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THE DEFENDANT
BY G. K. CHESTERTON
AUTHOR OF ‘THE WILD KNIGHT’ AND ‘GREYBEARDS AT PLAY’
SECOND EDITION
LONDON. MDCCCCII
R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON
The ‘Defences’ of which this volume is composed have appeared in The Speaker, and are here reprinted, after revision and amplification, by permission of the Editor. Portions of ‘The Defence of Publicity’ appeared in The Daily News.
October, 1901.
CONTENTS
IN DEFENCE OF A NEW EDITION
INTRODUCTION
A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS
A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS
A DEFENCE OF SKELETONS
A DEFENCE OF PUBLICITY
A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE
A DEFENCE OF PLANETS
A DEFENCE OF CHINA SHEPHERDESSES
A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION
A DEFENCE OF HERALDRY
A DEFENCE OF UGLY THINGS
A DEFENCE OF FARCE
A DEFENCE OF HUMILITY
A DEFENCE OF SLANG
A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP
A DEFENCE OF DETECTIVE STORIES
A DEFENCE OF PATRIOTISM
_IN DEFENCE OF A NEW EDITION
The reissue of a series of essays so ephemeral and even superfluous may seem at the first glance to require some excuse; probably the best excuse is that they will have been completely forgotten, and therefore may be read again with entirely new sensations. I am not sure, however, that this claim is so modest as it sounds, for I fancy that Shakespeare and Balzac, if moved to prayers, might not ask to be remembered, but to be forgotten, and forgotten thus; for if they were forgotten they would be everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are. The ancients were not wrong when they made Lethe the boundary of a better land; perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb back upon the bank of the earth and fancy himself in Elysium.
If, therefore, I am certain that most sensible people have forgotten the existence of this book—I do not speak in modesty or in pride—I wish only to state a simple and somewhat beautiful fact. In one respect the passing of the period during which a book can be considered current has afflicted me with some melancholy, for I had intended to write anonymously in some daily paper a thorough and crushing exposure of the work inspired mostly by a certain artistic impatience of the too indulgent tone of the critiques and the manner in which a vast number of my most monstrous fallacies have passed unchallenged. I will not repeat that powerful article here, for it cannot be necessary to do anything more than warn the reader against the perfectly indefensible line of argument adopted at the end of p. 28. I am also conscious that the title of the book is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is a legal metaphor, and, speaking legally, a defendant is not an enthusiast for the character of King John or the domestic virtues of the prairie-dog. He is one who defends himself, a thing which the present writer, however poisoned his mind may be with paradox, certainly never dreamed of attempting.
Criticism upon the book considered as literature, if it can be so considered, I should, of course, never dream of discussing—firstly, because it is ridiculous to do so; and, secondly, because there was, in my opinion, much justice in such criticism.
But there is one matter on which an author is generally considered as having a right to explain himself, since it has nothing to do with capacity or intelligence, and that is the question of his morals.
I am proud to say that a furious, uncompromising, and very effective attack was made upon what was alleged to be the utter immorality of this book by my excellent friend Mr. C.F.G. Masterman, in the ‘Speaker.’ The tendency of that criticism was to the effect that I was discouraging improvement and disguising scandals by my offensive optimism. Quoting the passage in which I said that ‘diamonds were to be found in the dust-bin,’ he said: ‘There is no difficulty in finding good in what humanity rejects. The difficulty is to find it in what humanity accepts. The diamond is easy enough to find in the dust-bin. The difficulty is to find it in the drawing-room.’ I must admit, for my part, without the slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing-room. But I merely mention this purely ethical attack in order to state, in as few sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into decay. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. No man ever did, and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an ugly thing beautiful. There must be some germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf for Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.
G. K. C_.
THE DEFENDANT
INTRODUCTION
In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a level, and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose. The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some words—words that seemed shameful and tremendous—and the world, in terror, buried him under a wilderness of stones. The place is the monument of an ancient fear.
If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would he more difficult to imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation—it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.
Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope—the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of human history—that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.
This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.
The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple. Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in general.
It becomes increasingly apparent, therefore, that the world is in a permanent danger of being misjudged. That this is no fanciful or mystical idea may be tested by simple examples. The two absolutely basic words ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ descriptive of two primal and inexplicable sensations, are not, and never have been, used properly. Things that are bad are not called good by any people who experience them; but things that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity.
Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one’s back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.
Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. I have found that every man is disposed to call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is, and the snow of Christmas a little less white than it is; therefore I have imagined that the main business of a man, however humble, is defence. I have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings despise the world—that a counsel for the defence would not have been out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary and Man was rejected of men.
A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.
In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.
To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current boys’ literature of the lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture. But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personæ, but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I wish sincerely that anyone had the moral courage to spread that carpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly be too short, for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight. And so, while the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.
But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common-sense recognition of this fact—that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness—we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under discussion do not read ‘The Egoist’ and ‘The Master Builder.’ It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child’s knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence of Mr. George Moore’s novels, I should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.
Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys’ novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish.
So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy, recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanized and naked narrative as this.
Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott’s ‘Ivanhoe,’ Scott’s ‘Rob Roy,’ Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake,’ Byron’s ‘Corsair,’ Wordsworth’s ‘Rob Roy’s Grave,’ Stevenson’s ‘Macaire,’ Mr. Max Pemberton’s ‘Iron Pirate,’ and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in ‘Ivanhoe’ will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it. It might at least cross our minds that, for whatever other reason the errand-boy reads ‘The Red Revenge,’ it really is not because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.
In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says, with a modest swagger, ‘I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea.’ If he said ‘I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea,’ everyone would see the humour of so simple a classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.
If the authors and publishers of ‘Dick Deadshot,’ and such remarkable works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.
But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are the criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a ‘many-faced and fickle traitor,’ but at least it is a better aim than to be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d’Annunzio’s downwards. So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life—have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a ‘blood and thunder’ literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS
If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill’s ‘Liberty’ seventy-six times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes expressed, was ‘an artist in life.’ Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures in civic and national civilization—by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get there.
But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as symbols of the ‘decadence.’ But the men who did these things were not decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall, unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains together, and that, if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one’s self, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously significant phrase, another man. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the Decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday, Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend the feelings of a man about to be hanged:
‘For he that lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.’
And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us—this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.
Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief, or love, or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it exegi monumentum oere perennius was the only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together. But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a vow. For what could be more maddening than an existence in which our mother or aunt received the information that we were going to assassinate the King or build a temple on Ben Nevis with the genial composure of custom?
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—‘free-love’—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.
In Mr. Bernard Shaw’s brilliant play ‘The Philanderer,’ we have a vivid picture of this state of things. Charteris is a man perpetually endeavouring to be a free-lover, which is like endeavouring to be a married bachelor or a white negro. He is wandering in a hungry search for a certain exhilaration which he can only have when he has the courage to cease from wandering. Men knew better than this in old times—in the time, for example, of Shakespeare’s heroes. When Shakespeare’s men are really celibate they praise the undoubted advantages of celibacy, liberty, irresponsibility, a chance of continual change. But they were not such fools as to continue to talk of liberty when they were in such a condition that they could be made happy or miserable by the moving of someone else’s eyebrow. Suckling classes love with debt in his praise of freedom.
‘And he that’s fairly out of both Of all the world is blest. He lives as in the golden age, When all things made were common; He takes his pipe, he takes his glass, He fears no man or woman.’
This is a perfectly possible, rational and manly position. But what have lovers to do with ridiculous affectations of fearing no man or woman? They know that in the turning of a hand the whole cosmic engine to the remotest star may become an instrument of music or an instrument of torture. They hear a song older than Suckling’s, that has survived a hundred philosophies. ‘Who is this that looketh out of the window, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners?’
As we have said, it is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterilizing spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern Jingoes practically say, ‘Let us have the pleasures of conquerors without the pains of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.’ Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent mystics say: ‘Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint; let us sing hymns alternately to the Virgin and Priapus.’ Thus in love the free-lovers say: ‘Let us have the splendour of offering ourselves without the peril of committing ourselves; let us see whether one cannot commit suicide an unlimited number of times.’
Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.
A DEFENCE OF SKELETONS
Some little time ago I stood among immemorial English trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils. As I walked among these living pillars I became gradually aware that the rustics who lived and died in their shadow adopted a very curious conversational tone. They seemed to be constantly apologizing for the trees, as if they were a very poor show. After elaborate investigation, I discovered that their gloomy and penitent tone was traceable to the fact that it was winter and all the trees were bare. I assured them that I did not resent the fact that it was winter, that I knew the thing had happened before, and that no forethought on their part could have averted this blow of destiny. But I could not in any way reconcile them to the fact that it was winter. There was evidently a general feeling that I had caught the trees in a kind of disgraceful deshabille, and that they ought not to be seen until, like the first human sinners, they had covered themselves with leaves. So it is quite clear that, while very few people appear to know anything of how trees look in winter, the actual foresters know less than anyone. So far from the line of the tree when it is bare appearing harsh and severe, it is luxuriantly indefinable to an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette. The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in comparison hard, gross and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders’ webs.
But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a pianist. When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor over hill and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they were less like mops. But it does appear to be a deep and essential difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure, or of the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.
The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.
One ground exists for this terror: a strange idea has infected humanity that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left naked after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution; but both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own, all the pulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, in the House of Livelihood as in the House of Life. There is no reason why this creature (new, as I fancy, to art), the living skeleton, should not become the essential symbol of life.
The truth is that man’s horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all. It is man’s eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be genteel—a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of animals carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous shapes and appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs, when they are necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big for its body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour rather abruptly deserts him.
In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the mere dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went to meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity, an endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that they would fall into one grinning man-trap, and not rise again. That the whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous, they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were taught that death was humorous.
There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what we call Nature lie in her beauty. But the fact that Nature is beautiful in the sense that a dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful, is only one of her charms, and almost an accidental one. The highest and most valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and defiant ugliness. A hundred instances might be taken. The croaking noise of the rooks is, in itself, as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a London railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse kindliness and honesty, and the lover in ‘Maud’ could actually persuade himself that this abominable noise resembled his lady-love’s name. Has the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting? It is a noise that does a man good—a strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest, the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of Nature—the value which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as grotesque, as solemn and as happy as a child. The mood does come when we see all her shapes like shapes that a baby scrawls upon a slate—simple, rudimentary, a million years older and stronger than the whole disease that is called Art. The objects of earth and heaven seem to combine into a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and levity. The tree above my head is flapping like some gigantic bird standing on one leg; the moon is like the eye of a Cyclops. And, however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for ever.
A DEFENCE OF PUBLICITY
It is a very significant fact that the form of art in which the modern world has certainly not improved upon the ancient is what may roughly be called the art of the open air. Public monuments have certainly not improved, nor has the criticism of them improved, as is evident from the fashion of condemning such a large number of them as pompous. An interesting essay might be written on the enormous number of words that are used as insults when they are really compliments. It is in itself a singular study in that tendency which, as I have said, is always making things out worse than they are, and necessitating a systematic attitude of defence. Thus, for example, some dramatic critics cast contempt upon a dramatic performance by calling it theatrical, which simply means that it is suitable to a theatre, and is as much a compliment as calling a poem poetical. Similarly we speak disdainfully of a certain kind of work as sentimental, which simply means possessing the admirable and essential quality of sentiment. Such phrases are all parts of one peddling and cowardly philosophy, and remind us of the days when ‘enthusiast’ was a term of reproach. But of all this vocabulary of unconscious eulogies nothing is more striking than the word ‘pompous.’
Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous. Pomp is its very object; it would be absurd to have columns and pyramids blushing in some coy nook like violets in the woods of spring. And public monuments have in this matter a great and much-needed lesson to teach. Valour and mercy and the great enthusiasms ought to be a great deal more public than they are at present. We are too fond nowadays of committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence. We have forgotten the old and wholesome morality of the Book of Proverbs, ‘Wisdom crieth without; her voice is heard in the streets.’ In Athens and Florence her voice was heard in the streets. They had an outdoor life of war and argument, and they had what modern commercial civilization has never had—an outdoor art. Religious services, the most sacred of all things, have always been held publicly; it is entirely a new and debased notion that sanctity is the same as secrecy. A great many modern poets, with the most abstruse and delicate sensibilities, love darkness, when all is said and done, much for the same reason that thieves love it. The mission of a great spire or statue should be to strike the spirit with a sudden sense of pride as with a thunderbolt. It should lift us with it into the empty and ennobling air. Along the base of every noble monument, whatever else may be written there, runs in invisible letters the lines of Swinburne:
‘This thing is God: To be man with thy might, To go straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life in the light.’
If a public monument does not meet this first supreme and obvious need, that it should be public and monumental, it fails from the outset.
There has arisen lately a school of realistic sculpture, which may perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and depressing object in the universe—far more hideous and depressing than one of Mr. H.G. Wells’s shapeless monsters of the slime (and not at all unlike them)—is the statue of an English philanthropist. Almost as bad, though, of course, not quite as bad, are the statues of English politicians in Parliament Fields. Each of them is cased in a cylindrical frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking garment over the arm that might be either a bathing-towel or a light great-coat. Each of them is in an oratorical attitude, which has all the disadvantage of being affected without even any of the advantages of being theatrical. Let no one suppose that such abortions arise merely from technical demerit. In every line of those leaden dolls is expressed the fact that they were not set up with any heat of natural enthusiasm for beauty or dignity. They were set up mechanically, because it would seem indecorous or stingy if they were not set up. They were even set up sulkily, in a utilitarian age which was haunted by the thought that there were a great many more sensible ways of spending money. So long as this is the dominant national sentiment, the land is barren, statues and churches will not grow—for they have to grow, as much as trees and flowers. But this moral disadvantage which lay so heavily upon the early Victorian sculpture lies in a modified degree upon that rough, picturesque, commonplace sculpture which has begun to arise, and of which the statue of Darwin in the South Kensington Museum and the statue of Gordon in Trafalgar Square are admirable examples. It is not enough for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it must be striking; it must be in the highest sense of the word sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the longest and blackest catalogue has been made of all our crimes and follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.
The two modes of commemorating a public man are a statue and a biography. They are alike in certain respects, as, for example, in the fact that neither of them resembles the original, and that both of them commonly tone down not only all a man’s vices, but all the more amusing of his virtues. But they are treated in one respect differently. We never hear anything about biography without hearing something about the sanctity of private life and the necessity for suppressing the whole of the most important part of a man’s existence. The sculptor does not work at this disadvantage. The sculptor does not leave out the nose of an eminent philanthropist because it is too beautiful to be given to the public; he does not depict a statesman with a sack over his head because his smile was too sweet to be endurable in the light of day. But in biography the thesis is popularly and solidly maintained, so that it requires some courage even to hint a doubt of it, that the better a man was, the more truly human life he led, the less should be said about it.
For this idea, this modern idea that sanctity is identical with secrecy, there is one thing at least to be said. It is for all practical purposes an entirely new idea; it was unknown to all the ages in which the idea of sanctity really flourished. The record of the great spiritual movements of mankind is dead against the idea that spirituality is a private matter. The most awful secret of every man’s soul, its most lonely and individual need, its most primal and psychological relationship, the thing called worship, the communication between the soul and the last reality—this most private matter is the most public spectacle in the world. Anyone who chooses to walk into a large church on Sunday morning may see a hundred men each alone with his Maker. He stands, in truth, in the presence of one of the strangest spectacles in the world—a mob of hermits. And in thus definitely espousing publicity by making public the most internal mystery, Christianity acts in accordance with its earliest origins and its terrible beginning. It was surely by no accident that the spectacle which darkened the sun at noonday was set upon a hill. The martyrdoms of the early Christians were public not only by the caprice of the oppressor, but by the whole desire and conception of the victims.
The mere grammatical meaning of the word ‘martyr’ breaks into pieces at a blow the whole notion of the privacy of goodness. The Christian martyrdoms were more than demonstrations: they were advertisements. In our day the new theory of spiritual delicacy would desire to alter all this. It would permit Christ to be crucified if it was necessary to His Divine nature, but it would ask in the name of good taste why He could not be crucified in a private room. It would declare that the act of a martyr in being torn in pieces by lions was vulgar and sensational, though, of course, it would have no objection to being torn in pieces by a lion in one’s own parlour before a circle of really intimate friends.
It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars have never lost their sanctity, and they are more shameless and naked and numerous than advertisements of Pears’ soap. It would be a strange world indeed if Nature was suddenly stricken with this ethereal shame, if the trees grew with their roots in the air and their load of leaves and blossoms underground, if the flowers closed at dawn and opened at sunset, if the sunflower turned towards the darkness, and the birds flew, like bats, by night.
A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE
There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown from a boy’s bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is ‘the heir of all the ages’ is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.
The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt and inventive in any age; and if we were asked what was the best proof of this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say, with all respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies, that it was to be found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of nonsense. ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose,’ at least, is original, as the first ship and the first plough were original.
It is true in a certain sense that some of the greatest writers the world has seen—Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne—have written nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different sense. The nonsense of these men was satiric—that is to say, symbolic; it was a kind of exuberant capering round a discovered truth. There is all the difference in the world between the instinct of satire, which, seeing in the Kaiser’s moustaches something typical of him, draws them continually larger and larger; and the instinct of nonsense which, for no reason whatever, imagines what those moustaches would look like on the present Archbishop of Canterbury if he grew them in a fit of absence of mind. We incline to think that no age except our own could have understood that the Quangle-Wangle meant absolutely nothing, and the Lands of the Jumblies were absolutely nowhere. We fancy that if the account of the knave’s trial in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ had been published in the seventeenth century it would have been bracketed with Bunyan’s ‘Trial of Faithful’ as a parody on the State prosecutions of the time. We fancy that if ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’ had appeared in the same period everyone would have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell.
It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr. Lear’s ‘Nonsense Rhymes.’ To our mind he is both chronologically and essentially the father of nonsense; we think him superior to Lewis Carroll. In one sense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth and in dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of nonsense—the idea of escape, of escape into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear-trees, and any odd man you meet may have three legs. Lewis Carroll, living one life in which he would have thundered morally against any one who walked on the wrong plot of grass, and another life in which he would cheerfully call the sun green and the moon blue, was, by his very divided nature, his one foot on both worlds, a perfect type of the position of modern nonsense. His Wonderland is a country populated by insane mathematicians. We feel the whole is an escape into a world of masquerade; we feel that if we could pierce their disguises, we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare were Professors and Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental holiday. This sense of escape is certainly less emphatic in Edward Lear, because of the completeness of his citizenship in the world of unreason. We do not know his prosaic biography as we know Lewis Carroll’s. We accept him as a purely fabulous figure, on his own description of himself:
‘His body is perfectly spherical, He weareth a runcible hat.’
While Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is purely intellectual, Lear introduces quite another element—the element of the poetical and even emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong a contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded reason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.
‘Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live,’
is an entirely different type of poetry to that exhibited in ‘Jabberwocky.’ Carroll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, makes his whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words. But Edward Lear, with more subtle and placid effrontery, is always introducing scraps of his own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational statements, until we are almost stunned into admitting that we know what they mean. There is a genial ring of commonsense about such lines as,
‘For his aunt Jobiska said “Every one knows That a Pobble is better without his toes,”’
which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The poet seems so easy on the matter that we are almost driven to pretend that we see his meaning, that we know the peculiar difficulties of a Pobble, that we are as old travellers in the ‘Gromboolian Plain’ as he is.
Our claim that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than a mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth. The principle of art for art’s sake is a very good principle if it means that there is a vital distinction between the earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it is a very bad principle if it means that the tree could grow just as well with its roots in the air. Every great literature has always been allegorical—allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The ‘Iliad’ is only great because all life is a battle, the ‘Odyssey’ because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle. There is one attitude in which we think that all existence is summed up in the word ‘ghosts’; another, and somewhat better one, in which we think it is summed up in the words ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ Even the vulgarest melodrama or detective story can be good if it expresses something of the delight in sinister possibilities—the healthy lust for darkness and terror which may come on us any night in walking down a dark lane. If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be the tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a very unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things. Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the ‘wonders’ of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple with only two.
This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder. It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it. ‘Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?’ This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that ‘faith is nonsense,’ does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith.
A DEFENCE OF PLANETS
A book has at one time come under my notice called ‘Terra Firma: the Earth not a Planet.’ The author was a Mr. D. Wardlaw Scott, and he quoted very seriously the opinions of a large number of other persons, of whom we have never heard, but who are evidently very important. Mr. Beach of Southsea, for example, thinks that the world is flat; and in Southsea perhaps it is. It is no part of my present intention, however, to follow Mr. Scott’s arguments in detail. On the lines of such arguments it may be shown that the earth is flat, and, for the matter of that, that it is triangular. A few examples will suffice:
One of Mr. Scott’s objections was that if a projectile is fired from a moving body there is a difference in the distance to which it carries according to the direction in which it is sent. But as in practice there is not the slightest difference whichever way the thing is done, in the case of the earth ‘we have a forcible overthrow of all fancies relative to the motion of the earth, and a striking proof that the earth is not a globe.’
This is altogether one of the quaintest arguments we have ever seen. It never seems to occur to the author, among other things, that when the firing and falling of the shot all take place upon the moving body, there is nothing whatever to compare them with. As a matter of fact, of course, a shot fired at an elephant does actually often travel towards the marksman, but much slower than the marksman travels. Mr. Scott probably would not like to contemplate the fact that the elephant, properly speaking, swings round and hits the bullet. To us it appears full of a rich cosmic humour.
I will only give one other example of the astronomical proofs:
‘If the earth were a globe, the distance round the surface, say, at 45 degrees south latitude, could not possibly be any greater than the same latitude north; but since it is found by navigators to be twice the distance—to say the least of it—or double the distance it ought to be according to the globular theory, it is a proof that the earth is not a globe.’
This sort of thing reduces my mind to a pulp. I can faintly resist when a man says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have four legs; but when he says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have five legs I am crushed.
But, as I have indicated, it is not in the scientific aspect of this remarkable theory that I am for the moment interested. It is rather with the difference between the flat and the round worlds as conceptions in art and imagination that I am concerned. It is a very remarkable thing that none of us are really Copernicans in our actual outlook upon things. We are convinced intellectually that we inhabit a small provincial planet, but we do not feel in the least suburban. Men of science have quarrelled with the Bible because it is not based upon the true astronomical system, but it is certainly open to the orthodox to say that if it had been it would never have convinced anybody.
If a single poem or a single story were really transfused with the Copernican idea, the thing would be a nightmare. Can we think of a solemn scene of mountain stillness in which some prophet is standing in a trance, and then realize that the whole scene is whizzing round like a zoetrope at the rate of nineteen miles a second? Could we tolerate the notion of a mighty King delivering a sublime fiat and then remember that for all practical purposes he is hanging head downwards in space? A strange fable might be written of a man who was blessed or cursed with the Copernican eye, and saw all men on the earth like tintacks clustering round a magnet. It would be singular to imagine how very different the speech of an aggressive egoist, announcing the independence and divinity of man, would sound if he were seen hanging on to the planet by his boot soles.
For, despite Mr. Wardlaw Scott’s horror at the Newtonian astronomy and its contradiction of the Bible, the whole distinction is a good instance of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of gravitation has a curiously Hebrew sentiment in it—a sentiment of combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity, by which all things hang upon one thread. ‘Thou hast hanged the world upon nothing,’ said the author of the Book of Job, and in that sentence wrote the whole appalling poetry of modern astronomy. The sense of the preciousness and fragility of the universe, the sense of being in the hollow of a hand, is one which the round and rolling earth gives in its most thrilling form. Mr. Wardlaw Scott’s flat earth would be the true territory for a comfortable atheist. Nor would the old Jews have any objection to being as much upside down as right way up. They had no foolish ideas about the dignity of man.
It would be an interesting speculation to imagine whether the world will ever develop a Copernican poetry and a Copernican habit of fancy; whether we shall ever speak of ‘early earth-turn’ instead of ‘early sunrise,’ and speak indifferently of looking up at the daisies, or looking down on the stars. But if we ever do, there are really a large number of big and fantastic facts awaiting us, worthy to make a new mythology. Mr. Wardlaw Scott, for example, with genuine, if unconscious, imagination, says that according to astronomers, ‘the sea is a vast mountain of water miles high.’ To have discovered that mountain of moving crystal, in which the fishes build like birds, is like discovering Atlantis: it is enough to make the old world young again. In the new poetry which we contemplate, athletic young men will set out sturdily to climb up the face of the sea. If we once realize all this earth as it is, we should find ourselves in a land of miracles: we shall discover a new planet at the moment that we discover our own. Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on a star.
In the early days of the world, the discovery of a fact of natural history was immediately followed by the realization of it as a fact of poetry. When man awoke from the long fit of absent-mindedness which is called the automatic animal state, and began to notice the queer facts that the sky was blue and the grass green, he immediately began to use those facts symbolically. Blue, the colour of the sky, became a symbol of celestial holiness; green passed into the language as indicating a freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue, the symbolism would have been different. But for some mysterious reason this habit of realizing poetically the facts of science has ceased abruptly with scientific progress, and all the confounding portents preached by Galileo and Newton have fallen on deaf ears. They painted a picture of the universe compared with which the Apocalypse with its falling stars was a mere idyll. They declared that we are all careering through space, clinging to a cannon-ball, and the poets ignore the matter as if it were a remark about the weather. They say that an invisible force holds us in our own armchairs while the earth hurtles like a boomerang; and men still go back to dusty records to prove the mercy of God. They tell us that Mr. Scott’s monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a fact, and men still go back to the fairy-tale. To what towering heights of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of natural history had continued and man’s fancy had played with the planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers! We might have had a planetary patriotism, in which the green leaf should be like a cockade, and the sea an everlasting dance of drums. We might have been proud of what our star has wrought, and worn its heraldry haughtily in the blind tournament of the spheres. All this, indeed, we may surely do yet; for with all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing happily that no man knows: whether the world is old or young.
A DEFENCE OF CHINA SHEPHERDESSES
There are some things of which the world does not like to be reminded, for they are the dead loves of the world. One of these is that great enthusiasm for the Arcadian life which, however much it may now lie open to the sneers of realism, did, beyond all question, hold sway for an enormous period of the world’s history, from the times that we describe as ancient down to times that may fairly be called recent. The conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of Theocritus, of Virgil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, of Shakespeare, and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathen were stone and brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of the China Shepherdess. The Catholic Church and the Ideal Shepherd are indeed almost the only things that have bridged the abyss between the ancient world and the modern. Yet, as we say, the world does not like to be reminded of this boyish enthusiasm.
But imagination, the function of the historian, cannot let so great an element alone. By the cheap revolutionary it is commonly supposed that imagination is a merely rebellious thing, that it has its chief function in devising new and fantastic republics. But imagination has its highest use in a retrospective realization. The trumpet of imagination, like the trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves. Imagination sees Delphi with the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem with the eyes of a Crusader, Paris with the eyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with the eyes of a Euphuist. The prime function of imagination is to see our whole orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions. In spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders. To the imaginative the truisms are all paradoxes, since they were paradoxes in the Stone Age; to them the ordinary copy-book blazes with blasphemy.
Let us, then, consider in this light the old pastoral or Arcadian ideal. But first certainly one thing must be definitely recognised. This Arcadian art and literature is a lost enthusiasm. To study it is like fumbling in the love-letters of a dead man. To us its flowers seem as tawdry as cockades; the lambs that dance to the shepherd’s pipe seem to dance with all the artificiality of a ballet. Even our own prosaic toil seems to us more joyous than that holiday. Where its ancient exuberance passed the bounds of wisdom and even of virtue, its caperings seem frozen into the stillness of an antique frieze. In those gray old pictures a bacchanal seems as dull as an archdeacon. Their very sins seem colder than our restraints.
All this may be frankly recognised: all the barren sentimentality of the Arcadian ideal and all its insolent optimism. But when all is said and done, something else remains.
Through ages in which the most arrogant and elaborate ideals of power and civilization held otherwise undisputed sway, the ideal of the perfect and healthy peasant did undoubtedly represent in some shape or form the conception that there was a dignity in simplicity and a dignity in labour. It was good for the ancient aristocrat, even if he could not attain to innocence and the wisdom of the earth, to believe that these things were the secrets of the priesthood of the poor. It was good for him to believe that even if heaven was not above him, heaven was below him. It was well that he should have amid all his flamboyant triumphs the never-extinguished sentiment that there was something better than his triumphs, the conception that ‘there remaineth a rest.’
The conception of the Ideal Shepherd seems absurd to our modern ideas. But, after all, it was perhaps the only trade of the democracy which was equalized with the trades of the aristocracy even by the aristocracy itself. The shepherd of pastoral poetry was, without doubt, very different from the shepherd of actual fact. Where one innocently piped to his lambs, the other innocently swore at them; and their divergence in intellect and personal cleanliness was immense. But the difference between the ideal shepherd who danced with Amaryllis and the real shepherd who thrashed her is not a scrap greater than the difference between the ideal soldier who dies to capture the colours and the real soldier who lives to clean his accoutrements, between the ideal priest who is everlastingly by someone’s bed and the real priest who is as glad as anyone else to get to his own. There are ideal conceptions and real men in every calling; yet there are few who object to the ideal conceptions, and not many, after all, who object to the real men.
The fact, then, is this: So far from resenting the existence in art and literature of an ideal shepherd, I genuinely regret that the shepherd is the only democratic calling that has ever been raised to the level of the heroic callings conceived by an aristocratic age. So far from objecting to the Ideal Shepherd, I wish there were an Ideal Postman, an Ideal Grocer, and an Ideal Plumber. It is undoubtedly true that we should laugh at the idea of an Ideal Postman; it is true, and it proves that we are not genuine democrats.
Undoubtedly the modern grocer, if called upon to act in an Arcadian manner, if desired to oblige with a symbolic dance expressive of the delights of grocery, or to perform on some simple instrument while his assistants skipped around him, would be embarrassed, and perhaps even reluctant. But it may be questioned whether this temporary reluctance of the grocer is a good thing, or evidence of a good condition of poetic feeling in the grocery business as a whole. There certainly should be an ideal image of health and happiness in any trade, and its remoteness from the reality is not the only important question. No one supposes that the mass of traditional conceptions of duty and glory are always operative, for example, in the mind of a soldier or a doctor; that the Battle of Waterloo actually makes a private enjoy pipeclaying his trousers, or that the ‘health of humanity’ softens the momentary phraseology of a physician called out of bed at two o’clock in the morning. But although no ideal obliterates the ugly drudgery and detail of any calling, that ideal does, in the case of the soldier or the doctor, exist definitely in the background and makes that drudgery worth while as a whole. It is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists in the case of the vast number of honourable trades and crafts on which the existence of a modern city depends. It is a pity that current thought and sentiment offer nothing corresponding to the old conception of patron saints. If they did there would be a Patron Saint of Plumbers, and this would alone be a revolution, for it would force the individual craftsman to believe that there was once a perfect being who did actually plumb.
When all is said and done, then, we think it much open to question whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance of the ideal of the happy peasant. It is foolish enough to suppose that the rustic went about all over ribbons, but it is better than knowing that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact. The modern realistic study of the poor does in reality lead the student further astray than the old idyllic notion. For we cannot get the chiaroscuro of humble life so long as its virtues seem to us as gross as its vices and its joys as sullen as its sorrows. Probably at the very moment that we can see nothing but a dull-faced man smoking and drinking heavily with his friend in a pot-house, the man himself is on his soul’s holiday, crowned with the flowers of a passionate idleness, and far more like the Happy Peasant than the world will ever know.
A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION
It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realize that all of us, ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with the most undisputed and depressing facts. Men are not apparently so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time that it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated papers, such as Tit-Bits, Science Siftings, and many of the illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous passages in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings. It is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother Seigel’s Syrup because he wished to know what eventually happened to the young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel, whatever our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures; at the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy bull-baiting or getting drunk. But the literature of information is absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory. To read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise. It is this fact which constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this particular branch of popular literature.
Primarily, at least, there is one rather peculiar thing which must in justice be said about it. The readers of this strange science must be allowed to be, upon the whole, as disinterested as a prophet seeing visions or a child reading fairy-tales. Here, again, we find, as we so often do, that whatever view of this matter of popular literature we can trust, we can trust least of all the comment and censure current among the vulgar educated. The ordinary version of the ground of this popularity for information, which would be given by a person of greater cultivation, would be that common men are chiefly interested in those sordid facts that surround them on every side. A very small degree of examination will show us that whatever ground there is for the popularity of these insane encyclopaedias, it cannot be the ground of utility. The version of life given by a penny novelette may be very moonstruck and unreliable, but it is at least more likely to contain facts relevant to daily life than compilations on the subject of the number of cows’ tails that would reach the North Pole. There are many more people who are in love than there are people who have any intention of counting or collecting cows’ tails. It is evident to me that the grounds of this widespread madness of information for information’s sake must be sought in other and deeper parts of human nature than those daily needs which lie so near the surface that even social philosophers have discovered them somewhere in that profound and eternal instinct for enthusiasm and minding other people’s business which made great popular movements like the Crusades or the Gordon Riots.
I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who actually talked in private life after the manner of these papers. His conversation consisted of fragmentary statements about height and weight and depth and time and population, and his conversation was a nightmare of dulness. During the shortest pause he would ask whether his interlocutors were aware how many tons of rust were scraped every year off the Menai Bridge, and how many rival shops Mr. Whiteley had bought up since he opened his business. The attitude of his acquaintances towards this inexhaustible entertainer varied according to his presence or absence between indifference and terror. It was frightful to think of a man’s brain being stocked with such inexpressibly profitless treasures. It was like visiting some imposing British Museum and finding its galleries and glass cases filled with specimens of London mud, of common mortar, of broken walking-sticks and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered that this intolerable prosaic bore had been, in fact, a poet. I learnt that every item of this multitudinous information was totally and unblushingly untrue, that for all I knew he had made it up as he went along; that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that the rival tradesmen and Mr. Whiteley were creatures of the poet’s brain. Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him it must have been a case of art for art’s sake. The joke sustained so gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true, immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they were inventions of the human fancy. And here, as it seems to me, I laid my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which prevents it, and will, perhaps, always prevent it from seeing with the eyes of popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested, but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art, though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous. They look to life for interest with the same kind of cheerful and uneradicable assurance with which we look for interest at a comedy for which we have paid money at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary fastidiousness, the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-coloured picture, the scrawlings in circles of a baby upon the slate of night; its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a wallpaper, its flowers and fruits have a cockney brilliancy, like the holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art to its own level, they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man—the taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of 110 in South Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip. When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only because it was good, but also because it was news. So it is that if any of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always supposed to be, for his benefit; but in the fact that an unusually large whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading millionaire like Mr. Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralized with the mere indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and splendid disinterestedness of the reader of Pearson’s Weekly. He still keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of men—the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and, with a truly sportsmanlike instinct, the average man takes most pleasure in the details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the werewolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature, a refuge indicating the dulness of the world: it was an incident pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.
That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial, it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it may spoil the chance of better work, certainly by wasting time, possibly by ruining taste. But these obvious objections are the objections which we hear so persistently from everyone that one cannot help wondering where the papers in question procure their myriads of readers. The natural necessity and natural good underlying such crude institutions is far less often a subject of speculation; yet the healthy hungers which lie at the back of the habits of modern democracy are surely worthy of the same sympathetic study that we give to the dogmas of the fanatics long dethroned and the intrigues of commonwealths long obliterated from the earth. And this is the base and consideration which I have to offer: that perhaps the taste for shreds and patches of journalistic science and history is not, as is continually asserted, the vulgar and senile curiosity of a people that has grown old, but simply the babyish and indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young and entering history for the first time. In other words, I suggest that they only tell each other in magazines the same kind of stories of commonplace portents and conventional eccentricities which, in any case, they would tell each other in taverns. Science itself is only the exaggeration and specialization of this thirst for useless fact, which is the mark of the youth of man. But science has become strangely separated from the mere news and scandal of flowers and birds; men have ceased to see that a pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower, that a flower is as monstrous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind. We have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can be contented with a planet of miracles.
A DEFENCE OF HERALDRY
The modern view of heraldry is pretty accurately represented by the words of the famous barrister who, after cross-examining for some time a venerable dignitary of Heralds’ College, summed up his results in the remark that ‘the silly old man didn’t even understand his own silly old trade.’
Heraldry properly so called was, of course, a wholly limited and aristocratic thing, but the remark needs a kind of qualification not commonly realized. In a sense there was a plebeian heraldry, since every shop was, like every castle, distinguished not by a name, but a sign. The whole system dates from a time when picture-writing still really ruled the world. In those days few could read or write; they signed their names with a pictorial symbol, a cross—and a cross is a great improvement on most men’s names.
Now, there is something to be said for the peculiar influence of pictorial symbols on men’s minds. All letters, we learn, were originally pictorial and heraldic: thus the letter A is the portrait of an ox, but the portrait is now reproduced in so impressionist a manner that but little of the rural atmosphere can be absorbed by contemplating it. But as long as some pictorial and poetic quality remains in the symbol, the constant use of it must do something for the aesthetic education of those employing it. Public-houses are now almost the only shops that use the ancient signs, and the mysterious attraction which they exercise may be (by the optimistic) explained in this manner. There are taverns with names so dreamlike and exquisite that even Sir Wilfrid Lawson might waver on the threshold for a moment, suffering the poet to struggle with the moralist. So it was with the heraldic images. It is impossible to believe that the red lion of Scotland acted upon those employing it merely as a naked convenience like a number or a letter; it is impossible to believe that the Kings of Scotland would have cheerfully accepted the substitute of a pig or a frog. There are, as we say, certain real advantages in pictorial symbols, and one of them is that everything that is pictorial suggests, without naming or defining. There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.
