but the March on Rome gave them the surprise they needed. To say the least, it considerably halted the inevitable proletarian triumph; just as the Boers had halted the inevitable British triumph. And I do not like inevitable triumphs. Also I do not believe in them. I do not think that any social solution, even a more manly one like that of Morris, should be called “as sure as that tomorrow’s sun will rise.”
And then Belloc wrote a poem called “The Rebel,” and nobody noticed the interesting point about it. It is a very violent and bitter poem; it would be much too revolutionary for most of the revolutionists; even those with red ties would blush, and those with pale green ties would turn pale and green with sickness, at such threats against the rich as break out here—“and hack their horses at the knees and hew to death their timber trees,” and the very fine ending, “and all these things I mean to do; for fear perhaps my little son should break his hands as I have done.”
Conobbi Eccles a Fleet Street, fin dai primi giorni del vecchio Pro-Boero Speaker, di cui egli era largamente il consulente letterario; eppure era sempre inevitabile pensare a lui come seduto fuori da un caffè a Parigi piuttosto che a Londra. La sua testa, il suo cappello, le sue sopracciglia arcuate e la fronte corrugata di una curiosità del tutto disinteressata, il suo ciuffo mefistofelico, il suo tipo di paziente lucidità, erano assai più francesi del suo amico dal nome francese. Che questi tratti esterni corrispondano o no comunemente ai caratteri, certamente non corrispondono sempre alle carriere. Così, John Phillimore, figlio di un marinaio e proveniente largamente da una famiglia di marinai, egli stesso somigliava assai più a un marinaio che a un docente. La sua scura e compatta figura e il suo brillante volto bruno avrebbero potuto stare su qualsiasi cassero. D’altra parte, per un’altra tale carnevalesca commedia di scambio, ho sempre pensato che suo cugino, che è, credo, un distinto Ammiraglio, somigliasse assai più a un docente o a un professore. Ma John Phillimore, come andarono le cose, dovette essere un tipo piuttosto unico di docente; e a un tempo un professore popolare e battagliero. Non si potevano condurre lezioni in mezzo al caos razziale e religioso di Glasgow, pieno di selvaggi Highlander e selvaggi Irlandesi, e di giovani fanatici comunisti e vecchi fanatici calvinisti, senza possedere alcune delle qualità del cassero. La maggior parte delle storie su Phillimore si leggono come racconti di ammutinamento in alto mare. Fu argutamente detto di lui che l’effetto della parola «gentiluomini», come detta da lui, era come il famoso effetto della parola «Quirites!», come detta da Cesare. In un’occasione simile una insubordinata ma intelligente folla di Glasgow pare aver istantaneamente colto la gratificante ironia del suo appello: «Gentiluomini, gentiluomini! Non ho ancora cessato di gettare le mie perle».
Il fatto principale rilevante per questo capitolo, tuttavia, è che la carriera di Belloc cominciò con gli ideali del Club Repubblicano. A coloro che parlano di ideali, ma non pensano alle idee, può sembrare strano che sia lui sia Eccles siano finiti come forti Monarchici. Ma vi è una sottile differenza fra buon dispotismo e buona democrazia; entrambi implicano l’uguaglianza, con l’autorità; sia che l’autorità sia impersonale o personale. Ciò che entrambi detestano è l’oligarchia; anche nella sua più umana forma di aristocrazia, per non parlare della sua presente ripugnante forma di plutocrazia. La prima fede di Belloc era nell’autorità impersonale della Repubblica, ed egli si concentrò sul suo ritorno nel diciottesimo secolo, ma piuttosto specialmente riguardo al suo aspetto militare. I suoi primi due libri furono le assai belle monografie sui due più famosi dei rivoluzionari francesi; ed egli era, in quel senso, assai cordialmente rivoluzionario. Ma menziono la faccenda qui per una ragione speciale, in connessione con qualcosa in cui egli era ed è piuttosto unico in questo paese; per quanto nativa e radicata sia la sua reale relazione con questo paese. Ho già osservato che conoscerlo bene è sapere che, come uomo, egli è inglese e non francese. Ma vi è un altro aspetto nel suo curioso caso. In quanto egli è un tradizionalista, è un tradizionalista inglese. Ma quando era specialmente rivoluzionario, era nel senso più esatto un rivoluzionario francese. E lo si potrebbe grossomodo simboleggiare dicendo che egli era un poeta inglese ma un soldato francese.
Ora io pensavo di sapere tutto sui Rivoluzionari molto prima di incontrare il rappresentante del Club Repubblicano. Avevo parlato con loro in sudicie taverne o in disordinati studi, o in più deprimenti ostelli vegetariani. Sapevo che vi erano differenze di taglio e colore; e che alcuni erano davvero più rivoluzionari di altri. Sapevo che alcuni portavano cravatte verde pallido e tenevano conferenze sull’arte decorativa; mentre altri portavano cravatte rosse e facevano discorsi su tribune sindacali. Ho cantato «La Bandiera Rossa» in cordiale coro con questi ultimi, e «England, Awake» di William Morris in accenti più raffinati con i primi. E benché io non sapessi nulla del confronto con un altro metodo, mi resi sempre più conto, con cuore sempre più sprofondante, che per qualche ragione non avevamo una decente canzone rivoluzionaria a nostro nome; e che nella faccenda di produrre qualsiasi rispettabile sorta di Inno dell’Odio, i miei compatrioti erano un fiasco.
Una debolezza di questi popolari canti di guerra era che non erano canti di guerra. Non davano mai il più tenue accenno di come qualcuno potesse mai far guerra a qualcosa. Erano sempre in attesa dell’Alba; senza la minima anticipazione che essi potessero essere fucilati all’alba, o la minima intelligente preparazione a fucilare qualcun altro all’alba. «Inghilterra, svégliati; la lunga lunga notte è finita; fioca a oriente ecco apparire l’Alba.» Erano tutti così; erano tutti Canti Prima dell’Aurora; come se il sole che sorgeva sul giusto e sull’ingiusto non sorgesse anche sul conquistato e sul conquistatore. Ma il poeta rivoluzionario inglese scriveva come se possedesse il sole e fosse certo di essere il conquistatore. In altre parole, trovai che l’idea socialista di guerra era esattamente come l’idea imperialista di guerra; e fui rafforzato e approfondito nel mio disgusto per entrambe. Ho udito molti argomenti contro l’idea di una Guerra di Classe; ma l’argomento che la scredita per me è il fatto che i Socialisti, come gli Imperialisti, presumevano sempre che avrebbero vinto la guerra. Non sono un Fascista; ma la Marcia su Roma diede loro la sorpresa di cui avevano bisogno. Per dire il minimo, arrestò considerevolmente l’inevitabile trionfo proletario; proprio come i Boeri avevano arrestato l’inevitabile trionfo britannico. E a me non piacciono i trionfi inevitabili. E poi non ci credo. Non penso che qualsiasi soluzione sociale, anche una più virile come quella di Morris, dovrebbe essere chiamata «sicura come che il sole di domani sorgerà».
E poi Belloc scrisse una poesia intitolata «Il Ribelle», e nessuno notò il punto interessante che vi era. È una poesia assai violenta e amara; sarebbe assai troppo rivoluzionaria per la maggior parte dei rivoluzionari; perfino quelli con le cravatte rosse arrossirebbero, e quelli con le cravatte verde pallido diventerebbero pallidi e verdi dalla nausea, di fronte a tali minacce contro i ricchi come esplodono qui—«e mozzare i loro cavalli alle ginocchia e abbattere fino alla morte i loro alberi da legname», e il finale assai bello: «e tutte queste cose intendo fare; per paura che forse il mio piccolo figlio si spezzi le mani come ho fatto io».
That is not a Song Before Sunrise. That is an attack before sunrise. But the peculiar point I wish to note here, appears in the previous verse about the actual nature of the attack. It is the only revolutionary poem I ever read, that suggested that there was any plan for making any attack. The first two lines of the verse run: “When we shall find them where they stand, a mile of men on either hand?” The Comrades of the Dawn always seemed to be marching in column, and singing. They never seemed to have heard of deploying; into the long line that faces the foe for battle. The next two lines are: “I mean to charge from right away, and force the flanks of their array.” Whoever heard of the Comrades of the Dawn having so complicated an idea as that of turning the enemy’s flank? Then comes the encirclement:
And press them inward from the plains And drive them clamouring down the lanes, And gallop and harry and have them down, And carry the gates and hold the town.
The Pursuit; and then the Holding of the Bridgehead.
Now that is the only Song of the Class War I ever read that has the haziest notion of what a war would be like. In this wild lyric, full of vindictive violence and destruction, there is also in quite swift lyrical form a perfectly clear tactical plan and military map; a definite description of how men may storm a fortress, if it has to be stormed. The violence of this democratic, though doubtless dramatic, utterance goes far beyond anything that any Communist will reach in a hundred years. But it involves also the real character of battle; and a battle, like every human work, is at once designed in its beginning and doubtful in its end. Now the Comrades of the Dawn already annoyed me; because their revolution was wildly undesigned in its beginning, but had no doubt about its end. Just like Imperialism; and the South African War.
That is what I mean by saying that Belloc is an English poet but a French soldier. The man at rest, and therefore the man in reality, is the man of Sussex; but he has been enlarged, or some would say infected, by the foreign influence of those who have known real revolutions and invasions; and if he were called upon to conduct a revolution, he would conduct it as logically as a Parisian mob still conducts a riot. As he once remarked, such a democratic mob can deploy. But I have only taken this chance example to illustrate a general truth about a very remarkable man. I have taken the fact that the ordinary song of revolt is only militant, but his is also military. I mean that it is full of the notion, not only of fighting for the faith, but of getting to grips with the fact. If we are going to fight the rich, or fight the revolt against the rich, or fight resistance to a reasonable redistribution of riches, or fight anything else, this is how it is done. And when I remember all the other romantic revolutionary songs it does not at all surprise me, at least in this country, to realise that no fighting has been done.
Now that is exactly how his contemporaries have missed the whole point about Belloc at every point of his action; for instance, in his historic study, The Servile State. Because the English, of whom I am one, are romantic, and because they delight in the romance that the French are romantic, and delight in the more delirious romance that Belloc is French, they have simply been stone-blind to him when he is entirely scientific. His study of the Servile State is as strictly scientific as a military map is military. There is nothing romantic about it; nothing rollicking about it; nothing even particularly amusing about it, except the two admirable words, “this fool,” which occur in the calm procession of a thousand impartial words in the chapter on The Practical Man. And even excepting that is like accusing Euclid of making a joke, when he proves a proposition with a reductio ad absurdum. Anyone who knows the place of reason in the modern scheme, can imagine what happened. First, before reading what Belloc wrote, the critics started to criticise what Belloc would probably write. They said he threatened us with a horrible nightmare called the Servile State. As a fact, it was his whole point that it was not a nightmare, but something that we were already almost as habituated to accepting as to accepting the daylight. All the time, a thesis as pivotal as that of Adam Smith or Darwin is hardly realised, or even criticised, by anybody as what it is, though it has been criticised quite wildly, conjecturally and at random, as everything that it isn’t. Bernard Shaw roundly asserted that it was a mere revival of Herbert Spencer’s description of all dependence on the State as slavery. And when we pointed out that he could not have read a page of Belloc’s book if he really thought it was like Herbert Spencer’s book, he replied with characteristic gaiety that it was Herbert Spencer’s that he had not read. Many supposed that it was a sort of satiric description of a Socialist State; something between Laputa and Brave New World. Others seem still to suppose that the Servile State is a general term for any tyranny or oppressive official State; and even use the term currently in that sense. For it is typical of our time and country that, while no one could say the book was popular, the title of the book was immediately and vastly popular. There was a time when errand-boys and railway-porters said “Servile State”; they did not know what it meant; but they knew about as much as the book-reviewers and even the dons.
The thesis of the book is that the Socialist movement does not lead to Socialism. This is partly because of compromise and cowardice; but partly also because men have a dim indestructible respect for property, even in its disgusting disguise of modern monopoly. Therefore, instead of the intentional result, Socialism, we shall have the unintentional resultant: Slavery. The compromise will take the form of saying, “We must feed the poor; we won’t rob the rich; so we will tell the rich to feed the poor, handing them over to be the permanent servants of a master-class, to be maintained whether they are working or no, and in return for that complete maintenance giving a complete obedience.” All this, or the beginnings of it, can be seen in a hundred modern changes, from such things as Insurance Acts, which divide citizens by law into two classes of masters and servants, to all sorts of proposals for preventing strikes and lock-outs by compulsory arbitration. Any law that sends a man back to his work, when he wants to leave it, is in plain fact a Fugitive Slave Law.
Quello non è un Canto Prima dell’Aurora. Quello è un attacco prima dell’aurora. Ma il punto peculiare che desidero notare qui, appare nel verso precedente sulla reale natura dell’attacco. È la sola poesia rivoluzionaria che io abbia mai letto, che suggerisse che vi fosse un qualche piano per sferrare un qualche attacco. I primi due versi della strofa recitano: «Quando li troveremo dove stanno, un miglio di uomini per lato?». I Compagni dell’Alba parevano sempre marciare in colonna, e cantare. Non parevano mai aver sentito parlare dello spiegarsi; nella lunga linea che fronteggia il nemico per la battaglia. I due versi successivi sono: «Intendo caricare da destra senz’indugio, e forzare i fianchi della loro schiera». Chi mai udì che i Compagni dell’Alba avessero un’idea così complicata come quella di aggirare il fianco del nemico? Poi viene l’accerchiamento:
E premerli dentro dalle pianure E spingerli clamorosi giù per i viottoli, E galoppare e tormentare e abbatterli, E prendere le porte e tenere la città.
L’Inseguimento; e poi la Tenuta della Testa di Ponte.
Ora quello è il solo Canto della Guerra di Classe che io abbia mai letto che abbia la più vaga nozione di come sarebbe una guerra. In questa selvaggia Lirica, piena di vendicativa violenza e distruzione, vi è anche in forma del tutto rapida e lirica un piano tattico e una mappa militare perfettamente chiari; una precisa descrizione di come gli uomini possano dare l’assalto a una fortezza, se dev’essere assaltata. La violenza di questa espressione democratica, benché indubbiamente drammatica, va assai oltre qualsiasi cosa che qualsiasi Comunista raggiungerà in cent’anni. Ma implica anche il reale carattere della battaglia; e una battaglia, come ogni opera umana, è a un tempo progettata nel suo inizio e dubbia nella sua fine. Ora i Compagni dell’Alba già mi seccavano; perché la loro rivoluzione era selvaggiamente non progettata nel suo inizio, ma non aveva alcun dubbio sulla sua fine. Proprio come l’Imperialismo; e la Guerra sudafricana.
Questo è ciò che intendo dicendo che Belloc è un poeta inglese ma un soldato francese. L’uomo a riposo, e perciò l’uomo nella realtà, è l’uomo del Sussex; ma egli è stato ampliato, o alcuni direbbero infettato, dall’influenza straniera di coloro che hanno conosciuto vere rivoluzioni e invasioni; e se fosse chiamato a condurre una rivoluzione, la condurrebbe logicamente come una folla parigina conduce ancora una sommossa. Come egli osservò una volta, una tale folla democratica sa spiegarsi. Ma ho preso solo questo esempio casuale per illustrare una verità generale su un uomo assai notevole. Ho preso il fatto che l’ordinaria canzone di rivolta è solo militante, ma la sua è anche militare. Intendo che è piena della nozione, non solo di combattere per la fede, ma di venire alle prese col fatto. Se andremo a combattere i ricchi, o a combattere la rivolta contro i ricchi, o a combattere la resistenza a una ragionevole redistribuzione delle ricchezze, o a combattere qualsiasi altra cosa, ecco come si fa. E quando ricordo tutte le altre romantiche canzoni rivoluzionarie non mi sorprende affatto, almeno in questo paese, rendermi conto che nessun combattimento è stato fatto.
Ora è esattamente così che i suoi contemporanei hanno mancato tutto il punto su Belloc in ogni punto della sua azione; ad esempio, nel suo studio storico, Lo Stato Servile. Poiché gli Inglesi, di cui io sono uno, sono romantici, e poiché si dilettano del Romanzo che i Francesi siano romantici, e si dilettano del più delirante Romanzo che Belloc sia francese, sono stati semplicemente ciechi come pietre verso di lui quando è del tutto scientifico. Il suo studio dello Stato Servile è rigorosamente scientifico come una mappa militare è militare. Non vi è nulla di romantico in esso; nulla di gioviale in esso; nulla nemmeno di particolarmente divertente in esso, tranne le due ammirevoli parole «questo sciocco», che ricorrono nella calma processione di mille parole imparziali nel capitolo su L’Uomo Pratico. E perfino l’eccettuare quello è come accusare Euclide di fare uno scherzo, quando dimostra una proposizione con una reductio ad absurdum. Chiunque conosca il posto della ragione nello schema moderno, può immaginare ciò che accadde. Primo, prima di leggere ciò che Belloc scrisse, i critici si misero a criticare ciò che Belloc probabilmente avrebbe scritto. Dissero che egli ci minacciava con un orribile incubo chiamato lo Stato Servile. In effetti, era tutto il suo punto che esso non fosse un incubo, ma qualcosa cui eravamo già quasi tanto abituati ad accettare quanto ad accettare la luce del giorno. Per tutto il tempo, una tesi cardinale come quella di Adam Smith o di Darwin è a stento realizzata, o perfino criticata, da chicchessia per ciò che è, benché sia stata criticata assai selvaggiamente, congetturalmente e a caso, come tutto ciò che non è. Bernard Shaw asserì rotondamente che si trattava di un mero ravvivamento della descrizione di Herbert Spencer di ogni dipendenza dallo Stato come Schiavitù. E quando facemmo notare che egli non poteva aver letto una pagina del libro di Belloc se davvero pensava che fosse come il libro di Herbert Spencer, egli replicò con caratteristica gaiezza che era quello di Herbert Spencer che non aveva letto. Molti supposero che si trattasse di una sorta di satirica descrizione di uno Stato Socialista; qualcosa fra Laputa e Il Mondo Nuovo. Altri paiono ancora supporre che lo Stato Servile sia un termine generale per qualsiasi tirannia o oppressivo Stato ufficiale; e usano perfino il termine correntemente in quel senso. Poiché è tipico del nostro tempo e paese che, mentre nessuno potrebbe dire che il libro fosse popolare, il titolo del libro fu immediatamente e vastamente popolare. Vi fu un tempo in cui i fattorini e i facchini delle ferrovie dicevano «Stato Servile»; non sapevano cosa significasse; ma ne sapevano circa quanto i recensori di libri e perfino i docenti.
La tesi del libro è che il movimento socialista non conduce al Socialismo. Ciò è in parte a causa del compromesso e della codardia; ma in parte anche perché gli uomini hanno un fosco e indistruttibile rispetto per la proprietà, anche nel suo disgustoso travestimento di monopolio moderno. Perciò, invece del risultato intenzionale, il Socialismo, avremo la risultante non intenzionale: la Schiavitù. Il compromesso prenderà la forma del dire: «Dobbiamo nutrire i poveri; non deruberemo i ricchi; perciò diremo ai ricchi di nutrire i poveri, consegnandoli a essere i servitori permanenti di una classe padronale, da mantenere sia che lavorino o no, e in cambio di quel completo mantenimento dando una completa obbedienza». Tutto ciò, o l’inizio di ciò, si può vedere in cento cambiamenti moderni, da cose come gli Insurance Act, che dividono i cittadini per legge in due classi di padroni e servitori, a ogni sorta di proposte per prevenire scioperi e serrate mediante arbitrato obbligatorio. Qualsiasi legge che rimandi un uomo al suo lavoro, quando egli vuole lasciarlo, è in semplice fatto una Legge sullo Schiavo Fuggitivo.
Now I take that one example of a scientific thesis, maintained in a purely scientific way, to show how very little the intellectual importance of Belloc’s work has been understood. The reason of that misunderstanding lies in the other fact about him, which is really foreign and relatively French; the habit of separating in his own mind the scientific from the artistic; the ornamental from the useful. It is true that when a Frenchman designs a park as an ornamental park the paths are very curly indeed because they are only ornamental. When he designs a road, he makes it as straight as a ramrod, like the roads down which French soldiers used to march with all their ramrods; because a road is meant to be useful and is most short when it is straight. Belloc’s little Arcadian lyric, “When I was not much older than Cupid and bolder,” is very like an ornamental French garden; and his book on the Servile State is very like a French military road. No man is more instinctively witty; and no man can be more intentionally dull.
These two voices of Belloc, so to speak, were so distinct that he could sometimes pass from one to the other and make it seem like two persons speaking; effecting a transition on a platform almost as dramatic as the dialogue of a ventriloquist with his doll. When he stood as a Liberal member for Salford, he often managed to bewilder his hecklers by spraying them with these sharply alternated showers of cold and hot water. Salford was a poor and popular constituency, in which there were many strata of simple and provincial people, retaining the prejudices of our great-grandfathers; one of them being the touching belief that anybody with a French name could be made to cower and grovel by any allusion to the Battle of Waterloo. This was probably the only battle of which the heckler himself had ever heard; and his information about it was limited to the partly inaccurate statement that it was won by the English. He therefore used to call out at intervals, “Who won Waterloo?” And Belloc would affect to take this with grave exactitude, as a technical question put to him upon a tactical problem, and would reply with the laborious lucidity of a lecturer, “The issue of Waterloo was ultimately determined, chiefly by Colborne’s manoeuvre in the centre, supported by the effects of Van der Smitzen’s battery earlier in the engagement. The Prussian failure in synchrony was not sufficiently extensive, etc.” And then, while the unfortunate patriot in the audience was still endeavouring to grapple with this unexpected growth of complexity in the problem he had propounded, Belloc would suddenly change his own note to the ringing directness of the demagogue, would openly boast of the blood of that Pyrenean soldier who had followed the revolutionary army of Napoleon, and risen in its ranks, through all the victories that established a code of justice all over a continent and restored citizenship to civilisation. “It is good democratic blood; and I am not ashamed of it.”
