The Thing

G.K. Chesterton, The Thing

CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

2. THE SCEPTIC AS CRITIC

3. Is HUMANISM A RELIGION?

4. THE DRIFT FROM DOMESTICITY

5. LOGIC AND LAWN TENNIS

6. OBSTINATE ORTHODOXY

7. THE USUAL ARTICLE

8. WHY I AM A CATHOLIC

9. WHAT DO THEY THINK?

10. THE MASK OF THE AGNOSTIC

11. THE EARLY BIRD IN HISTORY

12. PROTESTANTISM: A PROBLEM NOVEL

13. A SIMPLE THOUGHT

14. THE CALL TO THE BARBARIANS

15. ON THE NOVEL WITH A PURPOSE

16. THE REVOLT AGAINST IDEAS

17. THE FEASTS AND THE ASCETIC

18. WHO ARE THE CONSPIRATORS?

19. THE HAT AND THE HALO

20. ON TWO ALLEGORIES

21. THE PROTESTANT SUPERSTITIONS

22. ON COURAGE AND INDEPENDENCE

23. THE NORDIC HINDOO

24. SPIRITUALIST LOOKS BACK

25. THE ROOTS OF SANITY

26. SOME OF OUR ERRORS

27. THE SLAVERY OF THE MIND

28. INGE VERSUS BARNES

29. WHAT WE THINK ABOUT

30. THE OPTIMIST AS A SUICIDE

31. THE OUTLINE OF THE FALL

32. THE IDOLS OF SCOTLAND

33. IF THEY HAD BELIEVED

34. PEACE AND THE PAPACY

35. THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

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INTRODUCTION

IT will be naturally objected to the publication of these papers that they are ephemeral and that they are controversial. In other words, the normal critic will at once dismiss them as too frivolous and dislike them as too serious. The rather one-sided truce of good taste, touching all religious matters, which prevailed until a short time ago, has now given place to a rather one-sided war. But the truce can still be invoked, as such terrorism of taste generally is invoked, against the minority. We all know the dear old Conservative colonel who swears himself red in the face that he is not going to talk politics, but that damning to hell all those bloody blasted Socialists is not politics. We all have a kindly feeling for the dear old lady, living at Bath or Cheltenham, who would not dream of talking uncharitably about anybody, but who does certainly think the Dissenters are too dreadful or that Irish servants are really impossible. It is in the spirit of these two very admirable persons that the controversy is now conducted in the Press on behalf of a Progressive Faith and a Broad and Brotherly Religion. So long as the writer employs vast and universal gestures of fellowship and hospitality to all those who are ready to abandon their religious beliefs, he is allowed to be as rude as he likes to all those who venture to retain them. The Dean of St. Paul’s permits himself genially to call the Catholic Church a treacherous and bloody corporation; Mr. H. G. Wells is allowed to compare the Blessed Trinity to an undignified dance; the Bishop of Birmingham to compare the Blessed Sacrament to a barbarous blood-feast. It is felt that phrases like these cannot ruffle that human peace and harmony which all such humanitarians desire; there is nothing in THESE expressions that could possibly interfere with brotherhood and the sympathy that is the bond of society. We may be sure of this, for we have the word of the writers themselves that their whole aim is to generate an atmosphere of liberality and love. If, therefore, any unlucky interruption mars the harmony of the occasion, if it is really impossible for these fraternal festivities to pass off without some silly disturbance, or somebody making a scene, it is obvious that the blame must lie with a few irritable and irritating individuals, who cannot accept these descriptions of the Trinity and the Sacrament and the Church as soothing their feelings or satisfying their ideas.

It is explained very clearly in all such statements that they are accepted by all intelligent people except those who do not accept them. But as I myself, in my political experience, have ventured to doubt the right of the Tory colonel to curse his political opponents and say it is not politics, or of the lady to love everybody and loathe Irishmen, I have the same difficulty in admitting the right of the most liberal and large-minded Christian to see good in all religions and nothing but evil in mine. But I know that to publish replies to this effect, particularly direct replies given in real controversy, will be regarded by many as a provocation and an impertinence.

Well, I must in this matter confess to being so old-fashioned as to feel something like a point of honour. I think I may say that I am normally of the sort to be sociable and get on easily with my fellows; I am not so much disposed to quarrel as to argue; and I value more than I can easily say the generally genial relations I have kept with those who differ from me merely in argument. I am very fond of England even as it is, quite apart from what it was or might be; I have a number of popular tastes, from detective stories to the defence of public-houses; I have been on many occasions on the side of the majority, as for instance in the propaganda of English patriotism during the Great War. I could even find in these sympathies a sufficient material for popular appeals; and, in a more practical sense, I should enjoy nothing more than always writing detective stories, except always reading them. But if in this much too lucky and even lazy existence I find that my co-religionists are being pelted with insults for saying that their religion is right, it would ill become me not to put myself in the way of being insulted. Many of them have had far too hard a life, and I have had far too easy a life, for me not to count it a privilege to be the object of the same curious controversial methods. If the Dean of St. Paul’s really does believe, as he most undoubtedly does say, that the most devout and devoted rulers of the Catholic Church, when they accepted (realistically and even reluctantly) the fact of a modern miracle, were engaged in a “lucrative imposture,” I should very much prefer to believe that he accuses me, along with better men than myself, of becoming an impostor merely for filthy lucre. If the word “Jesuit” is still to be used as synonymous with the word “liar,” I should prefer that the same simple translation should apply to the word “Journalist,” of which it is much more often true. If the Dean accuses Catholics as Catholics of desiring innocent men to die in prison (as he does), I should much prefer that he should cast me for some part in that terrific and murderous melodrama; it might in any case be material for a detective story. In short, it is precisely because I do sympathise and agree with my Protestant and agnostic fellow countrymen, on about ninety-nine subjects out of a hundred, that I do feel it a point of honour not to avoid their accusations on these points, if they really have such accusations to bring. I am very sorry if this little book of mine seems to be controversial on subjects about which everybody is allowed to be controversial except ourselves. But I am afraid there is no help for it; and if I assure the reader that I have tried to start putting it together in an unimpaired spirit of charity, it is always possible that the charity may be as one-sided as the controversy. Anyhow, it represents my attitude towards this controversy; and it is quite possible that everything is wrong about it, except that it is right.

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THE SCEPTIC AS A CRITIC

IT takes three to make a quarrel. There is needed a peacemaker. The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes. I feel myself to be in some such position in the recent American debate about Mr. Mencken’s MERCURY and the Puritans; and I admit it at the beginning with an embarrassment not untinged with terror. I know that the umpire may be torn in pieces. I know that the self-appointed umpire ought to be torn in pieces. I know, above all, that this is especially the case in anything which in any way involves international relations. Perhaps the only sound criticism is self-criticism. Perhaps this is even more true of nations than of men. And I can quite well understand that many Americans would accept suggestions from their fellow countrymen which they would rightly refuse from a foreigner. I can only plead that I have endeavoured to carry out the excellent patriotic principle of “See England First” in the equally patriotic paraphrase of “Criticize England First.” I have been engaged upon it long enough to be quite well aware that there are evils present in England that are relatively absent from America; and none more conspicuously absent, as Mr. Belloc has pointed out to the surprise of many, than the real, servile, superstitious, and mystical adoration of Money.

But what makes me so objectionable on the present occasion is that I feel a considerable sympathy with both sides. This offensive attitude I will endeavour to disguise, as far as possible, by tactfully distributed abuse of such things as I really think are abuses, and a gracefully simulated disgust with this or that part of each controversial case. But the plain truth is, that if I were an American, I should very frequently rejoice at the AMERICAN MERCURY’s scoring off somebody or something; nor would my modest fireside be entirely without mild rejoicings when the AMERICAN MERCURY was scored off. But I do definitely think that both sides, and perhaps especially the iconoclastic side, need what the whole modern world needs— a fixed spiritual standard even for their own intellectual purposes. I might express it by saying that I am very fond of revolutionists, but not very fond of nihilists. For nihilists, as their name implies, have nothing to revolt about.

On this side of the matter there is little to be added to the admirably sane, subtle, and penetrating article by Mr. T. S. Eliot;* especially that vital sentence in it in which he tells Professor Irving Babbitt (who admits the need of enthusiasm) that we cannot have an enthusiasm for having an enthusiasm. I think I know, incidentally, what we must have. Professor Babbitt is a very learned man; and I myself have little Latin and less Greek. But I know enough Greek to know the meaning of the second syllable of “enthusiasm,” and I know it to be the key to this and every other discussion.

Let me take two examples, touching my points of agreement with the two sides. I heartily admire Mr. Mencken, not only for his vivacity and wit, but for his vehemence and sometimes for his violence. I warmly applaud him for his scorn and detestation of Service; and I think he was stating a historical fact when he said, as quoted in THE FORUM: “When a gang of real estate agents, bond salesmen, and automobile dealers gets together to sob for Service, it takes no Freudian to surmise that someone is about to be swindled.” I do not see why he should not call a spade a spade and a swindler a swindler. I do not blame him for using vulgar words for vulgar things. But I do remark upon two ways in which the fact of his philosophy being negative makes his criticism almost shallow. First of all, it is obvious that such a satire is entirely meaningless unless swindling is a sin. And it is equally obvious that we are instantly swallowed up in the abysses of “moralism” and “religionism,” if it is a sin. And the second point, if less obvious, is equally important— that his healthy instinct against greasy hypocrisy does not really enlighten him about the heart of that hypocrisy.

What is the matter with the cult of Service is that, like so many modern notions, it is an idolatry of the intermediate, to the oblivion of the ultimate. It is like the jargon of the idiots who talk about Efficiency without any criticism of Effect. The sin of Service is the sin of Satan: that of trying to be first where it can only be second. A word like Service has stolen the sacred capital letter from the thing which it was once supposed to serve. There is a sense in serving God, and an even more disputed sense in serving man; but there is no sense in serving Service. To serve God is at least to serve an ideal being. Even if he were an imaginary being, he would still be an ideal being. That ideal has definite and even dogmatic attributes—truth, justice, pity, purity, and the rest. To serve it, however imperfectly, is to serve a particular concept of perfection. But the man who rushes down the street waving his arms and wanting something or somebody to serve, will probably fall into the first bucket-shop or den of thieves and usurers, and be found industriously serving THEM. There arises the horrible idea that industry, reliability, punctuality, and business activity are good things; that mere readiness to serve the powers of this world is a Christian virtue. That is the case against Service, as distinct from the curse against Service, so heartily and inspiringly hurled by Mr. Mencken. But the serious case cannot be stated without once more raising the real question of whether mankind ought to serve anything; and of whether they had not better try to define what they intend to serve. All these silly words like Service and Efficiency and Practicality and the rest fail because they worship the means and not the end. But it all comes back to whether we do propose to worship the end; and preferably the right end.

Two other characteristic passages from Mr. Mencken will serve to show more sharply this curious sense in which he misses his own point. On the one hand, he appears to state most positively the purely personal and subjective nature of criticism; he makes it individual and almost irresponsible. “The critic is first and last simply trying to express himself; he is trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed, a tension relieved, a katharsis attained, which Wagner achieved when he wrote DIE WALKURIE, and a hen achieves every time she lays an egg.” That is all consistent enough as far as it goes; but unfortunately Mr. Mencken appears to go on to something quite inconsistent with it. According to the quotation, he afterwards bursts into a song of triumph because there is now in America not only criticism, but controversy. “To-day for the first time in years there is strife in American criticism… ears are bitten off, noses are bloodied. There are wallops both above and below the belt.”

Now, there may be something in his case for controversy; but it is quite inconsistent with his case for creative self-expression. If the critic produces the criticism ONLY to please himself; it is entirely irrelevant that it does not please somebody else. The somebody else has a perfect right to say the exact opposite to please himself, and be perfectly satisfied with himself. But they cannot controvert because they cannot compare. They cannot compare because there is no common standard of comparison. Neither I nor anybody else can have a controversy about literature with Mr. Mencken, because there is no way of criticizing the criticism, except by asking whether the critic is satisfied. And there the debate ends, at the beginning: for nobody can doubt that Mr. Mencken is satisfied.

But not to make Mr. Mencken a mere victim of the ARGUMENTUM AD HOMINEM, I will make the experiment in a viler body and offer myself for dissection. I daresay a great deal of the criticism I write really is moved by a mood of self-expression; and certainly it is true enough that there is a satisfaction in self-expression. I can take something or other about which I have definite feelings—as, for instance, the philosophy of Mr. Dreiser, which has been mentioned more than once in this debate. I can achieve for my own inner ego the grateful feeling of writing as follows:

“He describes a world which appears to be a dull and discolouring illusion of indigestion, not bright enough to be called a nightmare; smelly, but not even stinking with any strength; smelling of the stale gas of ignorant chemical experiments by dirty, secretive schoolboys—the sort of boys who torture cats in corners; spineless and spiritless like a broken-backed worm; loathsomely slow and laborious like an endless slug; despairing, but not with dignity; blaspheming, but not with courage; without wit without will, without laughter or uplifting of the heart; too old to die, too deaf to leave off talking, too blind to stop, too stupid to start afresh, too dead to be killed, and incapable even of being damned, since in all its weary centuries it has not reached the age of reason.”

That is what I feel about it; and it certainly gives me pleasure to relieve my feelings. I have got it off my chest. I have attained a katharsis. I have laid an egg. I have produced a criticism, satisfying all Mr. Mencken’s definitions of the critic. I have performed a function. I feel better, thank you.

But what influence my feelings can be expected to have on Mr. Dreiser, or anybody who does not admit my standards of truth and falsehood, I do not quite see. Mr. Dreiser can hardly be expected to say that his chemistry is quackery, as I think it—quackery without the liveliness we might reasonably expect from quacks. He does not think fatalism base and servile, as I do; he does not think free will the highest truth about humanity, as I do. He does not believe that despair is itself a sin, and perhaps the worst of sins, as Catholics do. He does not think blasphemy the smallest and silliest sort of pride, as even pagans do. He naturally does not think his own picture of life a false picture, resembling real life about as much as a wilderness of linoleum would resemble the land of all the living flowers, as I do. But he would not think it falser for being like a wilderness. He would probably admit that it was dreary, but think it correct to be dreary. He would probably own that he was hopeless, but not see any harm in being hopeless. What I advance as accusations, he would very probably accept as compliments.

Under these circumstances, I do not quite see how I, or anyone with my views, could have a CONTROVERSY with Mr. Dreiser. There does not seem to be any way in which I could prove him wrong, because he does not accept my view of what is wrong. There does not seem to be any way in which he could prove himself right, because I do not share his notions of what is right. We might, indeed, meet in the street and fall on each other; and while I believe we are both heavy men, I doubt not that he is the more formidable. The very possibility of our being reduced to this inarticulate explanation may possibly throw some light on Mr. Mencken’s remarkable description of the new literary life in America. “Ears are bitten off,” he says; and this curious form of cultural intercourse might really be the only solution, when ears are no longer organs of hearing and there are no organs except organs of self-expression. He that hath ears to hear and will not hear may just as well have them bitten off. Such deafness seems inevitable in the creative critic, who is as indifferent as a hen to all noises except her own cackling over her own egg. Anyhow, hens do not criticize each other’s eggs, or even pelt each other with eggs, in the manner of political controversy. We can only say that the novelist in question has undoubtedly laid a magnificently large and solid egg—something in the nature of an ostrich’s egg; and after that, there is really nothing to prevent the ostrich from hiding its head in the sand, achieving thereby for its own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed. But we cannot argue with it about whether the egg is a bad egg, or whether parts of it are excellent.

In all these instances, therefore, because of the absence of a standard of ultimate values, the most ordinary functions really cannot be performed. They not only cannot be performed with “a grateful feeling,” or a katharsis, but in the long run they cannot be performed at all. We cannot really denounce the Service-mongering bond salesman as a swindler, because we have no certain agreement that it is shameful to be a swindler. A little manipulation of some of Mr. Mencken’s own individualistic theories about mentality as superior to moralism might present the swindler as a superman. We cannot really argue for or against the mere ideal of Service, because neither side has really considered what is to be served or how we are to arrive at the right rules for serving it. Consequently, in practice, it may turn out that the State of Service is merely the Servile State. And finally, we cannot really argue about that or anything else, because there are no rules of the game of argument. There is nothing to prove who has scored a point and who has not. There cannot be “strife in American criticism”; the professors cannot be “forced to make some defence.” That would require plaintiffs and defendants to appear before some tribunal and give evidence according to some tests of truth. There can be a disturbance, but there can not be a discussion.

In plain words, the normal functions of man—effort, protest, judgment, persuasion, and proof—are found in fact to be hampered and hamstrung by these negations of the sceptic even when the sceptic seems at first to be only denying some distant vision or some miraculous tale. Each function is found in fact to refer to some end, to some test, to some way of distinguishing between use and misuse, which the mere sceptic destroys as completely as he could destroy any myth or superstition. If the function is only performed for the satisfaction of the performer, as in the parable of the critic and the egg, it becomes futile to discuss whether it is an addled egg. It becomes futile to consider whether eggs will produce chickens or provide breakfasts. But even to be certain of our own sanity in applying the tests, we do really have to go back to some aboriginal problem, like that of the old riddle of the priority of egg or chicken; we do really, like the great religions, have to begin AB OVO. If those primordial sanities can be disturbed, the whole of practical life can be disturbed with them. Men can be frozen by fatalism, or crazed by anarchism, or driven to death by pessimism; for men will not go on indefinitely acting on what they feel to be a fable. And it is in this organic and almost muscular sense that religion is really the help of man—in the sense that without it he is ultimately helpless, almost motionless.

Mr. Mencken and Mr. Sinclair Lewis and the other critics in the MERCURY movement are so spirited and sincere, they attack so vigorously so many things that ought to be attacked, they expose so brilliantly many things that really are impostures, that in discussing matters with them a man will have every impulse to put his cards on the table. It would be affectation and almost hypocrisy in me to ignore, in this place, the fact that I do myself believe in a special spiritual solution of this problem, a special spiritual authority above this chaos. Nor, indeed, is the idea altogether absent, as an idea, from many other minds besides my own. The Catholic philosophy is mentioned in terms of respect, and even a sort of hope, both by Professor Babbitt** and Mr. T. S. Eliot. I do not misunderstand their courtesies, or seek to lure them a step further than they desire to go. But, as a matter of fact, by a series of faultlessly logical steps, Mr. Eliot led Professor Babbitt so near to the very gates of the Catholic Church that in the end I felt quite nervous, so to speak, for fear they should both take another unintentional step and fall into it by accident.

I have a particular reason for mentioning this matter in conclusion— a reason that is directly related to this curious effect of scepticism in weakening the normal functions of the human being. In one of the most brilliant and amusing of Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s recent books there is a passage which I quote from memory, but I think more or less correctly. He said that the Catholic Faith differs from current Puritanism in that it does not ask a man to give up his sense of beauty, or his sense of humour, or his pleasant vices (by which he probably meant smoking and drinking, which are not vices at all), but that it does ask a man to give up his life and soul, his mind, body, reason, and all the rest. I ask the reader to consider, as quietly and impartially as possible, the statement thus made; and put it side by side with all those other facts about the gradual fossilizing of human function by the fundamental doubts of our day.

It would be far truer to say that the Faith gives a man back his body and his soul and his reason and his will and his very life. It would be far truer to say that the man who has received it receives all the old human functions which all the other philosophies are already taking away. It would be nearer to reality to say that he alone will have freedom, that he alone will have will, because he alone will believe in free will; that he alone will have reason, since ultimate doubt denies reason as well as authority; that he alone will truly act, because action is performed to an end. It is at least a less unlikely vision that all this hardening and hopeless despair of the intellect will leave him at last the only walking and talking citizen in a city of paralytics.

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• “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,” The Forum for July 1928.

** “The Critic and American life,” The Forum for February 1928.

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IS HUMANISM A RELIGION?

I HAVE just been reading Mr. Norman Foerster’s book on “American Criticism”; and I hope it is no disrespect to the bulk of the book, a series of very thoughtful studies on American thinkers, if I say that the whole point of it is in the last chapter; which propounds a certain problem or challenge to modern thought. It is the problem of whether what he calls Humanism can satisfy humanity. Of his other topics it would be easy to talk for ever. He generally says the right thing; he sometimes says the last word, in that suggestive or provocative style that tempts somebody to say one word more. In my own estimate of his subjects, Whitman would be very much larger and Lowell very much smaller. About Emerson he seems both sensitive and just; and Emerson certainly had distinction; but just that dry sort of distinction to which I should always be afraid of being unfair. A Puritan tried to be a Pagan; and succeeded in being a Pagan who hesitated about whether he ought to go and see a girl dancing. But all these things are stimulating but secondary to the question which I will take the liberty of attacking separately and attempting to answer seriously. I fear that answering it seriously must mean answering it personally. The question really is whether Humanism can perform all the functions of religion; and I cannot but regard it in relation to my own religion. It is only just to say that Humanism is quite different from Humanitarianism. It means, as explained here, something like this. Modern science and organization are in a sense only too natural. They herd us like the beasts along lines of heredity or tribal doom; they attach man to the earth like a plant instead of liberating him, even like a bird, let alone an angel. Indeed, their latest psychology is lower than the level of life. What is subconscious is sub-human and, as it were, subterranean: or something less than earthly. This fight for culture is above all a fight for consciousness: what some would call self-consciousness: but anyhow against mere subconsciousness. We need a rally of the really HUMAN things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers. Nevertheless, my first duty is to answer the question put to me; and I must answer it in the negative.

I do not believe that Humanism can be a complete substitute for Superhumanism. I do not believe it because of a certain truth to me so concrete as to be called a fact. I know it sounds very like something that has often been said in conventional or superficial apologetics. But I do not mean it in that vague sense; so far from inheriting it as a convention, I have rather recently collided with it as a discovery. I have realized it relatively late in life, and realized that it is indeed the whole story and moral of my own lifetime. But even a few years ago, when most of my moral and religious views were pretty finally formed, I should not have seen it quite sharply and clearly; as I see it now.

The fact is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including, of course, many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallized in Christendom. But it is NOT really starting new enthusiasms of its own. The novelty is a matter of names and labels, like modern advertisement; in almost every other way the novelty is merely negative. It is not starting fresh things that it can really carry on far into the future. On the contrary, it is picking up old things that it cannot carry on at all. For these are the two marks of modern moral ideals. First, that they were borrowed or snatched out of ancient or mediaeval hands. Second, that they wither very quickly in modern hands. That is, very briefly, the thesis I maintain; and it so happens that the book called AMERICAN CRITICISM might almost have been meant for a text-book to prove my point.

I will begin with a particular example with which the book also deals. My whole youth was filled, as with a sunrise, with the sanguine glow of Walt Whitman. He seemed to me something like a crowd turned to a giant, or like Adam the First Man. It thrilled me to hear of somebody who had heard of somebody, who saw him in the street; it was as if Christ were still alive. I did not care about whether his unmetrical poetry were a wise form or no, any more than whether a true Gospel of Jesus were scrawled on parchment or stone. I never had a hint of the evil some enemies have attributed to him; if it was there, it was not there for me. What I saluted was a new equality, which was not a dull levelling but an enthusiastic lifting; a shouting exultation in the mere fact that men were men. Real men were greater than unreal gods; and each remained as mystic and majestic as a god, while he became as frank and comforting as a comrade. The point can be put most compactly in one of Whitman’s own phrases; he says somewhere that old artists painted crowds, in which one head had a nimbus of gold-coloured light; “but I paint hundreds of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light.” A glory was to cling about men as men; a mutual worship was to take the form of fellowship; and the least and lowest of men must be included in this fellowship; a hump-backed Negro half-wit, with one eye and homicidal mania, must not be painted without his nimbus of gold-coloured light. This might seem only the final expansion of a movement begun a century before with Rousseau and the Revolutionists; and I was brought up to believe and did believe that the movement was the beginning of bigger and better things. But these were songs before sunrise; and there is no comparison between even sunrise and the sun. Whitman was brotherhood in broad daylight, showing endless varieties of radiant and wonderful creatures, all the more sacred for being solid. Shelley had adored Man, but Whitman adored Men. Every human face, every human feature, was a matter of mystical poetry, such as lit like chance torchlight, hitherto, a face here and there in the crowd. A king was a man treated as all men should be treated. A god was a man worshipped as all men should be worshipped. What could they do against a race of gods and a republic of kings; not verbally but veritably the New World?

Well … here is what Mr. Foerster says about the present position of the founder of the new world of democracy: “Our present science lends little support to an inherent ‘dignity of man’ or to his ‘perfectibility.’ It is wholly possible that the science of the future will lead us away from democracy towards some form of aristocracy. The millennial expectations that Whitman built upon science and democracy, we are now well aware rested upon insecure foundations… The perfection of nature, the natural goodness of man, ‘the great pride of man in himself’ offset with an emotional humanitarianism—these are the materials of a structure only slightly coloured with modernity. His politics, his ethics, his religion belong to the past, even that facile ‘religiousness’ which he hoped would suffuse and complete the work of science and democracy… In the essentials of his prophecy, Whitman, we must conclude, has been falsified by the event.” This is a very moderate and fair statement; it would be easy to find the same thing in a much fiercer statement. Here is a monumental remark by Mr. H.L. Mencken: “They (he means certain liberal or ex-liberal thinkers) have come to realize that the morons whom they sweated to save do not want to be saved, and are not worth saving.” That is the New Spirit, if there is any New Spirit. “I will make unconquerable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks,” cried Walt Whitman, “by the love of comrades, by the lifelong love of comrades.” I like to think of the face of Mr. Mencken of Baltimore, if some casual comrade from Pittsburgh tried to make him unconquerable by putting an arm around his neck. But the idea is dead for much less ferocious people than Mr. Mencken. It is dead in a man like Aldous Huxley, who complained recently of the “gratuitous” romancing of the old republican view of human nature. It is dead in the most humane and humorous of our recent critics. It is dead in so many wise and good men to-day, that I cannot help wondering whether, under modern conditions of his favourite “science,” it would not be dead in Whitman himself.

It is not dead in me. It remains real for me, not by any merit of mine, but by the fact that this mystical idea, while it has evaporated as a mood, still exists as a creed. I am perfectly prepared to assert, as firmly as I should have asserted in my boyhood, that the hump-backed and half-witted Negro is decorated with a nimbus of gold-coloured light. The truth is that Whitman’s wild picture, or what he thought was a wild picture, is in fact a very old and orthodox picture. There are, as a matter of fact, any number of old pictures in which whole crowds are crowned with haloes, to indicate that they have all attained Beatitude. But for Catholics it is a fundamental dogma of the Faith that all human beings, without any exception whatever, were specially made, were shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting the mark of Beatitude. It is true that the shafts are feathered with free will, and therefore throw the shadow of all the tragic possibilities of free will; and that the Church (having also been aware for ages of that darker side of truth, which the new sceptics have just discovered) does also draw attention to the darkness of that potential tragedy. But that does not make any difference to the gloriousness of the potential glory. In one aspect it is even a part of it; since the freedom is itself a glory. In that sense they would still wear their haloes even in hell.

But the point is that anyone believing that all these beings were made to be blessed, and multitudes of them probably well on their way to be blessed, really has a sound philosophic reason for regarding them all as radiant and wonderful creatures, or seeing all their heads in haloes. That conviction does make every human face, every human feature, a matter of mystical poetry. But it is not at all like modern poetry. The most modern of modern poetry is not the poetry of reception, but of rejection, or rather, of repulsion. The spirit that inhabits most recent work might be called a fury of fastidiousness. The new man of letters does not get his effect by saying that for him a hump-backed Negro has a halo. He gets his effect by saying that, just as he was about to embrace finally the fairest of women, he was nauseated by a pimple above her eyebrow or a stain of grease on her left thumb. Whitman tried to prove that dirty things were really clean, as when he glorified manure as the matrix of the purity of grass. His followers in free verse try to prove that clean things are really dirty; to suggest something leprous and loathsome about the thick whiteness of milk, or something prickly and plague-stricken about the unaccountable growth of hair. In short, the whole mood has changed, as a matter of poetry. But it has not changed as a matter of theology; and that is the argument for having an unchanging theology. The Catholic theology has nothing to do with democracy, for or against, in the sense of a machinery of voting or a criticism of particular political privileges. It is not committed to support what Whitman said for democracy, or even what Jefferson or Lincoln said for democracy. But it is absolutely committed to contradict what Mr. Mencken says against democracy. There will be Diocletian persecutions, there will be Dominican crusades, there will be rending of all religious peace and compromise, or even the end of civilization and the world, before the Catholic Church will admit that one single moron, or one single man, “is not worth saving.”

I have therefore found in my middle age this curious fact about the lesson of my life, and that of all my generation. We all grew up with a common conviction, lit by the flames of the literary genius of Rousseau, of Shelley, of Victor Hugo, finding its final flare up and conflagration in the universalism of Walt Whitman. And we all took it for granted that all our descendants would take it for granted. I said the discovery of brotherhood seemed like the discovery of broad daylight; of something that men could never grow tired of. Yet even in my own short lifetime, men have already grown tired of it. We cannot now appeal to the love of equality as an EMOTION. We cannot now open a new book of poems, and expect it to be about the life-long love of comrades, or “Love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.” We realize that in most men it has died, because it was a mood and not a doctrine. And we begin to wonder too late, in the wise fashion of the aged, how we could ever have expected it to last as a mood, if it was not strong enough to last as a doctrine. And we also begin to realize that all the real strength there was in it, which is the only strength that remains in it, was the original strength of the doctrine. What really happened was this: that the men of the eighteenth century, many of them in a just impatience with corrupt and cynical priests, turned on those priests and said in effect, “Well, I suppose you call yourselves Christians; so you can’t actually DENY that men are brothers or that it is our duty to help the poor.” The very confidence of their challenge, the very ringing note in the revolutionary voice, came from the fact that the Christian reactionaries were in a false position as Christians. The democratic demand won because it seemed unanswerable. And it seemed unanswerable, not in the least because it is unanswerable, but because even decadent Christians dared not give the answer. Mr. H. L. Mencken will always be happy to oblige with the answer.

Now, it was just here that, for me, the business began to be odd and interesting. For, looking back on older religious crises, I seem to see a certain coincidence, or rather, a set of things too coincident to be called a coincidence After all, when I come to think of it, all the other revolts against the Church, before the Revolution and especially since the Reformation, had told the same strange story. Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church’s bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted. He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible. To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed “Psalms” or “Gospels”; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements. If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures? Yet it was long before it even occurred to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself. People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.

Again, the Calvinists took the Catholic idea of the absolute knowledge and power of God; and treated it as a rocky irreducible truism so solid that anything could be built on it, however crushing or cruel. They were so confident in their logic, and its one first principle of predestination, that they tortured the intellect and imagination with dreadful deductions about God, that seemed to turn Him into a demon. But it never seems to have struck them that somebody might suddenly say that he did not believe in the demon. They were quite surprised when people called “infidels” here and there began to say it. They had assumed the Divine foreknowledge as so fixed, that it must, if necessary, fulfil itself by destroying the Divine mercy. They never thought anybody would deny the knowledge exactly as they denied the mercy. Then came Wesley and the reaction against Calvinism; and Evangelicals seized on the very Catholic idea that mankind has a sense of sin; and they wandered about offering everybody release from his mysterious burden of sin. It is a proverb, and almost a joke, that they address a stranger in the street and offer to relax his secret agony of sin. But it seldom seemed to strike them, until much later, that the man in the street might possibly answer that he did not want to be saved from sin, any more than from spotted fever or St. Vitus’s Dance; because these things were not in fact causing him any suffering at all. They, in their turn, were quite surprised when the result of Rousseau and the revolutionary optimism began to express itself in men claiming a purely human happiness and dignity; a contentment with the comradeship of their kind; ending with the happy yawp of Whitman that he would not “lie awake and weep for his sins.”

Now the plain truth is that Shelley and Whitman and the revolutionary optimists were themselves doing exactly the same thing all over again. They also, though less consciously because of the chaos of their times, had really taken out of the old Catholic tradition one particular transcendental idea; the idea that there is a spiritual dignity in man as man, and a universal duty to love men as men. And they acted in exactly the same extraordinary fashion as their prototypes, the Wesleyans and the Calvinists. They took it for granted that this spiritual idea was absolutely self-evident like the sun and moon; that nobody could ever destroy that, though in the name of it they destroyed everything else. They perpetually hammered away at their human divinity and human dignity, and inevitable love for all human beings; as if these things were naked natural facts. And now they are quite surprised when new and restless realists suddenly explode, and begin to say that a pork-butcher with red whiskers and a wart on his nose does not strike them as particularly divine or dignified, that they are not conscious of the smallest sincere impulse to love him, that they could not love him if they tried, or that they do not recognize any particular obligation to try.

It might appear that the process has come to an end, and that there is nothing more for the naked realist to shed. But it is not so; and the process can still go on. There are still traditional charities to which men cling. There are still traditional charities for them to fling away when they find they are only traditional. Everybody must have noticed in the most modern writers the survival of a rather painful sort of pity. They no longer honour all men, like St. Paul and the other mystical democrats. It would hardly be too much to say that they despise all men; often (to do them justice) including themselves. But they do in a manner pity all men, and particularly those that are pitiable; by this time they extend the feeling almost disproportionately to the other animals. This compassion for men is also tainted with its historical connection with Christian charity; and even in the case of animals, with the example of many Christian saints. There is nothing to show that a new revulsion from such sentimental religions will not free men even from the obligation of pitying the pain of the world. Not only Nietzsche, but many Neo-Pagans working on his lines, have suggested such hardness as a higher intellectual purity. And having read many modern poems about the Man of the Future, made of steel and illumined with nothing warmer than green fire, I have no difficulty in imagining a literature that should pride itself on a merciless and metallic detachment. Then, perhaps, it might be faintly conjectured that the last of the Christian virtues had died. But so long as they lived they were Christian.

I do not therefore believe that Humanism and Religion are rivals on equal terms. I believe it is a rivalry between the pools and the fountain; or between the firebrands and the fire. Each of these old intellectuals snatched one firebrand out of the undying fire; but the point is that though he waved the torch very wildly, though he would have used the torch to burn down half the world, the torch went out very soon. The Puritans did not really perpetuate their sublime exultation in helplessness; they only made it unpopular. We did not go on indefinitely looking at the Brooklyn crowds with the eye of Whitman; we have come with singular rapidity to regard them with the eye of Dreiser. In short, I distrust spiritual experiments outside the central spiritual tradition; for the simple reason that I think they do not last, even if they manage to spread. At the most they stand for one generation; at the commonest for one fashion; at the lowest for one clique. I do not think they have the secret of continuity; certainly not of corporate continuity. For an antiquated, doddering old democrat like myself may be excused for attaching some slight importance to that last question; that of covering the common life of mankind. How many Humanists are there supposed to be among the inferior crowd of human beings? Are there to be, for instance, no more than there were Greek philosophers in an ordinary rabble of jolly pagan polytheistic Greeks? Are there to be no more than there were men concentrated on the Culture of Matthew Arnold, among the mobs who followed Cardinal Manning or General Booth? I do not in the least intend to sneer at Humanism; I think I understand the intellectual distinction it draws, and I have tried to understand it in a spirit of humility; but I feel a faint interest in how many people out of the battered and bewildered human race are actually expected to understand it. And I ask with a certain personal interest; for there are three hundred million people in the world who accept the mysteries that I accept and live by the faith I hold. I really want to know whether it is anticipated that there will be three hundred million Humanists in Humanity. The sanguine may say that Humanism will be the religion of the next generation, just as Comte said that Humanity would be the God of the next generation; and so in one sense it was. But it is not the God of this generation. And the question is what will be the religion of the next generation after that, or all the other generations (as a certain ancient promise ran) even unto the end of the world.

Humanism, in Mr. Foerster’s sense, has one very wise and worthy character. It is really trying to pick up the pieces; that is, to pick up all the pieces. All that was done before was first blind destruction and then random and scrappy selection; as if boys had broken up a stained-glass window and then made a few scraps into coloured spectacles, the rose-coloured spectacles of the republican or the green or yellow spectacles of the pessimist and the decadent. But Humanism as here professed will stoop to gather all it can; for instance, it is great enough to stoop and pick up the jewel of humility. Mr. Foerster does understand, as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not understand, the case for humility. Matthew Arnold, who made something of the same stand for what he called Culture in the mid-nineteenth century, attempted something of the same preservation of chastity; which he would call, in a rather irritating manner, “pureness.” But before we call either Culture or Humanism a substitute for religion, there is a very plain question that can be asked in the form of a very homely metaphor. Humanism may try to pick up the pieces; but can it stick them together? Where is the cement which made religion corporate and popular, which can prevent it falling to pieces in a debris of individualistic tastes and degrees? What is to prevent one Humanist wanting chastity without humility, and another humility without chastity, and another truth or beauty without either? The problem of an enduring ethic and culture consists in finding an arrangement of the pieces by which they remain related, as do the stones arranged in an arch. And I know only one scheme that has thus proved its solidity, bestriding lands and ages with its gigantic arches, and carrying everywhere the high river of baptism upon an aqueduct of Rome.

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THE DRIFT FROM DOMESTICITY

IN the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion. We might even say that he is seeing things in a nightmare. This principle applies to a thousand things, to trifles as well as true institutions, to convention as well as to conviction. It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to become a beggar on the open road. And when, in the general emancipation of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn’t play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons with patient benevolence: “Defer, therefore, the operation you contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your head and the Lord be with you.”

Among the traditions that are being thus attacked, not intelligently but most unintelligently, is the fundamental human creation called the Household or the Home. That is a typical thing which men attack, not because they can see through it, but because they cannot see it at all. They beat at it blindly, in a fashion entirely haphazard and opportunist; and many of them would pull it down without even pausing to ask why it was ever put up. It is true that only a few of them would have avowed this object in so many words. That only proves how very blind and blundering they are. But they have fallen into a habit of mere drift and gradual detachment from family life; something that is often merely accidental and devoid of any definite theory at all. But though it is accidental it is none the less anarchical. And it is all the more anarchical for not being anarchist. It seems to be largely founded on individual irritation; an irritation which varies with the individual. We are merely told that in this or that case a particular temperament was tormented by a particular environment; but nobody even explained how the evil arose, let alone whether the evil is really escaped. We are told that in this or that family Grandmamma talked a great deal of nonsense, which God knows is true; or that it is very difficult to have intimate intellectual relations with Uncle Gregory without telling him he is a fool, which is indeed the case. But nobody seriously considers the remedy, or even the malady; or whether the existing individualistic dissolution is a remedy at all. Much of this business began with the influence of Ibsen, a very powerful dramatist and an exceedingly feeble philosopher. I suppose that Nora of THE DOLL’S HOUSE was intended to be an inconsequent person; but certainly her most inconsequent action was her last. She complained that she was not yet fit to look after children, and then proceeded to get as far as possible from the children, that she might study them more closely.

There is one simple test and type of this neglect of scientific thinking and the sense of a social rule; the neglect which has now left us with nothing but a welter of exceptions. I have read hundreds and thousands of times, in all the novels and newspapers of our epoch, certain phrases about the just right of the young to liberty, about the unjust claim of the elders to control, about the conception that all souls must be free or all citizens equal, about the absurdity of authority or the degradation of obedience. I am not arguing those matters directly at the moment. But what strikes me as astounding, in a logical sense, is that not one of these myriad novelists and newspaper-men ever seems to think of asking the next and most obvious question. It never seems to occur to them to enquire what becomes of the opposite obligation. If the child is free from the first to disregard the parent, why is not the parent free from the first to disregard the child? If Mr. Jones, Senior, and Mr. Jones, Junior, are only two free and equal citizens, why should one citizen sponge on another citizen for the first fifteen years of his life? Why should the elder Mr. Jones be expected to feed, clothe and shelter out of his own pocket another person who is entirely free of any obligations to him? If the bright young thing cannot be asked to tolerate her grandmother, who has become something of a bore, why should the grandmother or the mother have tolerated the bright young thing at a period of her life when she was by no means bright? Why did they laboriously look after her at a time when her contributions to the conversation were seldom epigrammatic and not often intelligible? Why should Jones Senior stand drinks and free meals to anybody so unpleasant as Jones Junior, especially in the immature phases of his existence? Why should he not throw the baby out of the window; or at any rate, kick the boy out of doors? It is obvious that we are dealing with a real relation, which may be equality, but is certainly not similarity.

Some social reformers try to evade this difficulty, I know, by some vague notions about the State or an abstraction called Education eliminating the parental function. But this, like many notions of solid scientific persons, is a wild illusion of the nature of mere moonshine. It is based on that strange new superstition, the idea of infinite resources of organisation. It is as if officials grew like grass or bred like rabbits. There is supposed to be an endless supply of salaried persons, and of salaries for them; and they are to undertake all that human beings naturally do for themselves; including the care of children. But men cannot live by taking in each other’s baby-linen. They cannot provide a tutor for each citizen; who is to tutor the tutors? Men cannot be educated by machinery; and though there might be a Robot bricklayer or scavenger, there will never be a Robot schoolmaster or governess. The actual effect of this theory is that one harassed person has to look after a hundred children, instead of one normal person looking after a normal number of them. Normally that normal person is urged by a natural force, which costs nothing and does not require a salary; the force of natural affection for his young, which exists even among the animals. If you cut off that natural force, and substitute a paid bureaucracy, you are like a fool who should pay men to turn the wheel of his mill, because he refused to use wind or water which he could get for nothing. You are like a lunatic who should carefully water his garden with a watering-can, while holding up an umbrella to keep off the rain.

It is now necessary to recite these truisms; for only by doing so can we begin to get a glimpse of that REASON for the existence of the family, which I began this essay by demanding. They were all familiar to our fathers, who believed in the links of kinship and also in the links of logic. To-day our logic consists mostly of missing links; and our family largely of absent members. But, anyhow, this is the right end at which to begin any such enquiry; and not at the tail-end or the fag-end of some private muddle, by which Dick has become discontented or Susan has gone off on her own. If Dick or Susan wish to destroy the family because they do not see the use of it, I say as I said in the beginning; if they do not see the use of it, they had much better preserve it. They have no business even to think of destroying it until they have seen the use of it.

But it has other uses, besides the obvious fact that it means a necessary social work being done for love when it cannot be done for money; and (one might almost dare to hint) presumably to be repaid with love since it is never repaid in money. On that simple side of the matter the general situation is easy to record. The existing and general system of society, subject in our own age and industrial culture to very gross abuses and painful problems, is nevertheless a normal one. It is the idea that the commonwealth is made up of a number of small kingdoms, of which a man and a woman become the king and queen and in which they exercise a reasonable authority, subject to the common sense of the commonwealth, until those under their care grow up to found similar kingdoms and exercise similar authority. This is the social structure of mankind, far older than all its records and more universal than any of its religions; and all attempts to alter it are mere talk and tomfoolery.

But the other advantage of the small group is now not so much neglected as simply not realised. Here again we have some extraordinary delusions spread all over the literature and journalism of our time. Those delusions now exist in such a degree that we may say, for all practical purposes, that when a thing has been stated about a thousand times as obviously true, it is almost certain to be obviously false. One such statement may be specially noted here. There is undoubtedly something to be said against domesticity and in favour of the general drift towards life in hotels, clubs, colleges, communal settlements and the rest; or for a social life organised on the plan of the great commercial systems of our time. But the truly extraordinary suggestion is often made that this escape from the home is an escape into greater freedom. The change is actually offered as favourable to liberty.

To anybody who can think, of course, it is exactly the opposite. The domestic division of human society is not perfect, being human. It does not achieve complete liberty; a thing somewhat difficult to do or even to define. But it is a mere matter of arithmetic that it puts a larger number of people in supreme control of something, and able to shape it to their personal liking, than do the vast organisations that rule society outside; whether those systems are legal or commercial or even merely social. Even if we were only considering the parents, it is plain that there are more parents than there are policemen or politicians or heads of big businesses or proprietors of hotels. As I shall suggest in a moment, the argument actually applies indirectly to the children as well as directly to the parents. But the main point is that the world OUTSIDE the home is now under a rigid discipline and routine and it is only inside the home that there is really a place for individuality and liberty. Anyone stepping out of the front-door is obliged to step into a procession, all going the same way and to a great extent even obliged to wear the same uniform. Business, especially big business, is now organised like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I should say, a militarism without the military virtues. But anyhow, it is obvious that a hundred clerks in a bank or a hundred waitresses in a teashop are more regimented and under rule than the same individuals when each has gone back to his or her own dwelling or lodging, hung with his or her favourite pictures or fragrant with his or her favourite cheap cigarettes. But this, which is so obvious in the commercial case, is no less true even in the social case. In practice, the pursuit of pleasure is merely the pursuit of fashion. The pursuit of fashion is merely the pursuit of convention; only that it happens to be a new convention. The jazz dances, the joy rides, the big pleasure parties and hotel entertainments, do not make any more provision for a REALLY independent taste than did any of the fashions of the past. If a wealthy young lady wants to do what all the other wealthy young ladies are doing, she will find it great fun, simply because youth is fun and society is fun. She will enjoy being modern exactly as her Victorian grandmother enjoyed being Victorian. And quite right too; but it is the enjoyment of convention, not the enjoyment of liberty. It is perfectly healthy for all young people of all historic periods to herd together, to a reasonable extent, and enthusiastically copy each other. But in that there is nothing particularly fresh and certainly nothing particularly free. The girl who likes shaving her head and powdering her nose and wearing short skirts will find the world organised for her and will march happily with the procession. But a girl who happened to like having her hair down to her heels or loading herself with barbaric gauds and trailing garments or (most awful of all) leaving her nose in its natural state— she will still be well advised to do these things on her own premises. If the Duchess does want to play leap frog, she must not start suddenly leaping in the manner of a frog across the ballroom of the Babylon Hotel, when it is crowded with the fifty best couples professionally practising the very latest dance, for the instruction of society. The Duchess will find it easier to practise leap frog to the admiration of her intimate friends in the old oak-panelled hall of Fitzdragon Castle. If the Dean must stand on his head, he will do it with more ease and grace in the calm atmosphere of the Deanery than by attempting to interrupt the programme of some social entertainment already organised for philanthropic purposes.

If there is this impersonal routine in commercial and even in social things, it goes without saying that it exists and always must exist in political and legal things. For instance, the punishments of the State must be sweeping generalisations. It is only the punishments of the home that can possibly be adapted to the individual case; because it is only there that the judge can know anything of the individual. If Tommy takes a silver thimble out of a work-basket, his mother may act very differently according as she knows that he did it for fun or for spite or to sell to somebody, or to get somebody into trouble. But if Tomkins takes a silver thimble out of a shop, the law not only can but must punish him according to the rule made for all shoplifters or stealers of silver. It is only the domestic discipline that can show any sympathy or especially any humour. I do not say that the family always does do this; but I say that the State never ought to attempt it. So that even if we consider the parents alone as independent princes, and the children merely as subjects, the relative freedom of the family can and often does work to the advantage of those subjects. But so long as the children are children, they will always be the subjects of somebody. The question is whether they are to be distributed naturally under their natural princes, as the old phrase went, who normally feel for them what nobody else will feel, a natural affection. It seems to me clear that this normal distribution gives the largest amount of liberty to the largest number of people.

My complaint of the anti-domestic drift is that it is unintelligent. People do not know what they are doing; because they do not know what they are undoing. There are a multitude of modern manifestations, from the largest to the smallest, ranging from a divorce to a picnic party. But each is a separate escape or evasion; and especially an evasion of the point at issue. People ought to decide in a philosophical fashion whether they desire the traditional social order or not; or if there is any particular alternative to be desired. As it is they treat the public question merely as a mess or medley of private questions. Even in being anti-domestic they are much too domestic in their test of domesticity. Each family considers only its own case and the result is merely narrow and negative. Each case is an exception to a rule that does not exist. The family, especially in the modern state, stands in need of considerable correction and reconstruction; most things do in the modern state. But the family mansion should be preserved or destroyed or rebuilt; it should not be allowed to fall to pieces brick by brick because nobody has any historic sense of the object of bricklaying. For instance, the architects of the restoration should rebuild the house with wide and easily opened doors, for the practice of the ancient virtue of hospitality. In other words, private property should be distributed with sufficiently decent equality to allow of a margin for festive intercourse. But the hospitality of a house will always be different from the hospitality of a hotel. And it will be different in being more individual, more independent, more interesting than the hospitality of a hotel. It is perfectly right that the young Browns and the young Robinsons should meet and mix and dance and make asses of themselves, according to the design of their Creator. But there will always be some difference between the Browns entertaining the Robinsons and the Robinsons entertaining the Browns. And it will be a difference to the advantage of variety, of personality, of the potentialities of the mind of man; or, in other words, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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LOGIC AND LAWN TENNIS

WHEN we say that we doubt the intellectual improvement produced by Protestantism and Rationalism and the modern world, there generally arises a very confused controversy, which is a sort of tangle of terminology. But, broadly speaking, the difference between us and our critics is this. They mean by growth an increase of the tangle; whereas we mean by thought a disentangling of the tangle. Even a short and simple length of straight and untangled wire is worth more to us than whole forests of mere entanglement. That there are more topics talked about, or more terms used, or more people using them, or more books and other authorities cited— all this is nothing to us if people misuse the terms, misunderstand the topics, invoke the authorities at random and without the use of reason; and finally bring out a false result. A peasant who merely says, “I have five pigs; if I kill one I shall have four pigs,” is thinking in an extremely simple and elementary way; but he is thinking as clearly and correctly as Aristotle or Euclid. But suppose he reads or half-reads newspapers and books of popular science. Suppose he starts to call one pig the Land and another pig Capital and a third pig Exports, and finally brings out the result that the more pigs he kills the more he possesses; or that every sow that litters decreases the number of pigs in the world. He has learnt economic terminology, merely as a means of becoming entangled in economic fallacy. It is a fallacy he could never have fallen into while he was grounded in the divine dogma that Pigs is Pigs. Now for that sort of intellectual instruction and advancement we have no use at all; and in that sense only it is true that we prefer the ignorant peasant to the instructed pedant. But that is not because we think ignorance better than instruction or barbarism better than culture. It is merely that we think a short length of the untangled logical chain is better than an interminable length of it that is interminably tangled. It is merely that we prefer a man to do a sum of simple addition right than a sum in long division wrong.

Now what we observe about the whole current culture of journalism and general discussion is that people do not know how to begin to think. Not only is their thinking at third and fourth hand, but it always starts about three-quarters of the way through the process. Men do not know where their own thoughts came from. They do not know what their own words imply. They come in at the end of every controversy and know nothing of where it began or what it is all about. They are constantly assuming certain absolutes, which, if correctly defined, would strike even themselves as being not absolutes but absurdities. To think thus is to be in a tangle; to go on thinking is to be in more and more of a tangle. And at the back of all there is always something understood; which is really something misunderstood.

For instance, I read an article by the admirable Mr. Tilden, the great tennis-player, who was debating what is wrong with English Tennis. “Nothing can save English Tennis,” he said, except certain reforms of a fundamental sort, which he proceeded to explain. The English, it appears, have a weird and unnatural way of regarding tennis as a game, or thing to be enjoyed. He admitted that this has been part of a sort of amateur spirit in everything which is (as he very truly noted) also a part of the national character. But all this stands in the way of what he called saving English Tennis. He meant what some would call making it perfect, and others would call making it professional. Now, I take that as a very typical passage, taken from the papers at random, and containing the views of a keen and acute person on a subject that he thoroughly understands. But what he does not understand is the thing which he supposes to be understood. He thoroughly knows his subject and yet he does not know what he is talking about; because he does not know what he is taking for granted. He does not realise the relation of means and ends, or axioms and inferences, in his own philosophy. And nobody would probably be more surprised and even legitimately indignant than he, if I were to say that the first principles of his philosophy appear to be as follows: (1) There is in the nature of things a certain absolute and divine Being, whose name is Mr. Lawn Tennis. (2) All men exist for the good and glory of this Mr. Tennis and are bound to approximate to his perfections and fulfil his will. (3) To this higher duty they are bound to surrender their natural desire for enjoyment in this life. (4) They are bound to put this loyalty first; and to love it more passionately than patriotic tradition, the preservation of their own national type and national culture; not to mention even their national virtues. That is the creed or scheme of doctrine that is here developed without being defined. The only way for us to save the game of Lawn Tennis is to prevent it from being a game. The only way to save English Tennis is to prevent it from being English. It does not occur to such thinkers that some people may possibly like it because it is English and enjoy it because it is enjoyable. There is some abstract divine standard in the thing, to which it is everybody’s duty to rise, at any sacrifice of pleasure or affection. When Christians say this of the sacrifices made for Christ, it sounds rather a hard saying. But when tennis-players say it about the sacrifices demanded by tennis, it sounds quite ordinary and casual in the confusion of current thought and expression. And nobody notices that a sort of human sacrifice is being offered to a sort of new and nameless god.

In the good old days of Victorian rationalism it used to be the conventional habit to scoff at St. Thomas Aquinas and the mediaeval theologians; and especially to repeat perpetually a well-worn joke about the man who discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The comfortable and commercial Victorians, with their money and merchandise, might well have felt a sharper end of the same needle, even if it was the other end of it. It would have been good for their souls to have looked for that needle, not in the haystack of mediaeval metaphysics, but in the neat needle-case of their own favourite pocket Bible. It would have been better for them to meditate, not on how many angels could go on the point of a needle, but on how many camels could go through the eye of it. But there is another comment on this curious joke or catchword, which is more relevant to our purpose here. If the mediaeval mystic ever did argue about angels standing on a needle, at least he did not argue as if the object of angels was to stand on a needle; as if God had created all the Angels and Archangels, all the Thrones, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, solely in order that there might be something to clothe and decorate the unseemly nakedness of the point of a needle. But that is the way that modern rationalists reason. The mediaeval mystic would not even have said that a needle exists to be a standing-ground for angels. The mediaeval mystic would have been the first to say that a needle exists to make clothes for men. For mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for, and what was the dependence of one idea on another. And they might even have suggested, what so many journalists seem to forget, the paradoxical possibility that Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis.

The Modernists were peculiarly unfortunate when they said that the modern world must not be expected to tolerate the old syllogistic methods of the Schoolmen. They were proposing to scrap the one mediaeval instrument which the modern world will most immediately require. There would have been a far better case for saying that the revival of Gothic architecture has been sentimental and futile; that the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art was only an eccentric episode; that the fashionable use of the word “Guild” for every possible sort of social institution was affected and artificial; that the feudalism of Young England was very different from that of Old England. But this method of clean-cut deduction, with the definition of the postulates and the actual answering of the question, is something of which the whole of our newspaper-flattered society is in sharp and instant need; as the poisoned are in need of medicine. I have here taken only one example which happened to catch my eye out of a hundred thousand that flash past every hour. And as Tennis, like every other good game, has to be played with the head as well as the hand, I think it highly desirable that it should be occasionally discussed at least as intelligently as it is played.

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OBSTINATE ORTHODOXY

I HAVE been asked to explain something about myself which seems to be regarded as very extraordinary. The problem has been presented to me in the form of a cutting from a very flattering American article, which yet contained a certain suggestion of wonder. So far as I can understand, it is thought extraordinary that a man should be ordinary. I am ordinary in the correct sense of the term; which means the acceptance of an order; a Creator and the Creation, the common sense of gratitude for Creation, life and love as gifts permanently good, marriage and chivalry as laws rightly controlling them, and the rest of the normal traditions of our race and religion. It is also thought a little odd that I regard the grass as green, even after some newly-discovered Slovak artist has painted it grey; that I think daylight very tolerable in spite of thirteen Lithuanian philosophers sitting in a row and cursing the light of day; and that, in matters more polemical, I actually prefer weddings to divorces and babies to Birth Control. These eccentric views, which I share with the overwhelming majority of mankind, past and present, I should not attempt to defend here one by one. And I only give a general reply for a particular reason. I wish to make it unmistakably plain that my defence of these sentiments is not sentimental. It would be easy to gush about these things; but I defy the reader, after reading this, to find the faintest trace of the tear of sensibility. I hold this view not because it is sensibility, but because it is sense.

On the contrary, it is the sceptics who are the sentimentalists. More than half the “revolt” and the talk of being advanced and progressive is simply a weak sort of snobbishness which takes the form of a worship of Youth. Some men of my generation delight in declaring that they are of the Party of the Young and defending every detail of the latest fashions or freaks. If I do not do that, it is for the same reason that I do not dye my hair or wear stays. But even when it is less despicable than that, the current phrase that everything must be done for youth, that the rising generation is all that matters, is in sober fact a piece of pure sentimentalism. It is also, within reason, a perfectly natural piece of sentiment. All healthy people like to see the young enjoying themselves; but if we turn that pleasure into a principle, we are sentimentalists. If we desire the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it will be obvious that the greatest number, at any given moment, are rather more likely to be between twenty-five and seventy than to be between seventeen and twenty-five. Sacrificing everything to the young will be like working only for the rich. They will be a privileged class and the rest will be snobs or slaves. Moreover, the young will always have a fair amount of fun under the worst conditions; if we really wish to console the world, it will be much more rational to console the old. This is what I call facing facts; and I have continued to believe in most of these traditions because they are facts. I could give a great many other examples; for instance, chivalry. Chivalry is not the romantic, but the realistic, view of the sexes. It is so realistic that the real reasons for it cannot always be given in print.

If those called free-thinkers are sentimentalists, those called free-lovers are open and obvious sentimentalists. We can always convict such people of sentimentalism by their weakness for euphemism. The phrase they use is always softened and suited for journalistic appeals. They talk of free love when they mean something quite different, better defined as free lust. But being sentimentalists they feel bound to simper and coo over the word “love.” They insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control. We could smash them to atoms, if we could be as indecent in our language as they are immoral in their conclusions. And as it is with morals, so it is with religion. The general notion that science establishes agnosticism is a sort of mystification produced by talking Latin and Greek instead of plain English. Science is the Latin for knowledge. Agnosticism is the Greek for ignorance. It is not self-evident that ignorance is the goal of knowledge. It is the ignorance and not the knowledge that produces the current notion that free thought weakens theism. It is the real world, that we see with our own eyes, that obviously unfolds a plan of things that fit into each other. It is only a remote and misty legend that ever pretended to explain it by the automatic advantage of the “fit.” As a fact, modern evolutionists, even when they are still Darwinians, do not pretend that the theory explains all varieties and adaptations. Those who know are rather rescuing Darwin at the expense of Darwinism. But it is those who do not know who doubt or deny; it is typical that their myth is actually called the Missing Link. They actually know nothing of their own argument except that it breaks down somewhere. But it is worth while to ask why this loose legend has such power over many; and I will proceed to my suggestion. I have not changed my mind; nor, indeed, have they changed their mind. They have only changed their mood.