Thus in the old aristocratic days there existed this vast pictorial symbolism of all the colours and degrees of aristocracy. When the great trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours, should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry. The grocer who sold margarine as butter should have felt that there was a stain on the escutcheon of the Higginses. Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling mistake—a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady—of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, ‘You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk,’ but used that meaner democratic formula, ‘The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.’
For it cannot be denied that the world lost something finally and most unfortunately about the beginning of the nineteenth century. In former times the mass of the people was conceived as mean and commonplace, but only as comparatively mean and commonplace; they were dwarfed and eclipsed by certain high stations and splendid callings. But with the Victorian era came a principle which conceived men not as comparatively, but as positively, mean and commonplace. A man of any station was represented as being by nature a dingy and trivial person—a person born, as it were, in a black hat. It began to be thought that it was ridiculous for a man to wear beautiful garments, instead of it being—as, of course, it is—ridiculous for him to deliberately wear ugly ones. It was considered affected for a man to speak bold and heroic words, whereas, of course, it is emotional speech which is natural, and ordinary civil speech which is affected. The whole relations of beauty and ugliness, of dignity and ignominy were turned upside down. Beauty became an extravagance, as if top-hats and umbrellas were not the real extravagance—a landscape from the land of the goblins. Dignity became a form of foolery and shamelessness, as if the very essence of a fool were not a lack of dignity. And the consequence is that it is practically most difficult to propose any decoration or public dignity for modern men without making them laugh. They laugh at the idea of carrying crests and coats-of-arms instead of laughing at their own boots and neckties. We are forbidden to say that tradesmen should have a poetry of their own, although there is nothing so poetical as trade. A grocer should have a coat-of-arms worthy of his strange merchandise gathered from distant and fantastic lands; a postman should have a coat-of-arms capable of expressing the strange honour and responsibility of the man who carries men’s souls in a bag; the chemist should have a coat-of-arms symbolizing something of the mysteries of the house of healing, the cavern of a merciful witchcraft.
There were in the French Revolution a class of people at whom everybody laughed, and at whom it was probably difficult, as a practical matter, to refrain from laughing. They attempted to erect, by means of huge wooden statues and brand-new festivals, the most extraordinary new religions. They adored the Goddess of Reason, who would appear, even when the fullest allowance has been made for their many virtues, to be the deity who had least smiled upon them. But these capering maniacs, disowned alike by the old world and the new, were men who had seen a great truth unknown alike to the new world and the old. They had seen the thing that was hidden from the wise and understanding, from the whole modern democratic civilization down to the present time. They realized that democracy must have a heraldry, that it must have a proud and high-coloured pageantry, if it is to keep always before its own mind its own sublime mission. Unfortunately for this ideal, the world has in this matter followed English democracy rather than French; and those who look back to the nineteenth century will assuredly look back to it as we look back to the reign of the Puritans, as the time of black coats and black tempers. From the strange life the men of that time led, they might be assisting at the funeral of liberty instead of at its christening. The moment we really believe in democracy, it will begin to blossom, as aristocracy blossomed, into symbolic colours and shapes. We shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves. For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous.
A DEFENCE OF UGLY THINGS
There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often they are made.
But while nothing in this world would persuade us that a great friend of Mr. Forbes Robertson, let us say, would experience no surprise or discomfort at seeing him enter the room in the bodily form of Mr. Chaplin, there is a confusion constantly made between being attracted by exterior, which is natural and universal, and being attracted by what is called physical beauty, which is not entirely natural and not in the least universal. Or rather, to speak more strictly, the conception of physical beauty has been narrowed to mean a certain kind of physical beauty which no more exhausts the possibilities of external attractiveness than the respectability of a Clapham builder exhausts the possibilities of moral attractiveness.
The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been the Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism—an asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish severity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that men lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees of blood certain consequences might follow. But they did not starve their instinct for contrasts and combinations; their prophets gave two wings to the ox and any number of eyes to the cherubim with all the riotous ingenuity of Lewis Carroll. But the Greeks carried their police regulation into elfland; they vetoed not the actual adulteries of the earth but the wild weddings of ideas, and forbade the banns of thought.
It is extraordinary to watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Who ever feels that the giants in Greek art and poetry were really big—big as some folk-lore giants have been? In some Scandinavian story a hero walks for miles along a mountain ridge, which eventually turns out to be the bridge of the giant’s nose. That is what we should call, with a calm conscience, a large giant. But this earthquake fancy terrified the Greeks, and their terror has terrified all mankind out of their natural love of size, vitality, variety, energy, ugliness. Nature intended every human face, so long as it was forcible, individual, and expressive, to be regarded as distinct from all others, as a poplar is distinct from an oak, and an apple-tree from a willow. But what the Dutch gardeners did for trees the Greeks did for the human form; they lopped away its living and sprawling features to give it a certain academic shape; they hacked off noses and pared down chins with a ghastly horticultural calm. And they have really succeeded so far as to make us call some of the most powerful and endearing faces ugly, and some of the most silly and repulsive faces beautiful. This disgraceful via media, this pitiful sense of dignity, has bitten far deeper into the soul of modern civilization than the external and practical Puritanism of Israel. The Jew at the worst told a man to dance in fetters; the Greek put an exquisite vase upon his head and told him not to move.
Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the same conception applies to noses. To insist that one type of face is ugly because it differs from that of the Venus of Milo is to look at it entirely in a misleading light. It is strange that we should resent people differing from ourselves; we should resent much more violently their resembling ourselves. This principle has made a sufficient hash of literary criticism, in which it is always the custom to complain of the lack of sound logic in a fairy tale, and the entire absence of true oratorical power in a three-act farce. But to call another man’s face ugly because it powerfully expresses another man’s soul is like complaining that a cabbage has not two legs. If we did so, the only course for the cabbage would be to point out with severity, but with some show of truth, that we were not a beautiful green all over.
But this frigid theory of the beautiful has not succeeded in conquering the art of the world, except in name. In some quarters, indeed, it has never held sway. A glance at Chinese dragons or Japanese gods will show how independent are Orientals of the conventional idea of facial and bodily regularity, and how keen and fiery is their enjoyment of real beauty, of goggle eyes, of sprawling claws, of gaping mouths and writhing coils. In the Middle Ages men broke away from the Greek standard of beauty, and lifted up in adoration to heaven great towers, which seemed alive with dancing apes and devils. In the full summer of technical artistic perfection the revolt was carried to its real consummation in the study of the faces of men. Rembrandt declared the sane and manly gospel that a man was dignified, not when he was like a Greek god, but when he had a strong, square nose like a cudgel, a boldly-blocked head like a helmet, and a jaw like a steel trap.
This branch of art is commonly dismissed as the grotesque. We have never been able to understand why it should be humiliating to be laughable, since it is giving an elevated artistic pleasure to others. If a gentleman who saw us in the street were suddenly to burst into tears at the mere thought of our existence, it might be considered disquieting and uncomplimentary; but laughter is not uncomplimentary. In truth, however, the phrase ‘grotesque’ is a misleading description of ugliness in art. It does not follow that either the Chinese dragons or the Gothic gargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the least intended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance of satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the whole key of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jut out in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red pines stand up hardily upon a high cliff, we like to see a chasm cloven from end to end of a mountain. With equally noble enthusiasm we like to see a nose jut out decisively, we like to see the red hair of a friend stand up hardily in bristles upon his head, we like to see his mouth broad and clean cut like the mountain crevasse. At least some of us like all this; it is not a question of humour. We do not burst with amusement at the first sight of the pines or the chasm; but we like them because they are expressive of the dramatic stillness of Nature, her bold experiments, her definite departures, her fearlessness and savage pride in her children. The moment we have snapped the spell of conventional beauty, there are a million beautiful faces waiting for us everywhere, just as there are a million beautiful spirits.
A DEFENCE OF FARCE
I have never been able to understand why certain forms of art should be marked off as something debased and trivial. A comedy is spoken of as ‘degenerating into farce’; it would be fair criticism to speak of it ‘changing into farce’; but as for degenerating into farce, we might equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a story is spoken of as ‘melodramatic,’ and the phrase, queerly enough, is not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as ‘pantomimic’ or ‘sensational’ is innocently supposed to be biting, Heaven knows why, for all works of art are sensations, and a good pantomime (now extinct) is one of the pleasantest sensations of all. ‘This stuff is fit for a detective story,’ is often said, as who should say, ‘This stuff is fit for an epic.’
Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification, there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set up for them, no gust of generous artistic pride to lift them up, do actually tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children of the great mother, they grow up in darkness, dirty and unlettered, and when they are right they are right almost by accident, because of the blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or effect, a mass of ‘jarring atoms,’ a prolonged mental torture of irrelevancy. The ordinary farce seems a world of almost piteous vulgarity, where a half-witted and stunted creature is afraid when his wife comes home, and amused when she sits down on the doorstep. All this is, in a sense, true, but it is the fault of nothing in heaven or earth except the attitude and the phrases quoted at the beginning of this article. We have no doubt in the world that, if the other forms of art had been equally despised, they would have been equally despicable. If people had spoken of ‘sonnets’ with the same accent with which they speak of ‘music-hall songs,’ a sonnet would have been a thing so fearful and wonderful that we almost regret we cannot have a specimen; a rowdy sonnet is a thing to dream about. If people had said that epics were only fit for children and nursemaids, ‘Paradise Lost’ might have been an average pantomime: it might have been called ‘Harlequin Satan, or How Adam ‘Ad ‘em.’ For who would trouble to bring to perfection a work in which even perfection is grotesque? Why should Shakespeare write ‘Othello’ if even his triumph consisted in the eulogy, ‘Mr. Shakespeare is fit for something better than writing tragedies’?
The case of farce, and its wilder embodiment in harlequinade, is especially important. That these high and legitimate forms of art, glorified by Aristophanes and Molière, have sunk into such contempt may be due to many causes: I myself have little doubt that it is due to the astonishing and ludicrous lack of belief in hope and hilarity which marks modern aesthetics, to such an extent that it has spread even to the revolutionists (once the hopeful section of men), so that even those who ask us to fling the stars into the sea are not quite sure that they will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary art must be a symbol of some phase of the human spirit; but whereas the phase is, in human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it must have a certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate for its lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round a tea-table may have all the comedy emotions of ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ or ‘Northanger Abbey,’ but if their actual conversation were reported, it would possibly not be a worthy addition to literature. An old man sitting by his fire may have all the desolate grandeur of Lear or Père Goriot, but if he comes into literature he must do something besides sit by the fire. The artistic justification, then, of farce and pantomime must consist in the emotions of life which correspond to them. And these emotions are to an incredible extent crushed out by the modern insistence on the painful side of life only. Pain, it is said, is the dominant element of life; but this is true only in a very special sense. If pain were for one single instant literally the dominant element in life, every man would be found hanging dead from his own bed-post by the morning. Pain, as the black and catastrophic thing, attracts the youthful artist, just as the schoolboy draws devils and skeletons and men hanging. But joy is a far more elusive and elvish matter, since it is our reason for existing, and a very feminine reason; it mingles with every breath we draw and every cup of tea we drink. The literature of joy is infinitely more difficult, more rare and more triumphant than the black and white literature of pain. And of all the varied forms of the literature of joy, the form most truly worthy of moral reverence and artistic ambition is the form called ‘farce’—or its wilder shape in pantomime. To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and architecture which characterizes pantomime and farce. If the whole affair happened in some alien atmosphere, if a pear-tree began to grow apples or a river to run with wine in some strange fairyland, the effect would be quite different. The streets and shops and door-knockers of the harlequinade, which to the vulgar aesthete make it seem commonplace, are in truth the very essence of the aesthetic departure. It must be an actual modern door which opens and shuts, constantly disclosing different interiors; it must be a real baker whose loaves fly up into the air without his touching them, or else the whole internal excitement of this elvish invasion of civilization, this abrupt entrance of Puck into Pimlico, is lost. Some day, perhaps, when the present narrow phase of aesthetics has ceased to monopolize the name, the glory of a farcical art may become fashionable. Long after men have ceased to drape their houses in green and gray and to adorn them with Japanese vases, an aesthete may build a house on pantomime principles, in which all the doors shall have their bells and knockers on the inside, all the staircases be constructed to vanish on the pressing of a button, and all the dinners (humorous dinners in themselves) come up cooked through a trapdoor. We are very sure, at least, that it is as reasonable to regulate one’s life and lodgings by this kind of art as by any other.
The whole of this view of farce and pantomime may seem insane to us; but we fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing in this strange age of transition is so depressing as its merriment. All the most brilliant men of the day when they set about the writing of comic literature do it under one destructive fallacy and disadvantage: the notion that comic literature is in some sort of way superficial. They give us little knick-knacks of the brittleness of which they positively boast, although two thousand years have beaten as vainly upon the follies of the ‘Frogs’ as on the wisdom of the ‘Republic.’ It is all a mean shame of joy. When we come out from a performance of the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ we feel as near to the stars as when we come out from ‘King Lear.’ For the joy of these works is older than sorrow, their extravagance is saner than wisdom, their love is stronger than death.
The old masters of a healthy madness, Aristophanes or Rabelais or Shakespeare, doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But what abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have reserved for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and did not even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to exuberance, which contented itself with the fool’s cap without the bells!
A DEFENCE OF HUMILITY
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes. And especially (in this age of egoistic idealism) there is about one who defends humility something inexpressibly rakish.
It is no part of my intention to defend humility on practical grounds. Practical grounds are uninteresting, and, moreover, on practical grounds the case for humility is overwhelming. We all know that the ‘divine glory of the ego’ is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility—in other people.
But the matter must go deeper than this. If the grounds of humility are found only in social convenience, they may be quite trivial and temporary. The egoists may be the martyrs of a nobler dispensation, agonizing for a more arduous ideal. To judge from the comparative lack of ease in their social manner, this seems a reasonable suggestion.
There is one thing that must be seen at the outset of the study of humility from an intrinsic and eternal point of view. The new philosophy of self-esteem and self-assertion declares that humility is a vice. If it be so, it is quite clear that it is one of those vices which are an integral part of original sin. It follows with the precision of clockwork every one of the great joys of life. No one, for example, was ever in love without indulging in a positive debauch of humility. All full-blooded and natural people, such as schoolboys, enjoy humility the moment they attain hero-worship. Humility, again, is said both by its upholders and opponents to be the peculiar growth of Christianity. The real and obvious reason of this is often missed. The pagans insisted upon self-assertion because it was the essence of their creed that the gods, though strong and just, were mystic, capricious, and even indifferent. But the essence of Christianity was in a literal sense the New Testament—a covenant with God which opened to men a clear deliverance. They thought themselves secure; they claimed palaces of pearl and silver under the oath and seal of the Omnipotent; they believed themselves rich with an irrevocable benediction which set them above the stars; and immediately they discovered humility. It was only another example of the same immutable paradox. It is always the secure who are humble.
This particular instance survives in the evangelical revivalists of the street. They are irritating enough, but no one who has really studied them can deny that the irritation is occasioned by these two things, an irritating hilarity and an irritating humility. This combination of joy and self-prostration is a great deal too universal to be ignored. If humility has been discredited as a virtue at the present day, it is not wholly irrelevant to remark that this discredit has arisen at the same time as a great collapse of joy in current literature and philosophy. Men have revived the splendour of Greek self-assertion at the same time that they have revived the bitterness of Greek pessimism. A literature has arisen which commands us all to arrogate to ourselves the liberty of self-sufficing deities at the same time that it exhibits us to ourselves as dingy maniacs who ought to be chained up like dogs. It is certainly a curious state of things altogether. When we are genuinely happy, we think we are unworthy of happiness. But when we are demanding a divine emancipation we seem to be perfectly certain that we are unworthy of anything.
The only explanation of the matter must be found in the conviction that humility has infinitely deeper roots than any modern men suppose; that it is a metaphysical and, one might almost say, a mathematical virtue. Probably this can best be tested by a study of those who frankly disregard humility and assert the supreme duty of perfecting and expressing one’s self. These people tend, by a perfectly natural process, to bring their own great human gifts of culture, intellect, or moral power to a great perfection, successively shutting out everything that they feel to be lower than themselves. Now shutting out things is all very well, but it has one simple corollary—that from everything that we shut out we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on the wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtain knowledge. A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man—the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle. The most brilliant exponent of the egoistic school, Nietszche, with deadly and honourable logic, admitted that the philosophy of self-satisfaction led to looking down upon the weak, the cowardly, and the ignorant. Looking down on things may be a delightful experience, only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that is really seen when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarified heaven; only he sees everything foreshortened or deformed.
Now if we imagine that a man wished truly, as far as possible, to see everything as it was, he would certainly proceed on a different principle. He would seek to divest himself for a time of those personal peculiarities which tend to divide him from the thing he studies. It is as difficult, for example, for a man to examine a fish without developing a certain vanity in possessing a pair of legs, as if they were the latest article of personal adornment. But if a fish is to be approximately understood, this physiological dandyism must be overcome. The earnest student of fish morality will, spiritually speaking, chop off his legs. And similarly the student of birds will eliminate his arms; the frog-lover will with one stroke of the imagination remove all his teeth, and the spirit wishing to enter into all the hopes and fears of jelly-fish will simplify his personal appearance to a really alarming extent. It would appear, therefore, that this great body of ours and all its natural instincts, of which we are proud, and justly proud, is rather an encumbrance at the moment when we attempt to appreciate things as they should be appreciated. We do actually go through a process of mental asceticism, a castration of the entire being, when we wish to feel the abounding good in all things. It is good for us at certain times that ourselves should be like a mere window—as clear, as luminous, and as invisible.
In a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are—of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other. Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terrible landscapes; here a desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock; here a miraculous forest, of which all the trees flower above the head with the hues of sunset; here, again, a sea full of monsters that Dante would not have dared to dream. These are the visions of him who, like the child in the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the sage whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance; the whole passionate and intricate life of common things becomes as lost to him as is the life of the infusoria to a man without a microscope. He rises always through desolate eternities. He may find new systems, and forget them; he may discover fresh universes, and learn to despise them. But the towering and tropical vision of things as they really are—the gigantic daisies, the heaven-consuming dandelions, the great Odyssey of strange-coloured oceans and strange-shaped trees, of dust like the wreck of temples, and thistledown like the ruin of stars—all this colossal vision shall perish with the last of the humble.
A DEFENCE OF SLANG
The aristocrats of the nineteenth century have destroyed entirely their one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and arrogant; but they flaunt unobtrusively, and their attempts at arrogance are depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of variety, vivacity, and fulness of life; oligarchy was the world’s first experiment in liberty. But now they have adopted the opposite ideal of ‘good form,’ which may be defined as Puritanism without religion. Good form has sent them all into black like the stroke of a funeral bell. They engage, like Mr. Gilbert’s curates, in a war of mildness, a positive competition of obscurity. In old times the lords of the earth sought above all things to be distinguished from each other; with that object they erected outrageous images on their helmets and painted preposterous colours on their shields. They wished to make it entirely clear that a Norfolk was as different, say, from an Argyll as a white lion from a black pig. But to-day their ideal is precisely the opposite one, and if a Norfolk and an Argyll were dressed so much alike that they were mistaken for each other they would both go home dancing with joy.
The consequences of this are inevitable. The aristocracy must lose their function of standing to the world for the idea of variety, experiment, and colour, and we must find these things in some other class. To ask whether we shall find them in the middle class would be to jest upon sacred matters. The only conclusion, therefore, is that it is to certain sections of the lower class, chiefly, for example, to omnibus-conductors, with their rich and rococo mode of thought, that we must look for guidance towards liberty and light.
The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang. Every day a nameless poet weaves some fairy tracery of popular language. It may be said that the fashionable world talks slang as much as the democratic; this is true, and it strongly supports the view under consideration. Nothing is more startling than the contrast between the heavy, formal, lifeless slang of the man-about-town and the light, living, and flexible slang of the coster. The talk of the upper strata of the educated classes is about the most shapeless, aimless, and hopeless literary product that the world has ever seen. Clearly in this, again, the upper classes have degenerated. We have ample evidence that the old leaders of feudal war could speak on occasion with a certain natural symbolism and eloquence that they had not gained from books. When Cyrano de Bergerac, in Rostand’s play, throws doubts on the reality of Christian’s dulness and lack of culture, the latter replies:
‘Bah! on trouve des mots quand on monte à l’assaut; Oui, j’ai un certain esprit facile et militaire;’
and these two lines sum up a truth about the old oligarchs. They could not write three legible letters, but they could sometimes speak literature. Douglas, when he hurled the heart of Bruce in front of him in his last battle, cried out, ‘Pass first, great heart, as thou wert ever wont.’ A Spanish nobleman, when commanded by the King to receive a high-placed and notorious traitor, said: ‘I will receive him in all obedience, and burn down my house afterwards.’ This is literature without culture; it is the speech of men convinced that they have to assert proudly the poetry of life.
Anyone, however, who should seek for such pearls in the conversation of a young man of modern Belgravia would have much sorrow in his life. It is not only impossible for aristocrats to assert proudly the poetry of life; it is more impossible for them than for anyone else. It is positively considered vulgar for a nobleman to boast of his ancient name, which is, when one comes to think of it, the only rational object of his existence. If a man in the street proclaimed, with rude feudal rhetoric, that he was the Earl of Doncaster, he would be arrested as a lunatic; but if it were discovered that he really was the Earl of Doncaster, he would simply be cut as a cad. No poetical prose must be expected from Earls as a class. The fashionable slang is hardly even a language; it is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating certain broad, well-understood states of mind. ‘Bored,’ ‘cut up,’ ‘jolly,’ ‘rotten,’ and so on, are like the words of some tribe of savages whose vocabulary has only twenty of them. If a man of fashion wished to protest against some solecism in another man of fashion, his utterance would be a mere string of set phrases, as lifeless as a string of dead fish. But an omnibus conductor (being filled with the Muse) would burst out into a solid literary effort: ‘You’re a gen’leman, aren’t yer … yer boots is a lot brighter than yer ‘ed…there’s precious little of yer, and that’s clothes…that’s right, put yer cigar in yer mouth ‘cos I can’t see yer be’ind it…take it out again, do yer! you’re young for smokin’, but I’ve sent for yer mother… Goin’? oh, don’t run away: I won’t ‘arm yer. I’ve got a good ‘art, I ‘ave… “Down with croolty to animals,” I say,’ and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote metaphors as a coster puts into a curse; his speech is one long allegory, like Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen.’
I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic allusiveness is the characteristic of true slang. Such an expression as ‘Keep your hair on’ is positively Meredithian in its perverse and mysterious manner of expressing an idea. The Americans have a well-known expression about ‘swelled-head’ as a description of self-approval, and the other day I heard a remarkable fantasia upon this air. An American said that after the Chinese War the Japanese wanted ‘to put on their hats with a shoe-horn.’ This is a monument of the true nature of slang, which consists in getting further and further away from the original conception, in treating it more and more as an assumption. It is rather like the literary doctrine of the Symbolists.
The real reason of this great development of eloquence among the lower orders again brings us back to the case of the aristocracy in earlier times. The lower classes live in a state of war, a war of words. Their readiness is the product of the same fiery individualism as the readiness of the old fighting oligarchs. Any cabman has to be ready with his tongue, as any gentleman of the last century had to be ready with his sword. It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this process should be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The essential point is that somebody must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a language.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we paused for a moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many sonnets. To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social relations ‘breaking the ice.’ If this were expanded into a sonnet, we should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of everlasting ice, the sombre and baffling mirror of the Northern nature, over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away with them—a whole chaos of fairy tales.
A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP
The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.
There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energies and aspirations, may easily be convinced that it will find new things to appreciate; but it will never be convinced, at bottom, that it has properly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not found—that on which we were born.
But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simple or ignorant)—we do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in this matter—that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the child, so much admired by its worshippers, are common enough. The fact is that this is precisely where baby-worship is so profoundly right. Any words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, the child’s words and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the philosopher’s words and antics are equally wonderful.
The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair, and reverence, love, and fear them. When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.
We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations. A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life, generally healthy in motive, but often intolerable in a domestic commonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptious tyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities as rather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told them that they would ‘understand when they were older,’ we should probably be adopting the best and most crushing attitude towards the weaknesses of humanity. In our relations to children we prove that the paradox is entirely true, that it is possible to combine an amnesty that verges on contempt with a worship that verges upon terror. We forgive children with the same kind of blasphemous gentleness with which Omar Khayyam forgave the Omnipotent.
The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.
But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.
A DEFENCE OF DETECTIVE STORIES
In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace prefer bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a book popular. Bradshaw’s Railway Guide contains few gleams of psychological comedy, yet it is not read aloud uproariously on winter evenings. If detective stories are read with more exuberance than railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic. Many good books have fortunately been popular; many bad books, still more fortunately, have been unpopular. A good detective story would probably be even more popular than a bad one. The trouble in this matter is that many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. To write a story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of sensational crime as one of Shakespeare’s plays.
There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent of the public weal.
The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees. Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the ‘Iliad.’ No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland, that in the course of that incalculable journey the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship. The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signalling the meaning of the mystery.
This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums. Anything which tends, even under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, to assert this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably human character in flints and tiles, is a good thing. It is good that the average man should fall into the habit of looking imaginatively at ten men in the street even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh might be a notorious thief. We may dream, perhaps, that it might be possible to have another and higher romance of London, that men’s souls have stranger adventures than their bodies, and that it would be harder and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt their crimes. But since our great authors (with the admirable exception of Stevenson) decline to write of that thrilling mood and moment when the eyes of the great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark, we must give fair credit to the popular literature which, amid a babble of pedantry and preciosity, declines to regard the present as prosaic or the common as commonplace. Popular art in all ages has been interested in contemporary manners and costume; it dressed the groups around the Crucifixion in the garb of Florentine gentlefolk or Flemish burghers. In the last century it was the custom for distinguished actors to present Macbeth in a powdered wig and ruffles. How far we are ourselves in this age from such conviction of the poetry of our own life and manners may easily be conceived by anyone who chooses to imagine a picture of Alfred the Great toasting the cakes dressed in tourist’s knickerbockers, or a performance of ‘Hamlet’ in which the Prince appeared in a frock-coat, with a crape band round his hat. But this instinct of the age to look back, like Lot’s wife, could not go on for ever. A rude, popular literature of the romantic possibilities of the modern city was bound to arise. It has arisen in the popular detective stories, as rough and refreshing as the ballads of Robin Hood.
There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.
A DEFENCE OF PATRIOTISM
The decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two is a serious and distressing matter. Only in consequence of such a decay could the current lust of territory be confounded with the ancient love of country. We may imagine that if there were no such thing as a pair of lovers left in the world, all the vocabulary of love might without rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire. If no type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the ‘love of the city,’ that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been written in red blood on the same table with the primal passions of our being. On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word ‘love’ means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word ‘love’ is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ No doubt if a decent man’s mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.
What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly. For the first of all the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid counsellor the best. Love is drawn to truth by the unerring magnetism of agony; it gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with vociferous optimism round a death-bed.
We have to ask, then, Why is it that this recent movement in England, which has honestly appeared to many a renascence of patriotism, seems to us to have none of the marks of patriotism—at least, of patriotism in its highest form? Why has the adoration of our patriots been given wholly to qualities and circumstances good in themselves, but comparatively material and trivial:—trade, physical force, a skirmish at a remote frontier, a squabble in a remote continent? Colonies are things to be proud of, but for a country to be only proud of its extremities is like a man being only proud of his legs. Why is there not a high central intellectual patriotism, a patriotism of the head and heart of the Empire, and not merely of its fists and its boots? A rude Athenian sailor may very likely have thought that the glory of Athens lay in rowing with the right kind of oars, or having a good supply of garlic; but Pericles did not think that this was the glory of Athens. With us, on the other hand, there is no difference at all between the patriotism preached by Mr. Chamberlain and that preached by Mr. Pat Rafferty, who sings ‘What do you think of the Irish now?’ They are both honest, simple-minded, vulgar eulogies upon trivialities and truisms.
I have, rightly or wrongly, a notion of the chief cause of this pettiness in English patriotism of to-day, and I will attempt to expound it. It may be taken generally that a man loves his own stock and environment, and that he will find something to praise in it; but whether it is the most praiseworthy thing or no will depend upon the man’s enlightenment as to the facts. If the son of Thackeray, let us say, were brought up in ignorance of his father’s fame and genius, it is not improbable that he would be proud of the fact that his father was over six feet high. It seems to me that we, as a nation, are precisely in the position of this hypothetical child of Thackeray’s. We fall back upon gross and frivolous things for our patriotism, for a simple reason. We are the only people in the world who are not taught in childhood our own literature and our own history.
We are, as a nation, in the truly extraordinary condition of not knowing our own merits. We have played a great and splendid part in the history of universal thought and sentiment; we have been among the foremost in that eternal and bloodless battle in which the blows do not slay, but create. In painting and music we are inferior to many other nations; but in literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence, if history be taken as a whole, we can hold our own with any. But all this vast heritage of intellectual glory is kept from our schoolboys like a heresy; and they are left to live and die in the dull and infantile type of patriotism which they learnt from a box of tin soldiers. There is no harm in the box of tin soldiers; we do not expect children to be equally delighted with a beautiful box of tin philanthropists. But there is great harm in the fact that the subtler and more civilized honour of England is not presented so as to keep pace with the expanding mind. A French boy is taught the glory of Molière as well as that of Turenne; a German boy is taught his own great national philosophy before he learns the philosophy of antiquity. The result is that, though French patriotism is often crazy and boastful, though German patriotism is often isolated and pedantic, they are neither of them merely dull, common, and brutal, as is so often the strange fate of the nation of Bacon and Locke. It is natural enough, and even righteous enough, under the circumstances. An Englishman must love England for something; consequently, he tends to exalt commerce or prize-fighting, just as a German might tend to exalt music, or a Flamand to exalt painting, because he really believes it is the chief merit of his fatherland. It would not be in the least extraordinary if a claim of eating up provinces and pulling down princes were the chief boast of a Zulu. The extraordinary thing is, that it is the chief boast of a people who have Shakespeare, Newton, Burke, and Darwin to boast of.
The peculiar lack of any generosity or delicacy in the current English nationalism appears to have no other possible origin but in this fact of our unique neglect in education of the study of the national literature. An Englishman could not be silly enough to despise other nations if he once knew how much England had done for them. Great men of letters cannot avoid being humane and universal. The absence of the teaching of English literature in our schools is, when we come to think of it, an almost amazing phenomenon. It is even more amazing when we listen to the arguments urged by headmasters and other educational conservatives against the direct teaching of English. It is said, for example, that a vast amount of English grammar and literature is picked up in the course of learning Latin and Greek. This is perfectly true, but the topsy-turviness of the idea never seems to strike them. It is like saying that a baby picks up the art of walking in the course of learning to hop, or that a Frenchman may successfully be taught German by helping a Prussian to learn Ashanti. Surely the obvious foundation of all education is the language in which that education is conveyed; if a boy has only time to learn one thing, he had better learn that.
We have deliberately neglected this great heritage of high national sentiment. We have made our public schools the strongest walls against a whisper of the honour of England. And we have had our punishment in this strange and perverted fact that, while a unifying vision of patriotism can ennoble bands of brutal savages or dingy burghers, and be the best thing in their lives, we, who are—the world being judge—humane, honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst thing in ours. What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that have produced sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who could walk with Dante, that we should talk as if we have never done anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are the children of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are judged, it will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of failing to appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual transgression of failing to appreciate ourselves.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
_IN DEFENCE OF A NEW EDITION
The reissue of a series of essays so ephemeral and even superfluous may seem at the first glance to require some excuse; probably the best excuse is that they will have been completely forgotten, and therefore may be read again with entirely new sensations. I am not sure, however, that this claim is so modest as it sounds, for I fancy that Shakespeare and Balzac, if moved to prayers, might not ask to be remembered, but to be forgotten, and forgotten thus; for if they were forgotten they would be everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are. The ancients were not wrong when they made Lethe the boundary of a better land; perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb back upon the bank of the earth and fancy himself in Elysium.
If, therefore, I am certain that most sensible people have forgotten the existence of this book—I do not speak in modesty or in pride—I wish only to state a simple and somewhat beautiful fact. In one respect the passing of the period during which a book can be considered current has afflicted me with some melancholy, for I had intended to write anonymously in some daily paper a thorough and crushing exposure of the work inspired mostly by a certain artistic impatience of the too indulgent tone of the critiques and the manner in which a vast number of my most monstrous fallacies have passed unchallenged. I will not repeat that powerful article here, for it cannot be necessary to do anything more than warn the reader against the perfectly indefensible line of argument adopted at the end of p. 28. I am also conscious that the title of the book is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is a legal metaphor, and, speaking legally, a defendant is not an enthusiast for the character of King John or the domestic virtues of the prairie-dog. He is one who defends himself, a thing which the present writer, however poisoned his mind may be with paradox, certainly never dreamed of attempting.
Criticism upon the book considered as literature, if it can be so considered, I should, of course, never dream of discussing—firstly, because it is ridiculous to do so; and, secondly, because there was, in my opinion, much justice in such criticism.
But there is one matter on which an author is generally considered as having a right to explain himself, since it has nothing to do with capacity or intelligence, and that is the question of his morals.
I am proud to say that a furious, uncompromising, and very effective attack was made upon what was alleged to be the utter immorality of this book by my excellent friend Mr. C.F.G. Masterman, in the ‘Speaker.’ The tendency of that criticism was to the effect that I was discouraging improvement and disguising scandals by my offensive optimism. Quoting the passage in which I said that ‘diamonds were to be found in the dust-bin,’ he said: ‘There is no difficulty in finding good in what humanity rejects. The difficulty is to find it in what humanity accepts. The diamond is easy enough to find in the dust-bin. The difficulty is to find it in the drawing-room.’ I must admit, for my part, without the slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing-room. But I merely mention this purely ethical attack in order to state, in as few sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into decay. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. No man ever did, and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an ugly thing beautiful. There must be some germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf for Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.
G. K. C_.
THE DEFENDANT
_IN DIFESA DI UNA NUOVA EDIZIONE
La ristampa di una serie di saggi tanto effimeri e persino superflui può sembrare a prima vista richiedere qualche scusa; probabilmente la miglior scusa è che saranno stati completamente dimenticati, e perciò potranno essere letti di nuovo con sensazioni interamente nuove. Non sono certo, tuttavia, che questa pretesa sia così modesta come suona, poiché immagino che Shakespeare e Balzac, se spinti a pregare, potrebbero chiedere non di essere ricordati, ma di essere dimenticati, e dimenticati così; perché se fossero dimenticati sarebbero eternamente riscoperti e riletti. È una monotona memoria che ci impedisce per lo più di vedere le cose splendide come sono. Gli antichi non avevano torto quando fecero del Lete il confine di una terra migliore; forse l’unico difetto del loro sistema è che un uomo che si fosse bagnato nel fiume dell’oblio sarebbe assai probabilmente risalito sulla riva della terra immaginandosi nell’Eliso.
Se, dunque, sono certo che la maggior parte delle persone assennate ha dimenticato l’esistenza di questo libro—non parlo per modestia né per orgoglio— desidero soltanto affermare un fatto semplice e in qualche modo bello. Sotto un aspetto il trascorrere del periodo durante il quale un libro può considerarsi attuale mi ha afflitto con una certa malinconia, poiché avevo inteso scrivere anonimamente in qualche quotidiano una minuziosa e schiacciante messa a nudo dell’ opera, ispirata soprattutto da una certa impazienza artistica per il tono troppo indulgente delle critiche e il modo in cui un gran numero delle mie più mostruose fallacie sono passate incontestate. Non ripeterò qui quel poderoso articolo, poiché non può essere necessario fare nulla di più che mettere in guardia il lettore contro la linea perfettamente indifendibile di argomentazione adottata alla fine di p. 28. Sono anche consapevole che il titolo del libro è, a rigore, inesatto. È una metafora legale, e, parlando legalmente, un imputato non è un entusiasta del carattere di Re Giovanni o delle virtù domestiche del cane della prateria. È colui che difende se stesso, cosa che il presente scrittore, per quanto avvelenata possa essere la sua mente dal paradosso, certamente non ha mai sognato di tentare.
Le critiche al libro considerato come letteratura, se così può essere considerato, non sognerei, naturalmente, mai di discuterle—in primo luogo, perché è ridicolo farlo; e, in secondo luogo, perché vi era, a mio parere, molta giustizia in tali critiche.
Ma vi è una questione su cui si ritiene generalmente che un autore abbia il diritto di spiegarsi, poiché nulla ha a che fare con la capacità o l’intelligenza, ed è la questione della sua morale.
Sono fiero di dire che un furioso, intransigente e assai efficace attacco fu mosso contro quella che si asseriva essere l’assoluta immoralità di questo libro dal mio eccellente amico il signor C.F.G. Masterman, sullo ‘Speaker.’ La tendenza di quella critica era nel senso che io scoraggiavo il miglioramento e mascheravo gli scandali col mio offensivo ottimismo. Citando il passo in cui dicevo che ‘si potevano trovare diamanti nella pattumiera,’ egli disse: ‘Non c’è difficoltà a trovare il bene in ciò che l’umanità rifiuta. La difficoltà è trovarlo in ciò che l’umanità accetta. Il diamante è abbastanza facile da trovare nella pattumiera. La difficoltà è trovarlo nel salotto.’ Devo ammettere, da parte mia, senza il minimo pudore, di aver trovato moltissime cose eccellenti nei salotti. Per esempio, ho trovato il signor Masterman in un salotto. Ma menziono questo attacco puramente etico soltanto per esporre, nel minor numero di frasi possibile, la mia differenza dalla teoria dell’ottimismo e del progresso ivi enunciata. A prima vista sembrerebbe che il pessimista incoraggi il miglioramento. Ma in realtà è una singolare verità che l’epoca in cui il pessimismo è stato gridato dai tetti è anche quella in cui quasi ogni riforma è ristagnata ed è caduta in rovina. La ragione di ciò non è difficile da scoprire. Nessun uomo mai ha, né mai può, creare o desiderare di rendere buona una cosa cattiva o bella una cosa brutta. Ci deve essere qualche germe di bene da amare, qualche frammento di bellezza da ammirare. La madre lava e adorna il bambino sporco o trascurato, ma nessuno può chiederle di lavare e adornare un folletto dal cuore come l’inferno. Nessuno può uccidere il vitello grasso per Mefistofele. La causa che oggi blocca ogni progresso è il sottile scetticismo che sussurra a un milione di orecchie che le cose non sono abbastanza buone da valere la pena di essere migliorate. Se il mondo è buono siamo rivoluzionari, se il mondo è malvagio dobbiamo essere conservatori. Questi saggi, per quanto futili siano considerati come letteratura seria, sono tuttavia eticamente sinceri, poiché cercano di ricordare agli uomini che le cose devono essere prima amate e poi migliorate.