This transition of tone had a tremendous effect, the whole hall rose at him roaring with applause and the investigator of the Belgian campaign was left isolated. But that is exactly the point; that he really was isolated. It is a point, not only in the subtlety of that blend of French and English blood; but also of the rather special subtlety of the English. The English are insular, not so much in the sense of being insolent but simply of being ignorant; but they are not spiteful. Other things being equal, they would rather cheer a Frenchman who was proud of being a Frenchman, as they cheered Napoleon’s Marshal at the Coronation of Queen Victoria, than remind him of Napoleon’s misfortune at Waterloo. And the same interesting distinction cuts the other way also. We have been told in a tiresome way from childhood about something that was called French rhetoric. To our shame, we have forgotten that there was until very lately a noble thing called English rhetoric. And as distinct from his irony or his objective scientific militarism, the rhetoric of Belloc was thoroughly English rhetoric. There was nothing in it that could not have been said by Cobbett or even by Fox, in the days when the genuine English Radical could address the genuine English crowd. What has weakened that direct popular appeal has been the change that turned nearly all Englishmen into a sort of imitation Londoners; and the rhetoric of Westminster grew more and more pompous and hypocritical while the wit of Whitechapel grew more and more acrid and flippant. But it has been possible, even in my own time, to hear occasionally the voice historic and a virile English demagogue; talking in plain English about primary emotions. Nobody ever did it better, when he chose, than old John Burns, for whom I have spoken and voted so often in the days when I lived in Battersea. To mention one case, as a sort of model; it was natural enough that the old Dock-Strike agitator, having become a Cabinet Minister and in many ways a rather Conservative force, should be assailed by more revolutionary groups as an extinct volcano if not a surrendered fortress. But Burns knew how to deal with that sort of thing when speaking to democrats; by cutting deeper into human facts instead of sliding away upon legal fictions. He was taunted by some Socialists at a Battersea meeting with not having opposed the Royal Grant to Queen Mary or some princess at the celebrations on the appearance of an heir. I can imagine how the smoother sort of Lib-Lab social climber, passing through Parliament into the governing class, would explain away his position in terms of the etiquette of the House. John Burns said, “I am the son of my mother and the husband of my wife. And if you ask me to put a public insult upon a woman who has just borne a child, I will not do it.” That is English rhetoric: and it is as good as any in the world.
Ora prendo quell’unico esempio di una tesi scientifica, sostenuta in modo puramente scientifico, per mostrare quanto poco l’importanza intellettuale dell’opera di Belloc sia stata compresa. La ragione di quel fraintendimento sta nell’altro fatto su di lui, che è davvero straniero e relativamente francese; l’abitudine di separare nella sua propria mente lo scientifico dall’artistico; l’ornamentale dall’utile. È vero che quando un francese progetta un parco come un parco ornamentale i sentieri sono assai tortuosi appunto perché sono solo ornamentali. Quando progetta una strada, la fa dritta come una bacchetta da fucile, come le strade lungo le quali i soldati francesi solevano marciare con tutte le loro bacchette da fucile; perché una strada è fatta per essere utile ed è più corta quando è dritta. La piccola Lirica arcadica di Belloc, «Quando non ero molto più vecchio di Cupido e più audace», è assai simile a un ornamentale giardino francese; e il suo libro sullo Stato Servile è assai simile a una strada militare francese. Nessun uomo è più istintivamente arguto; e nessun uomo può essere più intenzionalmente noioso.
Queste due voci di Belloc, per così dire, erano così distinte che egli poteva talvolta passare dall’una all’altra e farlo sembrare come due persone che parlano; effettuando una transizione su una tribuna quasi drammatica come il dialogo di un ventriloquo con la sua bambola. Quando si presentò come membro Liberale per Salford, spesso riusciva a sconcertare i suoi disturbatori spruzzandoli con questi nettamente alternati scrosci di acqua fredda e calda. Salford era un collegio povero e popolare, in cui vi erano molti strati di gente semplice e provinciale, che conservava i pregiudizi dei nostri bisnonni; uno di essi essendo la commovente credenza che chiunque con un nome francese potesse essere fatto rannicchiare e strisciare da qualsiasi allusione alla Battaglia di Waterloo. Questa era probabilmente la sola battaglia di cui il disturbatore stesso avesse mai sentito parlare; e la sua informazione al riguardo era limitata all’affermazione in parte inesatta che fu vinta dagli Inglesi. Egli perciò soleva gridare a intervalli: «Chi vinse Waterloo?». E Belloc affettava di prendere ciò con grave esattezza, come una domanda tecnica postagli su un problema tattico, e rispondeva con la laboriosa lucidità di un conferenziere: «L’esito di Waterloo fu in ultimo determinato, principalmente dalla manovra di Colborne al centro, sostenuta dagli effetti della batteria di Van der Smitzen più presto nell’ingaggio. Il fallimento prussiano nella sincronia non fu sufficientemente esteso, ecc.». E poi, mentre lo sfortunato patriota nel pubblico stava ancora cercando di alle prese con questa inaspettata crescita di complessità nel problema che aveva proposto, Belloc mutava d’improvviso la sua propria nota nella squillante schiettezza del demagogo, e apertamente si vantava del sangue di quel soldato pirenaico che aveva seguito l’esercito rivoluzionario di Napoleone, ed era salito nei suoi ranghi, attraverso tutte le vittorie che stabilirono un codice di giustizia su tutto un continente e restituirono la cittadinanza alla civiltà. «È buon sangue democratico; e non me ne vergogno.»
Questa transizione di tono aveva un tremendo effetto, l’intera sala si levava verso di lui ruggendo d’applauso e l’investigatore della campagna belga restava isolato. Ma è esattamente questo il punto; che egli era davvero isolato. È un punto, non solo nella sottigliezza di quella mescolanza di sangue francese e inglese; ma anche della piuttosto speciale sottigliezza degli Inglesi. Gli Inglesi sono insulari, non tanto nel senso di essere insolenti ma semplicemente di essere ignoranti; ma non sono astiosi. A parità di condizioni, preferirebbero acclamare un francese che fosse fiero di essere francese, come acclamarono il Maresciallo di Napoleone all’Incoronazione della Regina Vittoria, piuttosto che rammentargli la sventura di Napoleone a Waterloo. E la stessa interessante distinzione taglia anche nell’altro senso. Ci è stato detto in modo tedioso fin dalla fanciullezza di qualcosa che si chiamava retorica francese. A nostra vergogna, abbiamo dimenticato che vi era fino a assai di recente una nobile cosa chiamata retorica inglese. E come distinta dalla sua ironia o dal suo oggettivo militarismo scientifico, la retorica di Belloc era del tutto retorica inglese. Non vi era nulla in essa che non avrebbe potuto essere detto da Cobbett o perfino da Fox, nei giorni in cui il genuino Radicale inglese poteva rivolgersi alla genuina folla inglese. Ciò che ha indebolito quel diretto appello popolare è stato il cambiamento che ha trasformato quasi tutti gli Inglesi in una sorta di Imitazione di Londinesi; e la retorica di Westminster crebbe sempre più pomposa e ipocrita mentre l’arguzia di Whitechapel crebbe sempre più acre e frivola. Ma è stato possibile, perfino nel mio proprio tempo, udire occasionalmente la voce storica e un virile demagogo inglese; che parlava in semplice inglese su emozioni primarie. Nessuno lo fece mai meglio, quando volle, del vecchio John Burns, per il quale ho parlato e votato così spesso nei giorni in cui vivevo a Battersea. Per menzionare un caso, come una sorta di modello; era abbastanza naturale che il vecchio agitatore dello Sciopero dei Dock, essendo divenuto un Ministro del Gabinetto e per molti versi una forza piuttosto conservatrice, fosse assalito da gruppi più rivoluzionari come un vulcano spento se non una fortezza arresa. Ma Burns sapeva come trattare quel genere di cose quando parlava ai democratici; tagliando più a fondo nei fatti umani invece di scivolar via su finzioni legali. Fu schernito da alcuni Socialisti a una riunione di Battersea per non aver contrastato la Concessione Reale alla Regina Mary o a qualche principessa alle celebrazioni per la comparsa di un erede. Posso immaginare come il tipo più liscio di arrampicatore sociale Lib-Lab, che passa attraverso il Parlamento nella classe dirigente, avrebbe spiegato via la sua posizione nei termini dell’etichetta della Camera. John Burns disse: «Sono il figlio di mia madre e il marito di mia moglie. E se mi chiedete di rivolgere un pubblico insulto a una donna che ha appena partorito un bambino, non lo farò». Quella è retorica inglese: ed è buona come qualsiasi altra al mondo.
But while it is quite a mistake to suppose that there was anything particularly French about the direct democratic oratory that Belloc used in those days, there was another quality which he also used, which I think may really be called a rather French speciality. We generally have some very silly and inadequate notion in our minds when we talk about French wit; and the full richness of that fruit of culture is seldom covered even when we talk of French irony. For the best French irony is nothing so simple as merely saying one thing and meaning the opposite. It is at once exhibiting and withdrawing, in one flash, a series of aspects of a thing; like a man twirling a jewel with twenty facets. And the more brief it is, the more flippant it is, the more seemingly superficial it is, the more there is in that irony an element of mystery. There is always a touch of bewilderment, for the simple, in the tale of such tags as that of Voltaire: “To succeed in the world it is not sufficient to be stupid, you must be well-mannered.” Curiously enough, there is exactly that quality in an ordinary military dispatch, sent out by a very silent and practical soldier; by Foch at the supreme crisis of the Marne. “My right is hard pressed; my left is retreating; situation excellent; I attack.” For it might be all sorts of things besides the quite prosaic and practical thing that it is; it might be a paradox; or a boast; or a bitter jest of despair; and all the time it is in fact a quite correct description of the advantage of his own immediate tactical situation, as exact as a military map. I have never so vividly felt that there was really something French about Belloc, as when he would from time to time suddenly say things like that on a public platform before an entirely puzzled audience. I remember once when he was lecturing on the same campaign in the Great War; a purely technical lecture full of plans and figures. And he paused to say parenthetically that perhaps nobody would ever understand why Von Kluck made his one big blunder before Paris. “Perhaps,” said Belloc, like a man for a moment bemused, “perhaps he was inspired.”
Now you can make all sorts of things out of that; in all sorts of opposite directions. You could make it a Voltairean sneer at divine inspiration, and the disasters it brings; or a dark mysterious judgment like that suggested when “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” or all kinds of other fine shades between the two. But you could never be quite certain that you had got to the bottom of it. So that shining ornamental pond which looks so shallow, and is called French wit, is indeed the deepest of all wells and truth lies at the bottom of it. Finally, it may be remarked, that this very diversity in one man’s methods, and his own habit of keeping these diverse things distinct, is the explanation of the accident by which many people have been disappointed or bewildered or even bored by Belloc in different aspects; because they were looking for the revelation of one of the legends about him, when he happened to be concentrating with cold ferocity on something much more prosaic or precise. In debating with Bernard Shaw about the Law of Rent, he observed austerely that if they were discussing economics, he would discuss economics, but if Mr. Shaw was making jokes he would be happy to reply in comic verse. To which Mr. Shaw, ever ready to rise to a sporting event, pursued the subject in some delightful doggerel; which Belloc acknowledged with the song about “the strip to the south of the Strand”; then including the Adelphi. But it is typical that his song simply was a song, and could have been sung in any pub as a drinking-song.
One of the most amusing events of my life occurred when I took the chair for a private celebration of Belloc’s sixtieth birthday. There were about forty people assembled, nearly all of them were what is called important in the public sense, and the rest were even more important in the private sense, as being his nearest intimates and connections. To me it was that curious experience, something between the Day of Judgment and a dream, in which men of many groups known to me at many times, all appeared together as a sort of resurrection. Anybody will understand that feeling who has had, as most people have had, the experience of some total stranger stopping him in the street and saying, “And how are the old set?” On such occasions I become acutely conscious of having belonged to a large number of old sets. Most of the people I knew well enough; but some of the younger I had known quite lately and others long ago; and they included, as do all such gatherings, those whom I had intended to enquire about, and never carried out my intention. Anyhow, they were of all sorts except the stupid sort; and the renewed comradeship stirred in me the memory of a hundred controversies. There was my old friend Bentley, who dated from my first days at school; and Eccles, who reminded me of the earliest political rows of the Pro-Boers; and Jack Squire (now Sir John) who first floated into my circle in the days of the Eye-Witness and my brother’s campaign against corruption; and Duff Cooper, a rising young politician I had met but a month or so before, and A. P. Herbert of somewhat similar age; and the brilliant journalist I had long known as Beachcomber, and only recently known as Morton. It was to be, and was, a very jolly evening; there were to be no speeches. It was specially impressed upon me, that there were to be no speeches. Only I, as presiding, was to be permitted to say a few words in presenting Belloc with a golden goblet modelled on certain phrases in his heroic poem in praise of wine, which ends by asking that such a golden cup should be the stirrup-cup of his farewell to friends:
Ma mentre è del tutto un errore supporre che vi fosse qualcosa di particolarmente francese nella diretta oratoria democratica che Belloc usava in quei giorni, vi era un’altra qualità che egli pure usava, che credo si possa davvero chiamare una specialità piuttosto francese. Generalmente abbiamo qualche assai sciocca e inadeguata nozione nelle nostre menti quando parliamo di arguzia francese; e la piena ricchezza di quel frutto della cultura è raramente colta anche quando parliamo di ironia francese. Poiché la migliore ironia francese non è nulla di così semplice come il mero dire una cosa e intendere l’opposto. Essa è a un tempo esibire e ritrarre, in un solo lampo, una serie di aspetti di una cosa; come un uomo che fa roteare un gioiello con venti sfaccettature. E più è breve, più è frivola, più è apparentemente superficiale, più vi è in quell’ironia un elemento di mistero. Vi è sempre un tocco di smarrimento, per il semplice, nell’aforisma come quello di Voltaire: «Per riuscire nel mondo non è sufficiente essere stupidi, bisogna essere ben educati». Curiosamente, vi è esattamente quella qualità in un ordinario dispaccio militare, inviato da un soldato assai silenzioso e pratico; da Foch nella suprema crisi della Marna: «La mia destra è duramente pressata; la mia sinistra è in ritirata; situazione eccellente; attacco». Poiché potrebbe essere ogni sorta di cose oltre alla cosa del tutto prosaica e pratica che è; potrebbe essere un paradosso; o un vanto; o un’amara facezia di disperazione; e per tutto il tempo è in effetti una descrizione del tutto corretta del vantaggio della sua propria immediata situazione tattica, esatta come una mappa militare. Non ho mai così vividamente sentito che vi fosse davvero qualcosa di francese in Belloc, come quando egli soleva di tanto in tanto dire d’improvviso cose come quella su una pubblica tribuna davanti a un pubblico del tutto sconcertato. Ricordo una volta quando egli teneva una conferenza sulla stessa campagna nella Grande Guerra; una conferenza puramente tecnica piena di piani e cifre. E si fermò a dire tra parentesi che forse nessuno avrebbe mai capito perché Von Kluck fece il suo unico grande errore davanti a Parigi. «Forse», disse Belloc, come un uomo per un momento sbalordito, «forse fu ispirato».
Ora si possono cavare ogni sorta di cose da ciò; in ogni sorta di direzioni opposte. Se ne potrebbe fare uno sberleffo volterriano all’ispirazione divina, e ai disastri che essa porta; o un cupo e misterioso giudizio come quello suggerito quando «il Signore indurì il cuore del Faraone», o ogni sorta di altre fini sfumature fra i due. Ma non si potrebbe mai essere del tutto certi di essere giunti al fondo di ciò. Cosicché quella splendente pozza ornamentale che pare così superficiale, e si chiama arguzia francese, è invero il più profondo di tutti i pozzi e la verità giace sul suo fondo. Infine, si può osservare, che questa stessa diversità nei metodi di un uomo, e la sua stessa abitudine di tenere distinte queste diverse cose, è la spiegazione dell’accidente per cui molte persone sono state deluse o sconcertate o perfino annoiate da Belloc in aspetti diversi; perché cercavano la rivelazione di una delle leggende su di lui, quando egli si dava il caso stesse concentrandosi con fredda ferocia su qualcosa di assai più prosaico o preciso. Nel dibattere con Bernard Shaw sulla Legge della Rendita, egli osservò austeramente che se stavano discutendo di economia, avrebbe discusso di economia, ma se il signor Shaw stava facendo scherzi egli sarebbe stato felice di replicare in versi comici. Al che il signor Shaw, sempre pronto a levarsi a un evento sportivo, proseguì il soggetto in certi deliziosi versacci; che Belloc riconobbe con la canzone su «la striscia a sud dello Strand»; che allora comprendeva l’Adelphi. Ma è tipico che la sua canzone fosse semplicemente una canzone, e avrebbe potuto essere cantata in qualsiasi taverna come una canzone da bere.
Uno degli eventi più divertenti della mia vita avvenne quando presiedetti a una privata celebrazione del sessantesimo compleanno di Belloc. Vi erano circa quaranta persone radunate, quasi tutte erano ciò che si chiama importante nel senso pubblico, e le altre erano perfino più importanti nel senso privato, in quanto suoi più prossimi intimi e parenti. Per me fu quella curiosa esperienza, qualcosa fra il Giorno del Giudizio e un Sogno, in cui uomini di molti gruppi da me conosciuti in molti tempi, apparvero tutti insieme come una sorta di Resurrezione. Chiunque capirà quel sentimento che abbia avuto, come la maggior parte della gente ha avuto, l’esperienza di qualche perfetto sconosciuto che lo ferma per strada e gli dice: «E come sta la vecchia combriccola?». In tali occasioni divento acutamente conscio di essere appartenuto a un gran numero di vecchie combriccole. La maggior parte delle persone le conoscevo abbastanza bene; ma alcuni dei più giovani li avevo conosciuti del tutto di recente e altri molto tempo fa; e includevano, come fanno tutte tali radunanze, coloro sui quali avevo inteso informarmi, e non avevo mai attuato la mia intenzione. Comunque, erano di ogni sorta tranne la sorta stupida; e la rinnovata Cameratismo destò in me la memoria di cento controversie. C’era il mio vecchio amico Bentley, che datava dai miei primi giorni di scuola; ed Eccles, che mi rammentava le prime beghe politiche dei Pro-Boeri; e Jack Squire (ora Sir John) che per primo fluttuò nella mia cerchia nei giorni dell’Eye-Witness e della campagna di mio fratello contro la corruzione; e Duff Cooper, un giovane politico emergente che avevo incontrato solo un mese o giù di lì prima, e A. P. Herbert di età alquanto simile; e il brillante giornalista che avevo a lungo conosciuto come Beachcomber, e solo di recente conosciuto come Morton. Doveva essere, e fu, una serata assai gioviale; non vi dovevano essere discorsi. Mi fu specialmente inculcato, che non vi dovevano essere discorsi. Solo a me, in quanto presidente, doveva essere permesso di dire poche parole nel presentare a Belloc un calice d’oro modellato su certe frasi del suo eroico poema in lode del vino, che finisce col chiedere che una tale coppa d’oro sia la staffiera del suo commiato agli amici:
And sacramental raise me the divine Strong brother in God and last companion, wine.
I merely said a few words to the effect that such a ceremony might have been as fitting thousands of years ago, at the festival of a great Greek poet; and that I was confident that Belloc’s sonnets and strong verse would remain like the cups and the carved epics of the Greeks. He acknowledged it briefly, with a sad good humour, saying he found that, by the age of sixty, he did not care very much whether his verse remained or not. “But I am told,” he added with suddenly reviving emphasis, “I am told that you begin to care again frightfully when you are seventy. In which case, I hope I shall die at sixty-nine.” And then we settled down to the feast of old friends, which was to be so happy because there were no speeches.
Towards the end of the dinner somebody whispered to me that it would perhaps be better if a word were said in acknowledgement of the efforts of somebody else whose name I forget, who was supposed to have arranged the affair. I therefore briefly thanked him; and he still more briefly thanked me, but added that it was quite a mistake, because the real author of the scheme was Johnnie Morton, otherwise Beachcomber, who sat immediately on his right. Morton rose solemnly to acknowledge the abruptly transferred applause; glanced to his own right, and warmly thanked whoever happened to be sitting there (I think it was Squire) for having inspired him with this grand conception of a banquet for Belloc. Squire arose, and with many courteous gestures, explained that the gentleman on his own right, Mr. A. P. Herbert, had been the true and deep and ultimate inspiration of this great idea; and that it was only fitting that the secret of his initiative should be now revealed. By this time, the logic of the jest was in full gallop and could not be restrained; even if I had wished to restrain it. A. P. Herbert rose to the occasion with superb presence of mind, and gave the series quite a new and original turn. He is an excellent speaker; and, as we all know, an admirable author; but I never knew before that he is an admirable actor. For some reason best known to himself, he chose to pretend to be the oratorical official of some sort of Workmen’s Benevolent Society, like the Oddfellows or the Foresters. He did not need to tell us that he was taking this part; in the tone of his voice, he told it in the first few words. I shall never forget the exactitude of the accent with which he said, “I’m sure, friends, we’re all very pleased to see Ex-Druid Chesterton among us this evening.” But he also gave his speech a definite logical direction. He said it was not to ‘im, but to our old and faithful friend Duff Cooper that this pleasant evening was really due. Duff Cooper, sitting next to him, then rose and in resolute and ringing tones delivered an imitation of a Liberal platform speech, full of invocations of his great leader Lloyd-George. He explained, however, that Mr. E. C. Bentley on his right, and not himself, had arranged this tribute to that pillar of political Liberalism, Mr. Belloc. Bentley gave one glance to his own right, and rose with exactly that supercilious gravity that I had seen forty years ago in the debating-clubs of our boyhood; the memory of his balanced eyeglasses and bland solemnity came back to me across my life with such intensity as stirs the tears that are born of time. He said, with his precise enunciation, that he had himself followed through life one simple and sufficient rule. In all problems that arose, he had been content to consult exclusively the opinion of Professor Eccles. In every detail of daily life, in his choice of a wife, of a profession, of a house, of a dinner, he had done no more than carry out whatever Professor Eccles might direct. On the present occasion, any appearance he might have had of arranging the Belloc banquet was in fact a mask for Professor Eccles’ influence. Professor Eccles responded in a similar but even more restrained fashion, merely saying that he had been mistaken for the man next to him, the real founder of the feast; and so by fatal and unfaltering steps, the whole process went round the whole table; till every single human being had made a speech. It is the only dinner I have ever attended, at which it was literally true that every diner made an after-dinner speech. And that was the very happy ending of that very happy dinner, at which there were to be no speeches.