What we call the intellectual world is divided into two types of people—those who worship the intellect and those who use it. There are exceptions; but, broadly speaking, they are never the same people. Those who use the intellect never worship it; they know too much about it. Those who worship the intellect never use it; as you can see by the things they say about it. Hence there has arisen a confusion about intellect and intellectualism; and, as the supreme expression of that confusion, something that is called in many countries the Intelligentsia, and in France more especially, the Intellectuals. It is found in practice to consist of clubs and coteries of people talking mostly about books and pictures, but especially new books and new pictures; and about music, so long as it is very modern music; or what some would call very unmusical music. The first fact to record about it is that what Carlyle said of the world is very specially true of the intellectual world— that it is mostly fools. Indeed, it has a curious attraction for complete fools, as a warm fire has for cats. I have frequently visited such societies, in the capacity of a common or normal fool, and I have almost always found there a few fools who were more foolish than I had imagined to be possible to man born of woman; people who had hardly enough brains to be called half-witted. But it gave them a glow within to be in what they imagined to be the atmosphere of intellect; for they worshipped it like an unknown god. I could tell many stories of that world. I remember a venerable man with a very long beard who seemed to live at one of these clubs. At intervals he would hold up his hand as if for silence and preface his remarks by saying, “A Thought.” And then he would say something that sounded as if a cow had suddenly spoken in a drawing-room. I remember once a silent and much-enduring man (I rather think it was my friend Mr. Edgar Jepson, the novelist) who could bear it no longer and cried with a sort of expiring gasp, “But, Good God, man, you don’t call that a THOUGHT, do you?” But that was pretty much the quality of the thought of such thinkers, especially of the freethinkers. Out of this social situation arises one sort of exception to the rule. Intelligence does exist even in the Intelligentsia. It does sometimes happen that a man of real talent has a weakness for flattery, even the flattery of fools. He would rather say something that silly people think clever than something which only clever people could perceive to be true. Oscar Wilde was a man of this type. When he said somewhere that an immoral woman is the sort of woman a man never gets tired of, he used a phrase so baseless as to be perfectly pointless. Everybody knows that a man may get tired of a whole procession of immoral women, especially if he is an immoral man. That was “a Thought”; otherwise something to be uttered, with uplifted hand, to people who could not think at all. In their poor muddled minds there was some vague connection between wit and cynicism; so they never applauded him so warmly as a wit, as when he was cynical without being witty. But when he said, “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” he made a statement (in excellent epigrammatic form) which really meant something. But it would have meant his own immediate dethronement if it could have been understood by those who only enthroned him for being cynical.

Anyhow, it is in this intellectual world, with its many fools and few wits and fewer wise men, that there goes on perpetually a sort of ferment of fashionable revolt and negation. From this comes all that is called destructive criticism; though, as a matter of fact, the new critic is generally destroyed by the next critic long before he has had any chance of destroying anything else. When people say solemnly that the world is in revolt against religion or private property or patriotism or marriage, they mean that this world is in revolt against them; or rather, is in permanent revolt against everything. Now, as a matter of fact, this world has a certain excuse for being always in that state of excitement, apart from mere fuss and mere folly. The reason is rather an important one; and I would ask anyone who really does want to think, and especially to think freely, to pause upon it seriously for a moment. It arises from the fact that these people are so much concerned with the study of Art. It collapses into mere drivelling and despair, because they try to transfer their treatment of art to the treatment of morals and philosophy. In this they make a bad blunder in reasoning. But then, as I have explained, intellectuals are not very intellectual.

The Arts, exist, as we should put it in our primeval fashion, to show forth the glory of God; or, to translate the same thing in terms of our psychology, to awaken and keep alive the sense of wonder in man. The success of any work of art is achieved when we say of any subject, a tree or a cloud or a human character, “I have seen that a thousand times and I never saw it before.” Now for this purpose a certain variation of VENUE is natural and even necessary. Artists change what they call their attack; for it is to some extent their business to make it a surprise attack. They have to throw a new light on things; and it is not surprising if it is sometimes an invisible ultra-violet ray or one rather resembling a black ray of madness or death. But when the artist extends the eccentric experiment from art to real life, it is quite different. He is like an absent-minded sculptor turning his chisel from chipping at the bust to chipping at the bald head of the distinguished sitter. And these anarchic artists do suffer a little from absence of Mind.

Let us take a practical case for the sake of simplicity. Many moderns will be heard scoffing at what they would call “chocolate-box art”; meaning an insipid and sickly art. And it is easy to call up the sort of picture that might well make anybody ill. I will suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are looking sadly at the outside of a chocolate-box (now, I need hardly say, empty) and that we see painted on it in rather pallid colours a young woman with golden ringlets gazing from a balcony and holding a rose in the spot-light caused by a convenient ray of moonlight. Any similar touches may be added to the taste or distaste of the critic; she may be convulsively clasping a letter or conspicuously wearing an engagement ring or languidly waving farewell to a distant gentleman in a gondola; or anything else I can think of, calculated to cause pain to the sensitive critic. I sympathise with the critic’s feeling; but I think he goes quite wrong in his thinking.

Now, what do we mean when we say that this is a silly picture, or a stale subject, or something very difficult to bear, even when we are fortified by chocolates to endure it? We mean it is possible to have too much of a good thing; to have too many chocolate-boxes, as to have too many chocolates. We mean that it is not a picture, but a picture of a picture. Ultimately it is a picture of innumerable pictures; not a real picture of a rose or a girl or a beam of moonlight. In other words, artists have copied artists, right away back to the first sentimental pictures of the Romantic Movement.

But roses have not copied roses. Moonbeams have not imitated each other. And though a woman may copy women in externals, it is only in externals and not in existence; her womanhood was not copied from any other woman. Considered as realities, the rose and the moon and the woman are simply themselves. Suppose that scene to be a real one, and there is nothing particularly imitative about it. The flower is unquestionably fresh as the young woman is unquestionably young. The rose is a real object, which would smell as sweet by any other name, or by no name. The girl is a particular person, whose personality is entirely new to the world and whose experiences are entirely new to herself. If she does indeed choose to stand in that attitude on that balcony holding that botanical specimen (which seems improbable), we have no right to doubt that she has her own reasons for doing so. In short, when once we conceive the thing as reality, we have no reason whatever to dismiss it as mere repetition. So long as we are thinking of the thing as copied mechanically and for money, as a piece of monotonous and mercenary ornament, we naturally feel that the flower is in a special sense an artificial flower and that the moonlight is all moonshine. We feel inclined to welcome even wild variations in the decorative style; and to admire the new artist who will paint the rose black, lest we should forget that it is a deep red, or the moonshine green, that we may realise it is something more subtle than white. But the moon is the moon and the rose is the rose; and we do not expect the real things to alter. Nor is there any reason to expect the rules about them to alter. Nor is there any reason, so far as this question is concerned, to expect the woman to alter her attitude either about the beauty of the rose or the obligations of the engagement-ring. These things, considered as real things, are quite unaffected by the variation of artistic attack in fictitious things. The moon will continue to affect the tides, whether we paint it blue or green or pink with purple spots. And the man who imagines that artistic revolutions must always affect morals is like a man who should say, “I am so bored with seeing pink roses painted on chocolate-boxes that I refuse to believe that roses grow well in a clay soil.”

In short, what the critics would call romanticism is in fact the only form of realism. It is also the only form of rationalism. The more a man uses his reason upon realities, the more he will see that the realities remain much the same, though the representations are very different, And it is only the representations that are repetitions. The sensations are always sincere; the individuals are always individual. If the real girl is experiencing a real romance, she is experiencing something old, but not something stale. If she has plucked something from a real rose-tree, she is holding a very ancient symbol, but a very recent rose. And it is exactly in so far as a man can clear his head, so as to see actual things as they are, that he will see these things as permanently important as they are. Exactly in so far as his head is confused with current fashions and aesthetic modes of the moment, he will see nothing about it except that it is like a picture on a chocolate-box, and not like a picture at the Post-Futurist Gallery. Exactly in so far as he is thinking about real people, he will see that they are really romantic. Exactly in so far as he is thinking only about pictures and poems and decorative styles, he will think that romance is a false or old-fashioned style. He can only see people as imitating pictures; whereas the real people are not imitating anything. They are only being themselves— as they will always be. Roses remain radiant and mysterious, however many pink rosebuds are sprinkled like pips over cheap wallpapers. Falling in love remains radiant and mysterious, however threadbare be the thousandth repetition of a rhyme as a valentine or a cracker-motto. To see this fact is to live in a world of facts. To be always thinking of the banality of bad wallpapers and valentines is to live in a world of fictions.

Now the main truth about all this sceptical revolt, and all the rest of it, is that it was born in a world of fictions. It came from the Intelligentsia, who were perpetually discussing novels and plays and pictures instead of people. They insisted on putting “real life” on the stage and never saw it in the street. They professed to be putting realism into their novels when there was less and less of it in their conversation, as compared with the conversation of the common people. And that perpetual experiment, and shifting of the standpoint, which was natural enough in an artist seeking for certain effects (as it is natural in a photographer hovering round and focussing and fussing with his camera), was wholly inapplicable to any study of the permanent rules and relations of society. When these people began to play about with morals and metaphysics, they simply produced a series of mad worlds where they might have been harmlessly producing a series of mad pictures. Pictures are always meant to catch a certain aspect, at a certain angle, in a certain light; sometimes in light that is almost as brief as lightning. But when the artists became anarchists and began to exhibit the community and the cosmos by these flashes of lightning, the result was not realism but simply nightmare. Because a particular painter, for a particular purpose, might paint the red rose black, the pessimist deduced that the red rose of love and life was really as black as it was painted. Because one artist, from one angle, seized a momentary impression of moonlight as green, the philosopher solemnly put on a pair of green spectacles and declared that it was now a solid scientific certainty that the moon must be crawling with maggots, because it was made of green cheese.

In short, there might have been some value in the old cry of art for the artists; if it had meant that the artists would confine themselves to the medium of art. As a fact, they were always meddling with the medium of morals and religion; and they imported into them the unrest, the changing moods and the merely experimental tricks of their own trade. But a man with a solid sense of reality can see that this is utterly unreal. Whatever the laws of life and love and human relations may be, it is monstrously improbable that they ought to be changed with every fashion in poetry any more than with every fashion in pantaloons. It is insane that there should be a new pattern of hearts or heads whenever there is a new pattern of hats. These things are realities, like a high tide or a clay soil; and you do not get rid of high tides and clay soils by calling roses and moonlight old-fashioned and sentimental. I will venture to say, therefore, and I trust without undue vanity, that I have remained rooted in certain relations and traditions, not because I am a sentimentalist or even a romanticist; but because I am a realist. And I realise that morals must not change with moods, as Cubism must not mean chopping up real houses into cubes, or Vorticism swallowing real ships in whirlpools.

I have not changed my views on these things because there has never been any reason to change them. For anybody impelled by reason and not by running with a crowd will, for instance, perceive that there are always the same arguments for a Purpose and therefore a Personality in things, if he is a thinking person. Only it is now made easy for him to admit vaguely that there may be a Purpose, while denying that there is a Personality, so long as he happens to be a very unthinking person. It is quite as certain as it ever was that life is a gift of God immensely valuable and immensely valued, and anybody can prove it by putting a pistol to the head of a pessimist. Only a certain sort of modern does not like any problem presented to his head; and would dislike a plain question almost as much as a pistol. It is obvious common sense, and obviously consonant to real life, that romantic love is normal to youth and has its natural development in marriage and parenthood as the corresponding conditions of age. None of the nonsense talked about this, that or the other individual irritation or licence has ever made any difference to that solid social truth, for anyone who cares whether things are true, apart from whether they are trite. It is the man who cannot see that a thing is true, although it is trite, who is very truly a victim of mere words and verbal associations. He is the fool who has grown so furious with paper roses that he will not believe that the real rose has a root; nor (till he discovers it with an abrupt and profane ejaculation) that it has a thorn.

The truth is that the modern world has had a mental breakdown; much more than a moral breakdown. Things are being settled by mere associations because there is a reluctance to settle them by arguments. Nearly all the talk about what is advanced and what is antiquated has become a sort of giggling excitement about fashions. The most modern of the moderns stare at a picture of a man making love to a lady in a crinoline with exactly the same sort of vacant grin with which yokels stare at a stranger in an outlandish sort of hat. They regard their fathers of another age exactly as the most insular would regard the foreigners from another country. They seem mentally incapable of getting any further than the statement that our girls are shingled and short-skirted while their silly old great-grandmothers wore ringlets and hoops. That seems to satisfy all their appetite for satire; they are a simple race, a little like savages. They are exactly like the sort of cockney tripper who would roar with laughter because French soldiers wore red trousers and blue coats, while English soldiers were dressed properly in blue trousers and red coats. I have not altered my lines of thought for people who think in this fashion. Why should I?

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THE USUAL ARTICLE

THE Editor of an evening paper published recently what he announced as, and even apologized for as “an unusual article.” He anxiously guarded himself from expressing any opinion on the dreadful and dangerous views which the unusual article set forth. Needless to say, before I had read five lines of the unusual article, I knew it was a satisfactory sample of the usual article. It was even a careful and correct copy of the usual article; a sort of prize specimen, as if a thing could be unusually usual. I had read the article before, of course—thousands and thousands of times (as it seems to me)—and had always found it the same; but never before, somehow, had it seemed so exactly the same.

There are things of which the world to-day is subconsciously very weary. It does not always know what they are; for they commonly bear large though faded labels, describing them as the New Movement or the Latest Discovery. For instance, men are already as tired of the Socialist State as if they had been living in it for a thousand years. But there are some things on which boredom is becoming acute. It is now very near the surface; and may suddenly wake up in the form of suicide or murder or tearing newspapers with the teeth. So it is with this familiar product, the Usual Article. It is not only too usual; it has become intolerably, insupportably, unbearably usual. It is appropriately described as “A Woman’s Cry to the Churches.” And I beg to announce that, though I am of a heavy and placid habit, and have never been accused of any such feminine graces as hysteria, yet, if I have to read this article three more times, I shall scream. My scream will be entitled, “A Man’s Cry to the Newspapers.”

I will repeat somewhat hurriedly what the lady in question cried; for the reader knows it already by heart. The message of Christ was perfectly “simple”: that the cure of everything is Love; but since He was killed (I do not quite know why) for making this remark, great temples have been put up to Him and horrid people called priests have given the world nothing but “stones, amulets, formulas, shibboleths.” They also “quarrel eternally among themselves as to the placing of a button or the bending of a knee.” All this gives no comfort to the unhappy Christian, who apparently wishes to be comforted only by being told that he has a duty to his neighbour. “How many men in the time of their passing get comfort out of the thought of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Predestination, Transubstantiation, the doctrine of eternal punishment, and the belief that Christ will return on the Seventh Day?” The items make a curious catalogue; and the last item I find especially mysterious. But I can only say that, if Christ was the giver of the original and really comforting message of love, I should have thought it DID make a difference whether He returned on the Seventh Day. For the rest of that singular list, I should probably find it necessary to distinguish. I certainly never gained any deep and heartfelt consolation from the thought of the Thirty-Nine Articles. I never heard of anybody in particular who did. Of the idea of Predestination there are broadly two views; the Calvinist and the Catholic; and it would make a most uncommon difference to MY comfort, if I held the former instead of the latter. It is the difference between believing that God knows, as a fact, that I choose to go to the devil; and believing that God has given me to the devil, without my having any choice at all. As to Transubstantiation, it is less easy to talk currently about that; but I would gently suggest that, to most ordinary outsiders with any common sense, there would be a considerable practical difference between Jehovah pervading the universe and Jesus Christ coming into the room.

But I touch rapidly and reluctantly on these examples, because they exemplify a much wider question of this interminable way of talking. It consists of talking as if the moral problem of man were perfectly simple, as everyone knows it is not; and then depreciating attempts to solve it by quoting long technical words, and talking about senseless ceremonies without enquiring about their sense. In other words, it is exactly as if somebody were to say about the science of medicine: “All I ask is Health; what could be simpler than the beautiful gift of Health? Why not be content to enjoy for ever the glow of youth and the fresh enjoyment of being fit? Why study dry and dismal sciences of anatomy and physiology; why enquire about the whereabouts of obscure organs of the human body? Why pedantically distinguish between what is labelled a poison and what is labelled an antidote, when it is so simple to enjoy Health? Why worry with a minute exactitude about the number of drops of laudanum or the strength of a dose of chloral, when it is so nice to be healthy? Away with your priestly apparatus of stethoscopes and clinical thermometers; with your ritualistic mummery of feeling pulses, putting out tongues, examining teeth, and the rest! The god Esculapius came on earth solely to inform us that Life is on the whole preferable to Death; and this thought will console many dying persons unattended by doctors.”

In other words, the Usual Article, which is now some ten thousand issues old, was always stuff and nonsense even when it was new. There may be, and there has been, pedantry in the medical profession. There may be, and there has been, theology that was thin or dry or without consolation for men. But to talk as if it were possible for any science to attack any problem, without developing a technical language, and a method always methodical and often minute, merely means that you are a fool and have never really attacked a problem at all. Quite apart from the theory of a Church, if Christ had remained on earth for an indefinite time, trying to induce men to love one another, He would have found it necessary to have some tests, some methods, some way of dividing true love from false love, some way of distinguishing between tendencies that would ruin love and tendencies that would restore it. You cannot make a success of anything, even loving, entirely without thinking. All this is so obvious that it would seem unnecessary to repeat it; and yet it is necessary to repeat it, because it is the flat contradiction of it that is now incessantly repeated. Its flatness stretches around us like a vast wilderness on every side.

It is a character of the Usual Article that it alludes occasionally to the New Religion; but always in a rather timid and remote fashion. It suggests that there will be a better and broader belief; though it seldom touches on the belief, but only on the broadness. There is never in it by any chance anything resembling even the note of the true innovator. For the true innovator must be in some sense a legislator. We may put it in a hostile fashion, by saying that the revolutionist always becomes the tyrant. We may put it in a friendly fashion, by saying that the reformer must return to the idea of form. But anybody really founding a new religion, even a false religion, must have a certain quality of responsibility. He must make himself responsible for saying that some things shall be forbidden and some permitted; that there shall be a certain plan or system that must be defended from destruction. And all the things in any way resembling new religions, to do them justice, do show this quality and suffer this disadvantage. Christian Science is theoretically based on peace and almost on the denial of struggle. But for all that there has been not a little struggle in the councils of that creed; and the relations of all the successors of Mrs. Eddy have by no means been relations of peace. I do not say it as a taunt, but rather as a tribute; I should say that these proceedings did prove that the people involved were trying to found a real religion. It is a compliment to Christian Scientists to say that they also had their tests and their creeds, their anathemas and their excommunications, their encyclicals and their heresy-hunts. But it is a compliment to Christian Scientists which they can hardly use as an insult to Christians. Communism, even in its final form of Marxian materialism, had some of the qualities of a fresh and sincere faith. It had one of them at least; that it did definitely expel men for denying the creed. Both the Communist and the Christian Scientist were under this grave disadvantage; that they did turn a faith into a fact. There is such a thing as a Bolshevist government and it governs, even if it misgoverns. There are such things as Christian Science healers; there probably is such a thing as Christian Science healing, even if we do not fully admit that the healing is health. There is a Church in active operation; and for that reason it exhibits all the dogmas and differences charged against the Church of Christ. But the philosophy expressed in the Usual Article avoids all these disadvantages by never coming into the world of reality at all. Its god is afraid to be born; its scripture is afraid to be written; it only manages to remain as the New Religion by always coming to-morrow and never to-day. It puffs itself out with spiritual pride, because it does not impose what it cannot even invent. It shines with Pharisaical self-satisfaction, because there are no crimes committed for its creed and no creed to be the motive of its crimes. This sort of critic is a surgeon who never performs an unsuccessful operation because he never operates; a soldier who never falls because he never fights. Anybody can talk for ever about a non-existent religion which shall be free from all the evils of existence. Anybody can dream of that entirely humane and harmonious Christianity, whose Christ is never born and never crucified. It is so easy to do, that half a hundred people in the papers and the public discussions have been doing nothing else for the last twenty or thirty years. But it is every bit as futile as applied to a spiritual ideal as it would be if applied to a scientific theory or a political programme; and I only mention it because I have just heard it for the hundredth time; and feel a faint hope that I may be mentioning it for the last time.

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WHY I AM A CATHOLIC

A LEADING article in a daily paper was recently devoted to the New Prayer Book; without having anything very new to say about it. For it mostly consisted in repeating for the nine-hundredth-and-ninety-nine-thousandth time that what the ordinary Englishman wants is a religion without dogma (whatever that may be), and that the disputes about Church matters were idle and barren on both sides. Only, suddenly remembering that this equalisation of both sides might possibly involve some slight concession or consideration for our side, the writer hastily corrected himself. He proceeded to suggest that though it is wrong to be dogmatic, it is essential to be dogmatically Protestant. He suggested that the ordinary Englishman (that useful character) was quite convinced, in spite of his aversion to all religious differences, that it was vital to religion to go on differing from Catholicism. He is convinced (we were told) that “Britain is as Protestant as the sea is salt.” Gazing reverently at the profound Protestantism of Mr. Michael Arlen or Mr. Noel Coward, or the latest jazz dance in Mayfair, we might be tempted to ask: If the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? But since we may rightly deduce from this passage that Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. James Douglas and Mr. Hannen Swaffer, and all their following, are indeed stern and unbending Protestants (and as we know that Protestants are famous for the close and passionate study of the Scriptures, unhindered by Pope or priest), we might even take the liberty of interpreting the saying in the light of a less familiar text. Is it possible that in comparing Protestantism to the salt of the sea they were haunted with some faint memory of another passage, in which the same Authority spoke of one single and sacred fountain that is of living water, because it is of life-giving water, and really quenches the thirst of men; while all other pools and puddles are distinguished from it by the fact that those who drink of them will thirst again. It is a thing that does occasionally happen to people who prefer to drink salt water.

This is perhaps a somewhat provocative way of opening the statement of my strongest conviction; but I would respectfully plead that the provocation came from the Protestant. When Protestantism calmly claims to rule all the souls in the tone of Britannia ruling all the seas, it is permissible to retort that the very quintessence of such salt can be found thickest in the stagnation of the Dead Sea. But it is still more permissible to retort that Protestantism is claiming what no religion at this moment can possibly claim. It is calmly claiming the allegiance of millions of agnostics, atheists, hedonistic pagans, independent mystics, psychic investigators, theists, theosophists, followers of Eastern cults and jolly fellows living like the beasts that perish. To pretend that all these are Protestants is considerably to lower the prestige and significance of Protestantism. It is to make it merely negative; and salt is not negative.

Taking this as a text and test of the present problem of religious choice, we find ourselves faced from the first with a dilemma about the traditional religion of our fathers. Protestantism as here named is either a negative or a positive thing. If Protestantism is a positive thing, there is no doubt whatever that it is dead. In so far as it really was a set of special spiritual beliefs it is no longer believed. The genuine Protestant creed is now hardly held by anybody—least of all by the Protestants. So completely have they lost faith in it, that they have mostly forgotten what it was. If almost any modern man be asked whether we save our souls solely through our theology, or whether doing good (to the poor, for instance) will help us on the road to God, he would answer without hesitation that good works are probably more pleasing to God than theology. It would probably come as quite a surprise to him to learn that, for three hundred years, the faith in faith alone was the badge of a Protestant, the faith in good works the rather shameful badge of a disreputable Papist. The ordinary Englishman (to bring in our old friend once more) would now be in no doubt whatever on the merits of the long quarrel between Catholicism and Calvinism. And that was the most important and intellectual quarrel between Catholicism and Protestantism. If he believes in a God at all, or even if he does not, he would quite certainly prefer a God who has made all men for joy, and desires to save them all, to a God who deliberately made some for involuntary sin and immortal misery. But that was the quarrel; and it was the Catholic who held the first and the Protestant who held the second. The modern man not only does not share, he does not even understand, the unnatural aversion of the Puritans to all art and beauty in relation to religion. Yet that was the real Protestant protest; and right into the Mid-Victorian time Protestant matrons were shocked at a white gown, let alone a coloured vestment. On practically every essential count on which the Reformation actually put Rome in the dock, Rome has since been acquitted by the jury of the whole world.

It Is perfectly true that we can find real wrongs, provoking rebellion, in the Roman Church just before the Reformation. What we cannot find is one ot those real wrongs that the Reformation reformed. For instance, it was an abominable abuse that the corruption of the monasteries sometimes permitted a rich noble to play the patron and even play at being the Abbot, or draw on the revenues supposed to belong to a brotherhood of poverty and charity. But all that the Reformation did was to allow the same rich noble to take over ALL the revenue, to seize the whole house and turn it into a palace or a pig-sty, and utterly stamp out the last legend of the poor brotherhood. The worst things in worldly Catholicism were made worse by Protestantism. But the best things remained somehow through the era of corruption; nay, they survived even the era of reform. They survive to-day in all Catholic countries, not only in the colour and poetry and popularity of religion, but in the deepest lessons of practical psychology. And so completely are they justified, after the judgment of four centuries, that every one of them is now being copied, even by those who condemned it; only it is often caricatured. Psycho-analysis is the Confessional without the safeguards of the Confessional; Communism is the Franciscan movement without the moderating balance of the Church; and American sects, having howled for three centuries at the Popish theatricality and mere appeal to the senses, now “brighten” their services by super-theatrical films and rays of rose-red light falling on the head of the minister. If we had a ray of light to throw about, we should not throw it on the minister.

Next, Protestantism may be a negative thing. In other words, it may be a new and totally different list of charges against Rome; and only in continuity because it is still against Rome. That is very largely what it is; and that is presumably what the DAILY EXPRESS really meant, when it said that our country and our countrymen are soaked in Protestantism as in salt. In other words, the legend that Rome is wrong anyhow, is still a living thing, though all the features of the monster are now entirely altered in the caricature. Even this is an exaggeration, as applied to the England of to-day; but there is still a truth in it. Only the truth, when truly realised, can hardly be very satisfactory to honest and genuine Protestants. For, after all, what sort of a tradition is this, that tells a different story every day or every decade, and is content so long as all the contradictory tales are told against one man or one institution? What sort of holy cause is it to inherit from our ancestors, that we should go on hating something and being consistent only in hatred; being fickle and false in everything else, even in our reason for hating it? Are we really to settle down seriously to make up a new set of stories against the bulk of our fellow-Christians? Is that Protestantism; and is that worth comparing to patriotism or the sea?

Anyhow, that was the situation I found myself facing when I began to think of these things, the child of a purely Protestant ancestry and, in the ordinary sense, of a Protestant household. But as a fact my family, having become Liberal, was no longer Protestant. I was brought up a sort of Universalist and Unitarian; at the feet of that admirable man, Stopford Brooke. It was not Protestantism save in a very negative sense. Often it was the flat contrary of Protestantism, even in that sense. For instance, the Universalist did not believe in hell; and he was emphatic in saying that heaven was a happy state of mind—“a temper.” But he had the sense to see that most men do not live or die in a state of mind so happy that it will alone ensure them a heaven. If heaven is a temper, it is certainly not a universal temper; and a good many people pass through this life in a devil of a temper. If all these were to have heaven, solely through happiness, it seemed clear that something must happen to them first. The Universalist therefore believed in a progress after death, at once punishment and enlightenment. In other words, he believed in Purgatory; though he did not believe in Hell. Right or wrong, he obviously and flatly contradicted the Protestant, who believed in Hell but not in Purgatory. Protestantism, through its whole history, had waged ceaseless war on this one idea of Purgatory or Progress beyond the grave. I have come to see in the complete Catholic view much deeper truths on all three ideas; truths concerned with will and creation and God’s most glorious love of liberty. But even at the start, though I had no thought of Catholicism, I could not see why I should have any concern with Protestantism; which had always said the very opposite of what a Liberal is now expected to say.

I found, in plain words, that there was no longer any question of clinging to the Protestant faith. It was simply a question of whether I should cling to the Protestant feud. And to my enormous astonishment, I found a large number of my fellow Liberals eager to go on with the Protestant feud, though they no longer held the Protestant faith. I have no title to judge them; but to me, I confess, it seemed like a rather ugly breach of honour. To find out that you have been slandering somebody about something, to refuse to apologise, and to make up another more plausible story against him, so that you can carry on the spirit of the slander, seemed to me at the start a rather poor way of behaving. I resolved at least to consider the original slandered institution on its own merits and the first and most obvious question was: Why were Liberals so very illiberal about it? What was the meaning of the feud, so constant and so inconsistent? That question took a long time to answer and would now take much too long a time to record. But it led me at last to the only logical answer, which every fact of life now confirms; that the thing is hated, as nothing else is hated, simply because it is, in the exact sense of the popular phrase, like nothing on earth.

There is barely space here to indicate this one thing out of the thousand things that confirm the same fact and confirm each other. I would undertake to pick up any topic at random, from pork to pyrotechnics, and show that it illustrates the truth of the only true philosophy; so realistic is the remark that all roads lead to Rome. Out of all these I have here only taken one fact; that the thing is pursued age after age by an unreasonable hatred that is perpetually changing its reason. Now of nearly all the dead heresies it may be said that they are not only dead, but damned; that is, they are condemned or would be condemned by common sense, even outside the Church, when once the mood and mania of them is passed. Nobody now wants to revive the Divine Right of Kings which the first Anglicans advanced against the Pope. Nobody now wants to revive the Calvinism which the first Puritans advanced against the King. Nobody now is sorry that the Iconoclasts were prevented from smashing all the statues of Italy. Nobody now is sorry that the Jansenists failed to destroy all the dramas of France. Nobody who knows anything about the Albigensians regrets that they did not convert the world to pessimism and perversion. Nobody who really understands the logic of the Lollards (a much more sympathetic set of people) really wishes that they had succeeded in taking away all political rights and privileges from everybody who was not in a state of grace. “Dominion founded on Grace” was a devout ideal, but considered as a plan for disregarding an Irish policeman controlling the traffic in Piccadilly, until we have discovered whether he has confessed recently to his Irish priest, it is wanting in actuality. In nine cases out of ten the Church simply stood for sanity and social balance against heretics who were sometimes very like lunatics. Yet at each separate moment the pressure of the prevalent error was very strong; the exaggerated error of a whole generation, like the strength of the Manchester School in the ‘fifties, or of Fabian Socialism as a fashion in my own youth. A study of the true historical cases commonly shows us the spirit of the age going wrong, and the Catholics at least relatively going right. It is a mind surviving a hundred moods.

As I say, this is only one aspect; but it was the first that affected me and it leads on to others. When a hammer has hit the right nail on the head a hundred times, there comes a time when we think it was not altogether by accident. But these historical proofs would be nothing without the human and personal proofs, which would need quite a different sort of description. It is enough to say that those who know the Catholic practice find it not only right, but always right when everything else is wrong; making the Confessional the very throne of candour where the world outside talks nonsense about it as a sort of conspiracy; upholding humility when everybody is praising pride; charged with sentimental charity when the world is talking a brutal utilitarianism; charged with dogmatic harshness when the world is loud and loose with vulgar sentimentalism—as it is to-day. At the place where the roads meet there is no doubt of the convergence. A man may think all sorts of things, most of them honest and many of them true, about the right way to turn in the maze at Hampton Court. But he does not think he is in the centre; he knows.

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WHAT DO THEY THINK?

ALL science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive. The Catholic Church remains in the best sense a mystery even to believers. It would be foolish of them to complain if it is a riddle to unbelievers. But in a more practical sense we may well ask a question. What do they think it really is? What do they think we think it really is? What do they think it is all about, or even supposed to be all about? That problem becomes darker and darker for me, the more I stare at it. It becomes black as midnight, for instance, when I stare at such a sentence as I saw recently in TRUTH, a singularly intelligent and often a highly valuable paper. It stated that Rome tolerates, in her relation with the Russian Uniats, “strange heresies and even bearded and wedded clergy.”

In that one extraordinary phrase, what formless monster begins to take form in their visions? In those eight words it is not too much to say that every term is startling in its inconsequence. As somebody tumbling down the stairs bumps upon every step, the writer comes a crash upon every word. The word “strange” is strange enough. The word “heresy” is stranger. Perhaps at first sight the word “bearded,” with its joyous reminiscences of the game of Beaver, may appear the most funny. “Wedded” is also funny. Even the “and” between bearded and wedded is funny. But by far the funniest and most fantastic thing in all that fantastic sentence is the word “even.”

It is not everybody who can thus bestrew a page with comic conjunctions and farcical particles of speech. Only a wild unreason, about the whole way the thing hangs together, could thus make even the joints and hinges of that rickety statement rattle and creak with laughter. We can hardly say of this version of the Roman Catholic faith that it is a false version, or that it differs from the true version, or even that it differs from our version. What is the version; and how can it be even their version? There is in the world, they would tell us, a powerful and persecuting superstition, intoxicated with the impious idea of having a monopoly of divine truth, and therefore cruelly crushing and exterminating everything else as error. It burns thinkers for thinking, discoverers for discovering, philosophers and theologians who differ by a hair’s breadth from its dogmas; it will tolerate no tiny change or shadow of variety even among its friends and followers; it sweeps the whole world with one encyclical cyclone of uniformity; it would destroy nations and empires for a word, so wedded is it to its fixed idea that its own word is the Word of God. When it is thus sweeping the world, it comes to a remote and rather barbarous region somewhere on the borders of Russia; where it stops suddenly; smiles broadly; and tells the people there that they can have the strangest heresies they like. Strange heresies, by the standard of strangeness likely to exist in an experience so long as that of the Roman Church, may well be very strange indeed. The Church is no stranger to heresies that involved human sacrifice, or the worship of demons, or the practice of perversions. We might well suppose, therefore, that the Church says benevolently to these fortunate Slavs, “By all means worship Baphomet and Beelzebub; say the Lord’s Prayer backwards; continue to drink the blood of infants—nay, even,” and here her voice falters, till she rallies with an effort of generous resolution, “—yes, even, if you really must, grow a beard.” And then, I suppose, we must call up yet darker and more dreadful visions, of the heretic hiding himself in secret places, in caverns of witchcraft or sealed gardens of black magic, while the blasphemous beard is grown. Nobody explains why these particular Eastern Europeans should be regarded with so much favour, or why a number of long hairs on the chin should be regarded with so much disfavour. It is presumably a problem on which this intolerant spiritual tyranny will suffer no question to be asked.

Does the reader realise the despair that falls upon the hapless Catholic journalist at such moments; or how wild a prayer he may well send up for the intercession of St. Francis of Sales? What is he to say; or at what end of that sentence is he to begin? What is the good of his laboriously beginning to explain that a married clergy is a matter of discipline and not doctrine, that it can therefore be allowed locally without heresy—when all the time the man thinks a beard as important as a wife and more important than a false religion? What is the sense of explaining to him the peculiar historical circumstances that have led to preserving some local habits in Kiev or Warsaw, when the man at any moment may receive a mortal shock by seeing a bearded Franciscan walking through Wimbledon or Walham Green? What we want to get at is the mind of the man who can think so absurdly about us as to suppose we could have a horror of heresy, and then a weakness for heresy, and then a greater horror of hair. To what does he attribute all the inconsistent nonsense and inconsequent bathos that he associates with us? Does he think we are all joking; or all dreaming; or all out of our minds; or what does he think? Until we have got at that, we have really got very little further.

The notion that he merely thinks the Church is all nonsense is not very consistent with the way in which he talks about her in other aspects; as when he says she has always resisted such and such changes, which he perhaps approves; or that she can be counted on as an influence for such and such principles, which he perhaps dislikes; or that she is forbidden to accept this doctrine or committed to defending that. But what he can possibly suppose to be the principle upon which she accepts or rejects doctrines I never can imagine. And the more we really come in contact with the puzzle, the more we shall feel, I think, something quite unique and even creepy about it. It is like the old fable of the five blind men who tried to explore an elephant; a fable that used to be told as a sort of farce; but which I can well imagine being told by Maeterlinck or some modern mystic so as to make the flesh creep with mysteries. The thing is at once so obvious and so invisible; so public and so impalpable; so universal and so secret. They say so much about it; and they say so little. They see so much of it; and they see so little. There is a sort of colossal contradiction, such as can only be conceived between different dimensions or different planes of thought, in the coexistence of such familiar fact and such utterly unknown truth. Indeed, there is only one combination of words I know of, which ever did exactly express so huge a human and historical paradox; and they also are familiar and unfathomable: “The light shone in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.”

Some part of the difficulty is doubtless due to the odd way in which so many people are at once preoccupied with it and prejudiced against it. It is queer to observe so much ignorance with so little indifference. They love talking about it and they hate hearing about it. It would seem that they especially hate asking about it. If, for instance, a man contributing to TRUTH, in the middle of educated London, really were a little puzzled by Rome making an exception of the Uniats, and were perhaps especially puzzled by an exception to the celibacy of the clergy (I omit his dark and inscrutable broodings on the subject of Beavers) might it not have occurred to him to go and ask some Catholic priest, or for that matter, some Catholic layman, and thus gain some sort of rough idea of the relative importance attached in our system to celibacy and heresy and hair on the face? Could he not have gained a glimpse of the usual order or hierarchy of these ideas, which would have prevented him from writing the staggering word “and” or the stunning word “even”? But I am inclined to suspect that even this omission, negative as it may seem, has in it something deeper than mere negligence. I fancy that there is more than meets the eye in this curious controversial attitude; the desire to ask rhetorical questions and not to ask real questions; the wish to heckle and not to hear. It may well be connected with more mystical aspects of the whole question, on which I am certainly not going to speculate, since they are admittedly the most subtle problems of the trained theologian; all those questions about the will to believe and the operations of grace; and the fact that something more than reason is needed to bring any of us into the most reasonable of all philosophies.

But apart from these mysteries, I think there is another reason that is human and historical. The thing that causes Catholic philosophy to be neglected is the very thing that really makes it impossible to neglect. It is the fact that it was something left for dead; and now rather incredibly come to life. An ordinary man would not mind very much whether he knew the exact ritual with which Roman augurs examined the entrails of beasts or watched the movements of birds; because he is certain that the world will not go back to that Roman religion. The world was once almost as certain that it would not go back to this other Roman religion. A man would not be very much ashamed of having put the metals in the wrong order in the imaginary formula of an alchemist, described in a historical romance; because he is convinced that alchemists can only return in romance and can never return in history. There was a time when he felt quite as safe about abbots as about alchemists. That time has already passed. That mere confident contempt, as I have said, has already been succeeded by a rather restless curiosity. But mental habits overlap; and the dead momentum of the old disregard of facts goes along side by side with a new movement of anxiety about possibilities. They would not be so ignorant about it if they had not decided that it was dead. They would not be so irritated about it if they had not discovered that it was alive. For ignorance accumulates like knowledge; and these newly aroused critics are the inheritors of the accruing interest of four hundred years of an ignorance that became an indifference. At this moment they are no longer indifferent; but they are still ignorant. They have been awakened suddenly in the watches of the night, and what they see they can neither deny nor understand. For they see one that was dead walking; and the blaze of that living death blasts or obliterates all the older details of life; and all the fables they have believed and all the facts they have forgotten are alike swallowed up in the miracle they can neither believe nor forget.

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THE MASK OF THE AGNOSTIC

SIR ARTHUR KEITH, in his recent remarks on the soul, let the cat out of the bag. He let it out of that very prim and proper professional bag which is carried by the “medical man” whom he described as conscientiously compelled to assert that the life of the soul ceases with the breath of the body. Perhaps the figure which fits in so well with the bag is less fortunate in the case of the cat; a mystic animal, whose nine lives might rather be supposed to represent immortality, at least in the form of reincarnation. But anyhow, he let the cat out of the bag; in the sense of revealing a secret which such wise men would be wiser to keep. It is the secret that such scientists do not speak as scientists, but simply as materialists. That is, they do not give their conclusions, but simply their opinions; and a very shaky sort of opinions some of them are.

Not long ago, in his famous address on Anthropoids to the Congress at Leeds, Sir Arthur Keith said that he spoke simply as the foreman of a jury. It is true that he had not apparently consulted the jury; and it was rapidly made clear that the jury violently disagreed; which is unusual in a jury after the foreman has delivered the verdict. Still, in using this image he meant to claim complete impartiality of a judicial sort. He meant that a juryman is bound by oath to go entirely by the facts and the evidence, without fear or favour. And this effect would be a hundred times more effective if we were left free to imagine that the juryman’s personal sympathies might be on the other side; or at least, if we did not know that they were very keenly on the one side. Sir Arthur should have been careful to preserve the impression that, speaking strictly and solely as an anthropologist, he was forced to accept the natural selection of anthropoids. He should then have left it to be inferred that, merely as a private person, he might be yearning for seraphic visions and celestial hopes; he might be searching the Scriptures or awaiting the Apocalypse. For all it was any business of ours, or any business of anybody’s, he might be in private life a Mormon multiplying the stars in his heavenly crown or a Holy Roller continually convulsed by the Holy Ghost. The point was that the facts forced the Darwinian conclusion upon him. And a man of that sort, being forced to accept them, would be a real witness because a reluctant witness. In the trial of Darwin the man might feel for the plaintiff, but the juryman would be forced to find for the defendant.

And now Sir Arthur Keith has thrown the whole of that imperial impartiality away. He has gone out of his way to dogmatise and lay down the law about the soul; which has nothing to do with his subject, except in so far as it is everybody’s subject. But while it does not relate to what is his subject, it has told everybody which is his side. It has turned the foreman of the jury into a very unmistakable advocate for that side. Indeed, such a partisan is more like a party to the suit than an advocate; since it is the whole point that as a private person he has long had the private prejudice. Henceforth it is obvious that Keith deciding for Darwin is simply like Bradlaugh deciding for Darwin, or Ingersoll deciding for Darwin, or any atheist on a stool in Hyde Park deciding for Darwin. When THEY choose the side of natural selection, we can all agree that it is a very natural selection.

As to the conclusion itself, it seems almost incredibly inconclusive. Unless Sir Arthur Keith is very badly misreported, he specially stated that spiritual existence ceases with the physical functions; and that no medical man could conscientiously say anything else. However grave be the injury called death (which indeed is often fatal), this strikes me as a case in which it is quite unnecessary to call in a medical man at all. There is always a certain irony, even in the simple pages of my favourite detective stories, in the fact that everybody rushes for a doctor as soon as they are quite certain that a man is dead. But in the detective story there may at least be something to be learnt by the doctor from the dead body. In the doctrinal speculation there is nothing whatever; and it does but confuse the eternal detective story for the doctor of medicine to pretend to be a doctor of divinity. The truth is that all this business about “a medical man” is mere bluff and mystagogy. The medical man “sees” that the mind has ceased with the body. What the medical man sees is that the body can no longer kick, talk, sneeze, whistle or dance a jig. And a man does not need to be very medical in order to see that. But whether the principle of energy, that once made it kick, talk, sneeze, whistle and dance, does or does not still exist on some other plane of existence— a medical man knows no more about that than any other man. And when medical men were clear-headed, some of them (like an ex-surgeon named Thomas Henry Huxley) said they did not believe that medical men or any men could know anything about it. That is an intelligible position; but it does not seem to be Sir Arthur Keith’s position. He has been put up publicly to DENY that the soul survives the body; and to make the extraordinary remark that any medical man must say the same. It is as if we were to say that any competent builder or surveyor must deny the possibility of the Fourth Dimension; because he has learnt the technical secret that a building is measured by length, breadth and height. The obvious query is—Why bring in a surveyor? Everybody knows that everything is in fact measured by three dimensions. Anybody who thinks there is a fourth dimension thinks so in spite of being well aware that things are generally measured by three. Or it is as if a man were to answer a Berkeleian metaphysician, who holds all matter to be an illusion of mind, by saying, “I can call the evidence of an intelligent navvy who actually has to deal with solid concrete and cast iron; and he will tell you they are quite real.” We should naturally answer that we do not need a navvy to tell us that solid things are solid; and it is quite in another sense that the philosopher says they are not solid. Similarly, there is nothing to make a medical man a materialist, except what might make any man a materialist. And it is when a man has absorbed all that obvious materialism that he begins to use his mind. And, as some hold, does not stop.

This very unphilosophical irruption into philosophy was, however, in one way enlightening. It threw a light backwards on the speaker’s previous proclamation on things on which he has more right to speak. Even in those things he betrayed a curious simplicity common among such official scientists. The truth is that they become steadily less scientific and more official. They develop that thin disguise that is the daily wear of politicians. They perform before us the most artful tricks with the most artless transparency. It is like watching a child trying to hide something. They are perpetually trying to bluff us with big words and learned allusions; on the assumption that we have never learnt anything—even of their own funny little ways. Every leader-writer who thunders “Galileo” at us assumes that we know even less about Galileo than he does. Every preacher of popular science who throws a long word at us thinks we shall have to look it up in the dictionary and hopes we shall not study it seriously even in the encyclopaedia. Their use of science is rather like the use made of it by the heroes of certain adventure stories, in which the white men terrify the savages by predicting an eclipse or producing an electric shock. These are in a sense true demonstrations of science. They are in a sense right in saying that they are scientists. Where they are perhaps wrong is in supposing that we are savages.

But it is rather amusing for us who watch the preparations for giving us an electric shock, when we are seriously expected to be shocked by the shock. It is rather a joke when we, the benighted savages, are ourselves not only quite capable of predicting the eclipse, but capable of predicting the prediction. Now, among these facts that have been familiar to us for a long time is the fact that men of science stage and prepare their effects exactly as politicians do. They also do it rather badly—exactly as politicians do. Neither of these two modern mystagogues has yet realised how transparent his tricks have become. One of the most familiar and transparent of them is what is known as the “official contradiction.” It is a strange symbolic way of declaring that something has happened by denying that it has happened. So whitewashing reports are published after political scandals as regularly as bluebooks. So the Right Honourable Gentleman hopes it is not necessary for him to contradict what he feels sure the Honourable Member could not have intended to insinuate. So a Cabinet Minister is put up to deny from a platform that there is any change in the Government’s policy about Damascus. And so Sir Arthur Keith is put up to deny that there is any change in the scientific attitude about Darwin.

And when we hear that, we all give a sort of sigh of satisfaction; for we all know exactly what THAT means. It means more or less the opposite of what it says. It means that there has been a devil of a row about Damascus inside the Party, or, in other words, that there is beginning to be a devil of a scandal about discredited Darwinians inside the scientific world. The curious thing is that in the latter case the officials are not only solemn in uttering the official contradiction, but much more simple in supposing that nobody will realize that it is official. In the case of the similar legal fiction in politics, the politicians by this time not only know the truth, but often know that we know the truth. Everybody knows by this time, by the gossip that is repeated everywhere, exactly what is meant by the absolute agreement on everything which binds the Prime Minister and all his colleagues. The Prime Minister does not really expect us to believe that he is the holy and beloved king of a brotherhood of knights sworn to a faith and giving their hearts to him alone. But Sir Arthur Keith does really expect us to believe that he is the foreman of a jury containing all the different men of science, all absolutely agreed that Darwin’s particular opinion was “eternal.” That is what I mean by childish concealment; and the artless or transparent trick. That is why I say that they do not even know how much we know.

For the politician is less pompously absurd than the anthropologist, even if we test it by what they both call Progress; which is mostly only another word for Time. We all know the official optimism which always defends the present government. But this is like an official defence of all the past governments. If a man were to say that the politics of Palmerston were eternal, we should think him a little out of date. Yet Darwin was prominent at about the same date as Palmerston; and is quite equally dated. If Mr. Lloyd George were to get up and say that the great Liberal Party had not receded from one single position taken up by Gobden and Bright, the only true Tribunes of the People, we should reluctantly conclude (if such a thing be conceivable) that he was talking party claptrap to people ignorant of the history of the party. If a social reformer were to affirm solemnly that all social philosophy was still proceeding strictly on the principles of Herbert Spencer, we should know it was doing nothing of the sort, and that only an absolutely fossilized official could pretend that it was. Yet Darwin and Spencer were not only contemporaries but comrades and allies; and the Darwinian biology and the Spencerian sociology were regarded as parts of the same movement, which our grandfathers regarded as a very modern movement. Even considered a priori as a matter of probability it therefore seems rather unlikely that the science of that generation was any more infallible than its ethics and politics. Even on the principles Sir Arthur professes, it seems very queer that there should now be no more to be said about Darwinism than he said about it. But we do not need to appeal to those principles or those probabilities. We can appeal to the facts. As it happens, we do know something about the facts; and Sir Arthur Keith does not seem to know that we know.

It was in a Catholic paper that certain statements were made about Darwinism to-day; statements which Sir Arthur Keith himself went out of his way to contradict; and about which Sir Arthur Keith himself was proved sensationally and disastrously wrong. Probably the story is now known to all readers of that paper; but it will possibly never come to the knowledge of most other journalists, and it certainly will not be recorded in most of the other papers. Touching this cosmic controversy, most of the other papers are emphatically party papers; and they support the party leader when he publishes the official contradiction. They will not let the public know how triumphantly his other contradiction was contradicted.

When Mr. Belloc stated that these Darwinians were out of date and ignorant of recent biology, he quoted among a great many other recent authorities the French biologist Vialleton as denying the possibility of natural selection in a particular case connected with reptiles and birds. Sir Arthur Keith, coming to the rescue of Mr. H. G. Wells, and eager to prove that he and Mr. Wells were not out of date or ignorant of recent biology, proceeded to contradict Mr. Belloc flatly. He said that there was no such statement in Vialleton’s book; in other words, he accused Mr. Belloc of having misquoted or misrepresented Vialleton’s book. It then appeared, to the amazement of everybody, and especially of Mr. Belloc, that Sir Arthur Keith did not even know of the existence of the book. He was referring only to an early and elementary work by the same author published long ago. That was the last he had ever read of Vialleton. The important book, of which even I, a mere unscientific man in the street, had heard at least something, had never come to his ears at all. In short, the general charge, that Darwinians are out of date in their information, was proved about as completely as anything controversial can ever be proved in this world.

Now, when a thing like that has happened, above all when it has happened to us, in the pages of a paper in which I write, in the experience of one of my own friends, how can it be expected that people in our position should take seriously the speech at the opening of the British Association at Leeds? How can we keep a straight face when the President strikes an attitude as if pointing to the stars and declaring Darwinism equally eternal? That sort of thing is not meant for us; but for the reporters; just as the true story of Wells and Belloc is generally kept out of the reports.

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THE EARLY BIRD IN HISTORY

ST. JOAN OF ARC, a star and a thunderbolt, strange as a meteoric stone whose very solidity is not of this earth, may be compared also to a diamond among pebbles; the one white stone of history. Like a diamond, she is clear but not simple, as some count simplicity; but having many facets or aspects. There is one aspect of the discussion on St. Joan which I have never seen specially noted, and it seems to be worth a note. It concerns that common and current charge against the Catholic Church that she is, as the phrase goes, always behind the times.

When I became a Catholic, I was quite prepared to find that in many respects she really was behind the times. I was very tolerant of the idea of being behind the times, having had long opportunities of studying the perfectly ghastly people who were abreast of the times; or the still more pestilent people who were in advance of the times. I was prepared to find Catholicism rather Conservative, and in that sense slow; and so, of course, in some aspects it is. I knew that being in the movement generally meant only being in the fashion. I knew that fashions had an extraordinary way of being first omnipresent and oppressive and then suddenly blank and forgotten. I knew how publicity seems fixed like a spotlight and vanishes like a lightning-flash. I had seen the whole public imagination filled with a succession of Krugers and Kaisers, who were to be hanged next week and about whom nobody cared a hang next month. I have lived through an overwhelming illusion that there was nobody in the world except General Gordon or Captain Dreyfus or the elephant Jumbo at the Zoo. If there is something in the world that takes no notice of these world-changes, I confess to finding a certain comfort in its indifference. I think it was just as well, from every point of view, that the ecclesiastical authorities delayed a decision about Darwinism or even Evolution; and declined altogether to be excited in that universal excitement. There were many, even among the sympathetic, who seemed to think that Catholics ought to put up an altar to the Missing Link, as Pagans did to the Unknown God. But Catholics prefer to wait until they know what they are doing; and would prefer to learn a little more about a thing besides the fact that nobody can find it. And of course it is true that in some matters, judged by the feverish pace of recent fashion, the Church has always been slow as well as sure. But there is another side of the truth, and one which is more commonly missed. As it happens, both sides are strikingly illustrated in the story of the status of St. Joan.

If we go back to the very beginning of a story, we very often find that the Church did actually do something which her foes ignored and even her friends forgot. Then other social tendencies set in, other questions occupied the world, the tides of time and change passed over the whole business; and when that business came again to the surface, the world had the impression that the Church was dealing with it after a very long delay. But the world itself had never dealt with it at all. The world, as a matter of fact, had never woken up to the fact at all, until it woke up with a start and began to abuse the Church for not having woken up before. During all those long intervening ages, the world had really been much more asleep than the Church. The Church, a very long time ago, had done something; and the world had done nothing. The case of St. Joan of Arc is one curious example.

The Canonisation of St. Joan came very slowly and very late. But the Rehabilitation of St. Joan came very promptly and very early. It is a very exceptional example of rapid reparation for a judicial crime or a miscarriage of justice. There have been any number of these judicial crimes in history. There have been any number of heroes and martyrs whom history regards as having suffered for their virtues. It has almost passed into a popular proverb, especially in modern times; as in the words of the American popular poet: “Right for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne.” But I can hardly remember another example of the throne paying so prompt a salute to the scaffold. The condemnation of St. Joan was reversed by the Pope in the lifetime of her contemporaries, at the appeal of her brothers; about as soon as anybody could have expected anything of the sort to be reversed. I do not know if the Athenian Republic did as much for Socrates or the Florentine for Savonarola; but I am pretty certain that nobody could have got the Carthaginians to apologise thus to Regulus or the Antiochi to Maccabaeus. The only really fair way of considering the fashionable subject of the crimes of Christendom would be to compare them with the crimes of heathenism; and the normal human practice of the Pagan world. And while it may be a weakness of human beings, of every age and creed, to stone the prophets and then build their sepulchres, it is really very seldom that the sepulchre is built even as quickly as that. When those who build the sepulchre are really and truly the representatives or inheritors of those who threw the stones, it does not generally happen for hundreds of years. To take the parallel passions of the secular side of the Middle Ages, we should be considerably surprised to learn that when the head of William Wallace had been stuck on a spike by Edward the First, his remains had been respectfully interred and his character cleared by Edward the Third. We should be considerably surprised if the courts of Queen Elizabeth had gone out of their way to repudiate and quash the case against Thomas More. It is generally long afterwards, when the actual ambitions and rivalries are dead, when the feuds and family interests have long been forgotten, that a rather sentimental though sincere tenderness is shown to the dead enemy. In the nineteenth century the English do make a romance about Wallace and a statue of Washington. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the English do produce a fine enthusiasm and a number of excellent books about St. Joan. And I for one hope to see the day when this measure of magnanimity shall be filled up where it has been most wanting; and some such payment made for the deepest debt of all. I should like to see the day when the English put up a statue of Emmett beside the statue of Washington; and I wish that in the Centenary of Emancipation there were likely to be as much fuss in London about the figure of Daniel O’Connell as there was about that of Abraham Lincoln.

But I mean the comment here in a rather larger sense; and in a larger sense it is an even stronger case. I mean that if we take the tale of St. Joan as a test, the really remarkable thing is not so much the slowness of the Church to appreciate her, as the slowness of everybody else. The world, especially the wisest men of the world, were extraordinarily late in realising what a remarkable thing had happened; very much later than the rather rigid religious officials of the fifteenth century. That rigidity of fifteenth century religion was very soon broken up, partly by good and partly by bad forces. Comparatively soon after St. Joan’s ashes were thrown into the Seine, quite soon after the Rehabilitation, the Renaissance had really begun. Very soon after that the Reformation had begun. The Renaissance produced a number of large and liberal views on all sorts of things. The Reformation produced numberless narrow views, divided among all sorts of sects. But at least there were plenty of differences and varied points of view, many of them now loosened from anything that may have been restrictive in the medieval discipline. Human reason and imagination, left to themselves, might at least have made as much of Jeanne d’Arc as of John Huss. As a fact, human reason and imagination, left to themselves, made extraordinarily little of her. Humanism and Humanitarianism and, in a general sense, Humanity, did not really rehabilitate Joan until about five hundred years after the Church had done so.

The history of what great men have said about this great woman is a very dismal tale. The greatest man of all, Shakespeare, has an unfortunate pre-eminence by his insular insults in HENRY THE SIXTH. But the thing went on long after Shakespeare; and was far worse in people who had far less excuse than Shakespeare. Voltaire was a Frenchman; he was a great Frenchman; he professed an admiration for many French heroes; he certainly professed to be a reformer and a friend of freedom; he most certainly might have seized on any mediaeval miscarriage of justice that might be turned to anti-clerical account. What Voltaire wrote about St. Joan it will be most decent to pass over in silence. But it is the same all along the line; it is the same far later in rationalistic history than Voltaire. Byron had with all his faults a sensibility to the splendid and heroic, especially in the matter of nations struggling to be free. He was far less insular than any other English poet; he had far more comprehension of France and of the Continent; and he is still comprehended and admired there. He called St. Joan of Arc a fanatical strumpet. That was the general tone of human culture, of history as taught and talked in the age of reason. Mr. Belloc has noted that, so strong was this secular social pressure, that even a Catholic, when he wished to be moderate, like Lingard, was more or less sceptical, not indeed of the morality, but certainly of the miraculous mission of St. Joan. It is true that Schiller was sympathetic, though sentimental—and therefore out of touch. But it was not till nearly the end of the nineteenth century, not fully until the beginning of the twentieth century, that ordinary men of genius awoke to the recognition of one of the most wonderful women of genius in the history of the world. One of the first really popular attempts at a rationalist rehabilitation came, of all people in the world, from Mark Twain. His notion of the Middle Ages was as provincial as the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur; but it is to the credit of this rather crude genius, of the late culture of a new country, that he did catch the flame from the pyre of Rouen, which so many cultivated sceptics had found cold. Then came a patronising pamphlet by Anatole France; which I for one think rather more insulting than the ribald verse of Voltaire. Then came the last great attempt; wrong in many ways in its contention, but conspicuously spirited and sincere—the play of St. Joan. On the whole, nobody can say that humanists and rationalists have been very early in the field. This heroine had to wait about five centuries for Bernard Shaw.

Now, in that comparison, nobody can say that the Church comes off very badly in comparison with the world. The truth is that the ecclesiastical apology to the martyr came so early that everybody had forgotten all about it, long before the rest of the world began to consider the question at all. And though I have taken here the particular case of St. Joan of Arc, I believe that something of the same sort could be traced through a great many other affairs in human history.

It is true of those who gave the Jesuits a bad name and hanged them; and the hanging was not always metaphorical. The simplified version of it is to say that the Jesuits, especially in their capacity of Casuists, suffered almost entirely from being two hundred years before their time. They tried to start in a cautious way what is now surging up on every side of us in a chaotic way; all that is implied in talking about problem novels and problem plays. In other words, they recognised that there really are problems in moral conduct; not problems about whether the moral law should be obeyed, but problems about how in a particular case the moral law really applies. But they were not remembered as pioneers who had begun to ask the questions of Ibsen and Hardy and Shaw. They were remembered only as wicked conspirators who had not always believed in the Divine Right of Kings. They pioneered early enough to be execrated by an earlier generation; but too early to be thanked by a later generation. Protestants have eagerly supported Pascal against them, without taking the trouble to discover that any number of the things that Pascal denounced are things that any modern man would defend. For instance, Pascal blamed the infamous Jesuits for saying that a girl might in some conditions marry against the wish of her parents. The Jesuits would have had all modern novels, let alone problem novels, on their side. But they were too early in the field to have anybody on their side. Moreover, they wished to fit these exceptions into the moral rule; the Moderns who did it two centuries later have produced no rule, but a welter of exceptions.

Here, again, is yet another example that occurs to me at the moment. Many have given long histories of the laborious slowness with which the idea of justice to the aborigines, to Red Indians or such races, has advanced step by step with the progress of modern humanitarian ideas. In such a history Penn, the great Quaker, appears like a primeval founder and father of the republic; and he was undoubtedly very early in the field—in the Puritan field. But Las Casas, the Apostle of the Indians, actually sailed in a ship with Christopher Columbus. It would be difficult to be earlier in the American field than that. He spent his life pleading for the rights of the savages; but he did it at a time when nobody in the north would listen to such a story about a saint of Spain. In this and in many other examples, I believe that the real history of the Catholic pioneer has been the same; to be first and to be forgotten.