G. K. C_.
L’IMPUTATO
INTRODUCTION
In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a level, and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose. The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some words—words that seemed shameful and tremendous—and the world, in terror, buried him under a wilderness of stones. The place is the monument of an ancient fear.
If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would he more difficult to imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried under the brutal stones. For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation—it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. If we weigh the matter in the faultless scales of imagination, if we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.
Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope—the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of human history—that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.
This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.
The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple. Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in general.
It becomes increasingly apparent, therefore, that the world is in a permanent danger of being misjudged. That this is no fanciful or mystical idea may be tested by simple examples. The two absolutely basic words ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ descriptive of two primal and inexplicable sensations, are not, and never have been, used properly. Things that are bad are not called good by any people who experience them; but things that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity.
Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one’s back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.
Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. I have found that every man is disposed to call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is, and the snow of Christmas a little less white than it is; therefore I have imagined that the main business of a man, however humble, is defence. I have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings despise the world—that a counsel for the defence would not have been out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary and Man was rejected of men.
INTRODUZIONE
In certi altipiani sconfinati, altipiani come grandi pianure prese da vertigine, pendii che sembrano contraddire l’idea che esista persino una cosa quale un piano, e ci fanno tutti comprendere che viviamo su un pianeta dal tetto spiovente, vi imbatterete di tempo in tempo in intere valli colme di rocce sciolte e massi, così grandi da parere montagne staccatesi. Il tutto potrebbe essere una creazione sperimentale frantumata e gettata via. È spesso difficile credere che simili rifiuti cosmici possano essere venuti insieme se non per mano umana. La più mite e più cockney immaginazione concepisce il luogo come la scena di qualche guerra di giganti. Per me è sempre associato a un’unica idea, ricorrente e infine istintiva. La scena era la scena della lapidazione di qualche profeta preistorico, un profeta tanto più gigantesco dei profeti posteriori quanto i massi sono più giganteschi dei ciottoli. Egli pronunciò alcune parole—parole che parvero vergognose e tremende—e il mondo, atterrito, lo seppellì sotto un deserto di pietre. Il luogo è il monumento di un’antica paura.
Se seguissimo il medesimo stato d’animo fantastico, sarebbe più difficile immaginare quale terribile allusione o quale selvaggio quadro dell’universo evocasse quella persecuzione primordiale, quale segreto di pensiero sensazionale giaccia sepolto sotto le pietre brutali. Poiché ai nostri tempi le bestemmie sono logore. Il pessimismo è ora palesemente, come è sempre stato essenzialmente, più banale della pietà. La profanità è ora più di un’affettazione—è una convenzione. La maledizione contro Dio è l’Esercizio I. nel sillabario della poesia minore. Non fu, di certo, per simili solennità puerili che il nostro immaginario profeta fu lapidato nel mattino del mondo. Se soppesiamo la questione sulle impeccabili bilance dell’immaginazione, se vediamo quale sia la reale tendenza dell’umanità, ci parrà assai probabile che egli fu lapidato per aver detto che l’erba era verde e che gli uccelli cantavano in primavera; poiché la missione di tutti i profeti fin dal principio non è stata tanto l’indicare cieli o inferni quanto in primo luogo l’indicare la terra.
La religione ha dovuto fornire quel più lungo e più strano telescopio—il telescopio attraverso cui potessimo vedere la stella su cui dimoravamo. Poiché per la mente e gli occhi dell’uomo comune questo mondo è perduto come l’Eden e sommerso come Atlantide. Corre una strana legge lungo tutta la storia umana—che gli uomini tendono di continuo a sottovalutare il loro ambiente, a sottovalutare la loro felicità, a sottovalutare se stessi. Il grande peccato dell’umanità, il peccato tipizzato dalla caduta di Adamo, è la tendenza, non verso l’orgoglio, ma verso questa bizzarra e orribile umiltà.
Questa è la grande caduta, la caduta per cui il pesce dimentica il mare, il bue dimentica il prato, l’impiegato dimentica la città, ogni uomo dimentica il suo ambiente e, nel senso più pieno e più letterale, dimentica se stesso. Questa è la vera caduta di Adamo, ed è una caduta spirituale. È una cosa strana che molti uomini davvero spirituali, come il generale Gordon, abbiano effettivamente trascorso alcune ore a speculare sull’esatta ubicazione del Giardino dell’Eden. Con ogni probabilità siamo ancora nell’Eden. Sono soltanto i nostri occhi a essere cambiati.
Del pessimista si parla comunemente come dell’uomo in rivolta. Non lo è. In primo luogo, perché occorre una certa allegria per perseverare nella rivolta, e in secondo luogo, perché il pessimismo fa presa sul lato più debole di ciascuno, e il pessimista, perciò, fa affari altrettanto floridi dell’oste. La persona che è davvero in rivolta è l’ottimista, il quale generalmente vive e muore in uno sforzo disperato e suicida di persuadere tutte le altre persone di quanto siano buone. È stato provato un centinaio di volte che se si desidera davvero far infuriare la gente e renderla adirata, fino alla morte, il modo giusto di farlo è dire loro che sono tutti figli di Dio. Gesù Cristo fu crocifisso, si ricordi, non per qualcosa che disse su Dio, ma con l’accusa di aver detto che un uomo poteva in tre giorni abbattere e riedificare il Tempio. Ognuno dei grandi rivoluzionari, da Isaia a Shelley, è stato un ottimista. Sono stati indignati, non per la malvagità dell’esistenza, ma per la lentezza degli uomini nel comprenderne la bontà. Il profeta che viene lapidato non è un attaccabrighe o un guastafeste. È semplicemente un amante respinto. Soffre di un affetto non corrisposto per le cose in generale.
Diviene perciò sempre più evidente che il mondo è in un permanente pericolo di essere giudicato male. Che questa non sia un’idea fantasiosa o mistica lo si può verificare con semplici esempi. Le due parole assolutamente fondamentali ‘buono’ e ‘cattivo,’ descrittive di due sensazioni primordiali e inspiegabili, non sono, e non sono mai state, usate propriamente. Le cose che sono cattive non vengono chiamate buone da alcuno che le esperisca; ma le cose che sono buone vengono chiamate cattive dal verdetto universale dell’umanità.
Lasciate che spieghi un poco: Certe cose sono cattive per quel che valgono, come il dolore, e nessuno, nemmeno un pazzo, chiama un mal di denti buono in sé; ma un coltello che taglia goffamente e con difficoltà è chiamato un cattivo coltello, cosa che certamente non è. Solo non è buono quanto altri coltelli a cui gli uomini si sono abituati. Un coltello non è mai cattivo se non in quelle rare occasioni come quella in cui è pulitamente e scientificamente piantato in mezzo alla schiena di qualcuno. Il più rozzo e ottuso coltello che abbia mai spezzato in pezzi una matita invece di temperarla è una buona cosa in quanto è un coltello. Sarebbe apparso un miracolo nell’Età della Pietra. Ciò che chiamiamo un cattivo coltello è un buon coltello non abbastanza buono per noi; ciò che chiamiamo un cattivo cappello è un buon cappello non abbastanza buono per noi; ciò che chiamiamo cattiva cucina è buona cucina non abbastanza buona per noi; ciò che chiamiamo una cattiva civiltà è una buona civiltà non abbastanza buona per noi. Scegliamo di chiamare cattiva la grande massa della storia dell’umanità, non perché sia cattiva, ma perché noi siamo migliori. Questo è palesemente un principio ingiusto. L’avorio può non essere bianco come la neve, ma l’intero continente artico non rende nero l’avorio.
Ora mi è parso ingiusto che l’umanità sia impegnata perpetuamente a chiamare cattive tutte quelle cose che sono state abbastanza buone da rendere migliori altre cose, a buttar giù eternamente la scala per cui essa è salita. Mi è parso che il progresso dovrebbe essere qualcos’altro oltre a un continuo parricidio; perciò ho indagato i cumuli di polvere dell’umanità, e ho trovato un tesoro in ognuno di essi. Ho scoperto che l’umanità non è impegnata accidentalmente, ma eternamente e sistematicamente impegnata, a gettare oro nel rigagnolo e diamanti nel mare. Ho scoperto che ogni uomo è disposto a chiamare la foglia verde dell’albero un po’ meno verde di quanto sia, e la neve del Natale un po’ meno bianca di quanto sia; perciò ho immaginato che l’occupazione principale di un uomo, per quanto umile, sia la difesa. Ho concepito che un imputato è richiesto soprattutto quando i mondani disprezzano il mondo—che un avvocato della difesa non sarebbe stato fuori luogo in quel terribile giorno in cui il sole si oscurò sul Calvario e l’Uomo fu respinto dagli uomini.
A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically—it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.
In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.
To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current boys’ literature of the lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture. But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personæ, but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I wish sincerely that anyone had the moral courage to spread that carpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly be too short, for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight. And so, while the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.
But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common-sense recognition of this fact—that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness—we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under discussion do not read ‘The Egoist’ and ‘The Master Builder.’ It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child’s knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence of Mr. George Moore’s novels, I should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.
Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys’ novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish.
So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy, recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanized and naked narrative as this.
Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott’s ‘Ivanhoe,’ Scott’s ‘Rob Roy,’ Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake,’ Byron’s ‘Corsair,’ Wordsworth’s ‘Rob Roy’s Grave,’ Stevenson’s ‘Macaire,’ Mr. Max Pemberton’s ‘Iron Pirate,’ and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in ‘Ivanhoe’ will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it. It might at least cross our minds that, for whatever other reason the errand-boy reads ‘The Red Revenge,’ it really is not because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.
In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says, with a modest swagger, ‘I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea.’ If he said ‘I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea,’ everyone would see the humour of so simple a classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.
If the authors and publishers of ‘Dick Deadshot,’ and such remarkable works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall in Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.
But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are the criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a ‘many-faced and fickle traitor,’ but at least it is a better aim than to be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d’Annunzio’s downwards. So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life—have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a ‘blood and thunder’ literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
IN DIFESA DEI PENNY DREADFUL
Uno degli esempi più strani del grado in cui la vita ordinaria viene sottovalutata è quello della letteratura popolare, la cui vasta massa noi ci accontentiamo di definire volgare. Il romanzetto per ragazzi può essere ignorante in senso letterario, il che non è diverso dal dire che un romanzo moderno è ignorante in senso chimico, o in senso economico, o in senso astronomico; ma non è volgare intrinsecamente: è l’effettivo centro di un milione di immaginazioni fiammeggianti.
Nei secoli passati la classe colta ignorava la massa della letteratura volgare. La ignorava, e perciò, propriamente parlando, non la disprezzava. La semplice ignoranza e indifferenza non gonfia il carattere di orgoglio. Un uomo non cammina per la strada dando un’altezzosa torsione ai baffi al pensiero della propria superiorità su qualche varietà di pesci abissali. I vecchi studiosi lasciavano tutto il sottomondo delle composizioni popolari in una tenebra simile.
Oggi, però, abbiamo rovesciato questo principio. Disprezziamo le composizioni volgari, e non le ignoriamo. Corriamo un certo pericolo di diventare meschini nel nostro studio della meschinità; c’è una terribile legge circea sullo sfondo, per cui se l’anima si china troppo ostentatamente a esaminare qualcosa non si rialza mai più. Non esiste classe di pubblicazioni volgari a proposito della quale vi sia, a mio avviso, esagerazione e fraintendimento più assolutamente ridicoli dell’attuale letteratura per ragazzi dello strato più basso. Questa classe di composizioni è presumibilmente sempre esistita, e deve esistere. Non ha più diritto di essere buona letteratura di quanto la conversazione quotidiana dei suoi lettori abbia diritto di essere fine oratoria, o le pensioni e i casamenti che essi abitano di essere sublime architettura. Ma la gente deve pur avere conversazione, deve pur avere case, e deve pur avere storie. Il semplice bisogno di un qualche mondo ideale in cui persone fittizie recitino una parte senza impacci è infinitamente più profondo e più antico delle regole della buona arte, e assai più importante. Ognuno di noi nell’infanzia ha costruito un simile invisibile dramatis personæ, ma alle nostre bambinaie non è mai venuto in mente di correggere la composizione mediante un attento confronto con Balzac. In Oriente il narratore di professione va di villaggio in villaggio con un piccolo tappeto; e desidero sinceramente che qualcuno avesse il coraggio morale di stendere quel tappeto e di sedervisi sopra a Ludgate Circus. Ma non è probabile che tutti i racconti del portatore di tappeto siano piccole gemme di originale fattura artistica. Letteratura e narrativa sono due cose interamente diverse. La letteratura è un lusso; la narrativa è una necessità. Un’opera d’arte difficilmente può essere troppo breve, poiché il suo culmine è il suo merito. Una storia non può mai essere troppo lunga, poiché la sua conclusione è soltanto da deplorare, come l’ultimo mezzo penny o l’ultima pipata. E così, mentre l’accrescersi della coscienza artistica tende, nelle opere più ambiziose, alla brevità e all’impressionismo, una voluminosa industria contraddistingue ancora il produttore della vera paccottiglia romantica. Non c’era fine alle ballate di Robin Hood; non c’è fine ai volumi su Dick Deadshot e i Nove Vendicatori. Questi due eroi sono deliberatamente concepiti come immortali.
Ma invece di fondare ogni discussione del problema sul riconoscimento, dettato dal buon senso, di questo fatto — che la gioventù degli ordini inferiori ha sempre avuto e sempre dovrà avere letture romantiche informi e interminabili di qualche genere — e poi di procedere a provvedere alla loro salubrità, cominciamo, generalmente parlando, con un fantastico vituperio di queste letture nel loro insieme e con un’indignata sorpresa che i fattorini in questione non leggano «The Egoist» e «The Master Builder». È costume, particolarmente tra i magistrati, attribuire metà dei delitti della metropoli ai romanzetti da quattro soldi. Se qualche monello sudicio scappa con una mela, il magistrato osserva astutamente che la consapevolezza del bambino che le mele placano la fame è riconducibile a qualche curiosa ricerca letteraria. I ragazzi stessi, quando pentiti, accusano di frequente i romanzetti con grande amarezza, cosa che c’è solo da aspettarsi da giovani dotati di non poco innato umorismo. Se io avessi falsificato un testamento, e potessi ottenere comprensione facendo risalire l’episodio all’influsso dei romanzi del signor George Moore, troverei il massimo divertimento in tale diversivo. In ogni caso, è saldamente fissato nella mente della maggior parte delle persone che i ragazzi di strada, a differenza di chiunque altro nella comunità, trovino i loro principali moventi di condotta nei libri stampati.
Ora è del tutto chiaro che questa obiezione, l’obiezione mossa dai magistrati, non ha nulla a che fare col merito letterario. Scrivere cattive storie non è un delitto. Il signor Hall Caine cammina apertamente per le strade, e non può essere messo in prigione per un anticlimax. L’obiezione poggia sulla teoria che il tono della massa dei romanzetti per ragazzi sia criminale e degradato, facendo appello alla bassa cupidigia e alla bassa crudeltà. Questa è la teoria dei magistrati, e questa è una sciocchezza.
Per quanto io li abbia visti, in rapporto ai banchetti di libri più lerci dei quartieri più poveri, i fatti sono semplicemente questi: l’intera sconcertante massa della volgare letteratura giovanile ha per oggetto avventure, divaganti, sconnesse e interminabili. Non esprime alcuna passione di alcun genere, poiché non vi è alcun carattere umano di alcun genere. Corre eternamente in certi solchi di tipo locale e storico: il cavaliere medievale, il duellante del Settecento e il moderno cowboy ricorrono con la stessa rigida semplicità delle convenzionali figure umane in un motivo ornamentale orientale. Riesco a immaginare un essere umano che accende appetiti selvaggi contemplando il suo tappeto di Turchia altrettanto facilmente quanto mediante una narrazione disumanizzata e nuda come questa.
Tra queste storie ve n’è un certo numero che tratta con simpatia le avventure di briganti, fuorilegge e pirati, che presentano in luce dignitosa e romantica ladri e assassini come Dick Turpin e Claude Duval. Vale a dire, fanno esattamente la stessa cosa dell’«Ivanhoe» di Scott, del «Rob Roy» di Scott, della «Lady of the Lake» di Scott, del «Corsair» di Byron, di «Rob Roy’s Grave» di Wordsworth, del «Macaire» di Stevenson, dell’«Iron Pirate» del signor Max Pemberton, e di mille altre opere distribuite sistematicamente come premi e regali di Natale. Nessuno immagina che l’ammirazione per Locksley in «Ivanhoe» indurrà un ragazzo a tirare frecce giapponesi ai cervi di Richmond Park; nessuno pensa che l’incauta apertura di Wordsworth alla poesia su Rob Roy lo avvierà per la vita a diventare un ricattatore. Nel caso della nostra classe, riconosciamo che questa vita selvaggia è contemplata con piacere dai giovani non perché sia simile alla loro vita, ma perché ne è diversa. Potrebbe almeno attraversarci la mente che, per qualunque altra ragione il fattorino legga «The Red Revenge», di sicuro non è perché grondi del sangue dei propri amici e parenti.
In questa faccenda, come in tutte le faccende di tal genere, perdiamo del tutto l’orientamento parlando delle «classi inferiori» quando intendiamo l’umanità meno noi stessi. Questa modesta letteratura romantica non è particolarmente plebea: è semplicemente umana. Il filantropo non riesce mai a dimenticare classi e mestieri. Dice, con modesta spavalderia: «Ho invitato venticinque operai di fabbrica a prendere il tè». Se dicesse: «Ho invitato venticinque ragionieri iscritti all’albo a prendere il tè», chiunque coglierebbe l’umorismo di una classificazione così semplice. Ma questo è ciò che abbiamo fatto con questo ammasso di scrittura sciocca: abbiamo sondato, come se fosse una qualche mostruosa nuova malattia, ciò che è, di fatto, nient’altro che il cuore sciocco e valoroso dell’uomo. Gli uomini comuni saranno sempre dei sentimentali: poiché un sentimentale è semplicemente un uomo che ha sentimenti e non si dà la pena di inventare un nuovo modo di esprimerli. Queste comuni e correnti pubblicazioni non hanno nulla di essenzialmente malvagio. Esprimono le sanguigne ed eroiche verità ovvie su cui è edificata la civiltà; poiché è chiaro che, a meno che la civiltà non sia edificata su verità ovvie, non è affatto edificata. Chiaramente, non potrebbe esservi alcuna sicurezza per una società in cui l’osservazione del Presidente della Corte Suprema secondo cui l’omicidio è male fosse considerata un epigramma originale e sfolgorante.
Se gli autori e gli editori di «Dick Deadshot», e di opere tanto notevoli, facessero all’improvviso un’incursione nella classe colta, annotassero i nomi di ogni uomo, per quanto insigne, colto a una conferenza di estensione universitaria, confiscassero tutti i nostri romanzi e ci ammonissero tutti a correggere le nostre vite, ce ne avremmo seriamente a male. Eppure hanno assai più diritto di farlo di noi; poiché essi, con tutta la loro idiozia, sono normali e noi siamo anormali. È la letteratura moderna dei colti, non degli incolti, a essere dichiaratamente e aggressivamente criminale. Libri che raccomandano la dissolutezza e il pessimismo, di fronte ai quali il fattorino di animo nobile rabbrividirebbe, giacciono su tutti i tavoli dei nostri salotti. Se il più lercio vecchio proprietario del più lercio vecchio banchetto di libri di Whitechapel osasse esporre opere che raccomandino davvero la poligamia o il suicidio, la sua merce verrebbe sequestrata dalla polizia. Queste cose sono i nostri lussi. E con un’ipocrisia tanto ridicola da essere quasi senza pari nella storia, rimproveriamo i ragazzi di strada per la loro immoralità nel momento stesso in cui discutiamo (con equivoci professori tedeschi) se la moralità sia valida del tutto. Nell’istante stesso in cui malediciamo il penny dreadful per incoraggiare i furti contro la proprietà, dibattiamo la proposizione che ogni proprietà è furto. Nell’istante stesso in cui lo accusiamo (assai ingiustamente) di lascivia e indecenza, leggiamo allegramente filosofie che si gloriano di lascivia e indecenza. Nell’istante stesso in cui lo incolpiamo di incoraggiare i giovani a distruggere la vita, discutiamo placidamente se la vita valga la pena di essere conservata.
Ma siamo noi le eccezioni morbose; siamo noi la classe criminale. Questo dovrebbe essere il nostro grande conforto. La vasta massa dell’umanità, con la sua vasta massa di libri oziosi e di parole oziose, non ha mai dubitato e mai dubiterà che il coraggio sia splendido, che la fedeltà sia nobile, che le dame in difficoltà debbano essere soccorse, e i nemici sconfitti risparmiati. Vi è un gran numero di persone colte che dubitano di queste massime della vita quotidiana, proprio come vi è un gran numero di persone che credono di essere il Principe di Galles; e mi si dice che entrambe le classi di persone sono conversatori spassosi. Ma l’uomo o il ragazzo medio scrive ogni giorno, in questi grandi diari sgargianti della sua anima che chiamiamo penny dreadful, un vangelo più semplice e migliore di tutti quei cangianti paradossi etici che le persone alla moda cambiano tanto spesso quanto le loro cuffie. Può essere un fine assai limitato in moralità sparare a un «traditore dai molti volti e volubile», ma è almeno un fine migliore che essere un traditore dai molti volti e volubile, il che è un semplice riassunto di parecchi sistemi moderni, a partire da quello del signor d’Annunzio in giù. Finché la trama grossolana e sottile del mero romanzesco popolare corrente non viene toccata da una meschina cultura, esso non sarà mai vitalmente immorale. Sta sempre dalla parte della vita. I poveri — gli schiavi che davvero si curvano sotto il peso della vita — sono stati spesso folli, sventati e crudeli, ma mai disperati. È un privilegio di classe, come i sigari. La loro sdolcinata letteratura sarà sempre una letteratura di «sangue e tuono», semplice come il tuono del cielo e il sangue degli uomini.
A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS
If a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill’s ‘Liberty’ seventy-six times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to anyone of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes expressed, was ‘an artist in life.’ Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the vows which in the Middle Ages and in similar periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatest figures in civic and national civilization—by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains together, and the great chain hung there, it was said, for ages as a monument of that mystical folly. Another swore that he would find his way to Jerusalem with a patch over his eyes, and died looking for it. It is not easy to see that these two exploits, judged from a strictly rational standpoint, are any saner than the acts above suggested. A mountain is commonly a stationary and reliable object which it is not necessary to chain up at night like a dog. And it is not easy at first sight to see that a man pays a very high compliment to the Holy City by setting out for it under conditions which render it to the last degree improbable that he will ever get there.
But about this there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as symbols of the ‘decadence.’ But the men who did these things were not decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious direction of a superstitious religious system. This, again, will not hold water; for in the purely terrestrial and even sensual departments of life, such as love and lust, the medieval princes show the same mad promises and performances, the same misshapen imagination and the same monstrous self-sacrifice. Here we have a contradiction, to explain which it is necessary to think of the whole nature of vows from the beginning. And if we consider seriously and correctly the nature of vows, we shall, unless I am much mistaken, come to the conclusion that it is perfectly sane, and even sensible, to swear to chain mountains together, and that, if insanity is involved at all, it is a little insane not to do so.
The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one’s self, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea. In other words, we fear that by that time he will be, in the common but hideously significant phrase, another man. Now, it is this horrible fairy tale of a man constantly changing into other men that is the soul of the Decadence. That John Paterson should, with apparent calm, look forward to being a certain General Barker on Monday, Dr. Macgregor on Tuesday, Sir Walter Carstairs on Wednesday, and Sam Slugg on Thursday, may seem a nightmare; but to that nightmare we give the name of modern culture. One great decadent, who is now dead, published a poem some time ago, in which he powerfully summed up the whole spirit of the movement by declaring that he could stand in the prison yard and entirely comprehend the feelings of a man about to be hanged:
‘For he that lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die.’
And the end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us—this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.
Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief, or love, or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it exegi monumentum oere perennius was the only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together. But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a vow. For what could be more maddening than an existence in which our mother or aunt received the information that we were going to assassinate the King or build a temple on Ben Nevis with the genial composure of custom?
The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—‘free-love’—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.
In Mr. Bernard Shaw’s brilliant play ‘The Philanderer,’ we have a vivid picture of this state of things. Charteris is a man perpetually endeavouring to be a free-lover, which is like endeavouring to be a married bachelor or a white negro. He is wandering in a hungry search for a certain exhilaration which he can only have when he has the courage to cease from wandering. Men knew better than this in old times—in the time, for example, of Shakespeare’s heroes. When Shakespeare’s men are really celibate they praise the undoubted advantages of celibacy, liberty, irresponsibility, a chance of continual change. But they were not such fools as to continue to talk of liberty when they were in such a condition that they could be made happy or miserable by the moving of someone else’s eyebrow. Suckling classes love with debt in his praise of freedom.
‘And he that’s fairly out of both Of all the world is blest. He lives as in the golden age, When all things made were common; He takes his pipe, he takes his glass, He fears no man or woman.’
This is a perfectly possible, rational and manly position. But what have lovers to do with ridiculous affectations of fearing no man or woman? They know that in the turning of a hand the whole cosmic engine to the remotest star may become an instrument of music or an instrument of torture. They hear a song older than Suckling’s, that has survived a hundred philosophies. ‘Who is this that looketh out of the window, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners?’
As we have said, it is exactly this backdoor, this sense of having a retreat behind us, that is, to our minds, the sterilizing spirit in modern pleasure. Everywhere there is the persistent and insane attempt to obtain pleasure without paying for it. Thus, in politics the modern Jingoes practically say, ‘Let us have the pleasures of conquerors without the pains of soldiers: let us sit on sofas and be a hardy race.’ Thus, in religion and morals, the decadent mystics say: ‘Let us have the fragrance of sacred purity without the sorrows of self-restraint; let us sing hymns alternately to the Virgin and Priapus.’ Thus in love the free-lovers say: ‘Let us have the splendour of offering ourselves without the peril of committing ourselves; let us see whether one cannot commit suicide an unlimited number of times.’
Emphatically it will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.
Una difesa dei voti avventati
Se un uomo moderno e benestante, con un cappello alto e una redingote, si impegnasse solennemente davanti a tutti i suoi impiegati e amici a contare le foglie su ogni terzo albero di Holland Walk, a saltellare fino alla Città su un solo piede ogni giovedì, a ripetere l’intera opera “Liberty” di Mill settantasei volte, a raccogliere 300 dandelion nei campi appartenenti a chiunque si chiami Brown, a rimanere per trentun ore tenendosi l’orecchio sinistro con la mano destra, a cantare i nomi di tutte le sue zie in ordine di età sulla cima di un omnibus o ad assumersi qualsiasi altro impegno insolito, concluderemmo subito che l’uomo è pazzo, oppure, come si dice talvolta, è “un artista nella vita”. Eppure questi voti non sono più straordinari di quelli fatti nel Medioevo e in periodi simili, non da semplici fanatici ma dalle massime figure della civiltà cittadina e nazionale: re, giudici, poeti e sacerdoti. Un uomo giurò di catenare insieme due montagne, e la grande catena rimase appesa lì, si diceva, per secoli come monumento a quella follia mistica. Un altro giurò che avrebbe trovato la strada per Gerusalemme con una benda su un occhio, e morì cercandola. Non è facile vedere in cosa queste due imprese, giudicate da un punto di vista rigorosamente razionale, siano più sane degli atti suggeriti sopra. Una montagna è comunemente un oggetto stazionario e affidabile che non è necessario assicurare con una catena la notte come si fa con un cane. E a prima vista non è facile vedere in cosa un uomo renda un grande complimento alla Santa Città partendo per essa sotto condizioni che rendono estremamente improbabile che ci arrivi mai.
Ma su questo c’è una cosa sorprendente da notare. Se gli uomini si comportassero in quel modo nel nostro tempo, li considereremmo, come abbiamo detto, simboli della “decadenza”. Ma gli uomini che facevano queste cose non erano decadenti; appartenevano generalmente alle classi più robuste di un’epoca generalmente considerata robusta. Ancora una volta, si sosterrà che se uomini essenzialmente sani compivano tali follie, era sotto la direzione capricciosa di un sistema religioso superstizioso. Questo, ancora una volta, non regge acqua; perché nei dipartimenti puramente terrestri e persino sensuali della vita, come l’amore e il desiderio, i principi medievali mostrano le stesse promesse folli e le stesse performance, la stessa immaginazione deforme e lo stesso auto-sacrificio mostruoso. Qui abbiamo una contraddizione, per spiegare la quale è necessario pensare a tutta la natura dei voti fin dall’inizio. E se consideriamo seriamente e correttamente la natura dei voti, arriveremo, a meno che non mi sbagli molto, alla conclusione che è perfettamente sano, e persino sensato, giurare di catenare insieme le montagne, e che, se la follia è coinvolta in qualche modo, è un po’ folle non farlo.
L’uomo che fa un voto prende appuntamento con se stesso per qualche tempo o luogo lontano. Il pericolo è che lui non si presenti all’appuntamento. E nei tempi moderni questa paura del proprio sé, della debolezza e mutabilità del proprio sé, è cresciuta in modo pericoloso ed è la vera base dell’obiezione ai voti di qualsiasi tipo. Un uomo moderno si astiene dal giurare di contare le foglie su ogni terzo albero nel viale olandese, non perché sia sciocco farlo (fa cose ben più sciocche), ma perché è profondamente convinto che prima di arrivare alla trecentosettantanovesima foglia del primo albero si sarebbe stancato in modo eccessivo dell’argomento e vorrebbe tornare a casa per il tè. In altre parole, temiamo che a quel tempo lui sarà, nella comune ma orribilmente significativa espressione, un altro uomo. Ora, è questa terribile fiaba di un uomo che si trasforma costantemente in altri uomini l’anima della Decadenza. Che John Paterson possa, con apparente calma, guardare avanti ad essere un certo Generale Barker il lunedì, il dottor Macgregor il martedì, Sir Walter Carstairs il mercoledì e Sam Slugg giovedì, può sembrare un incubo; ma a quell’incubo diamo il nome di cultura moderna. Un grande decadente, che ora è morto, pubblicò una poesia qualche tempo fa, in cui riassumeva con forza lo spirito intero del movimento dichiarando che poteva stare nel cortile della prigione e comprendere completamente i sentimenti di un uomo in procinto di essere impiccato:
«Perché chi vive più vite di una, più morti di una deve morire».
E il risultato di tutto ciò è quell’orrore esasperante dell’irrealtà che scende sui decadenti, e al confronto del quale la dolore fisico stesso avrebbe la freschezza di una cosa giovanile. L’inferno che l’immaginazione deve concepire come il più infernale è quello di recitare eternamente in una commedia senza neppure un camerino stretto e squallido dove essere umani. E questa è la condizione del decadente, dell’esteta, del libero amante. Passare perennemente attraverso pericoli che sappiamo non possono danneggiarci, pronunciare giuramenti che sappiamo non possono legarci, sfidare nemici che sappiamo non possono conquistarci: questa è la tirannia ghignante del decadentismo chiamata libertà.
Volgiamoci, d’altra parte, verso colui che fa i voti. L’uomo che faceva un voto, per quanto folle, dava una sana e naturale espressione alla grandezza di un grande momento. Giurò, ad esempio, di catenare insieme due montagne, forse simbolo di qualche grande sollievo o amore o aspirazione. Breve quanto potesse essere il momento della sua decisione, era, come tutti i grandi momenti, un momento di immortalità, e il desiderio di dire exegi monumentum aere perennius era l’unico sentimento che avrebbe soddisfatto la sua mente. L’uomo estetico moderno vedrebbe, naturalmente, facilmente l’opportunità emotiva; giurerebbe di catenare insieme due montagne. Ma poi, altrettanto allegramente, giurerebbe di catenare la terra alla luna. E la coscienza avvizzita che non intendeva ciò che diceva, che stava, in verità, dicendo nulla di grande importanza, gli toglierebbe esattamente quel senso di audace attualità che è l’eccitazione di un voto. Perché cosa potrebbe essere più esasperante di un’esistenza in cui nostra madre o zia ricevessero la notizia che stavamo per assassinare il Re o costruire un tempio su Ben Nevis con la geniale compostezza dell’abitudine?
La rivolta contro i voti è stata portata ai nostri giorni fino al punto di una rivolta contro il tipico voto del matrimonio. È molto divertente ascoltare gli oppositori del matrimonio su questo argomento. Sembrano immaginare che l’ideale della costanza sia un giogo misteriosamente imposto all’umanità dal diavolo, invece di essere, come è, un giogo coerentemente imposto da tutti i amanti a se stessi. Hanno inventato una frase, una frase che è una contraddizione in bianco e nero in due parole: ‘amore libero’ - come se un innamorato fosse mai stato, o potesse mai essere, libero. È nella natura dell’amore legarsi e l’istituzione del matrimonio ha semplicemente reso omaggio all’uomo medio prendendolo alla sua parola. I saggi moderni offrono all’innamorato, con un ghigno di cattivo gusto, le più ampie libertà e la massima irresponsabilità; ma non lo rispettano come faceva la vecchia Chiesa; non scrivono il suo giuramento nei cieli, come testimonianza del suo momento più alto. Gli concedono ogni libertà tranne quella di vendere la propria libertà, che è l’unica cosa che desidera.
Nella brillante opera teatrale di Mr. Bernard Shaw “The Philanderer”, abbiamo un vivido quadro di questo stato di cose. Charteris è un uomo che cerca perpetuamente di essere un libero-amante, il che equivale a cercare di essere uno scapolo sposato o un negro bianco. Sta vagando in una ricerca affamata di una certa esaltazione che può avere solo quando ha il coraggio di smettere di vagare. Gli uomini sapevano meglio di così ai vecchi tempi, nel tempo, per esempio, degli eroi di Shakespeare. Quando gli uomini di Shakespeare erano veramente celibi lodavano i non dubbi vantaggi del celibato, della libertà, dell’irresponsabilità, la possibilità di un continuo cambiamento. Ma non erano così sciocchi da continuare a parlare di libertà quando si trovavano in una condizione tale che potevano essere resi felici o miserabili dal movimento del sopracciglio di qualcun altro. Suckling classifica l’amore con il debito nella sua lode della libertà.
«E chi è equamente fuori da entrambi di tutto il mondo è beato. Vive come nell’età dell’oro, quando tutte le cose create erano comuni; prende la sua pipa, prende il suo bicchiere, non teme uomo né donna.»
Questa è una posizione perfettamente possibile, razionale e virile. Ma che cosa hanno a che fare gli innamorati con le ridicole finzioni di non temere né uomo né donna? Sanno che nel girare di una mano l’intera macchina cosmica fino all’ultima stella può diventare uno strumento di musica o uno strumento di tortura. Sentono un canto più antico di quello di Suckling, che ha superato cento filosofie. “Chi è questa che guarda fuori dalla finestra, bella come il sole, chiara come la luna, terribile come un esercito con le insegne?”
Come abbiamo detto, è proprio questa porta di servizio, questo senso di avere una ritirata alle nostre spalle, che, secondo noi, rappresenta lo spirito sterilizzante del piacere moderno. Ovunque si nota il tentativo persistente e folle di ottenere piacere senza pagarne il prezzo. Così, in politica, i moderni jingoes dicono praticamente: “Godiamoci i piaceri dei conquistatori senza le sofferenze dei soldati; sediamoci sui divani ed essere una razza robusta”. Così, nella religione e nei costumi, i mistici decadenti dicono: “Godiamoci il profumo della purezza sacra senza le pene dell’auto-controllo; cantiamo inni alternativamente alla Vergine e a Priapo”. Così nell’amore i liberi amanti dicono: “Godiamoci lo splendore di offrirci senza il pericolo di impegnarci; vediamo se non si può commettere suicidio un numero illimitato di volte”.
E non funzionerà assolutamente. Ci sono momenti emozionanti, senza dubbio, per lo spettatore, l’amatoriale e l’esteta; ma c’è un brivido che è noto solo al soldato che combatte per la propria bandiera, all’asceta che si affama per la propria illuminazione, all’innamorato che finalmente fa la sua scelta. E questa è la trasfigurante autodisciplina che rende il voto una cosa veramente sana. Deve aver soddisfatto anche l’enorme fame dell’anima di un innamorato o di un poeta sapere che in conseguenza di un solo istante di decisione quella strana catena sarebbe appesa per secoli nelle Alpi tra i silenzi delle stelle e della neve. Tutto intorno a noi c’è la città dei piccoli peccati, abbondante di vie secondarie e ritiri, ma sicuramente, prima o poi, la fiamma torreggiante salirà dal porto annunciando che il regno dei codardi è finito e un uomo sta bruciando le sue navi.