I did not myself make another speech; though I was far from thinking that there had been too much speechifying. Only certain fragmentary words, a memory of a late Victorian poet whom I know, Sir William Watson, floated on the surface of my mind; and it was those words that I should have said, if I had said anything. For what the poet said to his friend is all that I could have added, in a merely personal spirit, to the many things that were said that night about Hilaire Belloc; and I should not have been ashamed if the words had sounded like a vaunt:
Nor without honour my days ran, Nor yet without a boast shall end; for I was Shakespeare’s countryman And were not you my friend.
E sacramentalmente lévami il divino Forte fratello in Dio e ultimo compagno, il vino.
Dissi soltanto poche parole nel senso che una tale cerimonia avrebbe potuto essere altrettanto adatta migliaia di anni fa, al festival di un grande poeta greco; e che ero fiducioso che i sonetti e i forti versi di Belloc sarebbero rimasti come le coppe e le scolpite epopee dei Greci. Egli lo riconobbe brevemente, con un triste buon umore, dicendo che trovava che, all’età di sessant’anni, non gli importava molto se i suoi versi rimanessero o no. «Ma mi si dice», aggiunse con enfasi d’improvviso rivivente, «mi si dice che si comincia a curarsene di nuovo terribilmente quando si hanno settant’anni. Nel qual caso, spero di morire a sessantanove». E poi ci accomodammo al banchetto dei vecchi amici, che doveva essere così felice perché non vi erano discorsi.
Verso la fine della cena qualcuno mi sussurrò che sarebbe stato forse meglio se una parola fosse detta in riconoscimento degli sforzi di qualcun altro di cui dimentico il nome, che si supponeva avesse organizzato la faccenda. Lo ringraziai perciò brevemente; ed egli ancor più brevemente ringraziò me, ma aggiunse che era del tutto un errore, perché il vero autore del piano era Johnnie Morton, altrimenti Beachcomber, che sedeva immediatamente alla sua destra. Morton si levò solennemente a riconoscere l’applauso bruscamente trasferito; guardò alla sua propria destra, e calorosamente ringraziò chiunque si trovasse a sedere là (credo fosse Squire) per averlo ispirato con questa grandiosa concezione di un banchetto per Belloc. Squire si alzò, e con molti cortesi gesti, spiegò che il gentiluomo alla sua propria destra, il signor A. P. Herbert, era stata la vera e profonda e ultima ispirazione di questa grande idea; e che era solo giusto che il segreto della sua iniziativa fosse ora rivelato. A quel punto, la logica dello scherzo era in pieno galoppo e non poteva essere frenata; anche se avessi voluto frenarla. A. P. Herbert si levò all’occasione con superba presenza di spirito, e diede alla serie una svolta del tutto nuova e originale. È un eccellente oratore; e, come tutti sappiamo, un ammirevole autore; ma non avevo mai saputo prima che è un ammirevole attore. Per qualche ragione a lui sola nota, scelse di fingere di essere il funzionario oratorio di una sorta di Società Benevola degli Operai, come gli Oddfellows o i Forestieri. Non ebbe bisogno di dirci che stava assumendo questa parte; nel tono della sua voce, ce lo disse nelle prime parole. Non dimenticherò mai l’esattezza dell’accento con cui disse: «Sono sicuro, amici, che siamo tutti assai lieti di vedere l’Ex Druido Chesterton fra noi questa sera». Ma diede anche al suo discorso una precisa direzione logica. Disse che non era a ‘ui, ma al nostro vecchio e fedele amico Duff Cooper che questa piacevole serata era davvero dovuta. Duff Cooper, seduto accanto a lui, allora si levò e in toni risoluti e squillanti pronunciò un’Imitazione di un discorso da tribuna liberale, pieno di invocazioni del suo grande capo Lloyd-George. Egli spiegò, tuttavia, che il signor E. C. Bentley alla sua destra, e non lui stesso, aveva organizzato questo tributo a quel pilastro del Liberalismo politico, il signor Belloc. Bentley diede un’occhiata alla sua propria destra, e si levò con esattamente quella supercigliosa gravità che avevo visto quarant’anni prima nei circoli di dibattito della nostra fanciullezza; il ricordo dei suoi occhialini in equilibrio e della sua blanda solennità mi tornò attraverso la vita con tale intensità da smuovere le lacrime che nascono dal tempo. Egli disse, con la sua precisa enunciazione, di aver egli stesso seguito attraverso la vita una sola e sufficiente regola. In tutti i problemi che sorgevano, si era accontentato di consultare esclusivamente l’opinione del Professor Eccles. In ogni dettaglio della vita quotidiana, nella sua scelta di una moglie, di una professione, di una casa, di una cena, non aveva fatto altro che eseguire qualunque cosa il Professor Eccles potesse dirigere. Nella presente occasione, qualsiasi apparenza egli potesse aver avuto di organizzare il banchetto di Belloc era in effetti una maschera per l’influenza del Professor Eccles. Il Professor Eccles rispose in modo simile ma perfino più contenuto, dicendo semplicemente di essere stato scambiato per l’uomo accanto a lui, il vero fondatore del festino; e così per fatali e infallibili passi, tutto il processo fece il giro dell’intera tavola; finché ogni singolo essere umano ebbe fatto un discorso. È la sola cena cui io abbia mai assistito, in cui fu letteralmente vero che ogni commensale fece un discorso dopocena. E quello fu il felicissimo finale di quella felicissima cena, in cui non vi dovevano essere discorsi.
Io stesso non feci un altro discorso; benché fossi tutt’altro che convinto che vi fosse stato troppo discorseggiare. Solo certe parole frammentarie, una memoria di un tardo poeta vittoriano che conosco, Sir William Watson, fluttuarono sulla superficie della mia mente; ed erano quelle parole che avrei detto, se avessi detto qualcosa. Poiché ciò che il poeta disse al suo amico è tutto ciò che avrei potuto aggiungere, in spirito meramente personale, alle molte cose che furono dette quella notte su Hilaire Belloc; e non mi sarei vergognato se le parole fossero suonate come un vanto:
Né senza Onore corsero i miei giorni, Né senza un vanto finiranno; poiché io fui compatriota di Shakespeare E non eravate voi mio amico.
XV
THE INCOMPLETE TRAVELLER
If these my memoirs are not exactly lavishly dated, as indeed my letters are never dated at all, I hope no one will suspect me of any lack of reverence for that great academic school of history now generally known as 1066 and All That. I have some rudiments of knowledge about what may be called 1066; for instance, I know that the Conquest did not really happen until 1067. But I think the point somewhat unimportant, as compared, let us say, with the current view that the Normans reared towers over Galilee and reigned in Sicily, and helped to give birth to St. Thomas Aquinas, solely that they might make Anglo-Saxons yet more Anglo-Saxon, in the far-off hope of their becoming Anglo-American. In short, I have the deepest respect for 1066; but I shall continue in a humble way to wage a relentless war with All That.
But for me, in any case, compromise and amendment would come too late. I have written several books that were supposed to be biographies; and lives of really great and remarkable men, meanly refusing them the most elementary details of chronology; and it would be a more than mortal meanness that I should now have the arrogance to be accurate about my own life, when I have failed to be thus accurate about theirs. Who am I that I should be dated more carefully than Dickens or Chaucer? What blasphemy if I reserved for myself what I had failed to render to St. Thomas and St. Francis of Assisi. It seems to be a clear case, in which common Christian humility commands me to continue in a course of crime.
But if I do not date my letters, or my literary sketches, when I am at home and am to some extent regulated by the clock and the calendar, still less do I feel capable of such punctuality when the timeless spirit of holiday travel has not only hurled me through space, but knocked me out of time. I shall give only this short chapter to a few notes of travel; because most of the notebooks have already been turned into some other sort of books; on Ireland and America, on Palestine and Rome. I will only touch here on a few things that I happen not to have recorded elsewhere; a visit to Spain; my second visit to America; and my first, but I hope not my last, visit to Poland.
Let me first feed the hunger for dates upon the date-palm of Palestine, if the flippancy be forgiven; and so at least get the first few journeys in their right order; even if I consider some of the subsequent cases in more general style. I can proudly claim that I do know the date of my pilgrimage to Jerusalem; partly because it was a year after the close of the Great War, and partly because when my publishers suggested my going to the Holy Land, it sounded to me like going to the moon. It was the first of my long journeys, through a country still imperilled and under arms; it involved crossing the desert at night in something like a cattle-truck; and parts even of the Promised Land had some of the qualities of a lunar landscape. One incident in that wilderness still stands out in my memory for some strange reason; there is no need to recur here to Palestinian politics; but I was wandering about in the wilderness in a car with a zealous little Zionist; he seemed at first almost monomaniac, of the sort who answers the statement, “It’s a fine day,” with the eager reply, “Oh, yes, the climate is perfect for our project.” But I came to sympathise with his romance; and when he said, “It’s a lovely land; I should like to put the Song of Solomon in my pocket and wander about,” I knew that, Jew or Gentile, mad or sane, we two were of the same sort. The lovely land was a wilderness of terraced rock to the horizon, and really impressive; there was not a human thing in sight but ourselves and the chauffeur, who was a black-browed giant, the rare but real Jewish type that turns prizefighter. He was an excellent driver; and the rule in those parts is that a Ford can go anywhere if it keeps off the road. He had gone ahead to clear some fallen stones and I remarked on this efficiency. The swarthy little professor beside me had taken a book from his pocket, but replied dispassionately, “Yes; I only know him slightly; between ourselves, I believe he is a murderer; but I made no indelicate enquiries.” He then continued to read the Song of Solomon, and savoured those spices that rise when the south wind blows upon the garden. The hour was full of poetry; and not without irony.
The dates of my first and second visits to America have some true significance; for one was about a year after the Palestinian visit, and the other was comparatively recently; in 1930. This is not only because the first was very near the beginning and the second very near the end of the prolonged freak of Prohibition. I will not stop here to argue with any fool who thinks there is something funny about objecting to Prohibition. What is part of the same process is this; that one began with the Boom and the other saw the start of the Slump and what is more important, a profound revolution in the highly intelligent American people. It is not trivial that, touching Prohibition, they had wholly changed; at the beginning even those who disliked it believed in it; at the end even those who liked it disbelieved in it. But it is much more important that, by the end, life-long Republicans told me of their intention to vote for Franklin Roosevelt; even those who had cursed the demagogy of Theodore Roosevelt. The Americans have seen more plutocracy than anybody; but I am not sure they may not see through it sooner than anybody else.
For the rest, my last American tour consisted of inflicting no less than ninety-nine lectures on people who never did me any harm; and the remainder of the adventure, which was very enjoyable, breaks up like a dream into isolated incidents. An aged negro porter, with a face like a walnut, whom I discouraged from brushing my hat, and who rebuked me saying, “Ho, young man. Yo’s losing yo dignity before yo time. Yo’s got to look nice for de girls.” A grave messenger who came to me in a Los Angeles hotel, from a leading film magnate, wishing to arrange for my being photographed with the Twenty-Four Bathing-Beauties; Leviathan among the Nereids; an offer which was declined amid general surprise. An agonising effort to be fair to the subtleties of the evolutionary controversy, in addressing the students of Notre Dame, Indiana, in a series on “Victorian Literature,” of which no record remained except that one student wrote in the middle of his blank notebook, “Darwin did a lot of harm.” I am not at all certain that he was wrong; but it was something of a simplification of my reasons for being agnostic about the agnostic deductions, in the debates about Lamarck and Mendel. A debate about the history of religion with a very famous sceptic; who, when I tried to talk about Greek cults or Asiatic asceticism, appeared to be unable to think of anything except Jonah and the Whale. But it is the curse of this comic career of lecturing that it seems to bring on the lighted stage nothing except comedies; and I have already said that I do not think America takes them any more seriously than I do. The real American commentary was serious and sound; and none more so than that of an industrial master of machinery, who said to me, “People must go back to the farm.”
XV
IL VIAGGIATORE INCOMPLETO
Se queste mie memorie non sono esattamente cosparse di date con prodigalità, come del resto le mie lettere non sono mai datate affatto, spero che nessuno mi sospetti di una qualche mancanza di reverenza verso quella grande scuola accademica di storia ormai generalmente nota come 1066 e Tutto Quanto. Ho qualche rudimento di conoscenza su ciò che si può chiamare il 1066; per esempio, so che la Conquista non avvenne davvero fino al 1067. Ma ritengo il punto piuttosto irrilevante, se paragonato, diciamo, con l’opinione corrente secondo cui i Normanni innalzarono torri sulla Galilea e regnarono in Sicilia, e contribuirono a dare i natali a san Tommaso d’Aquino, solo perché potessero rendere gli Anglosassoni ancora più Anglosassoni, nella lontana speranza che diventassero Anglo-Americani. In breve, ho il più profondo rispetto per il 1066; ma continuerò umilmente a muovere una guerra implacabile contro Tutto Quanto.
Ma per me, in ogni caso, compromesso ed emendamento verrebbero troppo tardi. Ho scritto parecchi libri che dovevano essere biografie; e vite di uomini davvero grandi e notevoli, negando loro meschinamente i dettagli più elementari della cronologia; e sarebbe una meschinità più che mortale se ora avessi l’arroganza di essere accurato sulla mia stessa vita, dopo aver mancato di essere così accurato sulle loro. Chi sono io per essere datato più scrupolosamente di Dickens o di Chaucer? Quale bestemmia se riservassi a me stesso ciò che ho mancato di rendere a san Tommaso e a san Francesco d’Assisi. Sembra un caso chiaro, in cui la comune umiltà cristiana mi comanda di perseverare in una condotta criminale.
Ma se non dato le mie lettere, o i miei bozzetti letterari, quando sono a casa e sono in qualche misura regolato dall’orologio e dal calendario, ancor meno mi sento capace di tale puntualità quando lo spirito senza tempo del viaggio di vacanza non solo mi ha scagliato attraverso lo spazio, ma mi ha buttato fuori dal tempo. Dedicherò solo questo breve capitolo a poche note di viaggio; perché la maggior parte dei taccuini è già stata trasformata in altri generi di libri; sull’Irlanda e sull’America, sulla Palestina e su Roma. Toccherò qui solo alcune cose che mi capita di non aver annotato altrove; una visita in Spagna; la mia seconda visita in America; e la mia prima, ma spero non l’ultima, visita in Polonia.
Lasciatemi dapprima nutrire la fame di date con la palma da datteri della Palestina, se mi si perdona la frivolezza; e così almeno mettere i primi viaggi nel loro giusto ordine; anche se poi considererò alcuni dei casi successivi in stile più generale. Posso vantarmi con orgoglio di conoscere davvero la data del mio pellegrinaggio a Gerusalemme; in parte perché fu un anno dopo la fine della Grande Guerra, e in parte perché quando i miei editori mi suggerirono di andare in Terra Santa, mi suonò come andare sulla luna. Fu il primo dei miei lunghi viaggi, attraverso un paese ancora in pericolo e sotto le armi; comportò l’attraversamento del deserto di notte in qualcosa di simile a un carro bestiame; e parti anche della Terra Promessa avevano alcune qualità di un paesaggio lunare. Un episodio in quella landa selvaggia spicca ancora nella mia memoria per qualche strana ragione; non c’è bisogno di tornare qui alla politica palestinese; ma stavo vagando nel deserto in un’auto con uno zelante piccolo sionista; all’inizio mi parve quasi monomaniaco, di quelli che alla frase «È una bella giornata» rispondono con l’entusiastica replica «Oh, sì, il clima è perfetto per il nostro progetto». Ma finii per simpatizzare con il suo romanticismo; e quando disse «È una terra incantevole; mi piacerebbe mettermi in tasca il Cantico di Salomone e andarmene a zonzo», capii che, ebreo o gentile, pazzo o sano, noi due eravamo della stessa razza. La terra incantevole era un deserto di roccia terrazzata fino all’orizzonte, e davvero imponente; non c’era in vista cosa umana alcuna tranne noi e l’autista, che era un gigante dalle sopracciglia nere, il raro ma reale tipo ebraico che diventa pugile. Era un eccellente guidatore; e la regola da quelle parti è che una Ford può andare ovunque purché stia fuori dalla strada. Era andato avanti a sgombrare alcune pietre cadute e io feci osservazione su tale efficienza. Il piccolo professore bruno accanto a me aveva preso un libro dalla tasca, ma replicò con distacco: «Sì; lo conosco solo di sfuggita; detto tra noi, credo che sia un assassino; ma non ho fatto domande indelicate». Poi riprese a leggere il Cantico di Salomone, e assaporò quelle spezie che si levano quando il vento del sud soffia sul giardino. L’ora era piena di poesia; e non priva di ironia.
Le date della mia prima e seconda visita in America hanno un significato reale; poiché una fu circa un anno dopo la visita palestinese, e l’altra fu relativamente di recente; nel 1930. Questo non solo perché la prima fu molto vicina all’inizio e la seconda molto vicina alla fine del prolungato capriccio del Proibizionismo. Non mi fermerò qui a discutere con qualche sciocco che ritenga ci sia qualcosa di buffo nell’obiettare al Proibizionismo. Ciò che fa parte dello stesso processo è questo: che una coincise con il Boom e l’altra vide l’inizio del Crollo e, cosa più importante, una profonda rivoluzione nell’assai intelligente popolo americano. Non è cosa da poco che, riguardo al Proibizionismo, essi fossero del tutto cambiati; all’inizio persino coloro che lo detestavano vi credevano; alla fine persino coloro che lo apprezzavano non vi credevano. Ma è molto più importante che, alla fine, Repubblicani di lunga data mi dicessero della loro intenzione di votare per Franklin Roosevelt; persino quelli che avevano maledetto la demagogia di Theodore Roosevelt. Gli Americani hanno visto più plutocrazia di chiunque altro; ma non sono sicuro che non possano vederci attraverso prima di chiunque altro.
Per il resto, il mio ultimo giro americano consistette nell’infliggere non meno di novantanove conferenze a gente che non mi aveva mai fatto alcun male; e il resto dell’avventura, che fu assai godibile, si sgretola come un sogno in episodi isolati. Un anziano facchino negro, con una faccia come una noce, che dissuasi dallo spazzolarmi il cappello, e che mi rimproverò dicendo: «Ehi, giovanotto. Sta’ perdendo la sua dignità prima del suo tempo. Deve far bella figura con le ragazze». Un solenne messaggero che venne da me in un albergo di Los Angeles, da un importante magnate del cinema, desideroso di combinare la mia fotografia insieme alle Ventiquattro Bellezze da Bagno; il Leviatano fra le Nereidi; un’offerta che fu declinata tra la generale sorpresa. Uno strenuo sforzo di rendere giustizia alle sottigliezze della controversia evoluzionista, rivolgendomi agli studenti di Notre Dame, Indiana, in una serie su «La Letteratura Vittoriana», della quale non rimase alcuna traccia se non che uno studente scrisse in mezzo al suo taccuino vuoto: «Darwin fece un gran male». Non sono affatto certo che avesse torto; ma era una certa semplificazione delle mie ragioni per essere agnostico riguardo alle deduzioni agnostiche, nei dibattiti su Lamarck e Mendel. Un dibattito sulla storia della religione con uno scettico assai famoso; che, quando tentavo di parlare di culti greci o di ascetismo asiatico, sembrava incapace di pensare a qualsiasi cosa tranne Giona e la Balena. Ma è la maledizione di questa comica carriera di conferenziere che essa sembri portare sulla scena illuminata nient’altro che commedie; e ho già detto che non credo che l’America le prenda più sul serio di quanto le prenda io. Il vero commento americano fu serio e sensato; e nessuno più di quello di un maestro industriale delle macchine, che mi disse: «La gente deve tornare alla fattoria».