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PROTESTANTISM: A PROBLEM NOVEL

I HAVE been looking at the little book on Protestantism which Dean Inge has contributed to the sixpenny series of Sir Ernest Benn; and though I suppose it has already been adequately criticised, it may be well to jot down a few notes on it before it is entirely forgotten. The book, which is called “Protestantism,” obviously ought to be called “Catholicism.” What the Dean has to say about any real thing recognisable as Protestantism is extraordinarily patchy, contradictory and inconclusive. It is only what he has to say about Catholicism that is clear, consistent and to the point. It is warmed and quickened by the human and hearty motive of hatred; and it makes everything else in the book look timid and tortuous by comparison. I am not going to annotate the work considered as history. There are some curious, if not conscious, falsifications of fact, especially in the form of suppressions of fact. He begins by interpreting Protestantism as a mere “inwardness and sincerity” in religion; which none of the Protestant reformers would have admitted to be Protestantism, and which any number of Catholic reformers have made the very heart and soul of their reforms inside Catholicism. It might be suggested that self-examination is now more often urged and practised among Catholics than among Protestants. But whether or no the champions of sincerity examine themselves, they might well examine their statements. Some of the statements here might especially be the subject of second thoughts. It is really a startling suppression and falsification to say that Henry the Eighth had only a few household troops; so that his people must have favoured his policy, or they would have risen against it. It seems enough to reply that they did rise against it. And BECAUSE Henry had only a few household troops, he brought in bands of ferocious mercenaries from abroad to put down the religious revolt of his own people. It is an effort of charity to concede even complete candour to the story-teller, who can actually use such an argument, and then keep silent upon such a sequel. Or again, it is outrageously misleading to suggest that the Catholic victims of Tudor and other tyranny were justly executed as traitors and not as martyrs to a religion. Every persecutor alleges social and secular necessity; so did Caiaphas and Annas; so did Nero and Diocletian; from the first the Christians were suppressed as enemies of the Empire; to the last the heretics were handed over to the secular arm with secular justifications. But when, in point of plain fact, a man can be hanged, drawn and quartered merely for saying Mass, or sometimes for helping somebody who has said Mass, it is simply raving nonsense to say that a religion is not being persecuted. To mention only one of many minor falsifications of this kind, it is quite true to say that Milton was in many ways more of a Humanist than a Puritan; but it is quite false to suggest that the Milton family was a typical Puritan family, in its taste for music and letters. The very simple explanation is that the Milton family was largely a Catholic family; and it was the celebrated John who specially separated himself from its creed but retained its culture. Countless other details as definitely false could be quoted; but I am much more interested in the general scope of the work— which allows itself to be so curiously pointless about Protestantism, merely in order to make a point against Catholicism.

Here is the Dean’s attempt at a definition. “What is the main function of Protestantism? It is essentially an attempt to check the tendency to corruption and degradation which attacks every institutional religion.” So far, so good. In that case St. Charles Borromeo, for instance, was obviously a leading Protestant. St. Dominic and St. Francis, who purged the congested conventionalism of much of the monasticism around them, were obviously leading Protestants. The Jesuits who sifted legend by the learning of Bollandism, were obviously leading Protestants. But most living Protestant leaders are not leading Protestants. If degradation drags down EVERY institutional religion, it has presumably dragged down Protestant institutional religion. Protestants might possibly appear to purge Protestantism; but so did Catholics appear to purge Catholicism. Plainly this definition is perfectly useless as a DISTINCTION between Protestantism and Catholicism. For it is not a description of any belief or system or body of thought; but simply of a good intention, which all men of all Churches would profess and a few men in some Churches practise—especially in ours. But the Dean not only proves that modern Protestant institutions ought to be corrupt, he says that their primitive founders ought to be repudiated. He distinctly holds that we cannot follow Luther and Calvin.

Very well—let us go on and see whom we are to follow. I will take one typical passage towards the end of the book. The Dean first remarks, “The Roman Church has declared that there can be no reconciliation between Rome and modern Liberalism or Progress.” One would like to see the encyclical or decree in which this declaration was made. Liberalism might mean many things, from the special thing which Newman denounced and defined to the intention of voting at a by-election for Sir John Simon. Progress generally means something which the Pope has never, so far as I know, found it necessary to deny; but which the Dean himself has repeatedly and most furiously denied. He then goes on: “Protestantism is entirely free from this uncompromising preference for the Dark Ages.” “The Dark Ages,” of course, is cant and claptrap; we need take no notice of that. But we may perhaps notice, not without interest and amusement, that about twenty-five lines before, the Dean himself has described the popular Protestantism of America as if it were a barbarism and belated obscurantism. From which one may infer that the Dark Ages are still going on, exactly where there is Protestantism to preserve them. And considering that he says at least five times that the appeal of Protestants to the letter of Scripture is narrow and superstitious, it surely seems a little astonishing that he should sum up by declaring Protestantism, as such, to be “ENTIRELY free” from this sort of darkness. Then, on top of all this welter of wordy contradictions, we have this marvellous and mysterious conclusion: “It is in this direction that Protestants may look for the beginning of what may really be a new Reformation, a resumption of the unfinished work of Sir Thomas More, Giordano Bruno and Erasmus.”

In short, Protestants may look forward to a Reformation modelled on the work of two Catholics and one obscure mystic, who was not a Protestant and of whose tenets they and the world know practically nothing. One hardly knows where to begin, in criticising this very new Reformation, two-thirds of which was apparently started by men of the Old Religion. We might meekly suggest that, if it be regrettable that the work of Sir Thomas More was “unfinished,” some portion of the blame may perhaps attach to the movement that cut off his head. Is it possible, I wonder, that what the Dean really means is that we want a new Reformation to undo all the harm that was done by the old Reformation? In this we certainly have no reason to quarrel with him. We should be delighted also to have a new Reformation, of ourselves as well as of Protestants and other people; though it is only fair to say that Catholics did, within an incredibly short space of time, contrive to make something very like a new Reformation; which is commonly called the Counter-Reformation. St. Vincent de Paul and St. Francis of Sales have at least as good a right to call themselves inheritors of the courtesy and charity of More as has the present Dean of St. Paul’s. But putting that seventeenth century reform on one side, there is surely something rather stupendous about the reform that the Dean proposes for the twentieth century, and the patron saints he selects for it out of the sixteenth century.

For this, it seems, is how we stand. We are not to follow Luther and Calvin. But we are to follow More and Erasmus. And that, if you please, is the true Protestantism and the promise of a second Reformation. We are to copy the views and virtues of the men who found they could remain under the Pope, and especially of one who actually died for the supremacy of the Pope. We are to throw away practically every rag of thought or theory that was held by the people who did not remain under the supremacy of the Pope. And we are to bind up all these views in a little popular pamphlet with an orange cover and call them “Protestantism.” The truth is that Dean Inge had an impossible title and an impossible task. He had to present Protestantism as Progress; when he is far too acute and cultivated a man not to suspect that it was (as it was) a relapse into barbarism and a break away from all that was central in civilisation. Even by the test of the Humanist, it made religion inhuman. Even by the test of the liberal, it substituted literalism for liberalism. Even if the goal had been mere Modernism, it led its followers to it by a long, dreary and straggling detour, a wandering in the wilderness, that did not even discover Modernism till it had first discovered Mormonism. Even if the goal had been logical scepticism, Voltaire could reach it more rapidly from the school of the Jesuits than the poor Protestant provincial brought up among the Jezreelites. Every mental process, even the process of going wrong, is clearer in the Catholic atmosphere. Protestantism has done nothing for Dean Inge, except give him a Deanery which rather hampers his mental activity. It has done nothing for his real talent or scholarship or sense of ideas. It has not in history defended any of the ideas he defends, or helped any of the liberties in which he hopes. But it has done one thing: it has hurt something he hates. It has done some temporary or apparent harm to the heritage of St. Peter. It once made something that looked like a little crack in the wall of Rome. And because of THAT, the Dean can pardon anything to the Protestants—even Protestantism.

For this is the strange passion of his life; and he toils through all these pages of doubts and distinctions only for the moment when he can liberate his soul in one wild roar of monomaniac absurdity: “Let the innocent Dreyfus die in prison; let the Irishman who has committed a treacherous murder be told to leave ‘politics’ out of his confession; let the lucrative imposture of Lourdes…” That is the way to talk! It is so tiring, pretending to talk sense.

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A SIMPLE THOUGHT

MOST men would return to the old ways in faith and morals if they could broaden their minds enough to do so. It is narrowness that chiefly keeps them in the rut of negation. But this enlargement is easily misunderstood, because the mind must be enlarged to see the simple things; or even to see the self-evident things. It needs a sort of stretch of imagination to see the obvious objects against the obvious background; and especially the big objects against the big background. There is always the sort of man who can see nothing but the spot on the carpet, so that he cannot even see the carpet. And that tends to irritation, which he may magnify into rebellion. Then there is the kind of man who can only see the carpet, perhaps because it is a new carpet. That is more human, but it may be tinged with vanity and even vulgarity. There is the man who can only see the carpeted room; and that will tend to cut him off too much from other things, especially the servants’ quarters. Finally, there is the man enlarged by imagination, who cannot sit in the carpeted room, or even in the coal-cellar, without seeing all the time the outline of the whole house against its aboriginal background of earth and sky. He, understanding that the roof is raised from the beginning as a shield against sun or snow, and the door against frost or slime, will know better and not worse than the rest the reasons of the rules within. He will know better than the first man that there ought not to be a spot on the carpet. But he will know, unlike the first man, why there is a carpet.

He will regard in the same fashion a speck or spot upon the records of his tradition or his creed. He will not explain it ingeniously; certainly he will not explain it away. On the contrary, he will see it very simply; but he will also see it very largely; and against the background of larger things. He will do what his critics never by any chance do; he will see the obvious thing and ask the obvious question. For the more I read of the modern criticisms of religion, especially of my own religion, the more I am struck by this narrow concentration and this imaginative incapacity to take in the problem as a whole. I have recently been reading a very moderate condemnation of current Catholic practices, coming from America, where the condemnation is often far from moderate. It takes the form, generally speaking, of a swarm of questions, all of which I should be quite willing to answer. Only I am vividly conscious of the big questions that are not asked, rather than of the little questions that are.

And I feel above all, this simple and forgotten fact; that whether certain charges are or are not true of Catholics, they are quite unquestionably true of everybody else. It never occurs to the critic to do anything so simple as to compare what is Catholic with what is Non-Catholic. The one thing that never seems to cross his mind, when he argues about what the Church is like, is the simple question of what the world would be like without it.

That is what I mean by being too narrow to see the house called the church against the background called the cosmos. For instance, the writer of whom I speak indulges in the millionth mechanical repetition of the charge of mechanical repetition. He says that we repeat prayers and other verbal forms without thinking about them. And doubtless there are many sympathisers who will repeat that denunciation after him, without thinking about it at all. But, before we come to explaining the Church’s real teaching about such things, or quoting her numberless recommendations of attention and vigilance, or expounding the reason of the reasonable exceptions that she does allow, there is a wide, a simple and a luminous truth about the whole situation which anybody can see if he will walk about with his eyes open. It is the obvious fact that ALL human forms of speech tend to fossilise into formalism; and that the Church stands unique in history not as talking a dead language among everlasting languages; but, on the contrary, as having preserved a living language in a world of dying languages. When the great Greek cry breaks into the Latin of the Mass, as old as Christianity itself, it may surprise some to learn that there are a good many people in church who really do say KYRIE ELEISON and mean exactly what they say. But anyhow, they mean what they say rather more than a man who begins a letter with “Dear Sir” means what he says. “Dear” is emphatically a dead word; in that place it has ceased to have any meaning. It is exactly what the Protestants would allege of Popish rites and forms; it is done rapidly, ritually, and without any memory even of the meaning of the rite. When Mr. Jones the solicitor uses it to Mr. Brown the banker, he does not mean that the banker is dear to him, or that his heart is filled with Christian love, even so much as the heart of some poor ignorant Papist listening to the Mass. Now, life, ordinary, jolly, heathen, human life, is simply chockful of these dead words and meaningless ceremonies. You will not escape from them by escaping from the Church into the world. When the critic in question, or a thousand other critics like him, say that we are only required to make a material or mechanical attendance at Mass, he says something which is NOT true about the ordinary Catholic in his feelings about the Catholic Sacraments. But he says something which IS true about the ordinary official attending official functions, about the ordinary Court levee or Ministerial reception, and about three-quarters of the ordinary society calls and polite visits in the town. This deadening of repeated social action may be a harmless thing; it may be a melancholy thing; it may be a mark of the Fall of Man; it may be anything the critic chooses to think. But those who have made it, hundreds and hundreds of times, a special and concentrated charge against the Church, are men blind to the whole human world they live in and unable to see anything but the thing they traduce.

There are, even in this record, any number of other cases of this queer and uncanny unconsciousness. The writer complains that priests are led blindfold into their calling and do not understand the duties involved in it. That also we seem to have heard before. But we have seldom heard it in so extraordinary a form as in his statement, that a man can be finally committed to the priesthood while he is still “a child.” He would appear to have odd and elastic ideas about the duration of childhood. As Mr. Michael Williams has pointed out in his most thoughtful and illuminating collection of essays, “Catholicism and the Modern Mind,” this is playing about with a matter of plain fact; since a priest is twenty-four at the earliest when he takes his vows. But here again I myself am haunted by this huge and naked and yet neglected comparison between the Church and everything outside the Church. Most critics of Catholicism declare it to be destructive of patriotism; and this critic says something about the disadvantages of the Church being merely “attached to an Italian diocese.” Well, I for one have always been a defender of the cult of patriotism; and nothing that I say here has any connection with what is commonly called pacifism. I think that our friends and brethren fell ten years ago in a just war against the hard heathenism of the north; I think the Prussianism they defeated was frozen with the pride of hell; and for these dead, I think it is well with them; and perhaps better than with us, who live to see how evil Peace can be.

But really—when we come to talk about the Church involving young people in vows! What are we to say to those who would pit patriotism or pagan citizenship against the Church on that issue? They conscript by violence boys of eighteen, they applaud volunteers of sixteen for saying they are eighteen, they throw them by thousands into a huge furnace and torture-chamber, of which their imaginations can have conceived nothing and from which their honour forbids them to escape; they keep them in those horrors year after year without any knowledge even of the possibility of victory; and kill them like flies by the million before they have begun to live. That is what the State does; that is what the World does; that is what their Protestant, practical, sensible, secular society does. And after that they have the astounding impudence to come and complain of us, because in dealing with a small minority of specialists, we allow a man finally to choose a charitable and peaceful life, not only long after he is twenty-one, but when he is well on towards thirty, and after he has had about ten years to think quietly whether he will do it or not!

In short, what I miss in all these things is the obvious thing: the question of how the Church compares with the world outside the Church, or opposed to the Church, or offered as a substitute for the Church. And the fact obviously is that the world will do all that it has ever accused the Church of doing, and do it much worse, and do it on a much larger scale, and do it (which is worst and most important of all) without any standards for a return to sanity or any motives for a movement of repentance. Catholic abuses can be reformed, because there is the admission of a form. Catholic sins can be expiated, because there is a test and a principle of expiation. But where else in the world to-day is any such test or standard found; or anything except a changing mood, which makes patriotism the fashion ten years ago and pacifism the fashion ten years afterwards?

The danger is to-day that men will not sufficiently enlarge their minds to take in the obvious things; and this is one of them. It is that men charge the Roman tradition with being half-heathen and then take refuge from it in a complete heathenism. It is that men complain because Christians have been infected with paganism; and then flee from the plague-spotted to take refuge with the pestilence. There is no single one of these faults alleged against the Catholic institution, which is not far more flagrant and even flamboyant in every other institution. And it is to these other institutions, the State, the School, the modern machinery of taxation and police, to which these people actually look to save them from the superstition of their fathers. That is the contradiction; that is the crashing collision; that is the inevitable intellectual disaster in which they have already involved themselves; and we have only to wait as patiently as we can, to see how long it is before they realise what has happened.

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THE CALL TO THE BARBARIANS

A BOOK was sent me the other day by a gentleman who pins his faith to what he calls the Nordic race; and who, indeed, appears to offer that race as a substitute for all religions. Crusaders believed that Jerusalem was not only the Holy City, but the centre of the whole world. Moslems bow their heads towards Mecca and Roman Catholics are notorious for being in secret communication with Rome. I presume that the Holy Place of the Nordic religion must be the North Pole. What form of religious architecture is exhibited in its icebergs, how far its vestments are modified by the white covering of Arctic animals, how the morning and evening service may be adapted to a day and a night each lasting for six months, whether their only vestment is the alb or their only service the angelus of noon, upon all these mysteries I will not speculate. But I can affirm with some confidence that the North Pole is very little troubled by heretical movements or the spread of modern doubt. Anyhow, it would seem that we know next to nothing about this social principle, except that anything is good if it is near enough to the North. And this undoubtedly explains the spiritual leadership of the Eskimo throughout history; and the part played by Spitzbergen as the spiritual arena of modern times. The only thing that puzzles me is that the Englishmen who now call themselves Nordic used to call themselves Teutonic; and very often even Germanic. I cannot think why they altered this so abruptly in the autumn of 1914. Some day, I suppose, when we have diplomatic difficulties with Norway, they will equally abruptly drop the word Nordic. They will hastily substitute some other—I would suggest Borealic. They might be called the Bores, for short.

But I only mention this book because of a passage in it which is rather typical of the tone of a good many other people when they are talking about Catholic history. The writer would substitute one race for all religions; in which he certainly differs from us, who are ready to offer one religion to all races. And even here, perhaps, the comparison is not altogether to his advantage. For anybody who likes can belong to the religion; whereas it is not very clear what is to be done with the people who do not happen to belong to the race. But even among religions he is ready to admit degrees of depravity; he will distinguish between these disgusting institutions; of course, according to their degree of latitude. It is rather unfortunate for him that many Eskimos are Catholics and that most French Protestants live in the south of France; but he proceeds on his general principle clearly enough. He points out, in his pleasant way, why it is exactly that Roman Catholicism is such a degrading superstition. And he adds (which is what interests me at the moment) that this was illustrated in the Dark Ages, which were a nightmare of misery and ignorance. He then admits handsomely that Protestantism is not quite so debased and devilish as Catholicism; and that men of the Protestant nations do exhibit rudimentary traces of the human form. But this, he says, “is not due to their Protestantism, but to their Nordic common sense.” They are more educated, more liberal, more familiar with reason and beauty, because they are what used to be called Teutonic; descended from Vikings and Gothic chiefs rather than from the Tribunes of Florence or the Troubadours of Provence. And in this curious idea I caught a glimpse of something much wider and more interesting; which is another note of the modern ignorance of the Catholic tradition. In speaking of things that people do not know, I have mostly spoken of things that are really within the ring or circle of our own knowledge; things inside the Catholic culture which they miss because they are outside it. But there are some cases in which they themselves are ignorant even of the things outside it. They themselves are ignorant, not only of the centre of civilisation which they slander, but even of the ends of the earth to which they appeal; they not only cannot find Rome on their map, but they do not even know where to look for the North Pole.

Take, for instance, that remark about the Dark Ages and the Nordic common sense. It is tenable and tolerable enough to say that the Dark Ages were a nightmare. But it is nonsense to say that the Nordic element was anything remotely resembling sense. If the Dark Ages were a nightmare, it was very largely because the Nordic nonsense made them an exceedingly Nordic nightmare. It was the period of the barbarian invasions; when piracy was on the high seas and civilisation was in the monasteries. You may not like monasteries, or the sort of civilisation that is preserved by monasteries; but it is quite certain that it was the only sort of civilisation there was. But this is simply one of the things that the Nordic gentleman does not know. He imagines that the Danish pirate was talking about Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference, with scientific statistics from Australia and Alaska, when he was rudely interrupted by a monk named Bede, who had never heard of anything but monkish fables. He supposes that a Viking or a Visigoth was firmly founded on the principles of the Primrose League and the English Speaking Union, and that everything else would have been founded on them if fanatical priests had not rushed in and proclaimed the savage cult called Christianity. He thinks that Penda of Mercia, the last heathen king, was just about to give the whole world the benefits of the British Constitution, not to mention the steam engine and the works of Rudyard Kipling, when his work was blindly ruined by unlettered ruffians with such names as Augustine and Dunstan and Anselm. And that is the little error which invalidates our Nordic friend’s importance as a serious historian; that is why we cannot throw ourselves with utter confidence and surrender into the stream of his historical enthusiasm. The difficulty consists in the annoying detail that nothing like what he is thinking about ever happened in the world at all; that the religion of race that he proposes is exactly what he himself calls the Dark Ages. It is what some scientific persons call a purely subjective idea; or in other words, a nightmare. It is very doubtful if there ever was any Nordic race. It is quite certain that there never was any Nordic common sense. The very words “common sense” are a translation from the Latin.

Now that one typical or even trivial case has a larger application. One very common form of Protestant or rationalist ignorance may be called the ignorance of what raw humanity is really like. Such men get into a small social circle, very modern and very narrow, whether it is called the Nordic race or the Rationalist Association. They have a number of ideas, some of them truisms, some of them very untrue, about liberty, about humanity, about the spread of knowledge. The point is that those ideas, whether true or untrue, are the very reverse of universal. They are not the sort of ideas that any large mass of mankind, in any age or country, may be assumed to have. They may in some cases be related to deeper realities; but most men would not even recognise them in the form in which these men present them. There is probably, for instance, a fundamental assumption of human brotherhood that is common to all humanity. But what we call humanitarianism is not common to humanity. There is a certain recognition of reality and unreality which may be called common sense. But the scientific sense of the special value of truth is not generally regarded as common sense. It is silly to pretend that priests specially persecuted a naturalist, when the truth is that all the little boys would have persecuted him in any village in the world, merely because he was a lunatic with a butterfly-net. Public opinion, taken as a whole is much more contemptuous of specialists and seekers after truth than the Church ever was. But these critics never can take public opinion as a whole. There are a great many examples of this truth; one is the case I have given, the absurd notion that a horde of heathen raiders out of the northern seas and forests, in the most ignorant epoch of history, were not likely to be at least as ignorant as anybody else. They were, of course, much more ignorant than anybody with the slightest social connection with the Catholic Church. Other examples may be found in the story of other religions. Great tracts of the globe, covered in theory by the other religions, are often covered in practice merely by certain human habits of fatalism or pessimism or some other human mood. Islam very largely stands for the fatalism. Buddhism very largely stands for the pessimism. Neither of them knows anything of either the Christian or the humanitarian sort of hope. But an even more convincing experience is to go out into the street, or into a tube or a tram, and talk to the actual cabmen, cooks and charwomen cut off from the Creed by the modern chaos. You will find that heathens are not happy, however Nordic. You will soon find that you do not need to go to Arabia for fatalism; or to the Thibetan desert for despair.

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ON THE NOVEL WITH A PURPOSE

I SEE that Mr. Patrick Braybrooke and others, writing to the CATHOLIC TIMES, have raised the question of Catholic propaganda in novels written by Catholics. The very phrase, which we are all compelled to use, is awkward and even false. A Catholic putting Catholicism into a novel, or a song, or a sonnet, or anything else, is not being a propagandist; he is simply being a Catholic. Everybody understands this about every other enthusiasm in the world. When we say that a poet’s landscape and atmosphere are full of the spirit of England, we do not mean that he is necessarily conducting an Anti-German propaganda during the Great War. We mean that if he is really an English poet, his poetry cannot be anything but English. When we say that songs are full of the spirit of the sea, we do not mean that the poet is recruiting for the Navy or even trying to collect men for the merchant service. We mean that he loves the sea; and for that reason would like other people to love it. Personally, I am all for propaganda; and a great deal of what I write is deliberately propagandist. But even when it is not in the least propagandist, it will probably be full of the implications of my own religion; because that is what is meant by having a religion. So the jokes of a Buddhist, if there were any, would be Buddhist jokes. So the love-songs of a Calvinistic Methodist, should they burst from him, would be Calvinistic Methodist love-songs. Catholics have produced more jokes and love-songs than Calvinists and Buddhists. That is because, saving their holy presence, Calvinists and Buddhists have not got so large or human a religion. But anything they did express would be steeped in any convictions that they do hold; and that is a piece of common sense which would seem to be quite self-evident; yet I foresee a vast amount of difficulty about it in the one isolated case of the Catholic Church.

To begin with, what I have said would be true of any other real religion; but so much of the modern world is full of a religiosity that is rather a sort of unconscious prejudice. Buddhism is a real religion, or at any rate, a very real philosophy. Calvinism was a real religion, with a real theology. But the mind of the modern man is a curious mixture of decayed Calvinism and diluted Buddhism; and he expresses his philosophy without knowing that he holds it. We say what it is natural to us to say; but we know what we are saying; therefore it is assumed that we are saying it for effect. He says what it is natural to him to say; but he does not know what he is saying, still less why he is saying it. So he is not accused of uttering his dogma with the purpose of revealing it to the world; for he has not really revealed it to himself. He is just as partisan; he is just as particularist; he is just as much depending on one doctrinal system as distinct from another. But he has taken it for granted so often that he has forgotten what it is. So his literature does not seem to him partisan, even when it is. But our literature does seem to him propagandist, even when it isn’t.

Suppose I write a story, let us hope a short story, say, about a wood that is haunted by evil spirits. Let us give ourselves the pleasure of supposing that at night all the branches have the appearance of being hung with hundreds of corpses, like the orchard of Louis the Eleventh, the spirits of travellers who have hanged themselves when they came to that spot; or anything bright and cheery like that. Suppose I make my hero, Gorlias Fitzgorgon (that noble character) make the sign of the cross as he passes this spot; or the friend who represents wisdom and experience advise him to consult a priest with a view to exorcism. Making the sign of the cross seems to me not only religiously right, but artistically appropriate and psychologically probable. It is what I should do; it is what I conceive that my friend Fitzgorgon would do; it is also aesthetically apt, or, as they say, “in the picture.” I rather fancy it might be effective if the traveller saw with the mystical eye, as he saw the forest of dead men, a sort of shining pattern or silver tangle of crosses hovering in the dark, where so many human fingers had made that sign upon the empty air. But though I am writing what seems to me natural and appropriate and artistic, I know that the moment I have written it, a great roar and bellow will go up with the word “Propaganda” coming from a thousand throats; and that every other critic, even if he is kind enough to commend the story, will certainly add: “But why does Mr. Chesterton drag in his Roman Catholicism?”

Now let us suppose that Mr Chesterton has not this disgusting habit. Let us suppose that I write the same story, or the same sort of story, informed with a philosophy which is familiar and therefore unobserved. Let us suppose that I accept the ready-made assumptions of the hour, without examining them any more than the others do. Suppose I get into the smooth rut of newspaper routine and political catchwords; and make the man in my story act exactly like the man in the average magazine story. I know exactly what the man in the average magazine story would do. I can almost give you his exact words. In that case Fitzgorgon, on first catching a glimpse of the crowds of swaying spectres in the moon, will almost inevitably say: “But this is the twentieth century!”

In itself, of course, the remark is simply meaningless. It is far more meaningless than making the sign of the cross could ever be; for to that even its enemies attach some sort of meaning. But to answer a ghost by saying, “This is the twentieth century,” is in itself quite unmeaning; like seeing somebody commit a murder and then saying, “But this is the second Tuesday in August!” Nevertheless, the magazine writer who for the thousandth time puts these words into the magazine story, has an intention in this illogical phrase. He is really depending upon two dogmas; neither of which he dares to question and neither of which he is able to state. The dogmas are: first, that humanity is perpetually and permanently improving through the process of time; and, second, that improvement consists in a greater and greater indifference or incredulity about the miraculous. Neither of these two statements can be proved. And it goes without saying that the man who uses them cannot prove them, for he cannot even state them. In so far as they are at all in the order of things that can be proved, they are things that can be disproved. For certainly there have been historical periods of relapse and retrogression; and there certainly are highly organised and scientific civilizations very much excited about the super-natural; as people are about Spiritualism to-day. But anyhow, those two dogmas must be accepted on authority as absolutely true before there is any sense whatever in Gorlias Fitzgorgon saying, “But this is the twentieth century.” The phrase depends on the philosophy; and the philosophy is put into the story.

Yet nobody says the magazine story is propagandist. Nobody says it is preaching that philosophy because it contains that phrase. We do not say that the writer has dragged in his progressive party politics. We do not say that he is going out of his way to turn the short story into a novel with a purpose. He does not feel as if he were going out of his way; his way lies straight through the haunted wood, as does the other; and he only makes Gorlias say what seems to him a sensible thing to say; as I make him do what seems to me a sensible thing to do. We are both artists in the same sense; we are both propagandists in the same sense and non-propagandists in the same sense. The only difference is that I can defend my dogma and he cannot even define his.

In other words, this world of to-day does not know that all the novels and newspapers that it reads or writes are in fact full of certain assumptions, that are just as dogmatic as dogmas. With some of those assumptions I agree, such as the ideal of human equality implied in all romantic stories from CINDERELLA to OLIVER TWIST; that the rich are insulting God in despising poverty. With some of them I totally disagree; as in the curious idea of human inequality, which is permitted about races though not about classes. “Nordic” people are so much superior to “Dagoes,” that a score of Spanish desperados armed to the teeth are certain to flee in terror from the fist of any solitary gentleman who has learned all the military and heroic virtues in Wall Street or the Stock Exchange. But the point about these assumptions, true or false, is that they are felt as being assumed, or alluded to, or taken naturally as they come. They are not felt as being preached; and therefore they are not called propaganda. Yet they have in practice all the double character of propaganda; they involve certain views with which everyone does not agree; and they do in fact spread those views by means of fiction and popular literature. What they do not do is to state them clearly so that they can be criticised. I do not blame the writers for putting their philosophy into their stories. I should not blame them even if they used their stories to spread their philosophy. But they do blame us; and the real reason is that they have not yet realised that we have a philosophy at all.

The truth is, I think, that they are caught in a sort of argument in a circle. Their vague philosophy says to them: “All religion is dead; Roman Catholicism is a religious sect which must be particularly dead, since it consists of mere external acts and attitudes, crossings, genuflections and the rest; which these sectarians suppose they have to perform in a particular place at a particular time.” Then some Catholic will write a romance or a tragedy about the love of a man and woman, or the rivalry of two men, or any other general human affair; and they will be astonished to find that he cannot preach these things in an “unsectarian” way. They say, “Why does he drag in his religion?” They mean, “Why does he drag in his religion, which consists entirely of crossings, genuflections and external acts belonging to a particular place and time, when he is talking about the wide world and the beauty of woman and the anger and ambition of man?” In other words, they say, “When we have assumed that his creed is a small and dead thing, how dare he apply it as a universal and living thing? It has no right to be so broad, when we all know it is so narrow.”

I conclude therefore that, while Mr. Braybrooke was quite right in suggesting that a novelist with a creed ought not to be ashamed of having a cause, the more immediate necessity is to find some way of popularising our whole philosophy of life, by putting it more plainly than it can be put in the symbol of a story. The difficulty with a story is in its very simplicity and especially in its swiftness. Men do things and do not define or defend them. Gorlias Fitzgorgon makes the sign of the cross; he does not stop in the middle of the demon wood to explain why it is at once an invocation of the Trinity and a memorial of the Crucifixion. What is wanted is a popular outline of the way in which ordinary affairs are affected by our view of life, and how it is also a view of death, a view of sex, a view of social decencies, and so on. When people understood the light that shines for us upon all these facts, they would no longer be surprised to find it shining in our fictions.

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THE REVOLT AGAINST IDEAS

AT the time when the DAILY EXPRESS communiques provided some pretty awful revelations about Mexico, the DAILY EXPRESS correspondence column provided almost equally awful revelations about England. It gave us a glimpse of what monstrous and misshapen things are still living in our midst, veiled in red brick villas or disguised under bowler hats. The awful revelations about England were, of course, mainly psychological. It was not anarchy in the State, which is the failing of the fighting Latin peoples. It was anarchy in the mind, which is the special character of those whom we call, in moments of anger, Anglo-Saxons. A Mexican atheist would be quite capable of cutting the throat of a priest or training a cannon on a nunnery. But he would be quite incapable of arguing, as the English Protestants did in the newspaper, that it was quite right of Calles to persecute this belief on this occasion, because it was quite wrong of Catholics to persecute any belief on any occasion. No anarchist can be as anarchical as all that. Calles might blow up a St. Peter’s but he would not blame a Spaniard for having once done what he was praising a Mexican for trying to do. To that extent even Calles is more of a Catholic as well as more of a Latin. He wants to have his own way, and to prevent thousands of people from having their way; but he does not want to have it both ways. That wild sacrament, the miracle of the vanishing and reappearing cake, of the cake that is ever devoured and ever remaining—that miracle belongs to the religion of unreason and only takes place in the chapels of our own free country.

Amid a welter of such words there was a phrase in one of the letters which is of some sociological interest to us. One of these intolerant tolerationists was endeavouring to defend Calles by suggesting that only prejudice can accuse him of anarchical or anti-religious extremes of opinion. It is quite unfair (it was said) to call Calles an atheist or a Bolshevist. Indeed, we may learn from all these letters that Calles is probably a Wesleyan Methodist and regularly attends a chapel in East Croydon. But he is even worse. They appear to regard it as a favour to Calles to pay him the extraordinary compliment of comparing him to the sixteenth century Reformers. The correspondent here in question uses this as an argument against any alleged anarchism in the Mexican—if he is a Mexican. “Calles and his partisans are branded as Atheists and Bolsheviks—Why? Were the English Reformers Bolsheviks? Certainly not.”

Here we are happily all able to agree. With heartfelt unanimity we can repeat, “Certainly not.” The English Reformers were certainly not Bolshevists. None will withhold the handsome admission that the English Reformers were Capitalists. Few people in history have deserved to be described so exactly, so completely, so typically as Capitalists. They were a great many other things besides Capitalists; some of them were cads, some gentlemen, a few honest men, many thieves, a baser sort courtiers, a better sort monomaniacs; but they were all Capitalists and what they created was Capitalism. They all conducted their powerful political operations on a basis of much accumulated capital; but they never, even with their dying eyes, lost the light of hope and expectation; the promise and the vision of more capital.

But what concerns us nowadays is this; that it is their Capitalism that has remained. As a matter of fact, many of them did have other ideals of spiritual simplification which might in some ways be compared to Communism. We should never be likely to call a man like Cranmer or a man like Burleigh a Bolshevist. We could only say, with Hamlet, that we would he were so honest a man. But there were men in that movement, or that muddle, who were as mad and as honest as Bolshevists. There were theoretical, and especially theological enthusiasms which moved specially towards simplicity; like that of the Bolshevists. But the point to fix and rivet is that THOSE theories are dead. There was a logical and even lofty scheme of thought; but it is that which is utterly abandoned by modern thought. There were sincere ideals in some of the early Protestants; but they are not the ideals of any of the modern Protestants. Thus Calvinism was a clear philosophy; which is alone enough to distinguish it from Modern Thought. But in so far as they had an element of Calvinism, their Calvinism is dead. If they had had an element of Communism, as some of them might, that Communism would now be dead. Nothing but their Capitalism is alive.

We must remember that even to talk of the corruption of the monasteries is a compliment to the monasteries. For we do not talk of the corruption of the corrupt. Nobody pretends that the mediaeval institutions began in mere greed and pride. But the modern institutions did. Nobody says that St. Benedict drew up his rule of labour in order to make his monks lazy; but only that they became lazy. Nobody says that the first Franciscans practised poverty to obtain wealth; but only that later fraternities did obtain wealth. But it is quite certain that the Cecils and the Russells and the rest did from the first want to obtain wealth. That which was death to Catholicism was actually the birth of Capitalism. Since then we have had, not the inconsistency that a man who vowed to be poor became rich; but rather a shocking consistency, that the man who vowed to be rich became richer. After that there was no stopping a race of relative ambition; and a belief in bigger and bigger things. It is indeed true that the Reformers were not Communists. It might be aptly retorted that the Religious were Communists. But the more vital point is not Communism, but a certain comparative spirit. The English squire increased and the English yeoman diminished. Both found their pride in private ownership of land. But the pride was more and more in having a great estate, and not in having an estate. So, in his turn, the English shopkeeper ceased to be proud of minding his own business and could only be proud of the number of businesses he could mind. From this has come all the mercantile megalomania to-day; with its universal transformation of Trades into Trusts. It is the natural conclusion of the movement away from the transformation of all Trades into Guilds. But its genesis was the change from an ideal of humility, in which many failed, to an ideal of pride in which (by its nature) only a few can succeed.

In this sense we may agree with the newspaper correspondent; that the Reformers were not Revolutionists. We can reassure that simple gentleman of our full realisation that they were not Bolshevists. We can entirely absolve the Cranmers and the Cromwells of any restless desire to raise the proletariat. We can clear the great names of Burleigh and Bacon of the stain of any dangerous sympathy with the poor. The distinguishing mark of the Reformers was a profound respect for the powers that be, but an even profounder respect for the wealth that was to be; and a really unfathomable reverence for the wealth that was to be their own. Some people like that spirit, and regard it as the soundest foundation of stable government; we need not argue about it here. It is, broadly speaking, what is regarded as respectability by all those who have nothing else to respect. Certainly nobody could confuse it with revolution. But the point of historical importance could be put in another fashion, also more or less favourable to the Reformers. Capitalism was not only solid, it was in a sense candid. It set up a class to be worshipped openly and frankly because of its wealth. That is the point at the moment and the real contrast between this and the older mediaeval order. Such wealth was the abuse of the monks and abbots; it was the use of the merchants and the squires. The avaricious abbot violated his ideals. The avaricious employer had no ideals to violate. For there never has been, properly speaking, such a thing as the ideal good of Capitalism; though there are any number of good men who are Capitalists following other ideals. The Reformation, especially in England, was above all the abandonment of the attempt to rule the world by ideals, or even by ideas. The attempt had undoubtedly failed, in part, because those who were supposed to be the idealists failed to uphold the ideals; and any number of people who were supposed to accept the general idea thwarted the fulfilment of the ideas. But it also fell under the attack of those who hated, not only those ideals, but any ideals. It was the result of the impatient and imperious appetites of humanity, hating to be restrained by bonds; but most of all to be restrained by invisible bonds. For the English Reformers did not really set up an opposite ideal or an alternative set of ideas. As our friend truly said, they were not Bolshevists. They set up certain very formidable things called facts. They set out almost avowedly to rule the realm merely by facts; by the fact that somebody called Russell had two hundred times more money than any of his neighbours; by the fact that somebody called Cecil had obtained the power of having any of his neighbours hanged. Facts are at least solid while they last; but the fatal thing about them is that they do not last. It is only the ideas that last. And to-day a man may be called Russell and have considerably less money than a man who is called Rockefeller; and history may see the amazing spectacle of a man called Cecil largely thrust out of practical politics and called an idealist and a failure.

The same progress of Capitalism that made the squires has destroyed the squires. The same commercial advance that exalted England before Europe has abased England before America. Exactly in so far as we have our affections healthily attached to this adventurous and patriotic England of the last few centuries, we shall see that our affections and attachments are bound to be betrayed. The process called practical, the attempt to rule merely by facts, has in its own nature the essence of all betrayal. We discover that facts, which seem so solid, are of all things the most fluid. As the professors and the prigs say, facts are always evolving; in other words, they are always evading or escaping or running away. Men who bow down to the wealth of a squire, because it enables him to behave like a gentleman, have to go on bowing down to the same wealth in somebody who cannot behave like a gentleman; and eventually perhaps to the same wealth not attached to any recognisable human being at all, but invested in an irresponsible company in a foreign country. Wealth does indeed take to itself wings, and even abide in the uttermost parts of the sea. Wealth becomes formless and almost fabulous; indeed, they were unconscious satirists who talked about “fabulous wealth.” Great financiers buy and sell thousands of things that nobody has ever seen; and which are for all practical purposes imaginary. So ends the adventure of trusting only to facts; it ends in a fairyland of fantastic abstractions.

We must go back to the idea of government by ideas. There is just that grain of truth in the already mentioned fantasy of Communism. But there were many richer, and subtler and better balanced ideas even in the mediaeval make-up of Catholicism. I repeat that this Catholicism was ruined by Catholics as well as Protestants. Mediaeval sins hampered and corrupted mediaeval ideas, before the Reformers decided to throw away all ideas. But that was the right thing to follow, or to try to follow; and there is not and never will be anything else to do except to try again. Many mediaeval men failed in the attempt to live up to those ideals. But many more modern men are more disastrously failing in the attempt to live without them. And through that failure we shall gradually come to understand the real advantages of that ancient scheme which only partly failed; according to which, in theory at least, the man of peace was higher than the man of war, and poverty superior to wealth.

There is one quaint little phrase in Macaulay’s essay on Bacon; that great outbreak of the Philistines against the Philosophers. In one small sentence the great Philistine betrays the weakness of his whole argument of utility. Speaking scornfully of the Schoolmen, he says that St. Thomas Aquinas would doubtless (such was his simplicity) have thought it more important to engage in the manufacture of syllogisms than in the manufacture of gunpowder. Not even the Gunpowder Plot could prevent that sturdy Protestant from assuming that gunpowder is always useful. Since his time we have seen a good deal more gunpowder. One does not need to be a pacifist to think that gunpowder need hardly go on being useful on quite such a grand scale. And a great part of the world has now reached a mood of reaction, in which it is disposed to cry out, “If there are any syllogisms that will save us from all this gunpowder, for God’s sake let us listen to them.” Even logic they are prepared, in their despair, to accept. They will not only listen to religion, they will even perhaps listen to reason, if it will promise them a little peace.

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THE FEASTS AND THE ASCETIC

I WAS reflecting in the course of the recent feast of Christmas (which, like other feasts, is preceded by a fast) that the combination is still a puzzle to many. The Modernist, or man who boasts of being modern, is generally rather like a man who overeats himself so much on Christmas Eve that he has no appetite on Christmas Day. It is called being In Advance of the Times; and is incumbent upon all who are progressive, prophetic, futuristic and generally looking towards what Mr. Belloc calls the Great Rosy Dawn: a dawn which generally looks a good deal rosier the night before than it does the morning after.

To many people, however, who are not offensively in advance of the times the combination of these ideas does seem to be a sort of contradiction or confusion. But in real fact it is not only not so confused, but even not so complicated. The great temptation of the Catholic in the modern world is the temptation to intellectual pride. It is so obvious that most his critics are talking without in the least knowing what they are talking about, that he is sometimes a little provoked towards the very un-Christian logic of answering a fool according to his folly. He is a little bit disposed to luxuriate in secret, as it were over the much greater subtlety and richness of the philosophy he inherits; and only answer a bewildered barbarian so as to bewilder him still more. He is tempted to ironical agreements or even to disguising himself as a dunce. Men who have an elaborate philosophical defence of their views sometimes take pleasure in boasting of their almost babyish credulity. Having reached their own goal through labyrinths of logic, they will point the stranger only to the very shortest short cut of authority; merely in order to shock the simpleton with simplicity. Or, as in the present case, they will find a grim amusement in presenting the separate parts of the scheme as if they were really separate; and leave the outsider to make what he can of them. So when somebody says that a fast is the opposite to a feast, and yet both seem to be sacred to us, some of us will always be moved merely to say, “Yes,” and relapse into an objectionable grin. When the anxious ethical enquirer says, “Christmas is devoted to merry-making, to eating meat and drinking wine, and yet you encourage this pagan and materialistic enjoyment,” you or I will be tempted to say, “Quite right, my boy,” and leave it at that. When he then says, looking even more worried, “Yet you admire men for fasting in caves and deserts and denying themselves ordinary pleasures; you are clearly committed, like the Buddhists, to the opposite or ascetic principle,” we shall be similarly inspired to say, “Quite correct, old bean,” or “Got it first time, old top,” and merely propose an adjournment for convivial refreshment.

Nevertheless, it is a temptation to be resisted. Not only is it obviously our duty to explain to the other people that what seems to them contradictory is really complementary, but we are not altogether justified in any such tone of superiority. We are not right in making our geniality an expression of our despair. We are not entitled to despair of explaining the truth; nor is it really so horribly difficult to explain. The real difficulty is not so much that the critic is crude as that we ourselves are not always clear, even in our own minds, far less in our public expositions. It is not so much that they are not subtle enough to understand it, as that they and we and everybody else are not simple enough to understand it. Those two things are obviously part of one thing, if we are straightforward enough to look at the thing; and to see it simply as it is. I suggested recently that people would see the Christian story if it could only be told as a heathen story. The Faith is simply the story of a God who died for men. But, queerly enough, if we were even to print the words without a capital G, as if it were the cult of some new and nameless tribe, many would realise the idea for the first time. Many would feel the thrill of a new fear and sympathy if we simply wrote, “the story of a god who died for men.” People would sit up suddenly and say what a beautiful and touching pagan religion that must be.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Church is out of the question; that we have nothing but the earth and the children of man pottering about on it, with their normal mortal tales and traditions. Then suppose there appears on this earth a prodigy, a portent, or what is alleged to be a portent. In some way heaven has rent the veil or the gods have given some new marvel to mankind. Suppose, for instance, it is a fountain of magic water, said to be flowing at the top of a mountain. It blesses like holy water; it heals diseases; it inspires more than wine, or those who drink of it never thirst again. Well, this story may be true or false; but among those who spread it as true, it is perfectly obvious that the story will produce a number of other stories. It is equally obvious that those stories will be of two kinds. The first sort will say: “When the water was brought down to the valley there was dancing in all the villages; the young men and maidens rejoiced with music and laughter. A surly husband and wife were sprinkled with the holy water and reconciled, so that their house was full of happy children. A cripple was sprinkled and he went capering about gaily like an acrobat. The gardens were watered and became gay with flowers,” and so on. It is quite equally obvious that there will be another sort of story from exactly the same source, told with exactly the same motive. “A man limped a hundred miles, till he was quite lame, to find the sacred fountain. Men lay broken and bleeding among the rocks on the mountainside in their efforts to climb after it. A man sold all his lands and the rivers running through them for one drop of the water. A man refused to turn back from it, when confronted with brigands, but was tortured and died calling for it,” and so on. There is nothing in the least inconsistent between these two types of legend. They are exactly what would naturally be expected, given the original legend of the miraculous fountain. Anyone who can really look at them simply, can see that they are both equally simple. But we in our time have confused ourselves with long words for unreal distinctions; and talking incessantly about optimism and pessimism, about asceticism and hedonism, about what we call Paganism and what we think about Buddhism, till we cannot understand a plain tale when it is told. The Pagan would have understood it much better.

This very simple truth explains another fact that I have heard the learned insist on with some excitement: the emphasis and repetition touching the ascetic side of religion. It is exactly what would happen with any human story, even if it were a heathen story. We remark upon the case of the man who starves to get the water more than on the case of the man who is merely glad to get the water. We remark upon it more because it is more remarkable. Any human tradition would make more of the heroes who suffered for something than of the human beings who simply benefited by it. But that does not alter the fact that there are more human beings than heroes; and that this great majority of human beings has benefited by it. It is natural that men should marvel more at the man who deliberately lames himself than at the man who dances when he is no longer lame. But that does not alter the fact that the countries where that legend prevails are, in fact, full of dancing. I have here only suggested how very simple, after all, is the contradiction between austerity and jollity which puzzles our critics so much. There is a higher application of it to ascetics, which I may consider on another occasion. Here I will only hint at it by saying: “The more a man could LIVE only on the water, the more he would prove it to be the water of life.”

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WHO ARE THE CONSPIRATORS?

I CAME across, more or less indirectly, the other day, a lady of educated and even elegant pretensions, of the sort whom her foes would call luxurious and her friends cultured, who happened to mention a certain small West Country town, and added with a sort of hiss that it contained “a nest of Roman Catholics.” This apparently referred to a family with which I happen to be acquainted. The lady then said, her voice changing to a deep note of doom, “God alone knows what is said and done behind those closed doors.”

On hearing this stimulating speculation, my mind went back to what I remembered of the household in question, which was largely concerned with macaroons, and a little girl who rightly persuaded herself that I could eat an almost unlimited number of them. But when I contrasted that memory with that vision it was brought suddenly and stunningly to my mind what a vast abyss still yawns between us and many of our countrymen, and what extraordinary ideas are still entertained about us, by people who walk about the world without keepers or strait-waistcoats and are apparently, on all other subjects, sane. It is doubtless true, and theologically sound, to say that God alone knows what goes on in Catholic homes; as it is to say that God alone knows what goes on in Protestant heads. I do not know why a Catholic’s doors should be any more closed than anybody else’s doors; the habit is not unusual in persons of all philosophical beliefs when retiring for the night; and on other occasions depends on the weather and the individual taste. But even those who would find it difficult to believe that an ordinary Catholic is so eccentric as to bolt and padlock himself in the drawing-room or the smoking-room, whenever he strolls into those apartments, do really have a haunting idea that it is more conceivable of a Catholic than of a Calvinistic Methodist or a Plymouth Brother. There does remain the stale savour of a sort of sensational romance about us; as if we were all foreign counts and conspirators. And the really interesting fact is that this absurd melodrama can be found among educated people; though now rather in an educated individual than in an educated class. The world still pays us this wild and imaginative compliment of imagining that we are much less ordinary than we really are. The argument, of course, is the one with which we are wearily familiar in twenty other aspects; the argument that because the evidence against us cannot be produced, it must have been concealed. It is obvious that Roman Catholics do not generally shout to each other the arrangements of a St. Bartholomew Massacre across the public streets; and the only deduction any reasonable man can draw is that they do it behind closed doors. It is but seldom that the project of burning down London is proclaimed in large letters on the posters of the UNIVERSE; so what possible deduction can there be, except that the signals are given at the private tea-table by means of a symbolical alphabet of macaroons? It would be an exaggeration to say that it is my daily habit to leap upon aged Jews in Fleet Street and tear out their teeth; so, given my admitted monomania on the subject, it only remains to suppose that my private house is fitted up like a torture chamber for this mode of mediaeval dentistry. Catholic crimes are not plotted in public, so it stands to reason that they must be plotted in private. There is indeed a third remote and theoretical alternative; that they are not plotted anywhere; but it is unreasonable to expect our fellow-countrymen to suggest anything so fanciful as that.

Now this mysterious delusion, still far commoner than many suppose even in England, and covering whole interior spaces of America, happens to be another illustration of what I have been suggesting in an earlier essay; the fact that those who are always digging and prying for secret things about us, have never even glanced at the most self-evident things about themselves. We have only to ask ourselves, with a sort of shudder, what would have been said if we really had confessed to conspiracy as shamelessly as half our accusers have confessed to it themselves. What in the world would be said, either in America or in Europe, if we really had behaved like a secret society, in places where the groups of our enemies cannot even deny that they are secret societies? What in the world would happen if a Catholic Congress at Glasgow or Leeds really consisted entirely of hooded and white-robed delegates, all with their faces covered and their names unknown, looking out of slits in their ghastly masks of white? Yet this was, until just lately, the rigid routine of the great American organisation to destroy Catholicism; an organisation which recently threatened to seize all government in America. What would have been said, if there really was a definite, recognised, but entirely unknown thing, called the Secret of the Catholics; as there has been for long past a recognised but unknown reality called the Secret of the Freemasons? I dare say a great deal involved in such things is mere harmless foolery. But if we had done such things, would our critics have said it was harmless foolery? Suppose we had started to spread the propaganda of the Faith by means of a movement called “Know Nothing,” because we were in the habit of always shaking our heads and shrugging our shoulders and swearing that we knew nothing of the Faith we meant to spread. Suppose our veneration for the dignity of St. Peter were wholly and solely a veneration for the denial of St. Peter; and we used it as a sort of motto or password to swear that we knew not Christ. Yet that was admittedly the policy of a whole political movement in America, which aimed at destroying the citizenship of Catholics. Suppose that the Mafia and all the murderous secret associations of the Continent had been notoriously working on the Catholic side, instead of the other side. Should we ever have heard the last of it? Would not the world have rung with indignant denunciation of a disgrace clinging to all our conduct, and a treason that must never be forgot? Yet these things are done constantly, and at regular intervals, and right down to the present day, by the Anti-Catholic parties; and it is never thought necessary to recall them, or say a word of apology for them, in the writings of any Anti-Catholic partisan. It would be just our Jesuitical way to dare to look over hedges, when everybody else is only stealing horses.

In short, what I recently said of bigotry is even more true of secrecy. In so far as there is something merely antiquated about a certain type of doctrinal narrowness, it is much more characteristic of Dayton, Tennessee, than of Louvain or Rome. And in the same way, in so far as there is something antiquated about all these antics in masks and cloaks, it has been much more characteristic of the Ku Klux Klan than of the Jesuits. Indeed, this sort of Protestant is a figure of old-fashioned melodrama in a double sense and in a double aspect. He is antiquated in the plots he attributes to us and in the plots that he practises himself.

As regards the latter, it is probable that the whole world will discover this fact a long time before he does. The anti-clerical will go on playing solemnly the pranks of Cagliostro, like a medium still blindfolded in broad daylight; and will open his mouth in mysteries long after everybody in the world is completely illuminated about the illuminati. And though the almost half-witted humour of the American society, which seemed to consist entirely of beginning as many words as possible with KL, has been rather abruptly toned down by a reaction of relative sanity, I have no doubt that there is still many a noble Nordic fellow going about hugging himself over the happy secret that he is a Kleagle or a Klemperor, long after everybody has ceased to klare a klam whether he is or not. On the political side the power of these conspiracies has been practically broken in both Continents; in Italy by the Fascists and in America by a rally of reasonable and public-spirited governors of both political parties. But the point of historical interest remains: that it was the very people who accused us of mummery and mystery who surrounded all their secularising activities with far more fantastic mysteries and mummeries; that they had not even the manhood to fight an ancient ritual with the appearance of republican simplicity, but boasted of hiding everything in a sort of comic complexity; even when there was nothing to hide. By this time such movements as the Ku Klux Klan have very little left which can be hidden or which is worth hiding; and it is therefore probable that our romantic curiosity about them will be considerably colder than their undying romantic curiosity about us. The Protestant lady will continue to resent the fact that God does not share with her his knowledge of the terrible significance of tea and macaroons in the Catholic home. But we shall probably in the future feel a fainter and fainter interest in whatever it is that Kleagues do behind closed— or perhaps I should say Klosed Doors.

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THE HAT AND THE HALO

PERHAPS it is a little ungenerous to refer again to the fiasco of the unfortunate Bishop of Birmingham, when he made an exhibition of himself on the subject of St. Francis. That he should be unable to restrain himself from attacking one whom so many free-thinkers have loved and reverenced is interesting as showing how far sectarians can go. But the tone of the attack raises a question more interesting than the personal one. It may be called broadly the question of Sentiment; but it involves the whole question of what things in life are deep and what things shallow; what is central and what is merely external. It is needless to say that people like the Bishop invariably and instinctively get them the wrong way round.

For instance, he said something to the effect that people are now seeing St. Francis in a halo of false sentiment, or through a haze of false sentiment. I am not sure which he said and I doubt whether he knew which he meant. If the Bishop had a halo it would probably be rather like a haze. But anyhow he implied that the hero-worship of St. Francis was a sort of external and extraneous thing, a dazzling distraction or a distorting medium, something added to his figure afterwards; whereas the facts about the real St. Francis were quite different and decidedly repulsive to a refined person. Well, the poor Bishop got all his facts about St. Francis quite wrong; and his claim to talk about the REAL St. Francis, even in an ordinary historical sense, was pretty rapidly shown up. But there was something behind it which interests me much more. It is the curious trick of turning everything inside out; so that the really central things become external and the merely external things central. The inmost soul of St. Francis is a haze of false sentiment; but the accidents of his historical setting, as viewed by people without any historical sense, are a sort of dreadful secret of his soul.

According to this sort of criticism, St. Francis had a great soul; which was merely a cloak for a miserable body. It is sentimental to consider what he felt like. But it is realistic to consider what he looked like. Or rather it is realistic to consider what he would have looked like to the best-dressed people in Birmingham who never saw him, or the fashionable tailor in Bond Street who never had the opportunity of making him a suit of clothes. The critic tells us what some hypothetical suburban snob of the twentieth century would have thought of the Saint he never saw; and THAT is the real truth about the Saint. We can tell him what the Saint would have thought of the suburban snob (and his thoughts would have been full of the simple and spontaneous tenderness which he showed to all small and helpless creatures) but that is only sentiment about St. Francis. What St Francis himself felt about all other creatures is only a misleading and artificial addition to his character. But what some of the most limited and least imaginative of those creatures might possibly think about him, or rather about his clothes or his meals—that alone is reality.

When the admirers of St. Francis, who number myriads of Protestants and Agnostics as well as Catholics, say that they admire that great man, they mean that they admire his mind, his affections, his tastes, his point of view. They mean that, like any other poet, he puts them in a position to view the world in a certain way; and that life looked at from his mental standpoint is more inspiring or intelligible. But when the Bishop tells them that they do not know the facts about St. Francis, he does not mean that St. Francis had some other mind or some other standpoint. He means that St. Francis did not have hot and cold water laid on in the bathroom, did not put on a clean collar every morning, did not send a sufficient number of shirts to the Birmingham Imperial Laundry every week, did not have black mud smeared on his boots or white mud to stiffen his shirt front, and all the rest of it. And THAT is what he calls the truth about St. Francis! Everything else, including everything that St. Francis did do, is a haze of sentiment.

That is the deeper problem of which this foolish affair happens to be an illustration. How are we to make these superficial people understand that we are not being sentimental about St. Francis, that we are not presenting an elegant and poetical picture of St. Francis; that we are not presenting irresponsible emotional ravings about St. Francis; that we are simply presenting St. Francis? We are presenting a remarkable mind; just as Plato presented a remarkable mind, whether it was his own or somebody else’s. We think no more of Bishop Barnes and his nonsense than a Platonist would think about some joke in Aristophanes about Socrates catching fleas. There may have been people who saw that mind through a haze of false sentiment; there were people who saw it through a haze of exaggerated enthusiasm; like those heretics who made St. Francis greater than Christ and the founder of a new dispensation. But even those fanatics were more like philosophers than a gentleman who is content to say either of a true saint or a false god, that his taste in linen and steam laundries was “not ours.” In short, the true situation is simple and obvious enough. It is we who are thinking about the real Francis Bernadone, even the realistic Francis Bernadone, the actual man whose mind and mood we admire. It is the critic who is thinking of the unreal Francis, a fantastic phantom produced by looking at him in a Bond Street looking-glass or comparing him with the fashion-plates of 1926. If it is well for a man to be happy, to have the way of welcoming the thing that happens and the next man that comes along, then St. Francis was happy; happier than most modern men. If it be good that a man should be sympathetic, should include a large number of things in his imaginative sympathy, should have a hospitality of the heart for strange things and strange people, then St. Francis was sympathetic; more sympathetic than most modern men. If it be good that a man should be original, should add something creative and not merely customary or conventional, should do what he thinks right in his own way and without fear of worldly consequences in ruin or starvation, then St. Francis was original; more original than most modern men. All these are tests at once personal and permanent; they deal with the very essence of the ego or individual and they are not affected by changes in external fashion. To say that these things are mere sentiment is to say that the inmost sense of the inmost self is mere sentiment. And yet how are we to stop superficial people from calling it mere sentiment? How are we to make them realise that it is not we who have a sentimental attachment to a mediaeval friar, but they who have an entirely sentimental attachment to certain modern conventions?