A DEFENCE OF SKELETONS
Some little time ago I stood among immemorial English trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils. As I walked among these living pillars I became gradually aware that the rustics who lived and died in their shadow adopted a very curious conversational tone. They seemed to be constantly apologizing for the trees, as if they were a very poor show. After elaborate investigation, I discovered that their gloomy and penitent tone was traceable to the fact that it was winter and all the trees were bare. I assured them that I did not resent the fact that it was winter, that I knew the thing had happened before, and that no forethought on their part could have averted this blow of destiny. But I could not in any way reconcile them to the fact that it was winter. There was evidently a general feeling that I had caught the trees in a kind of disgraceful deshabille, and that they ought not to be seen until, like the first human sinners, they had covered themselves with leaves. So it is quite clear that, while very few people appear to know anything of how trees look in winter, the actual foresters know less than anyone. So far from the line of the tree when it is bare appearing harsh and severe, it is luxuriantly indefinable to an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette. The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in comparison hard, gross and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders’ webs.
But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a pianist. When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor over hill and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they were less like mops. But it does appear to be a deep and essential difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure, or of the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.
The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.
One ground exists for this terror: a strange idea has infected humanity that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left naked after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution; but both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own, all the pulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, in the House of Livelihood as in the House of Life. There is no reason why this creature (new, as I fancy, to art), the living skeleton, should not become the essential symbol of life.
The truth is that man’s horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all. It is man’s eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be genteel—a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of animals carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous shapes and appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs, when they are necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big for its body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour rather abruptly deserts him.
In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the mere dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went to meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity, an endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that they would fall into one grinning man-trap, and not rise again. That the whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous, they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were taught that death was humorous.
There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what we call Nature lie in her beauty. But the fact that Nature is beautiful in the sense that a dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful, is only one of her charms, and almost an accidental one. The highest and most valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and defiant ugliness. A hundred instances might be taken. The croaking noise of the rooks is, in itself, as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a London railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse kindliness and honesty, and the lover in ‘Maud’ could actually persuade himself that this abominable noise resembled his lady-love’s name. Has the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting? It is a noise that does a man good—a strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest, the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of Nature—the value which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as grotesque, as solemn and as happy as a child. The mood does come when we see all her shapes like shapes that a baby scrawls upon a slate—simple, rudimentary, a million years older and stronger than the whole disease that is called Art. The objects of earth and heaven seem to combine into a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and levity. The tree above my head is flapping like some gigantic bird standing on one leg; the moon is like the eye of a Cyclops. And, however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for ever.
IN DIFESA DEGLI SCHELETRI
Qualche tempo fa mi trovavo tra immemori alberi inglesi che parevano avvinghiarsi alle stelle come una nidiata di Yggdrasill. Mentre camminavo tra questi pilastri viventi, mi resi conto a poco a poco che i campagnoli che vivevano e morivano alla loro ombra adottavano un tono di conversazione assai curioso. Sembravano scusarsi di continuo per gli alberi, come se fossero un ben misero spettacolo. Dopo elaborata indagine, scoprii che il loro tono cupo e penitente era riconducibile al fatto che era inverno e tutti gli alberi erano spogli. Li assicurai che non mi risentivo del fatto che fosse inverno, che sapevo che la cosa era già accaduta prima, e che nessuna previdenza da parte loro avrebbe potuto stornare questo colpo del destino. Ma non riuscii in alcun modo a riconciliarli col fatto che fosse inverno. Vi era evidentemente un sentimento generale che io avessi colto gli alberi in una sorta di disdicevole déshabillé, e che essi non dovessero essere veduti finché, come i primi peccatori umani, non si fossero coperti di foglie. Sicché è del tutto chiaro che, mentre pochissime persone paiono sapere alcunché di come appaiano gli alberi in inverno, i forestali stessi ne sanno meno di chiunque altro. Ben lungi dall’apparire aspra e severa, la linea dell’albero quando è spoglio è lussureggiantemente indefinibile a un grado inconsueto; la frangia della foresta si dissolve come una vignetta. Le cime di due o tre alberi alti, quando sono privi di foglie, sono così morbide da sembrare le gigantesche scope di quella favolosa dama che spazzava via le ragnatele dal cielo. Il contorno di una foresta frondosa è, al confronto, duro, grossolano e chiazzato; le nubi della notte non oscurano la luna più sicuramente di quanto quelle nubi verdi e mostruose oscurino l’albero; l’effettiva vista del boschetto, col suo mare grigio e argenteo di vita, è interamente una visione invernale. Tanto fioco e delicato è il cuore dei boschi d’inverno, una sorta di scintillante crepuscolo, che una figura che avanzi verso di noi nel chiaroscuro screziato pare come se stesse aprendosi un varco attraverso insondabili profondità di ragnatele.
Ma certamente l’idea che le sue foglie siano la grazia precipua di un albero è un’idea volgare, alla pari dell’idea che i capelli siano la grazia precipua di un pianista. Quando l’inverno, quel sano asceta, passa il suo gigantesco rasoio su colle e valle, e rade tutti gli alberi come monaci, sentiamo di sicuro che essi sono tanto più simili ad alberi se sono tosati, proprio come tanti pittori e musicisti sarebbero tanto più simili a uomini se fossero meno simili a spazzoloni. Ma pare davvero esservi una difficoltà profonda ed essenziale, ossia che gli uomini hanno un terrore costante della propria struttura, o della struttura delle cose che amano. Questo si avverte oscuramente nello scheletro dell’albero: si avverte profondamente nello scheletro dell’uomo.
L’importanza dello scheletro umano è grandissima, e l’orrore con cui esso viene comunemente considerato è alquanto misterioso. Senza rivendicare per lo scheletro umano una bellezza del tutto convenzionale, possiamo affermare che esso non è certo più brutto di un bulldog, la cui popolarità non svanisce mai, e che ha un’espressione assai più allegra e accattivante. Ma proprio come l’uomo si vergogna misteriosamente degli scheletri degli alberi in inverno, così si vergogna misteriosamente del proprio scheletro nella morte. È una cosa del tutto singolare, questo orrore dell’architettura delle cose. Si penserebbe che sarebbe quanto mai imprudente per un uomo aver paura di uno scheletro, dal momento che la Natura ha posto curiosi e del tutto insormontabili ostacoli alla sua fuga da esso.
Un fondamento esiste per questo terrore: una strana idea ha infettato l’umanità, ossia che lo scheletro sia tipico della morte. Un uomo potrebbe altrettanto bene dire che una ciminiera di fabbrica è tipica della bancarotta. La fabbrica può essere lasciata nuda dopo la rovina, lo scheletro può essere lasciato nudo dopo la dissoluzione del corpo; ma entrambi hanno avuto una vita vivace e operosa tutta loro, con tutte le carrucole che cigolavano, tutte le ruote che giravano, nella Casa del Sostentamento come nella Casa della Vita. Non v’è ragione per cui questa creatura (nuova, a quel che immagino, per l’arte), lo scheletro vivente, non debba diventare il simbolo essenziale della vita.
La verità è che l’orrore dell’uomo per lo scheletro non è affatto orrore della morte. È l’eccentrica gloria dell’uomo il fatto che egli non ha, generalmente parlando, alcuna obiezione a essere morto, ma ha una serissima obiezione a essere privo di dignità. E la questione fondamentale che lo turba nello scheletro è il richiamo al fatto che la pianta di base del suo aspetto è spudoratamente grottesca. Non so perché egli debba obiettare a questo. Egli prende posto con soddisfazione in un mondo che non pretende di essere raffinato: un mondo che ride, lavora, schernisce. Vede milioni di animali che portano, con una leggerezza del tutto azzimata, le forme e le appendici più mostruose, le corna, le ali e le zampe più assurde, quando siano necessarie all’utilità. Vede il buon umore della rana, l’inspiegabile felicità dell’ippopotamo. Vede un intero universo che è ridicolo, dall’animalcolo, con una testa troppo grande per il suo corpo, fino alla cometa, con una coda troppo grande per la sua testa. Ma quando si tratta della deliziosa stranezza del proprio interno, il suo senso dell’umorismo lo abbandona piuttosto bruscamente.
Nel Medioevo e nel Rinascimento (che fu, in certi tempi e per certi rispetti, un periodo assai più cupo) questa idea dello scheletro ebbe un vasto influsso nel gelare via l’orgoglio da tutte le pompe terrene e la fragranza da tutti i piaceri fuggevoli. Ma non fu, di certo, il mero timore della morte a fare ciò, poiché quelle furono epoche in cui gli uomini andavano incontro alla morte cantando; fu l’idea della degradazione dell’uomo nella ghignante bruttezza della sua struttura ad avvizzire la giovanile insolenza della bellezza e dell’orgoglio. E in ciò fece quasi sicuramente più bene che male. Non v’è nulla di così freddo o così spietato come la giovinezza, e la giovinezza, nelle stazioni e nelle età aristocratiche, tendeva a un’impeccabile dignità, a un’interminabile estate di successo che aveva bisogno di essere assai bruscamente ricordata dello scherno delle stelle. Fu bene che tali sgargianti presuntuosi fossero convinti che almeno uno scherzo pratico li avrebbe fatti ruzzolare, che sarebbero caduti in una ghignante tagliola, per non rialzarsi più. Che l’intera struttura della loro esistenza fosse tanto salubremente ridicola quanto quella di un maiale o di un pappagallo, non ci si poteva aspettare che se ne rendessero conto; che nascere fosse comico, raggiungere la maggiore età comico, bere e battersi comico, essi erano troppo giovani e solenni per saperlo. Ma almeno fu loro insegnato che la morte era comica.
C’è in giro una peculiare idea, ossia che il valore e il fascino di ciò che chiamiamo Natura risiedano nella sua bellezza. Ma il fatto che la Natura sia bella nel senso in cui è bello un fregio a mezza parete o una tenda Liberty è soltanto uno dei suoi incanti, e quasi accidentale. La qualità più alta e più preziosa nella Natura non è la sua bellezza, ma la sua generosa e sfidante bruttezza. Si potrebbero addurre cento esempi. Il gracchiare delle cornacchie è, in sé, orrendo quanto l’intero inferno di suoni in una galleria ferroviaria di Londra. Eppure ci solleva come una tromba con la sua rozza cordialità e onestà, e l’amante in «Maud» riusciva davvero a persuadersi che quell’abominevole rumore somigliasse al nome della sua donna-amore. Il poeta, per il quale la Natura significa soltanto rose e gigli, ha mai udito un maiale grugnire? È un rumore che fa bene a un uomo: un rumore forte, sbuffante, imprigionato, che si apre un varco fuori da insondabili segrete attraverso ogni possibile sbocco e organo. Potrebbe essere la voce della terra stessa, che russa nel suo possente sonno. Questo è il più profondo, il più antico, il più salubre e religioso senso del valore della Natura: il valore che proviene dalla sua immensa fanciullaggine. Essa è tanto squilibrata in alto, tanto grottesca, tanto solenne e tanto felice quanto un bambino. Il momento viene quando vediamo tutte le sue forme come forme che un bimbo scarabocchia su una lavagna: semplici, rudimentali, un milione di anni più vecchie e più forti dell’intera malattia che si chiama Arte. Gli oggetti della terra e del cielo paiono combinarsi in una fiaba per bambini, e la nostra relazione con le cose pare per un momento così semplice che occorrerebbe un lunatico danzante per rendere giustizia alla sua limpidezza e leggerezza. L’albero sopra il mio capo sbatte le ali come un qualche gigantesco uccello ritto su una zampa sola; la luna è come l’occhio di un Ciclope. E, per quanto il mio volto si annuvoli di cupa vanità, o di volgare vendetta, o di spregevole disprezzo, le ossa del mio cranio al di sotto di esso ridono in eterno.
A DEFENCE OF PUBLICITY
It is a very significant fact that the form of art in which the modern world has certainly not improved upon the ancient is what may roughly be called the art of the open air. Public monuments have certainly not improved, nor has the criticism of them improved, as is evident from the fashion of condemning such a large number of them as pompous. An interesting essay might be written on the enormous number of words that are used as insults when they are really compliments. It is in itself a singular study in that tendency which, as I have said, is always making things out worse than they are, and necessitating a systematic attitude of defence. Thus, for example, some dramatic critics cast contempt upon a dramatic performance by calling it theatrical, which simply means that it is suitable to a theatre, and is as much a compliment as calling a poem poetical. Similarly we speak disdainfully of a certain kind of work as sentimental, which simply means possessing the admirable and essential quality of sentiment. Such phrases are all parts of one peddling and cowardly philosophy, and remind us of the days when ‘enthusiast’ was a term of reproach. But of all this vocabulary of unconscious eulogies nothing is more striking than the word ‘pompous.’
Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous. Pomp is its very object; it would be absurd to have columns and pyramids blushing in some coy nook like violets in the woods of spring. And public monuments have in this matter a great and much-needed lesson to teach. Valour and mercy and the great enthusiasms ought to be a great deal more public than they are at present. We are too fond nowadays of committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence. We have forgotten the old and wholesome morality of the Book of Proverbs, ‘Wisdom crieth without; her voice is heard in the streets.’ In Athens and Florence her voice was heard in the streets. They had an outdoor life of war and argument, and they had what modern commercial civilization has never had—an outdoor art. Religious services, the most sacred of all things, have always been held publicly; it is entirely a new and debased notion that sanctity is the same as secrecy. A great many modern poets, with the most abstruse and delicate sensibilities, love darkness, when all is said and done, much for the same reason that thieves love it. The mission of a great spire or statue should be to strike the spirit with a sudden sense of pride as with a thunderbolt. It should lift us with it into the empty and ennobling air. Along the base of every noble monument, whatever else may be written there, runs in invisible letters the lines of Swinburne:
‘This thing is God: To be man with thy might, To go straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life in the light.’
If a public monument does not meet this first supreme and obvious need, that it should be public and monumental, it fails from the outset.
There has arisen lately a school of realistic sculpture, which may perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and depressing object in the universe—far more hideous and depressing than one of Mr. H.G. Wells’s shapeless monsters of the slime (and not at all unlike them)—is the statue of an English philanthropist. Almost as bad, though, of course, not quite as bad, are the statues of English politicians in Parliament Fields. Each of them is cased in a cylindrical frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking garment over the arm that might be either a bathing-towel or a light great-coat. Each of them is in an oratorical attitude, which has all the disadvantage of being affected without even any of the advantages of being theatrical. Let no one suppose that such abortions arise merely from technical demerit. In every line of those leaden dolls is expressed the fact that they were not set up with any heat of natural enthusiasm for beauty or dignity. They were set up mechanically, because it would seem indecorous or stingy if they were not set up. They were even set up sulkily, in a utilitarian age which was haunted by the thought that there were a great many more sensible ways of spending money. So long as this is the dominant national sentiment, the land is barren, statues and churches will not grow—for they have to grow, as much as trees and flowers. But this moral disadvantage which lay so heavily upon the early Victorian sculpture lies in a modified degree upon that rough, picturesque, commonplace sculpture which has begun to arise, and of which the statue of Darwin in the South Kensington Museum and the statue of Gordon in Trafalgar Square are admirable examples. It is not enough for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it must be striking; it must be in the highest sense of the word sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the longest and blackest catalogue has been made of all our crimes and follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.
The two modes of commemorating a public man are a statue and a biography. They are alike in certain respects, as, for example, in the fact that neither of them resembles the original, and that both of them commonly tone down not only all a man’s vices, but all the more amusing of his virtues. But they are treated in one respect differently. We never hear anything about biography without hearing something about the sanctity of private life and the necessity for suppressing the whole of the most important part of a man’s existence. The sculptor does not work at this disadvantage. The sculptor does not leave out the nose of an eminent philanthropist because it is too beautiful to be given to the public; he does not depict a statesman with a sack over his head because his smile was too sweet to be endurable in the light of day. But in biography the thesis is popularly and solidly maintained, so that it requires some courage even to hint a doubt of it, that the better a man was, the more truly human life he led, the less should be said about it.
For this idea, this modern idea that sanctity is identical with secrecy, there is one thing at least to be said. It is for all practical purposes an entirely new idea; it was unknown to all the ages in which the idea of sanctity really flourished. The record of the great spiritual movements of mankind is dead against the idea that spirituality is a private matter. The most awful secret of every man’s soul, its most lonely and individual need, its most primal and psychological relationship, the thing called worship, the communication between the soul and the last reality—this most private matter is the most public spectacle in the world. Anyone who chooses to walk into a large church on Sunday morning may see a hundred men each alone with his Maker. He stands, in truth, in the presence of one of the strangest spectacles in the world—a mob of hermits. And in thus definitely espousing publicity by making public the most internal mystery, Christianity acts in accordance with its earliest origins and its terrible beginning. It was surely by no accident that the spectacle which darkened the sun at noonday was set upon a hill. The martyrdoms of the early Christians were public not only by the caprice of the oppressor, but by the whole desire and conception of the victims.
The mere grammatical meaning of the word ‘martyr’ breaks into pieces at a blow the whole notion of the privacy of goodness. The Christian martyrdoms were more than demonstrations: they were advertisements. In our day the new theory of spiritual delicacy would desire to alter all this. It would permit Christ to be crucified if it was necessary to His Divine nature, but it would ask in the name of good taste why He could not be crucified in a private room. It would declare that the act of a martyr in being torn in pieces by lions was vulgar and sensational, though, of course, it would have no objection to being torn in pieces by a lion in one’s own parlour before a circle of really intimate friends.
It is, I am inclined to think, a decadent and diseased purity which has inaugurated this notion that the sacred object must be hidden. The stars have never lost their sanctity, and they are more shameless and naked and numerous than advertisements of Pears’ soap. It would be a strange world indeed if Nature was suddenly stricken with this ethereal shame, if the trees grew with their roots in the air and their load of leaves and blossoms underground, if the flowers closed at dawn and opened at sunset, if the sunflower turned towards the darkness, and the birds flew, like bats, by night.
IN DIFESA DELLA PUBBLICITÀ
È un fatto assai significativo che la forma d’arte in cui il mondo moderno non ha certo superato l’antico sia quella che si potrebbe grossolanamente chiamare l’arte dell’aria aperta. I monumenti pubblici non sono certo migliorati, né è migliorata la critica di essi, come risulta evidente dalla moda di condannarne un così gran numero come pomposi. Si potrebbe scrivere un interessante saggio sull’enorme numero di parole che vengono usate come insulti quando sono in realtà complimenti. È di per sé un singolare studio di quella tendenza che, come ho detto, fa sempre apparire le cose peggiori di quanto siano, e rende necessario un sistematico atteggiamento di difesa. Così, per esempio, certi critici teatrali gettano il disprezzo su una rappresentazione teatrale chiamandola teatrale, il che significa semplicemente che è adatta a un teatro, ed è tanto un complimento quanto chiamare poetica una poesia. Similmente parliamo sdegnosamente di un certo genere di opera come sentimentale, il che significa semplicemente che possiede la mirabile ed essenziale qualità del sentimento. Simili espressioni fanno tutte parte di una medesima filosofia gretta e codarda, e ci ricordano i giorni in cui «entusiasta» era un termine di biasimo. Ma di tutto questo vocabolario di elogi inconsapevoli nulla è più notevole della parola «pomposo».
Propriamente parlando, s’intende, un monumento pubblico dovrebbe essere pomposo. La pompa è il suo vero scopo; sarebbe assurdo avere colonne e piramidi che arrossiscono in qualche timido cantuccio come violette nei boschi di primavera. E i monumenti pubblici hanno, in questa materia, una grande e assai necessaria lezione da impartire. Il valore e la misericordia e i grandi entusiasmi dovrebbero essere assai più pubblici di quanto siano al presente. Siamo troppo inclini, di questi tempi, a commettere il peccato della paura e a chiamarlo la virtù della reverenza. Abbiamo dimenticato l’antica e salubre moralità del Libro dei Proverbi: «La sapienza grida di fuori; la sua voce si ode nelle strade». Ad Atene e a Firenze la sua voce si udiva nelle strade. Avevano una vita all’aperto di guerra e di argomentazione, e avevano ciò che la moderna civiltà commerciale non ha mai avuto: un’arte all’aperto. I servizi religiosi, la più sacra di tutte le cose, si sono sempre tenuti pubblicamente; è del tutto una nozione nuova e degradata quella secondo cui la santità è lo stesso della segretezza. Moltissimi poeti moderni, dalle sensibilità più astruse e delicate, amano le tenebre, a conti fatti, in gran parte per la stessa ragione per cui le amano i ladri. La missione di una grande guglia o statua dovrebbe essere quella di colpire lo spirito con un improvviso senso di orgoglio come con un fulmine. Dovrebbe sollevarci con sé nell’aria vuota e nobilitante. Lungo la base di ogni nobile monumento, qualunque altra cosa vi sia scritta, corrono in lettere invisibili i versi di Swinburne:
«Questa cosa è Dio: essere uomo con la tua possanza, andare diritto nella forza del tuo spirito, e vivere fino in fondo la tua vita nella luce.»
Se un monumento pubblico non soddisfa questo primo, supremo e ovvio bisogno, ossia di essere pubblico e monumentale, esso fallisce fin dall’inizio.
È sorta di recente una scuola di scultura realistica, che si potrebbe forse meglio descrivere come una scuola di scultura abbozzata. Un simile movimento era giusto e inevitabile come reazione alla meschina e squallida pomposità della statuaria vittoriana inglese. Forse l’oggetto più orrendo e deprimente dell’universo — assai più orrendo e deprimente di uno dei mostri informi della melma del signor H. G. Wells (e per nulla dissimile da essi) — è la statua di un filantropo inglese. Quasi altrettanto brutte, però, per quanto, s’intende, non del tutto altrettanto brutte, sono le statue dei politici inglesi nei Parliament Fields. Ciascuna di esse è racchiusa in una redingote cilindrica, e ciascuna reca o una pergamena o un dubbio indumento sul braccio che potrebbe essere o un asciugamano da bagno o un leggero soprabito. Ciascuna di esse è in atteggiamento oratorio, che ha tutto lo svantaggio di essere affettato senza nemmeno alcuno dei vantaggi di essere teatrale. Nessuno supponga che tali aborti sorgano meramente da demerito tecnico. In ogni linea di quei fantocci di piombo è espresso il fatto che essi non furono eretti con alcun calore di naturale entusiasmo per la bellezza o la dignità. Furono eretti meccanicamente, perché sarebbe parso sconveniente o gretto se non fossero stati eretti. Furono eretti perfino di malavoglia, in un’età utilitaria ossessionata dal pensiero che vi fossero moltissimi modi più sensati di spendere denaro. Finché questo è il sentimento nazionale dominante, la terra è sterile, statue e chiese non cresceranno — poiché esse devono crescere, tanto quanto gli alberi e i fiori. Ma questo svantaggio morale, che gravava così pesantemente sulla scultura del primo periodo vittoriano, grava in grado attenuato su quella scultura rozza, pittoresca, comune che ha cominciato a sorgere, e di cui la statua di Darwin nel South Kensington Museum e la statua di Gordon in Trafalgar Square sono esempi mirabili. Non basta che un monumento popolare sia artistico, come uno schizzo a carboncino nero; deve essere impressionante; deve essere, nel più alto senso della parola, sensazionale; deve stare per l’umanità; deve parlare per noi alle stelle; deve dichiarare al cospetto di tutti i cieli che, quando sia stato compilato il più lungo e più nero catalogo di tutti i nostri delitti e le nostre follie, vi sono alcune cose di cui noi uomini non ci vergogniamo.
I due modi di commemorare un uomo pubblico sono una statua e una biografia. Si somigliano sotto certi rispetti, come, per esempio, nel fatto che né l’una né l’altra somiglia all’originale, e che entrambe comunemente attenuano non solo tutti i vizi di un uomo, ma anche tutte le più divertenti delle sue virtù. Ma vengono trattate in un rispetto in modo diverso. Non udiamo mai nulla intorno alla biografia senza udire qualcosa intorno alla santità della vita privata e alla necessità di sopprimere l’intera parte più importante dell’esistenza di un uomo. Lo scultore non lavora con questo svantaggio. Lo scultore non tralascia il naso di un eminente filantropo perché è troppo bello per essere dato al pubblico; non raffigura uno statista con un sacco sul capo perché il suo sorriso era troppo dolce per essere sopportabile alla luce del giorno. Ma nella biografia la tesi è popolarmente e solidamente sostenuta, tanto che occorre un certo coraggio anche solo per accennare un dubbio su di essa, ossia che quanto migliore era un uomo, quanto più veramente umana era la vita che conduceva, tanto meno se ne dovrebbe dire.
A favore di questa idea, questa idea moderna che la santità sia identica alla segretezza, c’è almeno una cosa da dire. A ogni fine pratico è un’idea interamente nuova; era ignota a tutte le età in cui l’idea di santità realmente fioriva. Il registro dei grandi movimenti spirituali dell’umanità è tutto contrario all’idea che la spiritualità sia una faccenda privata. Il più tremendo segreto dell’anima di ogni uomo, il suo bisogno più solitario e individuale, la sua relazione più primordiale e psicologica, la cosa chiamata adorazione, la comunicazione tra l’anima e l’ultima realtà — questa faccenda privatissima è il più pubblico spettacolo del mondo. Chiunque scelga di entrare in una grande chiesa la mattina della domenica può vedere cento uomini ciascuno solo col proprio Creatore. Egli sta, in verità, al cospetto di uno dei più strani spettacoli del mondo: una folla di eremiti. E nell’abbracciare così decisamente la pubblicità, rendendo pubblico il più interiore mistero, il Cristianesimo agisce in accordo con le sue origini più antiche e col suo terribile inizio. Non fu di certo per caso che lo spettacolo che oscurò il sole a mezzogiorno fu posto su un colle. I martirii dei primi cristiani furono pubblici non solo per il capriccio dell’oppressore, ma per l’intero desiderio e l’intera concezione delle vittime.
Il mero significato grammaticale della parola «martire» manda in frantumi d’un colpo l’intera nozione della privatezza della bontà. I martirii cristiani furono più che dimostrazioni: furono pubblicità. Ai giorni nostri la nuova teoria della delicatezza spirituale desidererebbe mutare tutto questo. Permetterebbe che Cristo fosse crocifisso se ciò fosse necessario alla sua natura Divina, ma chiederebbe, in nome del buon gusto, perché non potesse essere crocifisso in una stanza privata. Dichiarerebbe che l’atto di un martire fatto a pezzi dai leoni era volgare e sensazionale, benché, s’intende, non avrebbe alcuna obiezione a essere fatto a pezzi da un leone nel proprio salotto dinanzi a una cerchia di amici davvero intimi.
È, sono incline a pensare, una purezza decadente e malata quella che ha inaugurato questa nozione che l’oggetto sacro debba essere nascosto. Le stelle non hanno mai perduto la loro santità, e sono più spudorate e nude e numerose delle réclame del sapone Pears. Sarebbe davvero un mondo strano se la Natura fosse d’un tratto colpita da questo etereo pudore, se gli alberi crescessero con le radici in aria e il loro carico di foglie e fiori sottoterra, se i fiori si chiudessero all’alba e si aprissero al tramonto, se il girasole si volgesse verso le tenebre, e gli uccelli volassero, come pipistrelli, di notte.
A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE
There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown from a boy’s bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is ‘the heir of all the ages’ is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.
The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt and inventive in any age; and if we were asked what was the best proof of this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say, with all respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies, that it was to be found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of nonsense. ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose,’ at least, is original, as the first ship and the first plough were original.
It is true in a certain sense that some of the greatest writers the world has seen—Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne—have written nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different sense. The nonsense of these men was satiric—that is to say, symbolic; it was a kind of exuberant capering round a discovered truth. There is all the difference in the world between the instinct of satire, which, seeing in the Kaiser’s moustaches something typical of him, draws them continually larger and larger; and the instinct of nonsense which, for no reason whatever, imagines what those moustaches would look like on the present Archbishop of Canterbury if he grew them in a fit of absence of mind. We incline to think that no age except our own could have understood that the Quangle-Wangle meant absolutely nothing, and the Lands of the Jumblies were absolutely nowhere. We fancy that if the account of the knave’s trial in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ had been published in the seventeenth century it would have been bracketed with Bunyan’s ‘Trial of Faithful’ as a parody on the State prosecutions of the time. We fancy that if ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’ had appeared in the same period everyone would have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell.
It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr. Lear’s ‘Nonsense Rhymes.’ To our mind he is both chronologically and essentially the father of nonsense; we think him superior to Lewis Carroll. In one sense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth and in dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of nonsense—the idea of escape, of escape into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear-trees, and any odd man you meet may have three legs. Lewis Carroll, living one life in which he would have thundered morally against any one who walked on the wrong plot of grass, and another life in which he would cheerfully call the sun green and the moon blue, was, by his very divided nature, his one foot on both worlds, a perfect type of the position of modern nonsense. His Wonderland is a country populated by insane mathematicians. We feel the whole is an escape into a world of masquerade; we feel that if we could pierce their disguises, we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare were Professors and Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental holiday. This sense of escape is certainly less emphatic in Edward Lear, because of the completeness of his citizenship in the world of unreason. We do not know his prosaic biography as we know Lewis Carroll’s. We accept him as a purely fabulous figure, on his own description of himself:
‘His body is perfectly spherical, He weareth a runcible hat.’
While Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is purely intellectual, Lear introduces quite another element—the element of the poetical and even emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong a contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded reason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.
‘Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live,’
is an entirely different type of poetry to that exhibited in ‘Jabberwocky.’ Carroll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, makes his whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words. But Edward Lear, with more subtle and placid effrontery, is always introducing scraps of his own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational statements, until we are almost stunned into admitting that we know what they mean. There is a genial ring of commonsense about such lines as,
‘For his aunt Jobiska said “Every one knows That a Pobble is better without his toes,”’
which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The poet seems so easy on the matter that we are almost driven to pretend that we see his meaning, that we know the peculiar difficulties of a Pobble, that we are as old travellers in the ‘Gromboolian Plain’ as he is.
Our claim that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than a mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth. The principle of art for art’s sake is a very good principle if it means that there is a vital distinction between the earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it is a very bad principle if it means that the tree could grow just as well with its roots in the air. Every great literature has always been allegorical—allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The ‘Iliad’ is only great because all life is a battle, the ‘Odyssey’ because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle. There is one attitude in which we think that all existence is summed up in the word ‘ghosts’; another, and somewhat better one, in which we think it is summed up in the words ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ Even the vulgarest melodrama or detective story can be good if it expresses something of the delight in sinister possibilities—the healthy lust for darkness and terror which may come on us any night in walking down a dark lane. If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be the tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a very unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things. Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the ‘wonders’ of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper. Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple with only two.
This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder. It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it. ‘Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?’ This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that ‘faith is nonsense,’ does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith.
Difesa del nonsense
Vi sono due modi eguali ed eterni di guardare questo nostro mondo crepuscolare: possiamo vederlo come il crepuscolo della sera o come quello del mattino; possiamo pensare a qualunque cosa, fin giù a una ghianda caduta, come a un discendente o come a un antenato. Vi sono momenti in cui siamo quasi schiacciati, non tanto dal peso del male quanto dal peso della bontà dell’umanità, in cui sentiamo di non essere altro che gli eredi di uno splendore umiliante. Ma vi sono altri momenti in cui tutto sembra primitivo, in cui le antiche stelle non sono che scintille sprigionate dal falò di un ragazzo, in cui l’intera terra sembra così giovane e sperimentale che perfino i capelli bianchi dei vecchi, nella bella frase biblica, sono come mandorli che fioriscono, come il bianco biancospino cresciuto in maggio. Che sia bene per un uomo rendersi conto di essere «l’erede di tutte le età» è cosa comunemente ammessa; è un punto meno popolare ma egualmente importante che sia bene per lui talvolta rendersi conto di essere non solo un antenato, ma un antenato di primeva antichità; è bene per lui domandarsi se non sia un eroe, e provare nobilitanti dubbi sul fatto di non essere un mito solare.
Le cose che più profondamente evocano questo senso della perdurante infanzia del mondo sono quelle che sono davvero fresche, brusche e inventive in ogni epoca; e se ci si chiedesse quale fosse la miglior prova di questa avventurosa giovinezza nel diciannovesimo secolo, diremmo, con tutto il rispetto per le sue portentose scienze e filosofie, che essa si trova nelle rime di Mr. Edward Lear e nella letteratura del nonsense. «The Dong with the Luminous Nose», almeno, è originale come furono originali la prima nave e il primo aratro.
È vero in un certo senso che alcuni dei più grandi scrittori che il mondo abbia visto — Aristofane, Rabelais e Sterne — hanno scritto nonsense; ma, se non erriamo, in un senso assai diverso. Il nonsense di questi uomini era satirico, vale a dire simbolico; era una sorta di esuberante saltellare attorno a una verità scoperta. Corre tutta la differenza del mondo tra l’istinto della satira, che, vedendo nei baffi del Kaiser qualcosa di tipico di lui, li disegna sempre più grandi e più grandi; e l’istinto del nonsense che, senza ragione alcuna, immagina come apparirebbero quei baffi sull’attuale Arcivescovo di Canterbury se se li facesse crescere in un accesso di distrazione. Siamo inclini a pensare che nessuna epoca eccetto la nostra avrebbe potuto comprendere che il Quangle-Wangle non significava assolutamente nulla, e che le Terre dei Jumblies erano assolutamente in nessun luogo. Immaginiamo che se il resoconto del processo al fante in «Alice nel Paese delle Meraviglie» fosse stato pubblicato nel diciassettesimo secolo, sarebbe stato accostato al «Processo di Fedele» di Bunyan come una parodia dei processi di Stato del tempo. Immaginiamo che se «The Dong with the Luminous Nose» fosse apparso nello stesso periodo, tutti l’avrebbero chiamato una scialba satira su Oliver Cromwell.
È del tutto di proposito che citiamo principalmente le «Nonsense Rhymes» di Mr. Lear. A nostro avviso egli è, cronologicamente ed essenzialmente, il padre del nonsense; lo riteniamo superiore a Lewis Carroll. In un senso, in verità, Lewis Carroll ha un grande vantaggio. Sappiamo che cosa fosse Lewis Carroll nella vita quotidiana: era un don singolarmente serio e convenzionale, universalmente rispettato, ma assai pedante e alquanto filisteo. Così la sua strana duplice vita nella terra e nel paese dei sogni sottolinea l’idea che sta dietro al nonsense: l’idea della fuga, della fuga in un mondo dove le cose non sono fissate orribilmente in un’eterna appropriatezza, dove le mele crescono sui peri, e qualunque strano individuo tu incontri può avere tre gambe. Lewis Carroll, che viveva una vita in cui avrebbe tuonato moralmente contro chiunque avesse calpestato l’aiuola d’erba sbagliata, e un’altra vita in cui avrebbe allegramente chiamato verde il sole e blu la luna, era, per la sua stessa natura divisa, con un piede in entrambi i mondi, un tipo perfetto della posizione del nonsense moderno. Il suo Paese delle Meraviglie è un paese popolato da matematici folli. Sentiamo che il tutto è una fuga in un mondo di mascherata; sentiamo che se potessimo trapassare i loro travestimenti, potremmo scoprire che Humpty Dumpty e la Lepre Marzolina erano Professori e Dottori in Teologia che si godevano una vacanza mentale. Questo senso di fuga è certamente meno marcato in Edward Lear, per la completezza della sua cittadinanza nel mondo dell’irragionevolezza. Non conosciamo la sua prosaica biografia come conosciamo quella di Lewis Carroll. Lo accettiamo come una figura puramente favolosa, sulla sua stessa descrizione di sé:
«Il suo corpo è perfettamente sferico, Egli porta un cappello runcibile.»
Mentre il Paese delle Meraviglie di Lewis Carroll è puramente intellettuale, Lear introduce tutt’altro elemento: l’elemento del poetico e persino dell’emotivo. Carroll opera con la pura ragione, ma questo non è un contrasto così forte; poiché, dopo tutto, l’umanità nel complesso ha sempre considerato la ragione un po’ come uno scherzo. Lear introduce le sue parole prive di senso e le sue creature amorfe non con la pompa della ragione, ma con il preludio romantico di ricche tinte e di ritmi ossessionanti.
«Lontane e poche, lontane e poche, Sono le terre dove vivono i Jumblies,»
è un tipo di poesia interamente diverso da quello esibito nel «Jabberwocky». Carroll, con un senso di nitidezza matematica, fa dell’intera sua poesia un mosaico di parole nuove e misteriose. Ma Edward Lear, con una sfrontatezza più sottile e placida, sta sempre introducendo brandelli del proprio dialetto elfico nel bel mezzo di affermazioni semplici e razionali, finché non siamo quasi storditi fino ad ammettere di sapere che cosa significano. Vi è un genuino suono di buonsenso in versi come,
«Poiché sua zia Jobiska diceva “Ognun sa Che un Pobble sta meglio senza le sue dita dei piedi,”»
che è al di là della portata di Carroll. Il poeta sembra tanto a suo agio sull’argomento che siamo quasi spinti a fingere di vedere il suo significato, di conoscere le peculiari difficoltà di un Pobble, di essere vecchi viaggiatori nella «Piana Gromboolica» quanto lo è lui.