I had pottered about in France ever since my father took me there as a boy; and Paris was the only foreign capital I knew. I owe it to him that I was at least a traveller and not a tripper. The distinction is not snobbish; indeed it is one rather of epoch than education; half the trouble about the modern man is that he is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners. The traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see. A true traveller in a primitive epic or folk-tale did not pretend to like a beautiful princess because she was beautiful. It is still true of a poor sailor; of a tramp; in short, of a traveller. Thus he need form no opinion of Paris newspapers; but if he wanted to, he would probably read them. The tripper never reads them, calls them rags, and knows as much about the rags as the chiffonnier who picks them up with a spike. I will give only one case, since it recalls my connection with a very early controversy. All England came to two great moral conclusions about a man called Zola; or rather about two men both called Zola. The first was merely a filthy Frenchman; a pornographer we jailed by proxy even in his publisher. The second was a hero and martyr for the truth, presumably tortured by the Inquisition—just like Galileo. The truth concerned the Dreyfus Case; and as a journalist behind the scenes I soon found out the truth was not so simple. Déroulède said, “Dreyfus may or may not be guilty; but France is not guilty.” I say Dreyfus may have been innocent, but Dreyfusards were not always innocent; even when they were English editors. It was my first awful eye-opener about our press propaganda. I am not talking of the conclusion but of the methods of the Dreyfusards. A quite independent intelligent Scot, an Oxford friend of Oldershaw, told me they had practically proposed forgery, by falsifying the size of handwriting. But the only point here is Zola, who was first nasty and then noble; even in his very pictures, his brow grew loftier and his neck less thick. Now I would not go to either extreme about poor Zola; but I happened to be in Paris on the day of his funeral at the Pantheon. Paris was fiercely divided; and I bought one of the fanatical rags in a cafe, in which Maurice Barrès, a pretty detached littérateur, gave his reasons for having voted against the apotheosis; and wrote in one sentence all that I have tried to say here about the pessimists and the atheists and the realists and the rest. He said he did not object to obscenity; “I do not care how far down you force the mind of man; so long as you do not break the spring.”
Most of us would not look at such rags as that, of course; but they are full of remarks like that, for anyone who, not content even with condescending to look at them, has the morbid curiosity to read them. And the remark seems to me a more important comment on what Zola stood for than the mere fact that he stood for the Dreyfusard Party, even if he was as trustworthy about Dreyfus as he was certainly untrustworthy about Lourdes. Now we have not that sort of comment in England; for bulk and business methods and good printing do not provide it. But we have good things of our own to balance its absence; and the best of them are things we hardly ever hear anything about.
After all, the strangest country I ever visited was England; but I visited it at a very early age, and so became a little queer myself. England is extremely subtle; and about the best of it there is something almost secretive; it is amateur even more than aristocratic in tradition; it is never official. Among its very valuable and hardly visible oddities is this. There is one type of Englishman I have very frequently met in travel and never met in books of travel. He is the expiation for the English tripper; he may be called the English exile. He is a man of good English culture quite warmly and unaffectedly devoted to some particular foreign culture. In some sense, he has already figured in this story; for Maurice Baring had exactly that attitude towards Russia and Professor Eccles towards France. But I have met a particularly charming Anglo-Irish academic gentleman doing exactly the same work of penetrating with sympathy the soul of Poland; I have met another searching out the secrets of Spanish music in Madrid; and everywhere they are dotted about on the map, doing not only something for Europe but very decidedly something for England; proving to Lithuanian antiquaries or Portuguese geographers that we are not all bounders and boosters; but come of the people that could interpret Plutarch and translate Rabelais. They are a microscopically small minority; like nearly every English group that really knows what is going on; but they are a seed and therefore a secret. It can only be a comic coincidence, but it is a curious fact, that they are mostly of a certain personal type; tending to slight baldness and agreeable smiles under old-fashioned moustaches. If sociology were a science, which is absurd, I would set up a claim like a Darwinian scientist to have discovered a species. It is remembering these men that I find it easiest to range rapidly, for the purpose of this short chapter, over the different countries in which they are our very unofficial diplomatists.
I love France; and I am glad I saw it first when I was young. For if an Englishman has understood a Frenchman, he has understood the most foreign of foreigners. The nation that is nearest is now the furthest away. Italy and Spain and rather especially Poland are much more like England than that square fortress of equal citizens and Roman soldiers; full of family councils and patria potestas and private property under the Roman Law; the keep and citadel of Christendom. This is evident, for a first example, in the case of Italy. When I first went to Florence, I had only a confused impression that this Italian city was full of English ladies; and that they were all Theosophists. But when I first went to Assisi after I had been to Rome (in more senses than one), I saw that this is not quite fair. There really is a sympathy between English and Italian culture, which there is not as yet between English and French culture. There is really something warm-hearted and romantic gilding those stark cliffs that look across the plain to Perugia; and it is in touch with two nations. The English do appreciate St. Francis as they do not appreciate Pascal or the Curé d’Ars. The English can read Dante in a translation, even when they cannot read Italian, they cannot read Racine, even when they can read French. In short, they have some comprehension of medievalism in Italy; when they have not a glimmer of the granite grandeur of classicism in France. The surname of Rossetti was not altogether an accident. The devotion of my old friend Philip Wicksteed to Dante was an excellent example of what I mean by the typical Englishman with a foreign hobby.
Avevo bighellonato per la Francia fin da quando mio padre mi portò là da ragazzo; e Parigi era l’unica capitale straniera che conoscessi. Devo a lui l’essere stato almeno un viaggiatore e non un gitante. La distinzione non è snobistica; anzi è piuttosto d’epoca che d’istruzione; metà del guaio dell’uomo moderno è che egli è educato a capire le lingue straniere e a fraintendere gli stranieri. Il viaggiatore vede ciò che vede; il gitante vede ciò che è venuto a vedere. Un vero viaggiatore in un epico primitivo o in una fiaba popolare non fingeva di apprezzare una bella principessa perché era bella. Ciò è ancora vero di un povero marinaio; di un vagabondo; in breve, di un viaggiatore. Così egli non ha bisogno di formarsi alcuna opinione sui giornali di Parigi; ma se lo volesse, probabilmente li leggerebbe. Il gitante non li legge mai, li chiama stracci, e sa altrettanto poco degli stracci quanto lo straccivendolo che li raccoglie con uno spuntone. Citerò un solo caso, poiché richiama il mio legame con una controversia assai antica. Tutta l’Inghilterra giunse a due grandi conclusioni morali su un uomo chiamato Zola; o piuttosto su due uomini entrambi chiamati Zola. Il primo era semplicemente un lercio Francese; un pornografo che imprigionammo per procura persino nel suo editore. Il secondo era un eroe e martire della verità, presumibilmente torturato dall’Inquisizione—proprio come Galileo. La verità riguardava il Caso Dreyfus; e da giornalista dietro le quinte scoprii presto che la verità non era così semplice. Déroulède disse: «Dreyfus può essere colpevole o no; ma la Francia non è colpevole». Io dico che Dreyfus può essere stato innocente, ma i Dreyfusardi non erano sempre innocenti; anche quando erano redattori inglesi. Fu il mio primo terribile risveglio riguardo alla propaganda della nostra stampa. Non parlo della conclusione ma dei metodi dei Dreyfusardi. Uno Scozzese del tutto indipendente e intelligente, un amico di Oxford di Oldershaw, mi disse che avevano praticamente proposto la falsificazione, alterando le dimensioni della calligrafia. Ma l’unico punto qui è Zola, che fu prima ripugnante e poi nobile; persino nei suoi stessi ritratti, la fronte si fece più alta e il collo meno tozzo. Ora io non andrei a nessuno dei due estremi riguardo al povero Zola; ma mi trovavo per caso a Parigi il giorno del suo funerale al Pantheon. Parigi era ferocemente divisa; e comprai uno degli stracci fanatici in un caffè, in cui Maurice Barrès, un letterato piuttosto distaccato, esponeva le sue ragioni per aver votato contro l’apoteosi; e scrisse in una sola frase tutto ciò che ho cercato di dire qui riguardo ai pessimisti e agli atei e ai realisti e a tutti gli altri. Disse che non aveva nulla in contrario all’oscenità; «Non mi importa fino a che punto in basso spingete la mente dell’uomo; purché non spezziate la molla».
La maggior parte di noi non degnerebbe di uno sguardo stracci del genere, naturalmente; ma essi sono pieni di osservazioni come quella, per chiunque, non contento nemmeno di condiscendere a guardarli, abbia la morbosa curiosità di leggerli. E l’osservazione mi pare un commento assai più importante su ciò che Zola rappresentava del mero fatto che egli rappresentasse il Partito Dreyfusardo, anche se fu attendibile su Dreyfus quanto fu certamente inattendibile su Lourdes. Ora noi non abbiamo quel genere di commento in Inghilterra; perché la mole e i metodi commerciali e la buona stampa non lo forniscono. Ma abbiamo cose buone nostre a bilanciarne l’assenza; e le migliori tra esse sono cose di cui non sentiamo quasi mai parlare.
Dopotutto, il paese più strano che io abbia mai visitato fu l’Inghilterra; ma lo visitai in età assai precoce, e così divenni io stesso un po’ bizzarro. L’Inghilterra è estremamente sottile; e riguardo al meglio di essa c’è qualcosa di quasi segreto; è dilettantesca ancor più che aristocratica per tradizione; non è mai ufficiale. Tra le sue assai preziose e quasi invisibili stranezze c’è questa. C’è un tipo di Inglese che ho incontrato assai di frequente in viaggio e mai incontrato nei libri di viaggio. È l’espiazione per il gitante inglese; lo si può chiamare l’esule inglese. È un uomo di buona cultura inglese assai calorosamente e senza affettazione devoto a una qualche particolare cultura straniera. In un certo senso, ha già figurato in questa storia; poiché Maurice Baring aveva esattamente quell’atteggiamento verso la Russia e il Professor Eccles verso la Francia. Ma ho incontrato un anglo-irlandese accademico particolarmente affascinante che compiva esattamente lo stesso lavoro di penetrare con simpatia l’anima della Polonia; ne ho incontrato un altro che scandagliava i segreti della musica spagnola a Madrid; e dappertutto sono disseminati sulla carta geografica, facendo non solo qualcosa per l’Europa ma assai decisamente qualcosa per l’Inghilterra; dimostrando agli antiquari lituani o ai geografi portoghesi che noi non siamo tutti cafoni e sbruffoni; ma discendiamo dal popolo che seppe interpretare Plutarco e tradurre Rabelais. Sono una minoranza microscopicamente piccola; come quasi ogni gruppo inglese che sappia davvero cosa sta accadendo; ma sono un seme e perciò un segreto. Può solo essere una comica coincidenza, ma è un curioso fatto, che siano per lo più di un certo tipo personale; con la tendenza a una leggera calvizie e a gradevoli sorrisi sotto baffi all’antica. Se la sociologia fosse una scienza, il che è assurdo, avanzerei una pretesa come uno scienziato darwiniano di aver scoperto una specie. È ricordando questi uomini che trovo più facile spaziare rapidamente, ai fini di questo breve capitolo, tra i diversi paesi in cui essi sono i nostri assai ufficiosi diplomatici.
Amo la Francia; e sono contento di averla vista per la prima volta da giovane. Poiché se un Inglese ha compreso un Francese, ha compreso il più straniero degli stranieri. La nazione più vicina è ora quella più lontana. L’Italia e la Spagna e in modo assai particolare la Polonia sono molto più simili all’Inghilterra di quella quadrata fortezza di cittadini uguali e soldati romani; piena di consigli di famiglia e di patria potestas e di proprietà privata sotto il Diritto Romano; il mastio e la cittadella della Cristianità. Questo è evidente, per un primo esempio, nel caso dell’Italia. Quando andai per la prima volta a Firenze, avevo solo la confusa impressione che questa città italiana fosse piena di signore inglesi; e che fossero tutte Teosofe. Ma quando andai per la prima volta ad Assisi dopo essere stato a Roma (in più sensi di uno), vidi che questo non è del tutto giusto. C’è davvero una simpatia tra la cultura inglese e quella italiana, che non c’è ancora tra la cultura inglese e quella francese. C’è davvero qualcosa di caloroso e romantico che indora quelle nude rupi che guardano attraverso la pianura verso Perugia; ed esso è in contatto con due nazioni. Gli Inglesi apprezzano davvero san Francesco come non apprezzano Pascal o il Curato d’Ars. Gli Inglesi sanno leggere Dante in traduzione, anche quando non sanno leggere l’italiano, non sanno leggere Racine, anche quando sanno leggere il francese. In breve, essi hanno una certa comprensione del medievalismo in Italia; mentre non hanno un barlume della grandezza granitica del classicismo in Francia. Il cognome dei Rossetti non fu del tutto un caso. La devozione del mio vecchio amico Philip Wicksteed verso Dante fu un eccellente esempio di ciò che intendo per il tipico Inglese con un hobby straniero.
I felt the same when I went to lecture in Madrid; and met that shy and polite Englishman who could have lectured to the Spaniards on their own Spanish tunes and songs. I did not feel that Spanish people were in a difficult sense different from English people; but only that a stupid Puritanism had forbidden the English to show the hearty and healthy emotions the Spanish are allowed to show. The most manifest emotion, as it struck me, was the pride of fathers in their little boys. I have seen a little boy run the whole length of the tree-lined avenues in the great streets, in order to leap into the arms of a ragged workman, who hugged him with more than maternal ecstasy. It may of course be said that this is un-English; which seems an ungenerous reflection on the English. I prefer to say that the Spanish workman, only too probably, had not been to an English public school. But really there are very few English people who would not like it to happen. Puritanism is only a paralysis; which stiffens into Stoicism when it loses religion. That sort of warmth and casualness was my impression of Spain. Oh yes, I saw the Escorial. Yes, thank you I visited Toledo; it is glorious, but I remember it best by a more glorious peasant woman who poured out wine by the gallon and talked all the time.
I recently revisited Spain, if the Catalans will allow me to call it Spain (opinions apart, I am sincerely sympathetic with such sensitive points), for I revisited it with a rush in a car that could only charge down the eastern coast to Tarragona. If I say that I charged, the motion is metaphorical; the motive power was a motor driven by Miss Dorothy Collins who acted as secretary, courier, chauffeuse, guide, philosopher and above all friend, without whom my wife and I would have often been without friends and in need of philosophy. For after crossing France and cresting the Pyrenees like Charlemagne and the Alps like Napoleon (or like Hannibal accompanied by an elephant) she brought me again to Florence, to deliver some lecture, and then returned through Switzerland to Calais, where the great campaign began.
In the course of it, I had two curious experiences in two foreign cafés. One was outside Barcelona, where the proprietor was an authentic American gangster, who had actually written a book of confessions about his own organised robbing and racketeering. Modest, like all great men, about the ability he had shown in making big business out of burglary and highway robbery, he was very proud of his literary experiment, and especially of his book; but, like some other literary men, he was dissatisfied with his publishers. He said he had rushed across just in time to find that they had stolen nearly all his royalties. “It was a shame,” I said sympathetically, “why it was simply robbery.” “I’ll say it was,” he said with an indignant blow on the table. “It was just plain robbery.”
The other day was dateless, even for my dateless life; for I had forgotten time and had no notion of anything anywhere, when in a small French town I strolled into a cafe noisy with French talk. Wireless songs wailed unnoted; which is not surprising, for French talk is much better than wireless. And then, unaccountably, I heard a voice speaking in English; and a voice I had heard before. For I heard the words, ”… wherever you are, my dear people, whether in this country or beyond the sea,” and I remembered Monarchy and an ancient cry; for it was the King; and that is how I kept the Jubilee.
Returning through France, I remembered again the riddle, that I had found those far countries so near; but that the two nations that are nearest are those we never understand; Ireland and France. About Ireland, I have already written much; and I have nothing to say because I have nothing to unsay. I have written about Ireland in the hour of her tragedy, after the red dawn of the Easter Rising and the nightmare threat of conscription; and again in the hour of her triumph, when the Eucharistic Congress blazed before millions in the Phoenix Park; and all the swords and the trumpets saluted what was a Phoenix indeed. But there is one more nation, not unlike her in that tragedy and triumph, with a note on which I will end. Some day perhaps I may attempt a fuller study. Here in this chapter I only recall one or two things; not those I could remember, but those I cannot forget.
When I visited Poland, I was honoured by an invitation from the Government; but all the hospitality I received was far too much alive to remind me of anything official. There is a sort of underground tavern in Warsaw, where men drink Tokay, which would cure any official of officialism; and there they sang the marching songs of the Poles. Cracow is now even more the national city because it is not the capital; and its secrets are better explored by men like Professor Roman Dyboski than by anybody entangled in Statecraft. But I saw something of that difficult statesmanship—enough to know that, nothing but nonsense is talked about in the newspapers which discuss what they call the Polish Corridor. The fairest generalisation is this: recent events would be better understood, if everybody saw the self-evident fact that the Poles always have a choice of evils. I met the great Pilsudski; and that grand and rather grim old soldier of fortune practically told me that, of the two, he preferred Germany to Russia. It is equally clear that his rival Dmowski, who also entertained us delightfully in his rural retreat, had decided that, of the two, he preferred Russia to Germany. I had met this interesting man before; for Dr. Sarolea brought him to my house; where the Belgian, in his impish way, had taunted the Pole with his Anti-Semitism, saying persuasively, “After all, your religion came from the Jews.” To which the Pole answered, “My religion came from Jesus Christ, who was murdered by the Jews.” Pilsudski was also very sympathetic with Lithuania; though Lithuanians and Poles were quarrelling at the time. He was enthusiastic for Wilno; and I afterwards found on the frontier a historic site where Poles and Lithuanians are at peace—even when they are at war.
Provai lo stesso quando andai a tenere conferenze a Madrid; e incontrai quel timido e cortese Inglese che avrebbe potuto tenere conferenze agli Spagnoli sulle loro stesse arie e canzoni spagnole. Non sentii che gli Spagnoli fossero diversi dagli Inglesi in un senso difficile; ma solo che uno stupido Puritanesimo aveva proibito agli Inglesi di mostrare le calde e sane emozioni che agli Spagnoli è concesso mostrare. L’emozione più manifesta, così come mi colpì, era l’orgoglio dei padri per i loro bambini. Ho visto un bambino correre per l’intera lunghezza dei viali alberati nelle grandi strade, per gettarsi tra le braccia di un operaio cencioso, che lo strinse con più che materna estasi. Si può certo dire che questo è poco inglese; il che pare un’ingenerosa riflessione sugli Inglesi. Preferisco dire che l’operaio spagnolo, con ogni probabilità, non era stato in una public school inglese. Ma davvero ci sono pochissimi Inglesi a cui non piacerebbe che accadesse. Il Puritanesimo è solo una paralisi; che s’irrigidisce in Stoicismo quando perde la religione. Quel genere di calore e di noncuranza fu la mia impressione della Spagna. Oh sì, vidi l’Escorial. Sì, grazie, visitai Toledo; è gloriosa, ma la ricordo soprattutto per una contadina ancor più gloriosa che versava vino a galloni e parlava tutto il tempo.
Ho di recente rivisitato la Spagna, se i Catalani mi permetteranno di chiamarla Spagna (opinioni a parte, sono sinceramente solidale con simili punti sensibili), poiché la rivisitai con un impeto in un’auto che poteva solo caricare giù per la costa orientale fino a Tarragona. Se dico che caricai, il moto è metaforico; la forza motrice era un motore guidato dalla signorina Dorothy Collins che fungeva da segretaria, corriere, autista, guida, filosofa e soprattutto amica, senza la quale mia moglie e io saremmo stati spesso senza amici e in bisogno di filosofia. Poiché dopo aver attraversato la Francia e scavalcato i Pirenei come Carlomagno e le Alpi come Napoleone (o come Annibale accompagnato da un elefante) ella mi riportò di nuovo a Firenze, a tenere qualche conferenza, e poi tornò attraverso la Svizzera a Calais, dove ebbe inizio la grande campagna.
Nel suo corso, ebbi due curiose esperienze in due caffè stranieri. Uno era fuori Barcellona, dove il proprietario era un autentico gangster americano, che aveva effettivamente scritto un libro di confessioni sulle sue rapine e i suoi racket organizzati. Modesto, come tutti i grandi uomini, riguardo all’abilità dimostrata nel far grandi affari con lo scasso e la rapina a mano armata, era assai orgoglioso del suo esperimento letterario, e specialmente del suo libro; ma, come certi altri letterati, era insoddisfatto dei suoi editori. Disse di essere accorso appena in tempo per scoprire che gli avevano rubato quasi tutti i diritti d’autore. «Fu una vergogna», dissi con simpatia, «diamine, fu semplice furto». «Puoi dirlo forte», disse con un indignato colpo sul tavolo. «Fu semplice e schietto furto».
L’altro giorno era senza data, persino per la mia vita senza date; poiché avevo dimenticato il tempo e non avevo nozione di nulla in nessun luogo, quando in una piccola cittadina francese entrai per caso in un caffè rumoroso di chiacchiere francesi. Canzoni radiofoniche gemevano inascoltate; il che non sorprende, poiché la chiacchiera francese è molto meglio della radio. E poi, inspiegabilmente, udii una voce parlare in inglese; e una voce che avevo già udito prima. Poiché udii le parole: «… ovunque voi siate, popolo mio caro, sia in questo paese sia oltre il mare», e ricordai la Monarchia e un antico grido; poiché era il Re; ed è così che io festeggiai il Giubileo.
Tornando attraverso la Francia, ricordai di nuovo l’enigma, che avevo trovato quei paesi lontani così vicini; ma che le due nazioni che sono più vicine sono quelle che non comprendiamo mai; l’Irlanda e la Francia. Sull’Irlanda ho già scritto molto; e non ho nulla da dire perché non ho nulla da disdire. Ho scritto sull’Irlanda nell’ora della sua tragedia, dopo la rossa alba della Rivolta di Pasqua e la minaccia da incubo della coscrizione; e di nuovo nell’ora del suo trionfo, quando il Congresso Eucaristico avvampò dinanzi a milioni nel Phoenix Park; e tutte le spade e le trombe salutarono ciò che era davvero una Fenice. Ma c’è ancora una nazione, non dissimile da lei in quella tragedia e in quel trionfo, con una nota su cui concluderò. Un giorno forse potrò tentare uno studio più completo. Qui in questo capitolo richiamo solo una o due cose; non quelle che potrei ricordare, ma quelle che non posso dimenticare.