Such critics have never really thought of asking what they mean by “sentiment,” still less what they mean by “false sentiment.” “False” is simply a conventional term of abuse to be applied to “sentiment”; and “sentiment” is simply a conventional term of abuse to be applied to Catholicism. But it is very much more applicable nowadays to Protestantism. It is especially applicable to Bishop Barnes’s own rather nebulous type of Protestantism. Men of his school always complain of our thinking too much of theology, just as they complained a few centuries before of our thinking too little of theology. But theology is only the element of reason in religion; the reason that prevents it from being a mere emotion. There are a good many broad-minded persons for whom it is only an emotion; and it would hardly be unfair to say it is only a sentiment. And we have not to look far for them in cases like these.

If a school of critics were found prepared to pay divine honours to a certain person while doubting whether he was divine, men who took off their hats in his churches while denying that he was present on his altars, who hinted that he was only a religious teacher and then hinted again that he must be served as if he were the only teacher of religion; who are always ready to treat him as a fallible individual in relation to his rivals, and then to invoke him as an infallible authority against his followers, who dismiss every text they choose to think dogmatic and then gush over every text they choose to think amiable, who heckle him with Higher Criticism about three-quarters of what he said and then grovel before a mawkish and unmanly ideal made by misunderstanding the little which is left—if there were a school of critics in THIS relation to a historical character, we might very well admit that they were not getting to grips with it, but surrounding it with “a halo of false sentiment.”

That is the vital distinction. At least we do not admit sentiment as a substitute for statement; still less as a contradiction of something that we state. There may be devotional expressions that are emotional, and even extravagantly emotional; but they do not actually distort any definition that is purely intellectual. But in the case of our critics, the confusion is in the intellect. We do not claim that all our pictorial or poetical expressions are adequate; but the fault is in the execution not in the conception. And there is a conception which is not a confusion. We do not say that every pink and blue doll from an Art Repository is a satisfactory symbol of the Mother of God. But we do say that it is less of a contradiction than exists in a person who says there is no Original Sin in anybody, and then calls it Mariolatry to say there was no Original Sin in Mary. We do not profess to admire the little varnished pictures of waxen angels or wooden children around the Communion Table. But we do most strongly profess and proclaim that they are less of a blot on the intellectual landscape than a bishop who suggests that the Host may actually be the divine Presence, but that High Church curates will do his lordship a personal favour if they take no notice of it. We are under no illusions about the literary quality of a large number of hymns in our hymn-books, or any other hymn-books. But we modestly submit that though they are doggerel they are not nonsense; and that saying that we can assert a personal God, a personal immortality, a personal divine love that extends to the least and worst, and do all this without holding “a Creed,” IS nonsense. We know that the nearest sane agnostic or atheist would agree that it is nonsense. Devotional art and literature are often out of balance or broken in expression; sometimes because the emotion is too real and too strong for the reason, the same thing which makes the love-letters of the wisest men like the letters of lunatics; sometimes from a real deficiency in the individual power of reason; but never from a theoretical repudiation of reason, like that of the Pragmatists and about three-quarters of the Modernists. And in the same way it is the very reverse of the truth to say that a mere emotional distortion of the facts has drawn the modern mind towards St. Francis. It is, on the contrary, emphatically an attraction of mind to mind; and the more purely mental the process, the less it will be interrupted by ignorant irritation against the strangeness of Italian manners or mediaeval conditions. And in this case there is no international problem. Thousands of Englishmen who know nothing but England glow with love and understanding of St. Francis. We may well feel an unaffected pity for the one unlucky Englishman who cannot understand.

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ON TWO ALLEGORIES

PERHAPS it is only fair that the modern iconoclasm should be applied also to the ancient iconoclasts; and especially to the great Puritans, those idol-breakers who have long been idols. Mr. Belloc was recently tapping the Parliamentary statue of Cromwell with a highly scientific hammer; and Mr. Noyes has suddenly assailed the image of Bunyan with something more like a sledge-hammer. In the latter case I confess to thinking the reaction excessive; I should say nothing worse of Bunyan than of many old writers; that he is best known by his best passages, and that many, who fondly believe they have read him, would be mildly surprised at some of his worst passages. But that is not peculiar to Bunyan; and I for one should be content with saying what I said some years ago. A fair and balanced view of the culture and creeds involved can best be reached by comparing the Pilgrimage of Christian with the Pilgrimage of Piers Plowman. The Puritan allegory is much neater (even if it be not always neat) than the rather bewildering mediaeval medley. The Puritan allegory is more national, in the sense that the language and style have obviously become clearer and more fixed. But the Puritan allegory is certainly much narrower than the mediaeval allegory. Piers Plowman deals with the death or resurrection of a whole human society, where men are members of each other. In the later work schism has “isolated the soul”; and it is certainly mere individualism, when it is not mere terrorism. But I will only say now what I said then; I do not want to damage the statue of John Bunyan at Bedford, where it stands facing (symbolically in more ways than one) the site of his own prison. But I do wish there were a statue of John Langland, uplifted on a natural height into a more native air, and looking across all England from the Malvern hills.

But there is one intellectual side issue of the debate that does interest me very much. Mr. James Douglas, who once presented himself to me as a representative of Protestant truth, and who is certainly a representative of Protestant tradition, answered Mr. Alfred Noyes in terms very typical of the present state of that tradition. He said that we should salute Bunyan’s living literary genius, and not bother our heads about Bunyan’s obsolete theology. Then he added the comparison which seems to me so thought-provoking: that this is after all what we do, when we admire Dante’s genius and not HIS obsolete theology. Now there is a distinction to be made here; if the whole modern mind is to realize at all where it stands. If I say that Bunyan’s theology IS obsolete, but Dante’s theology is NOT obsolete—then I know the features of my friend Mr. Douglas will be wreathed in a refined smile of superiority and scorn. He will say that I am a Papist and therefore of course I think the Papist dogmatism living. But the point is that he is a Protestant and he thinks the Protestant dogmatism dead. I do at least defend the Catholic theory because it can be defended. The Puritans would presumably be defending the Puritan theory— if it could be defended. The point is that it is dead for them as much as for us. It is not merely that Mr. Noyes demands the disappearance of a disfigurement; it is that Mr. Douglas says it cannot be a disfigurement because it has already disappeared. Now the Thomist philosophy, on which Dante based his poetry has not disappeared. It is not a question of faith but of fact; anybody who knows Paris or Oxford, or the worlds where such things are discussed, will tell you that it has not disappeared. All sorts of people, including those who do not believe in it, refer to it and argue against it on equal terms.

I do not believe, for a fact, that modern men so discuss the seventeenth century sectarianism. Had I the privilege of passing a few days with Mr. Douglas and his young lions of the DAILY EXPRESS, I doubt not that we should discuss and differ about many things. But I do rather doubt whether Mr. Douglas would every now and again cry out, as with a crow of pure delight “Oh, I must read you this charming little bit from Calvin.” I do rather doubt whether his young journalists are joyously capping each other’s quotations from Toplady’s sermons on Calvinism. But eager young men do still quote Aquinas, just as they still quote Aristotle. I have heard them at it. And certain ideas are flying about, even in the original prose of St. Thomas, as well as in the poetry of Dante—or, for that matter, of Donne.

The case of Bunyan is really the opposite of the case of Dante. In Dante the abstract theory still illuminates the poetry; the ideas enlighten even where the images are dark. In Bunyan it is the human facts and figures that are bright; while the spiritual background is not only dark in spirit, but blackened by time and change. Of course it is true enough that in Dante the mere images are immensely imaginative. It is also true that in one sense some of them are obsolete; in the sense that the incidents are obsolete and the personal judgment merely personal. Nobody will ever forget how there came through the infernal twilight the figure of that insolent troubadour, carrying his own head aloft in his hand like a lantern to light his way. Everybody knows that such an image is poetically true to certain terrible truths about the unnatural violence of intellectual pride. But as to whether anybody has any business to say that Bertrand de Born is damned, the obvious answer is No. Dante knew no more about it than I do: only he cared more about it; and his personal quarrel is an obsolete quarrel. But that sort of thing is not Dante’s theology, let alone Catholic theology.

In a word; so far from his theology being obsolete, it would be much truer to say that everything is obsolete except his theology. That he did not happen to like a particular Southern gentleman is obsolete; but that was at most a private fancy, in demonology rather than theology. We come to theology when we come to theism. And if anybody will read the passage in which Dante grapples with the gigantic problem of describing the Beatific Vision, he will find it is uplifted into another world of ideas from the successful entry to the Golden City at the end of the Pilgrim’s Progress. It is a Thought; which a thinker, especially a genuine freethinker, is always free to go on thinking. The images of Dante are not to be worshipped, any more than any other images. But there is an idea behind all images; and it is before that, in the last lines of the Paradiso, that the spirit of the poet seems first to soar like an eagle and then to fall like a stone.

There is nothing in this comparison that reflects on the genius and genuineness of Bunyan in his own line or class; but it does serve to put him in his own class. I think there was something to be said for the vigorous denunciation of Mr. Noyes; but no such denunciation is involved in this distinction. On the contrary, it would be easy to draw the same distinction between two men both at the very top of all literary achievement. It would be true to say, I think, that those who most enjoy reading Homer care more about an eternal humanity than an ephemeral mythology. The reader of Homer cares more about men than about gods. So, as far as one can guess, does Homer. It is true that if those curious and capricious Olympians did between them make up a religion, it is now a dead religion. It is the human Hector who so died that he will never die. But we should remonstrate with a critic who, after successfully proving this about Homer, should go on to prove it about Plato. We should protest if he said that the only interest of the Platonic Dialogues to-day is in their playful asides and very lively local colour, in the gay and graceful picture of Greek life; but that nobody troubles nowadays about the obsolete philosophy of Plato. We should point out that there is no truth in the comparison; and that if anything the case is all the other way. Plato’s philosophy will be important as long as there is philosophy; and Dante’s religion will be important as long as there is religion. Above all it will be important as long as there is that lucid and serene sort of religion that is most in touch with philosophy. Nobody will say that the theology of the Baptist tinker is in that sense serene or even lucid; on many points it necessarily remains obscure. The reason is that such religion does not do what philosophy does; it does not begin at the beginning. In the matter of mere chronological order, it is true that the pilgrimage of Dante and that of Bunyan both end in the Celestial City. But it is in a very different sense that the pilgrimage of Bunyan begins in the City of Destruction. The mind of Dante, like that of his master St. Thomas, really begins as well as ends in the City of Creation. It begins as well as ends in the burning focus in which all things began. He sees his series from the right end, though he then begins it at the wrong end. But it is the whole point of a personal work like THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS that it does begin with a man’s own private sins and private panic about them. This intense individualism gives it great force; but it cannot in the nature of things give it great breadth and range. Heaven is haven; but the wanderer has not many other thoughts about it except that it is haven. It is typical of the two methods, each of them very real in its way, that Dante could write a whole volume, one-third of his gigantic epic, describing the things of Heaven; whereas in the case of Bunyan, as the gates of Heaven open the book itself closes.

I think it worth while to write this note on the critical remark of Mr. James Douglas, because it is a remark that would be made as readily by many other intelligent men to-day. But it is founded on a fallacy; on the idea that the choice between living philosophies and dead philosophies is the same as the choice between old philosophies and new. It is not true of Plato and it is not true of Dante; and, apart from whatever is our own philosophy, we should realise that some of the most ancient are the most alive.

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THE PROTESTANT SUPERSTITIONS

THAT delightful guessing game, which has long caused innocent merriment in so many Catholic families, the game of guessing at exactly which line of an article say on Landscape or Latin Elegiacs, we shall find the Dean of St. Paul’s introducing the Antidote to Antichrist; or the Popish Plot Revealed—that most familiar of our Catholic parlour games happened to be entertaining me some time ago, as a sort of substitute for a crossword puzzle, when I found I had hit on a very lucky example. I wrote above about “Catholic families,” and had almost, by force of associations written “Catholic firesides.” And I imagine that the Dean really does think that even in this weather we keep the home-fires burning, like the fire of Vesta, in permanent expectation of relighting the fires of Smithfield. Anyhow, this sort of guessing game or crossword puzzle is seldom disappointing. The Dean must by this time have tried quite a hundred ways of leading up to his beloved topic; and even concealing it, like a masked battery, until he can let loose the cannonade in a perfect tornado of temper. Then the crossword puzzle is no longer a puzzle, though the crosswords are apparent and appropriate enough; especially those devoted to the great historical process of crossing out the Cross.

In the case of this particular article, it was only towards the end of it that the real subject was allowed to leap out from an ambush upon the reader. I think it was a general article on Superstition; and, being a journalistic article of the modern type, it was of course devoted to discussing superstition without defining superstition. In an article of that enlightened sort, it seemed enough for the writer to suggest that superstition is anything that he does not happen to like. Some of the things are also things that I do not happen to like. But such a writer is not reasonable even when he is right. A man ought to have some more philosophical objection to stories of ill luck than merely calling them credulity; as certainly as a man ought to have some more philosophical objection to Mass than to call it Magic. It is hardly a final refutation of Spiritualists to prove that they believe in Spirits; any more than a refutation of Deists to prove that they believe in Deity. Creed and credence and credulity are words of the same origin and can be juggled backwards and forwards to any extent. But when a man assumes the absurdity of anything that anybody else believes, we wish first to know what he believes; on what principle he believes; and, above all, upon what principle he disbelieves. There is no trace of anything so rational in the Dean’s piece of metaphysical journalism. If he had stopped to define his terms, or in other words to tell us what he was talking about, such an abstract analysis would of course have filled up some space in the article. There might have been no room for the Alarum Against the Pope.

The Dean of St. Paul’s got to business, in a paragraph in the second half of his article, in which he unveiled to his readers all the horrors of a quotation from Newman; a very shocking and shameful passage in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his religion, and in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that he likes to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and beloved, that there is a sense of being protected by prayers, sacramentals and so on; and that happiness of this sort satisfies the soul. The Dean, having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the Cardinal’s spiritual condition, drops the curtain with a groan and says it is Paganism. How different from the Christian orthodoxy of Plotinus!

Now it was exactly that little glimpse that interested me in this matter; not so much a glimpse into the soul of the Cardinal as into the mind of the Dean. I suddenly seemed to see, in much simpler form than I had yet realised, the real issue between him and us. And the curious thing about the issue is this; that what he thinks about us is exactly what we think about him. What I for one feel most strongly, in considering a case like that of the Dean and his quotation from the Cardinal, is that the Dean is a man of distinguished intelligence and culture, that he is always interesting, that he is sometimes even just, or at least justified or justifiable; but that he is first and last the champion of a Superstition; the man who is really and truly defending a Superstition, as it would be understood by people who could define a Superstition. What makes it all the more amusing is that it is in a rather special sense a Pagan Superstition. But what makes it most intensely interesting, so far as I am concerned, is that the Dean is devoted to what may be called par excellence a superstitious Superstition. I mean that it is in a special sense a LOCAL superstition.

Dean Inge is a superstitious person because he is worshipping a relic; a relic in the sense of a remnant. He is idolatrously adoring the broken fragment of something; simply because that something happens to have lingered out of the past in the place called England; in the rather battered form called Protestant Christianity. It is as if a local patriot were to venerate the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham only because she was in Walsingham and without even remembering that she was in Heaven. It is still more as if he venerated a fragment chipped from the toe of the statue and forgot where it came from and ignored Our Lady altogether. I do not think it superstitious to respect the chip in relation to the statue, or the statue in relation to the saint, or the saint in relation to the scheme of theology and philosophy. But I do think it superstitious to venerate, or even to accept, the fragment because it happens to be there. And Dean Inge does accept the fragment called Protestantism because it happens to be there.

Let us for a moment consider the whole matter as philosophers should; in a universal air above all local superstitions like the Dean’s. It is quite obvious that there are three or four philosophies or views of life possible to reasonable men; and to a great extent these are embodied in the great religions or in the wide field of irreligion. There is the atheist, the materialist or monist or whatever he calls himself, who believes that all is ultimately material, and all that is material is mechanical. That is emphatically a view of life; not a very bright or breezy view, but one into which it is quite possible to fit many facts of existence. Then there is the normal man with the natural religion, which accepts the general idea that the world has a design and therefore a designer; but feels the Architect of the Universe to be inscrutable and remote, as remote from men as from microbes. That sort of theism is perfectly sane; and is really the ancient basis of the solid if somewhat stagnant sanity of Islam. There is again the man who feels the burden of life so bitterly that he wishes to renounce all desire and all division, and rejoin a sort of spiritual unity and peace from which (as he thinks) our separate selves should never have broken away. That is the mood answered by buddhism and by many metaphysicians and mystics. Then there is a fourth sort of man, sometimes called a mystic and perhaps more properly to be called a poet; in practice he can very often be called a pagan. His position is this; it is a twilight world and we know not where it ends. If we do not know enough for monotheism, neither do we know enough for monism. There may be a borderland and a world beyond; but we can only catch hints of it as they come; we may meet a nymph in the forest; we may see the fairies on the mountains. We do not know enough about the natural to DENY the preternatural. That was, in ancient times, the healthiest aspect of Paganism. That is, in modern times, the rational part of Spiritualism. All these are possible as general views of life; and there is a fourth that is at least equally possible, though certainly more positive.

The whole point of this last position might be expressed in the line of M. Cammaerts’s beautiful little poem about bluebells; LE CIEL EST TOMBE PAR TERRE. Heaven has DESCENDED into the world of matter; the supreme spiritual power is now operating by the machinery of matter, dealing miraculously with the bodies and souls of men. It blesses all the five senses; as the senses of the baby are blessed at a Catholic christening. It blesses even material gifts and keepsakes, as with relics or rosaries. It works through water or oil or bread or wine. Now that sort of mystical materialism may please or displease the Dean, or anybody else. But I cannot for the life of me understand why the Dean, or anybody else, does not SEE that the Incarnation is as much a part of that idea as the Mass; and that the Mass is as much a part of that idea as the Incarnation. A Puritan may think it blasphemous that God should become a wafer. A Moslem thinks it blasphemous that God should become a workman in Galilee. And he is perfectly right, from his point of view; and given his primary principle. But if the Moslem has a principle, the Protestant has only a prejudice. That is, he has only a fragment; a relic; a superstition. If it be profane that the miraculous should descend to the plane of matter, then certainly Catholicism is profane; and Protestantism is profane; and Christianity is profane. Of all human creeds or concepts, in that sense, Christianity is the most utterly profane. But why a man should accept a Creator who was a carpenter, and then worry about holy water, why he should accept a local Protestant tradition that God was born in some particular place mentioned in the Bible, merely because the Bible had been left lying about in England, and then say it is incredible that a blessing should linger on the bones of a saint, why he should accept the first and most stupendous part of the story of Heaven on Earth, and then furiously deny a few small but obvious deductions from it— that is a thing I do not understand; I never could understand; I have come to the conclusion that I shall never understand. I can only attribute it to Superstition.

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ON COURAGE AND INDEPENDENCE

WHEN we are pressed and taunted upon our obstinacy in saying the Mass in a dead language, we are tempted to reply to our questioners by telling them that they are apparently not fit to be trusted with a living language. When we consider what they have done with the noble English language, as compared with the English of the Anglican Prayer-Book, let alone the Latin of the Mass, we feel that their development may well be called degenerate.

The language called dead can never be called degenerate. Surely even they might understand our taking refuge in it, by the time that (in the vernacular) the word “immaculate” is applied only to the shirt-fronts of snobs; or “unction” means not Extreme Unction, but only unctuous rectitude. It is needless to note once more how the moral qualities have lost their mystical quality; and with it all their dignity and delicacy and spontaneous spiritual appeal. Charity, that was the flaming heart of the world, has become a name for a niggardly and pompous patronage of the poor, generally amounting by this time to the enslavement of the poor.

But there are more subtle examples of this degeneration in ideal terms. And an even worse example, I think, than the cheapening of the word CHARITY is the new newspaper cheapening of the word COURAGE.

Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham and Surbiton, is described as “daring,” though nobody on earth knows what danger it is that he dares. I speak, of course, of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in. To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened, and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead, does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had the strength to endure it.

The dramatic critic of a Sunday paper, a little while ago, lashed himself into a frenzy of admiration for the “courage” of some dismal and dirty play or other, because it represented a soldier as raving like a hysterical woman against the cruelty of those who had expected him to defend his country. It may be amusing that his idea of courage should be a defence of cowardice. But it is the sort of defence of it that we have heard ten thousand times during the reaction after the War; and the courage required to utter it is exactly as great as the courage required to utter any other stale quotation from the cant and convention of the moment: such trifles as the absurdity of marriage or the sympathetic personality of Judas Iscariot. These things have become quite commonplace; but they still pretend to be courageous. So sham soldiers have been known to swagger about in uniform when the war was over.

The Catholic Church, as the guardian of all values, guards also the value of words. Her children will not fall, I hope, into this conventional and comfortable folly. We need not pretend that Catholics to-day are called upon to show anything worth calling courage, by the standard of the Catholics in other days. It did require some courage to be a Catholic when it involved the definite disinclination felt by most of us for being racked or ripped up with a knife. It did require some courage when there was only an intermittent possibility of being torn in pieces by a mob. Even that our subtle human psychology regards with some distaste.

But I hope we do not feel any distaste for being on the opposite side to Bishop Barnes, or for being regarded with alarm and suspicion by Jix. These things are almost intellectual pleasures. Indeed, they really involve a certain temptation to intellectual pride. Let us pray to be delivered from it; and let us hope that we are not left altogether without occasions for courage. But most of them will be present in private life and in other practical aspects of public life; in resisting pain or passion or defying the economic threat and tyranny of our time. But do not let us make fools of ourselves like the rationalists and the realists, by posing as martyrs who are never martyred or defying tyrants who have been dead for two hundred years.

But though the name of this virtue has been vulgarized so much that it is hard to use it even where it is exact, let alone where it is in any case exaggerative, there is a somewhat analogous quality which the modern world lauds equally loudly and has lost almost more completely. Putting aside the strict sense of a Catholic courage, the world ought to be told something about Catholic intellectual independence. It is, of course, the one quality which the world supposes that Catholics have lost. It is also, at this moment, the one quality which Catholics perceive that all the world has lost. The modern world has many marks, good as well as bad; but by far the most modern thing in it is the abandonment of individual reason, in favour of press stunts and suggestion and mass psychology and mass production. The Catholic Faith, which always preserves the unfashionable virtue, is at this moment alone sustaining the independent intellect of man.

Our critics, in condemning us, always argue in a circle. They say of mediaevalism that all men were narrow. When they discover that many of them were very broad, they insist that those men must have been in revolt, not only against mediaevalism, but against Catholicism. No Catholics were intelligent; for when they were intelligent, they cannot really have been Catholics. This circular argument appears with a slight difference in the matter of independent thought to-day. It consists of extending to all Catholicism what are in fact the independent ideas of different Catholics. Men start by assuming (what they have been told) that Rome rigidly suppresses ALL variety and therefore Romanists never differ on anything. Then if one of them advances an interesting view, they say that Rome must have imposed it on him and therefore on all the other Roman Catholics. I myself have advanced several economic and political suggestions, for which I never dreamed of claiming anything more than that a loyal Catholic can offer them. But I would rather take any other example than my own unimportant opinions.

In any case, my own experience of the modern world tells me that Catholics are much more and not less individualistic than other men in their general opinions. Mr. Michael Williams, the spirited propagandist of Catholicism in America, gave this as a very cogent reason for refusing to found or join anything like a Catholic party in politics. He said that Catholics will combine for Catholicism, but it is quite abnormally difficult to get them to combine for anything else. This is confirmed by my own impressions and is contrasted very sharply with my recollections about most other religious groups. For instance, what we called the Free Churches, constituting what was also called the Nonconformist Conscience, represented a marvel of moral unity and the spreading of a special spiritual atmosphere. But the Free Churches were not free, whatever else they were. The most striking and even startling thing about them was the ABSENCE of any individual repudiations of the common ideals which the Conscience laid down. The Nonconformist Conscience was not the normal conscience; they would hardly themselves have pretended that the mass of mankind necessarily agreed with them about Drink or Armaments. But they all agreed with each other about Drink or Armaments. A Nonconformist minister standing up to defend public-houses, or public expenditure on guns and bayonets, was a much rarer thing than a heretic in much more hierarchical systems. It was broadly the fact that ALL such men supported what they called Temperance; which seemed to mean an intemperate denunciation of temperate drinking. It is almost as certain that ALL of them insisted on what they called Peace; which seemed, so far as I could make out, to mean such weakening of armament as would involve disaster and destruction in War. But the question here is not whether I disagreed with them; but whether they ever disagreed with each other. And one thing is at least certain, that on things of this sort they disagreed with each other infinitely less than Catholics do. Though the traditional culture and sacramental symbol of the vine makes most Catholics moderately favourable to fermented liquor in moderation, there have been many prominent Catholics who were teetotallers in a degree hardly to be called moderate. The great Cardinal Manning startled all his own supporters by the passion of this private conviction; just as he startled them by many other Radical eccentricities, such as making friends with Stead and championing the Salvation Army. Whether he was right is not here in question; the point is that he thought he was right when his own religious world thought he was wrong, and not unfrequently told him so. You would not have found a man in the Salvation Army to defend Irish whisky, as you found a man like Father Matthew to denounce it.

The same facts could be supported by a hundred facts in my own experience. Dean Inge observed the other day that Mr. Belloc was the only man in England who believed that Dreyfus was guilty. He might have added that he was nearly the only man in England who knew any of the actual facts of the case, which were suppressed in the English newspapers. In any case, the phrase is an exaggeration; for several men, like Lord Chief Justice Russell, whom no one will call incompetent to judge evidence, and old Harry Labouchere, whom no one will call a zealot for militarism, were of the same opinion. But substantially it is true that Mr. Belloc, in the days of his youth, found himself absolutely alone in almost any assembly of English people discussing the question. It is by no means the only occasion on which he has found himself alone. Merely from my own personal knowledge of him, I could give a list as long as this article of topics on which he was opposed to everyone else’s opinion and sometimes opposed to mine. To mention only a few things, large and small, he would probably be the only person in a drawing-room saying that Lewis Carroll was overrated, that Byron and Longfellow were not overrated, that wit is superior to humour, that ALLY SLOPE’S HALF-HOLIDAY was superior to PUNCH, that James the Second was chiefly notable as a stolid English patriot suspicious of French influence, that an Irish political murder might actually be as excusable as a Russian political murder (old regime), that half the modern legislation advanced in favour of Labour is part of a plan to re-establish pagan slavery, that it is the mark of the Protestant culture to tolerate Catholicism and the mark of the Catholic culture to persecute it, and a variety of other opinions which would at least be largely regarded as paradoxes. And he says such things because he is a Catholic: which does not mean that other Catholics would say the same. On the contrary, each would say something quite different. It is not that they need agree with him; but that he need not agree with them. Apart from his own genius, Catholics do differ thus more than a company of Anglican public-school patriots or solid Liberal Nonconformists; to say nothing of the middle class of the Middle West, with its rigid pattern of regular guys. Catholics know the two or three transcendental truths on which they do agree; and take rather a pleasure in disagreeing on everything else. A glance at the living literature, written by other Catholics besides Mr. Belloc, will confirm what I say.

I might take, for instance, a book like the remarkable recent work of Mr. Christopher Hollis, “The American Heresy.” Now surely nobody in his senses will say that all Catholics are bound to believe that the Slave States ought to have won the American Civil War, that America ought never to have extended westward of Tennessee, that Andrew Jackson was a savage, or that Abraham Lincoln was a failure, that Calhoun was like a heathen Roman or that Wilson was an arrogant and dishonest schoolmaster. These opinions are not part of the Catholic order; but they are illustrations of the Catholic liberty. And they illustrate exactly the sort of liberty which the modern world emphatically has not got; the real liberty of the mind. It is no longer a question of liberty from kings and captains and inquisitors. It is a question of liberty from catchwords and headlines and hypnotic repetitions and all the plutocratic platitudes imposed on us by advertisement and journalism.

It is strictly true to say that the average reader of the DAILY MAIL and the “Outline of History” is inhibited from these intellectual acts. It is true to say that he CANNOT think that Abraham Lincoln was a failure. It is true to say that he CANNOT think that a Republic should have refused to expand as it has expanded. He cannot move his mind to such a position, even experimentally; it means moving it out of too deep a rut, worn too smooth by the swift traffic of modern talk and journalism, all perpetually moving one way.

These modern people mean by mental activity simply an express train going faster and faster along the same rails to the same station; or having more and more railway carriages hooked on to it to be taken to the same place. The one notion that has vanished from their minds is the notion of voluntary movement even to the same end. They have fixed not only the ends, but the means. They have imposed not only the doctrines, but the words. They are bound not merely in religion, which is avowedly binding, but in everything else as well. There are formal praises of free thought; but even the praises are in a fixed form. Thousands who have never learned to think at all are urged to think whatever may take their fancy about Jesus Christ. But they are, in fact, forbidden to think in any way but one about Abraham Lincoln. That is why it is worth remarking that it is a Catholic who has thought for himself.

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THE NORDIC HINDOO

I CANNOT, as some do, find Dr. Barnes a very exciting Bishop merely because he is an Evolutionist in the style of fifty years ago and a Protestant persecutor in the style of eighty years ago. His views are stale enough; but I admit that his arguments are sometimes amusing.

Thus, he reached the last limit of wildness in one remark which he made in the course of explaining that the folklore of the Mediterranean had been forced upon the Nordic nations—whatever that may mean. He added abruptly that Indian and Chinese metaphysics are now much more important than ours. But, above all, he made the crowning assertion that Rome is thus stamped as Provincial. This seems to suggest to the educational mind the construction of an examination paper in elementary general knowledge. It might run something like this:

1. From what language is the word “provincial” derived?

2. To what provinces did it generally refer?

3. If Athens, Antioch, Rome and Jerusalem were provincial towns, what was their Metropolitan city?

4. What reasons are there for supposing that Birmingham occupied this Metropolitan position from the earliest times?

5. Give a short account of the conquest of Southern Europe and the Near East by the Emperors of Birmingham.

6. At what date did the Papacy rebel against the Diocese of Birmingham?

7. Explain the old proverb, “All roads lead to Birmingham.”

8. Discuss the following remark, “The most charmingly Nordic people I know are those dear Chinamen.”

9. Why is the folklore of the Hindoos so much more reasonable than that of the Romans?

10. When will the Bishop of Birmingham go touring in the Provinces?

Answers must be sent in before the time of the Disestablishment of the Church of England, and priests are forbidden to give their crafty assistance to the candidates.

Really, I do not know any other way of dealing with even a pretence of seriousness with such an extraordinary remark. It was rendered even more extraordinary, of course, by the further remarks on the subject of Chinamen and Hindoos. Now we know all about the Nordic Man, so far as anybody can know anything about a person who does not exist. We know, for instance, that up to the autumn of 1914 he used to be called the Teutonic Man. Dean Inge used to be frightfully fond of him in those days; even fonder than he is now. He once quoted lavishly, and still quotes occasionally, from that great and glorious English patriot, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

We quite understood that all Nordic Men were like gods, having long golden hair and gigantic stature; and this made it all the more pleasant to realize that we ourselves were Nordic Men, Unfortunately, the Germans were even more Nordic and gigantic and beautiful to gaze upon; they said so; and they ought to know. The poor Teuton was a little unpopular for five years or so; but now he is creeping out again to feel the sun, like the kings after Napoleon’s fall in Mrs. Browning’s poem. Like several other people, he changed his name during the War. He is now entirely Nordic and not at all Teutonic. And, as it is, and always was, his whole profession in life to praise himself and exalt the virtue of pride, so much undervalued by Christians, it is perfectly natural that he should despise “Dagos” and talk about the lower culture of lesser breeds without the law. It is natural that he should insist that all Spaniards are cowardly bullfighters and all Italians luxurious organ-grinders. He may be expected to point out at intervals the sluggish incompetence of Napoleon and the impotent languor of Mussolini.

All this we were used to; it was what we expected from the Nordic Man; for nobody ever expected a Nordic Man to face facts staring him in the face, or to learn anything even from his own experience. We thought we had it all clear and complete, like a mutual understanding; there was the Nordic Man who was noble because he was Protestant and had light hair; and there was the Southern Catholic who was a lower sort of animal, because he was swarthy and superstitious. But why Hindoos? 0 Venerable Father in God and gentle shepherd of souls, why Hindoos?

Why are we now told to learn from people who are even less light-haired and even further off from the Arctic Circle? Are they not a lower race, conquered by the earth-shaking Imperialism of Birmingham? Are they not a lesser breed without the law? Are we to go to Asia to escape from the folklore and magic? Do the dear Indians never exhibit any of the errors that deface the deplorable Romans? If the Latins are idolaters, do the Indians never have idols? If Southern Europe is attached to mythology, is Southern Asia a world of pure reason that has never been defaced by a myth?

The explanation, the only explanation that I can suggest, is the one I have already suggested; and it is in a simple word; the word DESPAIR. Everybody knows that when a military campaign begins to fail there is an inevitable and even pardonable temptation to every military commander on the defeated side to lower the standard of military fitness and collect soldiers from anywhere, whatever be their military quality. This has happened again and again even among the white races; something similar is constantly happening in their relation to the other races. So both the Dutch and the English in the South African quarrel have been continually tempted to make use of the natives for war as well as labour. France has been blamed for relying on dark troops; though I never could see why she should be blamed by us, who drew dark troops from all over our own Empire.

Anyhow, it is a process that defeated or embarrassed captains fall back upon regularly but often reluctantly. It is a very exact parallel to the defeat of the Bishop of Birmingham and his cry for help to the Hindoos. He has reached the position in which he will accept reinforcements from anywhere except Rome. Rome must be provincial; even if it is the only place in the world that is provincial. Rome must be barbaric; if all the barbarians of the earth are called up to sack the city.

And when we have reached that point, it is not difficult to see that the very invasion and spoliation proclaim it to be a Holy City; unique and universal and towering over the tribes of men.

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A SPIRITUALIST LOOKS BACK

WE hear much about new religions; many of them based on the very latest novelties of Buddha and Pythagoras. But I have come to a conclusion which I fear will offend still more. I fancy that all modern religions are counter-religions; attacks on, or alternative to the Catholic Church. They bear no likeness to the natural pagan speculations that existed before the Catholic Church, or would exist if it had never existed. The attitude of Dean Inge is certainly much more like that of Plotinus than that of Plato. But it is even more like that of Porphyry than that of Plotinus. He is exactly like some pagan of the decline; it is not necessary for him to know very much about the Christian superstition; as soon as he heard of it, he hated it.

In a recent work, which I have considered in this place, he is careful to insist that the word PROTESTANT had an old meaning which was not merely negative. And he has certainly fulfilled an old meaning that is positive; if the word Protestant means a man who doth protest too much. He is so very anxious to explain what he thinks about the Catholic Church that he cannot keep it out of any article about M. Coue or Monkey Glands.

The Dean stands by himself; and must be presumably described as an Anglican, for want of anything else in particular to call him. But it is very interesting to observe that even those who seem to go out into the wilderness to stake out their own Promised Land, like the Mormons, are eventually found to be as much a mere reaction against orthodoxy as the Modernists. Their march towards the new Utopia is found to be only a rather longer and more elaborate manoeuvre of one of the armies besieging the Holy City. We imagined that these new schismatics had finally gone off to pray; but we always find (a little while afterwards) that they have remained to scoff. They always come back to boo and riot in our churches when they have got tired of trying to build their own.

One who thus reveals all that he does not know, and certainly ought to know, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He broke out the other day into a diatribe, which was supposed to begin with the relations of his new religion to others, but which turned with incalculable rapidity into mere abuse of his old original family religion, as if there were no other in the world.

Perhaps he is right; and there is not. But you would think a man fresh from founding a new religion might have a few new things to say about that; instead of old and negative things to say about something else. But the special strictures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on Catholic orthodoxy had a certain very curious character, which alone makes them worth noting at all. In themselves they are almost indescribably stale and thin and shabby; and have been thrashed threadbare in a hundred controversies. But the odd thing which I want to remark about them is this; that they are not only old, but old-fashioned, in the sense that they do not even fit into what is now fashionable. They had some meaning sixty years ago. They have no meaning at all for anybody who looks at the living world as it is— even at the world of new faiths or fads like Spiritualism. But the Spiritualist is not looking even at the Spiritualist world. He is not looking at the human world, or the heathen world, or even at the worldly world. He is looking only at the thing he hates.

For instance, he says, exactly as did our Calvinist great-grandmother, that the Confessional is a most indelicate institution; and that it is highly improper for a young lady of correct deportment, in the matter of prunes and prisms, to mention such things as sins to a strange gentleman who is a celibate. Well, of course, all Catholics know the answer to that; and hundreds of Catholics have answered it to Protestants who had some sort of right or reason to ask it.

Nobody, or next to nobody, has ever had to go into so much morbid detail in confessing to a priest as in confessing to a doctor. And the joke of it is that the Protestant great-grandmother, who objected to the gentleman priest, would have been the very first to object to a lady doctor. What matters in the confessional is the moral guilt and not the material details. But the material details are everything in medicine, even for the most respectable and responsible physician, let alone all the anarchical quacks who have been let loose to hear confessions in the name of Psychoanalysis or Hypnotic Cures. But though we all know the old and obvious answers, what I find startling is this: that our critic does not see the new and obvious situation.

What in the world is the sense of his coming with his prunes and prisms into the sort of society that surrounds us to-day? If a girl must not mention sin to a man in a corner of a church, it is apparently the only place nowadays in which she may not do so. She may sit side by side with him on a jury and discuss the details of the foulest and most perverted wickedness in the world, perhaps with a man’s life hanging on the minuteness of the detail. She may read in novels and newspapers sins she has never heard of, let alone sins she is likely to commit or confess. She must not whisper to an impersonal presence behind a grating the most abstract allusion to the things that she hears shouted and cat-called in all the theatrical art and social conversation of the day.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must know as well as I do that modesty of that sort is not being regarded at all by the modern world; and that nobody dreams of attempting to safeguard it so strictly as it is safeguarded in Catholic conversation and Catholic confessions. We can say of Rome and Purity what Swinburne said, in another sense, about Rome and Liberty—“Who is against but all her men, and who is beside her but Thou?” And yet the critic has the impudence to accuse us of the neglect of what all but we are neglecting; simply because that charge was used against us a century ago, and anything used against us can be used over and over again, until it drops to pieces. The old stick of the old grandmother is still good enough to beat the old dog with, though if the old grandmother could rise from the dead, she would think the dog the only decent object in the landscape.

I mean nothing flippant when I say that the only interesting thing about all this is its staleness. I have no unfriendly feelings towards Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to whom we all owe so much gratitude in the realm of literature and entertainment, and who often seems to me entirely right in his manner of defending Spiritualism against Materialism. But I do realize, even if he does not realize, that, at the back of the whole business, he is not defending Spiritualism, and not attacking Materialism; he is attacking Rome.

By a deep and true ancestral instinct with him, he knows that this is ultimately the one Thing to be either attacked or defended; and that he that is not against it is for it. Unless the claim of the Church can be challenged in the modern world, it is impossible really to set up an alternative modern religion. He feels that to be a fact, and I am glad to sympathize with him. Indeed, it is because I would remain so far sympathetic that I take only one example among the doctrines he denounced; and deliberately avoid, for instance, his strangely benighted remarks on the cult of the Blessed Virgin. For I confess to a difficulty in remaining patient with blindness about that topic. But there are other parallel topics.

He has some very innocent remarks about what he considers grotesque in the sacramental system; innocent, because apparently unconscious of what everybody else in the world considers grotesque in the spiritualistic system. If any Christian service was so conducted as to resemble a really successful seance, the world might well be excused for falling back on the word “grotesque,” a favourite word of Dr. Watson. Indeed, we may well question whether the institution of the Red-Headed League or the episode of the Yellow Face at the window, or any of the fantasies of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, were any more fantastic than some that have been submitted to us seriously enough by the school of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I do not say that this test of external extravagance ought to be final, or that no defence of such details could be made. But when Sir Arthur deliberately gibes at our ceremonies, we may at least be allowed to smile at his. Suppose any Catholic rite before the altar consisted of binding a human being hand and foot with ropes; should we ever hear the last of the horrible survival of human sacrifice? Suppose we declared that the priest went into a trance and that clouds of thick white stuff like cotton-wool came out of his mouth, as a manifestation of celestial grace; might not some of our critics be heard to murmur the word, “grotesque”? If we conducted a quiet little evening service in which a big brass trumpet careered about in the air and patted people on the head, caressed a lady with intimate gestures of affection, and generally exhibited itself as about as attractive an object as a philandering trombone or an amorous big drum, would not our critics have something to say about the unwholesome hysteria and senseless excitement of Popery? If the Spiritualist goes out of his way to challenge us to a duel in the matter of dignity, I do not really think it can be reasonably said that he is on stronger ground than we.

But I remark on all these charges, not in order to show how they recoil upon themselves, but in order to show how the Spiritualist is driven to return upon himself, and to react against his origins, and to forget all else in making war upon his mother.

The man of the modern religion does not quarrel with the modern world, as he well might, for its neglect of modesty. He quarrels with the ancient mother, who is alone teaching it any modesty at all. He does not devote himself to condemning the modern dances or the fashionable comedies for their vulgar and obvious indifference to dignity. He brings his special charge of grotesque extravagance against the only ceremonial that really retains any dignity. It seems to him, somehow, more important that the Catholic Church should be, on the most minute point, open to misunderstanding, than that the whole world should go to the devil in a dance of death before his very eyes. And he is quite right; at least, the instinct of which this is a symbol is quite right.

The world really pays the supreme compliment to the Catholic Church in being intolerant of her tolerating even the appearance of the evils which it tolerates in everything else. A fierce light does indeed beat upon that throne and blacken every blot; but the interest here is in the fact that even those who profess to be setting up new thrones or throwing new light are perpetually looking backwards at the original blaze if only to discover the blots. They have not really succeeded in getting out of the orbit of the system which they criticize. They have not really found new stars; they are still pointing at alleged spots on the sun, and thereby admitting that it is their native daylight and the centre of their solar system.

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THE ROOTS OF SANITY

THE Dean of St. Paul’s, when he is right, is very right. He is right with all that ringing emphasis that makes him in other matters so rashly and disastrously wrong. And I cannot but hail with gratitude the scorn with which he spoke lately of all the newspaper nonsense about using monkey-glands to turn old men into young men; or into young monkeys, if that is to be the next step towards the Superman. Not unnaturally, he tried to balance his denunciation of that very experimental materialism which he is always accusing us of denouncing, by saying that this materialism is one evil extreme and that Catholicism is the other. In that connection he said some of the usual things which he commonly finds it easy to say, and we generally find it tolerably easy to answer.

For instance, it is a good example of the contradictory charges brought against Rome that the Dean apparently classes us with those who leave children entirely “unwarned” about the moral dangers of the body. Considering that we have been abused for decades on the ground that we forced on the young the infamous suggestions of the Confessional, this is rather funny.

Only the other day I noted that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle revived this charge of an insult to innocence; and I will leave Dean Inge and Sir Arthur to fight it out. And when he charges us with indifference to Eugenics and the breeding of criminals and lunatics, it is enough that he has himself to denounce the perversion of science manifested in the monkey business. He might permit others to resent equally the schemes by which men are to act like lunatics and criminals in order to avoid lunacy and crime.

There is, however, another aspect of this matter of being right or wrong, which is not so often associated with us, but which is equally consistent with our philosophy. And it has a notable bearing on the sort of questions here raised by Dean Inge. It concerns not only the matters in which the world is wrong, but rather especially the matters in which the world is right. The world, especially the modern world, has reached a curious condition of ritual or routine; in which we might almost say that it is wrong even when it is right. It continues to a great extent to do the sensible things. It is rapidly ceasing to have any of the sensible reasons for doing them. It is always lecturing us on the deadness of tradition; and it is living entirely on the life of tradition. It is always denouncing us for superstition; and its own principal virtues are now almost entirely superstitions.

I mean that when we are right, we are right by principle; and when they are right, they are right by prejudice. We can say, if they prefer it so, that they are right by instinct. But anyhow, they are still restrained by healthy prejudice from many things into which they might be hurried by their own unhealthy logic. It is easiest to take very simple and even extreme examples; and some of the extremes are nearer to us than some may fancy.

Thus, most of our friends and acquaintances continue to entertain a healthy prejudice against Cannibalism. The time when this next step in ethical evolution will be taken seems as yet far distant. But the notion that there is not very much difference between the bodies of men and animals—that is not by any means far distant, but exceedingly near. It is expressed in a hundred ways, as a sort of cosmic communism. We might almost say that it is expressed in every other way except cannibalism.

It is expressed, as in the Voronoff notion, in putting pieces of animals into men. It is expressed, as in the vegetarian notion, in not putting pieces of animals into men. It is expressed in letting a man die as a dog dies, or in thinking it more pathetic that a dog should die than a man. Some are fussy about what happens to the bodies of animals, as if they were quite certain that a rabbit resented being cooked, or that an oyster demanded to be cremated. Some are ostentatiously indifferent to what happens to the bodies of men; and deny all dignity to the dead and all affectionate gesture to the living. But all these have obviously one thing in common; and that is that they regard the human and bestial body as common things. They think of them under a common generalisation; or under conditions at best comparative. Among people who have reached this position, the REASON for disapproving of cannibalism has already become very vague. It remains as a tradition and an instinct. Fortunately, thank God, though it is now very vague, it is still very strong. But though the number of earnest ethical pioneers who are likely to begin to eat boiled missionary is very small, the number of those among them who could explain their own real reason for not doing so is still smaller.

The real reason is that all such social sanities are now the traditions of old Catholic dogmas. Like many other Catholic dogmas, they are felt in some vague way even by heathens, so long as they are healthy heathens. But when it is a question of their not being merely felt but formulated, it will be found to be a formula of the Faith. In this case it is all those ideas that Modernists most dislike, about “special creation” and that Divine image that does not come merely by evolution, and the chasm between man and the other creatures. In short, it is those very doctrines with which men like Dean Inge are perpetually reproaching us, as things that forbid us a complete confidence in science or a complete unity with animals. It is these that stand between men and cannibalism—or possibly monkey glands. They have the prejudice; and long may they retain it! We have the principle, and they are welcome to it when they want it.

If Euclid were demonstrating with diagrams for the first time and used the argument of the REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM, he would now only produce the impression that his own argument was absurd. I am well aware that I expose myself to this peril by extending my opponent’s argument to an extreme, which may be considered an extravagance. The question is, why is it an extravagance? I know that in this case it will be answered that the social feature of cannibalism is rare in our culture. So far as I know, there are no cannibal restaurants threatening to become fashionable in London like Chinese restaurants. Anthropophagy is not like Anthroposophy, a subject of society lectures; and, varied as are the religions and moralities among us, the cooking of missionaries is not yet a mission. But if anyone has so little of logic as to miss the meaning of an extreme example, I should have no difficulty in giving a much more practical and even pressing example. A few years ago, all sane people would have said that Adamitism was quite as mad as Anthropophagy. A banker walking down the streets with no clothes on would have been quite as nonsensical as a butcher selling man instead of mutton. Both would be the outbreak of a lunatic under the delusion that he was a savage. But we have seen the New Adamite or No Clothes Movement start quite seriously in Germany; start indeed with a seriousness of which only Germans are capable. Englishmen probably are still English enough to laugh at it and dislike it. But they laugh by instinct; and they only dislike by instinct. Most of them, with their present muddled moral philosophy, would probably have great difficulty in refuting the Prussian professor of nakedness, however heartily they might desire to kick him. For if we examine the current controversies, we shall find the same negative and defenceless condition as in the case of the theory of cannibalism. All the fashionable arguments used against Puritanism do in fact lead to Adamitism. I do not mean, of course, that they are not often practically healthy as against Puritanism; still less do I mean that there are no better arguments against Puritanism. But I mean that in pure logic the civilised man has laid open his guard; and is, as it were, naked against the inroads of nakedness. So long as he is content merely to argue that the body is beautiful or that what is natural is right, he has surrendered to the Adamite in theory, though it may be, please God, a long time before he surrenders in practice. Here again the modern theorist will have to defend his own sanity with a prejudice. It is the mediaeval theologian who can defend it with a reason. I need not go into that reason at length; it is enough to say that it is founded on the Fall of Man, just as the other instinct against cannibalism is founded on the Divinity of Man. The Catholic argument can be put shortly by saying that there is nothing the matter with the human body; what is the matter is with the human soul.

In other words, if man were completely a god, it might be true that all aspects of his bodily being were godlike; just as if he were completely a beast, we could hardly blame him for any diet, however beastly. But we say that experience confirms our theory of his human complexity. It has nothing to do with the natural things themselves. If red roses mysteriously maddened men to commit murder, we should make rules to cover them up; but red roses would be quite as pure as white ones.

In most modern people there is a battle between the new opinions, which they do not follow out to their end, and the old traditions, which they do not trace back to their beginning. If they followed the new notions forward, it would lead them to Bedlam. If they followed the better instincts backward, it would lead them to Rome. At the best they remain suspended between two logical alternatives, trying to tell themselves, as does Dean Inge, that they are merely avoiding two extremes. But there is this great difference in his case, that the question on which he is wrong is, in however perverted a form, a matter of science, whereas the matter in which he is right is by this time simply a matter of sentiment. I need not say that I do not use the word here in a contemptuous sense, for in these things there is a very close kinship between sentiment and sense. But the fact remains that all the people in his position can only go on being sensible. It is left for us to be also reasonable.

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SOME OF OUR ERRORS

THE thoughtful reader, studying the literature of the enlightened and scientific when they advise us about ethics and religion, will be arrested by one phrase which really has a meaning. Nay, he will observe, with increasing interest and excitement, that it really contains a truth. Most of the phrases that are supposed to go along with it, and to be of the same sort, will be found to be not only untrue but almost unmeaning. When the Modernist says that we must free the human intellect from the mediaeval syllogism, it is as if he said we must free it from the multiplication-table. Some people can count or reason quicker than others; some people put in all the steps and are safe; some people leave out the steps and are still right; many leave out the steps and are consequently wrong. But the process of multiplication is the same, and the process of demonstration is the same. Men think in that way, except when they escape from it by ceasing to think. Or again, when we find in the same context the remark that some Christian doctrine which we do know is “only a form of” some Pagan cult that nobody really knows, we realise that the mathematician is treating the unknown quantity as the known. But when we find among these fallacies the remark I speak of, we shall be wise to pause upon it with greater patience. It is the remark, “We need a restatement of religion”; and though it has been said thirty thousand times, it is quite true.

It is also true that those who say it often mean the very opposite of what they say. As I have remarked elsewhere, they very often intend not to restate anything, but to state something else, introducing as many of the old words as possible. By this time not only the word religion, but also the word restatement, is becoming rather an old word. But anyhow the point is that they do not really mean that we should give freshness and a new aspect to religion by calling it roly-poly or rumpti-foo. On the contrary, they mean that we should take something totally different and agree to call it religion. I mention, with some sadness, that I have said this before; because I have found it quite difficult to get them to see a fact of almost heart-breaking simplicity. It seems to strike them as being merely a fine shade of distinction; but it strikes me as a rather grotesque and staggering reversal. There would be the same fine shade of difference, if somebody of a sartorial sort came to me protesting that my aged father was waiting in rags on my door-step, and urgently needing a new hat and coat, and indeed a complete equipment; if he made the most animated preparations for the reclothing of my parent, and the whole episode ended by his introducing me to a total stranger begging for my father’s old hat.

Now I do really believe that there is a need for the restatement of religious truth; but not the statement of something quite different, which I do not believe to be true. I believe there is a very urgent need for a verbal paraphrase of many of the fundamental doctrines; simply because people have ceased to understand them as they are traditionally stated. It does not follow from this that the traditional statement is not the true statement. It only means that the traditional statement now needs to be translated; although translation is seldom true. This is especially the case in connection with Catholic ideas; because they were originally stated in what some call a dead language and some an everlasting language. But anyhow, they were stated in a language that has since broken up into other languages, and mixed with other dialects, and produced a popular PATOIS which is spirited, and often splendid, but necessarily less exact. Now I do think that the Catholic culture suffers very much from the popular misunderstanding of its original terminology. I do think that Catholics are themselves to blame, in many cases, for not realising that their doctrines need to be stated afresh, and not left in language that is intrinsically correct but practically misleading. Those who call themselves liberal, commonly take for granted that the fault is with a dead language, as against a language that has developed. If they were really liberal, they could enlarge their minds to see that there is a case for the language having degenerated. But in either case, it is practically true that there are misunderstandings, and that we ought chiefly to desire to make people understand. And I think we have faults and follies of our own in this matter; and that it is not always the fault of our enemies that they misunderstand. There are cases in which we, more or less unconsciously, misinform them. We do not allow enough, in justifying the words that we speak, for the difference in the words that they hear. And I propose to say a few words in this article upon what I may call Catholic criticisms of Catholic faults; or what are (in many cases) merely Catholic accidents and misunderstanding.

For instance, there is a sort of misunderstanding that is simply mistranslation. Probably we have never properly explained to them the real case for using Latin for something that must be immutable and universal. But as half of them are howling day and night for an international language, and accepting a journalese jibberish with plurals in “oj” because they can get no better, some glimmering of the old use of Latin by Erasmus or Bacon might reasonably be expected of them. Of the full defence of such a hieratic tongue I may say something later. But for the moment I am thinking of certain mistakes which arise very largely by our fault and not theirs. It is not the Church’s Latin that is to blame; it is the English Catholic’s English. It is not because we do not translate it into the vulgar tongue that we are wrong; it is because we do. Sometimes, I am sorry to say, we translate it into a very vulgar tongue. When we do translate things into English, they often only serve as a luminous argument for leaving them in Latin. Latin is Latin, and always says exactly what it means. But popular versions of Latin things often only serve to make them unpopular.

I will venture to take one example, about which I feel very strongly. Will somebody with better authority than I have announce in a voice of thunder, through a trumpet or with a salute of big guns, the vital and very much needed truth that “dulcis” is not the Latin for “sweet”? “Sweet” is not the English word for “dulcis”; any more than for “doux” or “douce.” It has a totally different connotation and atmosphere. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” does not mean “it is sweet and decorous to die for our country.” It means something untranslatable like everything that means anything; but something more like “It is a gracious thing and of good report to die for our country.” When Roland was dying in the mountains, having blown his horn and broken his sword, and thought of “La doulce France” and the men of his line, he did not sully his lips by saying “sweet France,” but something like “beautiful and gracious France.” In English the word “sweet” has been rendered hopelessly sticky by the accident of the word “sweets.” But in any case it suggests something much more intense and even pungent in sweetness like the tabloids of saccharine that are of concentrated sugar. It is at once too strong and too weak a word. It has not the same savour as the same word in the Latin languages, which often means no more than the word “gentle” as it was used of “a perfect gentle knight.” But English Catholicism, having in the great calamity of our history gone into exile in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (at the very moment when our modern language was being finally made) naturally had to seek for its own finest enthusiasms in foreign languages. It could not find a salutation to the Mass or the Blessed Virgin except in French or Italian or Spanish or some such tongue; and it translated these things back into a language with which the exile had lost touch and in which his taste was not quite firm and sure. It seemed to be thought necessary to use the word “sweet” in every single case of the kind; which produces not only something that did not sound English; but something which did not sound in the least as the Latin or French sounded. In a certain number of cases, of course, it is exactly the right word; just as it is from time to time in ordinary English poetry. Sometimes it is right because it is so obviously the natural and inevitable word that it would seem more affected not to use it than to use it; as in the song of Burns; “My love is like the melody that’s sweetly played in tune.” Sometimes it is right because there is something to be a salt to its sweetness, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s line; “Before the eyes of that sweet enemy France.” Similarly it is often exactly right in good Catholic translations or compositions in English. But this fixed notion that it must always be used wherever some such tender expression would be used in Romance literature is simply a blunder in translation; and a blunder that has had very bad effects in fields much more important than literature. I believe that this incongruous and inaccurate repetition of the word “sweet” has kept more Englishmen out of the Catholic Church than all the poison of the Borgias or all the poisonous lies of the people who have written about them.

Ours is at this moment the most rational of all religions. It is even, in a sense, the most rationalistic of all religions. Those who talk about it as merely or mainly emotional simply do not know what they are talking about. It is all the other religions, all the modern religions, that are merely emotional. This is as true of the emotional salvationism of the first Protestants as of the emotional intuitionalism of the last Modernists. We alone are left accepting the action of the reason and the will, without any necessary assistance from the emotions. A convinced Catholic is easily the most hard-headed and logical person walking about the world to-day. But this old slander, of a slimy sentimentalism in all we say and do, is terribly perpetuated by this mere muddle about words. We are still supposed to have a silly sort of devotion, when we really have the most sensible sort, merely because we have taken a foreign phrase and translated it wrong; instead of either leaving it in Latin for those who can read Latin or trusting it in English to people who can write English. But if in this case we admit that the misunderstanding is more our fault than our opponents’ fault, the fault which we confess is the very reverse of the fault of which the opponents complain. It has not arisen through the Catholic practice of saying prayers in Latin. On the contrary, it has arisen through the Protestant practice of always saying them in English. It has come through yielding merely weakly and mechanically to the Protestant pressure in the days when our tradition was completely out of fashion. In other words, it has come through doing exactly what they advised us to do, and not doing it well. Of course I do not mean that it is not a good thing to have good popular translation when it is done well. I think it is a very good thing indeed. But while I see what there is to be said for the cult of the vernacular, the Protestant critic does not see what there is to be said for the fixed form of the classic tongue. He does not see that there is something to be said even for the general idea that Catholic poetry should be in the vernacular like the Divine Comedy and Catholic worship in the fundamental language like the Mass.

It is a question between a dead language and a dying language. Every living language is a dying language, even if it does not die. Parts of it are perpetually perishing or changing their sense; there is only one escape from that flux; and a language must die to be immortal. The style of the English Jacobean translation is as noble and simple a thing as any in the world; but even there the words degenerate. It is not their fault; but ours who misuse them; but they are misused. No language could lift itself into a loftier or simpler strain than that which begins, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”; but even then, when we pass on to “speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,” we stumble over a word we have vulgarised.

But the world plays havoc with all such words, whether they are in the English Bible or the Latin Canon. There are many words of Catholic usage which have in practice been thus misused. When an outsider hears that a Catholic has refrained from something for fear of “causing scandal,” he instantly has an irritated impression that it means a fear of setting all the silly old women in the town talking gossip. Of course it means nothing of the kind. It does not mean that in Greek. It does not mean that in Latin. It ought not to mean that in English. It ought to mean what it says; the fear of tripping somebody up, of putting a stumbling-block in the way of some struggling human being. If I encourage to carousals a man who must be kept off drink, I am causing scandal. If I talk what might be a wholesome realism for some hearers, to a young and innocent person who is certain to feel it as mere obscenity, I am causing scandal. I am doing what for me is right, at the risk of making him do what for him is wrong. To say that that is unjustifiable is manifest moral common sense. But it is not conveyed in modern English by talking about causing scandal. All that is conveyed in modern English is that the person so acting is disdaining idle chatter and irresponsible criticism; which is exactly what all the saints and martyrs have consistently lived and died by doing. And that is a good example of what I mean by translation; or, if the word be preferred, by restatement. But that does not mean turning round and abusing the old statement, which was really quite correctly stated. It only means restating exactly what the old statement states.