La nostra pretesa che il nonsense sia una nuova letteratura (potremmo quasi dire un nuovo senso) sarebbe del tutto indifendibile se il nonsense non fosse nulla più di una mera fantasia estetica. Nulla di sublimemente artistico è mai sorto dalla mera arte, non più di quanto alcunché di essenzialmente ragionevole sia mai sorto dalla pura ragione. Deve sempre esservi un ricco suolo morale per ogni grande crescita estetica. Il principio dell’arte per l’arte è un ottimo principio se significa che vi è una distinzione vitale tra la terra e l’albero che ha le radici nella terra; ma è un pessimo principio se significa che l’albero potrebbe crescere altrettanto bene con le radici in aria. Ogni grande letteratura è sempre stata allegorica — allegorica di qualche visione dell’intero universo. L’«Iliade» è grande soltanto perché tutta la vita è una battaglia, l’«Odissea» perché tutta la vita è un viaggio, il Libro di Giobbe perché tutta la vita è un enigma. Vi è un atteggiamento in cui pensiamo che tutta l’esistenza si riassuma nella parola «fantasmi»; un altro, e alquanto migliore, in cui pensiamo che si riassuma nelle parole «Sogno di una notte di mezza estate». Perfino il più volgare melodramma o la più volgare storia poliziesca può essere buono se esprime qualcosa del piacere nelle possibilità sinistre — la sana brama di tenebra e terrore che può coglierci in qualunque notte camminando lungo un viottolo oscuro. Se, dunque, il nonsense dev’essere davvero la letteratura del futuro, deve avere una propria versione del Cosmo da offrire; il mondo non solo dev’essere tragico, romantico e religioso, ma dev’essere anche insensato. E qui immaginiamo che il nonsense verrà, in modo del tutto inatteso, in aiuto della visione spirituale delle cose. La religione ha per secoli tentato di far esultare gli uomini per le «meraviglie» del creato, ma ha dimenticato che una cosa non può essere completamente meravigliosa finché rimane sensata. Finché consideriamo un albero come una cosa ovvia, creata naturalmente e ragionevolmente perché una giraffa se ne cibi, non possiamo propriamente meravigliarcene. È quando lo consideriamo come una prodigiosa onda del suolo vivente che si distende verso i cieli senza alcuna ragione particolare che ci togliamo il cappello, con stupore del guardiano del parco. Ogni cosa ha in effetti un altro lato, come la luna, patrona del nonsense. Vista da quell’altro lato, un uccello è un fiore sbocciato e liberatosi dalla sua catena di stelo, un uomo un quadrupede che mendica sulle zampe posteriori, una casa un gigantesco cappello per riparare un uomo dal sole, una sedia un apparato di quattro gambe di legno per uno storpio che ne ha solo due.
Questo è il lato delle cose che tende più veramente alla meraviglia spirituale. È significativo che nel più grande poema religioso esistente, il Libro di Giobbe, l’argomento che convince l’infedele non sia (come è stato rappresentato dal religionismo meramente razionale del diciottesimo secolo) un quadro dell’ordinata beneficenza della Creazione; ma, al contrario, un quadro della sua immensa e indecifrabile irragionevolezza. «Hai Tu mandato la pioggia sul deserto dove non v’è uomo?» Questo semplice senso di meraviglia di fronte alle forme delle cose, e alla loro esuberante indipendenza dai nostri criteri intellettuali e dalle nostre triviali definizioni, è il fondamento della spiritualità come è il fondamento del nonsense. Nonsense e fede (per quanto strana possa sembrare la congiunzione) sono le due supreme asserzioni simboliche della verità che trarre fuori l’anima delle cose con un sillogismo è tanto impossibile quanto trarre fuori il Leviatano con un amo. La persona ben intenzionata che, studiando semplicemente il lato logico delle cose, ha deciso che «la fede è nonsense», non sa quanto veramente parli; più tardi potrà tornarle in mente nella forma che il nonsense è fede.
A DEFENCE OF PLANETS
A book has at one time come under my notice called ‘Terra Firma: the Earth not a Planet.’ The author was a Mr. D. Wardlaw Scott, and he quoted very seriously the opinions of a large number of other persons, of whom we have never heard, but who are evidently very important. Mr. Beach of Southsea, for example, thinks that the world is flat; and in Southsea perhaps it is. It is no part of my present intention, however, to follow Mr. Scott’s arguments in detail. On the lines of such arguments it may be shown that the earth is flat, and, for the matter of that, that it is triangular. A few examples will suffice:
One of Mr. Scott’s objections was that if a projectile is fired from a moving body there is a difference in the distance to which it carries according to the direction in which it is sent. But as in practice there is not the slightest difference whichever way the thing is done, in the case of the earth ‘we have a forcible overthrow of all fancies relative to the motion of the earth, and a striking proof that the earth is not a globe.’
This is altogether one of the quaintest arguments we have ever seen. It never seems to occur to the author, among other things, that when the firing and falling of the shot all take place upon the moving body, there is nothing whatever to compare them with. As a matter of fact, of course, a shot fired at an elephant does actually often travel towards the marksman, but much slower than the marksman travels. Mr. Scott probably would not like to contemplate the fact that the elephant, properly speaking, swings round and hits the bullet. To us it appears full of a rich cosmic humour.
I will only give one other example of the astronomical proofs:
‘If the earth were a globe, the distance round the surface, say, at 45 degrees south latitude, could not possibly be any greater than the same latitude north; but since it is found by navigators to be twice the distance—to say the least of it—or double the distance it ought to be according to the globular theory, it is a proof that the earth is not a globe.’
This sort of thing reduces my mind to a pulp. I can faintly resist when a man says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have four legs; but when he says that if the earth were a globe cats would not have five legs I am crushed.
But, as I have indicated, it is not in the scientific aspect of this remarkable theory that I am for the moment interested. It is rather with the difference between the flat and the round worlds as conceptions in art and imagination that I am concerned. It is a very remarkable thing that none of us are really Copernicans in our actual outlook upon things. We are convinced intellectually that we inhabit a small provincial planet, but we do not feel in the least suburban. Men of science have quarrelled with the Bible because it is not based upon the true astronomical system, but it is certainly open to the orthodox to say that if it had been it would never have convinced anybody.
If a single poem or a single story were really transfused with the Copernican idea, the thing would be a nightmare. Can we think of a solemn scene of mountain stillness in which some prophet is standing in a trance, and then realize that the whole scene is whizzing round like a zoetrope at the rate of nineteen miles a second? Could we tolerate the notion of a mighty King delivering a sublime fiat and then remember that for all practical purposes he is hanging head downwards in space? A strange fable might be written of a man who was blessed or cursed with the Copernican eye, and saw all men on the earth like tintacks clustering round a magnet. It would be singular to imagine how very different the speech of an aggressive egoist, announcing the independence and divinity of man, would sound if he were seen hanging on to the planet by his boot soles.
For, despite Mr. Wardlaw Scott’s horror at the Newtonian astronomy and its contradiction of the Bible, the whole distinction is a good instance of the difference between letter and spirit; the letter of the Old Testament is opposed to the conception of the solar system, but the spirit has much kinship with it. The writers of the Book of Genesis had no theory of gravitation, which to the normal person will appear a fact of as much importance as that they had no umbrellas. But the theory of gravitation has a curiously Hebrew sentiment in it—a sentiment of combined dependence and certainty, a sense of grappling unity, by which all things hang upon one thread. ‘Thou hast hanged the world upon nothing,’ said the author of the Book of Job, and in that sentence wrote the whole appalling poetry of modern astronomy. The sense of the preciousness and fragility of the universe, the sense of being in the hollow of a hand, is one which the round and rolling earth gives in its most thrilling form. Mr. Wardlaw Scott’s flat earth would be the true territory for a comfortable atheist. Nor would the old Jews have any objection to being as much upside down as right way up. They had no foolish ideas about the dignity of man.
It would be an interesting speculation to imagine whether the world will ever develop a Copernican poetry and a Copernican habit of fancy; whether we shall ever speak of ‘early earth-turn’ instead of ‘early sunrise,’ and speak indifferently of looking up at the daisies, or looking down on the stars. But if we ever do, there are really a large number of big and fantastic facts awaiting us, worthy to make a new mythology. Mr. Wardlaw Scott, for example, with genuine, if unconscious, imagination, says that according to astronomers, ‘the sea is a vast mountain of water miles high.’ To have discovered that mountain of moving crystal, in which the fishes build like birds, is like discovering Atlantis: it is enough to make the old world young again. In the new poetry which we contemplate, athletic young men will set out sturdily to climb up the face of the sea. If we once realize all this earth as it is, we should find ourselves in a land of miracles: we shall discover a new planet at the moment that we discover our own. Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on a star.
In the early days of the world, the discovery of a fact of natural history was immediately followed by the realization of it as a fact of poetry. When man awoke from the long fit of absent-mindedness which is called the automatic animal state, and began to notice the queer facts that the sky was blue and the grass green, he immediately began to use those facts symbolically. Blue, the colour of the sky, became a symbol of celestial holiness; green passed into the language as indicating a freshness verging upon unintelligence. If we had the good fortune to live in a world in which the sky was green and the grass blue, the symbolism would have been different. But for some mysterious reason this habit of realizing poetically the facts of science has ceased abruptly with scientific progress, and all the confounding portents preached by Galileo and Newton have fallen on deaf ears. They painted a picture of the universe compared with which the Apocalypse with its falling stars was a mere idyll. They declared that we are all careering through space, clinging to a cannon-ball, and the poets ignore the matter as if it were a remark about the weather. They say that an invisible force holds us in our own armchairs while the earth hurtles like a boomerang; and men still go back to dusty records to prove the mercy of God. They tell us that Mr. Scott’s monstrous vision of a mountain of sea-water rising in a solid dome, like the glass mountain in the fairy-tale, is actually a fact, and men still go back to the fairy-tale. To what towering heights of poetic imagery might we not have risen if only the poetizing of natural history had continued and man’s fancy had played with the planets as naturally as it once played with the flowers! We might have had a planetary patriotism, in which the green leaf should be like a cockade, and the sea an everlasting dance of drums. We might have been proud of what our star has wrought, and worn its heraldry haughtily in the blind tournament of the spheres. All this, indeed, we may surely do yet; for with all the multiplicity of knowledge there is one thing happily that no man knows: whether the world is old or young.
UNA DIFESA DEI PIANETI
Mi è capitato una volta sotto gli occhi un libro intitolato «Terra Firma: la Terra non è un Pianeta». L’autore era un certo signor D. Wardlaw Scott, il quale citava con molta serietà le opinioni di un gran numero di altre persone, delle quali non abbiamo mai sentito parlare, ma che sono evidentemente assai importanti. Il signor Beach di Southsea, per esempio, ritiene che il mondo sia piatto; e a Southsea forse lo è. Non rientra però nelle mie presenti intenzioni seguire nei dettagli gli argomenti del signor Scott. Sulla falsariga di simili argomenti si può dimostrare che la Terra è piatta e, se è per questo, che è triangolare. Basteranno pochi esempi:
Una delle obiezioni del signor Scott era che, se un proiettile viene sparato da un corpo in movimento, c’è una differenza nella distanza a cui esso arriva a seconda della direzione in cui è lanciato. Ma poiché in pratica non c’è la minima differenza in qualunque modo lo si faccia, nel caso della Terra «abbiamo un rovesciamento perentorio di tutte le fantasie relative al moto della Terra, e una prova lampante che la Terra non è un globo».
Questo è nel complesso uno degli argomenti più bizzarri che ci sia mai capitato di vedere. All’autore non pare mai venire in mente, tra l’altro, che quando lo sparo e la caduta del colpo avvengono tutti sul corpo in movimento, non c’è proprio nulla con cui confrontarli. In realtà, naturalmente, un colpo sparato contro un elefante viaggia spesso davvero verso il tiratore, ma assai più lentamente di quanto viaggi il tiratore. Il signor Scott probabilmente non gradirebbe considerare il fatto che l’elefante, a rigore, ruota su sé stesso e va a colpire il proiettile. A noi tutto ciò appare colmo di un ricco umorismo cosmico.
Darò solo un altro esempio delle prove astronomiche:
«Se la Terra fosse un globo, la distanza intorno alla superficie, poniamo, a 45 gradi di latitudine sud, non potrebbe in alcun modo essere maggiore della medesima latitudine nord; ma poiché i navigatori la trovano doppia — a dir poco — ovvero il doppio di quella che dovrebbe essere secondo la teoria globulare, ciò è una prova che la Terra non è un globo.»
Questo genere di cose mi riduce la mente in poltiglia. Riesco a resistere debolmente quando un uomo dice che, se la Terra fosse un globo, i gatti non avrebbero quattro zampe; ma quando dice che, se la Terra fosse un globo, i gatti non avrebbero cinque zampe, resto annientato.
Ma, come ho accennato, non è l’aspetto scientifico di questa notevole teoria che al momento m’interessa. È piuttosto la differenza fra il mondo piatto e quello rotondo come concezioni nell’arte e nell’immaginazione che mi sta a cuore. È cosa assai notevole che nessuno di noi sia davvero copernicano nel suo effettivo modo di guardare le cose. Siamo convinti intellettualmente di abitare un piccolo pianeta di provincia, ma non ci sentiamo affatto provinciali. Gli uomini di scienza hanno bisticciato con la Bibbia perché non è fondata sul vero sistema astronomico, ma è certo lecito all’ortodosso ribattere che, se lo fosse stata, non avrebbe mai convinto nessuno.
Se una sola poesia o una sola storia fossero davvero pervase dall’idea copernicana, la cosa sarebbe un incubo. Possiamo immaginare una scena solenne di quiete montana in cui un profeta se ne sta in estasi, e poi accorgerci che l’intera scena sfreccia in tondo come uno zootropio alla velocità di diciannove miglia al secondo? Potremmo tollerare l’idea di un possente Re che pronuncia un sublime editto, e poi ricordarci che, a tutti gli effetti pratici, egli pende a testa in giù nello spazio? Si potrebbe scrivere una strana favola su un uomo benedetto o maledetto dall’occhio copernicano, che vedeva tutti gli uomini sulla terra come puntine da disegno ammassate intorno a una calamita. Sarebbe curioso immaginare quanto diverso suonerebbe il discorso di un egoista aggressivo, che proclama l’indipendenza e la divinità dell’uomo, se lo si vedesse aggrappato al pianeta con le suole degli stivali.
Poiché, malgrado l’orrore del signor Wardlaw Scott per l’astronomia newtoniana e la sua contraddizione della Bibbia, l’intera distinzione è un buon esempio della differenza fra la lettera e lo spirito; la lettera dell’Antico Testamento si oppone alla concezione del sistema solare, ma lo spirito ha molta affinità con essa. Gli autori del Libro della Genesi non avevano alcuna teoria della gravitazione, il che alla persona normale apparirà un fatto d’importanza pari a quella del non avere ombrelli. Ma la teoria della gravitazione racchiude in sé un sentimento curiosamente ebraico — un sentimento di dipendenza e insieme di certezza, un senso di unità avvinghiante, per cui tutte le cose pendono da un solo filo. «Tu hai appeso il mondo sul nulla», disse l’autore del Libro di Giobbe, e in quella frase scrisse tutta la sconvolgente poesia dell’astronomia moderna. Il senso della preziosità e della fragilità dell’universo, il senso di trovarsi nell’incavo di una mano, è quello che la Terra rotonda e rotolante ci offre nella sua forma più emozionante. La Terra piatta del signor Wardlaw Scott sarebbe il vero territorio per un ateo tranquillo. Né gli antichi ebrei avrebbero avuto obiezione a stare tanto a testa in giù quanto per il verso giusto. Non nutrivano sciocche idee sulla dignità dell’uomo.
Sarebbe un’interessante speculazione immaginare se il mondo svilupperà mai una poesia copernicana e un’abitudine copernicana della fantasia; se mai parleremo di «primo giro della terra» invece di «prima alba», e se diremo indifferentemente di alzare lo sguardo verso le margherite o di abbassarlo sulle stelle. Ma se mai lo faremo, ci attende davvero un gran numero di fatti grandi e fantastici, degni di dar vita a una nuova mitologia. Il signor Wardlaw Scott, per esempio, con genuina, benché inconsapevole, immaginazione, dice che secondo gli astronomi «il mare è una vasta montagna d’acqua alta miglia e miglia». Aver scoperto quella montagna di cristallo in movimento, in cui i pesci costruiscono come uccelli, è come scoprire Atlantide: basta a far tornare giovane il vecchio mondo. Nella nuova poesia che vagheggiamo, gagliardi giovani atleti si metteranno in cammino risolutamente per scalare la parete del mare. Se una volta cogliessimo tutta questa terra così com’è, ci ritroveremmo in un paese di miracoli: scopriremmo un nuovo pianeta nel momento stesso in cui scopriamo il nostro. Fra tutte le strane cose che gli uomini hanno dimenticato, il più universale e catastrofico vuoto di memoria è quello per cui hanno dimenticato di vivere su una stella.
Nei primi giorni del mondo, la scoperta di un fatto di storia naturale era subito seguita dalla sua percezione come fatto di poesia. Quando l’uomo si destò dal lungo accesso di distrazione che si chiama stato animale automatico, e cominciò a notare gli strani fatti che il cielo era azzurro e l’erba verde, prese immediatamente a usare quei fatti in senso simbolico. L’azzurro, il colore del cielo, divenne simbolo di santità celeste; il verde passò nella lingua a indicare una freschezza che sconfina nell’ingenuità. Se avessimo avuto la fortuna di vivere in un mondo in cui il cielo fosse verde e l’erba azzurra, il simbolismo sarebbe stato diverso. Ma per qualche misteriosa ragione quest’abitudine di cogliere poeticamente i fatti della scienza è cessata di colpo con il progresso scientifico, e tutti gli sbalorditivi portenti predicati da Galileo e Newton sono caduti su orecchie sorde. Essi dipinsero un quadro dell’universo al cui confronto l’Apocalisse, con le sue stelle cadenti, era un mero idillio. Dichiararono che stiamo tutti sfrecciando attraverso lo spazio, aggrappati a una palla di cannone, e i poeti ignorano la faccenda come se fosse un’osservazione sul tempo. Dicono che una forza invisibile ci tiene fermi nelle nostre poltrone mentre la Terra sfreccia come un boomerang; e gli uomini tornano ancora a polverosi documenti per provare la misericordia di Dio. Ci dicono che la mostruosa visione del signor Scott, una montagna d’acqua marina che si leva in una solida cupola, come la montagna di vetro della fiaba, è realmente un fatto, e gli uomini tornano ancora alla fiaba. A quali torreggianti altezze d’immagine poetica non saremmo potuti salire, se solo il poetizzare la storia naturale fosse continuato e la fantasia dell’uomo avesse giocato con i pianeti con la stessa naturalezza con cui un tempo giocava con i fiori! Avremmo potuto avere un patriottismo planetario, in cui la foglia verde fosse come una coccarda, e il mare un’eterna danza di tamburi. Avremmo potuto essere fieri di ciò che la nostra stella ha forgiato, e portarne altezzosamente l’araldica nel cieco torneo delle sfere. Tutto questo, in verità, possiamo di certo farlo ancora; perché, con tutta la molteplicità del sapere, c’è per fortuna una cosa che nessun uomo conosce: se il mondo sia vecchio o giovane.
A DEFENCE OF CHINA SHEPHERDESSES
There are some things of which the world does not like to be reminded, for they are the dead loves of the world. One of these is that great enthusiasm for the Arcadian life which, however much it may now lie open to the sneers of realism, did, beyond all question, hold sway for an enormous period of the world’s history, from the times that we describe as ancient down to times that may fairly be called recent. The conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of Theocritus, of Virgil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, of Shakespeare, and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathen were stone and brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of the China Shepherdess. The Catholic Church and the Ideal Shepherd are indeed almost the only things that have bridged the abyss between the ancient world and the modern. Yet, as we say, the world does not like to be reminded of this boyish enthusiasm.
But imagination, the function of the historian, cannot let so great an element alone. By the cheap revolutionary it is commonly supposed that imagination is a merely rebellious thing, that it has its chief function in devising new and fantastic republics. But imagination has its highest use in a retrospective realization. The trumpet of imagination, like the trumpet of the Resurrection, calls the dead out of their graves. Imagination sees Delphi with the eyes of a Greek, Jerusalem with the eyes of a Crusader, Paris with the eyes of a Jacobin, and Arcadia with the eyes of a Euphuist. The prime function of imagination is to see our whole orderly system of life as a pile of stratified revolutions. In spite of all revolutionaries it must be said that the function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders. To the imaginative the truisms are all paradoxes, since they were paradoxes in the Stone Age; to them the ordinary copy-book blazes with blasphemy.
Let us, then, consider in this light the old pastoral or Arcadian ideal. But first certainly one thing must be definitely recognised. This Arcadian art and literature is a lost enthusiasm. To study it is like fumbling in the love-letters of a dead man. To us its flowers seem as tawdry as cockades; the lambs that dance to the shepherd’s pipe seem to dance with all the artificiality of a ballet. Even our own prosaic toil seems to us more joyous than that holiday. Where its ancient exuberance passed the bounds of wisdom and even of virtue, its caperings seem frozen into the stillness of an antique frieze. In those gray old pictures a bacchanal seems as dull as an archdeacon. Their very sins seem colder than our restraints.
All this may be frankly recognised: all the barren sentimentality of the Arcadian ideal and all its insolent optimism. But when all is said and done, something else remains.
Through ages in which the most arrogant and elaborate ideals of power and civilization held otherwise undisputed sway, the ideal of the perfect and healthy peasant did undoubtedly represent in some shape or form the conception that there was a dignity in simplicity and a dignity in labour. It was good for the ancient aristocrat, even if he could not attain to innocence and the wisdom of the earth, to believe that these things were the secrets of the priesthood of the poor. It was good for him to believe that even if heaven was not above him, heaven was below him. It was well that he should have amid all his flamboyant triumphs the never-extinguished sentiment that there was something better than his triumphs, the conception that ‘there remaineth a rest.’
The conception of the Ideal Shepherd seems absurd to our modern ideas. But, after all, it was perhaps the only trade of the democracy which was equalized with the trades of the aristocracy even by the aristocracy itself. The shepherd of pastoral poetry was, without doubt, very different from the shepherd of actual fact. Where one innocently piped to his lambs, the other innocently swore at them; and their divergence in intellect and personal cleanliness was immense. But the difference between the ideal shepherd who danced with Amaryllis and the real shepherd who thrashed her is not a scrap greater than the difference between the ideal soldier who dies to capture the colours and the real soldier who lives to clean his accoutrements, between the ideal priest who is everlastingly by someone’s bed and the real priest who is as glad as anyone else to get to his own. There are ideal conceptions and real men in every calling; yet there are few who object to the ideal conceptions, and not many, after all, who object to the real men.
The fact, then, is this: So far from resenting the existence in art and literature of an ideal shepherd, I genuinely regret that the shepherd is the only democratic calling that has ever been raised to the level of the heroic callings conceived by an aristocratic age. So far from objecting to the Ideal Shepherd, I wish there were an Ideal Postman, an Ideal Grocer, and an Ideal Plumber. It is undoubtedly true that we should laugh at the idea of an Ideal Postman; it is true, and it proves that we are not genuine democrats.
Undoubtedly the modern grocer, if called upon to act in an Arcadian manner, if desired to oblige with a symbolic dance expressive of the delights of grocery, or to perform on some simple instrument while his assistants skipped around him, would be embarrassed, and perhaps even reluctant. But it may be questioned whether this temporary reluctance of the grocer is a good thing, or evidence of a good condition of poetic feeling in the grocery business as a whole. There certainly should be an ideal image of health and happiness in any trade, and its remoteness from the reality is not the only important question. No one supposes that the mass of traditional conceptions of duty and glory are always operative, for example, in the mind of a soldier or a doctor; that the Battle of Waterloo actually makes a private enjoy pipeclaying his trousers, or that the ‘health of humanity’ softens the momentary phraseology of a physician called out of bed at two o’clock in the morning. But although no ideal obliterates the ugly drudgery and detail of any calling, that ideal does, in the case of the soldier or the doctor, exist definitely in the background and makes that drudgery worth while as a whole. It is a serious calamity that no such ideal exists in the case of the vast number of honourable trades and crafts on which the existence of a modern city depends. It is a pity that current thought and sentiment offer nothing corresponding to the old conception of patron saints. If they did there would be a Patron Saint of Plumbers, and this would alone be a revolution, for it would force the individual craftsman to believe that there was once a perfect being who did actually plumb.
When all is said and done, then, we think it much open to question whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance of the ideal of the happy peasant. It is foolish enough to suppose that the rustic went about all over ribbons, but it is better than knowing that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact. The modern realistic study of the poor does in reality lead the student further astray than the old idyllic notion. For we cannot get the chiaroscuro of humble life so long as its virtues seem to us as gross as its vices and its joys as sullen as its sorrows. Probably at the very moment that we can see nothing but a dull-faced man smoking and drinking heavily with his friend in a pot-house, the man himself is on his soul’s holiday, crowned with the flowers of a passionate idleness, and far more like the Happy Peasant than the world will ever know.
DIFESA DELLE PASTORELLE DI PORCELLANA
Vi sono cose delle quali il mondo non ama essere richiamato al ricordo, poiché sono gli amori defunti del mondo. Una di queste è quel grande entusiasmo per la vita arcadica che, per quanto oggi possa prestarsi ai sogghigni del realismo, tenne pure, oltre ogni dubbio, il suo dominio per un periodo enorme della storia del mondo, dai tempi che noi diciamo antichi fino a tempi che si possono a buon diritto chiamare recenti. La concezione della vita innocente e ilare di pastori e pastorelle abbracciò e assorbì di certo il tempo di Teocrito, di Virgilio, di Catullo, di Dante, di Cervantes, dell’Ariosto, di Shakespeare e di Pope. Ci vien detto che gli dèi dei pagani erano di pietra e di bronzo, ma la pietra e il bronzo non hanno mai perdurato con la lunga resistenza della Pastorella di Porcellana. La Chiesa cattolica e il Pastore Ideale sono davvero quasi le sole cose che abbiano gettato un ponte sull’abisso tra il mondo antico e il moderno. Eppure, come diciamo, il mondo non ama essere richiamato al ricordo di questo entusiasmo fanciullesco.
Ma l’immaginazione, la funzione dello storico, non può lasciare in disparte un elemento tanto grande, solo a sé. Dal rivoluzionario dozzinale si suppone comunemente che l’immaginazione sia cosa meramente ribelle, che essa abbia la sua funzione principale nell’escogitare repubbliche nuove e fantastiche. Ma l’immaginazione ha il suo uso più alto in una realizzazione retrospettiva. La tromba dell’immaginazione, come la tromba della Risurrezione, chiama i morti fuori dalle loro tombe. L’Imagination vede Delfi con gli occhi di un Greco, Gerusalemme con gli occhi di un Crociato, Parigi con gli occhi di un Giacobino, e l’Arcadia con gli occhi di un Eufuista. La funzione prima dell’immaginazione è di vedere il nostro intero sistema ordinato di vita come un cumulo di rivoluzioni stratificate. A dispetto di tutti i rivoluzionari va detto che la funzione dell’immaginazione non è di rendere assestate le cose strane, quanto piuttosto di rendere strane le cose assestate; non tanto di fare dei prodigi dei fatti quanto di fare dei fatti dei prodigi. Per l’immaginativo i luoghi comuni sono tutti paradossi, poiché erano paradossi nell’Età della Pietra; per lui l’ordinaria pagina d’esercizi sfolgora di bestemmia.
Consideriamo, dunque, in questa luce l’antico ideale pastorale o arcadico. Ma prima una cosa dev’essere di certo riconosciuta con precisione. Quest’arte e questa letteratura arcadiche sono un entusiasmo perduto. Studiarle è come frugare tra le lettere d’amore di un uomo morto. A noi i loro fiori paiono sgargianti come coccarde; gli agnelli che danzano al piffero del pastore paiono danzare con tutta l’artificiosità di un balletto. Perfino la nostra prosaica fatica ci pare più gioiosa di quella festa. Là dove la loro antica esuberanza oltrepassava i confini della saggezza e persino della virtù, le loro capriole paiono irrigidite nell’immobilità di un fregio antico. In quelle grigie vecchie pitture un baccante pare tedioso quanto un arcidiacono. I loro stessi peccati paiono più freddi dei nostri ritegni.
Tutto ciò può essere francamente riconosciuto: tutta la sterile sentimentalità dell’ideale arcadico e tutto il suo insolente ottimismo. Ma quando tutto è stato detto e fatto, rimane qualcos’altro.
Attraverso epoche in cui gli ideali più arroganti ed elaborati di potenza e civiltà tennero altrimenti un dominio incontrastato, l’ideale del perfetto e sano contadino rappresentò indubbiamente in qualche forma o foggia la concezione che vi fosse una dignità nella semplicità e una dignità nel lavoro. Era bene per l’antico aristocratico, anche se egli non poteva attingere all’innocenza e alla saggezza della terra, credere che queste cose fossero i segreti del sacerdozio dei poveri. Era bene per lui credere che, anche se il cielo non era sopra di lui, il cielo era sotto di lui. Era bene che egli avesse, in mezzo a tutti i suoi sgargianti trionfi, il sentimento mai spento che vi fosse qualcosa di migliore dei suoi trionfi, la concezione che «vi rimane un riposo».
La concezione del Pastore Ideale pare assurda alle nostre idee moderne. Ma, dopo tutto, era forse il solo mestiere della democrazia che sia stato equiparato ai mestieri dell’aristocrazia perfino dall’aristocrazia stessa. Il pastore della poesia pastorale era, senza dubbio, molto diverso dal pastore reale. Là dove l’uno pifferava innocentemente ai suoi agnelli, l’altro innocentemente li bestemmiava; e la loro divergenza d’intelletto e di pulizia personale era immensa. Ma la differenza tra il pastore ideale che danzava con Amarilli e il pastore reale che la bastonava non è affatto maggiore della differenza tra il soldato ideale che muore per conquistare la bandiera e il soldato reale che vive per pulire il proprio equipaggiamento, tra il sacerdote ideale che sta eternamente al capezzale di qualcuno e il sacerdote reale che è lieto quanto ogni altro di raggiungere il proprio. Vi sono concezioni ideali e uomini reali in ogni vocazione; eppure pochi sono coloro che obiettano alle concezioni ideali, e non molti, dopo tutto, coloro che obiettano agli uomini reali.
Il fatto, dunque, è questo: ben lungi dal risentirmi dell’esistenza nell’arte e nella letteratura di un pastore ideale, io sinceramente rimpiango che il pastore sia la sola vocazione democratica che sia mai stata innalzata al livello delle vocazioni eroiche concepite da un’età aristocratica. Ben lungi dall’ obiettare al Pastore Ideale, io vorrei che vi fossero un Postino Ideale, un Droghiere Ideale e un Idraulico Ideale. È indubbiamente vero che rideremmo all’idea di un Postino Ideale; è vero, e ciò prova che non siamo genuini democratici.
Indubbiamente il moderno droghiere, se chiamato ad agire in maniera arcadica, se richiesto di compiacerci con una danza simbolica esprimente le delizie della drogheria, o di esibirsi con qualche semplice strumento mentre i suoi garzoni gli saltellavano intorno, sarebbe imbarazzato, e forse persino riluttante. Ma ci si può chiedere se questa temporanea riluttanza del droghiere sia una buona cosa, o prova di una buona condizione di sentimento poetico nel commercio di drogheria nel suo insieme. Vi dovrebbe di certo essere un’ immagine ideale di salute e felicità in ogni mestiere, e la sua lontananza dalla realtà non è la sola questione importante. Nessuno suppone che la massa delle concezioni tradizionali di dovere e gloria sia sempre operante, per esempio, nella mente di un soldato o di un medico; che la Battaglia di Waterloo faccia realmente godere un fante nel dar la biacca ai propri calzoni, o che la «salute dell’umanità» addolcisca la momentanea fraseologia di un medico chiamato fuori dal letto alle due dell’orologio del mattino. Ma benché nessun ideale cancelli la brutta sgobbata e i dettagli di una qualunque vocazione, quell’ideale sì, nel caso del soldato o del medico, esiste distintamente sullo sfondo e rende quella sgobbata degna d’esser fatta nel suo insieme. È una seria sciagura che nessun tale ideale esista nel caso dell’immenso numero di onorevoli mestieri e arti da cui dipende l’esistenza di una città moderna. È un peccato che il pensiero e il sentimento correnti non offrano nulla che corrisponda all’antica concezione dei santi patroni. Se lo facessero vi sarebbe un Santo Patrono degli Idraulici, e questo da solo sarebbe una rivoluzione, poiché costringerebbe il singolo artigiano a credere che vi fu una volta un essere perfetto che davvero faceva l’idraulico.
Quando tutto è stato detto e fatto, dunque, riteniamo assai discutibile se il mondo non abbia perduto qualcosa nella completa scomparsa dell’ideale del contadino felice. È abbastanza sciocco supporre che il campagnolo se ne andasse tutto coperto di nastri, ma è meglio che sapere che se ne va tutto coperto di stracci ed esserne indifferenti. Il moderno studio realistico dei poveri conduce in verità lo studioso più lontano dalla via che l’antica nozione idillica. Poiché non possiamo cogliere il chiaroscuro dell’umile vita fintanto che le sue virtù ci paiono grossolane quanto i suoi vizi e le sue gioie tetre quanto i suoi dolori. Probabilmente nel preciso istante in cui non vediamo altro che un uomo dal volto ottuso che fuma e beve smodatamente con l’amico in una taverna, l’uomo stesso è nella vacanza della sua anima, coronato dei fiori di un’oziosità appassionata, e assai più simile al Contadino Felice di quanto il mondo mai saprà.
A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION
It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realize that all of us, ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with the most undisputed and depressing facts. Men are not apparently so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time that it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated papers, such as Tit-Bits, Science Siftings, and many of the illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous passages in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings. It is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother Seigel’s Syrup because he wished to know what eventually happened to the young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel, whatever our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures; at the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy bull-baiting or getting drunk. But the literature of information is absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory. To read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise. It is this fact which constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this particular branch of popular literature.
Primarily, at least, there is one rather peculiar thing which must in justice be said about it. The readers of this strange science must be allowed to be, upon the whole, as disinterested as a prophet seeing visions or a child reading fairy-tales. Here, again, we find, as we so often do, that whatever view of this matter of popular literature we can trust, we can trust least of all the comment and censure current among the vulgar educated. The ordinary version of the ground of this popularity for information, which would be given by a person of greater cultivation, would be that common men are chiefly interested in those sordid facts that surround them on every side. A very small degree of examination will show us that whatever ground there is for the popularity of these insane encyclopaedias, it cannot be the ground of utility. The version of life given by a penny novelette may be very moonstruck and unreliable, but it is at least more likely to contain facts relevant to daily life than compilations on the subject of the number of cows’ tails that would reach the North Pole. There are many more people who are in love than there are people who have any intention of counting or collecting cows’ tails. It is evident to me that the grounds of this widespread madness of information for information’s sake must be sought in other and deeper parts of human nature than those daily needs which lie so near the surface that even social philosophers have discovered them somewhere in that profound and eternal instinct for enthusiasm and minding other people’s business which made great popular movements like the Crusades or the Gordon Riots.
I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who actually talked in private life after the manner of these papers. His conversation consisted of fragmentary statements about height and weight and depth and time and population, and his conversation was a nightmare of dulness. During the shortest pause he would ask whether his interlocutors were aware how many tons of rust were scraped every year off the Menai Bridge, and how many rival shops Mr. Whiteley had bought up since he opened his business. The attitude of his acquaintances towards this inexhaustible entertainer varied according to his presence or absence between indifference and terror. It was frightful to think of a man’s brain being stocked with such inexpressibly profitless treasures. It was like visiting some imposing British Museum and finding its galleries and glass cases filled with specimens of London mud, of common mortar, of broken walking-sticks and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered that this intolerable prosaic bore had been, in fact, a poet. I learnt that every item of this multitudinous information was totally and unblushingly untrue, that for all I knew he had made it up as he went along; that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that the rival tradesmen and Mr. Whiteley were creatures of the poet’s brain. Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him it must have been a case of art for art’s sake. The joke sustained so gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true, immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they were inventions of the human fancy. And here, as it seems to me, I laid my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which prevents it, and will, perhaps, always prevent it from seeing with the eyes of popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested, but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art, though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous. They look to life for interest with the same kind of cheerful and uneradicable assurance with which we look for interest at a comedy for which we have paid money at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary fastidiousness, the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-coloured picture, the scrawlings in circles of a baby upon the slate of night; its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a wallpaper, its flowers and fruits have a cockney brilliancy, like the holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art to its own level, they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man—the taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of 110 in South Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip. When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only because it was good, but also because it was news. So it is that if any of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always supposed to be, for his benefit; but in the fact that an unusually large whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading millionaire like Mr. Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralized with the mere indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and splendid disinterestedness of the reader of Pearson’s Weekly. He still keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of men—the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and, with a truly sportsmanlike instinct, the average man takes most pleasure in the details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the werewolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature, a refuge indicating the dulness of the world: it was an incident pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.
That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial, it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it may spoil the chance of better work, certainly by wasting time, possibly by ruining taste. But these obvious objections are the objections which we hear so persistently from everyone that one cannot help wondering where the papers in question procure their myriads of readers. The natural necessity and natural good underlying such crude institutions is far less often a subject of speculation; yet the healthy hungers which lie at the back of the habits of modern democracy are surely worthy of the same sympathetic study that we give to the dogmas of the fanatics long dethroned and the intrigues of commonwealths long obliterated from the earth. And this is the base and consideration which I have to offer: that perhaps the taste for shreds and patches of journalistic science and history is not, as is continually asserted, the vulgar and senile curiosity of a people that has grown old, but simply the babyish and indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young and entering history for the first time. In other words, I suggest that they only tell each other in magazines the same kind of stories of commonplace portents and conventional eccentricities which, in any case, they would tell each other in taverns. Science itself is only the exaggeration and specialization of this thirst for useless fact, which is the mark of the youth of man. But science has become strangely separated from the mere news and scandal of flowers and birds; men have ceased to see that a pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower, that a flower is as monstrous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind. We have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can be contented with a planet of miracles.