Quando visitai la Polonia, fui onorato da un invito del Governo; ma tutta l’ospitalità che ricevetti era troppo viva per rammentarmi qualcosa di ufficiale. C’è una sorta di taverna sotterranea a Varsavia, dove gli uomini bevono Tokay, che guarirebbe ogni funzionario dal funzionarismo; e là cantarono le canzoni di marcia dei Polacchi. Cracovia è ora ancor più la città nazionale proprio perché non è la capitale; e i suoi segreti sono meglio esplorati da uomini come il Professor Roman Dyboski che da chiunque sia impigliato nell’Arte di Stato. Ma vidi qualcosa di quella difficile arte di governo—abbastanza da sapere che non si dicono che sciocchezze nei giornali che discutono ciò che chiamano il Corridoio Polacco. La più equa generalizzazione è questa: gli eventi recenti sarebbero meglio compresi, se ognuno vedesse il fatto auto-evidente che i Polacchi hanno sempre una scelta tra mali. Incontrai il grande Pilsudski; e quel grande e piuttosto arcigno vecchio soldato di ventura mi disse praticamente che, dei due, egli preferiva la Germania alla Russia. È altrettanto chiaro che il suo rivale Dmowski, che pure ci intrattenne deliziosamente nel suo rifugio campestre, aveva deciso che, dei due, egli preferiva la Russia alla Germania. Avevo incontrato questo interessante uomo in precedenza; poiché il dottor Sarolea lo portò a casa mia; dove il Belga, nel suo modo dispettoso, aveva schernito il Polacco per il suo Antisemitismo, dicendo persuasivamente: «Dopotutto, la vostra religione venne dagli Ebrei». Al che il Polacco rispose: «La mia religione venne da Gesù Cristo, che fu ucciso dagli Ebrei». Pilsudski era anche assai solidale con la Lituania; benché Lituani e Polacchi bisticciassero all’epoca. Era entusiasta di Wilno; e in seguito trovai alla frontiera un sito storico dove Polacchi e Lituani sono in pace—persino quando sono in guerra.
I was driving with a Polish lady, who was very witty and well-aquainted with the whole character of Europe, and also of England (as is the barbarous habit of the Slavs); and I only noticed that her tone changed, if anything to a sort of coolness, as we stopped outside an archway leading to a side-street, and she said, “We can’t drive in here.” I wondered; for the gateway was wide and the street apparently open. As we walked under the arch she said in the same colourless tone; “You take off your hat here.” And then I saw the open street. It was filled with a vast crowd, all facing me; and all on their knees on the ground. It was as if someone were walking behind me; or some strange bird were hovering over my head. I faced around, and saw in the centre of the arch great windows standing open, unsealing a chamber full of gold and colours; there was a picture behind; but parts of the whole picture were moving like a puppet-show, stirring strange double memories like a dream of the bridge in the puppet-show of my childhood; and then I realised that from those shifting groups there shone and sounded the ancient magnificence of the Mass.
One other memory I will add here. I made the acquaintance of a young Count whose huge and costly palace of a country house, upon the old model (for he had quite different notions himself), had been burned and wrecked and left in ruins by the retreat of the Red Army after the Battle of Warsaw. Looking at such a mountain of shattered marbles and black and blasted tapestries, one of our party said, “It must be a terrible thing for you to see your old family home destroyed like this.” But the young man, who was very young in all his gestures, shrugged his shoulders and laughed, at the same time looking a little sad. “Oh, I do not blame them for that,” he said. “I have been a soldier myself, and in the same campaign; and I know the temptations. I know what a fellow feels, dropping with fatigue and freezing with cold, when he asks himself what some other fellow’s armchairs and curtains can matter, if he can only have fuel for the night. On the one side or the other, we were all soldiers; and it is a hard and horrible life. I don’t resent at all what they did here. There is only one thing that I really resent. I will show it to you.”
And he led us out into a long avenue lined with poplars; and at the end of it was a statue of the Blessed Virgin; with the head and the hands shot off. But the hands had been lifted; and it is a strange thing that the very mutilation seemed to give more meaning to the attitude of intercession; asking mercy for the merciless race of men.
Viaggiavo con una dama polacca, che era assai arguta e ben informata sull’intero carattere dell’Europa, e anche dell’Inghilterra (come è la barbara abitudine degli Slavi); e notai solo che il suo tono cambiò, semmai in una sorta di freddezza, mentre ci fermavamo fuori da un arco che conduceva a una via laterale, ed ella disse: «Non possiamo entrare in auto qui». Mi meravigliai; poiché il portale era largo e la via apparentemente aperta. Mentre camminavamo sotto l’arco ella disse con lo stesso tono incolore: «Qui si toglie il cappello». E allora vidi la via aperta. Era gremita di una vasta folla, tutta rivolta verso di me; e tutta in ginocchio a terra. Era come se qualcuno stesse camminando dietro di me; o come se qualche strano uccello volteggiasse sopra il mio capo. Mi voltai, e vidi al centro dell’arco grandi finestre spalancate, che dischiudevano una camera piena d’oro e di colori; c’era un quadro sul fondo; ma parti dell’intero quadro si muovevano come uno spettacolo di burattini, suscitando strane doppie memorie come un sogno del ponte nello spettacolo di burattini della mia infanzia; e allora compresi che da quei gruppi cangianti risplendeva e risuonava l’antica magnificenza della Messa.
Un’altra memoria aggiungerò qui. Feci la conoscenza di un giovane Conte il cui enorme e costoso palazzo di casa di campagna, sul vecchio modello (poiché egli aveva idee assai diverse in proprio), era stata bruciata e distrutta e lasciata in rovina dalla ritirata dell’Armata Rossa dopo la Battaglia di Varsavia. Guardando una simile montagna di marmi frantumati e di arazzi neri e bruciati, uno del nostro gruppo disse: «Deve essere una cosa terribile per lei vedere la sua vecchia casa di famiglia distrutta così». Ma il giovane, che era assai giovane in tutti i suoi gesti, alzò le spalle e rise, e nello stesso tempo parve un po’ triste. «Oh, non li biasimo per questo», disse. «Sono stato anch’io un soldato, e nella stessa campagna; e conosco le tentazioni. So cosa prova un tale, che crolla di fatica e gela di freddo, quando si chiede cosa possano importare le poltrone e le tende di qualche altro tale, se solo può avere legna per la notte. Da una parte o dall’altra, eravamo tutti soldati; ed è una vita dura e orribile. Non serbo alcun rancore per ciò che fecero qui. C’è solo una cosa per cui serbo davvero rancore. Ve la mostrerò».
E ci condusse fuori in un lungo viale fiancheggiato da pioppi; e in fondo ad esso c’era una statua della Beata Vergine; con la testa e le mani portate via da un colpo. Ma le mani erano state levate; ed è una cosa strana che la mutilazione stessa sembrasse dare più significato all’atteggiamento di intercessione; chiedendo misericordia per la razza spietata degli uomini.
XVI
THE GOD WITH THE GOLDEN KEY
Some time ago, seated at ease upon a summer evening and taking a serene review of an indefensibly fortunate and happy life, I calculated that I must have committed at least fifty-three murders, and been concerned with hiding about half a hundred corpses for the purpose of the concealment of crimes; hanging one corpse on a hat-peg, bundling another into a postman’s bag, decapitating a third and providing it with somebody else’s head, and so on through quite a large number of innocent artifices of the kind. It is true that I have enacted most of these atrocities on paper; and I strongly recommend the young student, except in extreme cases, to give expression to his criminal impulses in this form; and not run the risk of spoiling a beautiful and well-proportioned idea by bringing it down to the plane of brute material experiment, where it too often suffers the unforseen imperfections and disappointments of this fallen world, and brings with it various unwelcome and unworthy social and legal consequences. I have explained elsewhere that I once drew up a scientific table of Twenty Ways of Killing a Wife and have managed to preserve them all in their undisturbed artistic completeness, so that it is possible for the artist, after a fashion, to have successfully murdered twenty wives and yet keep the original wife after all; an additional point which is in many cases, and especially my own, not without its advantages. Whereas, for the artist to sacrifice his wife and possibly his neck, for the mere vulgar and theatrical practical presentation of one of these ideal dramas, is to lose, not only this, but all the ideal enjoyment of the other nineteen. This being my strict principle, from which I have never wavered, there has been nothing to cut short the rich accumulation of imaginative corpses; and, as I say, I have already accumulated a good many. My name achieved a certain notoriety as that of a writer of these murderous short stories, commonly called detective stories; certain publishers and magazines have come to count on me for such trifles; and are still kind enough, from time to time, to write to me ordering a new batch of corpses; generally in consignments of eight at a time.
Any who have come upon traces of this industry may possibly know that a large number of my little crime stories were concerned with a person called Father Brown; a Catholic priest whose external simplicity and internal subtlety formed something near enough to a character for the purposes of this sketchy sort of story-telling. And certain questions have arisen, especially questions about the identity or accuracy of the type, which have not been without an effect on more important things.
As I have said, I have never taken my novels or short stories very seriously, or imagined that I had any particular status in anything so serious as a novel. But I can claim at the same time that it was novel enough to be novel, in the sense of not being historical or biographical; and that even one of my short stories was original enough to do without originals. The notion that a character in a novel must be “meant” for somebody or “taken from” somebody is founded on a misunderstanding of the nature of narrative fancy, and especially of such slight fancies as mine. Nevertheless, it has been generally said that Father Brown had an original in real life; and in one particular and rather personal sense, it is true.
The notion that a novelist takes a character bodily and in all its details from a friend or an enemy is a blunder that has done a great deal of harm. Even the characters of Dickens, at once so plainly creations and so plainly caricatures, were measured against mere mortals, as if there were any mortals who could fit exactly the magnificent mock-heroic stature of Weller or Micawber. I remember my father telling me how some of his contemporaries indignantly purged themselves of the charge of being the model of Mr. Pecksniff; and especially of how the well-known S. C. Hall, the Spiritualist, cleared himself with an eloquence which some found too sublime to be convincing. “How can I be said to resemble Pecksniff?” said this worthy man to my father. “You know me. The world knows me. The world knows that I have devoted my life to the good of others, that I have lived a pure and exalted life devoted to the highest duties and ideals, that I have sought always to set an example of truth, of justice, of probity, or purity and or public virtue. What resemblance can there be between me and Pecksniff?”
When a writer invents a character for the purposes of fiction, especially of light or fanciful fiction, he fits him out with all sorts of features meant to be effective in that setting and against that background. He may have taken, and probably has taken, a hint from a human being. But he will not hesitate to alter the human being, especially in externals, because he is not thinking of a portrait but of a picture. In Father Brown, it was the chief feature to be featureless. The point of him was to appear pointless; and one might say that his conspicuous quality was not being conspicuous. His commonplace exterior was meant to contrast with his unsuspected vigilance and intelligence; and that being so, of course I made his appearance shabby and shapeless, his face round and expressionless, his manners clumsy, and so on. At the same time, I did take some of his inner intellectual qualities from my friend, Father John O’Connor of Bradford, who has not, as a matter of fact, any of these external qualities. He is not shabby, but rather neat; he is not clumsy, but very delicate and dexterous; he not only is but looks amusing and amused. He is a sensitive and quickwitted Irishman, with the profound irony and some of the potential irritability of his race. My Father Brown was deliberately described as a Suffolk dumpling from East Anglia. That, and the rest of his description, was a deliberate disguise for the purpose of detective fiction. But for all that, there is a very real sense in which Father O’Connor was the intellectual inspiration of these stories; and of much more important things as well. And in order to explain these things, especially the important things, I cannot do better than tell the story of how the first notion of this detective comedy came into my mind.
XVI
IL DIO CON LA CHIAVE D’ORO
Qualche tempo fa, seduto a mio agio in una sera d’estate e passando in serena rassegna una vita indifendibilmente fortunata e felice, calcolai che devo aver commesso almeno cinquantatré omicidi, e aver avuto a che fare con l’occultamento di circa mezzo centinaio di cadaveri allo scopo di celare delitti; appendendo un cadavere a un attaccapanni, ficcandone un altro nella borsa di un postino, decapitandone un terzo e fornendolo della testa di qualcun altro, e così via attraverso un numero piuttosto grande di innocenti artifici del genere. È vero che ho messo in scena la maggior parte di queste atrocità sulla carta; e raccomando vivamente al giovane studente, salvo casi estremi, di dare espressione ai propri impulsi criminali in questa forma; e di non correre il rischio di rovinare un’idea bella e ben proporzionata abbassandola al piano del bruto esperimento materiale, dove essa troppo spesso patisce le imperviste imperfezioni e delusioni di questo mondo decaduto, e reca con sé svariate sgradite e indegne conseguenze sociali e legali. Ho spiegato altrove che una volta compilai una tavola scientifica dei Venti Modi di Uccidere una Moglie e sono riuscito a preservarli tutti nella loro indisturbata compiutezza artistica, così che è possibile per l’artista, in un certo senso, aver assassinato con successo venti mogli e nondimeno conservare in fin dei conti la moglie originale; un ulteriore punto che è, in molti casi, e specialmente nel mio, non privo di vantaggi. Mentre, per l’artista, sacrificare la propria moglie e magari il proprio collo, per la mera volgare e teatrale presentazione pratica di uno di questi drammi ideali, significa perdere, non solo questo, ma tutto il godimento ideale degli altri diciannove. Essendo questo il mio rigoroso principio, dal quale non ho mai vacillato, non c’è stato nulla a interrompere la ricca accumulazione di cadaveri immaginari; e, come dico, ne ho già accumulati parecchi. Il mio nome raggiunse una certa notorietà come quello di uno scrittore di questi omicidiari racconti brevi, comunemente chiamati storie poliziesche; certi editori e riviste hanno preso a contare su di me per tali inezie; e sono ancora così gentili, di tempo in tempo, da scrivermi per ordinarmi una nuova infornata di cadaveri; generalmente in partite di otto alla volta.
Chiunque abbia rinvenuto tracce di questa industria può forse sapere che un gran numero delle mie storielle criminali riguardava un personaggio chiamato Father Brown; un prete cattolico la cui esteriore semplicità e interiore sottigliezza formavano qualcosa di abbastanza vicino a un personaggio ai fini di questo abbozzato genere di narrazione. E sono sorte certe questioni, specialmente questioni sull’identità o l’accuratezza del tipo, che non sono state prive di effetto su cose più importanti.
Come ho detto, non ho mai preso i miei romanzi o racconti molto sul serio, né immaginato di avere una qualche particolare statura in qualcosa di così serio come un romanzo. Ma posso rivendicare allo stesso tempo che esso fu nuovo abbastanza da essere romanzo, nel senso di non essere storico o biografico; e che persino uno dei miei racconti fu abbastanza originale da fare a meno di originali. L’idea che un personaggio di un romanzo debba essere «pensato» per qualcuno o «preso da» qualcuno è fondata su un fraintendimento della natura della fantasia narrativa, e specialmente di fantasie così esili come le mie. Nondimeno, si è generalmente detto che Father Brown avesse un originale nella vita reale; e in un senso particolare e piuttosto personale, è vero.
L’idea che un romanziere prenda un personaggio di peso e in tutti i suoi dettagli da un amico o da un nemico è un abbaglio che ha fatto un gran danno. Persino i personaggi di Dickens, a un tempo così palesemente creazioni e così palesemente caricature, venivano misurati contro meri mortali, come se ci fossero mortali capaci di adattarsi esattamente alla magnifica statura mock-eroica di Weller o Micawber. Ricordo mio padre che mi raccontava come alcuni suoi contemporanei si scagionassero indignati dall’accusa di essere il modello del signor Pecksniff; e specialmente come il ben noto S. C. Hall, lo Spiritista, si discolpasse con un’eloquenza che alcuni trovarono troppo sublime per essere convincente. «Come si può dire che io somiglio a Pecksniff?» disse quest’onest’uomo a mio padre. «Voi mi conoscete. Il mondo mi conosce. Il mondo sa che ho dedicato la mia vita al bene degli altri, che ho vissuto una vita pura ed elevata dedita ai più alti doveri e ideali, che ho cercato sempre di dare l’esempio della verità, della giustizia, della probità, della purezza e della pubblica virtù. Quale somiglianza può esserci tra me e Pecksniff?»
Quando uno scrittore inventa un personaggio ai fini della finzione, specialmente di una finzione leggera o fantasiosa, lo equipaggia di ogni sorta di tratti intesi a risultare efficaci in quella cornice e su quello sfondo. Può aver colto, e probabilmente ha colto, uno spunto da un essere umano. Ma non esiterà ad alterare l’essere umano, specialmente negli esteriori, perché non sta pensando a un ritratto ma a un quadro. In Father Brown, il tratto principale era l’essere privo di tratti. Il punto di lui era di apparire senza punti; e si potrebbe dire che la sua qualità cospicua era il non essere cospicuo. Il suo aspetto ordinario era inteso a contrastare con la sua insospettata vigilanza e intelligenza; e stando così le cose, naturalmente resi il suo aspetto trasandato e informe, la sua faccia tonda e inespressiva, i suoi modi goffi, e così via. Allo stesso tempo, presi alcune delle sue intime qualità intellettuali dal mio amico, Padre John O’Connor di Bradford, il quale non ha, in verità, alcuna di queste qualità esteriori. Non è trasandato, ma piuttosto ordinato; non è goffo, ma assai delicato e destro; non solo è ma appare divertente e divertito. È un Irlandese sensibile e pronto di spirito, con la profonda ironia e una parte della potenziale irritabilità della sua razza. Il mio Father Brown fu deliberatamente descritto come un tarchiato del Suffolk dell’East Anglia. Questo, e il resto della sua descrizione, era un deliberato travestimento ai fini della narrativa poliziesca. Ma ciononostante, c’è un senso assai reale in cui Padre O’Connor fu l’ispirazione intellettuale di queste storie; e di cose ben più importanti pure. E per spiegare queste cose, specialmente le cose importanti, non posso far di meglio che raccontare la storia di come la prima idea di questa poliziesca commedia mi venne in mente.
In those early days, especially just before and just after I was married, it was my fate to wander over many parts of England, delivering what were politely called lectures. There is a considerable appetite for such bleak entertainments, especially in the north of England, the south of Scotland and among certain active Nonconformist centres even in the suburbs of London. With the mention of bleakness there comes back to me the memory of one particular chapel, lying in the last featureless wastes to the north of London, to which I actually had to make my way through a blinding snow-storm, which I enjoyed very much; because I like snowstorms. In fact, I like practically all kinds of English weather except that particular sort of weather that is called “a glorious day.” So none need weep prematurely over my experience, or imagine that I am pitying myself or asking for pity. Still, it is the fact that I was exposed to the elements for nearly two hours either on foot or on top of a forlorn omnibus wandering in a wilderness; and by the time I arrived at the chapel I must have roughly resembled the Snow Man that children make in the garden. I proceeded to lecture, God knows on what, and was about to resume my wintry journey, when the worthy minister of the chapel, robustly rubbing his hands and slapping his chest and beaming at me with the rich hospitality of Father Christmas, said in a deep, hearty, fruity voice, “Come, Mr. Chesterton; it’s a bitter cold night! Do let me offer you an oswego biscuit.” I assured him gratefully that I felt no such craving; it was very kind of him, for there was no possible reason, in the circumstances for his offering me any refreshment at all. But I confess that the thought of returning through the snow and the freezing blast, for two more hours, with the glow of that one biscuit within me, and the oswego fire running through all my veins, struck me as a little out of proportion. I fear it was with considerable pleasure that I crossed the road and entered a public-house immediately opposite the chapel, under the very eyes of the Nonconformist Conscience.
This is a parenthesis; and I could add a good many parentheses about distant days of vagabond lecturing. Of those days the tale is told that I once sent a telegram to my wife in London, which ran; “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” I cannot remember whether this story is true; but it is not unlikely or, I think, unreasonable. It was in the course of such wanderings that I made many friends whose friendship I value; such as Mr. Lloyd Thomas, then in Nottingham, and Mr. McClelland of Glasgow. But I mention these here only as leading up to that very accidental meeting in Yorkshire, which was to have consequences for me rather beyond the appearance of accident. I had gone to give a lecture at Keighley on the high moors of the West Riding, and stayed the night with a leading citizen ot that little industrial town; who had assembled a group of local friends such as could be conceived, I suppose, as likely to be patient with lecturers; including the curate of the Roman Catholic Church; a small man with a smooth face and a demure but elfish expression. I was struck by the tact and humour with which he mingled with his very Yorkshire and very Protestant company; and I soon found out that they had, in their bluff way, already learned to appreciate him as something of a character. Somebody gave me a very amusing account of how two gigantic Yorkshire farmers, of that district, had been deputed to go the rounds of various religious centres, and how they wavered, with nameless terrors, before entering the little presbytery of the little priest. With many sinkings of heart, they seem to have come finally to the conclusion that he would hardly do them any serious harm; and that if he did they could send for the police. They really thought, I suppose, that he had his house fitted up with all the torture engines of the Spanish Inquisition. But even these farmers, I was told, had since accepted him as a neighbour, and as the evening wore on his neighbours decidedly encouraged his considerable powers of entertainment. He expanded, and was soon in the middle of reciting that great heart-searching dramatic lyric which is entitled, “My Boots are Tight.” I liked him very much; but if you had told me that ten years afterwards I should be a Mormon Missionary in the Cannibal Islands, I should not have been more surprised than at the suggestion that, fully fifteen years afterwards, I should be making to him my General Confession and being received into the Church that he served.