I could give many other examples of words which were right in their Latin use, but which have become obscured in their English misuse. I always feel it in the necessarily frequent phrase “offending” God; which had originally almost the awful meaning of wounding God. But the word has degenerated through its application to man, until the sound of it is quite petty and perverted. We say that Mr. Binks was quite offended or that Aunt Susan will take offence; and lose sight of the essential truth, and even dogma that (in that lower sense) God is the very last to take offence. But here again we should not abuse the Latin language; we should abuse our own vulgarisation of the English language. Upon this one point, of the restatement of religious ideas, the reformers are right in everything except the one essential; which is knowing where to throw the blame.

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THE SLAVERY OF THE MIND

I HAVE chosen the subject of the slavery of the mind because I believe many worthy people imagine I am myself a slave. The nature of my supposed slavery I need not name and do not propose specially to discuss. It is shared by every sane man when he looks up a train in Bradshaw. That is, it consists in thinking a certain authority reliable; which is entirely reasonable. Indeed it would be rather difficult to travel in every train to find out where it went. It would be still more difficult to go to the destination in order to discover whether it was safe to begin the journey. Suppose a wild scare arose that Bradshaw was a conspiracy to produce railway accidents, a man might still believe the Guide to be a Guide and the scare to be only a scare; but he would know of the existence of the scare. What I mean by the slavery of the mind is that state in which men do not know of the alternative. It is something which clogs the imagination, like a drug or a mesmeric sleep, so that a person cannot possibly think of certain things at all. It is not the state in which he says, “I see what you mean; but I cannot think that because I sincerely think this” (which is simply rational): it is one in which he has never thought of the other view; and therefore does not even know that he has never thought of it. Though I am not discussing here my own religion, I think it only right to say that its authorities have never had this sort of narrowness. You may condemn their condemnations as oppressive; but not in this sense as obscurantist. St. Thomas Aquinas begins his enquiry by saying in effect, “Is there a God? It would seem not, for the following reasons”; and the most criticised of recent Encyclicals always stated a view before condemning it. The thing I mean is a man’s inability to state his opponent’s view; and often his inability even to state his own.

Curiously enough, I find this sort of thing rather specially widespread in our age, which claims to possess a popular culture or enlightenment. There is everywhere the habit of assuming certain things, in the sense of not even imagining the opposite things. For instance, as history is taught, nearly everybody assumes that in all important past conflicts, it was the right side that won. Everybody assumes it; and nobody knows that he assumes it. The man has simply never seriously entertained the other notion. Say to him that we should now all of us be better off if Charles Edward and the Jacobites had captured London instead of falling back from Derby, and he will laugh. He will think it is what he calls a “paradox.” Yet nothing can be a more sober or solid fact than that, when the issue was undecided, wise and thoughtful men were to be found on both sides; and the Jacobite theory is not in any way disproved by the fact that Cumberland could outflank the clans at Drummossie. I am not discussing whether it was right as a theory; I am only noting that it is never allowed to occur to anybody as a thought. The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination. If somebody says that the world would now be better if Napoleon had never fallen, but had established his Imperial dynasty, people have to adjust their minds with a jerk. The very notion is new to them. Yet it would have prevented the Prussian reaction; saved equality and enlightenment without a mortal quarrel with religion; unified Europeans and perhaps avoided the Parliamentary corruption and the Fascist and Bolshevist revenges. But in this age of free-thinkers, men’s minds are not really free to think such a thought.

What I complain of is that those who accept the verdict of fate in this way accept it without knowing why. By a quaint paradox, those who thus assume that history always took the right turning are generally the very people who do not believe there was any special providence to guide it. The very rationalists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history. In the war of the North and South in America, some of the Southern rebels wrote on their flags the rhyme, “Conquer we must for our cause is just.” The philosophy was faulty; and in that sense it served them right that their opponents copied and continued it in the form “Conquer they didn’t; so their cause wasn’t.” But the latter logic is as bad as the former. I have just read a book called, “The American Heresy,” by Mr. Christopher Hollis. It is a very brilliant and original book; but I know it will not be taken sufficiently seriously; because the reader will have to wrench his mind out of a rut even to imagine the South victorious; still more to imagine anybody saying that a small, limited and agricultural America would have been better for everybody—especially Americans.

I could give many other examples of what I mean by this imaginative bondage. It is to be found in the strange superstition of making sacred figures out of certain historical characters; who must not be moved from their stiff symbolic attitudes. Even their bad qualities are sacred. Much new light has lately been thrown on Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart. It is not only favourable to Mary but on the whole favourable to Elizabeth. It seems pretty certain that Mary did not plot to kill Darnley. It seems highly probable that Elizabeth did not plot to kill Mary. But many people are quite as tenderly attached to the idea of a merciless Elizabeth as to that of a murderous Mary. That a man devoted to Protestantism should rejoice that Elizabeth succeeded, that a man devoted to Catholicism should wish that Mary had succeeded—all that would be perfectly natural and rational. But Elizabeth was not Protestantism; and it ought not to disturb anybody to discover that she was hardly a Protestant. It ought to be even less gratification to her supporters to insist that she was a tyrant. But there is a sort of waxwork history, that cannot be happy unless Elizabeth has an axe and Mary a dagger. This sense of fixed and sacred figures ought to belong to a religion; but a historical speculation is not a religion. To believe in Calvinism by faith alone is comprehensible. To believe in Cromwell by faith alone is incomprehensible. It is supremely incomprehensible that when Calvinists left off believing in Calvinism, they still insisted on believing in Cromwell. To a simple rationalist like myself, these prejudices are hard to understand.

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INGE VERSUS BARNES

NONE of us I hope ever wished to be unjust to Dean Inge: though in such fights the button will sometimes come off the foil. And a cruel injustice is being done to him, in the suggestion widely circulated that he agrees with Dr. Barnes. Such things should not be lightly said of any gentleman. It is in accordance with the current legend, at least, that the Gloomy Dean even when he comes to bless should remain to curse. But if there is one isolated human being whom he can be imagined as wanting to bless, one would think it would be his ally, Bishop Barnes of Birmingham. And yet the alliance only serves to soften the curse and not to secure the blessing. If we may use such popular terms of such dignified ecclesiastics, we might be tempted to say that the Dean has found it necessary to throw over the Bishop. An interesting review by the Dean of the Bishop’s recent book of sermons contains, of course, a certain number of rather conventional compliments and a certain number of rather abrupt sneers, we might say snarls, at various other people including the greater part of Christendom. But on the two striking and outstanding matters on which Bishop Barnes was condemned by the Catholics, he is almost as strongly condemned by the Dean of St. Paul’s. Dean Inge is far too intelligent and cultivated a man to pretend to have much patience with the nonsense about testing Transubstantiation either by chemical experiments or psychical research. He tries to break it to his Broad Church colleague as gently as possible that the latter has made himself a laughing stock. But allowing for such necessary politeness between partners, it could hardly be stated better or even more plainly. He curtly refers the Bishop to the responsible definition of the doctrine in Father Rickaby’s book on metaphysics; and drily observes that it will be found rather more subtle and plausible than the Bishop seems to be aware of. He also adds, with a grim candour which is rather attractive, that it is pretty disastrous to challenge Catholics about whether the Mass does them any spiritual good, since they would quite certainly unite in testifying that it does. After these frank and arresting admissions, it is a mere matter of routine, and almost of respectability, that the Dean should agree with the Bishop that all such sacramentalism is very deplorable; that the admittedly intelligent people he knows who say they have found Christ in the Mass and not in the Morning Service must be “natural idolaters” and that it is “obvious” that the Blessed Sacrament has an affinity with the lower religions. Also with the lower classes. That, I fancy, is what the Dean really finds so disgusting about it.

The point is, however, that the Dean definitely snubs the Bishop on the one great point on which the newspapers have boomed and boosted him. And he does exactly the same thing, if in a lesser degree, on the second and lesser matter which was similarly boosted. I mean, of course, the matter of Evolution. The Dean, of course, believes in Evolution, as do a good many other people, Catholic and Protestant as well as agnostic. But though he believes in Evolution, he does not believe in Bishop Barnes’s Evolution. He comments with admirable clarity and decision on the folly of identifying progress with evolution; or even mere complication with progress. Nothing could be better than the brief and brisk sentences in which he disposes altogether of that idealisation of the scientific theory, which is in fact simply ignorance of it. In plain words, Bishop Barnes, for all his bluster, knows almost as little about Evolution as he does about Transubstantiation. The Dean of St. Paul’s does not, of course, put this truth in such plain words; but he manages to make it pretty plain. His candour in this case also has to be balanced by general expressions of agreement with the Bishop, and somewhat heartier expressions of disagreement with everybody else, especially with the Bishop’s enemies. The Dean alludes scornfully to the orthodox world, as if it necessarily repudiated certain biological theories; or as if it mattered very much if it did. The difference between the Broad Churchman and the Catholic Church is not that the former thinks Evolution true and the latter thinks it false. It is that the former thinks Evolution an explanation and the latter knows it is not an explanation. Hence the former thinks it all important; and the latter thinks it rather unimportant. Being unable to grasp this principle, the Dean has to fall back on quoting an old Victorian cant phrase; and saying that a new scientific discovery passes through three stages: that of being called absurd; of being called anti-scriptural; and of being discovered to be quite old and familiar. He might have added that it generally goes on to a fourth stage; that of being discovered to be quite untrue.

For that is the very simple fact which both Dean Inge and Bishop Barnes leave out; and which seems to be as utterly unknown to the more lucid rationalism of the one as to the cruder secularism of the other. Not only was the Archbishop of Canterbury right in suggesting that old gentlemen like himself had been familiar with Evolution all their lives; but he might have added that they were much more certain of it in the earlier part of their lives than they will be by the end of their lives. Those of them who have really read the most recent European enquiries and speculations know that Darwinism is every day becoming much less of a dogma and much more of a doubt. Those who have not read the speculations and the doubts simply go on repeating the dogma. While Dr. Barnes was preaching sermons carefully founded on the biology of fifty years ago, Mr. Belloc was proving conclusively before the whole world that Mr. H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Keith were unacquainted with the biology of five years ago. In short, it is only just, as we have said, to insist on the difference between Dean Inge and Dr. Barnes; which is like the difference between Huxley and Haeckel. Everybody would be better and happier if Dean Inge were known as Professor Inge; and if Dr. Barnes were not only a Professor but a Prussian Professor. Then he could be boomed along with other barbarians attacking Christianity, without having the ecclesiastical privilege of actually persecuting Christians. But there are heathens and heathens and there are persecutors and persecutors. The Dean is a pagan Roman of the Senate House. The Bishop is a pagan Teuton of the swamps and fens. The Dean dislikes the Christian tradition in the spirit of Diocletian and Julian. The Bishop dislikes it in the simpler spirit of a Danish pirate staring at the rigid mystery of a Roman-British Church. Even the common cause and broad brotherly maxim of CHRISTIANI AD LEONES did not always, I fancy, reconcile the Roman and the Goth. These historical comparisons may seem fanciful; and indeed in one sense both parties are very much tied to their own historical period. They are both very Victorian; but even here there is a difference and a superiority. The superiority of the Dean is that he knows it and says so. He is man enough to boast of being Victorian and not to mind being called reactionary. Whereas the Bishop seems really to cherish the truly extraordinary notion that his notions are new and up-to-date.

Of course they have a philosophy in common; and it would be a cheap simplification to call it Materialism. Indeed, we should be almost as shallow in talking about Materialism as they are in talking about Magic. The truth is that the strange bigotry, which leads the Bishop to scream and rail at all sacramentalism as Magic, is in its inmost essence the very reverse of Materialism. Indeed it is nothing half so healthy as Materialism. The root of this prejudice is not so much a trust in matter as a sort of horror of matter. The man of this philosophy is always asking that worship shall be wholly spiritual, or even wholly intellectual; because he does really feel a disgust at the idea of spiritual things having a body and a solid form. It probably does really give him a mystical shudder to suppose that God can become as bread and wine; though I never understood why it should not give the same shudder to say that God could become flesh and blood. But whether or no these thinkers are logical in their philosophy, I think this is their philosophy. It has a very long history and an ancient name. It is not Materialist but Manichee.

Indeed the Dean uttered an unconscious truth when he said the sacramentalists must be “natural idolaters.” He shrinks from it not only because it is idolatrous, but also because it is natural. He cannot bear to think how natural is the craving for the supernatural. He cannot tolerate the idea of it actually working through the elements of nature. Unconsciously, no doubt, but very stubbornly, that sort of intellectual does feel that our souls may belong to God, but our bodies only to the devil or the beast. That Manichean horror of matter is the only INTELLIGENT reason for any such sweeping refusal of supernatural and sacramental wonders. The rest is all cant and repetition and arguing in a circle; all the baseless dogmatism about science forbidding men to believe in miracles; as if SCIENCE could forbid men to believe in something which science does not profess to investigate. Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence; it cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America. Or it is as if a man were to say he was so close a student of the text of Hamlet that he was authorised to deny that an actor had dropped the skull and bolted when the theatre caught fire. The constitution follows a certain course, so long as it is there to follow it; the play follows a certain course, so long as it is being played; the visible order of nature follows a certain course if there is nothing behind it to stop it. But that fact throws no sort of light on whether there IS anything behind it to stop it. That is a question of philosophy or metaphysics and not of material science. And out of respect for the intelligence of both these reverend gentlemen, and especially for the high intelligence of the Dean of St. Paul’s, I much prefer to think that they are opposed to what they call Magic as consistent philosophers and not as inconsistent scientists. I prefer to think that they are thinking along the lines of great Gnostics and Buddhists and other mystics of a dark but dignified historical tradition; rather than that they are blundering in plain logic in the interests of cheap popular science. I can even understand or imagine that thrill of repulsion that seizes them in the presence of the divine materialism of the Mass. But I still think they would be more consistent and complete, if they made it quite clear that they carried their principle to completion; and said, as the Moslem says about Christmas, “Far be it from Him to have a Son,” or the terrified disciples who cried, “Far be this from Thee,” when God was going up to be crucified.

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WHAT WE THINK ABOUT

I WAS looking the other day at a weekly paper of the sort that is supposed to provide popular culture; in this case rather especially what may be called popular science. In practice it largely provides what its supporters optimistically call Modern Thought and what we more commonly call Modernism. It is, however, a paper by no means unfair or exclusive of the opposite point of view; it has more than once permitted me to reply to these views; and in looking at the issue in question, my eye was arrested by my own name.

It occurred in an article on the religious doctrines of Mr. Arnold Bennett. Indeed the prominence in the press of this name in this connection is one of the standing mysteries of modern journalism. I have not only a great admiration for the artistic genius, but in many ways a strong liking for the human personality of Mr. Arnold Bennett. I like his liveliness and contempt for contempt. I like his humanity and merciful curiosity about every thing human. I like that essential absence of snobbishness that enables him to sympathise even with snobs. But talking about the religious beliefs of Mr. Arnold Bennett seems to me exactly like talking about the foxhunting adventures of Mr. Bernard Shaw or the favourite vintages of Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson or the celestial visions of Sir Arthur Keith or the monastic vows of Mr. Bertrand Russell. Mr. Arnold Bennett has never disguised, as it seems to me, the essential fact that he has not got any religious beliefs; as religious beliefs were understood in the English language as I learnt it. That he has a number of highly estimable moral sentiments and sympathies I do not for a moment doubt. But the matter of Mr. Arnold Bennett is, for the moment, a parenthesis. I mention it here merely because it was in the course of such an article that I found myself mentioned; and I confess I thought the reference a little odd. It will not surprise the reader to learn that the writer found me less Modernist than Mr. Arnold Bennett. My religious beliefs did not present so pure and virgin and blameless a blank, but were defaced with definite statements about various things. But the writer professed to find something dubious or mysterious about my attitude; and what mystifies me is his mystification. He delicately implied that there was more in me than met the eye; that I had that within, which passed all these Papistical shows, but that it was hopeless to vivisect me and discover the secret. He said: “Mr. Chesterton does not mean to enlighten us; for all we know he is Modernist enough in his own thoughts.”

Now it would be thought a little annoying if an atheist were to say of some harmless Protestant Christian like General Booth; “For all we know, he is atheist enough in his own thoughts.” We might even venture to enquire how the atheist could possibly form any notion of what General Booth thought, in such complete contradiction to everything he said. Or I myself, on the other hand, might seem less than graceful, if I were to suggest that Mr. Arnold Bennett must be concealing his conversion out of cowardice; and were to express it in the form: “Mr. Bennett will never tell us the truth about it; for all we know he is Papist enough in his own thoughts.” I might even be cross-examined about how I had come to form these suspicions about the secret thoughts of Mr. Arnold Bennett; as to whether I had hidden under his bed and heard him muttering Latin prayers in his dreams, or sent a private detective to verify the existence of his hair-shirt and his concealed relics. It might be hinted that, until I could produce some such PRIMA FACIE case for my suspicions, it would be more polite to suppose that the opinions of Mr. Bennett were what he himself said they were. And if I were sensitive on such things, I might make a rather sharp request, that people who cannot possibly know anything about me except what I say, should for the sake of our general convenience believe what I say. On the subject of Modernism, at any rate, there has never been the least doubt or difficulty about what I say. For, as it happens, I had a strong intellectual contempt for Modernism, even before I really believed in Catholicism.

But I belong, as a biological product of evolution, to the order of the pachyderms. And I am not in the least moved by any annoyance in the matter; but only by a very strong mystification and curiosity about the real reason for this remarkable point of view. I know that the writer did not mean any harm; but I am much more interested in trying to understand what he did mean. And the truth is, I think, that there is hidden in this curious and cryptic phrase the secret of the whole modern controversy about Catholicism. What the man really meant was this: “Even poor old Chesterton must think; he can’t have actually left off thinking altogether; there must be some form of cerebral function going forward to fill the empty hours of his misdirected and wasted life; and it is obvious that if a man begins to THINK, he can only think more or less in the direction of Modernism.” The Modernists do really think that. That is the point. That is the joke.

Now what we have really got to hammer into the heads of all these people, somehow, is that a thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism, and not deeper and deeper into difficulties about Catholicism. We have got to make them see that conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful, progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect. For THAT is the thing that they cannot at present bring themselves to believe. They honestly say to themselves: “What can he be thinking about, if he is not thinking about the Mistakes of Moses, as discovered by Mr. Miggles of Pudsey, or boldly defying all the terrors of the Inquisition which existed two hundred years ago in Spain?” We have got to explain somehow that the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity or the Blessed Sacrament are the starting-points for trains of thought far more stimulating, subtle and even individual, compared with which all that sceptical scratching is as thin, shallow and dusty as a nasty piece of scandalmongering in a New England village. Thus, to accept the Logos as a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St. John the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the world. To accept the Logos as a “text” or an “interpolation” or a “development” or a dead word in a dead document, only used to give in rapid succession about six different dates to that document, is to be altogether on a lower plane of human life; to be squabbling and scratching for a merely negative success; even if it really were a success. To exalt the Mass is to enter into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections. To set out to belittle and minimise the Mass, by talking ephemeral back-chat about what it had in common with Mithras or the Mysteries, is to be in altogether a more petty and pedantic mood; not only lower than Catholicism but lower even than Mithraism.

As I have said before, it is very difficult to say how we can best set about these things. We and our critics have come to talk in two different languages; so that the very names by which we describe the things inside stand for totally different things in the absurd labels they have stuck upon the wall outside. Often if we said the great things we have to say, they would sound like the small things they accuse us of saying. A philosophical process can only begin at the right end; and they have got hold of everything by the wrong end. But I am myself disposed to think that we should begin by challenging one very common phrase or form of words; a thing that has become a catch-word and a caption; or in the ordinary popular phrase a headline. Because the journalists incessantly repeat it, and draw attention to it by repeating it, we may possibly draw attention by denying it.

When the journalist says for the thousandth time, “Living religion is not in dull and dusty dogmas, etc.” we must stop him with a sort of shout and say, “There—you go wrong at the very start.” If he would condescend to ask what the dogmas are, he would find out that it is precisely the dogmas that are living, that are inspiring, that are intellectually interesting. Zeal and charity and unction are admirable as flowers and fruit; but if you are really interested in the living principle you must be interested in the root or the seed. In other words, you must be intelligently interested in the statement with which the whole thing started; even if it is only to deny it. Even if the critic cannot come to agree with the Catholic, he can come to see that it is certain ideas about the Cosmos that make him a Catholic. He can see that being Cosmic in that way, and Catholic in that way, is what makes him different from other people; and what makes him, at the very least, a not uninteresting figure in human history. He will never get anywhere near it by sentimentalising against Catholic sentiment or pontificating against Catholic pontiffs. He must get hold of the ideas as ideas; and he will find that the most interesting of all the ideas are those which the newspapers dismiss as dogmas.

For instance; the doctrine of the Dual Nature of Christ is in the most genuine sense interesting; it ought to be interesting to anybody who can understand it, long before he can believe it. It has what can be called with all reverence a stereoscopic interest; the interest of having the two eyes in the head that create an object; of having the two angles in the triangle that determine the third. The old Monophysite sect declared that Christ had only the one divine nature. The new Monophysite sect declares that He had only the one human nature. But it is not a pun or a trick, but a truth, to say that the Monophysite is by nature monotonous. In either of his two forms, he is naturally on one note. The question of objective historical truth is another question, which I am not arguing here, though I am ready to argue it anywhere. I am talking about intellectual stimulation and the starting point of thought and imagination. And these, like all living things, breed from the conjunction of two, and not from one alone. Thus I read, with sympathy but a sympathy that hardly goes beyond sentiment, the studies of the modern Monophysites in the life of the limited and merely mortal Jesus of Nazareth. I respect their respect; I admire their admiration; I know that all they say about human greatness or religious genius is true as far as it goes. But it goes along one line; and cannot convince like the things that can converge. And then, after reading such a tribute to an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes, perhaps I turn another page of the same or some similar book; and come upon some phrase used about a real though a pagan religion; perhaps some supposed parallel of what is called a Pagan Christ. I find it said, if only of Atys or Adonis, “There was a conception that the god sacrificed himself to himself.” The man who can read those words without a thrill is dead.

The thrill is deeper for us, of course, because it is concerned with a fact and not a fancy. In that sense we do not admit that there is any such parallel with the legends of the ancient pagans as is implied in the books of the modern pagans. And indeed we are surely entitled to call it mere common sense to say that there can be no complete parallel between what was admittedly a myth or mystery and what was admittedly a man. But the point here is that the truth hidden even in myths and mysteries is altogether lost if we are confined to the consideration of a man. In this sense there is an ironic and unconscious truth in the words of the modern pagan, who sang that “the heathen outface and outlive us,” and that “our lives and our longings are twain.” It is true of the Modernists, but it is not true of us, who find simultaneously the realisation of a longing and the record of a life. It is perfectly true that there were in many pagan myths the faint foreshadowing of the Christian mysteries; though even in saying so we admit that the foreshadowings were shadows. But when all imaginative kinship has been explored or allowed for, it is not true that mythology ever rose to the heights of theology. It is not true that a thought so bold or so subtle as this one ever crossed the mind that created the centaurs and the fauns. In the wildest and most gigantic of the primitive epic fancies, there is no conception so colossal as the being who is both Zeus and Prometheus.

But I only advert to it here, not as arguing its truth against those who do not believe it, but only as insisting on its intense and intellectual interest for those who do believe it. I only wish to explain to those who are worried in this way, that a mind filled with the true conception of this Duality has plenty to think about along those lines and has no need to dig up dead gods to discredit the Everlasting Man. There is no necessity for me to be Modernist in my own thoughts, or Monophysite in my own thoughts; because I think these views much duller and more trivial than my own. In the beautiful words of the love-song in THE WALLET OF KAI LUNG, one of the few truly psychological love-songs of the world: “This insignificant and universally despised person would unhesitatingly prefer his thoughts to theirs.”

Any number of other examples could of course be given. This person (if I may use once more the graceful Chinese locution) would very soon exhaust the excitement of discovering that Mary and Maia both begin with an M, or that the Mother of Christ and the Mother of Cupid were both represented as women. But I know that I shall never exhaust the profundity of that unfathomable paradox which is defined so defiantly in the very title of the Mother of God. I know that there are not only far deeper, but far fresher and freer developments of thought and imagination, in that riddle of the perfectly human having once had a natural authority over the supernaturally divine, than in any sort of iconoclastic identification which assimilates all the sacred images by flattening all their faces. By the time that Christ is really made the same as Osiris, there can be very little left of either of them; but Christ, as conceived by the Catholic Church, is himself a complex and a combination, not of two unreal things, but of two real ones. In the same way an Ashtaroth exactly like one of Raphael’s Madonnas, or vice versa, would seem a somewhat featureless vision in any case; whereas there is something that is, in the most intellectual sense, unique about the conception of the THEOTOKOS. In short, in all this mere unification of traditions, true or false, there is something that may be quite simply described as dull. But the dogmas are not dull. Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve, but giving life. It is easy enough to flatten out everything for miles round with dynamite, if our only object is to give death. But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues, so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line. It is the custom, though by this time; already a rather stale custom, to complain that the Greeks or Italians who disputed about the Trinity or the Sacrament were splitting hairs. I do not know that even splitting hairs is any drearier than bleaching hairs, in the vain attempt to match the golden hair of Freya and the black hair of Cotytto. The subdivision of a hair does at least tell us something of its structure; whereas its mere discoloration tells us nothing at all. Theology does introduce us to the structure of ideas; whereas theosophical syncretism merely washes all the colours out of the coloured fairy-tales of the world. But my only purpose in this place is to reassure the kind gentleman who was troubled about the secret malady of modernity that must be eating away my otherwise empty mind. I hasten earnestly to explain that I am quite well, thank you; and that I have plenty of things to think about without falling back on a Baconian madness of pagan parallels, or establishing the connection between the tale of the bull killed by Mithras and the tune the old cow died of.

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THE OPTIMIST AS A SUICIDE

FREETHINKERS are occasionally thoughtful, though never free. In the modern world of the West, at any rate, they seem always to be tied to the treadmill of a materialist and monist cosmos. The universal sceptic, in Asia or in Antiquity, has probably been a bolder thinker, though very probably a more unhappy man. But what we have to deal with as scepticism is not scepticism; but a fixed faith in monism. The freethinker is not free to question monism. He is forbidden, for instance, in the only intelligible modern sense, to believe in a miracle. He is forbidden, in exactly the same sense in which he would say that we are forbidden to believe in a heresy. Both are forbidden by first principles and not by force. The Rationalist Press Association will not actually kidnap, gag or strangle Sir Arthur Keith if he admits the evidence for a cure at Lourdes. Neither will the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster have me hanged, drawn and quartered if I announce that I am an agnostic tomorrow. But of both cases it is true to say that a man cannot root up his first principles without a terrible rending and revolutionising of his very self. As a matter of fact, we are the freer of the two; as there is scarcely any evidence, natural or preternatural, that cannot be accepted as fitting into our system somewhere; whereas the materialist cannot fit the most minute miracle into his system anywhere. But let us leave that on one side as a separate question; and agree, if only for the sake of argument, that both the Catholic and the materialist are limited only by their fundamental conviction about the cosmic system; in both thought is in that sense forbidden and in that sense free. Consequently, when I see in some newspaper symposium, like that on Spiritualism, a leading materialist like Mr. John M. Robertson discussing the evidence for spiritualism, I feel exactly as I imagine him to feel when he hears a bishop in a mitre or a Jesuit in a cassock discussing the evidence for materialism. I know that Mr. Robertson cannot accept the evidence without becoming somebody quite different from Mr. Robertson; which also is within the power of the grace of God. But I know quite well he is not a freethinker; except in the sense in which I am a freethinker. He has long ago come to a conclusion which controls all his other conclusions. He is not driven by scientific evidence to accept Materialism. He is forbidden by Materialism to accept scientific evidence.

But there is another way in which the freethinker is not only thoughtful, but useful. The man who rejects the Faith altogether is often very valuable as a critic of the man who rejects it piecemeal, or bit by bit, or by fits and starts. The man who picks out some part of Catholicism that happens to please him, or throws away some part that happens to puzzle him, does in fact produce, not only the queerest sort of result, but generally the very opposite result to what he intends. And his inconsistency can often be effectively exposed from the extreme negative as well as the extreme positive point of view. It has been said that when the half-gods go, the gods arrive; it might be said in amiable parody that when the no-goddites arrive, the half-goddites go; and I am not sure it is not a good riddance. Anyhow, even the atheist can illustrate how important it is to keep the Catholic system altogether, even if he rejects it altogether.

A curious and amusing instance comes from America; in connection with Mr. Clarence Darrow, the somewhat simple-minded sceptic of that land of simplicity. He seems to have been writing something about the impossibility of anybody having a soul; of which nothing need be said except that (as usual) it seems to be the sceptic who really thinks of the soul superstitiously, as a separate and secret animal with wings; who considers the soul quite apart from the self. But what interests me about him at the moment is this. One of his arguments against immortality is that people do not really believe in it. And one of his arguments for that is that if they did believe in certain happiness beyond the grave, they would all kill themselves. He says that nobody would endure the martyrdom of cancer, for instance, if he really believed (as he apparently assumes all Christians to believe) that in any case the mere fact of death would instantly introduce the soul to perfect felicity and the society of all its best friends. A Catholic will certainly know what answer he has to give. But Mr. Clarence Darrow does not really in the least know what question he has asked.

Now there we have the final flower and crown of all modern optimism and universalism and humanitarianism in religion. Sentimentalists talk about love till the world is sick of the most glorious of all human words; they assume that there can be nothing in the next world except the sort of Utopia of practical pleasure which they promise us (but do not give us) in this world. They declare that all will be forgiven, because there is nothing to forgive. They insist that “passing over” is only like going into the next room, they insist that it will not even be a waiting-room. They declare that it must immediately introduce us to a cushioned lounge with all conceivable comforts, without any reference to how we have got there. They are positive that there is no danger, no devil; even no death. All is hope, happiness and optimism. And, as the atheist very truly points out, the logical result of all that hope, happiness and optimism would be hundreds of people hanging from lamp-posts or thousands of people throwing themselves into wells or canals. We should find the rational result of the modern Religion of Joy and Love in one huge human stampede of suicide. Pessimism would have killed its thousands, but optimism its ten thousands.

Now, of course, as I say, a Catholic knows the answer; because he holds the complete philosophy, which keeps a man sane; and not some single fragment of it, whether sad or glad, which may easily drive him mad. A Catholic does not kill himself because he does not take it for granted that he will deserve heaven in any case, or that it will not matter at all whether he deserves it at all. He does not profess to know exactly what danger he would run; but he does know what loyalty he would violate and what command or condition he would disregard. He actually thinks that a man might be fitter for heaven because he endured like a man; and that a hero could be a martyr to cancer as St. Lawrence or St. Cecilia were martyrs to cauldrons or gridirons. The faith in a future life, the hope of a future happiness, the belief that God is Love and that loyalty is eternal life, these things do not produce lunacy and anarchy, IF they are taken along with the other Catholic doctrines about duty and vigilance and watchfulness against the powers of hell. They might produce lunacy and anarchy, if they were taken alone. And the Modernists, that is, the optimists and the sentimentalists, did want us to take them alone. Of course, the same would be true, if somebody took the other doctrines of duty and discipline alone. It would produce another dark age of Puritans rapidly blackening into Pessimists. Indeed, the extremes meet, when they are both ends clipped off what should be a complete thing. Our parable ends poetically with two gibbets side by side; one for the suicidal pessimist and the other for the suicidal optimist.

The point is that in this passage the American sceptic is answering the Modernist; but he is not answering the Catholic. The Catholic has an extremely simple and sensible reason for not cutting his throat in order to fly instantly into Paradise. But he might really raise a question for those who talk as if Paradise were invariably and instantly populated with people who had cut their throats. And this is only one example out of a long list of historical examples; in which those who tried to make the Faith more simple invariably made it less sane. The Moslems imagined that they were merely being sensible when they cut down the creed to a mere belief in one God; but in the world of practical psychology they really cut it down to one Fate. The actual effect on ordinary men was simply fatalism; like that of the Turk who will not take his wound to a hospital because he is resigned to Kismet or the will of Allah. The Puritans thought they were simplifying things by appealing to what they called the plain words of Scripture; but as a fact they were complicating things by bringing in half a hundred cranky sects and crazy suggestions. And the modern universalist and humanitarian thought they were simplifying things when they interpreted the great truth that God is Love, as meaning that there can be no war with the demons or no danger to the soul. But in fact they were inventing even darker riddles with even wilder answers; and Mr. Clarence Darrow has suggested one of them. He will be gratified to receive the thanks of all Catholics for doing so.

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FALL

I HAVE remarked on the curious rearguard action of bluff that is being fought to cover the retreat of the Darwinians. An example of the same thing has appeared in connection with a much more famous name; indeed, with two famous names. Mr. H. G. Wells has replied to Mr. Belloc, who wrote a criticism of the “Outline of History,” chiefly to protest against a certain tone of arbitrary generalisation and sham knowledge of the unknown. A typical case was that in which Mr. Wells said of the men who drew reindeers in caves: “There seems no scope in such a life for speculation or philosophy,” and Mr. Belloc not unnaturally answered: “Why on earth not?” But the details of the various works in question do not concern me immediately here; they mostly depend on that habit of talking as if every cave-drawing had its date obligingly inscribed on it; or any stone hatchet might bear the inscription 400,000 B.C. or possibly, B.O.H., or Before the Outline of History. At the moment the only point of contact is that which affects a continuation of our previous criticism, touching the present state of Darwinism. And what strikes me is that even Mr. Wells, often a sufficiently warm controversialist, is relatively and really cold in the matter; and his defence of Darwin is much more of an apology than an apologia. Indeed, like so many other modern apologies, it almost amounts to pleading that Darwin was not a Darwinian.

The Victorian evolutionists devoted themselves to declaring how great Darwin’s thesis was. The new evolutionists seem to devote themselves to explaining how small it was. They really seem to plead, as in the old anecdote, that it gave birth to a theory, but a very little one. Some of Mr. Wells’s words may surely, without unfairness, be called apologetic. He does not, like the professor previously mentioned, try to get over the word “origin” by talking about “the cause of the origin.” So he concentrates on the word “species,” as if evolution had not only applied to a sub-division. He adds that Darwin did not at the beginning even apply it to man. What in the world would the Victorian Darwinians have said had they heard it urged in defence of Darwinism that it was not applied to man? Are we to understand that only the first book of Darwin is divinely inspired? Again, Mr. Wells says that natural selection is common sense. And doubtless, if it only means that things fitted for survival do survive, it is common sense. We may also add that it is common knowledge. Has it come to this, that Darwin is defended because he only discovered what was common knowledge? The real question, of course, is that stated by Mr. Belloc; when he said that nobody needs to be told that in a flood fish live and cattle die. The question is, How soon do cattle turn into fish? That would be an example of the true Darwinian theory; and it is now merely minimised, represented as only one element of evolution and without even the elements of an explanation. We fancy there is a healthy prejudice behind it all. Mr. Wells indignantly repudiates the slander uttered by Mr. Belloc, who called him a patriot. But it is true; the deep English national pride has much to do with this devotion. And rather than deprive England of her Darwin, they have deprived Darwin of his discovery.

When a man is as great a genius as Mr. Wells, I admit it sounds provocative to call him provincial. But if he wants to know why anybody does it, it will be enough to point silently to the headline of one of his pages, which runs: “Where is the Garden of Eden?” To come down to a thing like that, and to think it telling, when talking to an intelligent Catholic about the Fall, that IS provinciality; proud and priceless provinciality. The French peasants of whom Mr. Wells speaks are not in that sense provincial. As Mr. Wells says, they do not know anything about Darwin and Evolution. They do not know and they do not care. That is where they are much better philosophers than Mr. Wells. They hold the philosophy of the Fall, in the form of a simple story which may be historic or symbolic, but anyhow cannot be more important than what it symbolises. In comparison with that truth, it does not matter twopence whether any evolutionary theory is true or not. Whether or no the garden was an allegory, the truth itself can be very well allegorised as a garden. And the point of it is that Man, whatever else he is, is certainly NOT merely one of the plants of the garden that has plucked its roots out of the soil and walked about with them like legs, or on the principle of a double dahlia has grown duplicate eyes and ears. He is something else, something strange and solitary; and more like the statue that was once the god of the garden; but the statue has fallen from its pedestal and lies broken among the plants and weeds. This conception has nothing to do with materialism as it refers to materials. The image might be made of wood; the wood might have come from the garden; the sculptor presumably might, and probably did, allow for the growth and grain of the wood in what he carved and expressed. But my fable fixes the two truths of the true scripture. The first is that the wood was graven or stamped with an image, deliberately, and from the outside; in this case the image of God. The second is that this image has been damaged and defaced, so that it is now both better and worse than the mere plants in the garden, which are perfect according to their own plan. There is room for any amount of speculation about the history of the tree before it was turned into an image; there is room for any amount of doubt and mystery about what really happened when it was turned into an image; there is room for any amount of hope and imagination about what it will look like when it is really mended and made into the perfect statue we have never seen. But it has the two fixed points, that man was uplifted at the first and fell; and to answer it by saying, “Where is the Garden of Eden?” is like answering a philosophical Buddhist by saying, “When were you last a donkey?”

The Fall is a view of life. It is not only the only enlightening, but the only encouraging view of life. It holds, as against the only real alternative philosophies, those of the Buddhist or the Pessimist or the Promethean, that we have misused a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one. It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will. Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate. A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not a word to say. For instance, on the colossal contrast between the completeness of man’s machines and the continued corruption of his motives; on the fact that no social progress really seems to leave self behind; on the fact that the first and not the last men of any school or revolution are generally the best and purest; as William Penn was better than a Quaker millionaire or Washington better than an American oil magnate; on that proverb that says: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin; on those extremes of good and evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans and sceptics: “We look before and after, and pine for what is not”; which cries against all prigs and progressives out of the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory; and that we are all kings in exile.

Now to people who feel that this view of life is more real, more radical, more universal than the cheap simplifications opposed to it, it comes with quite a shock of bathos to realise that anybody let alone a man like Mr. Wells, supposes that it all depends on some detail about the site of a garden in Mesopotamia, like that identified by General Gordon. It is hard to find any parallel to such an incongruity; for there is no real similarity between our muddled mortal affairs and events that were divine if they were mysterious, and scriptures that are sacred even if they are symbolical. But some shadow of a comparison could be made out of the modern myths. I mean the sort of myths that men like Mr. Wells generally do believe in; such as the Myth of Magna Carta or the Myth of the Mayflower. Now many historians will maintain that Magna Carta was really nothing to speak of; that it was largely a piece of feudal privilege. But suppose one of the historians who holds this view began to argue with us excitedly about the fabulous nature of our ordinary fancy picture of Magna Carta. Suppose he produced maps and documents to prove that Magna Carta was not signed at Runnymede, but somewhere else; as I believe some scholars do maintain. Suppose he criticised the false heraldry and fancy-dress costumes of the ordinary sort of waxwork historical picture of the event. We should think he was rather unduly excited about a detail of mediaeval history. But with what a shock of astonishment should we realise at last that the man actually thought that all modern attempts at democracy must be abandoned, that all representative government must be wrong, that all Parliaments would have to be dissolved and all political rights destroyed, if once it were admitted that King John did not sign that special document in that little island in the Thames! What should we think of him, if he really thought we had no reasons for liking law or liberty, except the authenticity of that beloved royal signature? That is very much how I feel when I find that Mr. Wells really imagines that the luminous and profound philosophy of the Fall only means that Eden was somewhere in Mesopotamia. Now the only explanation of a great man like Mr. Wells having a small prejudice, like this about the snake, is that he does come of a religious tradition that regarded the text of Hebrew Scripture as the only authority and had forgotten all about the great mediaeval metaphysic and the discussion of fundamental ideas. The man who does that is provincial; and there is no harm in saying so even when he is one of the greatest men of letters and a glory to the English name.

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THE IDOLS OF SCOTLAND

THE thing that strikes me most in current controversy is that our opponents are talking almost entirely in terms of the past, and that an entirely dead past; whereas we are making some sort of attempt, whether it be considered impertinent or eccentric or meddlesome or paradoxical, to deal with the practical conditions of the present. An amusing comedy on these lines seems to have arisen on the subject of Scottish Nationalism or the notion of Home Rule for North Britain. A worthy Presbyterian has warned his fellow-countrymen that the movement is tainted by the presence of Roman Catholics, and especially by that of Mr. Compton Mackenzie; and that no little degree of the deadly peril is indicated by the fact that Mr. Cunninghame Graham is interested in a book by Mr. Belloc; in which the hideous sentiment is uttered that the Reformation was the shipwreck of Christendom. Personally I should have thought it was obvious to anybody on any side, in one solid and objective sense, that it was the shipwreck of Christendom. I should imagine that it would be obvious to anybody, for instance, who desires or even discusses the Reunion of Christendom. There certainly was a united vessel or vehicle and it certainly did break up into different parts. Some people may think the ship was a rotten old-fashioned three-decker that was bound to break up; and that the people were lucky who got away from it in boats. But it is certain that it did break up and that the boats were not the same as the original ship. A man might as well resent our saying that the rise of the feudal kingdoms and the modern nationalities was part of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This is only one of the marks of such bigotry; but it is worth noting at the outset. One of the peculiarities of this sort of bigot is that he cannot distinguish between provocative statements and plain inevitable statements. If I say that the Reformation was a relapse into barbarism, a return to all that was worst in the Dark Ages without anything of what was best in them, an idolatry of dead Hebrew documents full of visions and symbols without any Daniel to interpret the dreams, a stampede of brutal luxury and pride with a vulgar howl of hot-gospelling for an excuse, a riot of thieves and looters with a few foaming and gibbering lunatics carried in front of it like live mascots for luck; the return of the Manichee, the dirty ape of the ascetic, conspiring with the devil to destroy the world— if I were to say all this I should think that these remarks about Protestantism certainly had a slightly provocative flavour. But if I were to say, with Mr. Belloc, that Protestantism was the shipwreck of Christendom, I should regard it as an ordinary historical statement, like saying that the American War of Independence was a split in the British Empire. The bigot cannot see the difference between these two types of statement, whether made by us or by himself.

The next interesting thing to note about the protest is that the Protestant goes on to say that Mr. Compton Mackenzie and his friends are going to ruin Scotland by removing the stern teaching of John Knox, which has apparently created the Scottish character. This seems a little hard on the Scottish character. I cannot quite bring myself to believe that the character of Scott or of Stevenson, the character of Burns or Barrie, are exact and unaltered reproductions of the stern teaching of John Knox. But before we come to any such comparisons, it is worth remarking, on the face of the thing that a rather more living world, a life more in touch with modern conditions, a grasp of the actual problems of the present and the immediate future, is rather more indicated by saying the words “Compton Mackenzie” than by saying the words “John Knox.” Many very modern young men have recently joined the same religion as Mr. Compton Mackenzie. No such modern young men, that I ever heard of, have ever exhibited the smallest desire to go back to the religion of John Knox. As a matter of plain fact, there is hardly one modern Scotsman in a thousand who has the smallest sympathy with the real religion of John Knox. He may vaguely respect John Knox as a Scottish hero, on the supposition (quite startlingly false) that he was a Scottish patriot. As a matter of fact, the patriotic party in Scotland was the wicked Papistical party; Knox and his Presbyterians were all for helping the pressure of England and Elizabeth. They would have justified themselves by saying that they had the one, true and only right religion. The question is, who is left even in Scotland who believes that it was the one, true and only right religion? I repeat, about one in a thousand; perhaps only a few splendidly fanatical old Wee Frees in the Highlands. Anybody who knows anything of the Scottish Presbyterian Churches, during the last fifty years, knows that the prevailing doctrine taught in them has NOT been the severe Calvinism of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, still less the wild Calvinism of the sixteenth. It has been a mild hash of Hegelian philosophy and Higher Criticism, all borrowed from Germany and carefully learnt by Scotch students in German Universities. And anybody who has noticed what the modern Scottish character is really like, knows that it does not by this time (thank heaven) bear the smallest resemblance to the sternness of John Knox. It is rather sentimental than otherwise, though its sentiment finds expression in more than one brilliant and admirable man of genius. Modern Scotland is not even remotely represented by John Knox. It is represented much more accurately, and much more honourably, by Sir Harry Lauder and Sir James Barrie.

This dull habit of invoking dead things, in a world in which we are surrounded by more and more interesting living things, is the second mark of the sort of bigot I am describing. It would be an extremely interesting business to write a real, respectful and sympathetic history of the remarkable episode of Scottish Puritanism; insisting on its integrity and its intellectual vigour while it lasted. But any sincere study of it must conclude with the statement that it did not last. One of the most brilliant and distinguished of Scottish professors, at Edinburgh University, himself of an origin wholly Puritan and of sympathies the very reverse of Catholic, used to me the true and forcible expression about the old Scottish Sabbatarianism, “It covered all Scotland; and then one morning, it had suddenly vanished everywhere like the snow.” And though the story might be told truly from either standpoint, or from many others, it is but natural that we should draw our own moral from it. And the moral is, of course, one which we find running through the whole of our history.

The birth and death of every heresy has been essentially the same. A morbid or unbalanced Catholic takes one idea out of the thousandfold throng of Catholic ideas; and announces that he cares for that Catholic idea more than for Catholicism. He takes it away with him into a wilderness, where the idea becomes an image and the image an idol. Then, after a century or two, he suddenly wakes up and discovers that the idol is an idol; and, shortly after that, that the wilderness is a wilderness. If he is a wise man, he calls himself a fool. If he is a fool, he calls himself an evolutionary progressive who has outgrown the worship of idols; and he looks round him at the wilderness, spreading bare and desolate on every side and says, in the beautiful words of Mr. H. G. Wells: “I see no limit to it at all.”

That is what happened to the Calvinistic Scotsman; and the chief comfort in the prospect is that the Scotsman is not generally a fool, even when he has ceased to be a Calvinist. But he very often becomes an atheist; and the fact that so many of the hard destructive sceptics, from Hume downwards, came from Scotland, was the early and significant evidence of the discovery of the idol and the wilderness. But in any case, that is the compact parable of what occurred. The Calvinist was a Catholic whose imagination had been in some way caught and overpowered by the one isolated theological truth of the power and knowledge of God; and he offered to it human sacrifice, not only of every human sentiment, but of every other divine quality. Something in that bare idea of all-seeing, all-searching and pitiless power intoxicated and exalted certain men for a certain period, as certain men are intoxicated by a storm of wind or some terrible stage tragedy. The more moderate Protestants, the Anglicans and to a large extent the Lutherans, had something of the same queer feeling about the King. Hence came the Cavalier doctrine of Divine Right—and the court chaplains of Prussia. Nothing is more intriguing and challenging to the imagination than the necessity of trying to understand how men in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries felt a sort of abstract altruistic joy in the mere might and triumph of the Prince; in the mere autocracy of the earthly ruler. The Calvinists, to do them justice, felt it only about the heavenly ruler. In that sense the Scots can look proudly back on their Calvinism. But they cannot look proudly forward to Calvinism. They really know, as well as anybody else, that this isolated religious idea can no longer be kept separate from all the other religious ideas to which it belongs. The Calvinism of the Puritan is as dead as the Divine Right of the Cavaliers; men can no longer worship the idol, whether it is Presbyterianism or Erastianism. They can only worship the wilderness; which is atheism—or, as the more polite say, pantheism.

Whether it be called a Catholic tendency or no, all the movements of all the sects of late have been in the direction of trying to put together again those separate pieces that were pulled apart in the sixteenth century. The main feature of our time has been the fact that one person after another has recovered one piece after another, and added it to the new scheme by borrowing it from the old. There is one sufficient proof that there has indeed been a shipwreck. And that is that Robinson Crusoe has, ever since, been continually going back to get things from the wreck.

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IF THEY HAD BELIEVED

ONE of the things our enemies do not know is the real case for their own side. It is always for me a great matter of pride that the proudest, the most genuine and the most unanswerable boast, that the Protestants of England could ever make, was made for them by a Catholic. Very few of the Protestants, of his time at any rate, would have had the historical enlargement or enlightenment to make it. For it was said by Newman, when that great master of English was surveying the glorious triumphs of our tongue from Bacon and Milton, to Swift and Burke, and he reminded us firmly that, though we convert England to the true faith a thousand times over, “English literature will always HAVE BEEN Protestant.”

That generous piece of candour might well be represented as even too generous; but I think it is very wise for us to be too generous. It is not entirely, or at least not exclusively true. The name of Chaucer is alone enough to show that English literature was English a long time before it was Protestant. Even a Protestant, if he were also English, could ask for nobody more entirely English than Chaucer. He was, in the essential national temper, very much more English than Milton. As a matter of fact, the argument is no stronger for Chaucer than it is for Shakespeare. But in the case of Shakespeare the argument is long and complicated, as conducted by partisans; though sufficiently simple and direct for people with a sense of reality. I believe that recent discoveries, as recorded in a book by a French lady, have very strongly confirmed the theory that Shakespeare died a Catholic. But I need no books and no discoveries to prove to me that he had lived a Catholic, or more probably, like the rest of us, tried unsuccessfully to live a Catholic; that he thought like a Catholic and felt like a Catholic and saw every question as a Catholic sees it. The proofs of this would be matter for a separate essay; if indeed so practical an impression can be proved at all. It is quite self-evident to me that he was a certain real and recognisable Renaissance type of Catholic; like Cervantes; like Ronsard. But if I were asked offhand for a short explanation, I could only say that I know he was a Catholic from the passages which are now used to prove he was an agnostic.

But that is another and much more subtle question, which is not the question I proposed to myself in starting this essay. In starting it, I proposed to grant the whole sound and solid truth of Newman’s admission; that there has indeed arisen out of the disunion of Europe a great and glorious English Protestant literature; and to make some further speculations upon the point. And I think that nothing could make clearer to the modern English, the one supreme thing that they don’t know (which is what our religion really is and why we think it real) than to put this rather interesting historical question. What difference would it have made to the great masters of English literature, if they had been Catholics?

Of course, the question cannot be strictly and scientifically answered; because nobody knows what difference would be made to anybody by any change in the circumstances of his life. But taking the matter broadly, as a question of ideas or even of doctrines it is worth asking as a matter of religious history. How far did the great Protestant writers depend on Protestantism?

I have no intention of discussing it adequately here; and indeed this is not so much an essay as an essay to suggest an essay. It is, in fact, a delicate indication, to people more learned than myself, that I am in possession of a very good title and subject for an essay. But at least it will be safe to say that the common or conventional impression among English people on this point is wildly wrong. It is wrong because it imagines that purely Protestant ideas were in some vague way the same as liberal and emancipated ideas. And it is wrong in a more special sense, because it is founded on the utterly false history, which supposes that the Renaissance was the same as the Reformation. It would be very difficult to say what English literature owes to the Reformation as distinct from the Renaissance. There is the splendid sincerity that inspired the plain English of Bunyan; but even Bunyan was a sort of exception that proved the rule. He was a Puritan; but he was emphatically not a Puritan of the Puritans. He was a man actually suspected by his fellow Puritans, because he was not so much a Puritan as a Christian. It was remarked at the time, and it has often been remarked since, that his theory is not very sectarian by the standard of seventeenth century sects. Among the Calvinists he was so much of a moderate, that thousands must have read his great book without thinking about Calvinism at all. And if we take the great scenes in his great book, the battle with Apollyon, the Mission of Greatheart, the death of Valiant-for-the-Truth, when all the trumpets sounded on the other side—there is really no reason whatever why they should not have been written by a Catholic. I do not affirm that they WOULD have been written by a Catholic, if the course of history had left the common people Catholics; for that is a question which nobody can possibly answer one way or the other. But I am speaking strictly of doctrines in their relation to ideas and images; and there is no possible reason why a Catholic should be prevented by his Catholicism from writing such a story of the pilgrimage of Man and the fight to attain to God.

Milton in one way is an even stronger case; since he had much more in him of Shakespeare and the Catholic Renaissance. And I really cannot think of any deep difference that it would have made to his poetry, as poetry, if he had followed other members of his family in the old faith; I do not see that he need have been much altered, except possibly by being a much jollier man. Many will not realise this, because they insist on regarding artistic and intellectual freedom as something that was closed to the Catholic countries and open only to the Protestant. But all history is in flat contradiction to this view. The tide of culture in the seventeenth century flowed from France to England, not from England to France. Milton might have been as central as Moliere and still remained a Catholic man in a Catholic atmosphere. Descartes the Catholic was more truly than Bacon the Protestant, the PHILOSOPHER of rationalist science. The experiments, the new forms, the great names in criticism and philosophy, appeared during the last two or three centuries quite as much in the Catholic countries as in the Protestant, if not rather more. England could have produced a great English literature, as France produced a great French literature, without any change in the ancient European religion.

The real test case, to be considered in some such essay, would be a case like that of Cowper. There you do most emphatically have the Protestant theology; and there you do most emphatically have the English poetry. But the two have precious little to do with each other; until the coming of that dark hour when the theology destroyed the poetry. Poor Cowper’s Calvinism drove him mad; and only his poetry managed for some time to keep him sane. But there was nothing whatever either in the poetry or the sanity that could have prevented him from being a Catholic. On the contrary, he was exactly the sort of man who would have been very happy as a Catholic. He was the sort of man to have been devoted to the memory of St. Francis, if he had ever heard of him; and there was nothing to prevent the one any more than the other from keeping pet birds or stroking wild hares out of the woods. It was the brutal blow of Calvin, two centuries before, that broke the heart of that natural saint; and it is not the least of his crimes.

After the time of Cowper, there does indeed begin to appear another type of difficulty; but it is not the presence but rather the absence of Protestant theology. There were elements even in Burns and Byron, there were still more elements in Shelley and Swinburne, which would doubtless have been at issue with their Catholic tradition, if they had had it. But it would not have been a revolt against Catholicism half so much as it was a revolt against Protestantism. In so far as they tended to mere scepticism, they could have found their way to it more quickly from reading Rabelais and Montaigne in a Catholic country than from reading Shakespeare and Milton in a Protestant one. As soon as the Revolution has begun, in a sense as soon as the Romantic Movement has begun, the positive Puritan theology is left behind even more completely than the mediaeval theology. Indeed the Romantics did develop a faint and hazy sympathy, if not with mediaeval theology, at least with mediaeval religion. It is true that Byron or Hugo probably preferred an abbey to be a ruined abbey; but they would not have visited a Baptist chapel even for the pleasure of seeing it ruined. It is true that Scott advised us to see mediaeval Melrose by moonlight; with the delicate implication that the mediaeval religion was moonshine. But he would not in any case have wanted to see Exeter Hall by gaslight; and he would have thought its theology not moonshine but gas. The tributes which he occasionally forces himself to make to the official Puritanism of his own country are, it will be generally agreed, the most sullen and insincere words to be found in his works. On the negative side, therefore, the conclusion is altogether negative. It is very difficult to find, at least after the doubtful case of Bunyan and the deadly case of Cowper, anything that can be called a purely literary inspiration coming from the purely Protestant doctrines. There is plenty of inspiration coming more or less indirectly from Paganism; but after the first excitement, hardly any from Protestantism.

If this is true on the negative side, it is even truer on the positive side. I take it that the imaginative magnificence of Milton’s epic, in such matters as the War in Heaven, would have been much more convincing, if it had been modelled more on the profound mediaeval mysteries about the nature of angels and archangels, and less on the merely fanciful Greek myths about giants and gods. PARADISE LOST is an immortal poem; but it has just failed to be an immortal religious poem. Those are most happy in reading Milton who can read him as they would read Hesiod. It is doubtful whether those seeking spiritual satisfaction now read him even as naturally as they would read Crashaw. I suppose nobody will dispute that the pageantry of Scott might have taken on a tenfold splendour if he could have understood the emblems of an everlasting faith as sympathetically as he did the emblems of a dead feudalism. For him it was the habit that made the monk; but the habit would have been quite as picturesque if there had been a real monk inside it; let alone a real mind inside the monk, like the mind of St. Dominic or St. Hugh of Lincoln. “English literature will always have been Protestant”; but it might have been Catholic; without ceasing to be English literature, and perhaps succeeding in producing a deeper literature and a happier England.

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PEACE AND THE PAPACY

THERE is a famous saying which to some has seemed lacking in reverence, though in fact it is a support of one important part of religion; “If God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent Him.” It is not at all unlike some of the daring questions with which St. Thomas Aquinas begins his great defence of the faith. Some of the modern critics of his faith, especially the Protestant critics of it, have fallen into an amusing error, chiefly through ignorance of Latin and of the old use of the word DIVUS, and have accused Catholics of describing the Pope as God. Catholics, I need not say, are about as likely to call the Pope God as to call a grasshopper the Pope. But there is a sense in which they do recognise an eternal correspondence between the position of the King of Kings in the universe and of his Viceroy in the world, like the correspondence between a real thing and its shadow; a similarity something like the damaged and defective similarity between God and the image of God. And among the coincidences of this comparison may be classed the case of this epigram. The world will more and more find itself in a position in which even politicians and practical men will find themselves saying, “If the Pope had not existed, it would be necessary to invent him.”

It is not at all impossible that they may really try to invent him. The truth is that multitudes of them would already accept the Pope if he were not called the Pope. I firmly believe that it would be quite possible, in this and many other matters, to play a sort of pious practical joke on large numbers of heretics and heathens. I fancy it would be quite feasible to describe in accurate but abstract terms the general idea of an office or obligation, which would exactly correspond to the position of the Papacy in history, and which would be accepted on ethical and social ground by numbers of Protestants and free-thinkers; until they discovered with a reaction of rage and astonishment that they had been entrapped into accepting the international arbitration of the Pope. Suppose somebody were to advance the old idea as if it were a new idea; suppose he were to say; “I propose that there be erected in some central city in the more civilised part of our civilisation the seat of a permanent official to represent peace and the basis of agreement among all the surrounding nations; let him be by the nature of his post set apart from them all and yet sworn to consider the rights and wrongs of all; Let him be put there as a judge to expound an ethical law and system of social relations; let him be of a certain type and training different from that which encourages the ordinary ambitions of military glory or even the ordinary attachments of tribal tradition; let him be protected by a special sentiment from the pressure of kings and princes; let him be sworn in a special manner to the consideration of men as men.” There are not a few already, and there will soon be many more, who would be perfectly capable of proposing such an ideal international institution on their own account; there are also many who would really, in their innocence, suppose that it had never been attempted before.

It is true that as yet large numbers of such social reformers would shrink from the idea of the institution being an individual. But even that prejudice is weakening under the wear and tear of real political experience. We may be attached, as many of us are, to the democratic ideal; but most of us have already realised that direct democracy, the only true democracy which satisfies a true democrat, is a thing applicable to some things and not others; and not applicable at all to a question such as this. The actual speaking voice of a vast international civilisation, or of a vast international religion, will not in any case be the actual articulate distinguishable voices or cries of all the millions of the faithful. It is not the people who would be the heirs of a dethroned Pope; it is some synod or bench of bishops. It is not an alternative between monarchy and democracy, but an alternative between monarchy and oligarchy. And, being myself one of the democratic idealists, I have not the faintest hesitation in my choice between the two latter forms of privilege. A monarch is a man; but an oligarchy is not men; it is a few men forming a group small enough to be insolent and large enough to be irresponsible. A man in the position of a Pope, unless he is literally mad, must be responsible. But aristocrats can always throw the responsibility on each other; and yet create a common and corporate society from which is shut out the very vision of the rest of the world. These are conclusions to which many people in the world are coming; and many who would still be much astonished and horrified to find where those conclusions lead. But the point here is that even if our civilisation does not rediscover the need of a Papacy, it is extremely likely that sooner or later it will try to supply the need of something like a Papacy; even if it tries to do it on its own account. That will be indeed an ironical situation. The modern world will have set up a new Anti-Pope, even if, as in Monsignor Benson’s romance, the Anti-Pope has rather the character of an Antichrist.