DIFESA DELLE INFORMAZIONI UTILI
È naturale e più che giusto che le masse di munizioni esplosive accumulate nei racconti polizieschi e le fornite e solide botteghe di dolciumi che chiamiamo romanzetti sentimentali siano popolari presso il cliente comune. Non è difficile rendersi conto che tutti noi, ignoranti o colti, ci interessiamo in primo luogo all’assassinio e all’amore. La cosa davvero straordinaria è che le finzioni più spaventose non sono in realtà tanto popolari quanto quella letteratura che tratta dei fatti più incontestabili e deprimenti. A quanto pare, gli uomini non si interessano tanto all’assassinio e all’amore quanto al numero delle diverse forme di chiave da serratura che esistono a Londra o al tempo che impiegherebbe una cavalletta a saltare dal Cairo al Capo. L’enorme massa di verità fatue e inutili che riempie i giornali di più larga diffusione, come Tit-Bits, Science Siftings, e molte delle riviste illustrate, è certamente uno dei generi più straordinari di pastura emotiva e mentale di cui l’uomo si sia mai nutrito. È quasi incredibile che queste statistiche assurde possano essere effettivamente più popolari dei misteri più agghiaccianti e delle più lussuose crapule del sentimento. Immaginarlo è come immaginare i passi umoristici della Guida Ferroviaria di Bradshaw letti ad alta voce nelle sere d’inverno. È come concepire un uomo incapace di posare una réclame dello Sciroppo di Madre Seigel perché desiderava sapere che cosa alla fine fosse accaduto al giovane gravemente malato a Edimburgo. Nel caso dei racconti polizieschi da poco prezzo e dei romanzetti da quattro soldi, quasi tutti noi possiamo sentire, qualunque sia il nostro grado di istruzione, che sarebbe forse possibile leggerli se dessimo pieno sfogo a una parte più bassa e più facile della nostra natura; nel peggiore dei casi sentiamo che potremmo goderne come potremmo godere dell’aizzamento dei tori o dell’ubriacarci. Ma la letteratura dell’informazione ci è assolutamente misteriosa. Non possiamo pensare di divertircene più di quanto potremmo pensare di leggere intere pagine di un elenco cittadino di Surbiton. Leggere simili cose non sarebbe un atto di volgare compiacimento; sarebbe un’impresa altamente ardua e meritoria. È questo fatto che costituisce un interesse profondo e quasi insondabile in questo particolare ramo della letteratura popolare.
In primo luogo, almeno, c’è una cosa piuttosto singolare che in tutta giustizia se ne deve dire. Bisogna concedere che i lettori di questa strana scienza siano, nel complesso, disinteressati quanto un profeta che vede visioni o un bambino che legge fiabe. Anche qui troviamo, come tanto spesso ci accade, che qualunque opinione su questa faccenda della letteratura popolare possiamo fidarci di accogliere, meno di ogni altra possiamo fidarci del commento e della censura correnti fra i volgari eruditi. La versione ordinaria del motivo di questa popolarità dell’informazione, quale sarebbe data da una persona di maggiore cultura, sarebbe che gli uomini comuni si interessano soprattutto a quei sordidi fatti che li circondano da ogni parte. Un ben piccolo grado di esame ci mostrerà che qualunque fondamento vi sia per la popolarità di queste folli enciclopedie, non può essere il fondamento dell’utilità. La versione della vita offerta da un romanzetto da un soldo può essere assai lunatica e inattendibile, ma è almeno più probabile che contenga fatti attinenti alla vita quotidiana che non certe compilazioni sull’argomento del numero di code di vacca necessarie a raggiungere il Polo Nord. Vi sono molte più persone innamorate che persone le quali abbiano una qualche intenzione di contare o collezionare code di vacca. Mi è evidente che i motivi di questa diffusa follia dell’informazione per amore dell’informazione vanno cercati in parti diverse e più profonde della natura umana che non quei bisogni quotidiani i quali giacciono così presso la superficie che perfino i filosofi sociali li hanno scoperti da qualche parte in quel profondo ed eterno istinto per l’entusiasmo e per l’impicciarsi degli affari altrui che generò grandi movimenti popolari come le Crociate o i tumulti di Gordon.
Ebbi una volta il piacere di conoscere un uomo che effettivamente parlava, nella vita privata, alla maniera di questi giornali. La sua conversazione consisteva in frammentarie affermazioni intorno ad altezze, pesi, profondità, tempo e popolazione, e la sua conversazione era un incubo di monotonia. Durante la più breve pausa domandava se i suoi interlocutori fossero al corrente di quante tonnellate di ruggine venissero raschiate ogni anno dal Ponte di Menai, e di quanti negozi rivali il signor Whiteley avesse rilevato da quando aveva aperto la sua attività. L’atteggiamento dei suoi conoscenti verso questo inesauribile intrattenitore variava, secondo la sua presenza o assenza, fra l’indifferenza e il terrore. Faceva paura pensare al cervello di un uomo rimpinzato di tesori così inesprimibilmente infruttuosi. Era come visitare qualche imponente Museo Britannico e trovarne le gallerie e le vetrine colme di campioni di fango di Londra, di comune malta, di bastoni da passeggio spezzati e di tabacco scadente. Anni dopo scoprii che questo insopportabile e prosaico seccatore era stato, in realtà, un poeta. Appresi che ogni voce di quella moltitudinaria informazione era totalmente e sfacciatamente falsa, che per quanto ne sapevo egli l’aveva inventata di sana pianta man mano che parlava; che nessuna tonnellata di ruggine viene raschiata dal Ponte di Menai, e che i mercanti rivali e il signor Whiteley erano creature del cervello del poeta. All’istante concepii un rispetto struggente per l’uomo che era un bugiardo così circostanziato, così monotono, così interamente privo di scopo. Con lui doveva trattarsi di un caso di arte per l’arte. Lo scherzo sostenuto con tanta gravità attraverso una vita rispettata era di quell’ordine di scherzi che si condividono con l’onniscienza. Ma ciò che mi colpì più cogentemente, riflettendo, fu il fatto che quelle incommensurabili banalità, che mi avevano colpito come del tutto volgari e aride finché le credevo vere, divennero immediatamente pittoresche e quasi brillanti quando le pensai invenzioni dell’immaginazione umana. E qui, come mi sembra, posai il dito su una qualità fondamentale della classe colta che le impedisce, e forse le impedirà sempre, di vedere con gli occhi dell’immaginazione popolare. Il semplicemente istruito non si potrà quasi mai indurre a credere che questo mondo sia di per sé un luogo interessante. Quando guardano un’opera d’arte, buona o cattiva, si aspettano di essere interessati, ma quando guardano la réclame di un giornale o un crocchio di gente per la strada, non si aspettano, propriamente e letteralmente parlando, di essere interessati. Ma per la gente comune e semplice questo mondo è un’opera d’arte, benché sia, come molte grandi opere d’arte, anonima. Cercano nella vita l’interesse con lo stesso genere di lieta e inestirpabile certezza con cui noi cerchiamo l’interesse in una commedia per la quale abbiamo pagato il biglietto all’ingresso. Agli occhi della scuola ultima della schizzinosità contemporanea, l’universo è invero un quadro mal disegnato e dai colori eccessivi, gli sgorbi in cerchio d’un bimbo sulla lavagna della notte; i suoi cieli stellati sono un motivo volgare che non vorrebbero neppure per una tappezzeria, i suoi fiori e i suoi frutti hanno una lucentezza da cockney, come il cappello festivo di una fioraia. Perciò, degradati dall’arte al proprio livello, hanno perduto del tutto quel gusto primitivo e tipico dell’uomo: il gusto per le notizie. Con questo essenziale gusto per le notizie intendo il piacere di udire il semplice fatto che un uomo è morto all’età di centodieci anni nel Galles del Sud, o che i cavalli sono fuggiti a un funerale a San Francisco. Larghe masse delle antiche fedi e politiche del mondo, numerosi dei miracoli e degli aneddoti eroici, si fondano in primo luogo su questo amore per qualcosa che è appena accaduto, su questa divina istituzione del pettegolezzo. Quando il Cristianesimo fu chiamato la buona novella, si diffuse rapidamente, non solo perché era buona, ma anche perché era novella. Così accade che se qualcuno di noi ha mai parlato con uno sterratore in treno a proposito del giornale quotidiano, generalmente lo abbiamo trovato interessato non a quelle lotte di parlamenti e sindacati che talvolta sono, e sempre si suppone siano, a suo vantaggio, bensì al fatto che una balena insolitamente grossa sia stata trascinata a riva sulle coste delle Orcadi, o che qualche grande milionario come il signor Harmsworth risulti rompere un centinaio di pipe all’anno. Le classi colte, sazie e demoralizzate dal mero compiacimento dell’arte e dell’umore, non riescono più a comprendere l’ozioso e splendido disinteresse del lettore di Pearson’s Weekly. Egli conserva ancora qualcosa di quel sentimento che dovrebbe essere il diritto di nascita degli uomini: il sentimento che questo pianeta sia come una nuova casa nella quale abbiamo appena traslocato i nostri bagagli. Ogni suo particolare ha un valore, e, con un istinto davvero sportivo, l’uomo medio prova il maggior piacere nei particolari più complicati, irrilevanti, e insieme difficili e inutili da scoprire. Quelle parti del giornale che annunciano l’uva spina gigante e la pioggia di rane sono realmente i rappresentanti moderni della tendenza popolare che produsse l’idra, il lupo mannaro e gli uomini dalla testa di cane. La gente del Medioevo non si interessava a un drago o a un’apparizione del diavolo perché lo ritenesse un bell’idillio in prosa, ma perché riteneva che fosse stato davvero appena veduto. Non era, come tanta letteratura d’arte, un rifugio che indicava la monotonia del mondo: era un episodio che illustrava vividamente la feconda poesia del mondo.
Che molto si possa dire, e si dica, contro la letteratura dell’informazione, non lo nego neppure per un istante. È informe, è banale, può dare un’irreale aria di sapere, e giace indubbiamente, insieme al resto della letteratura popolare, sotto l’accusa generale di poter rovinare la possibilità di opere migliori, certamente sprecando tempo, forse guastando il gusto. Ma queste ovvie obiezioni sono le obiezioni che udiamo così ostinatamente da tutti che non si può fare a meno di chiedersi dove i giornali in questione si procurino le loro miriadi di lettori. La necessità naturale e il bene naturale che stanno alla base di simili rozze istituzioni sono assai meno spesso oggetto di speculazione; eppure le sane fami che giacciono sul retro delle abitudini della moderna democrazia meritano di certo lo stesso studio comprensivo che dedichiamo ai dogmi dei fanatici da tempo detronizzati e agli intrighi di repubbliche da tempo cancellate dalla terra. Ed ecco la base e la considerazione che ho da offrire: che forse il gusto per i brandelli e i ritagli di scienza e di storia giornalistica non è, come di continuo si afferma, la volgare e senile curiosità di un popolo che è invecchiato, ma semplicemente la curiosità puerile e indiscriminata di un popolo ancora giovane, che entra nella storia per la prima volta. In altre parole, io suggerisco che essi non fanno che raccontarsi l’un l’altro nelle riviste lo stesso genere di storie di prodigi comuni e di eccentricità convenzionali che, in ogni caso, si racconterebbero l’un l’altro nelle taverne. La scienza stessa non è che l’esagerazione e la specializzazione di questa sete di fatti inutili, che è il segno della giovinezza dell’uomo. Ma la scienza si è stranamente separata dalle semplici notizie e dai pettegolezzi dei fiori e degli uccelli; gli uomini hanno cessato di vedere che uno pterodattilo era fresco e naturale quanto un fiore, che un fiore è mostruoso quanto uno pterodattilo. La ricostruzione di questo ponte fra la scienza e la natura umana è uno dei più grandi bisogni dell’umanità. Dobbiamo tutti mostrare che, prima di procedere a qualsiasi visione o creazione, sappiamo accontentarci di un pianeta di miracoli.
A DEFENCE OF HERALDRY
The modern view of heraldry is pretty accurately represented by the words of the famous barrister who, after cross-examining for some time a venerable dignitary of Heralds’ College, summed up his results in the remark that ‘the silly old man didn’t even understand his own silly old trade.’
Heraldry properly so called was, of course, a wholly limited and aristocratic thing, but the remark needs a kind of qualification not commonly realized. In a sense there was a plebeian heraldry, since every shop was, like every castle, distinguished not by a name, but a sign. The whole system dates from a time when picture-writing still really ruled the world. In those days few could read or write; they signed their names with a pictorial symbol, a cross—and a cross is a great improvement on most men’s names.
Now, there is something to be said for the peculiar influence of pictorial symbols on men’s minds. All letters, we learn, were originally pictorial and heraldic: thus the letter A is the portrait of an ox, but the portrait is now reproduced in so impressionist a manner that but little of the rural atmosphere can be absorbed by contemplating it. But as long as some pictorial and poetic quality remains in the symbol, the constant use of it must do something for the aesthetic education of those employing it. Public-houses are now almost the only shops that use the ancient signs, and the mysterious attraction which they exercise may be (by the optimistic) explained in this manner. There are taverns with names so dreamlike and exquisite that even Sir Wilfrid Lawson might waver on the threshold for a moment, suffering the poet to struggle with the moralist. So it was with the heraldic images. It is impossible to believe that the red lion of Scotland acted upon those employing it merely as a naked convenience like a number or a letter; it is impossible to believe that the Kings of Scotland would have cheerfully accepted the substitute of a pig or a frog. There are, as we say, certain real advantages in pictorial symbols, and one of them is that everything that is pictorial suggests, without naming or defining. There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.
Thus in the old aristocratic days there existed this vast pictorial symbolism of all the colours and degrees of aristocracy. When the great trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours, should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry. The grocer who sold margarine as butter should have felt that there was a stain on the escutcheon of the Higginses. Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling mistake—a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady—of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, ‘You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk,’ but used that meaner democratic formula, ‘The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.’
For it cannot be denied that the world lost something finally and most unfortunately about the beginning of the nineteenth century. In former times the mass of the people was conceived as mean and commonplace, but only as comparatively mean and commonplace; they were dwarfed and eclipsed by certain high stations and splendid callings. But with the Victorian era came a principle which conceived men not as comparatively, but as positively, mean and commonplace. A man of any station was represented as being by nature a dingy and trivial person—a person born, as it were, in a black hat. It began to be thought that it was ridiculous for a man to wear beautiful garments, instead of it being—as, of course, it is—ridiculous for him to deliberately wear ugly ones. It was considered affected for a man to speak bold and heroic words, whereas, of course, it is emotional speech which is natural, and ordinary civil speech which is affected. The whole relations of beauty and ugliness, of dignity and ignominy were turned upside down. Beauty became an extravagance, as if top-hats and umbrellas were not the real extravagance—a landscape from the land of the goblins. Dignity became a form of foolery and shamelessness, as if the very essence of a fool were not a lack of dignity. And the consequence is that it is practically most difficult to propose any decoration or public dignity for modern men without making them laugh. They laugh at the idea of carrying crests and coats-of-arms instead of laughing at their own boots and neckties. We are forbidden to say that tradesmen should have a poetry of their own, although there is nothing so poetical as trade. A grocer should have a coat-of-arms worthy of his strange merchandise gathered from distant and fantastic lands; a postman should have a coat-of-arms capable of expressing the strange honour and responsibility of the man who carries men’s souls in a bag; the chemist should have a coat-of-arms symbolizing something of the mysteries of the house of healing, the cavern of a merciful witchcraft.
There were in the French Revolution a class of people at whom everybody laughed, and at whom it was probably difficult, as a practical matter, to refrain from laughing. They attempted to erect, by means of huge wooden statues and brand-new festivals, the most extraordinary new religions. They adored the Goddess of Reason, who would appear, even when the fullest allowance has been made for their many virtues, to be the deity who had least smiled upon them. But these capering maniacs, disowned alike by the old world and the new, were men who had seen a great truth unknown alike to the new world and the old. They had seen the thing that was hidden from the wise and understanding, from the whole modern democratic civilization down to the present time. They realized that democracy must have a heraldry, that it must have a proud and high-coloured pageantry, if it is to keep always before its own mind its own sublime mission. Unfortunately for this ideal, the world has in this matter followed English democracy rather than French; and those who look back to the nineteenth century will assuredly look back to it as we look back to the reign of the Puritans, as the time of black coats and black tempers. From the strange life the men of that time led, they might be assisting at the funeral of liberty instead of at its christening. The moment we really believe in democracy, it will begin to blossom, as aristocracy blossomed, into symbolic colours and shapes. We shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves. For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous.
UNA DIFESA DELL’ARALDICA
La concezione moderna dell’araldica è rappresentata con notevole esattezza dalle parole del celebre avvocato che, dopo aver controinterrogato per qualche tempo un venerando dignitario del Collegio degli Araldi, riassunse i propri risultati nell’osservazione che «quel vecchio sciocco non capiva nemmeno il proprio sciocco vecchio mestiere».
L’araldica propriamente detta era, s’intende, una cosa del tutto circoscritta e aristocratica, ma l’osservazione richiede una qualifica di genere non comunemente compreso. In un certo senso esisteva un’araldica plebea, poiché ogni bottega era, come ogni castello, contraddistinta non da un nome, ma da un’insegna. L’intero sistema risale a un tempo in cui la scrittura per immagini governava ancora davvero il mondo. In quei giorni pochi sapevano leggere o scrivere; firmavano il proprio nome con un simbolo pittorico, una croce — e una croce è un grande miglioramento rispetto al nome della maggior parte degli uomini.
Ora, c’è qualcosa da dire sulla peculiare influenza dei simboli pittorici sulla mente degli uomini. Tutte le lettere, apprendiamo, erano in origine pittoriche e araldiche: così la lettera A è il ritratto di un bue, ma il ritratto è ormai riprodotto in maniera tanto impressionistica che ben poco dell’atmosfera campestre può essere assorbito contemplandolo. Ma finché nel simbolo permane una qualche qualità pittorica e poetica, il suo uso costante deve pur fare qualcosa per l’educazione estetica di chi se ne serve. Le osterie sono ormai quasi le uniche botteghe che usino le antiche insegne, e la misteriosa attrazione che esse esercitano può essere (dall’ottimista) spiegata in questo modo. Vi sono taverne dai nomi così onirici e squisiti che perfino Sir Wilfrid Lawson potrebbe esitare un istante sulla soglia, concedendo al poeta di lottare con il moralista. Così era per le immagini araldiche. È impossibile credere che il leone rosso di Scozia agisse su chi lo impiegava semplicemente come una nuda comodità, al pari di un numero o di una lettera; è impossibile credere che i re di Scozia avrebbero accettato di buon grado in sua vece un maiale o una rana. Vi sono, come diciamo, certi reali vantaggi nei simboli pittorici, e uno di essi è che tutto ciò che è pittorico suggerisce, senza nominare né definire. C’è una strada che va dall’occhio al cuore senza passare per l’intelletto. Gli uomini non litigano sul significato dei tramonti; non contestano mai che il biancospino dica la cosa più bella e arguta a proposito della primavera.
Così, negli antichi giorni aristocratici, esisteva questo vasto simbolismo pittorico di tutti i colori e i gradi dell’aristocrazia. Quando fu suonata la grande tromba dell’uguaglianza, quasi immediatamente dopo si commise uno dei più grandi errori nella storia dell’umanità. Poiché tutto questo orgoglio e questa vivacità, tutti questi svettanti simboli e sgargianti colori, avrebbero dovuto essere estesi all’umanità. Il tabaccaio avrebbe dovuto avere uno stemma, e il formaggiaio un grido di guerra. Il droghiere che vendeva la margarina per burro avrebbe dovuto sentire che c’era una macchia sullo scudo degli Higgins. Invece di far ciò, i democratici commisero l’errore spaventoso — un errore che sta alla radice di tutto il morbo moderno — di diminuire la magnificenza umana del passato anziché accrescerla. Non dissero, come avrebbero dovuto, al comune cittadino: «Tu vali quanto il Duca di Norfolk», ma usarono quella più meschina formula democratica: «Il Duca di Norfolk non vale più di te».
Poiché non si può negare che il mondo perse qualcosa, definitivamente e nel modo più sventurato, verso il principio del diciannovesimo secolo. In tempi passati la massa del popolo era concepita come meschina e comune, ma solo come comparativamente meschina e comune; era rimpicciolita ed eclissata da certe alte condizioni e splendide vocazioni. Ma con l’era vittoriana venne un principio che concepiva gli uomini non comparativamente, bensì positivamente, meschini e comuni. Un uomo di qualunque condizione veniva rappresentato come, per natura, una persona grigia e insignificante — una persona nata, per così dire, con un cappello nero. Si cominciò a pensare che fosse ridicolo per un uomo indossare bei vestiti, invece che essere — come, s’intende, è — ridicolo che egli deliberatamente ne indossi di brutti. Si considerava affettato che un uomo pronunciasse parole ardite ed eroiche, mentre, s’intende, è il linguaggio dell’emozione a essere naturale, e l’ordinario linguaggio compìto a essere affettato. L’intero rapporto tra bellezza e bruttezza, tra dignità e ignominia fu capovolto. La bellezza divenne una stravaganza, come se i cilindri e gli ombrelli non fossero la vera stravaganza — un paesaggio dalla terra dei folletti. La dignità divenne una forma di buffoneria e sfrontatezza, come se l’essenza stessa dello sciocco non fosse una mancanza di dignità. E la conseguenza è che è praticamente difficilissimo proporre una qualsiasi decorazione o dignità pubblica per gli uomini moderni senza farli ridere. Ridono all’idea di portare cimieri e stemmi, invece di ridere dei propri stivali e delle proprie cravatte. Ci è vietato dire che i commercianti dovrebbero avere una poesia propria, benché non vi sia nulla di tanto poetico quanto il commercio. Un droghiere dovrebbe avere uno stemma degno delle sue strane mercanzie raccolte da terre remote e fantastiche; un postino dovrebbe avere uno stemma capace di esprimere lo strano onore e la responsabilità dell’uomo che porta le anime altrui in una borsa; il farmacista dovrebbe avere uno stemma che simboleggi qualcosa dei misteri della casa della guarigione, la caverna di una misericordiosa stregoneria.
Vi era nella Rivoluzione francese una classe di persone di cui tutti ridevano, e di cui era probabilmente difficile, in pratica, trattenersi dal ridere. Tentarono di erigere, per mezzo di enormi statue di legno e di festività nuove di zecca, le più straordinarie religioni nuove. Adoravano la Dea della Ragione, la quale sembrerebbe, anche facendo la più ampia concessione alle loro molte virtù, la divinità che meno aveva sorriso loro. Ma questi maniaci saltellanti, rinnegati sia dal vecchio mondo sia dal nuovo, erano uomini che avevano scorto una grande verità ignota tanto al mondo nuovo quanto al vecchio. Avevano veduto la cosa che era nascosta ai savi e agli intelligenti, all’intera moderna civiltà democratica fino al tempo presente. Compresero che la democrazia deve avere un’araldica, che deve avere una fiera e vivida pompa, se vuole tenere sempre dinanzi alla propria mente la propria sublime missione. Sfortunatamente per questo ideale, il mondo in questa materia ha seguito la democrazia inglese piuttosto che quella francese; e coloro che guarderanno indietro al diciannovesimo secolo vi guarderanno di certo come noi guardiamo al regno dei Puritani, come al tempo delle nere palandrane e dei neri umori. Dalla strana vita che gli uomini di quel tempo condussero, si direbbe che assistessero al funerale della libertà anziché al suo battesimo. Nel momento in cui davvero crederemo nella democrazia, essa comincerà a fiorire, come fiorì l’aristocrazia, in colori e forme simboliche. Non faremo mai nulla della democrazia finché non ci renderemo ridicoli. Poiché se un uomo davvero non sa rendersi sciocco, possiamo esser certi che lo sforzo è superfluo.
A DEFENCE OF UGLY THINGS
There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often they are made.
But while nothing in this world would persuade us that a great friend of Mr. Forbes Robertson, let us say, would experience no surprise or discomfort at seeing him enter the room in the bodily form of Mr. Chaplin, there is a confusion constantly made between being attracted by exterior, which is natural and universal, and being attracted by what is called physical beauty, which is not entirely natural and not in the least universal. Or rather, to speak more strictly, the conception of physical beauty has been narrowed to mean a certain kind of physical beauty which no more exhausts the possibilities of external attractiveness than the respectability of a Clapham builder exhausts the possibilities of moral attractiveness.
The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been the Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism—an asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish severity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that men lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees of blood certain consequences might follow. But they did not starve their instinct for contrasts and combinations; their prophets gave two wings to the ox and any number of eyes to the cherubim with all the riotous ingenuity of Lewis Carroll. But the Greeks carried their police regulation into elfland; they vetoed not the actual adulteries of the earth but the wild weddings of ideas, and forbade the banns of thought.
It is extraordinary to watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Who ever feels that the giants in Greek art and poetry were really big—big as some folk-lore giants have been? In some Scandinavian story a hero walks for miles along a mountain ridge, which eventually turns out to be the bridge of the giant’s nose. That is what we should call, with a calm conscience, a large giant. But this earthquake fancy terrified the Greeks, and their terror has terrified all mankind out of their natural love of size, vitality, variety, energy, ugliness. Nature intended every human face, so long as it was forcible, individual, and expressive, to be regarded as distinct from all others, as a poplar is distinct from an oak, and an apple-tree from a willow. But what the Dutch gardeners did for trees the Greeks did for the human form; they lopped away its living and sprawling features to give it a certain academic shape; they hacked off noses and pared down chins with a ghastly horticultural calm. And they have really succeeded so far as to make us call some of the most powerful and endearing faces ugly, and some of the most silly and repulsive faces beautiful. This disgraceful via media, this pitiful sense of dignity, has bitten far deeper into the soul of modern civilization than the external and practical Puritanism of Israel. The Jew at the worst told a man to dance in fetters; the Greek put an exquisite vase upon his head and told him not to move.
Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the same conception applies to noses. To insist that one type of face is ugly because it differs from that of the Venus of Milo is to look at it entirely in a misleading light. It is strange that we should resent people differing from ourselves; we should resent much more violently their resembling ourselves. This principle has made a sufficient hash of literary criticism, in which it is always the custom to complain of the lack of sound logic in a fairy tale, and the entire absence of true oratorical power in a three-act farce. But to call another man’s face ugly because it powerfully expresses another man’s soul is like complaining that a cabbage has not two legs. If we did so, the only course for the cabbage would be to point out with severity, but with some show of truth, that we were not a beautiful green all over.
But this frigid theory of the beautiful has not succeeded in conquering the art of the world, except in name. In some quarters, indeed, it has never held sway. A glance at Chinese dragons or Japanese gods will show how independent are Orientals of the conventional idea of facial and bodily regularity, and how keen and fiery is their enjoyment of real beauty, of goggle eyes, of sprawling claws, of gaping mouths and writhing coils. In the Middle Ages men broke away from the Greek standard of beauty, and lifted up in adoration to heaven great towers, which seemed alive with dancing apes and devils. In the full summer of technical artistic perfection the revolt was carried to its real consummation in the study of the faces of men. Rembrandt declared the sane and manly gospel that a man was dignified, not when he was like a Greek god, but when he had a strong, square nose like a cudgel, a boldly-blocked head like a helmet, and a jaw like a steel trap.
This branch of art is commonly dismissed as the grotesque. We have never been able to understand why it should be humiliating to be laughable, since it is giving an elevated artistic pleasure to others. If a gentleman who saw us in the street were suddenly to burst into tears at the mere thought of our existence, it might be considered disquieting and uncomplimentary; but laughter is not uncomplimentary. In truth, however, the phrase ‘grotesque’ is a misleading description of ugliness in art. It does not follow that either the Chinese dragons or the Gothic gargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the least intended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance of satire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the whole key of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jut out in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red pines stand up hardily upon a high cliff, we like to see a chasm cloven from end to end of a mountain. With equally noble enthusiasm we like to see a nose jut out decisively, we like to see the red hair of a friend stand up hardily in bristles upon his head, we like to see his mouth broad and clean cut like the mountain crevasse. At least some of us like all this; it is not a question of humour. We do not burst with amusement at the first sight of the pines or the chasm; but we like them because they are expressive of the dramatic stillness of Nature, her bold experiments, her definite departures, her fearlessness and savage pride in her children. The moment we have snapped the spell of conventional beauty, there are a million beautiful faces waiting for us everywhere, just as there are a million beautiful spirits.
UNA DIFESA DELLE COSE BRUTTE
Vi sono persone che dichiarano di essere indifferenti all’aspetto esteriore, al sesso o alla costituzione fisica di un’altra persona, e che a loro importa solo la comunione fra mente e mente; ma costoro non meritano di trattenerci. Vi sono affermazioni che nessuno pensa mai di credere, per quanto spesso vengano fatte.
Ma se nulla al mondo potrebbe persuaderci che un grande amico del signor Forbes Robertson, poniamo, non proverebbe alcuna sorpresa o disagio nel vederlo entrare nella stanza sotto le fattezze corporee del signor Chaplin, si fa di continuo confusione tra l’essere attratti dall’aspetto esteriore, cosa naturale e universale, e l’essere attratti da ciò che si chiama bellezza fisica, che non è del tutto naturale né minimamente universale. O piuttosto, per dirla con maggior rigore, la concezione della bellezza fisica è stata ristretta a significare un certo tipo di bellezza fisica che non esaurisce le possibilità dell’attrattiva esteriore più di quanto la rispettabilità di un costruttore di Clapham esaurisca le possibilità dell’attrattiva morale.
I tiranni e gli ingannatori del genere umano in questa materia sono stati i greci. Tutta la loro splendida opera per la civiltà non avrebbe dovuto accecarci del tutto sul fatto del loro grande e terribile peccato contro la varietà della vita. È fatto notevole che, mentre gli ebrei sono stati da tempo contestati e accusati di aver funestato il mondo con un rigido e unilaterale criterio etico, nessuno abbia notato che i greci ci hanno vincolati a un ascetismo infinitamente più orribile — un ascetismo della fantasia, il culto di un unico tipo estetico soltanto. La severità ebraica aveva almeno il buon senso come fondamento; riconosceva che gli uomini vivono in un mondo di fatti, e che se un uomo si sposava entro i gradi di sangue potevano seguirne certe conseguenze. Ma non affamavano il loro istinto per i contrasti e le combinazioni; i loro profeti davano due ali al bue e un numero qualsiasi di occhi ai cherubini, con tutta la sfrenata ingegnosità di Lewis Carroll. Ma i greci portarono i loro regolamenti di polizia nel regno degli elfi; posero il veto non sugli adultèri reali della terra, ma sui folli connubi delle idee, e proibirono le pubblicazioni del pensiero.
È straordinario osservare la graduale evirazione dei mostri del mito greco sotto la pestilente influenza dell’Apollo del Belvedere. La chimera era una creatura di cui qualsiasi popolo di mente sana sarebbe andato fiero; ma quando la vediamo nelle immagini greche ci viene voglia di legarle un nastro al collo e di darle una ciotola di latte. Chi mai ha la sensazione che i giganti dell’arte e della poesia greche fossero davvero grandi — grandi come lo sono stati certi giganti del folclore? In una storia scandinava un eroe cammina per miglia lungo un crinale montano, che alla fine si rivela essere il dorso del naso del gigante. Questo è ciò che noi chiameremmo, con la coscienza tranquilla, un gigante grande. Ma questa fantasia da terremoto atterriva i greci, e il loro terrore ha atterrito tutto il genere umano allontanandolo dal suo naturale amore per la mole, la vitalità, la varietà, l’energia, la bruttezza. La Natura voleva che ogni volto umano, purché vigoroso, individuale ed espressivo, fosse considerato distinto da tutti gli altri, come un pioppo è distinto da una quercia, e un melo da un salice. Ma ciò che i giardinieri olandesi fecero agli alberi, i greci lo fecero alla forma umana; ne recisero i tratti vivi e sbozzati per darle una certa foggia accademica; mozzarono nasi e limarono menti con una spaventosa calma da orticoltori. E vi sono riusciti al punto da farci chiamare brutti alcuni dei volti più potenti e amabili, e belli alcuni dei volti più sciocchi e ripugnanti. Questa vergognosa via media, questo pietoso senso della dignità, ha morso assai più a fondo nell’anima della civiltà moderna di quanto non abbia fatto il puritanesimo esteriore e pratico d’Israele. L’ebreo, nel peggiore dei casi, diceva a un uomo di danzare tra i ceppi; il greco gli poneva sul capo uno squisito vaso e gli diceva di non muoversi.
La Scrittura dice che una stella differisce dall’altra in gloria, e la stessa concezione vale per i nasi. Insistere che un tipo di volto sia brutto perché differisce da quello della Venere di Milo significa guardarlo in una luce del tutto fuorviante. È strano che ci si risenta del fatto che gli altri differiscano da noi; dovremmo risentirci assai più violentemente della loro somiglianza con noi. Questo principio ha combinato un bel pasticcio della critica letteraria, nella quale è sempre usanza lamentare la mancanza di solida logica in una fiaba, e la totale assenza di vera potenza oratoria in una farsa in tre atti. Ma dire brutto il volto di un altro uomo perché esprime potentemente l’anima di quell’uomo è come lamentarsi che un cavolo non abbia due gambe. Se lo facessimo, l’unica via per il cavolo sarebbe far notare con severità, ma con una certa apparenza di verità, che noi non siamo di un bel verde da cima a fondo.
Ma questa gelida teoria del bello non è riuscita a conquistare l’arte del mondo, se non di nome. In certi ambiti, anzi, non ha mai dominato. Un’occhiata ai draghi cinesi o agli dèi giapponesi mostrerà quanto gli orientali siano indipendenti dall’idea convenzionale di regolarità del volto e del corpo, e quanto acuto e ardente sia il loro godimento della vera bellezza, degli occhi sporgenti, degli artigli protesi, delle bocche spalancate e delle spire contorte. Nel Medioevo gli uomini si affrancarono dal canone greco della bellezza, e innalzarono in adorazione verso il cielo grandi torri, che parevano vive di scimmie e diavoli danzanti. Nella piena estate della perfezione tecnica dell’arte la rivolta fu portata al suo vero compimento nello studio dei volti degli uomini. Rembrandt proclamò il sano e virile vangelo secondo cui un uomo era dignitoso non quando somigliava a un dio greco, ma quando aveva un naso forte e squadrato come un randello, una testa arditamente sbozzata come un elmo, e una mascella come una tagliola d’acciaio.
Questo ramo dell’arte viene comunemente liquidato come il grottesco. Non siamo mai riusciti a capire perché sarebbe umiliante essere ridicoli, dal momento che così si dà agli altri un elevato piacere artistico. Se un gentiluomo che ci vedesse per strada scoppiasse d’improvviso in lacrime al solo pensiero della nostra esistenza, la cosa potrebbe apparire inquietante e poco lusinghiera; ma il riso non è poco lusinghiero. In verità, però, l’espressione «grottesco» è una descrizione fuorviante della bruttezza nell’arte. Non ne consegue che i draghi cinesi o i doccioni gotici o le vecchie da folletto di Rembrandt fossero minimamente intesi come comici. La loro stravaganza non era la stravaganza della satira, ma semplicemente la stravaganza della vitalità; e qui sta l’intera chiave del posto della bruttezza nell’estetica. Ci piace vedere una rupe sporgere con sfrontata decisione dalla scogliera, ci piace vedere i pini rossi ergersi arditamente su un’alta rupe, ci piace vedere un abisso spaccare da un capo all’altro una montagna. Con un entusiasmo altrettanto nobile ci piace vedere un naso sporgere con decisione, ci piace vedere i capelli rossi di un amico rizzarsi arditamente a spazzola sul suo capo, ci piace vedere la sua bocca larga e nettamente incisa come il crepaccio del monte. Almeno ad alcuni di noi piace tutto questo; non è questione di umorismo. Non scoppiamo dal divertimento alla prima vista dei pini o dell’abisso; ma ci piacciono perché esprimono la drammatica immobilità della Natura, i suoi arditi esperimenti, i suoi netti scarti, la sua intrepidezza e il suo selvaggio orgoglio per i propri figli. Nel momento in cui abbiamo spezzato l’incantesimo della bellezza convenzionale, ci sono un milione di volti bellissimi che ci aspettano dappertutto, proprio come ci sono un milione di spiriti bellissimi.
A DEFENCE OF FARCE
I have never been able to understand why certain forms of art should be marked off as something debased and trivial. A comedy is spoken of as ‘degenerating into farce’; it would be fair criticism to speak of it ‘changing into farce’; but as for degenerating into farce, we might equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a story is spoken of as ‘melodramatic,’ and the phrase, queerly enough, is not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as ‘pantomimic’ or ‘sensational’ is innocently supposed to be biting, Heaven knows why, for all works of art are sensations, and a good pantomime (now extinct) is one of the pleasantest sensations of all. ‘This stuff is fit for a detective story,’ is often said, as who should say, ‘This stuff is fit for an epic.’
Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification, there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set up for them, no gust of generous artistic pride to lift them up, do actually tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children of the great mother, they grow up in darkness, dirty and unlettered, and when they are right they are right almost by accident, because of the blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or effect, a mass of ‘jarring atoms,’ a prolonged mental torture of irrelevancy. The ordinary farce seems a world of almost piteous vulgarity, where a half-witted and stunted creature is afraid when his wife comes home, and amused when she sits down on the doorstep. All this is, in a sense, true, but it is the fault of nothing in heaven or earth except the attitude and the phrases quoted at the beginning of this article. We have no doubt in the world that, if the other forms of art had been equally despised, they would have been equally despicable. If people had spoken of ‘sonnets’ with the same accent with which they speak of ‘music-hall songs,’ a sonnet would have been a thing so fearful and wonderful that we almost regret we cannot have a specimen; a rowdy sonnet is a thing to dream about. If people had said that epics were only fit for children and nursemaids, ‘Paradise Lost’ might have been an average pantomime: it might have been called ‘Harlequin Satan, or How Adam ‘Ad ‘em.’ For who would trouble to bring to perfection a work in which even perfection is grotesque? Why should Shakespeare write ‘Othello’ if even his triumph consisted in the eulogy, ‘Mr. Shakespeare is fit for something better than writing tragedies’?