Next morning he and I walked over Keighley Gate, the great wall of the moors that separates Keighley from Wharfedale, for I was visiting friends in Ilkley; and after a few hours talk on the moors, it was a new friend whom I introduced to my old friends at my journey’s end. He stayed to lunch; he stayed to tea; he stayed to dinner; I am not sure that, under their pressing hospitality, he did not stay the night; and he stayed there many nights and days on later occasions; and it was there that we most often met. It was on one of these visits that the incident occurred, which led me to take the liberty of putting him, or rather part of him, into a string of sensational stories. But I mention it, not because I attach any importance to those stories, but because it has a more vital connection with the other story; the story that I am telling here.
I mentioned to the priest in conversation that I proposed to support in print a certain proposal, it matters not what, in connection with some rather sordid social questions of vice and crime. On this particular point he thought I was in error, or rather in ignorance; as indeed I was. And, merely as a necessary duty and to prevent me from falling into a mare’s nest, he told me certain facts he knew about perverted practices which I certainly shall not set down or discuss here. I have confessed on an earlier page that in my own youth I had imagined for myself any amount of iniquity; and it was a curious experience to find that this quiet and pleasant celibate had plumbed those abysses far deeper than I. I had not imagined that the world could hold such horrors. If he had been a professional novelist throwing such filth broadcast on all the bookstalls for boys and babies to pick up, of course he would have been a great creative artist and a herald of the Dawn. As he was only stating them reluctantly, in strict privacy, as a practical necessity, he was, of course, a typical Jesuit whispering poisonous secrets in my ear. When we returned to the house, we found it was full of visitors, and fell into special conversation with two hearty and healthy young Cambridge undergraduates, who had been walking or cycling across the moors in the spirit of the stern and vigorous English holiday. They were no narrow athletes, however, but interested in various sports and in a breezy way in various arts; and they began to discuss music and landscape with my friend Father O’Connor. I never knew a man who could turn with more ease than he from one topic to another, or who had more unexpected stores of information, often purely technical information, upon all. The talk soon deepened into a discussion on matters more philosophical and moral; and when the priest had left the room, the two young men broke out into generous expressions of admiration, saying truly that he was a remarkable man, and seemed to know a great deal about Palestrina or Baroque architecture, or whatever was the point at the moment. Then there fell a curious reflective silence, at the end of which one of the undergraduates suddenly burst out. “All the same, I don’t believe his sort of life is the right one. It’s all very well to like religious music and so on, when you’re all shut up in a sort of cloister and don’t know anything about the real evil in the world. But I don’t believe that’s the right ideal. I believe in a fellow coming out into the world, and facing the evil that’s in it, and knowing something about the dangers and all that. It’s a very beautiful thing to be innocent and ignorant; but I think it’s a much finer thing not to be afraid of knowledge.”
In quei primi giorni, specialmente poco prima e poco dopo il mio matrimonio, fu mio destino vagabondare per molte parti dell’Inghilterra, tenendo ciò che venivano cortesemente chiamate conferenze. C’è un considerevole appetito per simili tetri intrattenimenti, specialmente nel nord dell’Inghilterra, nel sud della Scozia e in certi attivi centri Nonconformisti persino nei sobborghi di Londra. Con la menzione della tetraggine mi torna alla mente il ricordo di una particolare cappella, situata nelle ultime lande informi a nord di Londra, verso la quale dovetti effettivamente aprirmi la strada attraverso una accecante tormenta di neve, che mi piacque assai; perché mi piacciono le tormente. Anzi, mi piacciono praticamente tutti i generi di tempo inglese tranne quel particolare genere di tempo che si chiama «una giornata gloriosa». Perciò nessuno pianga prematuramente sulla mia esperienza, né immagini che io compianga me stesso o chieda compassione. Eppure, è un fatto che rimasi esposto agli elementi per quasi due ore, o a piedi o in cima a uno sconsolato omnibus vagante in un deserto; e nel momento in cui arrivai alla cappella dovevo grossomodo somigliare all’Uomo di Neve che i bambini fanno nel giardino. Procedetti a tenere conferenza, Dio sa su cosa, e stavo per riprendere il mio invernale viaggio, quando il degno ministro della cappella, strofinandosi vigorosamente le mani e battendosi il petto e raggiante verso di me con la ricca ospitalità di Babbo Natale, disse con una voce profonda, calda, pastosa: «Suvvia, signor Chesterton; è una notte di freddo pungente! Mi permetta di offrirle un biscotto oswego». Lo assicurai con gratitudine che non sentivo alcuna simile brama; fu assai gentile da parte sua, poiché non c’era alcun motivo possibile, date le circostanze, per cui mi offrisse un qualsiasi rinfresco. Ma confesso che il pensiero di tornare attraverso la neve e la raffica gelata, per altre due ore, col calore di quell’unico biscotto dentro di me, e il fuoco oswego che mi scorreva in tutte le vene, mi parve un po’ sproporzionato. Temo che fu con considerevole piacere che attraversai la strada ed entrai in una osteria proprio di fronte alla cappella, sotto gli occhi stessi della Coscienza Nonconformista.
Questa è una parentesi; e potrei aggiungere molte altre parentesi su quei lontani giorni di conferenze vagabonde. Di quei giorni si racconta la storia che una volta mandai un telegramma a mia moglie a Londra, che diceva: «Sono a Market Harborough. Dove dovrei essere?» Non riesco a ricordare se questa storia sia vera; ma non è improbabile né, credo, irragionevole. Fu nel corso di simili peregrinazioni che feci molti amici la cui amicizia apprezzo; come il signor Lloyd Thomas, allora a Nottingham, e il signor McClelland di Glasgow. Ma li menziono qui solo come introduzione a quell’assai fortuito incontro nello Yorkshire, che avrebbe avuto conseguenze per me piuttosto oltre l’apparenza del fortuito. Ero andato a tenere una conferenza a Keighley sulle alte brughiere del West Riding, e passai la notte presso un eminente cittadino di quella piccola città industriale; che aveva radunato un gruppo di amici del luogo tali quali si potessero immaginare, suppongo, disposti a sopportare i conferenzieri; incluso il curato della Chiesa Cattolica Romana; un ometto dalla faccia liscia e dall’espressione compunta ma elfica. Fui colpito dal tatto e dall’umorismo con cui si mescolava alla sua compagnia assai dello Yorkshire e assai Protestante; e presto scoprii che essi avevano, nel loro modo burbero, già imparato ad apprezzarlo come una sorta di personaggio. Qualcuno mi diede un resoconto assai divertente di come due giganteschi contadini dello Yorkshire, di quel distretto, fossero stati incaricati di fare il giro di vari centri religiosi, e di come esitassero, con innominabili terrori, prima di entrare nel piccolo presbiterio del piccolo prete. Con molti sprofondamenti di cuore, pare che fossero giunti infine alla conclusione che egli difficilmente avrebbe fatto loro alcun serio male; e che se lo avesse fatto potevano chiamare la polizia. Pensavano davvero, suppongo, che egli avesse la casa attrezzata con tutte le macchine di tortura dell’Inquisizione Spagnola. Ma persino questi contadini, mi fu detto, lo avevano da allora accettato come vicino, e col procedere della serata i suoi vicini incoraggiarono decisamente le sue considerevoli doti d’intrattenitore. Si espanse, e fu presto nel bel mezzo del recitare quella grande struggente lirica drammatica che è intitolata «I Miei Stivali Sono Stretti». Mi piacque assai; ma se mi aveste detto che dieci anni dopo sarei stato un Missionario Mormone nelle Isole dei Cannibali, non sarei stato più sorpreso di quanto lo fossi al suggerimento che, ben quindici anni dopo, avrei fatto a lui la mia Confessione Generale e sarei stato ricevuto nella Chiesa che egli serviva.
Il mattino seguente egli e io scavalcammo Keighley Gate, il grande muro delle brughiere che separa Keighley da Wharfedale, poiché ero in visita ad amici a Ilkley; e dopo alcune ore di conversazione sulle brughiere, fu un nuovo amico quello che presentai ai miei vecchi amici alla fine del mio viaggio. Restò a pranzo; restò a tè; restò a cena; non sono sicuro che, sotto la loro insistente ospitalità, non restasse anche la notte; e restò là molte notti e giorni in occasioni successive; e fu là che ci incontrammo più spesso. Fu in una di queste visite che si verificò l’episodio, che mi indusse a prendermi la libertà di metterlo, o piuttosto una parte di lui, in una serie di storie sensazionali. Ma lo menziono, non perché attribuisca alcuna importanza a quelle storie, ma perché ha un legame più vitale con l’altra storia; la storia che sto raccontando qui.
Menzionai al prete in conversazione che mi proponevo di sostenere in stampa una certa proposta, non importa quale, in connessione con alcune questioni sociali piuttosto sordide di vizio e delitto. Su questo particolare punto egli riteneva che io fossi in errore, o piuttosto nell’ignoranza; come in effetti ero. E, semplicemente come necessario dovere e per impedirmi di cadere in una trappola, mi raccontò certi fatti che conosceva riguardo a pratiche perverse che di certo non riporterò né discuterò qui. Ho confessato in una pagina precedente che nella mia stessa giovinezza avevo immaginato per me qualsiasi quantità d’iniquità; e fu una curiosa esperienza scoprire che questo tranquillo e piacevole celibe aveva sondato quegli abissi assai più a fondo di me. Non avevo immaginato che il mondo potesse contenere simili orrori. Se egli fosse stato un romanziere di professione che gettava tale sozzura a piene mani su tutte le bancarelle perché ragazzi e infanti la raccogliessero, naturalmente sarebbe stato un grande artista creativo e un araldo dell’Alba. Poiché li stava solo enunciando con riluttanza, in stretta riservatezza, come necessità pratica, egli era, naturalmente, un tipico Gesuita che mi sussurrava velenosi segreti all’orecchio. Quando tornammo alla casa, la trovammo piena di visitatori, e ci mettemmo in speciale conversazione con due gioviali e sani giovani studenti di Cambridge, che avevano attraversato a piedi o in bicicletta le brughiere nello spirito della severa e vigorosa vacanza inglese. Non erano però atleti gretti, bensì interessati a vari sport e, in modo spensierato, a varie arti; e cominciarono a discutere di musica e paesaggio col mio amico Padre O’Connor. Non conobbi mai un uomo che passasse con più disinvoltura di lui da un argomento all’altro, o che avesse più inaspettate riserve d’informazione, spesso di informazione puramente tecnica, su tutti. Il discorso presto si approfondì in una discussione su questioni più filosofiche e morali; e quando il prete ebbe lasciato la stanza, i due giovani proruppero in generose espressioni d’ammirazione, dicendo veramente che era un uomo notevole, e sembrava sapere moltissimo su Palestrina o l’architettura barocca, o qualunque fosse il punto del momento. Poi cadde un curioso silenzio riflessivo, al termine del quale uno degli studenti improvvisamente esplose. «E tuttavia, non credo che quel suo genere di vita sia quello giusto. È tutto assai bello apprezzare la musica religiosa e così via, quando si è tutti rinchiusi in una specie di chiostro e non si sa nulla del male reale nel mondo. Ma non credo che quello sia l’ideale giusto. Io credo che un tale debba uscire nel mondo, e affrontare il male che c’è, e sapere qualcosa dei pericoli e di tutto quanto. È una cosa assai bella essere innocenti e ignoranti; ma io credo che sia una cosa assai più nobile non aver paura della conoscenza».
To me, still almost shivering with the appallingly practical facts of which the priest had warned me, this comment came with such a colossal and crushing irony, that I nearly burst into a loud harsh laugh in the drawing-room. For I knew perfectly well that, as regards all the solid Satanism which the priest knew and warred against with all his life, these two Cambridge gentlemen (luckily for them) knew about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator.
And there sprang up in my mind the vague idea of making some artistic use of these comic yet tragic cross-purposes; and constructing a comedy in which a priest should appear to know nothing and in fact know more about crime than the criminals. I afterwards summed up the special idea in the story called “The Blue Cross”, otherwise very slight and improbable, and continued it through the interminable series of tales with which I have afflicted the world. In short, I permitted myself the grave liberty of taking my friend and knocking him about; beating his hat and umbrella shapeless, untidying his clothes, punching his intelligent countenance into a condition of pudding-faced fatuity, and generally disguising Father O’Connor as Father Brown. The disguise, as I have said, was a deliberate piece of fiction, meant to bring out or accentuate the contrast that was the point of the comedy. There is also in the conception, as in nearly everything I have ever written, a good deal of inconsistency and inaccuracy on minor points; not the least of such flaws being the general suggestion of Father Brown having nothing in particular to do, except to hang about in any household where there was likely to be a murder. A very charming Catholic lady I know once paid my detective priest the appropriate compliment of saying, “I am very fond of that officious little loafer.”
Nevertheless, the incident of the Cambridge undergraduates, and their breezy contempt for the fugitive and cloistered virtue of a parish priest, stood for much more serious things in my life than my unfortunate, but merely professional, heap of corpses or massacre of characters. It brought me in a manner face to face once more with those morbid but vivid problems of the soul, to which I have earlier alluded, and gave me a great and growing sense that I had not found any real spiritual solution of them; though in certain external ways of proportion and practice, they trouble a man less in manhood than they do in youth. They still troubled me a good deal; but I might have sunk more and more into some sort of compromise or surrender of mere weariness, but for this sudden glimpse of the pit that is at all our feet. I was surprised at my own surprise. That the Catholic Church knew more about good than I did was easy to believe. That she knew more about evil than I did seemed incredible.
When people ask me, or indeed anybody else, “Why did you join the Church of Rome?” the first essential answer, if it is partly an elliptical answer, is, “To get rid of my sins.” For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people’s sins. It is confirmed by the logic, which to many seems startling, by which the Church deduces that sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned. And this brought me sharply back to those visions or fancies with which I have dealt in the chapter about childhood. I spoke there of the indescribable and indestructible certitude in the soul, that those first years of innocence were the beginning of something worthy, perhaps more worthy than any of the things that actually followed them. I spoke of the strange daylight, which was something more than the light of common day, that still seems in my memory to shine on those steep roads down from Campden Hill, from which one could see the Crystal Palace from afar. Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man. The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.
I am not here defending such doctrines as that of the Sacrament of Penance; any more than the equally staggering doctrine of the Divine love for man. I am not writing a book of religious controversy; of which I have written several and shall probably, unless violently restrained by my friends and relatives, write several more. I am here engaged in the morbid and degrading task of telling the story of my life; and have only to state what actually were the effects of such doctrines on my own feelings and actions. And I am, by the nature of the task, especially concerned with the fact that these doctrines seem to me to link up my whole life from the beginning, as no other doctrines could do; and especially to settle simultaneously the two problems of my childish happiness and my boyish brooding. And they specially affected one idea; which I hope it is not pompous to call the chief idea of my life; I will not say the doctrine I have always taught, but the doctrine I should always have liked to teach. That is the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted. Thus the Sacrament of Penance gives a new life, and reconciles a man to all living, but it does not do it as the optimists and the hedonists and the heathen preachers of happiness do it. The gift is given at a price, and is conditioned by a confession. In other words, the name of the price is Truth, which may also be called Reality; but it is facing the reality about oneself. When the process is only applied to other people it is called Realism.
Per me, ancora quasi tremante per i fatti spaventosamente pratici dei quali il prete mi aveva avvertito, questo commento giunse con un’ironia così colossale e schiacciante, che quasi scoppiai in una sonora e aspra risata nel salotto. Poiché sapevo perfettamente bene che, riguardo a tutto il solido Satanismo che il prete conosceva e combatteva con tutta la sua vita, questi due gentiluomini di Cambridge (per loro fortuna) sapevano del male reale press’a poco quanto due neonati nella stessa carrozzina.
E sorse nella mia mente la vaga idea di fare un qualche uso artistico di questi comici eppure tragici propositi incrociati; e di costruire una commedia in cui un prete dovesse apparire non sapere nulla e in realtà sapere sul delitto più dei criminali. In seguito riassunsi l’idea speciale nella storia intitolata «La Croce Azzurra», per il resto assai esile e improbabile, e la continuai attraverso l’ interminabile serie di racconti con cui ho afflitto il mondo. In breve, mi permisi la grave libertà di prendere il mio amico e di malmenarlo; deformandogli a colpi il cappello e l’ombrello, scompigliandogli i vestiti, prendendo a pugni il suo intelligente volto fino a ridurlo a una condizione di fatuità dalla faccia da budino, e in genere travestendo Padre O’Connor da Father Brown. Il travestimento, come ho detto, fu un deliberato pezzo di finzione, inteso a far risaltare o accentuare il contrasto che era il punto della commedia. C’è anche nella concezione, come in quasi tutto ciò che ho mai scritto, una buona dose d’incoerenza e imprecisione su punti minori; non ultima tra tali pecche essendo la generale suggestione di Father Brown che non aveva nulla in particolare da fare, se non gironzolare in qualsiasi famiglia dove fosse probabile un omicidio. Una signora cattolica assai deliziosa che conosco una volta fece al mio prete detective l’appropriato complimento di dire: «Sono molto affezionata a quel piccolo intrigante sfaccendato».
Nondimeno, l’episodio degli studenti di Cambridge, e il loro spensierato disprezzo per la fuggitiva e claustrale virtù di un parroco, rappresentava cose assai più serie nella mia vita che il mio sfortunato, ma meramente professionale, cumulo di cadaveri o massacro di personaggi. Mi pose in un certo modo di nuovo faccia a faccia con quei morbosi ma vividi problemi dell’anima, ai quali ho accennato prima, e mi diede un grande e crescente senso di non aver trovato alcuna reale soluzione spirituale di essi; benché in certe vie esteriori di proporzione e pratica, essi turbino un uomo meno nella virilità di quanto facciano nella giovinezza. Mi turbavano ancora parecchio; ma avrei potuto sprofondare sempre più in una sorta di compromesso o resa per mera stanchezza, se non fosse stato per questo improvviso scorcio dell’abisso che sta sotto i piedi di tutti noi. Fui sorpreso della mia stessa sorpresa. Che la Chiesa Cattolica sapesse più di me sul bene era facile da credere. Che sapesse più di me sul male pareva incredibile.
Quando la gente mi chiede, o chiede a chiunque altro: «Perché ti sei unito alla Chiesa di Roma?» la prima risposta essenziale, se è in parte una risposta ellittica, è: «Per liberarmi dei miei peccati». Poiché non c’è nessun altro sistema religioso che davvero pretenda di liberare la gente dei propri peccati. È confermato dalla logica, che a molti pare sconcertante, con cui la Chiesa deduce che il peccato confessato e adeguatamente pentito è effettivamente abolito; e che il peccatore ricomincia davvero come se non avesse mai peccato. E questo mi riportò bruscamente a quelle visioni o fantasie di cui ho trattato nel capitolo sull’infanzia. Parlai là dell’indescrivibile e indistruttibile certezza nell’anima, che quei primi anni d’innocenza fossero l’inizio di qualcosa di degno, forse più degno di qualsiasi delle cose che effettivamente li seguirono. Parlai della strana luce del giorno, che era qualcosa di più della luce del giorno comune, che ancora sembra nella mia memoria risplendere su quelle ripide strade che scendono da Campden Hill, da cui si poteva vedere il Crystal Palace da lontano. Ebbene, quando un Cattolico esce dalla Confessione, egli fa davvero, per definizione, un altro passo fuori in quell’alba del proprio inizio e guarda con occhi nuovi attraverso il mondo verso un Crystal Palace che è davvero di cristallo. Egli crede che in quell’oscuro angolo, e in quel breve rito, Dio lo abbia davvero rifatto a Sua immagine. Egli è ora un nuovo esperimento del Creatore. È altrettanto un nuovo esperimento di quanto lo era quando aveva davvero solo cinque anni. Egli sta, come ho detto, nella bianca luce al degno inizio della vita di un uomo. Le accumulazioni del tempo non possono più atterrire. Egli può essere grigio e gottoso; ma ha solo cinque minuti.
Non sto qui difendendo dottrine come quella del Sacramento della Penitenza; non più della dottrina egualmente sbalorditiva del divino Amore per l’uomo. Non sto scrivendo un libro di controversia religiosa; di cui ne ho scritti parecchi e ne scriverò probabilmente, a meno di essere violentemente frenato dai miei amici e parenti, parecchi altri. Sono qui impegnato nel morboso e degradante compito di raccontare la storia della mia vita; e devo solo enunciare quali furono effettivamente gli effetti di tali dottrine sui miei stessi sentimenti e azioni. E sono, per la natura del compito, specialmente interessato al fatto che queste dottrine mi sembrano collegare l’intera mia vita fin dall’inizio, come nessun’altra dottrina saprebbe fare; e specialmente a risolvere simultaneamente i due problemi della mia felicità infantile e della mia meditabonda malinconia di ragazzo. Ed esse influenzarono specialmente un’idea; che spero non sia pomposo chiamare l’idea principale della mia vita; non dirò la dottrina che ho sempre insegnato, ma la dottrina che avrei sempre voluto insegnare. Ossia l’idea di prendere le cose con gratitudine, e di non darle per scontate. Così il Sacramento della Penitenza dà una nuova vita, e riconcilia un uomo con tutto ciò che vive, ma non lo fa come gli ottimisti e gli edonisti e i pagani predicatori della felicità lo fanno. Il dono è dato a un prezzo, ed è condizionato da una confessione. In altre parole, il nome del prezzo è Verità, che si può anche chiamare Realtà; ma è affrontare la realtà su se stessi. Quando il processo è applicato solo ad altre persone si chiama Realismo.
I began by being what the pessimists called an optimist; I have ended by being what the optimists would very probably call a pessimist. And I have never in fact been either, and I have never really changed at all. I began by defending vermilion pillar-boxes and Victorian omnibuses although they were ugly. I have ended by denouncing modern advertisements or American films even when they are beautiful. The thing that I was trying to say then is the same thing that I am trying to say now; and even the deepest revolution of religion has only confirmed me in the desire to say it. For indeed, I never saw the two sides of this single truth stated together anywhere, until I happened to open the Penny Catechism and read the words, “The two sins against Hope are presumption and despair.”