The point is that men will attempt to put some sort of moral power out of the reach of material powers. It is the weakness of many worthy and well-meaning attempts at international justice just now, that the international council can hardly help being merely a microcosm or model of the world outside it, with all its little things and big things, including the things that are much too big. Suppose that in the international interchanges of the future some power, say Sweden, is felt to be disproportionate or problematical. If Sweden is powerful in Europe, she will be powerful in the council of Europe. If Sweden is too powerful in Europe, she will be too powerful in the council of Europe. And because she is the very thing that is irresistible, she is the very thing to be resisted; or at any rate to be restrained. I do not see how Europe can ever escape from that logical dilemma, except by discovering again an authority that is purely moral and is the recognised custodian of a morality. It may very reasonably be said that even those dedicated to that duty may not always practise what they profess. But the other rulers of the world are not even bound to profess it.

Again and again in history, especially in mediaeval history, the Papacy has intervened in the interests of peace and humanity; just as the greatest saints have thrown themselves between the swords and daggers of contending factions. But if there had been no Papacy and no saints and no Catholic Church at all, the world left to itself would certainly not have substituted social abstractions for theological creeds. As a whole, humanity has been far from humanitarian. If the world had been left to itself, let us say in the age of feudalism, all the decisions would have been rigidly and ruthlessly on the lines of feudalism. There was only one institution in that world that had existed before feudalism. There was only one institution which could possibly carry on some faint memory of the Republic and the Roman Law. If the world had been left to itself in the time of the Renaissance and the Italian statecraft of the Prince, it would have been arranged entirely in the current fashion of the glorification of princes. There was only one institution that could at any moment be moved to repeat, “Put not your trust in princes.” Had it been absent, the only result would have been that the famous settlement of CUJUS REGIO EJUS RELIGIO would have been all REGIO with precious little RELIGIO. And so, of course, our own day has its unconscious dogmas and its universal prejudices; and it needs a special, a sacred and what seems to many an inhuman separation to stand above them or to see beyond.

I know that this ideal has been abused like any other; I only say that even those who most denounce the reality will probably begin again to search for the ideal. But I do not, in fact, propose that any such spiritual tribunal should act like a legal tribunal or be given powers of practical interference with normal and national government. I am quite sure, for one thing, that it would never accept any such material entanglement. Nor do I, for that matter, desire that any of the secular tribunals now set up in the interests of international peace should thus have the power to interfere with nationality and local liberty. I would much rather give such power to a pope than to politicians and diplomatists of the sort to whom the world is giving it. But I do not want to give it to anybody and the authority in question does not want to accept it from anybody. The thing of which I speak is purely moral and cannot exist without a certain moral loyalty; it is a thing of atmosphere and even in a sense of affection. There is no space to describe here the manner in which such a general popular attachment grows up; but there is no doubt whatever that it did once grow up round such a religious centre of our civilisation; and that it is not likely to grow up again except for something which aims at a higher standard of humility and charity than the ordinary standard of the world. Men cannot have an affection for other people’s emperors, or even for other people’s politicians; they have sometimes been known to cool in affection even for their own politicians. I see no prospect of any such positive nucleus of amity except in some positive enthusiasm for something that moves the deepest parts of man’s moral nature; something which can unite us not (as the prigs say) by being entirely international, but by being universally human. Men cannot agree about nothing any more than they can disagree about nothing. And anything wide enough to make such an agreement must itself be wider than the world.

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THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

I HAVE rather rashly undertaken to write of the Spirit of Christmas; and it presents a preliminary difficulty about which I must be candid. People are very curious nowadays in their way of talking about “the spirit” of a thing. There is, for example, a particular sort of prig who is always lecturing us about having the spirit of true Christianity, apart from all names and forms. As far as I can make out, he means the very opposite of what he says. He means that we are to go on using the names “Christian” and “Christianity,” and so on, for something in which it is quite specially the spirit that is not Christian; something that is a sort of combination of the baseless optimism of an American atheist with the pacifism of a mild Hindoo. In the same way, we read a great deal about the Spirit of Christmas in modern journalism or commercialism; but it is really a reversal of the same kind. So far from preserving the essentials without the externals, it is rather preserving the externals where there cannot be the essentials. It means taking two mere material substances, like holly and mistletoe, and spreading them all over huge and homeless cosmopolitan hotels or round the Doric columns of impersonal clubs full of jaded and cynical old gentlemen; or in any other place where the actual spirit of Christmas is least likely to be. But there is also another way in which modern commercial complexity eats out the heart of the thing, while actually leaving the painted shell of it. And that is the much too elaborate system of dependence on buying and selling, and therefore on bustle and hustle; and the actual neglect of the new things that might be done by the old Christmas.

Normally, if anything were normal nowadays, it would seem a truism to say that Christmas has been a family festival. But it is now possible (as I have had the good or bad luck to discover) to earn a reputation for paradox simply by going on saying that truisms are true. In this case, of course, the reason, the only reasonable reason, was religious. It was concerned with a happy family because it was consecrated to the Holy Family. But it is perfectly true that many men saw the fact without specially feeling the reason. When we say the root was religious, we do not mean that Sam Weller was concentrated on theological values when he told the Fat Boy to “put a bit of Christmas,” into some object, probably edible. We do not mean that the Fat Boy had gone into a trance of mystical contemplation like a monk seeing a vision. We do not even mean that Bob Cratchit defended punch by saying he was only looking on the wine when it was yellow; or that Tiny Tim quoted Timothy. We only mean that they, including their author, would have confessed humbly and heartily that there was someone historically quite anterior to Mr. Scrooge, who might be called the Founder of the Feast. But in any case, whatever the reason, all would have agreed about the result. Mr. Wardle’s feast centred in Mr. Wardle’s family; and none the less because the romantic shadows of Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass threatened to break it up for the formation of other families.

The Christmas season is domestic; and for that reason most people now prepare for it by struggling in tramcars, standing in queues, rushing away in trains, crowding despairingly into tea-shops, and wondering when or whether they will ever get home. I do not know whether some of them disappear for ever in the toy department or simply lie down and die in the tea-rooms; but by the look of them, it is quite likely. Just before the great festival of the home the whole population seems to have become homeless. It is the supreme triumph of industrial civilisation that, in the huge cities which seem to have far too many houses, there is a hopeless shortage of housing. For a long time past great numbers of our poor have become practically nomadic. We even confess the fact; for we talk of some of them as Street Arabs. But this domestic institution, in its present ironical phase, has gone beyond such normal abnormality. The feast of the family turns the rich as well as the poor into vagabonds. They are so scattered over the bewildering labyrinth of our traffic and our trade, that they sometimes cannot even reach the tea-shop; it would be indelicate, of course, to mention the tavern. They have a difficulty in crowding into their hotels, let alone separating to reach their houses. I mean quite the reverse of irreverence when I say that their only point of resemblance to the archetypal Christmas family is that there is no room for them at the inn.

Now Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home. But the other sort of paradox is not intentional and is certainly not beautiful. It is bad enough that we cannot altogether disentangle the tragedy of poverty. It is bad enough that the birth of the homeless, celebrated at hearth and altar, should sometimes synchronise with the death of the homeless in workhouses and slums. But we need not rejoice in this universal restlessness brought upon rich and poor alike; and it seems to me that in this matter we need a reform of the modern Christmas.

I will now emit another brilliant flash of paradox by remarking that Christmas occurs in the winter. That is, it is not only a feast dedicated to domesticity, but it is one deliberately placed under the conditions in which it is most uncomfortable to rush about and most natural to stop at home. But under the complicated conditions of modern conventions and conveniences, there arises this more practical and much more unpleasant sort of paradox. People have to rush about for a few weeks, if it is only to stay at home for a few hours. Now the old and healthy idea of such winter festivals was this; that people being shut in and besieged by the weather were driven back on their own resources; or, in other words, had a chance of showing whether there was anything in them. It is not certain that the reputation of our most fashionable modern pleasure-seekers would survive the test. Some dreadful exposures would be made of some such brilliant society favourites, if they were cut off from the power of machinery and money. They are quite used to having everything done for them; and even when they go to the very latest American dances, it seems to be mostly the Negro musicians who dance. But anyhow, on the average of healthy humanity I believe the cutting off of all these mechanical connections would have a thoroughly enlivening and awakening effect. At present they are always accused of merely amusing themselves; but they are doing nothing so noble or worthy of their human dignity. Most of them by this time cannot amuse themselves; they are too used to being amused.

Christmas might be creative. We are told, even by those who praise it most, that it is chiefly valuable for keeping up ancient customs or old-fashioned games. It is indeed valuable for both those admirable purposes. But in the sense of which I am now speaking it might once more be possible to turn the truth the other way round. It is not so much old things as new things that a real Christmas might create. It might, for instance, create new games, if people were really driven to invent their own games. Most of the very old games began with the use of ordinary tools or furniture. So the very terms of tennis were founded on the framework of the old inn courtyard. So, it is said, the stumps in cricket were originally only the three legs of the milking-stool. Now we might invent new things of this kind, if we remembered who is the mother of invention. How pleasing it would be to start a game in which we scored so much for hitting the umbrella-stand or the dinner-wagon, or even the host and hostess; of course, with a missile of some soft material. Children who are lucky enough to be left alone in the nursery invent not only whole games, but whole dramas and life-stories of their own; they invent secret languages; they create imaginary families; they laboriously conduct family magazines. That is the sort of creative spirit that we want in the modern world; want both in the sense of desiring and in the sense of lacking it. If Christmas could become more domestic, instead of less, I believe there would be a vast increase in the real Christmas spirit; the spirit of the Child. But in indulging this dream we must once more invert the current convention into the form of a paradox. It is true in a sense that Christmas is the time at which the doors should be open. But I would have the doors shut at Christmas, or at least just before Christmas; and then the world shall see what we can do.

I cannot but remember, with something of a smile, that on an earlier and more controversial page of this book I have mentioned a lady who shuddered at the thought of the things perpetrated by my co-religionists behind closed doors. But my memory of it is mellowed by distance and the present subject, and I feel quite the reverse of controversial. I hope that lady, and all of her way of thinking, may also have the wisdom to close their doors; and discover that only when all the doors are closed the best thing will be found inside. If they are Puritans, whose religion is only based on the Bible, let it for once indeed be a Family Bible. If they are Pagans, who can accept nothing but the winter feast, let it at least be a family feast. The discordance or discomfort complained of by modern critics, in the family reunion, is not due to that mystical focal fire having been left burning, but to its having been left to go cold. It is because cold fragments of a once living thing are clumsily lumped together; it is no argument against making the thing alive. Christmas toys are incongruously dangled before heavy and heathen uncles who wish they were playing golf. But that does not alter the fact that they might become much brighter and more intelligent if they knew how to play with toys; and they are horrible bores about golf. Their dullness is only the last deadly product of the mechanical progress of organised and professional sports, in that rigid world of routine outside the home. When they were children, behind closed doors in the home, it is probable that nearly every one of them had day-dreams and unwritten dramas that belonged to them as much as Hamlet belonged to Shakespeare or Pickwick to Dickens. How much more thrilling it would be if Uncle Henry, instead of describing in detail all the strokes with which he ought to have got out of the bunker, were to say frankly that he had been on a voyage to the end of the world and had just caught the Great Sea-Serpent. How much more truly intellectual would be the conversation of Uncle William if, instead of telling us the point to which he had reduced his handicap, he could still say with conviction that he was King of the Kangaroo Islands, or Chief of the Rango Dango Redskins. These things, projected from within, were in almost all human spirits; and it is not normal that the inspiration of them should be so utterly crushed by the things without. Let it not be supposed for a moment that I also am among the tyrants of the earth, who would impose my own tastes, or force all the other children to play my own games. I have no disrespect for the game of golf; it is an admirable game. I have played it; or rather, I have played at it, which is generally regarded as the very opposite. By all means let the golfers golf and even the organisers organise, if their only conception of an organ is something like a barrel-organ. Let them play golf day after day; let them play golf for three hundred and sixty-four days, and nights as well, with balls dipped in luminous paint, to be pursued in the dark. But let there be one night when things grow luminous from within: and one day when men seek for all that is buried in themselves, and discover, where she is indeed hidden, behind locked gates and shuttered windows, and doors thrice barred and bolted, the spirit of liberty.

INTRODUCTION

IT will be naturally objected to the publication of these papers that they are ephemeral and that they are controversial. In other words, the normal critic will at once dismiss them as too frivolous and dislike them as too serious. The rather one-sided truce of good taste, touching all religious matters, which prevailed until a short time ago, has now given place to a rather one-sided war. But the truce can still be invoked, as such terrorism of taste generally is invoked, against the minority. We all know the dear old Conservative colonel who swears himself red in the face that he is not going to talk politics, but that damning to hell all those bloody blasted Socialists is not politics. We all have a kindly feeling for the dear old lady, living at Bath or Cheltenham, who would not dream of talking uncharitably about anybody, but who does certainly think the Dissenters are too dreadful or that Irish servants are really impossible. It is in the spirit of these two very admirable persons that the controversy is now conducted in the Press on behalf of a Progressive Faith and a Broad and Brotherly Religion. So long as the writer employs vast and universal gestures of fellowship and hospitality to all those who are ready to abandon their religious beliefs, he is allowed to be as rude as he likes to all those who venture to retain them. The Dean of St. Paul’s permits himself genially to call the Catholic Church a treacherous and bloody corporation; Mr. H. G. Wells is allowed to compare the Blessed Trinity to an undignified dance; the Bishop of Birmingham to compare the Blessed Sacrament to a barbarous blood-feast. It is felt that phrases like these cannot ruffle that human peace and harmony which all such humanitarians desire; there is nothing in THESE expressions that could possibly interfere with brotherhood and the sympathy that is the bond of society. We may be sure of this, for we have the word of the writers themselves that their whole aim is to generate an atmosphere of liberality and love. If, therefore, any unlucky interruption mars the harmony of the occasion, if it is really impossible for these fraternal festivities to pass off without some silly disturbance, or somebody making a scene, it is obvious that the blame must lie with a few irritable and irritating individuals, who cannot accept these descriptions of the Trinity and the Sacrament and the Church as soothing their feelings or satisfying their ideas.

It is explained very clearly in all such statements that they are accepted by all intelligent people except those who do not accept them. But as I myself, in my political experience, have ventured to doubt the right of the Tory colonel to curse his political opponents and say it is not politics, or of the lady to love everybody and loathe Irishmen, I have the same difficulty in admitting the right of the most liberal and large-minded Christian to see good in all religions and nothing but evil in mine. But I know that to publish replies to this effect, particularly direct replies given in real controversy, will be regarded by many as a provocation and an impertinence.

Well, I must in this matter confess to being so old-fashioned as to feel something like a point of honour. I think I may say that I am normally of the sort to be sociable and get on easily with my fellows; I am not so much disposed to quarrel as to argue; and I value more than I can easily say the generally genial relations I have kept with those who differ from me merely in argument. I am very fond of England even as it is, quite apart from what it was or might be; I have a number of popular tastes, from detective stories to the defence of public-houses; I have been on many occasions on the side of the majority, as for instance in the propaganda of English patriotism during the Great War. I could even find in these sympathies a sufficient material for popular appeals; and, in a more practical sense, I should enjoy nothing more than always writing detective stories, except always reading them. But if in this much too lucky and even lazy existence I find that my co-religionists are being pelted with insults for saying that their religion is right, it would ill become me not to put myself in the way of being insulted. Many of them have had far too hard a life, and I have had far too easy a life, for me not to count it a privilege to be the object of the same curious controversial methods. If the Dean of St. Paul’s really does believe, as he most undoubtedly does say, that the most devout and devoted rulers of the Catholic Church, when they accepted (realistically and even reluctantly) the fact of a modern miracle, were engaged in a “lucrative imposture,” I should very much prefer to believe that he accuses me, along with better men than myself, of becoming an impostor merely for filthy lucre. If the word “Jesuit” is still to be used as synonymous with the word “liar,” I should prefer that the same simple translation should apply to the word “Journalist,” of which it is much more often true. If the Dean accuses Catholics as Catholics of desiring innocent men to die in prison (as he does), I should much prefer that he should cast me for some part in that terrific and murderous melodrama; it might in any case be material for a detective story. In short, it is precisely because I do sympathise and agree with my Protestant and agnostic fellow countrymen, on about ninety-nine subjects out of a hundred, that I do feel it a point of honour not to avoid their accusations on these points, if they really have such accusations to bring. I am very sorry if this little book of mine seems to be controversial on subjects about which everybody is allowed to be controversial except ourselves. But I am afraid there is no help for it; and if I assure the reader that I have tried to start putting it together in an unimpaired spirit of charity, it is always possible that the charity may be as one-sided as the controversy. Anyhow, it represents my attitude towards this controversy; and it is quite possible that everything is wrong about it, except that it is right.

INTRODUZIONE

Si obietterà naturalmente alla pubblicazione di questi scritti che essi sono effimeri e che sono polemici. In altre parole, il critico consueto li liquiderà subito come troppo frivoli e li detesterà come troppo seri. La tregua alquanto unilaterale del buon gusto, in tutte le questioni religiose, che prevaleva fino a poco tempo fa, ha ora ceduto il posto a una guerra alquanto unilaterale. Ma la tregua può ancora essere invocata, come tale terrorismo del gusto generalmente viene invocato, contro la minoranza. Tutti conosciamo il caro vecchio colonnello conservatore che giura fino a diventare paonazzo in volto che non intende parlare di politica, ma che dannare all’inferno tutti quei maledetti dannati socialisti non è politica. Tutti nutriamo un sentimento benevolo per la cara vecchia signora, che vive a Bath o a Cheltenham, la quale non si sognerebbe mai di parlare senza carità di chicchessia, ma che certamente pensa che i dissidenti siano troppo terribili o che i domestici irlandesi siano davvero impossibili. È nello spirito di queste due assai ammirevoli persone che la polemica viene ora condotta sulla stampa in nome di una Fede progressista e di una Religione ampia e fraterna. Finché lo scrittore impiega gesti vasti e universali di solidarietà e di ospitalità verso tutti coloro che sono pronti ad abbandonare le proprie convinzioni religiose, gli è consentito di essere sgarbato quanto vuole verso tutti coloro che osano conservarle. Il decano di St. Paul si permette bonariamente di definire la Chiesa cattolica una corporazione infida e sanguinaria; al signor H. G. Wells è consentito di paragonare la Santissima Trinità a una danza indecorosa; al vescovo di Birmingham di paragonare il Santissimo Sacramento a un barbaro banchetto di sangue. Si ritiene che frasi come queste non possano turbare quella pace e armonia umana che tutti questi umanitari desiderano; non c’è nulla in QUESTE espressioni che possa in alcun modo interferire con la fratellanza e con la simpatia che è il vincolo della società. Di questo possiamo essere certi, poiché abbiamo la parola degli scrittori stessi che il loro unico scopo è generare un’atmosfera di liberalità e di amore. Se, dunque, qualche sventurata interruzione guasta l’armonia dell’occasione, se è davvero impossibile che queste festività fraterne trascorrano senza qualche sciocco disturbo, o senza che qualcuno faccia una scenata, è ovvio che la colpa debba ricadere su pochi individui irritabili e irritanti, che non riescono ad accettare queste descrizioni della Trinità e del Sacramento e della Chiesa come lenitive dei loro sentimenti o appaganti delle loro idee.

Si spiega molto chiaramente in tutte queste affermazioni che esse sono accettate da tutte le persone intelligenti tranne quelle che non le accettano. Ma poiché io stesso, nella mia esperienza politica, ho osato dubitare del diritto del colonnello tory di maledire i suoi avversari politici e dire che non è politica, o di quello della signora di amare tutti e detestare gli irlandesi, ho la stessa difficoltà ad ammettere il diritto del cristiano più liberale e di più larghe vedute di vedere del bene in tutte le religioni e null’altro che male nella mia. Ma so che pubblicare risposte di questo tenore, e in particolare risposte dirette date in una polemica reale, sarà considerato da molti una provocazione e un’impertinenza.

Ebbene, in questa faccenda devo confessare di essere tanto antiquato da provare qualcosa come un punto d’onore. Credo di poter dire che di norma sono del genere socievole e che vado d’accordo facilmente con i miei simili; non sono tanto incline a litigare quanto a discutere; e apprezzo più di quanto non sappia dire i rapporti generalmente cordiali che ho mantenuto con coloro che dissentono da me soltanto nel ragionamento. Amo molto l’Inghilterra anche così com’è, del tutto a prescindere da ciò che fu o potrebbe essere; ho parecchi gusti popolari, dai racconti polizieschi alla difesa delle osterie; in molte occasioni mi sono trovato dalla parte della maggioranza, come per esempio nella propaganda del patriottismo inglese durante la Grande Guerra. Potrei persino trovare in queste simpatie materia sufficiente per appelli popolari; e, in senso più pratico, nulla mi darebbe più piacere che scrivere sempre racconti polizieschi, se non leggerli sempre. Ma se in questa esistenza fin troppo fortunata e persino pigra scopro che i miei correligionari vengono bersagliati d’insulti per aver detto che la loro religione è giusta, mi si addirebbe male non espormi anch’io a essere insultato. Molti di loro hanno avuto una vita fin troppo dura, e io ho avuto una vita fin troppo facile, perché io non consideri un privilegio essere l’oggetto degli stessi curiosi metodi polemici. Se il decano di St. Paul crede davvero, come indubbiamente afferma, che i più devoti e zelanti governanti della Chiesa cattolica, quando accettarono (realisticamente e persino a malincuore) il fatto di un miracolo moderno, fossero impegnati in una «lucrosa impostura», preferirei di gran lunga credere che egli accusi me, insieme a uomini migliori di me, di essermi fatto impostore solo per lurido guadagno. Se la parola «gesuita» deve ancora essere usata come sinonimo della parola «bugiardo», preferirei che la stessa semplice traduzione si applicasse alla parola «giornalista», di cui è assai più spesso vera. Se il decano accusa i cattolici in quanto cattolici di desiderare che uomini innocenti muoiano in prigione (come fa), preferirei di gran lunga che assegnasse anche a me qualche parte in quel tremendo e sanguinario melodramma; potrebbe in ogni caso essere materia per un racconto poliziesco. In breve, è proprio perché simpatizzo e concordo con i miei connazionali protestanti e agnostici su circa novantanove argomenti su cento, che sento come un punto d’onore non sottrarmi alle loro accuse su questi punti, se davvero hanno tali accuse da muovere. Mi dispiace molto se questo mio piccolo libro sembra polemico su argomenti riguardo ai quali a tutti è consentito essere polemici tranne che a noi. Ma temo che non ci sia rimedio; e se assicuro al lettore che ho cercato di cominciare a metterlo insieme in uno spirito intatto di carità, è sempre possibile che la carità sia unilaterale quanto la polemica. Comunque sia, esso rappresenta il mio atteggiamento verso questa polemica; ed è del tutto possibile che tutto in esso sia sbagliato, tranne che è giusto.

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THE SCEPTIC AS A CRITIC

IT takes three to make a quarrel. There is needed a peacemaker. The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully intervenes. I feel myself to be in some such position in the recent American debate about Mr. Mencken’s MERCURY and the Puritans; and I admit it at the beginning with an embarrassment not untinged with terror. I know that the umpire may be torn in pieces. I know that the self-appointed umpire ought to be torn in pieces. I know, above all, that this is especially the case in anything which in any way involves international relations. Perhaps the only sound criticism is self-criticism. Perhaps this is even more true of nations than of men. And I can quite well understand that many Americans would accept suggestions from their fellow countrymen which they would rightly refuse from a foreigner. I can only plead that I have endeavoured to carry out the excellent patriotic principle of “See England First” in the equally patriotic paraphrase of “Criticize England First.” I have been engaged upon it long enough to be quite well aware that there are evils present in England that are relatively absent from America; and none more conspicuously absent, as Mr. Belloc has pointed out to the surprise of many, than the real, servile, superstitious, and mystical adoration of Money.

But what makes me so objectionable on the present occasion is that I feel a considerable sympathy with both sides. This offensive attitude I will endeavour to disguise, as far as possible, by tactfully distributed abuse of such things as I really think are abuses, and a gracefully simulated disgust with this or that part of each controversial case. But the plain truth is, that if I were an American, I should very frequently rejoice at the AMERICAN MERCURY’s scoring off somebody or something; nor would my modest fireside be entirely without mild rejoicings when the AMERICAN MERCURY was scored off. But I do definitely think that both sides, and perhaps especially the iconoclastic side, need what the whole modern world needs— a fixed spiritual standard even for their own intellectual purposes. I might express it by saying that I am very fond of revolutionists, but not very fond of nihilists. For nihilists, as their name implies, have nothing to revolt about.

On this side of the matter there is little to be added to the admirably sane, subtle, and penetrating article by Mr. T. S. Eliot;* especially that vital sentence in it in which he tells Professor Irving Babbitt (who admits the need of enthusiasm) that we cannot have an enthusiasm for having an enthusiasm. I think I know, incidentally, what we must have. Professor Babbitt is a very learned man; and I myself have little Latin and less Greek. But I know enough Greek to know the meaning of the second syllable of “enthusiasm,” and I know it to be the key to this and every other discussion.

Let me take two examples, touching my points of agreement with the two sides. I heartily admire Mr. Mencken, not only for his vivacity and wit, but for his vehemence and sometimes for his violence. I warmly applaud him for his scorn and detestation of Service; and I think he was stating a historical fact when he said, as quoted in THE FORUM: “When a gang of real estate agents, bond salesmen, and automobile dealers gets together to sob for Service, it takes no Freudian to surmise that someone is about to be swindled.” I do not see why he should not call a spade a spade and a swindler a swindler. I do not blame him for using vulgar words for vulgar things. But I do remark upon two ways in which the fact of his philosophy being negative makes his criticism almost shallow. First of all, it is obvious that such a satire is entirely meaningless unless swindling is a sin. And it is equally obvious that we are instantly swallowed up in the abysses of “moralism” and “religionism,” if it is a sin. And the second point, if less obvious, is equally important— that his healthy instinct against greasy hypocrisy does not really enlighten him about the heart of that hypocrisy.

What is the matter with the cult of Service is that, like so many modern notions, it is an idolatry of the intermediate, to the oblivion of the ultimate. It is like the jargon of the idiots who talk about Efficiency without any criticism of Effect. The sin of Service is the sin of Satan: that of trying to be first where it can only be second. A word like Service has stolen the sacred capital letter from the thing which it was once supposed to serve. There is a sense in serving God, and an even more disputed sense in serving man; but there is no sense in serving Service. To serve God is at least to serve an ideal being. Even if he were an imaginary being, he would still be an ideal being. That ideal has definite and even dogmatic attributes—truth, justice, pity, purity, and the rest. To serve it, however imperfectly, is to serve a particular concept of perfection. But the man who rushes down the street waving his arms and wanting something or somebody to serve, will probably fall into the first bucket-shop or den of thieves and usurers, and be found industriously serving THEM. There arises the horrible idea that industry, reliability, punctuality, and business activity are good things; that mere readiness to serve the powers of this world is a Christian virtue. That is the case against Service, as distinct from the curse against Service, so heartily and inspiringly hurled by Mr. Mencken. But the serious case cannot be stated without once more raising the real question of whether mankind ought to serve anything; and of whether they had not better try to define what they intend to serve. All these silly words like Service and Efficiency and Practicality and the rest fail because they worship the means and not the end. But it all comes back to whether we do propose to worship the end; and preferably the right end.

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LO SCETTICO COME CRITICO

Ci vogliono in tre per fare una lite. Occorre un paciere. Le piene potenzialità del furore umano non possono essere raggiunte finché un amico di entrambe le parti non interviene con tatto. Mi sento in una posizione di questo genere riguardo al recente dibattito americano intorno al MERCURY del signor Mencken e ai Puritani; e lo ammetto fin da principio con un imbarazzo non privo di una sfumatura di terrore. So che l’arbitro può essere fatto a pezzi. So che l’arbitro autoproclamatosi dovrebbe essere fatto a pezzi. So, soprattutto, che ciò vale in special modo per tutto ciò che in qualche modo coinvolge le relazioni internazionali. Forse la sola critica sana è l’autocritica. Forse ciò è ancor più vero delle nazioni che degli uomini. E posso benissimo comprendere che molti Americani accetterebbero suggerimenti dai loro connazionali che a buon diritto rifiuterebbero da uno straniero. Posso soltanto addurre di aver cercato di attuare l’eccellente principio patriottico del «Vedi prima l’Inghilterra» nell’altrettanto patriottica parafrasi di «Critica prima l’Inghilterra». Vi mi sono dedicato abbastanza a lungo da sapere bene che vi sono mali presenti in Inghilterra che sono relativamente assenti in America; e nessuno più cospicuamente assente, come il signor Belloc ha fatto notare con sorpresa di molti, dell’autentica, servile, superstiziosa e mistica adorazione del Denaro.

Ma ciò che mi rende tanto sgradevole nella presente occasione è che provo una considerevole simpatia per entrambe le parti. Questo atteggiamento offensivo cercherò, per quanto possibile, di dissimularlo con ingiurie distribuite con tatto verso quelle cose che ritengo realmente abusi, e con un disgusto graziosamente simulato per questa o quella parte di ciascuna tesi controversa. Ma la pura verità è che, se io fossi un Americano, molto spesso mi rallegrerei nel vedere l’AMERICAN MERCURY segnare un punto contro qualcuno o qualcosa; né il mio modesto focolare sarebbe del tutto privo di lievi rallegramenti quando l’AMERICAN MERCURY incassasse un punto. Ma penso decisamente che entrambe le parti, e forse specialmente la parte iconoclasta, abbiano bisogno di ciò di cui ha bisogno il mondo moderno intero: un criterio spirituale fisso, anche solo per i loro fini intellettuali. Potrei esprimerlo dicendo che sono molto affezionato ai rivoluzionari, ma non molto affezionato ai nichilisti. Poiché i nichilisti, come il loro nome implica, non hanno nulla contro cui ribellarsi.

Su questo versante della questione poco si può aggiungere all’articolo mirabilmente assennato, sottile e penetrante del signor T. S. Eliot;* in particolare quella frase vitale in cui egli dice al professor Irving Babbitt (che ammette la necessità dell’entusiasmo) che non possiamo avere un entusiasmo per l’avere un entusiasmo. Credo di sapere, per inciso, che cosa dobbiamo avere. Il professor Babbitt è un uomo molto dotto; e io stesso ho poco Latino e ancor meno Greco. Ma so abbastanza Greco da conoscere il significato della seconda sillaba di «entusiasmo», e so che essa è la chiave di questa e di ogni altra discussione.

Prendo due esempi, che toccano i miei punti d’accordo con le due parti. Ammiro cordialmente il signor Mencken, non solo per la sua vivacità e il suo spirito, ma per la sua veemenza e talvolta per la sua violenza. Lo applaudo calorosamente per il suo disprezzo e la sua detestazione del Servizio; e penso che enunciasse un fatto storico quando disse, come citato in THE FORUM: «Quando una banda di agenti immobiliari, venditori di obbligazioni e concessionari d’automobili si riunisce a piangere per il Servizio, non occorre un Freudiano per intuire che qualcuno sta per essere truffato». Non vedo perché non dovrebbe chiamare pane il pane e truffatore il truffatore. Non gli rimprovero l’uso di parole volgari per cose volgari. Ma faccio notare due modi in cui il fatto che la sua filosofia sia negativa rende la sua critica quasi superficiale. Anzitutto, è ovvio che una simile satira è del tutto priva di senso a meno che truffare non sia un peccato. Ed è altrettanto ovvio che veniamo istantaneamente inghiottiti negli abissi del «moralismo» e del «religionismo», se è un peccato. E il secondo punto, se meno ovvio, è ugualmente importante: che il suo sano istinto contro l’untuosa ipocrisia non lo illumina realmente sul cuore di quell’ipocrisia.

Ciò che non va nel culto del Servizio è che, come tante nozioni moderne, esso è un’idolatria dell’intermedio, fino all’oblio dell’ultimo. È come il gergo degli idioti che parlano di Efficienza senza alcuna critica dell’Effetto. Il peccato del Servizio è il peccato di Satana: quello di tentare di essere primo là dove può soltanto essere secondo. Una parola come Servizio ha rubato la sacra lettera maiuscola alla cosa che un tempo si supponeva dovesse servire. Vi è un senso nel servire Dio, e un senso ancor più discusso nel servire l’uomo; ma non vi è senso nel servire il Servizio. Servire Dio è almeno servire un essere ideale. Anche se egli fosse un essere immaginario, sarebbe pur sempre un essere ideale. Quell’ideale ha attributi definiti e persino dogmatici: verità, giustizia, pietà, purezza e il resto. Servirlo, per quanto imperfettamente, è servire una particolare concezione della perfezione. Ma l’uomo che si precipita per la strada agitando le braccia e volendo qualcosa o qualcuno da servire, cadrà probabilmente nella prima bisca di speculatori o nel primo covo di ladri e usurai, e sarà trovato mentre serve diligentemente LORO. Sorge l’orribile idea che laboriosità, affidabilità, puntualità e attività d’affari siano cose buone; che la mera prontezza a servire le potenze di questo mondo sia una virtù cristiana. Questa è l’accusa contro il Servizio, distinta dalla maledizione contro il Servizio, così cordialmente e appassionatamente scagliata dal signor Mencken. Ma la seria argomentazione non può essere enunciata senza sollevare ancora una volta la vera questione, se cioè l’umanità debba servire qualcosa; e se non farebbe meglio a cercare di definire ciò che intende servire. Tutte queste sciocche parole come Servizio ed Efficienza e Praticità e il resto falliscono perché adorano i mezzi e non il fine. Ma tutto torna alla questione se ci proponiamo di adorare il fine; e preferibilmente il fine giusto.

Two other characteristic passages from Mr. Mencken will serve to show more sharply this curious sense in which he misses his own point. On the one hand, he appears to state most positively the purely personal and subjective nature of criticism; he makes it individual and almost irresponsible. “The critic is first and last simply trying to express himself; he is trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed, a tension relieved, a katharsis attained, which Wagner achieved when he wrote DIE WALKURIE, and a hen achieves every time she lays an egg.” That is all consistent enough as far as it goes; but unfortunately Mr. Mencken appears to go on to something quite inconsistent with it. According to the quotation, he afterwards bursts into a song of triumph because there is now in America not only criticism, but controversy. “To-day for the first time in years there is strife in American criticism… ears are bitten off, noses are bloodied. There are wallops both above and below the belt.”

Now, there may be something in his case for controversy; but it is quite inconsistent with his case for creative self-expression. If the critic produces the criticism ONLY to please himself; it is entirely irrelevant that it does not please somebody else. The somebody else has a perfect right to say the exact opposite to please himself, and be perfectly satisfied with himself. But they cannot controvert because they cannot compare. They cannot compare because there is no common standard of comparison. Neither I nor anybody else can have a controversy about literature with Mr. Mencken, because there is no way of criticizing the criticism, except by asking whether the critic is satisfied. And there the debate ends, at the beginning: for nobody can doubt that Mr. Mencken is satisfied.

But not to make Mr. Mencken a mere victim of the ARGUMENTUM AD HOMINEM, I will make the experiment in a viler body and offer myself for dissection. I daresay a great deal of the criticism I write really is moved by a mood of self-expression; and certainly it is true enough that there is a satisfaction in self-expression. I can take something or other about which I have definite feelings—as, for instance, the philosophy of Mr. Dreiser, which has been mentioned more than once in this debate. I can achieve for my own inner ego the grateful feeling of writing as follows:

“He describes a world which appears to be a dull and discolouring illusion of indigestion, not bright enough to be called a nightmare; smelly, but not even stinking with any strength; smelling of the stale gas of ignorant chemical experiments by dirty, secretive schoolboys—the sort of boys who torture cats in corners; spineless and spiritless like a broken-backed worm; loathsomely slow and laborious like an endless slug; despairing, but not with dignity; blaspheming, but not with courage; without wit without will, without laughter or uplifting of the heart; too old to die, too deaf to leave off talking, too blind to stop, too stupid to start afresh, too dead to be killed, and incapable even of being damned, since in all its weary centuries it has not reached the age of reason.”

That is what I feel about it; and it certainly gives me pleasure to relieve my feelings. I have got it off my chest. I have attained a katharsis. I have laid an egg. I have produced a criticism, satisfying all Mr. Mencken’s definitions of the critic. I have performed a function. I feel better, thank you.

But what influence my feelings can be expected to have on Mr. Dreiser, or anybody who does not admit my standards of truth and falsehood, I do not quite see. Mr. Dreiser can hardly be expected to say that his chemistry is quackery, as I think it—quackery without the liveliness we might reasonably expect from quacks. He does not think fatalism base and servile, as I do; he does not think free will the highest truth about humanity, as I do. He does not believe that despair is itself a sin, and perhaps the worst of sins, as Catholics do. He does not think blasphemy the smallest and silliest sort of pride, as even pagans do. He naturally does not think his own picture of life a false picture, resembling real life about as much as a wilderness of linoleum would resemble the land of all the living flowers, as I do. But he would not think it falser for being like a wilderness. He would probably admit that it was dreary, but think it correct to be dreary. He would probably own that he was hopeless, but not see any harm in being hopeless. What I advance as accusations, he would very probably accept as compliments.

Under these circumstances, I do not quite see how I, or anyone with my views, could have a CONTROVERSY with Mr. Dreiser. There does not seem to be any way in which I could prove him wrong, because he does not accept my view of what is wrong. There does not seem to be any way in which he could prove himself right, because I do not share his notions of what is right. We might, indeed, meet in the street and fall on each other; and while I believe we are both heavy men, I doubt not that he is the more formidable. The very possibility of our being reduced to this inarticulate explanation may possibly throw some light on Mr. Mencken’s remarkable description of the new literary life in America. “Ears are bitten off,” he says; and this curious form of cultural intercourse might really be the only solution, when ears are no longer organs of hearing and there are no organs except organs of self-expression. He that hath ears to hear and will not hear may just as well have them bitten off. Such deafness seems inevitable in the creative critic, who is as indifferent as a hen to all noises except her own cackling over her own egg. Anyhow, hens do not criticize each other’s eggs, or even pelt each other with eggs, in the manner of political controversy. We can only say that the novelist in question has undoubtedly laid a magnificently large and solid egg—something in the nature of an ostrich’s egg; and after that, there is really nothing to prevent the ostrich from hiding its head in the sand, achieving thereby for its own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed. But we cannot argue with it about whether the egg is a bad egg, or whether parts of it are excellent.

Altri due passi caratteristici del signor Mencken serviranno a mostrare più nettamente questo curioso modo in cui egli manca il proprio bersaglio. Da un lato, sembra affermare nel modo più reciso la natura puramente personale e soggettiva della critica; la rende individuale e quasi irresponsabile. «Il critico non fa altro, in prima e in ultima istanza, che cercare di esprimere se stesso; cerca di procurare così al proprio io interiore la grata sensazione di una funzione compiuta, di una tensione allentata, di una catarsi raggiunta, come Wagner la raggiunse quando scrisse DIE WALKÜRE, e come la raggiunge una gallina ogni volta che depone un uovo.» Tutto ciò è abbastanza coerente, fin dove arriva; ma disgraziatamente il signor Mencken sembra passare poi a qualcosa che vi è del tutto incoerente. Stando alla citazione, egli prorompe in seguito in un canto di trionfo perché ora in America non c’è soltanto critica, ma controversia. «Oggi, per la prima volta da anni, c’è battaglia nella critica americana… si mordono via le orecchie, si insanguinano i nasi. Piovono colpi sopra e sotto la cintura.»

Ora, forse c’è qualcosa nella sua difesa della controversia; ma è del tutto incoerente con la sua difesa dell’espressione creativa di sé. Se il critico produce la critica UNICAMENTE per compiacere se stesso, è del tutto irrilevante che essa non compiaccia qualcun altro. Quel qualcun altro ha pieno diritto di dire l’esatto contrario per compiacere se stesso, ed essere perfettamente soddisfatto di sé. Ma non possono controvertere, perché non possono confrontare. Non possono confrontare, perché non esiste un termine comune di paragone. Né io né chiunque altro può avere una controversia sulla letteratura con il signor Mencken, perché non c’è modo di criticare la critica, se non domandando se il critico sia soddisfatto. E lì il dibattito finisce, sul nascere: giacché nessuno può dubitare che il signor Mencken sia soddisfatto.

Ma per non fare del signor Mencken una semplice vittima dell’ARGUMENTUM AD HOMINEM, farò l’esperimento su un corpo più vile e offrirò me stesso alla dissezione. Ammetto che gran parte della critica che scrivo è mossa davvero da un impulso all’espressione di sé; ed è certamente vero che c’è una soddisfazione nell’espressione di sé. Posso prendere qualcosa verso cui nutro sentimenti ben definiti — come, per esempio, la filosofia del signor Dreiser, che è stata menzionata più di una volta in questo dibattito. Posso procurare al mio io interiore la grata sensazione di scrivere quanto segue:

«Egli descrive un mondo che appare come una tetra e scolorita illusione da indigestione, non abbastanza vivida da meritare il nome di incubo; puzzolente, ma senza nemmeno la forza di un vero fetore; che sa del gas stantio di ignoranti esperimenti chimici condotti da sudici e furtivi scolaretti — il genere di ragazzi che torturano i gatti negli angoli; senza spina dorsale e senza spirito, come un verme dalla schiena spezzata; ripugnantemente lento e faticoso come una lumaca senza fine; disperato, ma non con dignità; blasfemo, ma non con coraggio; senza arguzia e senza volontà, senza riso né sollevamento del cuore; troppo vecchio per morire, troppo sordo per smettere di parlare, troppo cieco per fermarsi, troppo stupido per ricominciare da capo, troppo morto per essere ucciso, e incapace persino di essere dannato, poiché in tutti i suoi stanchi secoli non ha raggiunto l’età della ragione.»

Ecco ciò che provo al riguardo; e certamente mi dà piacere sfogare i miei sentimenti. Me lo sono tolto dal petto. Ho raggiunto una catarsi. Ho deposto un uovo. Ho prodotto una critica, che soddisfa tutte le definizioni del critico date dal signor Mencken. Ho compiuto una funzione. Mi sento meglio, grazie.

Ma quale influenza i miei sentimenti possano avere sul signor Dreiser, o su chiunque non ammetta i miei criteri di verità e di falsità, non lo vedo affatto. Non ci si può certo aspettare che il signor Dreiser dichiari che la sua chimica è ciarlataneria, come io la ritengo — ciarlataneria priva di quella vivacità che potremmo ragionevolmente attenderci dai ciarlatani. Egli non ritiene il fatalismo vile e servile, come lo ritengo io; non ritiene il libero arbitrio la più alta verità intorno all’umanità, come faccio io. Non crede che la disperazione sia in sé un peccato, e forse il peggiore dei peccati, come credono i cattolici. Non ritiene la bestemmia la più piccola e sciocca forma di orgoglio, come lo ritengono persino i pagani. Naturalmente non ritiene il proprio quadro della vita un quadro falso, che rassomiglia alla vita reale press’a poco quanto una landa di linoleum rassomiglierebbe alla terra di tutti i fiori viventi, come lo ritengo io. Ma non lo giudicherebbe più falso per il fatto di essere una landa. Ammetterebbe probabilmente che è squallido, ma riterrebbe corretto essere squallido. Ammetterebbe probabilmente di essere senza speranza, ma non vedrebbe alcun male nell’essere senza speranza. Ciò che io avanzo come accuse, egli assai probabilmente accoglierebbe come complimenti.

In tali circostanze, non vedo affatto come io, o chiunque condivida le mie idee, potrei avere una CONTROVERSIA con il signor Dreiser. Non pare esserci alcun modo per cui io potrei dimostrarlo in errore, perché egli non accetta la mia visione di ciò che è errato. Non pare esserci alcun modo per cui egli potrebbe dimostrarsi nel giusto, perché io non condivido le sue nozioni di ciò che è giusto. Potremmo, in verità, incontrarci per strada e avventarci l’uno sull’altro; e per quanto ci creda entrambi uomini corpulenti, non dubito che egli sia il più temibile. La stessa possibilità che si finisca ridotti a questa inarticolata spiegazione può forse gettare una qualche luce sulla notevole descrizione del signor Mencken della nuova vita letteraria in America. «Si mordono via le orecchie», dice; e questa curiosa forma di commercio culturale potrebbe davvero essere l’unica soluzione, quando le orecchie non sono più organi dell’udito e non vi sono altri organi se non organi dell’espressione di sé. Chi ha orecchie per intendere e non vuole intendere può anche farsele mordere via, tanto vale. Tale sordità sembra inevitabile nel critico creativo, il quale è indifferente come una gallina a ogni rumore tranne il proprio chiocciare sul proprio uovo. In ogni caso, le galline non criticano le uova altrui, né si tirano uova a vicenda, alla maniera della controversia politica. Possiamo solo dire che il romanziere in questione ha indubbiamente deposto un uovo magnificamente grande e solido — qualcosa della natura di un uovo di struzzo; e dopo di ciò, nulla impedisce davvero allo struzzo di nascondere la testa nella sabbia, procurandosi così, per il proprio io interiore, la grata sensazione di una funzione compiuta. Ma non possiamo discutere con esso se l’uovo sia un uovo guasto, o se certe parti di esso siano eccellenti.

In all these instances, therefore, because of the absence of a standard of ultimate values, the most ordinary functions really cannot be performed. They not only cannot be performed with “a grateful feeling,” or a katharsis, but in the long run they cannot be performed at all. We cannot really denounce the Service-mongering bond salesman as a swindler, because we have no certain agreement that it is shameful to be a swindler. A little manipulation of some of Mr. Mencken’s own individualistic theories about mentality as superior to moralism might present the swindler as a superman. We cannot really argue for or against the mere ideal of Service, because neither side has really considered what is to be served or how we are to arrive at the right rules for serving it. Consequently, in practice, it may turn out that the State of Service is merely the Servile State. And finally, we cannot really argue about that or anything else, because there are no rules of the game of argument. There is nothing to prove who has scored a point and who has not. There cannot be “strife in American criticism”; the professors cannot be “forced to make some defence.” That would require plaintiffs and defendants to appear before some tribunal and give evidence according to some tests of truth. There can be a disturbance, but there can not be a discussion.

In plain words, the normal functions of man—effort, protest, judgment, persuasion, and proof—are found in fact to be hampered and hamstrung by these negations of the sceptic even when the sceptic seems at first to be only denying some distant vision or some miraculous tale. Each function is found in fact to refer to some end, to some test, to some way of distinguishing between use and misuse, which the mere sceptic destroys as completely as he could destroy any myth or superstition. If the function is only performed for the satisfaction of the performer, as in the parable of the critic and the egg, it becomes futile to discuss whether it is an addled egg. It becomes futile to consider whether eggs will produce chickens or provide breakfasts. But even to be certain of our own sanity in applying the tests, we do really have to go back to some aboriginal problem, like that of the old riddle of the priority of egg or chicken; we do really, like the great religions, have to begin AB OVO. If those primordial sanities can be disturbed, the whole of practical life can be disturbed with them. Men can be frozen by fatalism, or crazed by anarchism, or driven to death by pessimism; for men will not go on indefinitely acting on what they feel to be a fable. And it is in this organic and almost muscular sense that religion is really the help of man—in the sense that without it he is ultimately helpless, almost motionless.

Mr. Mencken and Mr. Sinclair Lewis and the other critics in the MERCURY movement are so spirited and sincere, they attack so vigorously so many things that ought to be attacked, they expose so brilliantly many things that really are impostures, that in discussing matters with them a man will have every impulse to put his cards on the table. It would be affectation and almost hypocrisy in me to ignore, in this place, the fact that I do myself believe in a special spiritual solution of this problem, a special spiritual authority above this chaos. Nor, indeed, is the idea altogether absent, as an idea, from many other minds besides my own. The Catholic philosophy is mentioned in terms of respect, and even a sort of hope, both by Professor Babbitt** and Mr. T. S. Eliot. I do not misunderstand their courtesies, or seek to lure them a step further than they desire to go. But, as a matter of fact, by a series of faultlessly logical steps, Mr. Eliot led Professor Babbitt so near to the very gates of the Catholic Church that in the end I felt quite nervous, so to speak, for fear they should both take another unintentional step and fall into it by accident.

I have a particular reason for mentioning this matter in conclusion— a reason that is directly related to this curious effect of scepticism in weakening the normal functions of the human being. In one of the most brilliant and amusing of Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s recent books there is a passage which I quote from memory, but I think more or less correctly. He said that the Catholic Faith differs from current Puritanism in that it does not ask a man to give up his sense of beauty, or his sense of humour, or his pleasant vices (by which he probably meant smoking and drinking, which are not vices at all), but that it does ask a man to give up his life and soul, his mind, body, reason, and all the rest. I ask the reader to consider, as quietly and impartially as possible, the statement thus made; and put it side by side with all those other facts about the gradual fossilizing of human function by the fundamental doubts of our day.

It would be far truer to say that the Faith gives a man back his body and his soul and his reason and his will and his very life. It would be far truer to say that the man who has received it receives all the old human functions which all the other philosophies are already taking away. It would be nearer to reality to say that he alone will have freedom, that he alone will have will, because he alone will believe in free will; that he alone will have reason, since ultimate doubt denies reason as well as authority; that he alone will truly act, because action is performed to an end. It is at least a less unlikely vision that all this hardening and hopeless despair of the intellect will leave him at last the only walking and talking citizen in a city of paralytics.

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• “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt,” The Forum for July 1928.

** “The Critic and American life,” The Forum for February 1928.

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In tutti questi casi, dunque, a causa dell’assenza di un criterio di valori ultimi, le funzioni più ordinarie non possono in realtà essere compiute. Non solo non possono essere compiute con «una grata sensazione», o con una catarsi, ma alla lunga non possono essere compiute affatto. Non possiamo davvero denunciare come truffatore il piazzista di obbligazioni che spaccia il verbo del Servizio, perché non abbiamo alcun accordo certo sul fatto che sia vergognoso essere un truffatore. Una piccola manipolazione di alcune delle teorie individualistiche del signor Mencken sulla mentalità come superiore al moralismo potrebbe presentare il truffatore come un superuomo. Non possiamo davvero argomentare a favore o contro il mero ideale del Servizio, perché nessuna delle due parti ha realmente considerato che cosa vada servito o come si debba giungere alle giuste regole per servirlo. Di conseguenza, in pratica, può risultare che lo Stato del Servizio non sia altro che lo Stato Servile. E infine, non possiamo davvero discutere di questo o di altro, perché non esistono regole del gioco dell’argomentare. Non c’è nulla che stabilisca chi abbia segnato un punto e chi no. Non ci può essere «battaglia nella critica americana»; i professori non possono essere «costretti a una qualche difesa». Ciò richiederebbe che querelanti e imputati comparissero davanti a un qualche tribunale e deponessero secondo qualche criterio di verità. Ci può essere un tumulto, ma non ci può essere una discussione.

In parole povere, le normali funzioni dell’uomo — lo sforzo, la protesta, il giudizio, la persuasione e la prova — si rivelano di fatto ostacolate e paralizzate da queste negazioni dello scettico, anche quando lo scettico sembra dapprima negare soltanto qualche remota visione o qualche racconto miracoloso. Ciascuna funzione si rivela di fatto riferirsi a un qualche fine, a un qualche criterio, a un qualche modo di distinguere fra uso e abuso, che il mero scettico distrugge tanto compiutamente quanto potrebbe distruggere qualsiasi mito o superstizione. Se la funzione è compiuta soltanto per la soddisfazione di chi la compie, come nella parabola del critico e dell’uovo, diventa vano discutere se sia un uovo marcio. Diventa vano considerare se le uova produrranno pulcini o forniranno colazioni. Ma per essere anche solo certi della nostra sanità mentale nell’applicare i criteri, dobbiamo davvero risalire a qualche problema primigenio, come quello dell’antico enigma della priorità dell’uovo o della gallina; dobbiamo davvero, come le grandi religioni, cominciare AB OVO. Se quelle sanità primordiali possono essere turbate, con esse può essere turbata tutta la vita pratica. Gli uomini possono essere paralizzati dal fatalismo, o resi folli dall’anarchismo, o spinti alla morte dal pessimismo; giacché gli uomini non continueranno a tempo indeterminato ad agire su ciò che sentono essere una favola. Ed è in questo senso organico e quasi muscolare che la religione è davvero il sostegno dell’uomo — nel senso che senza di essa egli è in ultima analisi impotente, quasi immobile.

Il signor Mencken e il signor Sinclair Lewis e gli altri critici del movimento del MERCURY sono tanto vivaci e sinceri, attaccano con tanto vigore tante cose che meritano di essere attaccate, smascherano con tanta brillantezza molte cose che sono davvero impostura, che, discutendo con loro, un uomo avrà ogni impulso a mettere le proprie carte in tavola. Sarebbe affettazione e quasi ipocrisia, da parte mia, ignorare, in questa sede, il fatto che io stesso credo in una particolare soluzione spirituale di questo problema, in una particolare autorità spirituale al di sopra di questo caos. Né, in verità, l’idea è del tutto assente, come idea, da molte altre menti oltre la mia. La filosofia cattolica è menzionata in termini di rispetto, e persino di una sorta di speranza, sia dal professor Babbitt** sia dal signor T. S. Eliot. Non fraintendo le loro cortesie, né cerco di attirarli un passo oltre quanto desiderano andare. Ma, di fatto, per una serie di passaggi impeccabilmente logici, il signor Eliot condusse il professor Babbitt così vicino alle porte stesse della Chiesa cattolica che alla fine mi sentii, per così dire, alquanto in ansia, per timore che entrambi facessero un altro passo involontario e vi cadessero dentro per caso.

Ho un motivo particolare per menzionare questa faccenda in conclusione — un motivo che è direttamente connesso a questo curioso effetto dello scetticismo nell’indebolire le normali funzioni dell’essere umano. In uno dei più brillanti e divertenti fra i recenti libri del signor Sinclair Lewis c’è un passo che cito a memoria, ma credo più o meno correttamente. Egli diceva che la Fede cattolica differisce dall’odierno puritanesimo in ciò, che non chiede a un uomo di rinunciare al suo senso della bellezza, o al suo senso dell’umorismo, o ai suoi piacevoli vizi (con i quali probabilmente intendeva il fumo e il bere, che non sono affatto vizi), ma che gli chiede sì di rinunciare alla sua vita e alla sua anima, alla sua mente, al suo corpo, alla sua ragione e a tutto il resto. Prego il lettore di considerare, quanto più tranquillamente e imparzialmente possibile, l’affermazione così formulata; e di porla accanto a tutti quegli altri fatti relativi al graduale fossilizzarsi della funzione umana per opera dei dubbi fondamentali dei nostri giorni.

Sarebbe assai più vero dire che la Fede restituisce a un uomo il suo corpo e la sua anima e la sua ragione e la sua volontà e la sua vita stessa. Sarebbe assai più vero dire che l’uomo che l’ha ricevuta riceve tutte le antiche funzioni umane che tutte le altre filosofie gli stanno già togliendo. Sarebbe più aderente alla realtà dire che egli soltanto avrà la libertà, che egli soltanto avrà la volontà, perché egli soltanto crederà nel libero arbitrio; che egli soltanto avrà la ragione, giacché il dubbio ultimo nega la ragione non meno dell’autorità; che egli soltanto agirà veramente, perché l’azione è compiuta in vista di un fine. È per lo meno una visione meno improbabile che tutto questo indurirsi e disperato abbattimento dell’intelletto lascino lui, alla fine, unico cittadino capace di camminare e di parlare in una città di paralitici.

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• «The Humanism of Irving Babbitt», The Forum, luglio 1928.

** «The Critic and American Life», The Forum, febbraio 1928.

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IS HUMANISM A RELIGION?

I HAVE just been reading Mr. Norman Foerster’s book on “American Criticism”; and I hope it is no disrespect to the bulk of the book, a series of very thoughtful studies on American thinkers, if I say that the whole point of it is in the last chapter; which propounds a certain problem or challenge to modern thought. It is the problem of whether what he calls Humanism can satisfy humanity. Of his other topics it would be easy to talk for ever. He generally says the right thing; he sometimes says the last word, in that suggestive or provocative style that tempts somebody to say one word more. In my own estimate of his subjects, Whitman would be very much larger and Lowell very much smaller. About Emerson he seems both sensitive and just; and Emerson certainly had distinction; but just that dry sort of distinction to which I should always be afraid of being unfair. A Puritan tried to be a Pagan; and succeeded in being a Pagan who hesitated about whether he ought to go and see a girl dancing. But all these things are stimulating but secondary to the question which I will take the liberty of attacking separately and attempting to answer seriously. I fear that answering it seriously must mean answering it personally. The question really is whether Humanism can perform all the functions of religion; and I cannot but regard it in relation to my own religion. It is only just to say that Humanism is quite different from Humanitarianism. It means, as explained here, something like this. Modern science and organization are in a sense only too natural. They herd us like the beasts along lines of heredity or tribal doom; they attach man to the earth like a plant instead of liberating him, even like a bird, let alone an angel. Indeed, their latest psychology is lower than the level of life. What is subconscious is sub-human and, as it were, subterranean: or something less than earthly. This fight for culture is above all a fight for consciousness: what some would call self-consciousness: but anyhow against mere subconsciousness. We need a rally of the really HUMAN things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers. Nevertheless, my first duty is to answer the question put to me; and I must answer it in the negative.

I do not believe that Humanism can be a complete substitute for Superhumanism. I do not believe it because of a certain truth to me so concrete as to be called a fact. I know it sounds very like something that has often been said in conventional or superficial apologetics. But I do not mean it in that vague sense; so far from inheriting it as a convention, I have rather recently collided with it as a discovery. I have realized it relatively late in life, and realized that it is indeed the whole story and moral of my own lifetime. But even a few years ago, when most of my moral and religious views were pretty finally formed, I should not have seen it quite sharply and clearly; as I see it now.

The fact is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including, of course, many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallized in Christendom. But it is NOT really starting new enthusiasms of its own. The novelty is a matter of names and labels, like modern advertisement; in almost every other way the novelty is merely negative. It is not starting fresh things that it can really carry on far into the future. On the contrary, it is picking up old things that it cannot carry on at all. For these are the two marks of modern moral ideals. First, that they were borrowed or snatched out of ancient or mediaeval hands. Second, that they wither very quickly in modern hands. That is, very briefly, the thesis I maintain; and it so happens that the book called AMERICAN CRITICISM might almost have been meant for a text-book to prove my point.