The case of farce, and its wilder embodiment in harlequinade, is especially important. That these high and legitimate forms of art, glorified by Aristophanes and Molière, have sunk into such contempt may be due to many causes: I myself have little doubt that it is due to the astonishing and ludicrous lack of belief in hope and hilarity which marks modern aesthetics, to such an extent that it has spread even to the revolutionists (once the hopeful section of men), so that even those who ask us to fling the stars into the sea are not quite sure that they will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary art must be a symbol of some phase of the human spirit; but whereas the phase is, in human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it must have a certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate for its lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round a tea-table may have all the comedy emotions of ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ or ‘Northanger Abbey,’ but if their actual conversation were reported, it would possibly not be a worthy addition to literature. An old man sitting by his fire may have all the desolate grandeur of Lear or Père Goriot, but if he comes into literature he must do something besides sit by the fire. The artistic justification, then, of farce and pantomime must consist in the emotions of life which correspond to them. And these emotions are to an incredible extent crushed out by the modern insistence on the painful side of life only. Pain, it is said, is the dominant element of life; but this is true only in a very special sense. If pain were for one single instant literally the dominant element in life, every man would be found hanging dead from his own bed-post by the morning. Pain, as the black and catastrophic thing, attracts the youthful artist, just as the schoolboy draws devils and skeletons and men hanging. But joy is a far more elusive and elvish matter, since it is our reason for existing, and a very feminine reason; it mingles with every breath we draw and every cup of tea we drink. The literature of joy is infinitely more difficult, more rare and more triumphant than the black and white literature of pain. And of all the varied forms of the literature of joy, the form most truly worthy of moral reverence and artistic ambition is the form called ‘farce’—or its wilder shape in pantomime. To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Upon anyone who feels this nameless anarchism there rests for the time being the abiding spirit of pantomime. Of the clown who cuts the policeman in two it may be said (with no darker meaning) that he realizes one of our visions. And it may be noted here that this internal quality in pantomime is perfectly symbolized and preserved by that commonplace or cockney landscape and architecture which characterizes pantomime and farce. If the whole affair happened in some alien atmosphere, if a pear-tree began to grow apples or a river to run with wine in some strange fairyland, the effect would be quite different. The streets and shops and door-knockers of the harlequinade, which to the vulgar aesthete make it seem commonplace, are in truth the very essence of the aesthetic departure. It must be an actual modern door which opens and shuts, constantly disclosing different interiors; it must be a real baker whose loaves fly up into the air without his touching them, or else the whole internal excitement of this elvish invasion of civilization, this abrupt entrance of Puck into Pimlico, is lost. Some day, perhaps, when the present narrow phase of aesthetics has ceased to monopolize the name, the glory of a farcical art may become fashionable. Long after men have ceased to drape their houses in green and gray and to adorn them with Japanese vases, an aesthete may build a house on pantomime principles, in which all the doors shall have their bells and knockers on the inside, all the staircases be constructed to vanish on the pressing of a button, and all the dinners (humorous dinners in themselves) come up cooked through a trapdoor. We are very sure, at least, that it is as reasonable to regulate one’s life and lodgings by this kind of art as by any other.
The whole of this view of farce and pantomime may seem insane to us; but we fear that it is we who are insane. Nothing in this strange age of transition is so depressing as its merriment. All the most brilliant men of the day when they set about the writing of comic literature do it under one destructive fallacy and disadvantage: the notion that comic literature is in some sort of way superficial. They give us little knick-knacks of the brittleness of which they positively boast, although two thousand years have beaten as vainly upon the follies of the ‘Frogs’ as on the wisdom of the ‘Republic.’ It is all a mean shame of joy. When we come out from a performance of the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ we feel as near to the stars as when we come out from ‘King Lear.’ For the joy of these works is older than sorrow, their extravagance is saner than wisdom, their love is stronger than death.
The old masters of a healthy madness, Aristophanes or Rabelais or Shakespeare, doubtless had many brushes with the precisians or ascetics of their day, but we cannot but feel that for honest severity and consistent self-maceration they would always have had respect. But what abysses of scorn, inconceivable to any modern, would they have reserved for an aesthetic type and movement which violated morality and did not even find pleasure, which outraged sanity and could not attain to exuberance, which contented itself with the fool’s cap without the bells!
DIFESA DELLA FARSA
Non sono mai riuscito a capire perché certe forme d’arte debbano essere bollate come qualcosa di degradato e frivolo. Di una commedia si dice che ‘degenera in farsa’; sarebbe critica giusta dire che ‘si trasforma in farsa’; ma quanto al degenerare in farsa, con pari ragionevolezza potremmo dire che degenera in tragedia. Ancora, di una storia si dice che è ‘melodrammatica’, e la frase, per quanto strano, non è intesa come un complimento. Definire qualcosa ‘pantomimico’ o ‘sensazionale’ viene ingenuamente creduto pungente, Dio sa perché, giacché tutte le opere d’arte sono sensazioni, e una buona pantomima (oggi estinta) è una delle sensazioni più piacevoli di tutte. ‘Questa roba è degna di un racconto poliziesco’, si dice spesso, come chi dicesse: ‘Questa roba è degna di un poema epico.’
Quali che siano i torti e le ragioni di questo modo di classificare, non può esservi dubbio su un suo effetto quanto mai pratico e disastroso. Queste forme d’arte più leggere o più sfrenate, non avendo alcun canone stabilito per esse, nessun impeto di generoso orgoglio artistico a sollevarle, tendono per davvero a diventare cattive quanto si suppone che siano. Figli trascurati della grande madre, crescono nelle tenebre, sudici e illetterati, e quando sono nel giusto lo sono quasi per caso, per via del sangue che scorre nelle loro vene. Il comune racconto poliziesco di mistero e omicidio pare al lettore intelligente ben poca cosa se non uno strano scorcio di un pianeta popolato da idioti congeniti, che non sanno trovare la punta del proprio naso né il carattere delle proprie mogli. La comune pantomima pare una qualche orribile immagine satirica di un mondo senza causa né effetto, un ammasso di ‘atomi cozzanti’, una prolungata tortura mentale di irrilevanza. La farsa ordinaria pare un mondo di volgarità quasi pietosa, dove una creatura mezza scema e rachitica ha paura quando la moglie torna a casa, e si diverte quando lei si siede sulla soglia. Tutto ciò è, in un certo senso, vero, ma non è colpa di nulla in cielo o in terra se non dell’atteggiamento e delle frasi citate all’inizio di questo articolo. Non abbiamo alcun dubbio al mondo che, se le altre forme d’arte fossero state ugualmente disprezzate, sarebbero state ugualmente spregevoli. Se la gente avesse parlato dei ‘sonetti’ con lo stesso accento con cui parla delle ‘canzoni da music-hall’, un sonetto sarebbe stato cosa tanto terribile e mirabile che quasi ci duole non poterne avere un esemplare; un sonetto sguaiato è cosa da sognarci sopra. Se la gente avesse detto che i poemi epici erano adatti solo ai bambini e alle bambinaie, il ‘Paradiso perduto’ avrebbe potuto essere una pantomima qualunque: avrebbe potuto intitolarsi ‘Arlecchino Satana, ovvero Come Adamo li Ebbe.’ Perché mai qualcuno si prenderebbe la briga di portare a perfezione un’opera in cui perfino la perfezione è grottesca? Perché Shakespeare dovrebbe scrivere l”Otello’ se anche il suo trionfo consistesse nell’elogio: ‘Il signor Shakespeare è adatto a qualcosa di meglio che scrivere tragedie’?
Il caso della farsa, e della sua incarnazione più sfrenata nell’arlecchinata, è di particolare importanza. Che queste alte e legittime forme d’arte, glorificate da Aristofane e Molière, siano sprofondate in tale disprezzo può dipendere da molte cause: io stesso ho pochi dubbi che ciò sia dovuto alla stupefacente e ridicola mancanza di fede nella speranza e nell’ilarità che contrassegna l’estetica moderna, a tal punto che si è diffusa perfino tra i rivoluzionari (un tempo la parte fiduciosa dell’umanità), sicché anche coloro che ci chiedono di scagliare le stelle nel mare non sono del tutto certi che vi staranno meglio di quanto stessero prima. Ogni forma d’arte letteraria dev’essere il simbolo di qualche fase dello spirito umano; ma mentre la fase, nella vita umana, è di per sé sufficientemente convincente, nell’arte essa deve possedere una certa pungenza e nitidezza di forma, a compensare la sua mancanza di realtà. Così, un qualunque gruppo di giovani intorno a un tavolo da tè può avere tutte le emozioni comiche di ‘Molto rumore per nulla’ o dell”Abbazia di Northanger,’ ma se la loro effettiva conversazione fosse riportata, forse non sarebbe una degna aggiunta alla letteratura. Un vecchio seduto accanto al fuoco può avere tutta la desolata grandezza di Lear o di Père Goriot, ma se entra nella letteratura deve fare qualcosa di più che sedere accanto al fuoco. La giustificazione artistica, dunque, della farsa e della pantomima deve consistere nelle emozioni della vita che ad esse corrispondono. E queste emozioni sono, in misura incredibile, schiacciate dalla moderna insistenza sul solo lato doloroso della vita. Il dolore, si dice, è l’elemento dominante della vita; ma ciò è vero solo in un senso assai particolare. Se il dolore fosse per un solo istante letteralmente l’elemento dominante della vita, ogni uomo verrebbe trovato la mattina impiccato al proprio letto. Il dolore, come cosa nera e catastrofica, attrae il giovane artista, così come lo scolaro disegna diavoli e scheletri e uomini impiccati. Ma la gioia è faccenda assai più sfuggente ed elfica, poiché è la nostra ragione d’esistere, e una ragione assai femminile; si mescola a ogni respiro che traiamo e a ogni tazza di tè che beviamo. La letteratura della gioia è infinitamente più difficile, più rara e più trionfante della letteratura in bianco e nero del dolore. E di tutte le varie forme della letteratura della gioia, la forma più veramente degna di riverenza morale e di ambizione artistica è la forma chiamata ‘farsa’—o la sua figura più sfrenata nella pantomima. All’essere umano più quieto, seduto nella più quieta casa, verrà talvolta una subitanea e insensata fame per le possibilità o le impossibilità delle cose; egli si domanderà a un tratto se la teiera non possa d’improvviso mettersi a versare miele o acqua di mare, l’orologio a segnare tutte le ore del giorno insieme, la candela a bruciare verde o cremisi, la porta ad aprirsi su un lago o un campo di patate invece che su una strada di Londra. Su chiunque provi questo innominato anarchismo si posa per il tempo presente lo spirito perdurante della pantomima. Del clown che taglia in due il poliziotto si può dire (senza alcun significato più cupo) che egli realizza una delle nostre visioni. E qui si può notare che questa qualità interiore della pantomima è perfettamente simboleggiata e conservata da quel paesaggio e da quell’architettura banali e da cockney che caratterizzano la pantomima e la farsa. Se l’intera faccenda accadesse in qualche atmosfera aliena, se un pero cominciasse a produrre mele o un fiume a scorrere di vino in qualche strana terra fatata, l’effetto sarebbe assai diverso. Le strade e le botteghe e i battenti delle porte dell’arlecchinata, che all’esteta volgare la fanno parere banale, sono in verità l’essenza stessa dello scarto estetico. Dev’essere una vera porta moderna che si apre e si chiude, rivelando di continuo interni diversi; dev’essere un vero fornaio i cui pani volano in aria senza che egli li tocchi, altrimenti tutta l’interiore eccitazione di questa elfica invasione della civiltà, questa brusca irruzione di Puck in Pimlico, va perduta. Un giorno, forse, quando l’attuale angusta fase dell’estetica avrà cessato di monopolizzare il nome, la gloria di un’arte farsesca potrà divenire di moda. Molto tempo dopo che gli uomini avranno cessato di drappeggiare le loro case in verde e grigio e di adornarle con vasi giapponesi, un esteta potrà costruire una casa secondo principi pantomimici, in cui tutte le porte avranno i loro campanelli e battenti all’interno, tutte le scale saranno costruite per svanire alla pressione di un bottone, e tutti i pranzi (pranzi di per sé spassosi) saliranno già cotti attraverso una botola. Siamo quantomeno certi che è ragionevole regolare la propria vita e il proprio alloggio secondo questo tipo d’arte quanto secondo qualsiasi altro.
L’intera visione della farsa e della pantomima potrà sembrarci folle; ma temiamo che i folli siamo noi. Nulla in questa strana età di transizione è tanto deprimente quanto la sua allegria. Tutti gli uomini più brillanti del nostro tempo, quando si accingono a scrivere letteratura comica, lo fanno sotto un’unica fallacia e svantaggio distruttivo: l’idea che la letteratura comica sia in qualche modo superficiale. Ci porgono piccoli ninnoli della cui fragilità positivamente si vantano, benché duemila anni abbiano battuto altrettanto invano sulle follie delle ‘Rane’ quanto sulla saggezza della ‘Repubblica.’ È tutta una meschina vergogna della gioia. Quando usciamo da una rappresentazione del ‘Sogno di una notte di mezza estate’ ci sentiamo vicini alle stelle quanto quando usciamo dal ‘Re Lear.’ Poiché la gioia di queste opere è più antica del dolore, la loro stravaganza è più assennata della saggezza, il loro amore è più forte della morte.
I vecchi maestri di una sana follia, Aristofane o Rabelais o Shakespeare, ebbero senza dubbio molte scaramucce con i precisisti o gli asceti del loro tempo, ma non possiamo che sentire che per l’onesta severità e la coerente auto-macerazione avrebbero sempre avuto rispetto. Ma quali abissi di scherno, inconcepibili per qualsiasi moderno, avrebbero riservato a un tipo e a un movimento estetico che violava la moralità e non trovava nemmeno piacere, che oltraggiava la sanità mentale e non sapeva attingere all’esuberanza, che si accontentava del berretto da matto senza i sonagli!
A DEFENCE OF HUMILITY
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes. And especially (in this age of egoistic idealism) there is about one who defends humility something inexpressibly rakish.
It is no part of my intention to defend humility on practical grounds. Practical grounds are uninteresting, and, moreover, on practical grounds the case for humility is overwhelming. We all know that the ‘divine glory of the ego’ is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility—in other people.
But the matter must go deeper than this. If the grounds of humility are found only in social convenience, they may be quite trivial and temporary. The egoists may be the martyrs of a nobler dispensation, agonizing for a more arduous ideal. To judge from the comparative lack of ease in their social manner, this seems a reasonable suggestion.
There is one thing that must be seen at the outset of the study of humility from an intrinsic and eternal point of view. The new philosophy of self-esteem and self-assertion declares that humility is a vice. If it be so, it is quite clear that it is one of those vices which are an integral part of original sin. It follows with the precision of clockwork every one of the great joys of life. No one, for example, was ever in love without indulging in a positive debauch of humility. All full-blooded and natural people, such as schoolboys, enjoy humility the moment they attain hero-worship. Humility, again, is said both by its upholders and opponents to be the peculiar growth of Christianity. The real and obvious reason of this is often missed. The pagans insisted upon self-assertion because it was the essence of their creed that the gods, though strong and just, were mystic, capricious, and even indifferent. But the essence of Christianity was in a literal sense the New Testament—a covenant with God which opened to men a clear deliverance. They thought themselves secure; they claimed palaces of pearl and silver under the oath and seal of the Omnipotent; they believed themselves rich with an irrevocable benediction which set them above the stars; and immediately they discovered humility. It was only another example of the same immutable paradox. It is always the secure who are humble.
This particular instance survives in the evangelical revivalists of the street. They are irritating enough, but no one who has really studied them can deny that the irritation is occasioned by these two things, an irritating hilarity and an irritating humility. This combination of joy and self-prostration is a great deal too universal to be ignored. If humility has been discredited as a virtue at the present day, it is not wholly irrelevant to remark that this discredit has arisen at the same time as a great collapse of joy in current literature and philosophy. Men have revived the splendour of Greek self-assertion at the same time that they have revived the bitterness of Greek pessimism. A literature has arisen which commands us all to arrogate to ourselves the liberty of self-sufficing deities at the same time that it exhibits us to ourselves as dingy maniacs who ought to be chained up like dogs. It is certainly a curious state of things altogether. When we are genuinely happy, we think we are unworthy of happiness. But when we are demanding a divine emancipation we seem to be perfectly certain that we are unworthy of anything.
The only explanation of the matter must be found in the conviction that humility has infinitely deeper roots than any modern men suppose; that it is a metaphysical and, one might almost say, a mathematical virtue. Probably this can best be tested by a study of those who frankly disregard humility and assert the supreme duty of perfecting and expressing one’s self. These people tend, by a perfectly natural process, to bring their own great human gifts of culture, intellect, or moral power to a great perfection, successively shutting out everything that they feel to be lower than themselves. Now shutting out things is all very well, but it has one simple corollary—that from everything that we shut out we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on the wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtain knowledge. A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man—the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle. The most brilliant exponent of the egoistic school, Nietszche, with deadly and honourable logic, admitted that the philosophy of self-satisfaction led to looking down upon the weak, the cowardly, and the ignorant. Looking down on things may be a delightful experience, only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that is really seen when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarified heaven; only he sees everything foreshortened or deformed.
Now if we imagine that a man wished truly, as far as possible, to see everything as it was, he would certainly proceed on a different principle. He would seek to divest himself for a time of those personal peculiarities which tend to divide him from the thing he studies. It is as difficult, for example, for a man to examine a fish without developing a certain vanity in possessing a pair of legs, as if they were the latest article of personal adornment. But if a fish is to be approximately understood, this physiological dandyism must be overcome. The earnest student of fish morality will, spiritually speaking, chop off his legs. And similarly the student of birds will eliminate his arms; the frog-lover will with one stroke of the imagination remove all his teeth, and the spirit wishing to enter into all the hopes and fears of jelly-fish will simplify his personal appearance to a really alarming extent. It would appear, therefore, that this great body of ours and all its natural instincts, of which we are proud, and justly proud, is rather an encumbrance at the moment when we attempt to appreciate things as they should be appreciated. We do actually go through a process of mental asceticism, a castration of the entire being, when we wish to feel the abounding good in all things. It is good for us at certain times that ourselves should be like a mere window—as clear, as luminous, and as invisible.
In a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are—of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other. Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terrible landscapes; here a desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock; here a miraculous forest, of which all the trees flower above the head with the hues of sunset; here, again, a sea full of monsters that Dante would not have dared to dream. These are the visions of him who, like the child in the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the sage whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance; the whole passionate and intricate life of common things becomes as lost to him as is the life of the infusoria to a man without a microscope. He rises always through desolate eternities. He may find new systems, and forget them; he may discover fresh universes, and learn to despise them. But the towering and tropical vision of things as they really are—the gigantic daisies, the heaven-consuming dandelions, the great Odyssey of strange-coloured oceans and strange-shaped trees, of dust like the wreck of temples, and thistledown like the ruin of stars—all this colossal vision shall perish with the last of the humble.
UNA DIFESA DELL’UMILTÀ
L’atto di difendere una qualsiasi delle virtù cardinali ha oggi tutta l’esaltazione di un vizio. I luoghi comuni morali sono stati tanto contestati da aver cominciato a scintillare come altrettanti brillanti paradossi. E specialmente (in questa età di idealismo egoistico) vi è in colui che difende l’umiltà qualcosa di inesprimibilmente sfrontato.
Non rientra affatto nelle mie intenzioni difendere l’umiltà su basi pratiche. Le basi pratiche sono prive di interesse e, per di più, su basi pratiche la causa dell’umiltà è schiacciante. Sappiamo tutti che la «divina gloria dell’io» è socialmente un gran fastidio; tutti in realtà apprezziamo i nostri amici per la modestia, la freschezza e la semplicità di cuore. Qualunque ne sia la ragione, tutti rispettiamo calorosamente l’umiltà—negli altri.
Ma la questione deve andare più a fondo di così. Se i fondamenti dell’umiltà si trovano soltanto nella convenienza sociale, possono essere del tutto banali e temporanei. Gli egoisti potrebbero essere i martiri di una più nobile dispensazione, che si tormentano per un ideale più arduo. A giudicare dalla relativa mancanza di disinvoltura nei loro modi sociali, questa pare un’ipotesi ragionevole.
C’è una cosa che va colta fin dall’inizio dello studio dell’umiltà da un punto di vista intrinseco ed eterno. La nuova filosofia della stima di sé e dell’affermazione di sé dichiara che l’umiltà è un vizio. Se così fosse, è del tutto chiaro che si tratta di uno di quei vizi che sono parte integrante del peccato originale. Segue con la precisione di un orologio ognuna delle grandi gioie della vita. Nessuno, per esempio, fu mai innamorato senza abbandonarsi a una vera e propria orgia di umiltà. Tutte le persone piene di vigore e naturali, come gli scolari, godono dell’umiltà nel momento in cui giungono al culto dell’eroe. L’umiltà, ancora, è detta tanto dai suoi sostenitori quanto dai suoi avversari il peculiare frutto del Cristianesimo. La ragione reale e ovvia di ciò viene spesso mancata. I pagani insistevano sull’affermazione di sé perché era l’essenza del loro credo che gli dèi, per quanto forti e giusti, fossero mistici, capricciosi e persino indifferenti. Ma l’essenza del Cristianesimo era, in senso letterale, il Nuovo Testamento—un patto con Dio che apriva agli uomini una chiara liberazione. Si credevano al sicuro; rivendicavano palazzi di perla e d’argento sotto il giuramento e il sigillo dell’Onnipotente; si credevano ricchi di un’irrevocabile benedizione che li poneva al di sopra delle stelle; e immediatamente scoprirono l’umiltà. Era soltanto un altro esempio dello stesso immutabile paradosso. Sono sempre i sicuri a essere umili.
Questo caso particolare sopravvive nei revivalisti evangelici della strada. Sono abbastanza irritanti, ma nessuno che li abbia davvero studiati può negare che l’irritazione sia provocata da queste due cose, un’irritante ilarità e un’irritante umiltà. Questa combinazione di gioia e di prostrazione di sé è di gran lunga troppo universale per essere ignorata. Se l’umiltà è stata screditata come virtù ai giorni nostri, non è del tutto irrilevante osservare che tale discredito è sorto nel medesimo tempo di un grande crollo della gioia nella letteratura e nella filosofia correnti. Gli uomini hanno fatto rivivere lo splendore dell’affermazione di sé greca nel medesimo tempo in cui hanno fatto rivivere l’amarezza del pessimismo greco. È sorta una letteratura che ci comanda tutti di arrogarci la libertà di divinità che bastano a sé stesse nel medesimo tempo in cui ci mostra a noi stessi come squallidi maniaci che andrebbero incatenati come cani. È certamente uno stato di cose curioso nel complesso. Quando siamo genuinamente felici, pensiamo di essere indegni della felicità. Ma quando reclamiamo una divina emancipazione sembriamo perfettamente certi di essere indegni di qualsiasi cosa.
L’unica spiegazione della faccenda va trovata nella convinzione che l’umiltà abbia radici infinitamente più profonde di quanto qualsiasi uomo moderno supponga; che sia una virtù metafisica e, si potrebbe quasi dire, matematica. Probabilmente ciò si verifica al meglio con uno studio di coloro che francamente trascurano l’umiltà e affermano il supremo dovere di perfezionare ed esprimere il proprio sé. Queste persone tendono, per un processo del tutto naturale, a portare i propri grandi doni umani di cultura, intelletto o forza morale a una grande perfezione, escludendo via via tutto ciò che sentono inferiore a loro. Ora, escludere le cose va tutto molto bene, ma ha un semplice corollario—che da tutto ciò che escludiamo siamo noi stessi esclusi. Quando chiudiamo la nostra porta al vento, sarebbe altrettanto vero dire che il vento chiude la sua porta a noi. A qualsiasi virtù conduca realmente un egoismo trionfante, nessuno può ragionevolmente pretendere che conduca alla conoscenza. Allontanare un mendicante dalla porta può essere abbastanza giusto, ma pretendere di conoscere tutte le storie che il mendicante avrebbe potuto narrare è pura assurdità; e questa è praticamente la pretesa dell’egoismo che crede che l’affermazione di sé possa ottenere conoscenza. Uno scarabeo può essere o no inferiore a un uomo—la questione attende dimostrazione; ma se fosse inferiore di diecimila braccia, resta il fatto che esiste probabilmente una visione delle cose propria dello scarabeo di cui un uomo è del tutto ignaro. Se desidera concepire quel punto di vista, difficilmente lo raggiungerà crogiolandosi ostinatamente nel fatto di non essere uno scarabeo. Il più brillante esponente della scuola egoistica, Nietzsche, con una logica letale e onorevole, ammise che la filosofia dell’appagamento di sé portava a guardare dall’alto in basso i deboli, i codardi e gli ignoranti. Guardare le cose dall’alto può essere un’esperienza deliziosa, solo che non c’è nulla, da una montagna a un cavolo, che sia davvero visto quando è visto da un pallone aerostatico. Il filosofo dell’io vede tutto, senza dubbio, da un alto e rarefatto cielo; solo che vede tutto scorciato o deformato.
Ora, se immaginiamo che un uomo desiderasse davvero, per quanto possibile, vedere ogni cosa come era, egli procederebbe certamente secondo un principio diverso. Cercherebbe di spogliarsi per un tempo di quelle peculiarità personali che tendono a dividerlo dalla cosa che studia. È tanto difficile, per esempio, per un uomo esaminare un pesce senza sviluppare una certa vanità nel possedere un paio di gambe, come se fossero l’ultimo articolo di ornamento personale. Ma se un pesce deve essere compreso in modo approssimativo, questo dandismo fisiologico va superato. Il diligente studioso della moralità dei pesci, spiritualmente parlando, si taglierà via le gambe. E similmente lo studioso degli uccelli eliminerà le proprie braccia; l’amante delle rane con un solo tratto dell’immaginazione rimuoverà tutti i propri denti, e lo spirito che desidera entrare in tutte le speranze e paure delle meduse semplificherà il proprio aspetto personale a un grado davvero allarmante. Sembrerebbe, dunque, che questo nostro grande corpo e tutti i suoi istinti naturali, di cui siamo orgogliosi, e giustamente orgogliosi, siano piuttosto un ingombro nel momento in cui tentiamo di apprezzare le cose come dovrebbero essere apprezzate. Attraversiamo in effetti un processo di ascetismo mentale, una castrazione dell’intero essere, quando desideriamo sentire il bene sovrabbondante in tutte le cose. È bene per noi in certi momenti che noi stessi siamo come una semplice finestra—tanto chiara, tanto luminosa e tanto invisibile.
In un’opera assai divertente, sulla quale abbiamo riso a crepapelle nell’infanzia, si afferma che un punto non ha parti né grandezza. L’umiltà è l’arte lussuosa di ridurci a un punto, non a una cosa piccola o grande, ma a una cosa priva del tutto di dimensione, cosicché per essa tutte le cose cosmiche sono ciò che realmente sono—di statura incommensurabile. Che gli alberi siano alti e le erbe basse è un mero accidente dei nostri metri e della nostra statura. Ma per lo spirito che si è spogliato per un momento dei propri oziosi criteri temporali l’erba è una foresta eterna, con draghi per abitanti; le pietre della strada sono incredibili montagne ammucchiate l’una sull’altra; i denti di leone sono come giganteschi falò che illuminano le terre all’intorno; e le campanelle di brughiera sui loro steli sono come pianeti sospesi nel cielo, ciascuno più in alto dell’altro. Tra un palo di uno steccato e l’altro vi sono paesaggi nuovi e terribili; qui un deserto, con nient’altro che una roccia deforme; qui una foresta miracolosa, i cui alberi fioriscono tutti sopra il capo con le tinte del tramonto; qui, ancora, un mare pieno di mostri che Dante non avrebbe osato sognare. Queste sono le visioni di colui che, come il fanciullo delle fiabe, non ha paura di farsi piccolo. Nel frattempo, il saggio la cui fede è nella grandezza e nell’ambizione diventa, come un gigante, sempre più grande, il che significa soltanto che le stelle diventano sempre più piccole. Mondo dopo mondo gli cade nell’insignificanza; l’intera vita appassionata e intricata delle cose comuni gli diventa tanto perduta quanto è perduta la vita degli infusori per un uomo privo di microscopio. Egli sale sempre attraverso desolate eternità. Può trovare nuovi sistemi, e dimenticarli; può scoprire universi freschi, e imparare a disprezzarli. Ma la torreggiante e tropicale visione delle cose come realmente sono—le gigantesche margherite, i denti di leone che consumano il cielo, la grande Odissea di oceani dai colori strani e alberi dalle forme strane, di polvere come il relitto di templi, e lanugine di cardo come la rovina delle stelle—tutta questa colossale visione perirà con l’ultimo degli umili.
A DEFENCE OF SLANG
The aristocrats of the nineteenth century have destroyed entirely their one solitary utility. It is their business to be flaunting and arrogant; but they flaunt unobtrusively, and their attempts at arrogance are depressing. Their chief duty hitherto has been the development of variety, vivacity, and fulness of life; oligarchy was the world’s first experiment in liberty. But now they have adopted the opposite ideal of ‘good form,’ which may be defined as Puritanism without religion. Good form has sent them all into black like the stroke of a funeral bell. They engage, like Mr. Gilbert’s curates, in a war of mildness, a positive competition of obscurity. In old times the lords of the earth sought above all things to be distinguished from each other; with that object they erected outrageous images on their helmets and painted preposterous colours on their shields. They wished to make it entirely clear that a Norfolk was as different, say, from an Argyll as a white lion from a black pig. But to-day their ideal is precisely the opposite one, and if a Norfolk and an Argyll were dressed so much alike that they were mistaken for each other they would both go home dancing with joy.
The consequences of this are inevitable. The aristocracy must lose their function of standing to the world for the idea of variety, experiment, and colour, and we must find these things in some other class. To ask whether we shall find them in the middle class would be to jest upon sacred matters. The only conclusion, therefore, is that it is to certain sections of the lower class, chiefly, for example, to omnibus-conductors, with their rich and rococo mode of thought, that we must look for guidance towards liberty and light.
The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang. Every day a nameless poet weaves some fairy tracery of popular language. It may be said that the fashionable world talks slang as much as the democratic; this is true, and it strongly supports the view under consideration. Nothing is more startling than the contrast between the heavy, formal, lifeless slang of the man-about-town and the light, living, and flexible slang of the coster. The talk of the upper strata of the educated classes is about the most shapeless, aimless, and hopeless literary product that the world has ever seen. Clearly in this, again, the upper classes have degenerated. We have ample evidence that the old leaders of feudal war could speak on occasion with a certain natural symbolism and eloquence that they had not gained from books. When Cyrano de Bergerac, in Rostand’s play, throws doubts on the reality of Christian’s dulness and lack of culture, the latter replies:
‘Bah! on trouve des mots quand on monte à l’assaut; Oui, j’ai un certain esprit facile et militaire;’
and these two lines sum up a truth about the old oligarchs. They could not write three legible letters, but they could sometimes speak literature. Douglas, when he hurled the heart of Bruce in front of him in his last battle, cried out, ‘Pass first, great heart, as thou wert ever wont.’ A Spanish nobleman, when commanded by the King to receive a high-placed and notorious traitor, said: ‘I will receive him in all obedience, and burn down my house afterwards.’ This is literature without culture; it is the speech of men convinced that they have to assert proudly the poetry of life.
Anyone, however, who should seek for such pearls in the conversation of a young man of modern Belgravia would have much sorrow in his life. It is not only impossible for aristocrats to assert proudly the poetry of life; it is more impossible for them than for anyone else. It is positively considered vulgar for a nobleman to boast of his ancient name, which is, when one comes to think of it, the only rational object of his existence. If a man in the street proclaimed, with rude feudal rhetoric, that he was the Earl of Doncaster, he would be arrested as a lunatic; but if it were discovered that he really was the Earl of Doncaster, he would simply be cut as a cad. No poetical prose must be expected from Earls as a class. The fashionable slang is hardly even a language; it is like the formless cries of animals, dimly indicating certain broad, well-understood states of mind. ‘Bored,’ ‘cut up,’ ‘jolly,’ ‘rotten,’ and so on, are like the words of some tribe of savages whose vocabulary has only twenty of them. If a man of fashion wished to protest against some solecism in another man of fashion, his utterance would be a mere string of set phrases, as lifeless as a string of dead fish. But an omnibus conductor (being filled with the Muse) would burst out into a solid literary effort: ‘You’re a gen’leman, aren’t yer … yer boots is a lot brighter than yer ‘ed…there’s precious little of yer, and that’s clothes…that’s right, put yer cigar in yer mouth ‘cos I can’t see yer be’ind it…take it out again, do yer! you’re young for smokin’, but I’ve sent for yer mother… Goin’? oh, don’t run away: I won’t ‘arm yer. I’ve got a good ‘art, I ‘ave… “Down with croolty to animals,” I say,’ and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote metaphors as a coster puts into a curse; his speech is one long allegory, like Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen.’
I do not imagine that it is necessary to demonstrate that this poetic allusiveness is the characteristic of true slang. Such an expression as ‘Keep your hair on’ is positively Meredithian in its perverse and mysterious manner of expressing an idea. The Americans have a well-known expression about ‘swelled-head’ as a description of self-approval, and the other day I heard a remarkable fantasia upon this air. An American said that after the Chinese War the Japanese wanted ‘to put on their hats with a shoe-horn.’ This is a monument of the true nature of slang, which consists in getting further and further away from the original conception, in treating it more and more as an assumption. It is rather like the literary doctrine of the Symbolists.
The real reason of this great development of eloquence among the lower orders again brings us back to the case of the aristocracy in earlier times. The lower classes live in a state of war, a war of words. Their readiness is the product of the same fiery individualism as the readiness of the old fighting oligarchs. Any cabman has to be ready with his tongue, as any gentleman of the last century had to be ready with his sword. It is unfortunate that the poetry which is developed by this process should be purely a grotesque poetry. But as the higher orders of society have entirely abdicated their right to speak with a heroic eloquence, it is no wonder that the language should develop by itself in the direction of a rowdy eloquence. The essential point is that somebody must be at work adding new symbols and new circumlocutions to a language.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we paused for a moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every day, we should find that they were as rich and suggestive as so many sonnets. To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social relations ‘breaking the ice.’ If this were expanded into a sonnet, we should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of everlasting ice, the sombre and baffling mirror of the Northern nature, over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away with them—a whole chaos of fairy tales.
DIFESA DEL GERGO
Gli aristocratici del diciannovesimo secolo hanno distrutto interamente la loro unica, solitaria utilità. È loro dovere essere sfarzosi e arroganti; ma ostentano in maniera dimessa, e i loro tentativi di arroganza sono deprimenti. Il loro compito principale è stato finora lo sviluppo della varietà, della vivacità e della pienezza della vita; l’oligarchia fu il primo esperimento del mondo in fatto di libertà. Ma ora hanno adottato l’ideale opposto della «buona forma», che si potrebbe definire come puritanesimo senza religione. La buona forma li ha sospinti tutti nel nero come il rintocco di una campana a morto. Si impegnano, al pari dei curati del signor Gilbert, in una guerra di mitezza, in una vera e propria gara di anonimato. Nei tempi antichi i signori della terra cercavano al di sopra di ogni cosa di distinguersi l’uno dall’altro; a tale scopo innalzavano immagini oltraggiose sui loro elmi e dipingevano colori strampalati sui loro scudi. Volevano rendere del tutto chiaro che un Norfolk era diverso, poniamo, da un Argyll quanto un bianco leone da un maiale nero. Ma oggi il loro ideale è precisamente quello opposto, e se un Norfolk e un Argyll fossero vestiti così simili da venire scambiati l’uno per l’altro, tornerebbero entrambi a casa danzando di gioia.
Le conseguenze di ciò sono inevitabili. L’aristocrazia deve perdere la sua funzione di rappresentare al mondo l’idea della varietà, dell’esperimento e del colore, e queste cose dobbiamo trovarle in qualche altra classe. Chiedersi se le troveremo nella classe media sarebbe scherzare su cose sacre. L’unica conclusione, dunque, è che è a certe sezioni della classe inferiore, principalmente, per esempio, ai bigliettai degli omnibus, con il loro modo di pensare ricco e rococò, che dobbiamo guardare per una guida verso la libertà e la luce.
L’unico fiume di poesia che scorre di continuo è il gergo. Ogni giorno un poeta senza nome intreccia qualche fatato ricamo di linguaggio popolare. Si potrebbe dire che il mondo alla moda parla in gergo quanto quello democratico; è vero, e ciò sostiene fortemente la tesi in esame. Nulla è più sorprendente del contrasto fra il gergo pesante, formale e senza vita dell’uomo di mondo e il gergo leggero, vivo e flessibile del venditore ambulante. Il parlare degli strati superiori delle classi colte è il prodotto letterario più informe, senza scopo e senza speranza che il mondo abbia mai visto. Chiaramente anche in questo le classi superiori sono degenerate. Abbiamo ampia prova che gli antichi capi della guerra feudale sapessero all’occasione parlare con un certo naturale simbolismo ed eloquenza che non avevano tratto dai libri. Quando Cyrano de Bergerac, nel dramma di Rostand, mette in dubbio la realtà dell’ottusità e della mancanza di cultura di Christian, quest’ultimo replica:
‘Bah! on trouve des mots quand on monte à l’assaut; Oui, j’ai un certain esprit facile et militaire;’
e questi due versi riassumono una verità sugli antichi oligarchi. Non sapevano scrivere tre lettere leggibili, ma sapevano talvolta parlare letteratura. Douglas, quando scagliò davanti a sé il cuore di Bruce nella sua ultima battaglia, gridò: «Passa per primo, gran cuore, come sempre fu tuo costume». Un nobile spagnolo, quando gli fu ordinato dal re di ricevere un traditore altolocato e famigerato, disse: «Lo riceverò con ogni obbedienza, e poi darò alle fiamme la mia casa». Questa è letteratura senza cultura; è la parola di uomini convinti di dover affermare con orgoglio la poesia della vita.