I began in my boyhood to grope for it from quite the other end; the end of the earth most remote from purely supernatural hopes. But even about the dimmest earthly hope, or the smallest earthly happiness, I had from the first an almost violently vivid sense of those two dangers; the sense that the experience must not be spoilt by presumption or despair. To take a convenient tag out of my first juvenile book of rhymes, I asked through what incarnations or prenatal purgatories I must have passed, to earn the reward of looking at a dandelion. Now it would be easy enough, if the thing were worth while even for a commentator, to date that phrase by certain details, or guess that it might have been worded otherwise at a later time. I do not believe in Reincarnation, if indeed I ever did; and since I have owned a garden (for I cannot say since I have been a gardener) I have realised better than I did that there really is a case against weeds. But in substance what I said about the dandelion is exactly what I should say about the sunflower or the sun, or the glory which (as the poet said) is brighter than the sun. The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed. Now there are two ways of complaining of the weed or the flower; and one was the fashion in my youth and another is the fashion in my later days; but they are not only both wrong, but both wrong because the same thing is right. The pessimists of my boyhood, when confronted with the dandelion, said with Swinburne:
I am weary of all hours Blown buds and barren flowers Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep.
And at this I cursed them and kicked at them and made an exhibition of myself; having made myself the champion of the Lion’s Tooth, with a dandelion rampant on my crest. But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, “You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge’s,” or “You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth’s.” Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, “Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions,” or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you. These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them. Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, “What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?” we are to say like the discontented cabman, “What’s this?” or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, “Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?” Now I not only dislike this attitude quite as much as the Swinburnian pessimistic attitude, but I think it comes to very much the same thing; to the actual loss of appetite for the chop or the dish of dandelion-tea. And the name of it is Presumption and the name of its twin brother is Despair.
This is the principle I was maintaining when I seemed an optimist to Mr. Max Beerbohm; and this is the principle I am still maintaining when I should undoubtedly seem a pessimist to Mr. Gordon Selfridge. The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them. I originally said that a cockney lamp-post painted pea-green was better than no light or no life; and that if it was a lonely lamp-post, we might really see its light better against the background of the dark. The Decadent of my early days, however, was so distressed by it that he wanted to hang himself on the lamp-post, to extinguish the lamp, and to let everything relapse into aboriginal darkness. The modern millionaire comes bustling along the street to tell me he is an Optimist and has two million five thousand new lamp-posts, all ready painted not a Victorian pea-green but a Futuristic chrome yellow and electric blue, and that he will plant them over the whole world in such numbers that nobody will notice them, especially as they will all look exactly the same. And I cannot quite see what the Optimist has got to be Optimistic about. A lamp-post can be significant although it is ugly. But he is not making lamp-posts significant; he is making them insignificant.
In short, as it seems to me, it matters very little whether a man is discontented in the name of pessimism or progress, if his discontent does in fact paralyse his power of appreciating what he has got. The real difficulty of man is not to enjoy lamp-posts or landscapes, not to enjoy dandelions or chops; but to enjoy enjoyment. To keep the capacity of really liking what he likes; that is the practical problem which the philosopher has to solve. And it seemed to me at the beginning, as it seems to me now in the end, that the pessimists and optimists of the modern world have alike missed and muddled this matter; through leaving out the ancient conception of humility and the thanks of the unworthy. This is a matter much more important and interesting than my opinions; but, in point of fact, it was by following this thin thread of a fancy about thankfulness, as slight as any of those dandelion clocks that are blown upon the breeze like thistledown, that I did arrive eventually at an opinion which is more than an opinion. Perhaps the one and only opinion that is really more than an opinion.
Cominciai con l’essere ciò che i pessimisti chiamavano ottimista; ho finito con l’essere ciò che gli ottimisti chiamerebbero assai probabilmente pessimista. E in verità non sono mai stato né l’uno né l’altro, e non sono mai davvero cambiato affatto. Cominciai difendendo le cassette postali vermiglie e gli omnibus vittoriani benché fossero brutti. Ho finito denunciando le moderne pubblicità o i film americani anche quando sono belli. La cosa che cercavo di dire allora è la stessa cosa che cerco di dire ora; e persino la più profonda rivoluzione della religione non ha fatto che confermarmi nel desiderio di dirla. Poiché in verità, non vidi mai i due lati di quest’unica verità enunciati insieme in alcun luogo, finché non mi capitò di aprire il Penny Catechism e leggere le parole: «I due peccati contro la Speranza sono la presunzione e la Disperazione».
Cominciai nella mia fanciullezza a cercarla brancolando dall’estremità del tutto opposta; l’estremità della terra più remota dalle speranze puramente soprannaturali. Ma persino riguardo alla più fioca speranza terrena, o alla più piccola felicità terrena, ebbi fin dal principio un senso quasi violentemente vivido di quei due pericoli; il senso che l’esperienza non debba essere rovinata dalla presunzione o dalla disperazione. Per prendere una comoda etichetta dal mio primo giovanile libro di rime, mi chiesi attraverso quali incarnazioni o purgatori prenatali dovevo essere passato, per meritare la ricompensa di guardare un tarassaco. Ora sarebbe abbastanza facile, se la cosa valesse la pena persino per un commentatore, datare quella frase da certi dettagli, o congetturare che sarebbe potuta esser formulata altrimenti in un tempo successivo. Non credo nella Reincarnazione, ammesso che ci abbia mai creduto; e da quando ho posseduto un giardino (poiché non posso dire da quando sono stato giardiniere) ho compreso meglio di prima che c’è davvero un caso contro le erbacce. Ma in sostanza ciò che dissi del tarassaco è esattamente ciò che direi del girasole o del sole, o della gloria che (come disse il poeta) è più splendente del sole. L’unico modo di godere persino di un’erbaccia è di sentirsi indegni persino di un’erbaccia. Ora ci sono due modi di lamentarsi dell’erbaccia o del fiore; e uno era la moda della mia giovinezza e l’altro è la moda dei miei giorni più tardi; ma non sono solo entrambi sbagliati, bensì entrambi sbagliati perché la stessa cosa è giusta. I pessimisti della mia fanciullezza, di fronte al tarassaco, dicevano con Swinburne:
Sono stanco di tutte le ore Boccioli spirati e sterili Fiori Desideri e Sogni e poteri E ogni cosa tranne il Sonno.
E a questo li maledicevo e sferravo loro calci e facevo di me stesso uno spettacolo; essendomi fatto il campione del Dente del Leone, con un tarassaco rampante sul mio cimiero. Ma c’è un modo di disprezzare il tarassaco che non è quello del tetro pessimista, ma dell’ottimista più offensivo. Lo si può fare in vari modi; uno dei quali è dire: «Puoi avere tarassachi assai migliori da Selfridge», o «Puoi avere tarassachi assai più a buon mercato da Woolworth». Un altro modo è osservare con un casuale strascico di voce: «Naturalmente nessuno tranne Gamboli a Vienna capisce davvero i tarassachi», o dire che nessuno sopporterebbe più il tarassaco all’antica da quando il super-tarassaco è stato coltivato al Palm Garden di Francoforte; o semplicemente sogghignare sull’avarizia di offrire tarassachi, quando tutte le migliori padrone di casa ti danno un’orchidea per l’ occhiello e un mazzo di rari esotici da portar via con te. Questi sono tutti metodi per svalutare la cosa per confronto; poiché non è la familiarità ma il confronto a generare disprezzo. E tutti simili cavillosi confronti si fondano in ultima analisi sulla strana e sbalorditiva eresia che un essere umano abbia diritto ai tarassachi; che in qualche straordinario modo possiamo esigere proprio il fior fiore di tutti i tarassachi nel Giardino del Paradiso; che non dobbiamo alcun ringraziamento per essi affatto e non abbiamo bisogno di provare alcuna meraviglia per essi affatto; e soprattutto alcuna meraviglia d’essere ritenuti degni di riceverli. Invece di dire, come il vecchio poeta religioso: «Cos’è l’uomo che Tu ti curi di lui, o il figlio dell’uomo che Tu lo consideri?» dobbiamo dire come lo scontento vetturino: «Cos’è questo?» o come il Maggiore bilioso al circolo: «È questa una costoletta degna di un gentiluomo?» Ora io non solo detesto quest’atteggiamento tanto quanto l’atteggiamento pessimistico swinburniano, ma penso che esso equivalga proprio alla stessa cosa; all’effettiva perdita d’appetito per la costoletta o per il piatto di tè di tarassaco. E il suo nome è Presunzione e il nome del suo gemello è Disperazione.
Questo è il principio che sostenevo quando parevo un ottimista al signor Max Beerbohm; e questo è il principio che ancora sostengo quando dovrei senza dubbio parere un pessimista al signor Gordon Selfridge. Lo scopo della vita è l’apprezzamento; non c’è senso nel non apprezzare le cose; e non c’è senso nell’averne di più se se ne ha meno apprezzamento. Dissi originariamente che un lampione cockney dipinto di verde pisello era meglio di nessuna luce o nessuna vita; e che se era un lampione solitario, potremmo vederne davvero meglio la luce contro lo sfondo del buio. Il Decadente dei miei primi giorni, tuttavia, ne era così angustiato che voleva impiccarsi al lampione, spegnere la lampada, e lasciare che tutto ricadesse nell’oscurità primordiale. Il milionario moderno arriva trafelato lungo la strada per dirmi che è un Ottimista e ha due milioni e cinquemila nuovi lampioni, tutti già dipinti non di un verde pisello vittoriano ma di un Futuristico giallo cromo e blu elettrico, e che li pianterà per tutto il mondo in tal numero che nessuno li noterà, tanto più che appariranno tutti esattamente uguali. E io non riesco proprio a vedere di cosa l’Ottimista debba essere Ottimista. Un lampione può essere significativo benché sia brutto. Ma egli non sta rendendo i lampioni significativi; li sta rendendo insignificanti.
In breve, come mi pare, importa assai poco se un uomo sia scontento in nome del pessimismo o del progresso, se la sua scontentezza in effetti paralizza la sua capacità di apprezzare ciò che ha. La vera difficoltà dell’uomo non è godere di lampioni o paesaggi, non godere di tarassachi o costolette; ma godere del godimento. Conservare la capacità di apprezzare davvero ciò che apprezza; ecco il problema pratico che il filosofo deve risolvere. E mi pareva al principio, come mi pare ora alla fine, che i pessimisti e gli ottimisti del mondo moderno abbiano ugualmente mancato e ingarbugliato questa faccenda; per aver tralasciato l’antica concezione dell’umiltà e del ringraziamento dell’indegno. Questa è una faccenda assai più importante e interessante delle mie opinioni; ma, di fatto, fu seguendo questo sottile filo di una fantasia sulla riconoscenza, esile quanto uno di quei soffioni di tarassaco che vengono soffiati sulla brezza come lanugine di cardo, che io giunsi infine a un’opinione che è più di un’opinione. Forse l’unica e sola opinione che è davvero più di un’opinione.
For this secret of antiseptic simplicity was really a secret; it was not obvious, and certainly not obvious at that time. It was a secret that had already been almost entirely left to, and locked up with, certain neglected and unpopular things. It was almost as if the dandelion-tea really were a medicine, and the only recipe or prescription belonged to one old woman, a ragged and nondescript old woman, rather reputed in our village to be a witch. Anyhow, it is true that both the happy hedonists and the unhappy pessimists were stiffened by the opposite principle of pride. The pessimist was proud of pessimism, because he thought nothing good enough for him; the optimist was proud of optimism, because he thought nothing was bad enough to prevent him from getting good out of it. There were valuable men of both these types; there were men with many virtues; but they not only did not possess the virtue I was thinking of, but they never thought of it. They would decide that life was no good, or that it had a great deal of good; but they were not in touch with this particular notion, of having a great deal of gratitude even for a very little good. And as I began to believe more and more that the clue was to be found in such a principle, even if it was a paradox, I was more and more disposed to seek out those who specialised in humility, though for them it was the door of heaven and for me the door of earth.
For nobody else specialises in that mystical mood in which the yellow star of the dandelion is startling, being something unexpected and undeserved. There are philosophies as varied as the flowers of the field, and some of them weeds and a few of them poisonous weeds. But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower. Men will crown themselves with flowers and brag of them, or sleep on flowers and forget them, or number and name all the flowers only in order to grow a super-flower for the Imperial International Flower Show; or, on the other hand, trample the flowers like a stampede of buffaloes, or root up the flowers as a childish camouflage of the cruelty of nature, or tear the flowers with their teeth to show that they are enlightened philosophical pessimists. But this original problem with which I myself started, the utmost possible imaginative appreciation of the flower—about that they can make nothing but blunders, in that they are ignorant of the elementary facts of human nature; in that, working wildly in all directions, they are all without exception going the wrong way to work. Since the time of which I speak, the world has in this respect grown even worse. A whole generation has been taught to talk nonsense at the top of its voice about having “a right to life” and “a right to experience” and “a right to happiness.” The lucid thinkers who talk like this generally wind up their assertion of all these extraordinary rights, by saying that there is no such thing as right and wrong. It is a little difficult, in that case, to speculate on where their rights came from; but I, at least, leaned more and more to the old philosophy which said that their real rights came from where the dandelion came from; and that they will never value either without recognising its source. And in that ultimate sense uncreated man, man merely in the position of the babe unborn, has no right even to see a dandelion; for he could not himself have invented either the dandelion or the eyesight.
I have here fallen back on one idle figure of speech from a fortunately forgotten book of verses; merely because such a thing is light and trivial, and the children puff it away like thistledown; and this will be most fitting to a place in which formal argument would be quite a misfit. But lest anyone should suppose that the notion has no relation to the argument, but is only a sentimental fancy about weeds or wild flowers, I will lightly and briefly suggest how even the figure fits in with all the aspects of the argument. For the first thing the casual critic will say is “What nonsense all this is; do you mean that a poet cannot be thankful for grass and wild flowers without connecting it with theology; let alone your theology?” To which I answer, “Yes; I mean he cannot do it without connecting it with theology, unless he can do it without connecting it with thought. If he can manage to be thankful when there is nobody to be thankful to, and no good intentions to be thankful for, then he is simply taking refuge in being thoughtless in order to avoid being thankless.” But indeed the argument goes beyond conscious gratitude, and applies to any sort of peace or confidence or repose, even unconscious confidence or repose. Even the nature-worship which Pagans have felt, even the nature-love which Pantheists have felt, ultimately depends as much on some implied purpose and positive good in things, as does the direct thanksgiving which Christians have felt. Indeed Nature is at best merely a female name we give to Providence when we are not treating it very seriously; a piece of feminist mythology. There is a sort of fireside fairytale, more fitted for the hearth than for the altar; and in that what is called Nature can be a sort of fairy godmother. But there can only be fairy godmothers because there are godmothers; and there can only be godmothers because there is God.
What has troubled me about sceptics all my life has been their extraordinary slowness in coming to the point; even to the point of their own position. I have heard them denounced, as well as admired, for their headlong haste and reckless rush of innovation; but my difficulty has always been to get them to move a few inches and finish their own argument. When first it was even hinted that the universe may not be a great design, but only a blind and indifferent growth, it ought to have been perceived instantly that this must for ever forbid any poet to retire to the green fields as to his home, or to look at the blue sky for his inspiration. There would be no more of any such traditional truth associated with green grass than with green rot or green rust; no more to be recalled by blue skies than by blue noses amputated in a freezing world of death. Poets, even Pagans, can only directly believe in Nature if they indirectly believe in God; if the second idea should really fade, the first is bound to follow sooner or later; and, merely out of a sad respect for human logic, I wish it had been sooner. Of course a man might have an almost animal appreciation of certain accidents of form or colour in a rock or a pool, as in a rag-bag or a dustbin; but that is not what the great poets or the great pagans meant by mysteries of Nature or the inspiration of the elemental powers. When there is no longer even a vague idea of purposes or presences, then the many-coloured forest really is a rag-bag and all the pageant of the dust only a dustbin. We can see this realisation creeping like a slow paralysis over all those of the newest poets who have not reacted towards religion. Their philosophy of the dandelion is not that all weeds are flowers; but rather that all flowers are weeds. Indeed it reaches to something like nightmare; as if Nature itself were unnatural. Perhaps that is why so many of them try desperately to write about machinery; touching which nobody has yet disputed the Argument from Design. No Darwin has yet maintained that motors began as scraps of metal, of which most happened to be scrapped; or that only those cars, which had grown a carburettor by accident, survived the struggle for life in Piccadilly. But whatever the reason, I have read modern poems obviously meant to make grass seem something merely scrubby and prickly and repugnant, like an unshaven chin.
Poiché questo segreto dell’antisettica semplicità era davvero un segreto; non era ovvio, e di certo non ovvio a quel tempo. Era un segreto già stato quasi interamente lasciato a, e rinchiuso con, certe cose trascurate e impopolari. Era quasi come se il tè di tarassaco fosse davvero una medicina, e l’unica ricetta o prescrizione appartenesse a una vecchia, una cenciosa e indefinibile vecchia, piuttosto reputata nel nostro villaggio una strega. Comunque, è vero che sia gli edonisti felici sia gli infelici pessimisti erano irrigiditi dal principio opposto dell’orgoglio. Il pessimista era orgoglioso del pessimismo, perché non riteneva nulla abbastanza buono per sé; l’ottimista era orgoglioso dell’ottimismo, perché riteneva che nulla fosse abbastanza cattivo da impedirgli di trarne del bene. C’erano uomini di valore di entrambi questi tipi; c’erano uomini dotati di molte virtù; ma essi non solo non possedevano la virtù a cui pensavo, ma non vi pensavano mai. Decidevano che la vita non era un granché, o che aveva un gran mucchio di bene; ma non erano in contatto con questa particolare nozione, di avere una gran dose di gratitudine anche per un pochino di bene. E man mano che cominciavo a credere sempre più che la chiave fosse da trovarsi in un simile principio, anche se era un paradosso, ero sempre più disposto a cercare coloro che si specializzavano nell’umiltà, benché per loro fosse la porta del cielo e per me la porta della terra.
Poiché nessun altro si specializza in quello stato d’animo mistico in cui la gialla stella del tarassaco è sorprendente, essendo qualcosa d’inatteso e immeritato. Ci sono filosofie varie quanto i fiori del campo, e alcune di esse erbacce e poche di esse erbacce velenose. Ma nessuna di esse crea le condizioni psicologiche in cui io per primo vidi, o desiderai vedere, il fiore. Gli uomini si incoroneranno di fiori e se ne vanteranno, o dormiranno il sonno su fiori e li dimenticheranno, o numereranno e nomineranno tutti i fiori solo per coltivare un super-fiore per l’Imperiale Internazionale Mostra dei Fiori; oppure, d’altro canto, calpesteranno i fiori come una fuga precipitosa di bufali, o sradicheranno i fiori come un puerile mascheramento della crudeltà della natura, o strapperanno i fiori coi denti per mostrare che sono illuminati pessimisti filosofici. Ma su questo problema originario da cui io stesso partii, la massima possibile apprezzazione immaginativa del fiore—su questo essi non sanno fare altro che abbagli, in quanto ignorano gli elementari fatti della natura umana; in quanto, operando follemente in tutte le direzioni, vanno tutti senza eccezione a lavorare nel modo sbagliato. Dal tempo di cui parlo, il mondo è a questo riguardo peggiorato anche di più. Un’intera generazione è stata istruita a dire sciocchezze a squarciagola sull’avere «un diritto alla vita» e «un diritto all’esperienza» e «un diritto alla felicità». I lucidi pensatori che parlano così generalmente concludono la loro affermazione di tutti questi straordinari diritti, dicendo che non esiste alcuna cosa come il giusto e lo sbagliato. È un po’ difficile, in tal caso, speculare su da dove siano venuti i loro diritti; ma io, almeno, propendevo sempre più per la vecchia filosofia che diceva che i loro veri diritti venivano da dove veniva il tarassaco; e che essi non apprezzeranno mai né l’uno né gli altri senza riconoscerne la fonte. E in quel senso ultimo l’uomo increato, l’uomo meramente nella posizione del bimbo non nato, non ha diritto nemmeno a vedere un tarassaco; poiché egli non avrebbe potuto inventare da sé né il tarassaco né la vista.
Ho qui ripiegato su un’oziosa figura retorica tratta da un fortunatamente dimenticato libro di versi; semplicemente perché una cosa simile è leggera e triviale, e i bambini la soffiano via come lanugine di cardo; e questo sarà quanto mai appropriato a un luogo in cui l’argomentazione formale sarebbe del tutto fuori posto. Ma affinché nessuno supponga che la nozione non abbia relazione con l’argomento, ma sia solo una sentimentale fantasia su erbacce o fiori selvatici, suggerirò lievemente e brevemente come persino la figura si accordi con tutti gli aspetti dell’argomento. Poiché la prima cosa che il critico casuale dirà è: «Che sciocchezze son tutte queste; vuoi forse dire che un poeta non può ringraziare l’erba e i fiori selvatici senza connetterlo con la teologia; per non parlare della tua teologia?» Al che io rispondo: «Sì; voglio dire che egli non può farlo senza connetterlo con la teologia, a meno che non possa farlo senza connetterlo col pensiero. Se riesce a essere grato quando non c’è nessuno a cui essere grato, e nessuna buona intenzione per cui essere grato, allora egli sta semplicemente rifugiandosi nell’essere sventato per evitare di essere ingrato». Ma in verità l’argomento va oltre la gratitudine cosciente, e si applica a qualsiasi sorta di pace o fiducia o riposo, persino l’inconscia fiducia o riposo. Persino il culto della natura che i Pagani hanno provato, persino l’amore della natura che i Panteisti hanno provato, dipende in ultima analisi tanto da un qualche implicito fine e positivo bene nelle cose, quanto il diretto rendimento di grazie che i Cristiani hanno provato. In verità la Natura è nel migliore dei casi solo un nome femminile che diamo alla Provvidenza quando non la trattiamo molto sul serio; un pezzo di mitologia femminista. C’è una sorta di fiaba del focolare, più adatta al focolare che all’altare; e in essa ciò che si chiama Natura può essere una sorta di fata madrina. Ma possono esserci fate madrine solo perché ci sono madrine; e possono esserci madrine solo perché c’è Dio.