I will begin with a particular example with which the book also deals. My whole youth was filled, as with a sunrise, with the sanguine glow of Walt Whitman. He seemed to me something like a crowd turned to a giant, or like Adam the First Man. It thrilled me to hear of somebody who had heard of somebody, who saw him in the street; it was as if Christ were still alive. I did not care about whether his unmetrical poetry were a wise form or no, any more than whether a true Gospel of Jesus were scrawled on parchment or stone. I never had a hint of the evil some enemies have attributed to him; if it was there, it was not there for me. What I saluted was a new equality, which was not a dull levelling but an enthusiastic lifting; a shouting exultation in the mere fact that men were men. Real men were greater than unreal gods; and each remained as mystic and majestic as a god, while he became as frank and comforting as a comrade. The point can be put most compactly in one of Whitman’s own phrases; he says somewhere that old artists painted crowds, in which one head had a nimbus of gold-coloured light; “but I paint hundreds of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-coloured light.” A glory was to cling about men as men; a mutual worship was to take the form of fellowship; and the least and lowest of men must be included in this fellowship; a hump-backed Negro half-wit, with one eye and homicidal mania, must not be painted without his nimbus of gold-coloured light. This might seem only the final expansion of a movement begun a century before with Rousseau and the Revolutionists; and I was brought up to believe and did believe that the movement was the beginning of bigger and better things. But these were songs before sunrise; and there is no comparison between even sunrise and the sun. Whitman was brotherhood in broad daylight, showing endless varieties of radiant and wonderful creatures, all the more sacred for being solid. Shelley had adored Man, but Whitman adored Men. Every human face, every human feature, was a matter of mystical poetry, such as lit like chance torchlight, hitherto, a face here and there in the crowd. A king was a man treated as all men should be treated. A god was a man worshipped as all men should be worshipped. What could they do against a race of gods and a republic of kings; not verbally but veritably the New World?

L’UUMANESIMO È UNA RELIGIONE?

Ho appena finito di leggere il libro del signor Norman Foerster su “American Criticism”; e spero che non sia mancanza di rispetto verso la maggior parte del libro, una serie di studi molto riflessivi sui pensatori americani, se dico che l’intera questione è nell’ultimo capitolo; il quale propone un certo problema o sfida al pensiero moderno. È il problema di sapere se quello che chiama Umanesimo possa soddisfare l’umanità. Sui suoi altri argomenti si potrebbe parlare per sempre. Di solito dice la cosa giusta; a volte dice l’ultima parola, in quel stile suggestivo o provocatorio che spinge qualcuno a dire una parola di più. Nella mia personale valutazione dei suoi soggetti, Whitman sarebbe molto più grande e Lowell molto più piccolo. Su Emerson sembra sia sensibile e giusto; ed Emerson certamente aveva distinzione; ma proprio quel tipo secco di distinzione verso il quale io avrei sempre paura di essere ingiusto. Un puritano cercò di fare il pagano; e riuscì a diventare un pagano che esitava sul fatto che dovesse andare a vedere una ragazza ballare. Ma tutte queste cose sono stimolanti, ma secondarie rispetto alla questione sulla quale prenderò la libertà di attaccarmi separatamente e di tentare di rispondere seriamente. Temo che rispondere seriamente debba significare rispondere personalmente. La domanda è veramente se l’Umanesimo possa svolgere tutte le funzioni della religione; e non posso fare a meno di considerarlo in relazione alla mia stessa religione. È solo giusto dire che l’Umanesimo è del tutto diverso dall’umanitarismo. Significa, come spiegato qui, qualcosa di simile a questo. La scienza e l’organizzazione moderne sono in un certo senso troppo naturali. Ci conducono come le bestie lungo linee di eredità o destino tribale; attaccano l’uomo alla terra come una pianta invece di liberarlo, anche come un uccello, figuriamoci come un angelo. La loro ultima psicologia è addirittura inferiore al livello della vita. Ciò che è subcosciente è subumano e, per così dire, sotterraneo: o qualcosa di meno che terreno. Questa lotta per la cultura è soprattutto una lotta per la coscienza: ciò che alcuni chiamerebbero auto-coscienza: ma comunque contro il semplice subconscio. Abbiamo bisogno di un raduno delle cose veramente UMANE; la volontà che è morale, la memoria che è tradizione, la cultura che è l’astuzia mentale dei nostri padri. Tuttavia, il mio primo dovere è quello di rispondere alla domanda postami; e devo risponderla negativamente.

Non credo che l’Umanesimo possa essere un sostituto completo per il Superumanesimo. Non ci credo a causa di una certa verità così concreta da poter essere chiamata un fatto. So che sembra molto simile a qualcosa che è stato spesso detto nell’apologetica convenzionale o superficiale. Ma non intendo questo in quel senso vago; lungi dall’ereditarlo come una convenzione, ho piuttosto recentemente scontrato con esso come una scoperta. L’ho realizzato relativamente tardi nella vita e mi sono reso conto che è davvero tutta la storia e il morale della mia stessa esistenza. Ma anche pochi anni fa, quando la maggior parte delle mie opinioni morali e religiose erano già abbastanza formate, non l’avrei visto così nitidamente e chiaramente; come lo vedo ora.

Il fatto è questo: il mondo moderno, con i suoi movimenti moderni, sta vivendo del suo capitale cattolico. Sta usando e consumando le verità che gli rimangono dal vecchio tesoro della Cristianità; inclusa, naturalmente, molte verità note all’antichità pagana ma cristallizzate nella Cristianità. Ma NON sta realmente iniziando nuovi entusiasmi propri. La novità è questione di nomi ed etichette, come la pubblicità moderna; quasi in ogni altro modo la novità è semplicemente negativa. Non sta iniziando cose nuove che può davvero portare avanti lontano nel futuro. Al contrario, sta raccogliendo vecchie cose che non può affatto portare avanti. Perché questi sono i due segni degli ideali morali moderni. Primo, che furono presi in prestito o strappati dalle mani antiche o medievali. Secondo, che appassiscono molto rapidamente nelle mani moderne. Questo è, molto brevemente, la tesi che sostengo; e così avviene che il libro chiamato CRITICA AMERICANA potrebbe quasi essere stato pensato come un testo per provare il mio punto.

Comincerò con un esempio particolare di cui il libro tratta anch’esso. La mia giovinezza fu riempita, come da un’alba, dal bagliore sanguigno di Walt Whitman. Egli mi sembrava qualcosa come una folla trasformata in un gigante, o come Adamo, il Primo Uomo. Mi emozionavo nel sentire parlare di qualcuno che aveva sentito parlare di qualcun altro che lo aveva visto per strada; era come se Cristo fosse ancora vivo. Non mi importava se la sua poesia non metrica fosse una forma saggia o no, tanto quanto non mi importasse se un vero Vangelo di Gesù fosse scarabocchiato su pergamena o pietra. Non avevo mai avuto il minimo accenno del male che alcuni nemici gli hanno attribuito; se c’era, non era lì per me. Quello che salutavo era una nuova uguaglianza, che non era un livellamento noioso ma un sollevamento entusiasta; un’esultazione urlante nel semplice fatto che gli uomini fossero uomini. Gli uomini veri erano più grandi degli dei irreali; e ciascuno rimaneva tanto mistico e maestoso quanto un dio, mentre diventava tanto franco e confortante quanto un compagno. Il punto può essere espresso nel modo più compatto in una delle frasi stesse di Whitman; egli dice da qualche parte che i vecchi artisti dipingevano folle, nelle quali una testa aveva un alone di luce dorata; “ma io dipingo centinaia di teste, ma non dipingo nessuna testa senza il suo alone di luce dorata.” Una gloria doveva attorniare gli uomini come tali; un culto reciproco doveva assumere la forma di cameratismo; e anche l’ultimo e più basso degli uomini doveva essere incluso in questo cameratismo; un negro gobbo, mezzo scemo, con un occhio e manie omicide, non doveva essere dipinto senza il suo alone di luce dorata. Questo potrebbe sembrare solo l’espansione finale di un movimento iniziato un secolo prima con Rousseau e i Rivoluzionari; ed ero stato educato a credere, e credevo che quel movimento fosse l’inizio di cose più grandi e migliori. Ma questi erano canti prima dell’alba; e non c’è paragone tra anche l’alba e il sole. Whitman era fraternità in pieno giorno, mostrando infinite varietà di creature radiose e meravigliose, tanto più sacre per essere solide. Shelley aveva adorato l’Uomo, ma Whitman adorava gli Uomini. Ogni volto umano, ogni tratto umano, era materia di poesia mistica, che illuminava come torce casuali, finora, un volto qua e là nella folla. Un re era un uomo trattato come tutti gli uomini dovrebbero essere trattati. Un dio era un uomo adorato come tutti gli uomini dovrebbero essere adorati. Cosa potevano fare contro una razza di dei e una repubblica di re; non verbalmente ma veramente il Nuovo Mondo?

Well … here is what Mr. Foerster says about the present position of the founder of the new world of democracy: “Our present science lends little support to an inherent ‘dignity of man’ or to his ‘perfectibility.’ It is wholly possible that the science of the future will lead us away from democracy towards some form of aristocracy. The millennial expectations that Whitman built upon science and democracy, we are now well aware rested upon insecure foundations… The perfection of nature, the natural goodness of man, ‘the great pride of man in himself’ offset with an emotional humanitarianism—these are the materials of a structure only slightly coloured with modernity. His politics, his ethics, his religion belong to the past, even that facile ‘religiousness’ which he hoped would suffuse and complete the work of science and democracy… In the essentials of his prophecy, Whitman, we must conclude, has been falsified by the event.” This is a very moderate and fair statement; it would be easy to find the same thing in a much fiercer statement. Here is a monumental remark by Mr. H.L. Mencken: “They (he means certain liberal or ex-liberal thinkers) have come to realize that the morons whom they sweated to save do not want to be saved, and are not worth saving.” That is the New Spirit, if there is any New Spirit. “I will make unconquerable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks,” cried Walt Whitman, “by the love of comrades, by the lifelong love of comrades.” I like to think of the face of Mr. Mencken of Baltimore, if some casual comrade from Pittsburgh tried to make him unconquerable by putting an arm around his neck. But the idea is dead for much less ferocious people than Mr. Mencken. It is dead in a man like Aldous Huxley, who complained recently of the “gratuitous” romancing of the old republican view of human nature. It is dead in the most humane and humorous of our recent critics. It is dead in so many wise and good men to-day, that I cannot help wondering whether, under modern conditions of his favourite “science,” it would not be dead in Whitman himself.

It is not dead in me. It remains real for me, not by any merit of mine, but by the fact that this mystical idea, while it has evaporated as a mood, still exists as a creed. I am perfectly prepared to assert, as firmly as I should have asserted in my boyhood, that the hump-backed and half-witted Negro is decorated with a nimbus of gold-coloured light. The truth is that Whitman’s wild picture, or what he thought was a wild picture, is in fact a very old and orthodox picture. There are, as a matter of fact, any number of old pictures in which whole crowds are crowned with haloes, to indicate that they have all attained Beatitude. But for Catholics it is a fundamental dogma of the Faith that all human beings, without any exception whatever, were specially made, were shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting the mark of Beatitude. It is true that the shafts are feathered with free will, and therefore throw the shadow of all the tragic possibilities of free will; and that the Church (having also been aware for ages of that darker side of truth, which the new sceptics have just discovered) does also draw attention to the darkness of that potential tragedy. But that does not make any difference to the gloriousness of the potential glory. In one aspect it is even a part of it; since the freedom is itself a glory. In that sense they would still wear their haloes even in hell.

But the point is that anyone believing that all these beings were made to be blessed, and multitudes of them probably well on their way to be blessed, really has a sound philosophic reason for regarding them all as radiant and wonderful creatures, or seeing all their heads in haloes. That conviction does make every human face, every human feature, a matter of mystical poetry. But it is not at all like modern poetry. The most modern of modern poetry is not the poetry of reception, but of rejection, or rather, of repulsion. The spirit that inhabits most recent work might be called a fury of fastidiousness. The new man of letters does not get his effect by saying that for him a hump-backed Negro has a halo. He gets his effect by saying that, just as he was about to embrace finally the fairest of women, he was nauseated by a pimple above her eyebrow or a stain of grease on her left thumb. Whitman tried to prove that dirty things were really clean, as when he glorified manure as the matrix of the purity of grass. His followers in free verse try to prove that clean things are really dirty; to suggest something leprous and loathsome about the thick whiteness of milk, or something prickly and plague-stricken about the unaccountable growth of hair. In short, the whole mood has changed, as a matter of poetry. But it has not changed as a matter of theology; and that is the argument for having an unchanging theology. The Catholic theology has nothing to do with democracy, for or against, in the sense of a machinery of voting or a criticism of particular political privileges. It is not committed to support what Whitman said for democracy, or even what Jefferson or Lincoln said for democracy. But it is absolutely committed to contradict what Mr. Mencken says against democracy. There will be Diocletian persecutions, there will be Dominican crusades, there will be rending of all religious peace and compromise, or even the end of civilization and the world, before the Catholic Church will admit that one single moron, or one single man, “is not worth saving.”

I have therefore found in my middle age this curious fact about the lesson of my life, and that of all my generation. We all grew up with a common conviction, lit by the flames of the literary genius of Rousseau, of Shelley, of Victor Hugo, finding its final flare up and conflagration in the universalism of Walt Whitman. And we all took it for granted that all our descendants would take it for granted. I said the discovery of brotherhood seemed like the discovery of broad daylight; of something that men could never grow tired of. Yet even in my own short lifetime, men have already grown tired of it. We cannot now appeal to the love of equality as an EMOTION. We cannot now open a new book of poems, and expect it to be about the life-long love of comrades, or “Love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives.” We realize that in most men it has died, because it was a mood and not a doctrine. And we begin to wonder too late, in the wise fashion of the aged, how we could ever have expected it to last as a mood, if it was not strong enough to last as a doctrine. And we also begin to realize that all the real strength there was in it, which is the only strength that remains in it, was the original strength of the doctrine. What really happened was this: that the men of the eighteenth century, many of them in a just impatience with corrupt and cynical priests, turned on those priests and said in effect, “Well, I suppose you call yourselves Christians; so you can’t actually DENY that men are brothers or that it is our duty to help the poor.” The very confidence of their challenge, the very ringing note in the revolutionary voice, came from the fact that the Christian reactionaries were in a false position as Christians. The democratic demand won because it seemed unanswerable. And it seemed unanswerable, not in the least because it is unanswerable, but because even decadent Christians dared not give the answer. Mr. H. L. Mencken will always be happy to oblige with the answer.

Ecco … ecco cosa dice il signor Foerster sulla posizione attuale del fondatore del nuovo mondo della democrazia: «La nostra scienza attuale offre pochi argomenti a sostegno di una ‘dignità intrinseca dell’uomo’ o della sua ‘perfezionabilità’. È perfettamente possibile che la scienza del futuro ci allontani dalla democrazia verso qualche forma di aristocrazia. Le aspettative millenarie su cui Whitman ha costruito la scienza e la democrazia, ora siamo benissimo consapevoli che poggiavano su basi insicure… La perfezione della natura, la bontà naturale dell’uomo, ‘l’orgoglio dell’uomo in se stesso’, bilanciati con un umanitarismo emotivo — questi sono gli elementi di una struttura solo leggermente colorata di modernità. La sua politica, la sua etica, la sua religione appartengono al passato, anche quella facile ‘religiosità’ che sperava avrebbe pervaso e completato l’opera della scienza e della democrazia… Per quanto riguarda i punti essenziali della sua profezia, Whitman, dobbiamo concludere, è stato smentito dagli eventi». Questo è un’affermazione molto moderata ed equilibrata; sarebbe facile trovare la stessa cosa in una dichiarazione molto più feroce. Ecco un’osservazione monumentale del signor H.L. Mencken: «Loro (intende certi pensatori liberali o ex-liberali) si sono resi conto che i moroni che hanno sudato per salvare non vogliono essere salvati, e non lo meritano». Questo è il Nuovo Spirito, se c’è un qualche Nuovo Spirito. «Farò città invincibili, con le braccia intorno al collo l’una dell’altra», gridava Walt Whitman, «per amore dei compagni, per l’amore che dura tutta la vita dei compagni». Mi piace pensare alla faccia del signor Mencken di Baltimora, se qualche compagno occasionale da Pittsburgh cercasse di renderlo invincibile mettendogli un braccio intorno al collo. Ma l’idea è morta per persone molto meno feroci del signor Mencken. È morta in un uomo come Aldous Huxley, che si lamentava recentemente della romanticheria «gratuita» dell’antica visione repubblicana della natura umana. È morta nel più umano e umoristico dei nostri critici recenti. È morta in tanti uomini saggi e buoni di oggi, che non posso fare a meno di chiedermi se, nelle condizioni moderne della sua prediletta “scienza”, non sarebbe morta anche nel signor Whitman.

Non è morto in me. Rimane reale per me, non per alcun merito mio, ma perché questa idea mistica, sebbene si sia evaporata come umore, esiste ancora come credo. Sono perfettamente disposto ad affermare, con la stessa fermezza con cui avrei affermato in giovinezza, che il negro gobbo e mezzo scemo è decorato con un nimbo di luce dorata. La verità è che il quadro selvaggio di Whitman, o quello che lui pensava fosse un quadro selvaggio, è in realtà un quadro molto antico e ortodosso. Ci sono, infatti, qualsiasi numero di vecchi dipinti in cui intere folle sono incoronate da aureole, per indicare che hanno tutte raggiunto la Beatitudine. Ma per i cattolici è un dogma fondamentale della Fede che tutti gli esseri umani, senza alcuna eccezione, sono stati creati appositamente, modellati e diretti come frecce lucenti, con l’obiettivo di raggiungere il bersaglio della Beatitudine. È vero che le frecce sono piumate con la libera volontà, e quindi proiettano l’ombra di tutte le tragiche possibilità della libera volontà; e che la Chiesa (che è stata a conoscenza per secoli anche di quel lato più oscuro della verità, appena scoperto dai nuovi scettici) attira anche l’attenzione sull’oscurità di quella potenziale tragedia. Ma ciò non fa alcuna differenza per la gloria della potenziale gloria. In un certo senso ne è persino parte; poiché la libertà è essa stessa una gloria. In quel senso indosserebbero ancora le loro aureole anche all’inferno.

Ma il punto è che chiunque creda che tutti questi esseri siano stati creati per essere beati e che moltitudini di loro siano probabilmente bene avviate verso la beatitudine, ha davvero una solida ragione filosofica per considerarli tutte creature radiose e meravigliose, o per vedere tutti i loro volti circondati da aureole. Quella convinzione rende ogni volto umano, ogni tratto del viso, materia di poesia mistica. Ma non è affatto come la poesia moderna. La poesia più moderna della modernità non è la poesia dell’accoglienza, ma del rifiuto, o meglio, della repulsione. Lo spirito che anima le opere più recenti potrebbe essere chiamato una furia di schizzinosità. Il nuovo uomo di lettere non ottiene il suo effetto dicendo che per lui un negro gobbo ha un’aura. Ottiene il suo effetto dicendo che, proprio mentre stava per abbracciare finalmente la più bella delle donne, è stato nauseato da una pallina sopra il sopracciglio o da una macchia di grasso sul pollice sinistro. Whitman cercò di dimostrare che le cose sporche erano in realtà pulite, come quando glorificava il letame come la matrice della purezza dell’erba. I suoi seguaci nella versificazione libera cercano di dimostrare che le cose pulite sono in realtà sporche; suggeriscono qualcosa di lebbroso e ripugnante nell’ispessimento bianco del latte, o qualcosa di pungente e pestilenziale nella crescita inspiegabile dei peli. In breve, l’intero umore è cambiato, per quanto riguarda la poesia. Ma non è cambiato per quanto riguarda la teologia; e questo è l’argomento per avere una teologia immutabile. La teologia cattolica non ha nulla a che fare con la democrazia, né a favore né contro, nel senso di un meccanismo di voto o di una critica ai privilegi politici particolari. Non si impegna a sostenere ciò che Whitman disse per la democrazia, o anche ciò che Jefferson o Lincoln dissero per la democrazia. Ma è assolutamente impegnata a contraddire ciò che il signor Mencken dice contro la democrazia. Ci saranno persecuzioni di Diocleziano, ci saranno crociate domenicane, ci sarà lo strappo di ogni pace e compromesso religioso, o anche la fine della civiltà e del mondo, prima che la Chiesa Cattolica ammetta che un solo deficiente, o un solo uomo, “non valga la pena di essere salvato”.

Ho quindi scoperto nella mia mezza età questo curioso fatto sulla lezione della mia vita, e su quella di tutta la mia generazione. Siamo cresciuti tutti con una convinzione comune, accesa dalle fiamme del genio letterario di Rousseau, Shelley, Victor Hugo, trovando il suo ultimo scoppio e incendio nell’universalismo di Walt Whitman. E abbiamo dato per scontato che anche i nostri discendenti l’avrebbero data per scontata. Ho detto che la scoperta della fratellanza sembrava come la scoperta della piena luce del giorno; qualcosa di cui gli uomini non potessero mai stancarsi. Eppure, anche nella mia breve vita, gli uomini se ne sono già stancati. Non possiamo più fare appello all’amore per l’uguaglianza come un’EMOZIONE. Non possiamo più aprire un nuovo libro di poesie, e aspettarci che sia sulla vita lunga dell’amore tra compagni, o “Amor, la Repubblica amata, che si nutre di libertà e vive.” Ci rendiamo conto che nella maggior parte degli uomini è morto, perché era un umore e non una dottrina. E iniziamo a meravigliarci troppo tardi, nel saggio stile degli anziani, come avremmo mai potuto aspettarci che durasse come umore, se non era abbastanza forte da durare come dottrina. E iniziamo anche a renderci conto che tutta la vera forza che c’era in esso, che è l’unica forza che rimane in esso, era la forza originale della dottrina. Ciò che è realmente accaduto è stato questo: gli uomini del diciottesimo secolo, molti di loro in una giusta impazienza verso i preti corrotti e cinici, si sono rivoltati contro quei preti e hanno detto in effetti, “Beh, immagino che vi chiamiate cristiani; quindi non potete realmente NEGARE che gli uomini siano fratelli o che sia nostro dovere aiutare i poveri.” La stessa fiducia della loro sfida, la stessa nota squillante nella voce rivoluzionaria, proveniva dal fatto che i reazionari cristiani erano in una posizione falsa come cristiani. La richiesta democratica ha vinto perché sembrava irrefutabile. E sembrava irrefutabile, non per nulla perché lo è, ma perché anche i cristiani decadenti non osavano dare la risposta. Il signor H. L. Mencken sarà sempre felice di acconsentire con la risposta.

Now, it was just here that, for me, the business began to be odd and interesting. For, looking back on older religious crises, I seem to see a certain coincidence, or rather, a set of things too coincident to be called a coincidence After all, when I come to think of it, all the other revolts against the Church, before the Revolution and especially since the Reformation, had told the same strange story. Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church’s bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted. He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible. To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed “Psalms” or “Gospels”; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements. If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures? Yet it was long before it even occurred to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself. People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.

Again, the Calvinists took the Catholic idea of the absolute knowledge and power of God; and treated it as a rocky irreducible truism so solid that anything could be built on it, however crushing or cruel. They were so confident in their logic, and its one first principle of predestination, that they tortured the intellect and imagination with dreadful deductions about God, that seemed to turn Him into a demon. But it never seems to have struck them that somebody might suddenly say that he did not believe in the demon. They were quite surprised when people called “infidels” here and there began to say it. They had assumed the Divine foreknowledge as so fixed, that it must, if necessary, fulfil itself by destroying the Divine mercy. They never thought anybody would deny the knowledge exactly as they denied the mercy. Then came Wesley and the reaction against Calvinism; and Evangelicals seized on the very Catholic idea that mankind has a sense of sin; and they wandered about offering everybody release from his mysterious burden of sin. It is a proverb, and almost a joke, that they address a stranger in the street and offer to relax his secret agony of sin. But it seldom seemed to strike them, until much later, that the man in the street might possibly answer that he did not want to be saved from sin, any more than from spotted fever or St. Vitus’s Dance; because these things were not in fact causing him any suffering at all. They, in their turn, were quite surprised when the result of Rousseau and the revolutionary optimism began to express itself in men claiming a purely human happiness and dignity; a contentment with the comradeship of their kind; ending with the happy yawp of Whitman that he would not “lie awake and weep for his sins.”

Now the plain truth is that Shelley and Whitman and the revolutionary optimists were themselves doing exactly the same thing all over again. They also, though less consciously because of the chaos of their times, had really taken out of the old Catholic tradition one particular transcendental idea; the idea that there is a spiritual dignity in man as man, and a universal duty to love men as men. And they acted in exactly the same extraordinary fashion as their prototypes, the Wesleyans and the Calvinists. They took it for granted that this spiritual idea was absolutely self-evident like the sun and moon; that nobody could ever destroy that, though in the name of it they destroyed everything else. They perpetually hammered away at their human divinity and human dignity, and inevitable love for all human beings; as if these things were naked natural facts. And now they are quite surprised when new and restless realists suddenly explode, and begin to say that a pork-butcher with red whiskers and a wart on his nose does not strike them as particularly divine or dignified, that they are not conscious of the smallest sincere impulse to love him, that they could not love him if they tried, or that they do not recognize any particular obligation to try.

It might appear that the process has come to an end, and that there is nothing more for the naked realist to shed. But it is not so; and the process can still go on. There are still traditional charities to which men cling. There are still traditional charities for them to fling away when they find they are only traditional. Everybody must have noticed in the most modern writers the survival of a rather painful sort of pity. They no longer honour all men, like St. Paul and the other mystical democrats. It would hardly be too much to say that they despise all men; often (to do them justice) including themselves. But they do in a manner pity all men, and particularly those that are pitiable; by this time they extend the feeling almost disproportionately to the other animals. This compassion for men is also tainted with its historical connection with Christian charity; and even in the case of animals, with the example of many Christian saints. There is nothing to show that a new revulsion from such sentimental religions will not free men even from the obligation of pitying the pain of the world. Not only Nietzsche, but many Neo-Pagans working on his lines, have suggested such hardness as a higher intellectual purity. And having read many modern poems about the Man of the Future, made of steel and illumined with nothing warmer than green fire, I have no difficulty in imagining a literature that should pride itself on a merciless and metallic detachment. Then, perhaps, it might be faintly conjectured that the last of the Christian virtues had died. But so long as they lived they were Christian.

Ora, è proprio qui che, per me, la faccenda cominciò a farsi strana e interessante. Poiché, ripensando alle più antiche crisi religiose, mi pare di scorgere una certa coincidenza, o meglio, un insieme di cose troppo coincidenti per essere chiamate una coincidenza. Dopo tutto, a pensarci bene, tutte le altre rivolte contro la Chiesa, prima della Rivoluzione e specialmente dopo la Riforma, avevano raccontato la stessa strana storia. Ogni grande eretico aveva sempre esibito tre caratteristiche notevoli in combinazione. Primo, estraeva una qualche idea mistica dal fascio o dall’equilibrio di idee mistiche della Chiesa. Secondo, adoperava quell’unica idea mistica contro tutte le altre idee mistiche. Terzo (e cosa più singolare), pare in genere non aver avuto alcuna nozione che la propria prediletta idea mistica fosse un’idea mistica, almeno nel senso di un’idea misteriosa, o dubbia, o dogmatica. Con una strana perturbante innocenza, sembra averla sempre data per scontata. La supponeva inattaccabile, anche mentre la usava per attaccare ogni sorta di cose simili. L’esempio più popolare ed evidente è la Bibbia. A un osservatore pagano imparziale o scettico, deve sempre apparire la storia più strana del mondo: che uomini precipitatisi a devastare un tempio, rovesciando l’altare e scacciando il sacerdote, vi trovassero certi volumi sacri recanti l’iscrizione «Salmi» o «Vangeli»; e (invece di gettarli sul fuoco con il resto) cominciassero a usarli come oracoli infallibili per rimproverare tutte le altre disposizioni. Se il sacro altare maggiore era tutto sbagliato, perché i documenti sacri secondari dovevano necessariamente essere tutti giusti? Se il sacerdote aveva falsificato i suoi Sacramenti, perché non avrebbe potuto falsificare le sue Scritture? Eppure passò molto tempo prima che venisse anche solo in mente a coloro che brandivano questo unico pezzo del mobilio della Chiesa per far a pezzi tutto il resto del mobilio ecclesiastico, che qualcuno potesse essere tanto profano da esaminare questo stesso frammento di mobilio. Le persone erano assai sorprese, e in alcune parti del mondo sono ancora sorprese, che qualcuno osi farlo.

Di nuovo, i calvinisti presero l’idea cattolica della conoscenza e della potenza assoluta di Dio; e la trattarono come un truismo roccioso e irriducibile, tanto solido da poterci costruire sopra qualsiasi cosa, per quanto schiacciante o crudele. Erano tanto sicuri della loro logica, e del suo unico primo principio della predestinazione, che torturarono l’intelletto e l’immaginazione con spaventose deduzioni intorno a Dio, che sembravano trasformarlo in un demonio. Ma non pare sia mai passato loro per la mente che qualcuno potesse improvvisamente dire di non credere nel demonio. Rimasero assai sorpresi quando persone chiamate «infedeli» qua e là cominciarono a dirlo. Avevano dato per assodata la prescienza divina come cosa tanto fissa che essa doveva, se necessario, compiersi distruggendo la misericordia divina. Non pensarono mai che qualcuno potesse negare la conoscenza esattamente come essi negavano la misericordia. Poi vennero Wesley e la reazione contro il calvinismo; e gli evangelici si impadronirono dell’idea assai cattolica che l’umanità ha un senso del peccato; e andavano in giro offrendo a chiunque la liberazione dal suo misterioso fardello di peccato. È un proverbio, e quasi una barzelletta, che accostino uno sconosciuto per la strada e si offrano di alleviargli la sua segreta agonia di peccato. Ma di rado sembrò venir loro in mente, se non molto più tardi, che l’uomo della strada avrebbe forse potuto rispondere che non voleva essere salvato dal peccato, non più che dalla febbre petecchiale o dal ballo di San Vito; perché queste cose, in effetti, non gli causavano alcuna sofferenza. A loro volta, essi rimasero assai sorpresi quando l’esito di Rousseau e dell’ottimismo rivoluzionario cominciò a esprimersi in uomini che rivendicavano una felicità e una dignità puramente umane; un appagamento nella cameratismo della propria specie; e che culminò nel felice schiamazzo di Whitman, il quale non voleva «restare sveglio a piangere per i propri peccati».

Ora, la pura verità è che Shelley e Whitman e gli ottimisti rivoluzionari stavano essi stessi facendo esattamente la stessa cosa daccapo. Anch’essi, benché meno consapevolmente a causa del caos dei loro tempi, avevano davvero tratto dall’antica tradizione cattolica una particolare idea trascendentale; l’idea che vi sia una dignità spirituale nell’uomo in quanto uomo, e un dovere universale di amare gli uomini in quanto uomini. Ed essi agirono esattamente nella stessa straordinaria maniera dei loro prototipi, i wesleyani e i calvinisti. Diedero per scontato che questa idea spirituale fosse assolutamente evidente da sé come il sole e la luna; che nessuno avrebbe mai potuto distruggerla, benché in nome di essa distruggessero tutto il resto. Martellavano perpetuamente sulla loro divinità umana e dignità umana, e sull’inevitabile amore per tutti gli esseri umani; come se queste cose fossero nudi fatti naturali. E ora restano assai sorpresi quando nuovi e inquieti realisti d’un tratto esplodono, e cominciano a dire che un salumaio dai baffi rossi e con un porro sul naso non fa loro l’impressione di essere particolarmente divino o dignitoso, che non sono consapevoli del minimo sincero impulso ad amarlo, che non potrebbero amarlo neppure se ci provassero, o che non riconoscono alcun particolare obbligo di provarci.

Potrebbe sembrare che il processo sia giunto al termine, e che non vi sia più nulla che il nudo realista debba spogliare via. Ma non è così; e il processo può ancora proseguire. Vi sono ancora carità tradizionali a cui gli uomini si aggrappano. Vi sono ancora carità tradizionali da gettar via, quando scoprano che sono soltanto tradizionali. Chiunque avrà notato negli scrittori più moderni la sopravvivenza di una sorta piuttosto penosa di pietà. Essi non onorano più tutti gli uomini, come san Paolo e gli altri democratici mistici. Non sarebbe eccessivo dire che disprezzano tutti gli uomini; spesso (per rendere loro giustizia) compresi se stessi. Ma in un certo modo hanno pietà di tutti gli uomini, e in particolare di quelli che sono degni di pietà; e ormai estendono il sentimento quasi in modo sproporzionato agli altri animali. Questa compassione per gli uomini è anch’essa contaminata dalla sua connessione storica con la carità cristiana; e persino nel caso degli animali, con l’esempio di molti santi cristiani. Nulla dimostra che una nuova ripugnanza verso tali religioni sentimentali non libererà gli uomini persino dall’obbligo di aver pietà del dolore del mondo. Non solo Nietzsche, ma molti neopagani che lavorano sulla sua linea, hanno suggerito una simile durezza come una superiore purezza intellettuale. E avendo letto molte poesie moderne sull’Uomo del Futuro, fatto d’acciaio e illuminato da nulla di più caldo di un verde fuoco, non ho difficoltà a immaginare una letteratura che si faccia un vanto di uno spietato e metallico distacco. Allora, forse, si potrebbe debolmente congetturare che l’ultima delle virtù cristiane sia morta. Ma finché vissero, furono cristiane.

I do not therefore believe that Humanism and Religion are rivals on equal terms. I believe it is a rivalry between the pools and the fountain; or between the firebrands and the fire. Each of these old intellectuals snatched one firebrand out of the undying fire; but the point is that though he waved the torch very wildly, though he would have used the torch to burn down half the world, the torch went out very soon. The Puritans did not really perpetuate their sublime exultation in helplessness; they only made it unpopular. We did not go on indefinitely looking at the Brooklyn crowds with the eye of Whitman; we have come with singular rapidity to regard them with the eye of Dreiser. In short, I distrust spiritual experiments outside the central spiritual tradition; for the simple reason that I think they do not last, even if they manage to spread. At the most they stand for one generation; at the commonest for one fashion; at the lowest for one clique. I do not think they have the secret of continuity; certainly not of corporate continuity. For an antiquated, doddering old democrat like myself may be excused for attaching some slight importance to that last question; that of covering the common life of mankind. How many Humanists are there supposed to be among the inferior crowd of human beings? Are there to be, for instance, no more than there were Greek philosophers in an ordinary rabble of jolly pagan polytheistic Greeks? Are there to be no more than there were men concentrated on the Culture of Matthew Arnold, among the mobs who followed Cardinal Manning or General Booth? I do not in the least intend to sneer at Humanism; I think I understand the intellectual distinction it draws, and I have tried to understand it in a spirit of humility; but I feel a faint interest in how many people out of the battered and bewildered human race are actually expected to understand it. And I ask with a certain personal interest; for there are three hundred million people in the world who accept the mysteries that I accept and live by the faith I hold. I really want to know whether it is anticipated that there will be three hundred million Humanists in Humanity. The sanguine may say that Humanism will be the religion of the next generation, just as Comte said that Humanity would be the God of the next generation; and so in one sense it was. But it is not the God of this generation. And the question is what will be the religion of the next generation after that, or all the other generations (as a certain ancient promise ran) even unto the end of the world.

Humanism, in Mr. Foerster’s sense, has one very wise and worthy character. It is really trying to pick up the pieces; that is, to pick up all the pieces. All that was done before was first blind destruction and then random and scrappy selection; as if boys had broken up a stained-glass window and then made a few scraps into coloured spectacles, the rose-coloured spectacles of the republican or the green or yellow spectacles of the pessimist and the decadent. But Humanism as here professed will stoop to gather all it can; for instance, it is great enough to stoop and pick up the jewel of humility. Mr. Foerster does understand, as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not understand, the case for humility. Matthew Arnold, who made something of the same stand for what he called Culture in the mid-nineteenth century, attempted something of the same preservation of chastity; which he would call, in a rather irritating manner, “pureness.” But before we call either Culture or Humanism a substitute for religion, there is a very plain question that can be asked in the form of a very homely metaphor. Humanism may try to pick up the pieces; but can it stick them together? Where is the cement which made religion corporate and popular, which can prevent it falling to pieces in a debris of individualistic tastes and degrees? What is to prevent one Humanist wanting chastity without humility, and another humility without chastity, and another truth or beauty without either? The problem of an enduring ethic and culture consists in finding an arrangement of the pieces by which they remain related, as do the stones arranged in an arch. And I know only one scheme that has thus proved its solidity, bestriding lands and ages with its gigantic arches, and carrying everywhere the high river of baptism upon an aqueduct of Rome.

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Non credo dunque che l’Umanesimo e la Religione siano rivali a parità di condizioni. Credo che sia una rivalità tra le pozze e la sorgente; o tra i tizzoni e il fuoco. Ciascuno di questi vecchi intellettuali strappò un solo tizzone dal fuoco che non muore; ma il punto è che, per quanto agitasse la fiaccola con gran foga, per quanto avrebbe usato la fiaccola per incendiare metà del mondo, la fiaccola si spense assai presto. I puritani non perpetuarono davvero la loro sublime esultanza nell’impotenza; la resero soltanto impopolare. Non continuammo a tempo indeterminato a guardare le folle di Brooklyn con l’occhio di Whitman; siamo giunti con singolare rapidità a considerarle con l’occhio di Dreiser. In breve, diffido degli esperimenti spirituali fuori della centrale tradizione spirituale; per la semplice ragione che penso non durino, anche se riescono a diffondersi. Al massimo valgono per una generazione; il più delle volte per una moda; nel caso peggiore per una cricca. Non credo che possiedano il segreto della continuità; certamente non della continuità corporativa. Poiché a un antiquato, rimbambito vecchio democratico come me si può ben perdonare di attribuire una qualche lieve importanza a quest’ultima questione; quella dell’abbracciare la vita comune del genere umano. Quanti Umanisti si suppone vi siano tra la turba inferiore degli esseri umani? Ce ne saranno, per esempio, non più di quanti fossero i filosofi greci in un’ordinaria plebaglia di allegri Greci pagani e politeisti? Ce ne saranno non più di quanti fossero gli uomini tutti presi dalla Cultura di Matthew Arnold, in mezzo alle folle che seguivano il cardinale Manning o il generale Booth? Non intendo affatto irridere l’Umanesimo; credo di comprendere la distinzione intellettuale che esso traccia, e ho cercato di comprenderla in uno spirito di umiltà; ma provo un debole interesse a sapere quante persone, di tutta la malconcia e sconcertata razza umana, ci si aspetti davvero che lo comprendano. E lo chiedo con un certo interesse personale; perché vi sono trecento milioni di persone al mondo che accettano i misteri che io accetto e vivono secondo la fede che io professo. Voglio davvero sapere se si prevede che vi saranno trecento milioni di Umanisti nell’Umanità. Gli ottimisti potranno dire che l’Umanesimo sarà la religione della prossima generazione, proprio come Comte disse che l’Umanità sarebbe stata il Dio della prossima generazione; e in un certo senso così fu. Ma non è il Dio di questa generazione. E la domanda è quale sarà la religione della generazione successiva a quella, o di tutte le altre generazioni (come recitava una certa antica promessa) fino alla fine del mondo.

L’Umanesimo, nel senso del signor Foerster, ha un carattere assai saggio e degno. Cerca davvero di raccogliere i cocci; cioè, di raccogliere tutti i cocci. Tutto ciò che si era fatto prima fu dapprima cieca distruzione e poi selezione casuale e frammentaria; come se dei ragazzi avessero fatto a pezzi una vetrata istoriata e poi avessero ricavato da qualche scheggia degli occhiali colorati, gli occhiali color rosa del repubblicano, o gli occhiali verdi o gialli del pessimista e del decadente. Ma l’Umanesimo, quale qui viene professato, si chinerà a raccogliere tutto ciò che può; per esempio, è tanto grande da chinarsi a raccogliere il gioiello dell’umiltà. Il signor Foerster comprende davvero, come il diciottesimo e il diciannovesimo secolo non compresero, le ragioni dell’umiltà. Matthew Arnold, che sostenne qualcosa di simile per ciò che egli chiamava Cultura, a metà del diciannovesimo secolo, tentò qualcosa della stessa conservazione della castità; che egli chiamava, in maniera piuttosto irritante, «purezza». Ma prima di chiamare la Cultura o l’Umanesimo un surrogato della religione, c’è una domanda assai semplice che si può porre nella forma di una metafora assai casalinga. L’Umanesimo può tentare di raccogliere i cocci; ma può incollarli insieme? Dov’è il cemento che rese la religione corporativa e popolare, che può impedirle di cadere a pezzi in un cumulo di gusti e gradi individualistici? Che cosa impedirà a un Umanista di volere la castità senza l’umiltà, e a un altro l’umiltà senza la castità, e a un altro ancora la verità o la bellezza senza né l’una né l’altra? Il problema di un’etica e di una cultura durevoli consiste nel trovare una disposizione dei pezzi per cui essi rimangano collegati, come le pietre disposte in un arco. E io conosco un solo disegno che abbia così dato prova della propria solidità, cavalcando terre ed età con i suoi giganteschi archi, e recando ovunque l’alto fiume del battesimo su un acquedotto di Roma.

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THE DRIFT FROM DOMESTICITY

IN the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion. We might even say that he is seeing things in a nightmare. This principle applies to a thousand things, to trifles as well as true institutions, to convention as well as to conviction. It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to become a beggar on the open road. And when, in the general emancipation of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn’t play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons with patient benevolence: “Defer, therefore, the operation you contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your head and the Lord be with you.”

Among the traditions that are being thus attacked, not intelligently but most unintelligently, is the fundamental human creation called the Household or the Home. That is a typical thing which men attack, not because they can see through it, but because they cannot see it at all. They beat at it blindly, in a fashion entirely haphazard and opportunist; and many of them would pull it down without even pausing to ask why it was ever put up. It is true that only a few of them would have avowed this object in so many words. That only proves how very blind and blundering they are. But they have fallen into a habit of mere drift and gradual detachment from family life; something that is often merely accidental and devoid of any definite theory at all. But though it is accidental it is none the less anarchical. And it is all the more anarchical for not being anarchist. It seems to be largely founded on individual irritation; an irritation which varies with the individual. We are merely told that in this or that case a particular temperament was tormented by a particular environment; but nobody even explained how the evil arose, let alone whether the evil is really escaped. We are told that in this or that family Grandmamma talked a great deal of nonsense, which God knows is true; or that it is very difficult to have intimate intellectual relations with Uncle Gregory without telling him he is a fool, which is indeed the case. But nobody seriously considers the remedy, or even the malady; or whether the existing individualistic dissolution is a remedy at all. Much of this business began with the influence of Ibsen, a very powerful dramatist and an exceedingly feeble philosopher. I suppose that Nora of THE DOLL’S HOUSE was intended to be an inconsequent person; but certainly her most inconsequent action was her last. She complained that she was not yet fit to look after children, and then proceeded to get as far as possible from the children, that she might study them more closely.

There is one simple test and type of this neglect of scientific thinking and the sense of a social rule; the neglect which has now left us with nothing but a welter of exceptions. I have read hundreds and thousands of times, in all the novels and newspapers of our epoch, certain phrases about the just right of the young to liberty, about the unjust claim of the elders to control, about the conception that all souls must be free or all citizens equal, about the absurdity of authority or the degradation of obedience. I am not arguing those matters directly at the moment. But what strikes me as astounding, in a logical sense, is that not one of these myriad novelists and newspaper-men ever seems to think of asking the next and most obvious question. It never seems to occur to them to enquire what becomes of the opposite obligation. If the child is free from the first to disregard the parent, why is not the parent free from the first to disregard the child? If Mr. Jones, Senior, and Mr. Jones, Junior, are only two free and equal citizens, why should one citizen sponge on another citizen for the first fifteen years of his life? Why should the elder Mr. Jones be expected to feed, clothe and shelter out of his own pocket another person who is entirely free of any obligations to him? If the bright young thing cannot be asked to tolerate her grandmother, who has become something of a bore, why should the grandmother or the mother have tolerated the bright young thing at a period of her life when she was by no means bright? Why did they laboriously look after her at a time when her contributions to the conversation were seldom epigrammatic and not often intelligible? Why should Jones Senior stand drinks and free meals to anybody so unpleasant as Jones Junior, especially in the immature phases of his existence? Why should he not throw the baby out of the window; or at any rate, kick the boy out of doors? It is obvious that we are dealing with a real relation, which may be equality, but is certainly not similarity.

LA DERIVA DALLA DOMESTICITÀ

IN materia di riformare le cose, distintamente dal deformarle, esiste un principio piano e semplice; un principio che verrà probabilmente chiamato un paradosso. Esiste, in un caso simile, una certa istituzione o legge; diciamo, per amor di semplicità, uno steccato o un cancello eretto attraverso una strada. Il tipo più moderno di riformatore vi si avvicina allegramente e dice: «Non ne vedo l’utilità; sbarazziamocene.» Al che il tipo più intelligente di riformatore farà bene a rispondere: «Se non ne vedi l’utilità, di certo non ti lascerò sbarazzartene. Va’ via e pensaci. Poi, quando saprai tornare e dirmi che ne vedi l’utilità, potrò forse permetterti di distruggerlo.»

Questo paradosso poggia sul più elementare buon senso. Il cancello o lo steccato non è cresciuto lì. Non è stato eretto da sonnambuli che lo costruirono nel sonno. È altamente improbabile che sia stato messo lì da lunatici evasi che, per qualche ragione, si aggiravano liberi per la strada. Qualcuno ebbe qualche ragione per pensare che sarebbe stata una buona cosa per qualcuno. E finché non sappiamo quale fosse la ragione, non possiamo davvero giudicare se la ragione fosse ragionevole. È estremamente probabile che abbiamo trascurato qualche intero aspetto della questione, se qualcosa eretto da esseri umani come noi ci sembra del tutto privo di senso e misterioso. Vi sono riformatori che superano questa difficoltà supponendo che tutti i loro padri fossero degli sciocchi; ma se così fosse, non potremmo che dire che la follia pare essere una malattia ereditaria. La verità, però, è che nessuno ha alcun diritto di distruggere un’istituzione sociale prima di averla realmente vista come istituzione storica. Se sa come sorse, e quali scopi doveva servire, potrà forse davvero dire che erano scopi cattivi, o che sono da allora divenuti scopi cattivi, o che sono scopi che non vengono più serviti. Ma se si limita a fissare la cosa come un mostro insensato spuntato in qualche modo sul suo cammino, è lui, e non il tradizionalista, a soffrire di un’illusione. Potremmo persino dire che sta vedendo le cose in un incubo. Questo principio si applica a mille cose, alle inezie non meno che alle vere istituzioni, alla convenzione non meno che alla convinzione. Fu proprio quel genere di persona, come Giovanna d’Arco, che sapeva perché le donne portassero la gonna, ad avere maggior titolo a non portarne una; fu proprio quel genere di persona, come san Francesco, che simpatizzava davvero con il banchetto e il focolare, ad avere maggior diritto di farsi mendicante sulla strada aperta. E quando, nella generale emancipazione della società moderna, la Duchessa dice di non vedere perché non dovrebbe giocare a cavallina, o il Decano dichiara di non vedere alcuna valida ragione canonica per cui non dovrebbe reggersi sulla testa, possiamo dire a queste persone con paziente benevolenza: «Rimandate, dunque, l’operazione che meditate finché non avrete compreso, con matura riflessione, quale principio o pregiudizio state violando. Poi giocate a cavallina e reggetevi sulla testa, e il Signore sia con voi.»

Fra le tradizioni che vengono così attaccate, non intelligentemente ma quanto mai stoltamente, c’è la fondamentale creazione umana chiamata la Famiglia o la Casa. È una cosa tipica che gli uomini attaccano, non perché la comprendano a fondo, ma perché non la vedono affatto. Vi battono contro alla cieca, in modo del tutto casuale e opportunistico; e molti di loro la abbatterebbero senza nemmeno fermarsi a chiedere perché mai fu eretta. È vero che solo pochi di loro avrebbero dichiarato questo scopo con tante parole. Ciò prova soltanto quanto siano ciechi e maldestri. Ma sono caduti in un’abitudine di mera deriva e di graduale distacco dalla vita familiare; qualcosa che spesso è puramente accidentale e privo di ogni teoria definita. Ma benché sia accidentale, non è per questo meno anarchico. Ed è tanto più anarchico in quanto non è anarchista. Sembra fondarsi in gran parte sull’irritazione individuale; un’irritazione che varia con l’individuo. Ci si dice soltanto che in questo o quel caso un particolare temperamento era tormentato da un particolare ambiente; ma nessuno ha mai spiegato come il male sia sorto, tanto meno se al male si sia davvero scampati. Ci si dice che in questa o quella famiglia la Nonna diceva un gran mucchio di sciocchezze, il che, Dio lo sa, è vero; oppure che è assai difficile avere intime relazioni intellettuali con lo Zio Gregorio senza dargli dello sciocco, il che è in effetti il caso. Ma nessuno considera seriamente il rimedio, né tanto meno il male; o se l’attuale dissoluzione individualistica sia poi un rimedio. Molta di questa faccenda ebbe inizio con l’influenza di Ibsen, drammaturgo assai potente e filosofo oltremodo fiacco. Suppongo che Nora di Casa di bambola fosse pensata come una persona inconseguente; ma di certo la sua azione più inconseguente fu l’ultima. Si lamentava di non essere ancora adatta ad accudire i figli, e poi procedette ad allontanarsi il più possibile dai figli, per poterli studiare più da vicino.

C’è una prova e un tipo semplice di questa trascuratezza del pensiero scientifico e del senso di una regola sociale; la trascuratezza che ci ha ora lasciati con nient’altro che un guazzabuglio di eccezioni. Ho letto centinaia e migliaia di volte, in tutti i romanzi e i giornali della nostra epoca, certe frasi sul giusto diritto dei giovani alla libertà, sull’ingiusta pretesa degli anziani di comandare, sulla concezione che tutte le anime debbano essere libere o tutti i cittadini uguali, sull’assurdità dell’autorità o sulla degradazione dell’obbedienza. Non sto discutendo direttamente quelle questioni in questo momento. Ma ciò che mi colpisce come stupefacente, in senso logico, è che nemmeno uno di questi miriadi di romanzieri e giornalisti sembra mai pensare di porre la domanda successiva e più ovvia. Non pare mai venir loro in mente di indagare che ne sia dell’obbligo opposto. Se il figlio è libero fin da principio di ignorare il genitore, perché il genitore non è libero fin da principio di ignorare il figlio? Se il signor Jones senior e il signor Jones junior sono soltanto due cittadini liberi e uguali, perché un cittadino dovrebbe vivere a scrocco su un altro cittadino per i primi quindici anni della sua vita? Perché ci si aspetta che il signor Jones il vecchio nutra, vesta e alloggi di tasca propria un’altra persona del tutto libera da ogni obbligo verso di lui? Se non si può chiedere alla brillante giovincella di tollerare la nonna, che è diventata alquanto noiosa, perché la nonna o la madre avrebbero dovuto tollerare la brillante giovincella in un periodo della sua vita in cui non era affatto brillante? Perché si presero cura di lei con tanta fatica in un tempo in cui i suoi contributi alla conversazione erano di rado epigrammatici e non di rado inintelligibili? Perché Jones senior dovrebbe offrire da bere e pasti gratis a qualcuno di sgradevole come Jones junior, specie nelle fasi immature della sua esistenza? Perché non dovrebbe gettare il neonato dalla finestra; o, per lo meno, cacciare il ragazzo fuori di casa a pedate? È evidente che abbiamo a che fare con una relazione reale, che può essere uguaglianza, ma non è di certo somiglianza.

Some social reformers try to evade this difficulty, I know, by some vague notions about the State or an abstraction called Education eliminating the parental function. But this, like many notions of solid scientific persons, is a wild illusion of the nature of mere moonshine. It is based on that strange new superstition, the idea of infinite resources of organisation. It is as if officials grew like grass or bred like rabbits. There is supposed to be an endless supply of salaried persons, and of salaries for them; and they are to undertake all that human beings naturally do for themselves; including the care of children. But men cannot live by taking in each other’s baby-linen. They cannot provide a tutor for each citizen; who is to tutor the tutors? Men cannot be educated by machinery; and though there might be a Robot bricklayer or scavenger, there will never be a Robot schoolmaster or governess. The actual effect of this theory is that one harassed person has to look after a hundred children, instead of one normal person looking after a normal number of them. Normally that normal person is urged by a natural force, which costs nothing and does not require a salary; the force of natural affection for his young, which exists even among the animals. If you cut off that natural force, and substitute a paid bureaucracy, you are like a fool who should pay men to turn the wheel of his mill, because he refused to use wind or water which he could get for nothing. You are like a lunatic who should carefully water his garden with a watering-can, while holding up an umbrella to keep off the rain.

It is now necessary to recite these truisms; for only by doing so can we begin to get a glimpse of that REASON for the existence of the family, which I began this essay by demanding. They were all familiar to our fathers, who believed in the links of kinship and also in the links of logic. To-day our logic consists mostly of missing links; and our family largely of absent members. But, anyhow, this is the right end at which to begin any such enquiry; and not at the tail-end or the fag-end of some private muddle, by which Dick has become discontented or Susan has gone off on her own. If Dick or Susan wish to destroy the family because they do not see the use of it, I say as I said in the beginning; if they do not see the use of it, they had much better preserve it. They have no business even to think of destroying it until they have seen the use of it.

But it has other uses, besides the obvious fact that it means a necessary social work being done for love when it cannot be done for money; and (one might almost dare to hint) presumably to be repaid with love since it is never repaid in money. On that simple side of the matter the general situation is easy to record. The existing and general system of society, subject in our own age and industrial culture to very gross abuses and painful problems, is nevertheless a normal one. It is the idea that the commonwealth is made up of a number of small kingdoms, of which a man and a woman become the king and queen and in which they exercise a reasonable authority, subject to the common sense of the commonwealth, until those under their care grow up to found similar kingdoms and exercise similar authority. This is the social structure of mankind, far older than all its records and more universal than any of its religions; and all attempts to alter it are mere talk and tomfoolery.

But the other advantage of the small group is now not so much neglected as simply not realised. Here again we have some extraordinary delusions spread all over the literature and journalism of our time. Those delusions now exist in such a degree that we may say, for all practical purposes, that when a thing has been stated about a thousand times as obviously true, it is almost certain to be obviously false. One such statement may be specially noted here. There is undoubtedly something to be said against domesticity and in favour of the general drift towards life in hotels, clubs, colleges, communal settlements and the rest; or for a social life organised on the plan of the great commercial systems of our time. But the truly extraordinary suggestion is often made that this escape from the home is an escape into greater freedom. The change is actually offered as favourable to liberty.

To anybody who can think, of course, it is exactly the opposite. The domestic division of human society is not perfect, being human. It does not achieve complete liberty; a thing somewhat difficult to do or even to define. But it is a mere matter of arithmetic that it puts a larger number of people in supreme control of something, and able to shape it to their personal liking, than do the vast organisations that rule society outside; whether those systems are legal or commercial or even merely social. Even if we were only considering the parents, it is plain that there are more parents than there are policemen or politicians or heads of big businesses or proprietors of hotels. As I shall suggest in a moment, the argument actually applies indirectly to the children as well as directly to the parents. But the main point is that the world OUTSIDE the home is now under a rigid discipline and routine and it is only inside the home that there is really a place for individuality and liberty. Anyone stepping out of the front-door is obliged to step into a procession, all going the same way and to a great extent even obliged to wear the same uniform. Business, especially big business, is now organised like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I should say, a militarism without the military virtues. But anyhow, it is obvious that a hundred clerks in a bank or a hundred waitresses in a teashop are more regimented and under rule than the same individuals when each has gone back to his or her own dwelling or lodging, hung with his or her favourite pictures or fragrant with his or her favourite cheap cigarettes. But this, which is so obvious in the commercial case, is no less true even in the social case. In practice, the pursuit of pleasure is merely the pursuit of fashion. The pursuit of fashion is merely the pursuit of convention; only that it happens to be a new convention. The jazz dances, the joy rides, the big pleasure parties and hotel entertainments, do not make any more provision for a REALLY independent taste than did any of the fashions of the past. If a wealthy young lady wants to do what all the other wealthy young ladies are doing, she will find it great fun, simply because youth is fun and society is fun. She will enjoy being modern exactly as her Victorian grandmother enjoyed being Victorian. And quite right too; but it is the enjoyment of convention, not the enjoyment of liberty. It is perfectly healthy for all young people of all historic periods to herd together, to a reasonable extent, and enthusiastically copy each other. But in that there is nothing particularly fresh and certainly nothing particularly free. The girl who likes shaving her head and powdering her nose and wearing short skirts will find the world organised for her and will march happily with the procession. But a girl who happened to like having her hair down to her heels or loading herself with barbaric gauds and trailing garments or (most awful of all) leaving her nose in its natural state— she will still be well advised to do these things on her own premises. If the Duchess does want to play leap frog, she must not start suddenly leaping in the manner of a frog across the ballroom of the Babylon Hotel, when it is crowded with the fifty best couples professionally practising the very latest dance, for the instruction of society. The Duchess will find it easier to practise leap frog to the admiration of her intimate friends in the old oak-panelled hall of Fitzdragon Castle. If the Dean must stand on his head, he will do it with more ease and grace in the calm atmosphere of the Deanery than by attempting to interrupt the programme of some social entertainment already organised for philanthropic purposes.

Alcuni riformatori sociali cercano di eludere questa difficoltà, lo so, con certe vaghe nozioni sullo Stato o su un’astrazione chiamata Istruzione che eliminerebbe la funzione dei genitori. Ma questa, come molte nozioni delle persone solidamente scientifiche, è una sfrenata illusione della natura di puro chiaro di luna. Si fonda su quella strana nuova superstizione, l’idea di risorse infinite di organizzazione. È come se i funzionari crescessero come l’erba o si riproducessero come i conigli. Si suppone esserci una scorta inesauribile di persone stipendiate, e di stipendi per loro; e che esse debbano assumersi tutto ciò che gli esseri umani fanno naturalmente da sé; compresa la cura dei figli. Ma gli uomini non possono vivere prendendo in consegna, l’uno dall’altro, la biancheria dei rispettivi neonati. Non possono fornire un precettore a ciascun cittadino; chi farà da precettore ai precettori? Gli uomini non possono essere educati da un macchinario; e per quanto possa esservi un muratore o uno spazzino Robot, non vi sarà mai un maestro o una governante Robot. L’effetto reale di questa teoria è che una sola persona sfinita deve accudire cento bambini, invece di una persona normale che ne accudisca un numero normale. Normalmente quella persona normale è sospinta da una forza naturale, che non costa nulla e non richiede uno stipendio; la forza dell’affetto naturale per i propri piccoli, che esiste persino tra gli animali. Se si recide quella forza naturale, e le si sostituisce una burocrazia stipendiata, si è come uno sciocco che pagasse degli uomini per far girare la ruota del suo mulino, perché ha rifiutato di usare il vento o l’acqua che potrebbe avere per nulla. Si è come un lunatico che innaffiasse con cura il proprio giardino con un annaffiatoio, tenendo intanto alzato un ombrello per ripararsi dalla pioggia.

È ora necessario recitare questi truismi; perché solo così possiamo cominciare a intravedere quella RAGIONE dell’esistenza della famiglia, che ho posto come esigenza all’inizio di questo saggio. Erano tutti familiari ai nostri padri, che credevano nei legami di parentela e anche nei legami della logica. Oggi la nostra logica consiste per lo più di anelli mancanti; e la nostra famiglia in gran parte di membri assenti. Ma, in ogni caso, questo è il giusto capo da cui iniziare una simile indagine; e non dalla coda o dal fondo di qualche privato imbroglio, per cui Dick si è scontentato o Susan se n’è andata per la sua strada. Se Dick o Susan desiderano distruggere la famiglia perché non ne vedono l’utilità, dico come dissi all’inizio: se non ne vedono l’utilità, farebbero assai meglio a conservarla. Non hanno alcun diritto nemmeno di pensare a distruggerla finché non ne abbiano visto l’utilità.