Chiunque, tuttavia, cercasse simili perle nella conversazione di un giovane della moderna Belgravia proverebbe molto dolore nella sua vita. Non solo è impossibile per gli aristocratici affermare con orgoglio la poesia della vita; è più impossibile per loro che per chiunque altro. È positivamente considerato volgare che un nobile si vanti del suo antico nome, il quale è, a ben pensarci, l’unico oggetto razionale della sua esistenza. Se un uomo per strada proclamasse, con rude retorica feudale, di essere il conte di Doncaster, verrebbe arrestato come pazzo; ma se si scoprisse che era davvero il conte di Doncaster, verrebbe semplicemente ignorato come un cafone. Da parte dei conti, come classe, non ci si deve aspettare alcuna prosa poetica. Il gergo alla moda non è nemmeno propriamente una lingua; è simile ai gridi informi degli animali, che indicano vagamente certi stati d’animo ampi e ben compresi. «Annoiato», «a pezzi», «allegro», «marcio», e così via, sono come le parole di qualche tribù di selvaggi il cui vocabolario ne conta solo venti. Se un uomo alla moda volesse protestare contro qualche solecismo in un altro uomo alla moda, la sua espressione sarebbe una mera sfilza di frasi fatte, priva di vita come una sfilza di pesci morti. Ma un bigliettaio d’omnibus (essendo colmo della Musa) proromperebbe in un solido sforzo letterario: «Sei un signore, no?… i tuoi stivali sono un bel po’ più lucidi della tua zucca… di te ce n’è ben poco, e per giunta è tutto vestito… ecco, mettiti pure il sigaro in bocca ché dietro non riesco a vederti… rimettilo via, su, dai! sei giovane per fumare, ma ho già mandato a chiamare tua madre… Te ne vai? oh, non scappare: non ti faccio mica del male. Ho un buon cuore, io… “Abbasso la crudeltà verso gli animali”, dico io», e così via. È evidente che questo modo di parlare non è soltanto letterario, ma letterario in un senso assai ornato e quasi artificiale. Keats non mise mai in un sonetto tante metafore remote quante ne mette un ambulante in una bestemmia; il suo parlare è una lunga allegoria, come la ‘Faerie Queen’ di Spenser.
Non immagino sia necessario dimostrare che questa allusività poetica è la caratteristica del vero gergo. Un’espressione come «Tieniti su i capelli» è positivamente meredithiana nella sua maniera perversa e misteriosa di esprimere un’idea. Gli americani hanno una espressione ben nota sulla «testa gonfia» come descrizione dell’autocompiacimento, e l’altro giorno ho udito una notevole fantasia su questo motivo. Un americano diceva che dopo la guerra cinese i giapponesi volevano «mettersi il cappello con il calzascarpe». Questo è un monumento alla vera natura del gergo, che consiste nell’allontanarsi sempre più dalla concezione originaria, nel trattarla sempre più come un presupposto. È piuttosto simile alla dottrina letteraria dei Simbolisti.
La vera ragione di questo grande sviluppo dell’eloquenza fra i ceti inferiori ci riporta ancora una volta al caso dell’aristocrazia in tempi più antichi. Le classi inferiori vivono in uno stato di guerra, una guerra di parole. La loro prontezza è il prodotto dello stesso ardente individualismo della prontezza degli antichi oligarchi guerrieri. Ogni vetturino deve essere pronto con la lingua, come ogni gentiluomo del secolo scorso doveva essere pronto con la spada. È spiacevole che la poesia sviluppata da questo processo sia una poesia puramente grottesca. Ma poiché gli ordini superiori della società hanno interamente abdicato al loro diritto di parlare con un’eloquenza eroica, non c’è da meravigliarsi che il linguaggio si sviluppi da sé nella direzione di un’eloquenza turbolenta. Il punto essenziale è che qualcuno deve pur essere al lavoro ad aggiungere nuovi simboli e nuove circonlocuzioni a una lingua.
Ogni gergo è metafora, e ogni metafora è poesia. Se ci fermassimo un istante a esaminare le più vili frasi di gergo che ci escono dalle labbra ogni giorno, scopriremmo che sono ricche e suggestive quanto altrettanti sonetti. Per prendere un solo esempio: nei rapporti sociali inglesi diciamo di un uomo che «rompe il ghiaccio». Se questo fosse ampliato in un sonetto, avremmo dinanzi a noi un quadro oscuro e sublime di un oceano di ghiaccio eterno, il cupo e sconcertante specchio della natura nordica, sul quale gli uomini camminavano e danzavano e pattinavano con agio, ma sotto il quale le acque vive ruggivano e si affannavano molte braccia più in basso. Il mondo del gergo è una sorta di mondo alla rovescia della poesia, pieno di lune blu e di elefanti bianchi, di uomini che perdono la testa, e di uomini la cui lingua li porta via con sé — un intero caos di fiabe.
A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIP
The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.
There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energies and aspirations, may easily be convinced that it will find new things to appreciate; but it will never be convinced, at bottom, that it has properly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and find new stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have not found—that on which we were born.
But the influence of children goes further than its first trifling effort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodel our conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of the marvellousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simple or ignorant)—we do actually treat talking in children as marvellous, walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children as marvellous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in this matter—that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of the child, so much admired by its worshippers, are common enough. The fact is that this is precisely where baby-worship is so profoundly right. Any words and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, the child’s words and antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that the philosopher’s words and antics are equally wonderful.
The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair, and reverence, love, and fear them. When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.
We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations. A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life, generally healthy in motive, but often intolerable in a domestic commonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptious tyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities as rather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told them that they would ‘understand when they were older,’ we should probably be adopting the best and most crushing attitude towards the weaknesses of humanity. In our relations to children we prove that the paradox is entirely true, that it is possible to combine an amnesty that verges on contempt with a worship that verges upon terror. We forgive children with the same kind of blasphemous gentleness with which Omar Khayyam forgave the Omnipotent.
The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.
But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.
IN DIFESA DEL CULTO DEI BAMBINI
I due fatti che attraggono quasi ogni persona normale verso i bambini sono, primo, che essi sono molto seri, e, secondo, che di conseguenza sono molto felici. Sono allegri con quella completezza che è possibile solo in assenza di umorismo. Le scuole e i saggi più insondabili non hanno mai raggiunto la gravità che dimora negli occhi di un bimbo di tre mesi. È la gravità dello stupore dinanzi all’universo, e lo stupore dinanzi all’universo non è misticismo, ma un buon senso trascendente. Il fascino dei bambini sta in questo: che con ciascuno di essi tutte le cose vengono rifatte, e l’universo è nuovamente sottoposto a giudizio. Mentre percorriamo le strade e vediamo sotto di noi quelle deliziose teste bulbose, tre volte troppo grandi per il corpo, che contrassegnano questi funghi umani, dovremmo sempre ricordare anzitutto che dentro ciascuna di quelle teste c’è un nuovo universo, nuovo come lo era il settimo giorno della creazione. In ciascuno di quegli orbi c’è un nuovo sistema di stelle, erba nuova, nuove città, un nuovo mare.
C’è sempre nella mente sana un oscuro suggerimento che la religione ci insegni piuttosto a scavare che a salire; che se una volta potessimo comprendere la comune argilla della terra comprenderemmo ogni cosa. Similmente, abbiamo il sentimento che se potessimo distruggere d’un colpo la consuetudine e vedere le stelle come le vede un bambino, non avremmo bisogno di altra apocalisse. Questa è la grande verità che è sempre stata alla base del culto dei bambini, e che lo sosterrà fino alla fine. La maturità, con le sue infinite energie e aspirazioni, può facilmente convincersi che troverà nuove cose da apprezzare; ma non si convincerà mai, in fondo, di aver debitamente apprezzato ciò che possiede. Possiamo scalare i cieli e trovare nuove stelle innumerevoli, ma c’è ancora la nuova stella che non abbiamo trovato: quella su cui siamo nati.
Ma l’influenza dei bambini va oltre il suo primo trascurabile sforzo di rifare cielo e terra. Ci costringe di fatto a rimodellare la nostra condotta in accordo con questa teoria rivoluzionaria della meravigliosità di tutte le cose. Noi facciamo (anche quando siamo perfettamente semplici o ignoranti)—noi trattiamo di fatto il parlare nei bambini come meraviglioso, il camminare nei bambini come meraviglioso, la comune intelligenza nei bambini come meravigliosa. Il filosofo cinico immagina di avere una vittoria in questa faccenda—di poter ridere quando mostra che le parole o le buffonerie del bambino, tanto ammirate dai suoi adoratori, sono abbastanza comuni. Il fatto è che è proprio qui che il culto dei bambini ha così profondamente ragione. Qualsiasi parola e qualsiasi buffoneria in una zolla d’argilla sono meravigliose, le parole e le buffonerie del bambino sono meravigliose, ed è giusto dire che le parole e le buffonerie del filosofo sono ugualmente meravigliose.
La verità è che è il nostro atteggiamento verso i bambini a essere giusto, e il nostro atteggiamento verso gli adulti a essere sbagliato. Il nostro atteggiamento verso i nostri coetanei consiste in una servile solennità, che sovrasta un considerevole grado di indifferenza o disdegno. Il nostro atteggiamento verso i bambini consiste in una condiscendente indulgenza, che sovrasta un insondabile rispetto. Ci inchiniamo agli adulti, ci togliamo il cappello davanti a loro, ci asteniamo dal contraddirli apertamente, ma non li apprezziamo debitamente. Dei bambini facciamo dei burattini, li rimproveriamo, tiriamo loro i capelli, e li riveriamo, li amiamo e li temiamo. Quando riveriamo qualcosa negli adulti, sono le loro virtù o la loro saggezza, e questa è cosa facile. Ma noi riveriamo i difetti e le follie dei bambini.
Probabilmente ci avvicineremmo assai di più alla vera concezione delle cose se trattassimo tutte le persone adulte, di ogni titolo e tipo, con precisamente quella oscura affezione e quel sbalordito rispetto con cui trattiamo le limitazioni infantili. Un bambino ha difficoltà a compiere il miracolo della parola, e di conseguenza troviamo i suoi errori quasi altrettanto meravigliosi quanto la sua precisione. Se solo adottassimo il medesimo atteggiamento verso i Primi Ministri e i Cancellieri dello Scacchiere, se incoraggiassimo bonariamente i loro balbettii e i loro deliziosi tentativi di parola umana, saremmo di temperamento assai più saggio e tollerante. Un bambino ha il vezzo di fare esperimenti nella vita, generalmente sani nell’intento, ma spesso intollerabili in una comunità domestica. Se solo trattassimo tutti i bucanieri del commercio e i tiranni tracotanti agli stessi termini, se rimproverassimo dolcemente le loro brutalità come piuttosto bizzarri errori nella condotta della vita, se semplicemente dicessimo loro che ‘capiranno quando saranno più grandi’, probabilmente adotteremmo il migliore e più schiacciante atteggiamento verso le debolezze dell’umanità. Nei nostri rapporti con i bambini dimostriamo che il paradosso è interamente vero, che è possibile combinare un’amnistia che rasenta il disprezzo con un culto che rasenta il terrore. Perdoniamo i bambini con quella stessa specie di blasfema dolcezza con cui Omar Khayyam perdonava l’Onnipotente.
L’essenziale rettitudine della nostra visione dei bambini sta nel fatto che noi sentiamo loro e i loro modi come soprannaturali mentre, per qualche misteriosa ragione, non sentiamo noi stessi o i nostri modi come soprannaturali. La piccolezza stessa dei bambini rende possibile considerarli come prodigi; sembra che abbiamo a che fare con una nuova razza, visibile solo attraverso un microscopio. Dubito che chiunque abbia un po’ di tenerezza o di immaginazione possa vedere la mano di un bambino senza esserne un po’ spaventato. È tremendo pensare all’essenziale energia umana che muove una cosa così minuscola; è come immaginare che la natura umana possa vivere nell’ala di una farfalla o nella foglia di un albero. Quando contempliamo vite così umane eppure così piccole, ci sentiamo come se noi stessi fossimo ingranditi fino a una statura imbarazzante. Proviamo verso queste creature quella stessa specie di obbligo che una divinità potrebbe provare se avesse creato qualcosa che non riesce a comprendere.
Ma l’aspetto buffo dei bambini è forse il più caro di tutti i legami che tengono unito il Cosmo. La loro dignità sbilenca è più commovente di qualsiasi umiltà; la loro solennità ci dà più speranza per tutte le cose di mille carnevali d’ottimismo; i loro occhi grandi e lucenti sembrano racchiudere tutte le stelle nel loro stupore; la loro affascinante assenza di naso sembra darci il più perfetto accenno dell’umorismo che ci attende nel regno dei cieli.
A DEFENCE OF DETECTIVE STORIES
In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace prefer bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a book popular. Bradshaw’s Railway Guide contains few gleams of psychological comedy, yet it is not read aloud uproariously on winter evenings. If detective stories are read with more exuberance than railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic. Many good books have fortunately been popular; many bad books, still more fortunately, have been unpopular. A good detective story would probably be even more popular than a bad one. The trouble in this matter is that many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. To write a story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of sensational crime as one of Shakespeare’s plays.
There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent of the public weal.
The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees. Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious the detective story is certainly the ‘Iliad.’ No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland, that in the course of that incalculable journey the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship. The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively signalling the meaning of the mystery.
This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums. Anything which tends, even under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, to assert this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably human character in flints and tiles, is a good thing. It is good that the average man should fall into the habit of looking imaginatively at ten men in the street even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh might be a notorious thief. We may dream, perhaps, that it might be possible to have another and higher romance of London, that men’s souls have stranger adventures than their bodies, and that it would be harder and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt their crimes. But since our great authors (with the admirable exception of Stevenson) decline to write of that thrilling mood and moment when the eyes of the great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark, we must give fair credit to the popular literature which, amid a babble of pedantry and preciosity, declines to regard the present as prosaic or the common as commonplace. Popular art in all ages has been interested in contemporary manners and costume; it dressed the groups around the Crucifixion in the garb of Florentine gentlefolk or Flemish burghers. In the last century it was the custom for distinguished actors to present Macbeth in a powdered wig and ruffles. How far we are ourselves in this age from such conviction of the poetry of our own life and manners may easily be conceived by anyone who chooses to imagine a picture of Alfred the Great toasting the cakes dressed in tourist’s knickerbockers, or a performance of ‘Hamlet’ in which the Prince appeared in a frock-coat, with a crape band round his hat. But this instinct of the age to look back, like Lot’s wife, could not go on for ever. A rude, popular literature of the romantic possibilities of the modern city was bound to arise. It has arisen in the popular detective stories, as rough and refreshing as the ballads of Robin Hood.
There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.
DIFESA DEI RACCONTI POLIZIESCHI
Nel tentativo di individuare la genuina ragione psicologica della popolarità dei racconti polizieschi, occorre liberarci di molte semplici frasi fatte. Non è vero, per esempio, che il popolino preferisca la cattiva letteratura alla buona, e accetti i racconti polizieschi perché sono cattiva letteratura. La mera assenza di sottigliezza artistica non rende popolare un libro. La Guida Ferroviaria di Bradshaw contiene pochi barlumi di commedia psicologica, eppure non la si legge ad alta voce fra grandi risate nelle sere d’inverno. Se i racconti polizieschi si leggono con più esuberanza delle guide ferroviarie, è di certo perché sono più artistici. Molti buoni libri sono stati, fortunatamente, popolari; molti cattivi libri, per fortuna ancora maggiore, sono stati impopolari. Un buon racconto poliziesco sarebbe probabilmente ancora più popolare di uno cattivo. Il guaio, in questa faccenda, è che molti non si rendono conto che esiste una cosa come un buon racconto poliziesco; per loro è come parlare di un buon diavolo. Scrivere un racconto su un furto con scasso è, ai loro occhi, una sorta di modo spirituale di commetterlo. Per persone di sensibilità un po’ debole ciò è abbastanza naturale; bisogna confessare che molti racconti polizieschi sono tanto pieni di delitti sensazionali quanto una delle commedie di Shakespeare.
Vi è tuttavia, tra un buon racconto poliziesco e un cattivo racconto poliziesco, una differenza altrettanto grande, anzi ancor maggiore, di quella che intercorre tra un buon poema epico e uno cattivo. Non solo il racconto poliziesco è una forma d’arte perfettamente legittima, ma possiede certi vantaggi definiti e reali come agente del bene pubblico.
Il primo valore essenziale del racconto poliziesco risiede in questo: che è la prima e unica forma di letteratura popolare in cui si esprima un qualche senso della poesia della vita moderna. Gli uomini vissero tra possenti montagne e foreste eterne per età intere prima di rendersi conto che esse erano poetiche; se ne può ragionevolmente inferire che alcuni dei nostri discendenti vedranno forse i comignoli d’un porpora ricco quanto le vette dei monti, e troveranno i lampioni tanto antichi e naturali quanto gli alberi. Di questa presa di coscienza di una grande città essa stessa come di qualcosa di selvaggio ed evidente, il racconto poliziesco è di certo l’«Iliade». Nessuno può non aver notato che in questi racconti l’eroe o l’investigatore attraversa London con qualcosa della solitudine e della libertà di un principe in una fiaba del regno degli elfi, e che nel corso di quell’incalcolabile viaggio il casuale omnibus assume i colori primordiali di una nave fatata. Le luci della città cominciano a brillare come innumerevoli occhi di folletto, poiché sono le custodi di un qualche segreto, per quanto rozzo, che lo scrittore conosce e il lettore no. Ogni svolta della strada è come un dito che vi punta contro; ogni fantastico profilo di comignoli sembra segnalare selvaggiamente e beffardamente il senso del mistero.
Questa presa di coscienza della poesia di London non è cosa da poco. Una città è, propriamente parlando, ancor più poetica di una campagna, giacché mentre la Nature è un caos di forze inconsce, una città è un caos di forze coscienti. La corolla del fiore o il disegno del lichene possono o no essere simboli significativi. Ma non c’è pietra nella via né mattone nel muro che non sia in realtà un simbolo deliberato: un messaggio da parte di qualche uomo, tanto quanto se fosse un telegramma o una cartolina. La più angusta stradina possiede, in ogni curva e svolta della sua intenzione, l’anima dell’uomo che la costruì, forse da lungo tempo nella tomba. Ogni mattone reca un geroglifico tanto umano come se fosse un mattone inciso di Babilonia; ogni tegola sul tetto è un documento tanto istruttivo come se fosse una lavagna coperta di somme e sottrazioni. Qualunque cosa tenda, anche sotto la forma fantastica delle minuzie di Sherlock Holmes, ad affermare questo romanzesco del dettaglio nella civiltà, a sottolineare questo insondabilmente umano carattere nelle selci e nelle mattonelle, è cosa buona. È bene che l’uomo medio prenda l’abitudine di guardare con immaginazione dieci uomini per la strada, anche se solo per l’eventualità che l’undicesimo possa essere un ladro notorio. Possiamo sognare, forse, che sia possibile avere un altro e più alto romanzesco di London, che le anime degli uomini vivano avventure più strane dei loro corpi, e che sarebbe più arduo ed emozionante dar la caccia alle loro virtù che ai loro crimini. Ma poiché i nostri grandi autori (con l’ammirevole eccezione di Stevenson) rifiutano di scrivere di quello stato d’animo e momento emozionante in cui gli occhi della grande città, come gli occhi di un gatto, cominciano a fiammeggiare nel buio, dobbiamo dare giusto merito alla letteratura popolare che, tra un cicaleccio di pedanteria e preziosismo, rifiuta di considerare il presente come prosaico o il comune come banale. L’arte popolare in ogni epoca si è interessata ai costumi e alle fogge contemporanee; vestì i gruppi attorno alla Crocifissione con l’abbigliamento di gentiluomini fiorentini o di borghesi fiamminghi. Nel secolo scorso era usanza per attori insigni presentare Macbeth con una parrucca incipriata e i polsini di trina. Quanto noi stessi, in quest’epoca, siamo lontani da tale convinzione della poesia della nostra vita e dei nostri costumi, lo può facilmente concepire chiunque scelga di immaginare un ritratto di Alfredo il Grande che tosta le focacce vestito con i calzoni alla zuava del turista, o una rappresentazione dell’«Hamlet» in cui il Principe apparisse in redingote, con una fascia di crespo nero attorno al cappello. Ma questo istinto dell’epoca a guardare indietro, come la moglie di Lot, non poteva durare in eterno. Una rude letteratura popolare delle possibilità romantiche della città moderna era destinata a sorgere. È sorta nei racconti polizieschi popolari, rozzi e ristoratori quanto le ballate di Robin Hood.
Vi è tuttavia un’altra opera buona che i racconti polizieschi compiono. Mentre è costante tendenza del Vecchio Adamo ribellarsi contro una cosa tanto universale e automatica quanto la civiltà, predicare la diserzione e la ribellione, il romanzesco dell’attività di polizia tiene in qualche senso davanti alla mente il fatto che la civiltà stessa è la più sensazionale delle diserzioni e la più romantica delle ribellioni. Trattando delle sentinelle insonni che vegliano sugli avamposti della società, essa tende a ricordarci che viviamo in un accampamento armato, in guerra con un mondo caotico, e che i criminali, i figli del caos, non sono altro che i traditori entro le nostre porte. Quando il poliziotto in un romanzo poliziesco sta solo, e alquanto fatuamente impavido tra i coltelli e i pugni di una taverna di ladri, ciò serve certo a farci ricordare che è l’agente della giustizia sociale ad essere la figura originaria e poetica, mentre gli scassinatori e i grassatori sono soltanto placidi vecchi conservatori cosmici, felici nell’immemoriale rispettabilità delle scimmie e dei lupi. Il romanzesco del corpo di polizia è così l’intero romanzesco dell’uomo. Si fonda sul fatto che la moralità è la più oscura e ardita delle cospirazioni. Ci ricorda che l’intera silenziosa e impercettibile gestione poliziesca, dalla quale siamo governati e protetti, non è altro che una riuscita cavalleria errante.
A DEFENCE OF PATRIOTISM
The decay of patriotism in England during the last year or two is a serious and distressing matter. Only in consequence of such a decay could the current lust of territory be confounded with the ancient love of country. We may imagine that if there were no such thing as a pair of lovers left in the world, all the vocabulary of love might without rebuke be transferred to the lowest and most automatic desire. If no type of chivalrous and purifying passion remained, there would be no one left to say that lust bore none of the marks of love, that lust was rapacious and love pitiful, that lust was blind and love vigilant, that lust sated itself and love was insatiable. So it is with the ‘love of the city,’ that high and ancient intellectual passion which has been written in red blood on the same table with the primal passions of our being. On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word ‘love’ means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word ‘love’ is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’ No doubt if a decent man’s mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.
What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous Jingoism is a renascence of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly. For the first of all the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid counsellor the best. Love is drawn to truth by the unerring magnetism of agony; it gives no pleasure to the lover to see ten doctors dancing with vociferous optimism round a death-bed.
We have to ask, then, Why is it that this recent movement in England, which has honestly appeared to many a renascence of patriotism, seems to us to have none of the marks of patriotism—at least, of patriotism in its highest form? Why has the adoration of our patriots been given wholly to qualities and circumstances good in themselves, but comparatively material and trivial:—trade, physical force, a skirmish at a remote frontier, a squabble in a remote continent? Colonies are things to be proud of, but for a country to be only proud of its extremities is like a man being only proud of his legs. Why is there not a high central intellectual patriotism, a patriotism of the head and heart of the Empire, and not merely of its fists and its boots? A rude Athenian sailor may very likely have thought that the glory of Athens lay in rowing with the right kind of oars, or having a good supply of garlic; but Pericles did not think that this was the glory of Athens. With us, on the other hand, there is no difference at all between the patriotism preached by Mr. Chamberlain and that preached by Mr. Pat Rafferty, who sings ‘What do you think of the Irish now?’ They are both honest, simple-minded, vulgar eulogies upon trivialities and truisms.
I have, rightly or wrongly, a notion of the chief cause of this pettiness in English patriotism of to-day, and I will attempt to expound it. It may be taken generally that a man loves his own stock and environment, and that he will find something to praise in it; but whether it is the most praiseworthy thing or no will depend upon the man’s enlightenment as to the facts. If the son of Thackeray, let us say, were brought up in ignorance of his father’s fame and genius, it is not improbable that he would be proud of the fact that his father was over six feet high. It seems to me that we, as a nation, are precisely in the position of this hypothetical child of Thackeray’s. We fall back upon gross and frivolous things for our patriotism, for a simple reason. We are the only people in the world who are not taught in childhood our own literature and our own history.
We are, as a nation, in the truly extraordinary condition of not knowing our own merits. We have played a great and splendid part in the history of universal thought and sentiment; we have been among the foremost in that eternal and bloodless battle in which the blows do not slay, but create. In painting and music we are inferior to many other nations; but in literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence, if history be taken as a whole, we can hold our own with any. But all this vast heritage of intellectual glory is kept from our schoolboys like a heresy; and they are left to live and die in the dull and infantile type of patriotism which they learnt from a box of tin soldiers. There is no harm in the box of tin soldiers; we do not expect children to be equally delighted with a beautiful box of tin philanthropists. But there is great harm in the fact that the subtler and more civilized honour of England is not presented so as to keep pace with the expanding mind. A French boy is taught the glory of Molière as well as that of Turenne; a German boy is taught his own great national philosophy before he learns the philosophy of antiquity. The result is that, though French patriotism is often crazy and boastful, though German patriotism is often isolated and pedantic, they are neither of them merely dull, common, and brutal, as is so often the strange fate of the nation of Bacon and Locke. It is natural enough, and even righteous enough, under the circumstances. An Englishman must love England for something; consequently, he tends to exalt commerce or prize-fighting, just as a German might tend to exalt music, or a Flamand to exalt painting, because he really believes it is the chief merit of his fatherland. It would not be in the least extraordinary if a claim of eating up provinces and pulling down princes were the chief boast of a Zulu. The extraordinary thing is, that it is the chief boast of a people who have Shakespeare, Newton, Burke, and Darwin to boast of.
IN DIFESA DEL PATRIOTTISMO
Il declino del patriottismo in Inghilterra negli ultimi due anni è una faccenda grave e sconfortante. Solo in conseguenza di un simile declino l’odierna brama di territorio ha potuto essere confusa con l’antico amore di patria. Possiamo immaginare che se non esistesse più al mondo una coppia di innamorati, tutto il vocabolario dell’amore potrebbe, senza rimprovero, essere trasferito al più basso e automatico dei desideri. Se nessun tipo di passione cavalleresca e purificatrice rimanesse, non vi sarebbe nessuno rimasto a dire che la lussuria non porta nessuno dei segni dell’amore, che la lussuria è rapace e l’amore pietoso, che la lussuria è cieca e l’amore vigile, che la lussuria si sazia e l’amore è insaziabile. Così è con l”amore della città,’ quell’alta e antica passione intellettuale che è stata scritta in sangue rosso sulla stessa tavola delle passioni primigenie del nostro essere. Da ogni parte udiamo oggi parlare dell’amore di patria, eppure chiunque nutra letteralmente un simile amore deve restare sconcertato da tali discorsi, come un uomo che senta tutti gli uomini dire che la luna splende di giorno e il sole di notte. La convinzione deve venirgli infine che questi uomini non comprendono cosa significhi la parola ‘amore,’ che intendono, per amore di patria, non ciò che un mistico intenderebbe per amore di Dio, ma qualcosa di ciò che un bambino intenderebbe per amore della marmellata. Per chi ama la sua patria, per esempio, la nostra vantata indifferenza all’etica di una guerra nazionale è mera, misteriosa farfugliatura. È come dire a un uomo che un ragazzo ha commesso un omicidio, ma che non deve preoccuparsene perché è solo suo figlio. Qui chiaramente la parola ‘amore’ è usata senza senso. È essenza dell’amore essere sensibile, è parte del suo destino; e chiunque si opponga all’una deve certamente sbarazzarsi dell’altro. Questa sensibilità, che sale talvolta a una sensibilità quasi morbosa, era il segno di tutti i grandi amanti come Dante e di tutti i grandi patrioti come Chatham. ‘La mia patria, nel giusto o nel torto,’ è una cosa che nessun patriota penserebbe di dire se non in un caso disperato. È come dire, ‘Mia madre, ubriaca o sobria.’ Non v’è dubbio che, se la madre di un uomo perbene si desse al bere, egli condividerebbe le sue pene fino all’ultimo; ma parlare come se egli fosse in uno stato di gaia indifferenza sul fatto che sua madre si dia al bere o no non è certo il linguaggio di uomini che conoscono il grande mistero.
Ciò di cui abbiamo davvero bisogno per la frustrazione e il rovesciamento di un sordo e rauco Jingoismo è una rinascita dell’amore della terra natale. Quando essa verrà, tutte le grida stridule cesseranno d’un tratto. Perché il primo di tutti i segni dell’amore è la serietà: l’amore non accetterà falsi bollettini o la vuota vittoria delle parole. Stimerà sempre il più franco consigliere come il migliore. L’Amore è attratto alla verità dall’infallibile magnetismo dell’agonia; non dà alcun piacere all’amante vedere dieci medici danzare con vociante ottimismo intorno a un letto di morte.
Dobbiamo allora chiederci: perché questo recente movimento in Inghilterra, che a molti è onestamente parso una rinascita del patriottismo, ci sembra non avere nessuno dei segni del patriottismo—almeno, del patriottismo nella sua forma più alta? Perché l’adorazione dei nostri patrioti è stata rivolta interamente a qualità e circostanze buone in sé, ma comparativamente materiali e triviali:—il commercio, la forza fisica, una scaramuccia a una frontiera remota, un battibecco in un continente remoto? Le colonie sono cose di cui essere fieri, ma che un paese sia fiero solo delle sue estremità è come che un uomo sia fiero solo delle proprie gambe. Perché non v’è un alto patriottismo centrale e intellettuale, un patriottismo del capo e del cuore dell’Impero, e non meramente dei suoi pugni e dei suoi stivali? Un rozzo marinaio ateniese può ben aver pensato che la gloria di Atene consistesse nel remare col giusto tipo di remi, o nell’avere una buona scorta di aglio; ma Pericle non pensava che questa fosse la gloria di Atene. Da noi, invece, non v’è alcuna differenza tra il patriottismo predicato dal signor Chamberlain e quello predicato dal signor Pat Rafferty, che canta ‘Che ne pensate ora degli Irlandesi?’ Sono entrambi onesti, ingenui, volgari elogi di trivialità e ovvietà.
Ho, a torto o a ragione, un’idea della causa principale di questa meschinità nell’odierno patriottismo inglese, e tenterò di esporla. Si può in generale ammettere che un uomo ami la propria stirpe e il proprio ambiente, e che trovi in essi qualcosa da lodare; ma se sia o no la cosa più lodevole dipenderà dall’ illuminazione dell’uomo circa i fatti. Se il figlio di Thackeray, mettiamo, fosse allevato nell’ignoranza della fama e del genio del padre, non è improbabile che sarebbe fiero del fatto che il padre era alto oltre sei piedi. Mi pare che noi, come nazione, siamo esattamente nella posizione di questo ipotetico figlio di Thackeray. Ripieghiamo su cose grossolane e frivole per il nostro patriottismo, per una semplice ragione. Siamo l’unico popolo al mondo a cui non si insegnano nell’infanzia la propria letteratura e la propria storia.
Siamo, come nazione, nella condizione davvero straordinaria di non conoscere i nostri stessi meriti. Abbiamo recitato una parte grande e splendida nella storia del pensiero e del sentimento universali; siamo stati tra i primi in quell’eterna e incruenta battaglia in cui i colpi non uccidono, ma creano. In pittura e musica siamo inferiori a molte altre nazioni; ma in letteratura, scienza, filosofia ed eloquenza politica, se la storia è presa nel suo insieme, possiamo tener testa a chiunque. Ma tutta questa vasta eredità di gloria intellettuale è tenuta lontana dai nostri scolari come un’ eresia; ed essi sono lasciati a vivere e morire in quel tipo tetro e infantile di patriottismo che appresero da una scatola di soldatini di stagno. Non v’è danno nella scatola di soldatini di stagno; non ci aspettiamo che i bambini siano ugualmente deliziati da una bella scatola di filantropi di stagno. Ma v’è gran danno nel fatto che il più sottile e più civile onore dell’ Inghilterra non è presentato in modo da tenere il passo con la mente che si espande. Un ragazzo francese è educato alla gloria di Molière così come a quella di Turenne; un ragazzo tedesco è educato alla propria grande filosofia nazionale prima di apprendere la filosofia dell’antichità. Il risultato è che, benché il patriottismo francese sia spesso folle e millantatore, benché il patriottismo tedesco sia spesso isolato e pedante, nessuno dei due è meramente tetro, comune e brutale, come è tanto spesso lo strano destino della nazione di Bacon e Locke. È abbastanza naturale, e perfino abbastanza giusto, date le circostanze. Un Inglese deve amare l’Inghilterra per qualcosa; di conseguenza tende a esaltare il commercio o il pugilato, proprio come un Tedesco potrebbe tendere a esaltare la musica, o un Fiammingo a esaltare la pittura, perché crede davvero che sia il merito principale della propria patria. Non sarebbe minimamente straordinario se il vanto di divorare province e abbattere principi fosse il vanto principale di uno Zulu. La cosa straordinaria è che è il vanto principale di un popolo che ha Shakespeare, Newton, Burke e Darwin di cui vantarsi.
The peculiar lack of any generosity or delicacy in the current English nationalism appears to have no other possible origin but in this fact of our unique neglect in education of the study of the national literature. An Englishman could not be silly enough to despise other nations if he once knew how much England had done for them. Great men of letters cannot avoid being humane and universal. The absence of the teaching of English literature in our schools is, when we come to think of it, an almost amazing phenomenon. It is even more amazing when we listen to the arguments urged by headmasters and other educational conservatives against the direct teaching of English. It is said, for example, that a vast amount of English grammar and literature is picked up in the course of learning Latin and Greek. This is perfectly true, but the topsy-turviness of the idea never seems to strike them. It is like saying that a baby picks up the art of walking in the course of learning to hop, or that a Frenchman may successfully be taught German by helping a Prussian to learn Ashanti. Surely the obvious foundation of all education is the language in which that education is conveyed; if a boy has only time to learn one thing, he had better learn that.
We have deliberately neglected this great heritage of high national sentiment. We have made our public schools the strongest walls against a whisper of the honour of England. And we have had our punishment in this strange and perverted fact that, while a unifying vision of patriotism can ennoble bands of brutal savages or dingy burghers, and be the best thing in their lives, we, who are—the world being judge—humane, honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst thing in ours. What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that have produced sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who could walk with Dante, that we should talk as if we have never done anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are the children of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are judged, it will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of failing to appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual transgression of failing to appreciate ourselves.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
La peculiare mancanza di ogni generosità o delicatezza nell’odierno nazionalismo inglese pare non avere altra possibile origine se non in questo fatto della nostra unica negligenza, nell’educazione, dello studio della letteratura nazionale. Un Inglese non potrebbe essere tanto sciocco da disprezzare le altre nazioni se una volta sapesse quanto l’Inghilterra ha fatto per esse. I grandi uomini di lettere non possono evitare di essere umani e universali. L’assenza dell’insegnamento della letteratura inglese nelle nostre scuole è, a ben pensarci, un fenomeno quasi sbalorditivo. È ancor più sbalorditivo quando ascoltiamo gli argomenti addotti dai presidi e da altri conservatori dell’educazione contro l’insegnamento diretto dell’inglese. Si dice, per esempio, che una vasta quantità di grammatica e letteratura inglese si raccoglie nel corso dell’apprendere il latino e il greco. Questo è perfettamente vero, ma la follia rovesciata dell’idea non pare mai colpirli. È come dire che un neonato raccoglie l’arte del camminare nel corso dell’apprendere a saltellare, o che a un Francese si possa insegnare con successo il tedesco aiutando un Prussiano a imparare l’ashanti. Di certo il fondamento ovvio di ogni educazione è la lingua in cui quell’educazione è impartita; se un ragazzo ha tempo di imparare una sola cosa, farebbe meglio a imparare quella.
Abbiamo deliberatamente trascurato questa grande eredità di alto sentimento nazionale. Abbiamo fatto delle nostre public school i muri più saldi contro un sussurro dell’onore dell’Inghilterra. E abbiamo avuto la nostra punizione in questo strano e perverso fatto che, mentre una visione unificante del patriottismo può nobilitare bande di brutali selvaggi o di squallidi borghesi, ed essere la miglior cosa delle loro vite, noi, che siamo—a giudizio del mondo—umani, onesti e seri individualmente, abbiamo un patriottismo che è la cosa peggiore della nostra. Che abbiamo fatto, e dove abbiamo vagato, noi che abbiamo prodotto saggi che avrebbero potuto conversare con Socrate e poeti che avrebbero potuto camminare con Dante, per parlare come se non avessimo mai fatto nulla di più intelligente che fondare colonie e prendere a calci i negri? Siamo i figli della luce, e siamo noi a sedere nelle tenebre. Se saremo giudicati, non sarà per la trasgressione meramente intellettuale di non saper apprezzare le altre nazioni, ma per la suprema trasgressione spirituale di non saper apprezzare noi stessi.
FINE
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., STAMPATORI, GUILDFORD