Ciò che mi ha turbato negli scettici per tutta la vita è stata la loro straordinaria lentezza nel venire al punto; persino al punto della loro stessa posizione. Li ho sentiti denunciare, come pure ammirare, per la loro impetuosa fretta e sconsiderata corsa all’innovazione; ma la mia difficoltà è stata sempre indurli a spostarsi di qualche pollice e a portare a termine la loro stessa argomentazione. Quando per la prima volta si accennò appena che l’universo potrebbe non essere un grande disegno, ma solo una cieca e indifferente crescita, si sarebbe dovuto percepire all’istante che questo doveva per sempre proibire a ogni poeta di ritirarsi ai verdi campi come al proprio focolare, o di guardare l’azzurro cielo per la propria ispirazione. Non ci sarebbe più stata alcuna tale tradizionale verità associata all’erba verde di quanta ce ne sia col marciume verde o la ruggine verde; nulla più da rammentarsi con azzurri cieli di quanto con azzurri nasi amputati in un gelido mondo di Morte. I poeti, persino i Pagani, possono credere direttamente nella Natura solo se credono indirettamente in Dio; se la seconda idea dovesse davvero svanire, la prima è destinata a seguire prima o poi; e, semplicemente per un triste rispetto della logica umana, avrei desiderato che fosse stato prima. Naturalmente un uomo potrebbe avere un apprezzamento quasi animalesco di certi accidenti di forma o colore in una roccia o in una pozza, come in un sacco di stracci o in una pattumiera; ma non è questo ciò che i grandi poeti o i grandi pagani intendevano coi misteri della Natura o l’ispirazione delle potenze elementali. Quando non c’è più nemmeno una vaga idea di scopi o presenze, allora la foresta variopinta è davvero un sacco di stracci e tutto il fasto della Polvere solo una pattumiera. Possiamo vedere questa presa di coscienza insinuarsi come una lenta paralisi su tutti quei più recenti poeti che non hanno reagito verso la religione. La loro filosofia del tarassaco non è che tutte le erbacce sono fiori; ma piuttosto che tutti i fiori sono erbacce. In verità raggiunge qualcosa come l’incubo; come se la Natura stessa fosse innaturale. Forse è per questo che tanti di loro cercano disperatamente di scrivere di macchinari; riguardo ai quali nessuno ha ancora contestato l’Argomento dal Disegno. Nessun Darwin ha ancora sostenuto che i motori cominciarono come pezzi di metallo, la maggior parte dei quali capitò d’esser rottamata; o che solo quelle auto, che avevano fatto crescere un carburatore per caso, sopravvissero alla lotta per la vita a Piccadilly. Ma qualunque sia la ragione, ho letto moderne poesie evidentemente intese a far sembrare l’erba qualcosa di meramente rasposo e pungente e ripugnante, come un mento non rasato.
That is the first note; that this common human mysticism about the dust or the dandelion or the daylight or the daily life of man does depend, and always did depend on theology, if it dealt at all in thought. And if it be next asked why this theology, I answer here—because it is the only theology that has not only thought, but thought of everything. That almost any other theology or philosophy contains a truth, I do not at all deny; on the contrary, that is what I assert; and that is what I complain of. Of all the other systems or sects I know, every single one is content to follow a truth, theological or theosophical or ethical or metaphysical; and the more they claim to be universal, the more it means that they merely take something and apply it to everything. A very brilliant Hindu scholar and man of science said to me, “There is but one thing, which is unity and universality. The points in which things differ do not matter; it is only their agreement that matters.” And I answered, “The agreement we really want is the agreement between agreement and disagreement. It is the sense that things do really differ, although they are at one.” Long afterwards I found what I meant stated much better by a Catholic writer, Coventry Patmore: “God is not infinite; He is the synthesis of infinity and boundary.” In short, the other teachers were always men of one idea, even when their one idea was universality. They were always especially narrow when their one idea was breadth. I have only found one creed that could not be satisfied with a truth, but only with the Truth, which is made of a million such truths and yet is one. And even in this passing illustration about my own private fancy, this was doubly demonstrated. If I had wandered away like Bergson or Bernard Shaw, and made up my own philosophy out of my own precious fragment of truth, merely because I had found it for myself, I should soon have found that truth distorting itself into a falsehood. Even in this one case, there are two ways in which it might have turned on me and rent me. One would have been by encouraging the delusion to which I was most prone; and the other by excusing the falsehood which I thought most inexcusable. First, the very exaggeration of the sense that daylight and dandelions and all early experience are a sort of incredible vision would, if unbalanced by other truths, have become in my case very unbalanced indeed. For that notion of seeing a vision was dangerously near to my old original natural nightmare, which had led me to move about as if I were in a dream; and at one time to lose the sense of reality and with it much of the sense of responsibility. And again, on the side of responsibility, in the more practical and ethical sphere, it might have forced on me a sort of political Quietism, to which I was really as much of a conscientious objector as to Quakerism. For what could I have said, if some tyrant had twisted this idea of transcendental contentment into an excuse for tyranny? Suppose he had quoted at me my verses about the all-sufficiency of elementary existence and the green vision of life, had used them to prove that the poor should be content with anything, and had said, like the old oppressor, “Let them eat grass.”
In a word, I had the humble purpose of not being a maniac, but especially of not being a monomaniac; and above all, of not being a monomaniac about a notion merely because it was my own. The notion was normal enough, and quite consistent with the Faith; indeed, it was already a part of it. But only as a part of it could it have remained normal. And I believe this to be true of practically all the notions of which my ablest contemporaries have made new philosophies; many of them normal enough at the start. I have therefore come to the conclusion that there is a complete contemporary fallacy about the liberty of individual ideas; that such flowers grow best in a garden, and even grow biggest in a garden; and that in the wilderness they wither and die.
Here again, I am well aware that somebody will ask the natural and normally reasonable question: “Do you really mean that a man cannot object to people being asked to eat grass, unless he accepts your particular creed?” To which I will only answer for the moment, “Yes; I do mean that; but not exactly as you mean it.” I will only add here, in passing, that what really revolts me and everybody else about that famous taunt of the tyrant is that it conveys some suggestion of treating men like beasts. I will also add that it would not remove my objection, even if the beasts had enough grass, or if the botanists had proved that grass is the most nutritious diet.
Now why do I offer here this handful of scrappy topics, types, metaphors all totally disconnected? Because I am not now expounding a religious system. I am finishing a story; rounding off what has been to me at least a romance, and very much of a mystery-story. It is a purely personal narrative that began in the first pages of this book; and I am answering at the end only the questions I asked at the beginning. I have said that I had in childhood, and have partly preserved out of childhood, a certain romance of receptiveness, which has not been killed by sin or even by sorrow; for though I have not had great troubles, I have had many. A man does not grow old without being bothered; but I have grown old without being bored. Existence is still a strange thing to me; and as a stranger I give it welcome. Well, to begin with, I put that beginning of all my intellectual impulses before the authority to which I have come at the end; and I find it was there before I put it there. I find myself ratified in my realisation of the miracle of being alive; not in some hazy literary sense such as the sceptics use, but in a definite dogmatic sense; of being made alive by that which can alone work miracles.
Questa è la prima nota; che questo comune misticismo umano riguardo alla Polvere o al tarassaco o alla luce del giorno o alla vita quotidiana dell’uomo dipende davvero, e dipese sempre dalla teologia, se aveva a che fare in qualche modo col pensiero. E se si chiedesse poi perché questa teologia, rispondo qui—perché è l’unica teologia che non solo ha pensato, ma ha pensato a tutto. Che quasi qualsiasi altra teologia o filosofia contenga una verità, io non lo nego affatto; al contrario, è questo che affermo; ed è questo di cui mi lamento. Di tutti gli altri sistemi o sette che conosco, ogni singolo si accontenta di seguire una verità, teologica o teosofica o etica o metafisica; e più pretendono di essere universali, più significa che si limitano a prendere qualcosa e ad applicarlo a tutto. Un assai brillante studioso e uomo di scienza indù mi disse: «C’è una sola cosa, che è l’unità e universalità. I punti in cui le cose differiscono non contano; conta solo il loro accordo». E io risposi: «L’accordo che davvero vogliamo è l’accordo tra accordo e disaccordo. È il senso che le cose davvero differiscono, benché siano una cosa sola». Molto tempo dopo trovai ciò che intendevo enunciato assai meglio da uno scrittore cattolico, Coventry Patmore: «Dio non è infinito; Egli è la sintesi di infinità e limite». In breve, gli altri maestri erano sempre uomini di un’unica idea, persino quando la loro unica idea era l’universalità. Erano sempre specialmente angusti quando la loro unica idea era l’ampiezza. Ho trovato un solo credo che non poteva accontentarsi di una verità, ma solo della Verità, che è fatta di un milione di tali verità eppure è una. E persino in questa passeggera illustrazione riguardo alla mia stessa fantasia privata, questo fu doppiamente dimostrato. Se mi fossi allontanato come Bergson o Bernard Shaw, e avessi costruito la mia stessa filosofia con il mio stesso prezioso frammento di verità, solo perché l’avevo trovato da me, avrei presto scoperto quella verità distorcersi in una falsità. Persino in quest’unico caso, ci sono due modi in cui essa avrebbe potuto rivoltarsi contro di me e dilaniarmi. Uno sarebbe stato incoraggiando la delusione a cui ero più incline; e l’altro scusando la falsità che ritenevo più imperdonabile. Primo, la stessa esagerazione del senso che la luce del giorno e i tarassachi e ogni precoce esperienza siano una sorta d’incredibile visione, se non equilibrata da altre verità, sarebbe nel mio caso divenuta davvero assai squilibrata. Poiché quella nozione di vedere una visione era pericolosamente vicina al mio vecchio originario naturale incubo, che mi aveva indotto a muovermi come se fossi in un sogno; e a un certo tempo a perdere il senso della realtà e con esso gran parte del senso della responsabilità. E di nuovo, sul versante della responsabilità, nella sfera più pratica ed etica, essa avrebbe potuto impormi una sorta di Quietismo politico, verso il quale io ero davvero altrettanto obiettore di coscienza quanto verso il Quaccherismo. Poiché cosa avrei potuto dire, se qualche tiranno avesse contorto quest’ idea di trascendentale contentezza in una scusa per la tirannide? Supponete che egli mi avesse citato i miei versi sull’auto-sufficienza dell’esistenza elementare e la verde visione della vita, li avesse usati per provare che i poveri dovrebbero accontentarsi di qualsiasi cosa, e avesse detto, come il vecchio oppressore: «Che mangino erba».
In una parola, avevo l’umile proposito di non essere un maniaco, ma specialmente di non essere un monomaniaco; e soprattutto, di non essere un monomaniaco riguardo a una nozione solo perché era la mia. La nozione era abbastanza normale, e del tutto coerente con la Fede; anzi, ne era già una parte. Ma solo come parte di essa avrebbe potuto rimanere normale. E credo che questo sia vero di praticamente tutte le nozioni di cui i miei più capaci contemporanei hanno fatto nuove filosofie; molte di esse abbastanza normali al principio. Sono perciò giunto alla conclusione che c’è un completo errore contemporaneo riguardo alla libertà delle idee individuali; che tali fiori crescono meglio in un giardino, e persino crescono più grandi in un giardino; e che nel deserto appassiscono e muoiono.
Anche qui, sono ben consapevole che qualcuno porrà la naturale e normalmente ragionevole domanda: «Vuoi davvero dire che un uomo non può obiettare al fatto che la gente sia invitata a mangiar erba, a meno che non accetti il tuo particolare credo?» Al che risponderò solo per il momento: «Sì; voglio dire proprio questo; ma non esattamente come lo intendi tu». Aggiungerò qui soltanto, di sfuggita, che ciò che davvero ripugna a me e a chiunque altro riguardo a quel famoso dileggio del tiranno è che esso trasmette un qualche suggerimento di trattare gli uomini come bestie. Aggiungerò anche che non rimuoverebbe la mia obiezione, nemmeno se le bestie avessero abbastanza erba, o se i botanici avessero provato che l’erba è la dieta più nutriente.
Ora perché offro qui questa manciata di frammentari argomenti, tipi, metafore tutte totalmente sconnesse? Perché non sto ora esponendo un sistema religioso. Sto concludendo una storia; arrotondando ciò che è stato per me almeno un romanzo, e in gran parte una storia di mistero. È una narrazione puramente personale che cominciò nelle prime pagine di questo libro; e alla fine sto rispondendo solo alle domande che posi al principio. Ho detto che ebbi nell’infanzia, e ho in parte preservato dall’infanzia, un certo fascino di ricettività, che non è stato ucciso dal peccato né persino dal dolore; poiché benché non abbia avuto grandi guai, ne ho avuti molti. Un uomo non invecchia senza esser tormentato; ma io sono invecchiato senza essere annoiato. L’esistenza è ancora una cosa strana per me; e da straniero le do il benvenuto. Ebbene, per cominciare, pongo quell’ inizio di tutti i miei impulsi intellettuali dinanzi all’autorità alla quale sono giunto alla fine; e trovo che esso era là prima che io ve lo ponessi. Mi trovo ratificato nella mia presa di coscienza del miracolo di essere vivo; non in un qualche vago senso letterario come quello che usano gli scettici, ma in un senso preciso e dogmatico; d’esser reso vivo da ciò che può da solo operare miracoli.
I have said that this rude and primitive religion of gratitude did not save me from ingratitude; from sin which is perhaps most horrible to me because it is ingratitude. But here again I have found that the answer awaited me. Precisely because the evil was mainly of the imagination, it could only be pierced by that conception of confession which is the end of mere solitude and secrecy. I had found only one religion which dared to go down with me into the depths of myself. I know, of course, that the practice of Confession, having been reviled through three or four centuries and through the greater part of my own life, has now been revived in a belated fashion. The scientific materialists, permanently behind the times, have revived all that was reviled in it as indecent and introspective. I have heard that a new sect has started once more the practice of the most primitive monasteries, and treated the confessional as communal. Unlike the primitive monks of the desert, it seems to find a satisfaction in performing the ritual in evening-dress. In short, I would not be supposed to be ignorant of the fact that the modern world, in various groups, is now prepared to provide us with the advantages of Confession. None of the groups, so far as I know, professes to provide the minor advantage of Absolution.
I have said that my morbidities were mental as well as moral; and sounded the most appalling depths of fundamental scepticism and solipsism. And there again I found that the Church had gone before me and established her adamantine foundations; that she had affirmed the actuality of external things; so that even madmen might hear her voice; and by a revelation in their very brain begin to believe their eyes.
Finally I said I had tried, however imperfectly, to serve justice; and that I saw our industrial civilisation as rooted in injustice, long before it became so common a comment as it is today. Anybody who cares to turn up the files of the great newspapers, even those supposed to be Radical newspapers, and see what they said about the Great Strikes, and compare it with what my friends and I said at the same date, can easily test whether this is a boast or a brute fact. But anybody reading this book (if anybody does) will see that from the very beginning my instinct about justice, about liberty and equality, was somewhat different from that current in our age; and from all the tendencies towards concentration and generalisation. It was my instinct to defend liberty in small nations and poor families; that is to defend the rights of man as including the rights of property; especially the property of the poor. I did not really understand what I meant by Liberty, until I heard it called by the new name of Human Dignity. It was a new name to me; though it was part of a creed nearly two thousand years old. In short, I had blindly desired that a man should be in possession of something, if it were only his own body. In so far as materialistic concentration proceeds, a man will be in possesion of nothing; not even his own body. Already there hover on the horizon sweeping scourges of sterilisation or social hygiene, applied to everybody and imposed by nobody. At least I will not argue here with what are quaintly called the scientific authorities on the other side. I have found one authority on my side.
This story, therefore, can only end as any detective story should end, with its own particular questions answered and its own primary problem solved. Thousands of totally different stories, with totally different problems have ended in the same place with their problems solved. But for me my end is my beginning, as Maurice Baring quoted of Mary Stuart, and this overwhelming conviction that there is one key which can unlock all doors brings back to me the first glimpse of the glorious gift of the senses; and the sensational experience of sensation. And there starts up again before me, standing sharp and clear in shape as of old, the figure of a man who crosses a bridge and carries a key; as I saw him when I first looked into fairyland through the window of my father’s peep-show. But I know that he who is called Pontifex, the Builder of the Bridge, is called also Claviger, the Bearer of the Key; and that such keys were given him to bind and loose when he was a poor fisher in a far province, beside a small and almost secret sea.
Ho detto che questa rude e primitiva religione della gratitudine non mi salvò dall’ingratitudine; dal peccato che è forse per me più orribile perché è ingratitudine. Ma anche qui ho scoperto che la risposta mi attendeva. Proprio perché il male era principalmente dell’Immaginazione, esso poteva essere trafitto solo da quella concezione della confessione che è la fine della mera Solitudine e segretezza. Avevo trovato una sola religione che osasse scendere con me nelle profondità di me stesso. So, naturalmente, che la pratica della Confessione, essendo stata vilipesa attraverso tre o quattro secoli e attraverso la maggior parte della mia stessa vita, è ora stata rianimata in modo tardivo. I materialisti scientifici, permanentemente indietro coi tempi, hanno rianimato tutto ciò che in essa era vilipeso come indecente e introspettivo. Ho sentito che una nuova setta ha ripreso ancora una volta la pratica dei più primitivi monasteri, e ha trattato il confessionale come comunale. A differenza dei primitivi Monaci del Deserto, pare che trovi una soddisfazione nell’eseguire il rito in abito da sera. In breve, non vorrei essere ritenuto ignaro del fatto che il mondo moderno, in vari gruppi, è ora pronto a fornirci i vantaggi della Confessione. Nessuno dei gruppi, per quanto ne so, professa di fornire il minor vantaggio dell’Assoluzione.
Ho detto che le mie morbosità erano mentali oltre che pure morali; e ho sondato le più spaventose profondità dello scetticismo fondamentale e del solipsismo. E anche là scoprii che la Chiesa era andata avanti a me e aveva stabilito le sue adamantine fondamenta; che aveva affermato l’attualità delle cose esterne; così che persino i pazzi potessero udire la sua voce; e per una rivelazione nel loro stesso cervello cominciare a credere ai propri occhi.
Infine dissi che avevo cercato, per quanto imperfettamente, di servire la giustizia; e che vedevo la nostra civiltà industriale come radicata nell’ingiustizia, molto prima che divenisse un commento così comune come lo è oggi. Chiunque abbia voglia di consultare gli archivi dei grandi giornali, persino di quelli supposti Radicali, e di vedere cosa dissero sui Grandi Scioperi, e di confrontarlo con ciò che i miei amici e io dicemmo alla stessa data, può facilmente verificare se questa sia una vanteria o un bruto fatto. Ma chiunque legga questo libro (se qualcuno lo legge) vedrà che fin dall’inizio il mio istinto sulla giustizia, sulla libertà e sull’uguaglianza, era in qualche modo diverso da quello corrente nella nostra età; e da tutte le tendenze verso la concentrazione e la generalizzazione. Era mio istinto difendere la libertà nelle piccole nazioni e nelle povere famiglie; ossia difendere i diritti dell’uomo comprendendo i diritti della proprietà; specialmente la proprietà dei poveri. Non capii davvero cosa intendessi per Libertà, finché non la sentii chiamare col nuovo nome di Dignità Umana. Era per me un nome nuovo; benché fosse parte di un credo vecchio quasi duemila anni. In breve, avevo ciecamente desiderato che un uomo fosse in possesso di qualcosa, fosse pure solo il proprio corpo. Nella misura in cui la materialistica concentrazione procede, un uomo sarà in possesso di nulla; nemmeno del proprio corpo. Già si profilano all’orizzonte spazzanti flagelli di sterilizzazione o igiene sociale, applicati a tutti e imposti da nessuno. Almeno non discuterò qui con ciò che vengono bizzarramente chiamate le autorità scientifiche dell’altra parte. Ho trovato un’autorità dalla mia parte.
Questa storia, perciò, può concludersi solo come dovrebbe concludersi qualsiasi storia poliziesca, con le sue proprie particolari domande risposte e il suo proprio problema primario risolto. Migliaia di storie totalmente diverse, con problemi totalmente diversi, sono finite nello stesso luogo coi loro problemi risolti. Ma per me la mia fine è il mio inizio, come Maurice Baring citò di Maria Stuarda, e questa travolgente convinzione che c’è una chiave che può aprire tutte le porte mi riporta il primo barlume del glorioso dono dei sensi; e la sensazionale esperienza della sensazione. E si erge di nuovo dinanzi a me, stagliandosi netta e chiara nella forma come un tempo, la figura di un uomo che attraversa un ponte e porta una chiave; come lo vidi quando per la prima volta scrutai nel paese delle fate attraverso l’oblò del teatrino di mio padre. Ma so che colui che è chiamato Pontifex, il Costruttore del Ponte, è chiamato anche Claviger, il Portatore della Chiave; e che tali chiavi gli furono date per legare e sciogliere quando era un povero pescatore in una lontana provincia, presso un mare piccolo e quasi segreto.