Ma essa ha altre utilità, oltre all’ovvio fatto che significa un necessario lavoro sociale compiuto per amore quando non può essere compiuto per denaro; e (si potrebbe quasi osare accennarlo) presumibilmente destinato a essere ripagato con amore, poiché non è mai ripagato in denaro. Da quel lato semplice della faccenda la situazione generale è facile da registrare. Il sistema esistente e generale della società, soggetto nella nostra epoca e nella nostra cultura industriale ad abusi assai grossolani e a problemi penosi, è nondimeno un sistema normale. È l’idea che lo Stato sia composto di un certo numero di piccoli regni, di cui un uomo e una donna diventano il re e la regina e nei quali essi esercitano un’autorità ragionevole, soggetta al buon senso dello Stato, finché coloro che sono affidati alle loro cure crescano fino a fondare regni simili ed esercitare un’autorità simile. Questa è la struttura sociale del genere umano, assai più antica di tutti i suoi documenti e più universale di qualsiasi delle sue religioni; e tutti i tentativi di alterarla sono mera chiacchiera e buffonaggine.

Ma l’altro vantaggio del piccolo gruppo è oggi non tanto trascurato quanto semplicemente non compreso. Anche qui abbiamo alcune straordinarie illusioni diffuse per tutta la letteratura e il giornalismo del nostro tempo. Quelle illusioni esistono ora in tal grado che possiamo dire, a tutti gli effetti pratici, che quando una cosa è stata affermata un migliaio di volte come ovviamente vera, è quasi certo che sia ovviamente falsa. Una simile affermazione merita qui una menzione speciale. C’è indubbiamente qualcosa da dire contro la domesticità e in favore della generale deriva verso la vita negli alberghi, nei circoli, nei collegi, negli insediamenti comunitari e in tutto il resto; ovvero in favore di una vita sociale organizzata secondo il modello dei grandi sistemi commerciali del nostro tempo. Ma il suggerimento davvero straordinario che viene spesso avanzato è che questa fuga dalla Casa sia una fuga verso una maggiore libertà. Il mutamento viene addirittura presentato come favorevole alla libertà.

Per chiunque sappia pensare, naturalmente, è esattamente il contrario. La divisione domestica della società umana non è perfetta, essendo umana. Non raggiunge la completa libertà; cosa alquanto difficile da realizzare o persino da definire. Ma è mera questione di aritmetica che essa pone un numero maggiore di persone al supremo controllo di qualcosa, e in grado di plasmarlo secondo il proprio gusto personale, di quanto non facciano le vaste organizzazioni che governano la società al di fuori; siano quei sistemi legali o commerciali o persino meramente sociali. Anche a considerare soltanto i genitori, è chiaro che vi sono più genitori che poliziotti o politici o capi di grandi imprese o proprietari d’alberghi. Come suggerirò tra un momento, l’argomento si applica in realtà indirettamente ai figli non meno che direttamente ai genitori. Ma il punto principale è che il mondo FUORI della Casa è ora sotto una rigida disciplina e routine, ed è soltanto dentro la Casa che c’è davvero un posto per l’individualità e la libertà. Chiunque metta il piede fuori dalla porta d’ingresso è costretto a inserirsi in un corteo, tutti diretti nella stessa direzione e in larga misura persino costretti a indossare la stessa uniforme. Gli affari, e specialmente i grandi affari, sono ora organizzati come un esercito. È, come direbbe qualcuno, una sorta di mite militarismo senza spargimento di sangue; come direi io, un militarismo privo delle virtù militari. Ma in ogni caso, è ovvio che cento impiegati in una banca o cento cameriere in una sala da tè sono più irreggimentati e sottoposti a regola degli stessi individui quando ciascuno è tornato alla propria dimora o al proprio alloggio, adorno delle proprie immagini predilette o profumato delle proprie predilette sigarette a buon mercato. Ma questo, che è così ovvio nel caso commerciale, non è meno vero anche nel caso sociale. In pratica, la ricerca del piacere è soltanto la ricerca della moda. La ricerca della moda è soltanto la ricerca della convenzione; solo che accade di essere una convenzione nuova. I balli jazz, le gite in automobile, i grandi ricevimenti di piacere e i divertimenti d’albergo non fanno maggior spazio a un gusto DAVVERO indipendente di quanto non facesse qualsiasi moda del passato. Se una ricca giovane signora vuole fare ciò che tutte le altre ricche giovani signore fanno, la troverà un gran divertimento, semplicemente perché la giovinezza è divertimento e la società è divertimento. Godrà a essere moderna esattamente come sua nonna vittoriana godeva a essere vittoriana. E benissimo così; ma è il godimento della convenzione, non il godimento della libertà. È perfettamente salutare per tutti i giovani di tutti i periodi storici radunarsi in branco, entro limiti ragionevoli, e imitarsi entusiasticamente a vicenda. Ma in ciò non c’è nulla di particolarmente fresco e di certo nulla di particolarmente libero. La ragazza che ama radersi la testa e incipriarsi il naso e portare gonne corte troverà il mondo organizzato per lei e marcerà felice con il corteo. Ma una ragazza cui capitasse di amare portare i capelli fino ai talloni, o caricarsi di barbariche cianfrusaglie e di vesti strascicanti, o (cosa più tremenda di tutte) lasciare il proprio naso al suo stato naturale — costei farà pur sempre bene a compiere queste cose in casa propria. Se la Duchessa vuole davvero giocare a cavallina, non deve mettersi a saltare all’improvviso alla maniera di una rana attraverso la sala da ballo dell’Hotel Babylon, quando essa è gremita dalle cinquanta migliori coppie che professionalmente esercitano l’ultimissimo ballo, a edificazione della società. La Duchessa troverà più facile esercitarsi nella cavallina, tra l’ammirazione dei suoi intimi amici, nell’antica sala rivestita di quercia del Castello di Fitzdragon. Se il Decano deve reggersi sulla testa, lo farà con più agio e grazia nella calma atmosfera del Decanato che non tentando d’interrompere il programma di qualche intrattenimento sociale già organizzato a scopo filantropico.

If there is this impersonal routine in commercial and even in social things, it goes without saying that it exists and always must exist in political and legal things. For instance, the punishments of the State must be sweeping generalisations. It is only the punishments of the home that can possibly be adapted to the individual case; because it is only there that the judge can know anything of the individual. If Tommy takes a silver thimble out of a work-basket, his mother may act very differently according as she knows that he did it for fun or for spite or to sell to somebody, or to get somebody into trouble. But if Tomkins takes a silver thimble out of a shop, the law not only can but must punish him according to the rule made for all shoplifters or stealers of silver. It is only the domestic discipline that can show any sympathy or especially any humour. I do not say that the family always does do this; but I say that the State never ought to attempt it. So that even if we consider the parents alone as independent princes, and the children merely as subjects, the relative freedom of the family can and often does work to the advantage of those subjects. But so long as the children are children, they will always be the subjects of somebody. The question is whether they are to be distributed naturally under their natural princes, as the old phrase went, who normally feel for them what nobody else will feel, a natural affection. It seems to me clear that this normal distribution gives the largest amount of liberty to the largest number of people.

My complaint of the anti-domestic drift is that it is unintelligent. People do not know what they are doing; because they do not know what they are undoing. There are a multitude of modern manifestations, from the largest to the smallest, ranging from a divorce to a picnic party. But each is a separate escape or evasion; and especially an evasion of the point at issue. People ought to decide in a philosophical fashion whether they desire the traditional social order or not; or if there is any particular alternative to be desired. As it is they treat the public question merely as a mess or medley of private questions. Even in being anti-domestic they are much too domestic in their test of domesticity. Each family considers only its own case and the result is merely narrow and negative. Each case is an exception to a rule that does not exist. The family, especially in the modern state, stands in need of considerable correction and reconstruction; most things do in the modern state. But the family mansion should be preserved or destroyed or rebuilt; it should not be allowed to fall to pieces brick by brick because nobody has any historic sense of the object of bricklaying. For instance, the architects of the restoration should rebuild the house with wide and easily opened doors, for the practice of the ancient virtue of hospitality. In other words, private property should be distributed with sufficiently decent equality to allow of a margin for festive intercourse. But the hospitality of a house will always be different from the hospitality of a hotel. And it will be different in being more individual, more independent, more interesting than the hospitality of a hotel. It is perfectly right that the young Browns and the young Robinsons should meet and mix and dance and make asses of themselves, according to the design of their Creator. But there will always be some difference between the Browns entertaining the Robinsons and the Robinsons entertaining the Browns. And it will be a difference to the advantage of variety, of personality, of the potentialities of the mind of man; or, in other words, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Se esiste questa routine impersonale nelle cose commerciali e persino in quelle sociali, va da sé che essa esiste e sempre deve esistere nelle cose politiche e legali. Per esempio, le punizioni dello Stato devono essere generalizzazioni radicali. Sono soltanto le punizioni della casa che possono adattarsi al caso individuale; perché soltanto lì il giudice può sapere qualcosa dell’individuo. Se Tommy prende un ditale d’argento dal cestino da lavoro, sua madre può agire in modo assai diverso a seconda che sappia se lo ha fatto per gioco o per dispetto o per venderlo a qualcuno, o per mettere qualcuno nei guai. Ma se Tomkins prende un ditale d’argento da una bottega, la legge non solo può ma deve punirlo secondo la regola fatta per tutti i taccheggiatori o ladri d’argento. È soltanto la disciplina domestica che può mostrare qualche compassione o soprattutto un po’ d’umorismo. Non dico che la famiglia lo faccia sempre; ma dico che lo Stato non dovrebbe mai tentarlo. Sicché, anche se consideriamo i genitori soli come principi indipendenti, e i figli semplicemente come sudditi, la relativa libertà della famiglia può operare, e spesso opera, a vantaggio di quei sudditi. Ma finché i figli sono figli, saranno sempre sudditi di qualcuno. La questione è se debbano essere distribuiti naturalmente sotto i loro principi naturali, come diceva la vecchia frase, i quali normalmente provano per loro ciò che nessun altro proverà: un affetto naturale. Mi pare chiaro che questa distribuzione normale dà la massima quantità di libertà al massimo numero di persone.

La mia doglianza contro la deriva anti-domestica è che è priva d’intelligenza. La gente non sa ciò che sta facendo; perché non sa ciò che sta disfacendo. C’è una moltitudine di manifestazioni moderne, dalla più grande alla più piccola, che spaziano da un divorzio a una gita in comitiva. Ma ciascuna è una fuga o un’evasione a sé; e specialmente un’evasione dal punto in questione. La gente dovrebbe decidere in modo filosofico se desidera o no l’ordine sociale tradizionale; o se vi sia qualche particolare alternativa da desiderare. Così com’è, tratta la questione pubblica come un mero guazzabuglio o miscuglio di questioni private. Persino nell’essere anti-domestica è fin troppo domestica nel suo criterio di domesticità. Ogni famiglia considera soltanto il proprio caso e il risultato è meramente angusto e negativo. Ogni caso è un’eccezione a una regola che non esiste. La famiglia, specialmente nello Stato moderno, ha bisogno di considerevoli correzioni e ricostruzioni; la maggior parte delle cose ne ha bisogno, nello Stato moderno. Ma la magione familiare andrebbe conservata o distrutta o riedificata; non le si dovrebbe permettere di andare in pezzi mattone dopo mattone perché nessuno ha alcun senso storico dello scopo del murare. Per esempio, gli architetti della restaurazione dovrebbero riedificare la casa con porte ampie e facili ad aprirsi, per la pratica dell’antica virtù dell’ospitalità. In altre parole, la proprietà privata dovrebbe essere distribuita con eguaglianza sufficientemente decorosa da lasciare un margine per il commercio festoso. Ma l’ospitalità di una casa sarà sempre diversa dall’ospitalità di un albergo. E sarà diversa nell’essere più individuale, più indipendente, più interessante dell’ospitalità di un albergo. È perfettamente giusto che i giovani Brown e i giovani Robinson si incontrino e si mescolino e danzino e facciano gli asini di sé stessi, secondo il disegno del loro Creatore. Ma vi sarà sempre qualche differenza fra i Brown che ricevono i Robinson e i Robinson che ricevono i Brown. E sarà una differenza a vantaggio della varietà, della personalità, delle potenzialità della mente dell’uomo; ovvero, in altre parole, della vita, della libertà e della ricerca della felicità.

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LOGIC AND LAWN TENNIS

WHEN we say that we doubt the intellectual improvement produced by Protestantism and Rationalism and the modern world, there generally arises a very confused controversy, which is a sort of tangle of terminology. But, broadly speaking, the difference between us and our critics is this. They mean by growth an increase of the tangle; whereas we mean by thought a disentangling of the tangle. Even a short and simple length of straight and untangled wire is worth more to us than whole forests of mere entanglement. That there are more topics talked about, or more terms used, or more people using them, or more books and other authorities cited— all this is nothing to us if people misuse the terms, misunderstand the topics, invoke the authorities at random and without the use of reason; and finally bring out a false result. A peasant who merely says, “I have five pigs; if I kill one I shall have four pigs,” is thinking in an extremely simple and elementary way; but he is thinking as clearly and correctly as Aristotle or Euclid. But suppose he reads or half-reads newspapers and books of popular science. Suppose he starts to call one pig the Land and another pig Capital and a third pig Exports, and finally brings out the result that the more pigs he kills the more he possesses; or that every sow that litters decreases the number of pigs in the world. He has learnt economic terminology, merely as a means of becoming entangled in economic fallacy. It is a fallacy he could never have fallen into while he was grounded in the divine dogma that Pigs is Pigs. Now for that sort of intellectual instruction and advancement we have no use at all; and in that sense only it is true that we prefer the ignorant peasant to the instructed pedant. But that is not because we think ignorance better than instruction or barbarism better than culture. It is merely that we think a short length of the untangled logical chain is better than an interminable length of it that is interminably tangled. It is merely that we prefer a man to do a sum of simple addition right than a sum in long division wrong.

Now what we observe about the whole current culture of journalism and general discussion is that people do not know how to begin to think. Not only is their thinking at third and fourth hand, but it always starts about three-quarters of the way through the process. Men do not know where their own thoughts came from. They do not know what their own words imply. They come in at the end of every controversy and know nothing of where it began or what it is all about. They are constantly assuming certain absolutes, which, if correctly defined, would strike even themselves as being not absolutes but absurdities. To think thus is to be in a tangle; to go on thinking is to be in more and more of a tangle. And at the back of all there is always something understood; which is really something misunderstood.

For instance, I read an article by the admirable Mr. Tilden, the great tennis-player, who was debating what is wrong with English Tennis. “Nothing can save English Tennis,” he said, except certain reforms of a fundamental sort, which he proceeded to explain. The English, it appears, have a weird and unnatural way of regarding tennis as a game, or thing to be enjoyed. He admitted that this has been part of a sort of amateur spirit in everything which is (as he very truly noted) also a part of the national character. But all this stands in the way of what he called saving English Tennis. He meant what some would call making it perfect, and others would call making it professional. Now, I take that as a very typical passage, taken from the papers at random, and containing the views of a keen and acute person on a subject that he thoroughly understands. But what he does not understand is the thing which he supposes to be understood. He thoroughly knows his subject and yet he does not know what he is talking about; because he does not know what he is taking for granted. He does not realise the relation of means and ends, or axioms and inferences, in his own philosophy. And nobody would probably be more surprised and even legitimately indignant than he, if I were to say that the first principles of his philosophy appear to be as follows: (1) There is in the nature of things a certain absolute and divine Being, whose name is Mr. Lawn Tennis. (2) All men exist for the good and glory of this Mr. Tennis and are bound to approximate to his perfections and fulfil his will. (3) To this higher duty they are bound to surrender their natural desire for enjoyment in this life. (4) They are bound to put this loyalty first; and to love it more passionately than patriotic tradition, the preservation of their own national type and national culture; not to mention even their national virtues. That is the creed or scheme of doctrine that is here developed without being defined. The only way for us to save the game of Lawn Tennis is to prevent it from being a game. The only way to save English Tennis is to prevent it from being English. It does not occur to such thinkers that some people may possibly like it because it is English and enjoy it because it is enjoyable. There is some abstract divine standard in the thing, to which it is everybody’s duty to rise, at any sacrifice of pleasure or affection. When Christians say this of the sacrifices made for Christ, it sounds rather a hard saying. But when tennis-players say it about the sacrifices demanded by tennis, it sounds quite ordinary and casual in the confusion of current thought and expression. And nobody notices that a sort of human sacrifice is being offered to a sort of new and nameless god.

In the good old days of Victorian rationalism it used to be the conventional habit to scoff at St. Thomas Aquinas and the mediaeval theologians; and especially to repeat perpetually a well-worn joke about the man who discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The comfortable and commercial Victorians, with their money and merchandise, might well have felt a sharper end of the same needle, even if it was the other end of it. It would have been good for their souls to have looked for that needle, not in the haystack of mediaeval metaphysics, but in the neat needle-case of their own favourite pocket Bible. It would have been better for them to meditate, not on how many angels could go on the point of a needle, but on how many camels could go through the eye of it. But there is another comment on this curious joke or catchword, which is more relevant to our purpose here. If the mediaeval mystic ever did argue about angels standing on a needle, at least he did not argue as if the object of angels was to stand on a needle; as if God had created all the Angels and Archangels, all the Thrones, Virtues, Powers and Principalities, solely in order that there might be something to clothe and decorate the unseemly nakedness of the point of a needle. But that is the way that modern rationalists reason. The mediaeval mystic would not even have said that a needle exists to be a standing-ground for angels. The mediaeval mystic would have been the first to say that a needle exists to make clothes for men. For mediaeval mystics, in their dim transcendental way, were much interested in the real reasons for things and the distinction between the means and the end. They wanted to know what a thing was really for, and what was the dependence of one idea on another. And they might even have suggested, what so many journalists seem to forget, the paradoxical possibility that Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis.

The Modernists were peculiarly unfortunate when they said that the modern world must not be expected to tolerate the old syllogistic methods of the Schoolmen. They were proposing to scrap the one mediaeval instrument which the modern world will most immediately require. There would have been a far better case for saying that the revival of Gothic architecture has been sentimental and futile; that the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art was only an eccentric episode; that the fashionable use of the word “Guild” for every possible sort of social institution was affected and artificial; that the feudalism of Young England was very different from that of Old England. But this method of clean-cut deduction, with the definition of the postulates and the actual answering of the question, is something of which the whole of our newspaper-flattered society is in sharp and instant need; as the poisoned are in need of medicine. I have here taken only one example which happened to catch my eye out of a hundred thousand that flash past every hour. And as Tennis, like every other good game, has to be played with the head as well as the hand, I think it highly desirable that it should be occasionally discussed at least as intelligently as it is played.

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LA LOGICA E IL LAWN TENNIS

QUANDO diciamo di dubitare del miglioramento intellettuale prodotto dal protestantesimo, dal razionalismo e dal mondo moderno, generalmente sorge una controversia assai confusa, che è una sorta di groviglio di terminologia. Ma, in linea di massima, la differenza tra noi e i nostri critici è questa. Essi intendono per crescita un aumento del groviglio; mentre noi intendiamo per pensiero un districare del groviglio. Persino un breve e semplice tratto di filo diritto e sbrogliato vale per noi più di intere foreste di puro intrico. Che si parli di più argomenti, o si usino più termini, o siano più le persone a usarli, o si citino più libri e altre autorità — tutto ciò non è nulla per noi se le persone usano male i termini, fraintendono gli argomenti, invocano le autorità a casaccio e senza l’uso della ragione; e infine tirano fuori un risultato falso. Un contadino che dica soltanto: «Ho cinque maiali; se ne ammazzo uno ne avrò quattro», sta pensando in modo estremamente semplice ed elementare; ma sta pensando in modo tanto chiaro e corretto quanto Aristotele o Euclide. Ma supponiamo che egli legga, o legga a metà, giornali e libri di scienza popolare. Supponiamo che cominci a chiamare un maiale la Terra e un altro maiale il Capitale e un terzo maiale le Esportazioni, e alla fine tiri fuori il risultato che più maiali ammazza più ne possiede; ovvero che ogni scrofa che figlia diminuisce il numero dei maiali nel mondo. Ha imparato la terminologia economica, unicamente come mezzo per rimanere invischiato nella fallacia economica. È una fallacia in cui non sarebbe mai potuto cadere finché era ben radicato nel divino dogma che Maiali è Maiali. Ora, di quel genere di istruzione e progresso intellettuale non sappiamo che farcene; e solo in quel senso è vero che preferiamo il contadino ignorante al pedante istruito. Ma ciò non è perché riteniamo l’ignoranza migliore dell’istruzione o la barbarie migliore della cultura. È soltanto che riteniamo un breve tratto della catena logica sbrogliata migliore di un tratto interminabile di essa che sia interminabilmente aggrovigliato. È soltanto che preferiamo un uomo che faccia bene una somma di semplice addizione a uno che faccia male un conto di lunga divisione.

Ora, ciò che osserviamo nell’intera cultura corrente del giornalismo e della discussione generale è che le persone non sanno come cominciare a pensare. Non solo il loro pensare è di terza e quarta mano, ma esso comincia sempre a circa tre quarti del percorso. Gli uomini non sanno da dove siano venuti i loro stessi pensieri. Non sanno che cosa implichino le loro stesse parole. Arrivano alla fine di ogni controversia e non sanno nulla di dove essa sia cominciata o di che cosa tratti. Danno costantemente per assodati certi assoluti, che, se correttamente definiti, colpirebbero persino loro stessi come non assoluti, bensì assurdità. Pensare così è essere in un groviglio; continuare a pensare è essere in un groviglio sempre più fitto. E in fondo a tutto c’è sempre qualcosa di sottinteso; che è in realtà qualcosa di frainteso.

Per esempio, ho letto un articolo dell’ammirevole signor Tilden, il grande tennista, che discuteva di che cosa non vada nel Tennis inglese. «Nulla può salvare il Tennis inglese», diceva, se non certe riforme di natura fondamentale, che passava poi a spiegare. Gli inglesi, a quanto pare, hanno uno strano e innaturale modo di considerare il tennis come un gioco, o come una cosa di cui godere. Ammetteva che ciò è stato parte di una sorta di spirito dilettantesco in ogni cosa, il quale è (come egli notava assai giustamente) anche parte del carattere nazionale. Ma tutto questo ostacola ciò che egli chiamava salvare il Tennis inglese. Intendeva ciò che alcuni chiamerebbero renderlo perfetto, e altri chiamerebbero renderlo professionale. Ora, io prendo quello come un passo assai tipico, tolto a caso dai giornali, e contenente le vedute di una persona acuta e penetrante su un argomento che comprende a fondo. Ma ciò che egli non comprende è la cosa che egli suppone essere compresa. Conosce a fondo il suo argomento eppure non sa di che cosa stia parlando; perché non sa che cosa stia dando per scontato. Non coglie la relazione tra mezzi e fini, o tra assiomi e inferenze, nella propria filosofia. E nessuno sarebbe probabilmente più sorpreso e persino legittimamente indignato di lui, se io dicessi che i primi principi della sua filosofia paiono essere i seguenti: (1) Esiste nella natura delle cose un certo Essere assoluto e divino, il cui nome è il signor Tennis su Prato. (2) Tutti gli uomini esistono per il bene e la gloria di questo signor Tennis e sono tenuti ad avvicinarsi alle sue perfezioni e ad adempiere la sua volontà. (3) A questo dovere superiore essi sono tenuti a sacrificare il loro naturale desiderio di godimento in questa vita. (4) Sono tenuti a porre questa lealtà al primo posto; e ad amarla più appassionatamente della tradizione patriottica, della conservazione del proprio tipo nazionale e della propria cultura nazionale; per non parlare persino delle proprie virtù nazionali. Questo è il credo o schema di dottrina che qui viene sviluppato senza essere definito. L’unico modo per noi di salvare il gioco del Tennis su Prato è impedire che sia un gioco. L’unico modo per salvare il Tennis inglese è impedire che sia inglese. A tali pensatori non viene in mente che qualcuno possa forse amarlo perché è inglese e goderne perché è godibile. C’è nella cosa un qualche astratto criterio divino, a cui è dovere di tutti innalzarsi, a qualsiasi sacrificio di piacere o di affetto. Quando i cristiani dicono questo dei sacrifici compiuti per Cristo, suona come un detto piuttosto duro. Ma quando i tennisti lo dicono a proposito dei sacrifici richiesti dal tennis, suona del tutto ordinario e casuale nella confusione del pensiero e dell’espressione correnti. E nessuno si accorge che una sorta di sacrificio umano viene offerto a una sorta di nuovo e senza nome dio.

Nei bei vecchi tempi del razionalismo vittoriano era abitudine convenzionale schernire san Tommaso d’Aquino e i teologi medievali; e specialmente ripetere perpetuamente una barzelletta logora sull’uomo che discuteva quanti angeli potessero danzare sulla punta di un ago. I comodi e commerciali vittoriani, con il loro denaro e le loro merci, avrebbero ben potuto sentire una punta più acuta dello stesso ago, fosse pure l’altra estremità di esso. Sarebbe stato bene per le loro anime cercare quell’ago, non nel pagliaio della metafisica medievale, ma nel lindo astuccio da aghi della loro prediletta Bibbia tascabile. Sarebbe stato meglio per loro meditare, non su quanti angeli potessero stare sulla punta di un ago, ma su quanti cammelli potessero passare per la sua cruna. Ma c’è un altro commento su questa curiosa barzelletta o motto, che è più pertinente al nostro scopo qui. Se il mistico medievale davvero disquisiva sugli angeli ritti su un ago, per lo meno non ragionava come se lo scopo degli angeli fosse stare su un ago; come se Dio avesse creato tutti gli Angeli e gli Arcangeli, tutti i Troni, le Virtù, le Potestà e i Principati, unicamente affinché vi fosse qualcosa con cui rivestire e adornare la sconveniente nudità della punta di un ago. Ma è così che ragionano i razionalisti moderni. Il mistico medievale non avrebbe nemmeno detto che un ago esiste per essere un piano d’appoggio per gli angeli. Il mistico medievale sarebbe stato il primo a dire che un ago esiste per fare vestiti per gli uomini. Poiché i mistici medievali, nel loro oscuro modo trascendentale, erano assai interessati alle vere ragioni delle cose e alla distinzione tra i mezzi e il fine. Volevano sapere a che cosa una cosa servisse veramente, e quale fosse la dipendenza di un’idea da un’altra. E avrebbero persino potuto suggerire, ciò che tanti giornalisti paiono dimenticare, la paradossale possibilità che il Tennis sia stato fatto per l’Uomo e non l’Uomo per il Tennis.

I Modernisti furono singolarmente sfortunati quando dissero che non ci si deve aspettare che il mondo moderno tolleri gli antichi metodi sillogistici degli Scolastici. Proponevano di rottamare l’unico strumento medievale di cui il mondo moderno avrà più immediatamente bisogno. Vi sarebbe stato un caso assai migliore per dire che il revival dell’architettura gotica è stato sentimentale e futile; che il movimento preraffaellita nell’arte fu soltanto un episodio eccentrico; che l’uso alla moda della parola «Gilda» per ogni possibile sorta di istituzione sociale era affettato e artificiale; che il feudalesimo della Giovane Inghilterra era assai diverso da quello della Vecchia Inghilterra. Ma questo metodo di deduzione netta e precisa, con la definizione dei postulati e l’effettiva risposta alla domanda, è qualcosa di cui l’intera nostra società lusingata dai giornali ha acuto e immediato bisogno; come gli avvelenati hanno bisogno di medicina. Ho preso qui un solo esempio, che per caso mi è caduto sott’occhio, tra i centomila che sfrecciano oltre ogni ora. E poiché il Tennis, come ogni altro buon gioco, va giocato con la testa non meno che con la mano, ritengo altamente desiderabile che venga occasionalmente discusso almeno con la stessa intelligenza con cui viene giocato.

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OBSTINATE ORTHODOXY

I HAVE been asked to explain something about myself which seems to be regarded as very extraordinary. The problem has been presented to me in the form of a cutting from a very flattering American article, which yet contained a certain suggestion of wonder. So far as I can understand, it is thought extraordinary that a man should be ordinary. I am ordinary in the correct sense of the term; which means the acceptance of an order; a Creator and the Creation, the common sense of gratitude for Creation, life and love as gifts permanently good, marriage and chivalry as laws rightly controlling them, and the rest of the normal traditions of our race and religion. It is also thought a little odd that I regard the grass as green, even after some newly-discovered Slovak artist has painted it grey; that I think daylight very tolerable in spite of thirteen Lithuanian philosophers sitting in a row and cursing the light of day; and that, in matters more polemical, I actually prefer weddings to divorces and babies to Birth Control. These eccentric views, which I share with the overwhelming majority of mankind, past and present, I should not attempt to defend here one by one. And I only give a general reply for a particular reason. I wish to make it unmistakably plain that my defence of these sentiments is not sentimental. It would be easy to gush about these things; but I defy the reader, after reading this, to find the faintest trace of the tear of sensibility. I hold this view not because it is sensibility, but because it is sense.

On the contrary, it is the sceptics who are the sentimentalists. More than half the “revolt” and the talk of being advanced and progressive is simply a weak sort of snobbishness which takes the form of a worship of Youth. Some men of my generation delight in declaring that they are of the Party of the Young and defending every detail of the latest fashions or freaks. If I do not do that, it is for the same reason that I do not dye my hair or wear stays. But even when it is less despicable than that, the current phrase that everything must be done for youth, that the rising generation is all that matters, is in sober fact a piece of pure sentimentalism. It is also, within reason, a perfectly natural piece of sentiment. All healthy people like to see the young enjoying themselves; but if we turn that pleasure into a principle, we are sentimentalists. If we desire the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it will be obvious that the greatest number, at any given moment, are rather more likely to be between twenty-five and seventy than to be between seventeen and twenty-five. Sacrificing everything to the young will be like working only for the rich. They will be a privileged class and the rest will be snobs or slaves. Moreover, the young will always have a fair amount of fun under the worst conditions; if we really wish to console the world, it will be much more rational to console the old. This is what I call facing facts; and I have continued to believe in most of these traditions because they are facts. I could give a great many other examples; for instance, chivalry. Chivalry is not the romantic, but the realistic, view of the sexes. It is so realistic that the real reasons for it cannot always be given in print.

If those called free-thinkers are sentimentalists, those called free-lovers are open and obvious sentimentalists. We can always convict such people of sentimentalism by their weakness for euphemism. The phrase they use is always softened and suited for journalistic appeals. They talk of free love when they mean something quite different, better defined as free lust. But being sentimentalists they feel bound to simper and coo over the word “love.” They insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control. We could smash them to atoms, if we could be as indecent in our language as they are immoral in their conclusions. And as it is with morals, so it is with religion. The general notion that science establishes agnosticism is a sort of mystification produced by talking Latin and Greek instead of plain English. Science is the Latin for knowledge. Agnosticism is the Greek for ignorance. It is not self-evident that ignorance is the goal of knowledge. It is the ignorance and not the knowledge that produces the current notion that free thought weakens theism. It is the real world, that we see with our own eyes, that obviously unfolds a plan of things that fit into each other. It is only a remote and misty legend that ever pretended to explain it by the automatic advantage of the “fit.” As a fact, modern evolutionists, even when they are still Darwinians, do not pretend that the theory explains all varieties and adaptations. Those who know are rather rescuing Darwin at the expense of Darwinism. But it is those who do not know who doubt or deny; it is typical that their myth is actually called the Missing Link. They actually know nothing of their own argument except that it breaks down somewhere. But it is worth while to ask why this loose legend has such power over many; and I will proceed to my suggestion. I have not changed my mind; nor, indeed, have they changed their mind. They have only changed their mood.

What we call the intellectual world is divided into two types of people—those who worship the intellect and those who use it. There are exceptions; but, broadly speaking, they are never the same people. Those who use the intellect never worship it; they know too much about it. Those who worship the intellect never use it; as you can see by the things they say about it. Hence there has arisen a confusion about intellect and intellectualism; and, as the supreme expression of that confusion, something that is called in many countries the Intelligentsia, and in France more especially, the Intellectuals. It is found in practice to consist of clubs and coteries of people talking mostly about books and pictures, but especially new books and new pictures; and about music, so long as it is very modern music; or what some would call very unmusical music. The first fact to record about it is that what Carlyle said of the world is very specially true of the intellectual world— that it is mostly fools. Indeed, it has a curious attraction for complete fools, as a warm fire has for cats. I have frequently visited such societies, in the capacity of a common or normal fool, and I have almost always found there a few fools who were more foolish than I had imagined to be possible to man born of woman; people who had hardly enough brains to be called half-witted. But it gave them a glow within to be in what they imagined to be the atmosphere of intellect; for they worshipped it like an unknown god. I could tell many stories of that world. I remember a venerable man with a very long beard who seemed to live at one of these clubs. At intervals he would hold up his hand as if for silence and preface his remarks by saying, “A Thought.” And then he would say something that sounded as if a cow had suddenly spoken in a drawing-room. I remember once a silent and much-enduring man (I rather think it was my friend Mr. Edgar Jepson, the novelist) who could bear it no longer and cried with a sort of expiring gasp, “But, Good God, man, you don’t call that a THOUGHT, do you?” But that was pretty much the quality of the thought of such thinkers, especially of the freethinkers. Out of this social situation arises one sort of exception to the rule. Intelligence does exist even in the Intelligentsia. It does sometimes happen that a man of real talent has a weakness for flattery, even the flattery of fools. He would rather say something that silly people think clever than something which only clever people could perceive to be true. Oscar Wilde was a man of this type. When he said somewhere that an immoral woman is the sort of woman a man never gets tired of, he used a phrase so baseless as to be perfectly pointless. Everybody knows that a man may get tired of a whole procession of immoral women, especially if he is an immoral man. That was “a Thought”; otherwise something to be uttered, with uplifted hand, to people who could not think at all. In their poor muddled minds there was some vague connection between wit and cynicism; so they never applauded him so warmly as a wit, as when he was cynical without being witty. But when he said, “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” he made a statement (in excellent epigrammatic form) which really meant something. But it would have meant his own immediate dethronement if it could have been understood by those who only enthroned him for being cynical.

ORTODOSSIA OSTINATA

MI È STATO chiesto di spiegare qualcosa su me stesso che pare venga considerato oltremodo straordinario. Il problema mi è stato presentato sotto forma di un ritaglio tratto da un articolo americano assai lusinghiero, il quale tuttavia conteneva una certa sfumatura di meraviglia. Per quanto mi è dato capire, si reputa straordinario che un uomo sia ordinario. Io sono ordinario nel senso corretto del termine; il che significa l’accettazione di un ordine: un Creatore e la Creazione, il buon senso della gratitudine per la Creazione, la vita e l’amore come doni permanentemente buoni, il matrimonio e la cavalleria come leggi che giustamente li governano, e tutto il resto delle normali tradizioni della nostra stirpe e della nostra religione. Si giudica inoltre un po’ bizzarro che io consideri verde l’erba, persino dopo che qualche artista slovacco di recente scoperta l’ha dipinta grigia; che io trovi la luce del giorno assai tollerabile a dispetto di tredici filosofi lituani seduti in fila a maledire la luce diurna; e che, in materie più polemiche, io preferisca davvero le nozze ai divorzi e i bambini al Controllo delle Nascite. Queste vedute eccentriche, che condivido con la stragrande maggioranza dell’umanità, passata e presente, non tenterò qui di difenderle a una a una. E do soltanto una risposta generale per una ragione particolare. Desidero rendere inequivocabilmente chiaro che la mia difesa di questi sentimenti non è sentimentale. Sarebbe facile sdilinquirsi su queste cose; ma sfido il lettore, dopo aver letto questo, a trovare la più tenue traccia della lacrima della sensibilità. Sostengo questa veduta non perché sia sensibilità, ma perché è senno.

Al contrario, sono gli scettici a essere i sentimentali. Più della metà della “rivolta” e del gran parlare di essere avanzati e progressisti è semplicemente una debole specie di snobismo che assume la forma di un culto della Gioventù. Certi uomini della mia generazione si dilettano nel dichiarare di appartenere al Partito dei Giovani e nel difendere ogni dettaglio delle ultime mode o stramberie. Se io non lo faccio, è per la stessa ragione per cui non mi tingo i capelli né porto il busto. Ma anche quando è meno spregevole di così, la frase corrente secondo cui tutto dev’essere fatto per la gioventù, secondo cui la generazione nascente è la sola cosa che conti, è in sobria realtà un puro pezzo di sentimentalismo. È anche, entro certi limiti, un pezzo di sentimento perfettamente naturale. Tutte le persone sane amano vedere i giovani divertirsi; ma se tramutiamo quel piacere in un principio, siamo dei sentimentali. Se desideriamo la massima felicità del massimo numero, sarà ovvio che il massimo numero, in ogni dato momento, ha piuttosto più probabilità di trovarsi fra i venticinque e i settant’anni che non fra i diciassette e i venticinque. Sacrificare ogni cosa ai giovani sarà come lavorare soltanto per i ricchi. Costoro saranno una classe privilegiata e il resto saranno snob o schiavi. Per di più, i giovani avranno sempre una discreta dose di svago anche nelle peggiori condizioni; se davvero vogliamo consolare il mondo, sarà assai più razionale consolare i vecchi. Questo è ciò che io chiamo guardare in faccia i fatti; e ho continuato a credere nella maggior parte di queste tradizioni perché sono fatti. Potrei addurre moltissimi altri esempi; per esempio, la cavalleria. La cavalleria non è la veduta romantica, bensì quella realistica dei sessi. È così realistica che le vere ragioni di essa non sempre possono darsi a stampa.

Se coloro che si dicono liberi pensatori sono sentimentali, coloro che si dicono liberi amanti sono sentimentali aperti e manifesti. Possiamo sempre convincere di sentimentalismo simile gente per la loro debolezza verso l’eufemismo. La frase che usano è sempre addolcita e adattata agli appelli giornalistici. Parlano di libero amore quando intendono qualcosa di ben diverso, meglio definito come libera libidine. Ma essendo sentimentali si sentono tenuti a fare moine e tubare sulla parola «amore». Insistono a parlare di Controllo delle Nascite quando intendono meno nascite e nessun controllo. Potremmo ridurli in atomi, se potessimo essere altrettanto indecenti nel nostro linguaggio quanto essi sono immorali nelle loro conclusioni. E come è per la morale, così è per la religione. La nozione generale secondo cui la scienza fonda l’agnosticismo è una sorta di mistificazione prodotta parlando latino e greco anziché semplice inglese. Scienza è il latino per conoscenza. Agnosticismo è il greco per ignoranza. Non è affatto di per sé evidente che l’ignoranza sia la meta della conoscenza. È l’ignoranza e non la conoscenza a produrre la nozione corrente secondo cui il libero pensiero indebolisce il teismo. È il mondo reale, che vediamo con i nostri stessi occhi, a dispiegare con evidenza un disegno di cose che si incastrano l’una nell’altra. È soltanto una remota e nebbiosa leggenda ad aver mai preteso di spiegarlo con l’automatico vantaggio dell’«adatto». Di fatto gli evoluzionisti moderni, anche quando sono ancora darwiniani, non pretendono che la teoria spieghi tutte le varietà e gli adattamenti. Coloro che sanno stanno piuttosto salvando Darwin a spese del darwinismo. Ma sono coloro che non sanno a dubitare o negare; è tipico che il loro mito venga davvero chiamato l’Anello Mancante. In realtà non sanno nulla del proprio argomento se non che esso crolla da qualche parte. Ma vale la pena chiedersi perché questa fumosa leggenda abbia tale potere su tanti; e procederò alla mia ipotesi. Io non ho cambiato idea; né, in verità, l’hanno cambiata loro. Hanno soltanto cambiato umore.

Ciò che chiamiamo il mondo intellettuale si divide in due tipi di persone: quelle che venerano l’intelletto e quelle che lo usano. Vi sono eccezioni; ma, in linea di massima, non sono mai le stesse persone. Coloro che usano l’intelletto non lo venerano mai; ne sanno troppo. Coloro che venerano l’intelletto non lo usano mai; come potete vedere dalle cose che dicono in proposito. Di qui è sorta una confusione fra intelletto e intellettualismo; e, quale suprema espressione di tale confusione, qualcosa che in molti paesi viene chiamato l’Intelligentsia, e in Francia più particolarmente gli Intellettuali. Si constata in pratica che essa consiste di club e cenacoli di persone che parlano perlopiù di libri e di quadri, ma specialmente di libri nuovi e quadri nuovi; e di musica, purché sia musica molto moderna; o ciò che alcuni chiamerebbero musica assai poco musicale. Il primo fatto da registrare al riguardo è che ciò che Carlyle disse del mondo vale specialissimamente per il mondo intellettuale: che è per la maggior parte fatto di sciocchi. Anzi, esso esercita una curiosa attrazione sui perfetti sciocchi, come un caldo fuoco la esercita sui gatti. Ho frequentato spesso simili società, in veste di comune o normale sciocco, e vi ho quasi sempre trovato alcuni sciocchi più sciocchi di quanto avessi immaginato possibile a uomo nato di donna; gente che aveva a malapena cervello sufficiente per essere detta scema a metà. Ma dava loro un fervore interiore trovarsi in quella che immaginavano l’atmosfera dell’intelletto; poiché lo veneravano come un dio ignoto. Potrei raccontare molte storie di quel mondo. Ricordo un venerando individuo con una barba lunghissima che pareva vivere in uno di questi club. A intervalli alzava la mano come per invocare silenzio e prefaziava le sue osservazioni dicendo: «Un Pensiero». E poi diceva qualcosa che suonava come se una vacca avesse a un tratto parlato in un salotto. Ricordo una volta un uomo silenzioso e assai paziente (credo piuttosto fosse il mio amico signor Edgar Jepson, il romanziere) che non poté più sopportarlo e gridò con una specie di rantolo agonizzante: «Ma, santo Dio, amico, non chiamerà mica quello un PENSIERO, vero?» Ma tale era pressappoco la qualità del pensiero di simili pensatori, e specialmente dei liberi pensatori. Da questa situazione sociale sorge un tipo di eccezione alla regola. L’intelligenza esiste anche nell’Intelligentsia. Accade talvolta che un uomo di reale talento abbia una debolezza per l’adulazione, persino l’adulazione degli sciocchi. Preferisce dire qualcosa che gli sciocchi ritengono arguto piuttosto che qualcosa che solo le persone arguti potrebbero cogliere come vero. Oscar Wilde era un uomo di questo tipo. Quando disse da qualche parte che una donna immorale è il tipo di donna di cui un uomo non si stanca mai, usò una frase tanto infondata da essere perfettamente priva di senso. Tutti sanno che un uomo può stancarsi di un’intera processione di donne immorali, specialmente se è un uomo immorale. Quello era «un Pensiero»; ossia qualcosa da pronunciare, con mano levata, a gente incapace di pensare affatto. Nelle loro povere menti confuse c’era un vago nesso fra arguzia e cinismo; sicché non lo applaudivano mai tanto calorosamente come arguto quanto quando era cinico senza essere arguto. Ma quando disse: «Un cinico è un uomo che conosce il prezzo di ogni cosa e il valore di nessuna», fece un’affermazione (in eccellente forma epigrammatica) che significava davvero qualcosa. Ma essa avrebbe significato la sua immediata detronizzazione se avesse potuto essere compresa da coloro che lo intronizzavano solo perché cinico.

Anyhow, it is in this intellectual world, with its many fools and few wits and fewer wise men, that there goes on perpetually a sort of ferment of fashionable revolt and negation. From this comes all that is called destructive criticism; though, as a matter of fact, the new critic is generally destroyed by the next critic long before he has had any chance of destroying anything else. When people say solemnly that the world is in revolt against religion or private property or patriotism or marriage, they mean that this world is in revolt against them; or rather, is in permanent revolt against everything. Now, as a matter of fact, this world has a certain excuse for being always in that state of excitement, apart from mere fuss and mere folly. The reason is rather an important one; and I would ask anyone who really does want to think, and especially to think freely, to pause upon it seriously for a moment. It arises from the fact that these people are so much concerned with the study of Art. It collapses into mere drivelling and despair, because they try to transfer their treatment of art to the treatment of morals and philosophy. In this they make a bad blunder in reasoning. But then, as I have explained, intellectuals are not very intellectual.

The Arts, exist, as we should put it in our primeval fashion, to show forth the glory of God; or, to translate the same thing in terms of our psychology, to awaken and keep alive the sense of wonder in man. The success of any work of art is achieved when we say of any subject, a tree or a cloud or a human character, “I have seen that a thousand times and I never saw it before.” Now for this purpose a certain variation of VENUE is natural and even necessary. Artists change what they call their attack; for it is to some extent their business to make it a surprise attack. They have to throw a new light on things; and it is not surprising if it is sometimes an invisible ultra-violet ray or one rather resembling a black ray of madness or death. But when the artist extends the eccentric experiment from art to real life, it is quite different. He is like an absent-minded sculptor turning his chisel from chipping at the bust to chipping at the bald head of the distinguished sitter. And these anarchic artists do suffer a little from absence of Mind.

Let us take a practical case for the sake of simplicity. Many moderns will be heard scoffing at what they would call “chocolate-box art”; meaning an insipid and sickly art. And it is easy to call up the sort of picture that might well make anybody ill. I will suppose, for the sake of argument, that we are looking sadly at the outside of a chocolate-box (now, I need hardly say, empty) and that we see painted on it in rather pallid colours a young woman with golden ringlets gazing from a balcony and holding a rose in the spot-light caused by a convenient ray of moonlight. Any similar touches may be added to the taste or distaste of the critic; she may be convulsively clasping a letter or conspicuously wearing an engagement ring or languidly waving farewell to a distant gentleman in a gondola; or anything else I can think of, calculated to cause pain to the sensitive critic. I sympathise with the critic’s feeling; but I think he goes quite wrong in his thinking.

Now, what do we mean when we say that this is a silly picture, or a stale subject, or something very difficult to bear, even when we are fortified by chocolates to endure it? We mean it is possible to have too much of a good thing; to have too many chocolate-boxes, as to have too many chocolates. We mean that it is not a picture, but a picture of a picture. Ultimately it is a picture of innumerable pictures; not a real picture of a rose or a girl or a beam of moonlight. In other words, artists have copied artists, right away back to the first sentimental pictures of the Romantic Movement.

But roses have not copied roses. Moonbeams have not imitated each other. And though a woman may copy women in externals, it is only in externals and not in existence; her womanhood was not copied from any other woman. Considered as realities, the rose and the moon and the woman are simply themselves. Suppose that scene to be a real one, and there is nothing particularly imitative about it. The flower is unquestionably fresh as the young woman is unquestionably young. The rose is a real object, which would smell as sweet by any other name, or by no name. The girl is a particular person, whose personality is entirely new to the world and whose experiences are entirely new to herself. If she does indeed choose to stand in that attitude on that balcony holding that botanical specimen (which seems improbable), we have no right to doubt that she has her own reasons for doing so. In short, when once we conceive the thing as reality, we have no reason whatever to dismiss it as mere repetition. So long as we are thinking of the thing as copied mechanically and for money, as a piece of monotonous and mercenary ornament, we naturally feel that the flower is in a special sense an artificial flower and that the moonlight is all moonshine. We feel inclined to welcome even wild variations in the decorative style; and to admire the new artist who will paint the rose black, lest we should forget that it is a deep red, or the moonshine green, that we may realise it is something more subtle than white. But the moon is the moon and the rose is the rose; and we do not expect the real things to alter. Nor is there any reason to expect the rules about them to alter. Nor is there any reason, so far as this question is concerned, to expect the woman to alter her attitude either about the beauty of the rose or the obligations of the engagement-ring. These things, considered as real things, are quite unaffected by the variation of artistic attack in fictitious things. The moon will continue to affect the tides, whether we paint it blue or green or pink with purple spots. And the man who imagines that artistic revolutions must always affect morals is like a man who should say, “I am so bored with seeing pink roses painted on chocolate-boxes that I refuse to believe that roses grow well in a clay soil.”

Comunque, è in questo mondo intellettuale, con i suoi molti sciocchi e i suoi pochi ingegni e i suoi ancor più pochi saggi, che si svolge di continuo una sorta di fermento di rivolta e negazione alla moda. Di qui viene tutto ciò che si chiama critica distruttiva; benché, in verità, il nuovo critico venga generalmente distrutto dal critico successivo assai prima di aver avuto occasione di distruggere alcunché d’altro. Quando la gente dice solennemente che il mondo è in rivolta contro la religione o la proprietà privata o il patriottismo o il matrimonio, intende che questo mondo è in rivolta contro di essi; o piuttosto che è in rivolta permanente contro ogni cosa. Ora, di fatto, questo mondo ha una certa scusa per trovarsi sempre in quello stato di eccitazione, a parte il mero clamore e la mera follia. La ragione è piuttosto importante; e chiederei a chiunque voglia davvero pensare, e specialmente pensare liberamente, di soffermarsi seriamente su di essa per un momento. Essa nasce dal fatto che questa gente è tanto occupata con lo studio dell’Arte. Crolla nel mero blaterare e nella disperazione, perché tenta di trasferire il proprio trattamento dell’arte al trattamento della morale e della filosofia. In questo commette un grave errore di ragionamento. Ma poi, come ho spiegato, gli intellettuali non sono molto intellettuali.

Le Arti esistono, come diremmo alla nostra maniera primeva, per manifestare la gloria di Dio; o, per tradurre la stessa cosa nei termini della nostra psicologia, per risvegliare e tener viva nell’uomo il senso della meraviglia. Il successo di ogni opera d’arte si consegue quando diciamo di un soggetto qualsiasi, un albero o una nuvola o un carattere umano: «L’ho veduto mille volte e non l’avevo mai veduto prima». Ora, a questo scopo, una certa variazione di SEDE è naturale e persino necessaria. Gli artisti mutano ciò che chiamano il loro attacco; poiché rientra in una certa misura nel loro mestiere renderlo un attacco di sorpresa. Devono gettare una nuova luce sulle cose; e non sorprende se talvolta è un invisibile raggio ultravioletto o uno che somiglia piuttosto a un nero raggio di follia o di morte. Ma quando l’artista estende l’esperimento eccentrico dall’arte alla vita reale, è tutt’altra cosa. È come uno scultore distratto che volge lo scalpello dallo scheggiare il busto allo scheggiare la testa calva dell’illustre modello. E questi artisti anarchici soffrono davvero un poco di assenza di Mente.

Prendiamo un caso pratico per amor di semplicità. Molti moderni si udranno schernire ciò che chiamerebbero «arte da scatola di cioccolatini»; intendendo un’arte insipida e stucchevole. Ed è facile richiamare alla mente il genere di quadro che potrebbe ben far venire il malessere a chiunque. Supporrò, per amor di argomentazione, che stiamo guardando tristemente l’esterno di una scatola di cioccolatini (ormai, quasi non occorre dirlo, vuota) e che vi vediamo dipinta in colori piuttosto pallidi una giovane donna dai riccioli d’oro che scruta da un balcone tenendo una rosa nel cono di luce prodotto da un opportuno raggio di luna. Qualsiasi tocco simile può essere aggiunto secondo il gusto o il disgusto del critico; ella può stringere convulsamente una lettera o portare cospicuamente un anello di fidanzamento o agitare languidamente un addio a un signore lontano su una gondola; o qualunque altra cosa mi venga in mente, calcolata per procurare dolore al critico sensibile. Simpatizzo col sentimento del critico; ma penso che sbagli del tutto nel suo pensare.

Ora, che cosa intendiamo quando diciamo che questo è un quadro sciocco, o un soggetto trito, o qualcosa di assai difficile da sopportare, anche quando siamo fortificati dai cioccolatini per resistervi? Intendiamo che è possibile avere troppo di una cosa buona; avere troppe scatole di cioccolatini, come avere troppi cioccolatini. Intendiamo che non è un quadro, ma il quadro di un quadro. In ultima analisi è il quadro di innumerevoli quadri; non un vero quadro di una rosa o di una fanciulla o di un raggio di luna. In altre parole, gli artisti hanno copiato gli artisti, a ritroso fino ai primi quadri sentimentali del Movimento Romantico.

Ma le rose non hanno copiato le rose. I raggi di luna non si sono imitati l’un l’altro. E benché una donna possa copiare le donne negli aspetti esteriori, è solo negli aspetti esteriori e non nell’esistenza; la sua femminilità non fu copiata da nessun’altra donna. Considerate come realtà, la rosa e la luna e la donna sono semplicemente se stesse. Supponete che quella scena sia reale, e non vi è nulla di particolarmente imitativo in essa. Il fiore è indubitabilmente fresco come la giovane donna è indubitabilmente giovane. La rosa è un oggetto reale, che manderebbe profumo altrettanto dolce sotto qualsiasi altro nome, o sotto nessun nome. La fanciulla è una persona particolare, la cui personalità è del tutto nuova al mondo e le cui esperienze sono del tutto nuove a lei stessa. Se ella sceglie davvero di stare in quell’atteggiamento su quel balcone tenendo quell’esemplare botanico (il che pare improbabile), non abbiamo alcun diritto di dubitare che ella abbia le sue ragioni per farlo. In breve, una volta che concepiamo la cosa come realtà, non abbiamo alcun motivo di liquidarla come mera ripetizione. Finché pensiamo alla cosa come copiata meccanicamente e per denaro, come un pezzo di ornamento monotono e mercenario, sentiamo naturalmente che il fiore è in un senso speciale un fiore artificiale e che il chiaro di luna è tutto fumo lunare. Ci sentiamo inclini ad accogliere persino selvagge variazioni nello stile decorativo; e ad ammirare il nuovo artista che dipingerà la rosa di nero, per timore che dimentichiamo che è di un rosso profondo, o il chiaro di luna verde, affinché comprendiamo che è qualcosa di più sottile del bianco. Ma la luna è la luna e la rosa è la rosa; e non ci aspettiamo che le cose reali si alterino. Né vi è alcun motivo di aspettarsi che si alterino le regole che le riguardano. Né vi è alcun motivo, per quanto concerne questa questione, di aspettarsi che la donna alteri il suo atteggiamento sia riguardo alla bellezza della rosa sia riguardo agli obblighi dell’anello di fidanzamento. Queste cose, considerate come cose reali, sono del tutto immuni alla variazione dell’attacco artistico nelle cose fittizie. La luna continuerà a influenzare le maree, la dipingiamo pure di blu o di verde o di rosa con macchie violacee. E l’uomo che immagina che le rivoluzioni artistiche debbano sempre influenzare la morale è come un uomo che dicesse: «Sono tanto annoiato di vedere rose rosa dipinte sulle scatole di cioccolatini che mi rifiuto di credere che le rose crescano bene in un suolo argilloso».

In short, what the critics would call romanticism is in fact the only form of realism. It is also the only form of rationalism. The more a man uses his reason upon realities, the more he will see that the realities remain much the same, though the representations are very different, And it is only the representations that are repetitions. The sensations are always sincere; the individuals are always individual. If the real girl is experiencing a real romance, she is experiencing something old, but not something stale. If she has plucked something from a real rose-tree, she is holding a very ancient symbol, but a very recent rose. And it is exactly in so far as a man can clear his head, so as to see actual things as they are, that he will see these things as permanently important as they are. Exactly in so far as his head is confused with current fashions and aesthetic modes of the moment, he will see nothing about it except that it is like a picture on a chocolate-box, and not like a picture at the Post-Futurist Gallery. Exactly in so far as he is thinking about real people, he will see that they are really romantic. Exactly in so far as he is thinking only about pictures and poems and decorative styles, he will think that romance is a false or old-fashioned style. He can only see people as imitating pictures; whereas the real people are not imitating anything. They are only being themselves— as they will always be. Roses remain radiant and mysterious, however many pink rosebuds are sprinkled like pips over cheap wallpapers. Falling in love remains radiant and mysterious, however threadbare be the thousandth repetition of a rhyme as a valentine or a cracker-motto. To see this fact is to live in a world of facts. To be always thinking of the banality of bad wallpapers and valentines is to live in a world of fictions.

Now the main truth about all this sceptical revolt, and all the rest of it, is that it was born in a world of fictions. It came from the Intelligentsia, who were perpetually discussing novels and plays and pictures instead of people. They insisted on putting “real life” on the stage and never saw it in the street. They professed to be putting realism into their novels when there was less and less of it in their conversation, as compared with the conversation of the common people. And that perpetual experiment, and shifting of the standpoint, which was natural enough in an artist seeking for certain effects (as it is natural in a photographer hovering round and focussing and fussing with his camera), was wholly inapplicable to any study of the permanent rules and relations of society. When these people began to play about with morals and metaphysics, they simply produced a series of mad worlds where they might have been harmlessly producing a series of mad pictures. Pictures are always meant to catch a certain aspect, at a certain angle, in a certain light; sometimes in light that is almost as brief as lightning. But when the artists became anarchists and began to exhibit the community and the cosmos by these flashes of lightning, the result was not realism but simply nightmare. Because a particular painter, for a particular purpose, might paint the red rose black, the pessimist deduced that the red rose of love and life was really as black as it was painted. Because one artist, from one angle, seized a momentary impression of moonlight as green, the philosopher solemnly put on a pair of green spectacles and declared that it was now a solid scientific certainty that the moon must be crawling with maggots, because it was made of green cheese.

In short, there might have been some value in the old cry of art for the artists; if it had meant that the artists would confine themselves to the medium of art. As a fact, they were always meddling with the medium of morals and religion; and they imported into them the unrest, the changing moods and the merely experimental tricks of their own trade. But a man with a solid sense of reality can see that this is utterly unreal. Whatever the laws of life and love and human relations may be, it is monstrously improbable that they ought to be changed with every fashion in poetry any more than with every fashion in pantaloons. It is insane that there should be a new pattern of hearts or heads whenever there is a new pattern of hats. These things are realities, like a high tide or a clay soil; and you do not get rid of high tides and clay soils by calling roses and moonlight old-fashioned and sentimental. I will venture to say, therefore, and I trust without undue vanity, that I have remained rooted in certain relations and traditions, not because I am a sentimentalist or even a romanticist; but because I am a realist. And I realise that morals must not change with moods, as Cubism must not mean chopping up real houses into cubes, or Vorticism swallowing real ships in whirlpools.

I have not changed my views on these things because there has never been any reason to change them. For anybody impelled by reason and not by running with a crowd will, for instance, perceive that there are always the same arguments for a Purpose and therefore a Personality in things, if he is a thinking person. Only it is now made easy for him to admit vaguely that there may be a Purpose, while denying that there is a Personality, so long as he happens to be a very unthinking person. It is quite as certain as it ever was that life is a gift of God immensely valuable and immensely valued, and anybody can prove it by putting a pistol to the head of a pessimist. Only a certain sort of modern does not like any problem presented to his head; and would dislike a plain question almost as much as a pistol. It is obvious common sense, and obviously consonant to real life, that romantic love is normal to youth and has its natural development in marriage and parenthood as the corresponding conditions of age. None of the nonsense talked about this, that or the other individual irritation or licence has ever made any difference to that solid social truth, for anyone who cares whether things are true, apart from whether they are trite. It is the man who cannot see that a thing is true, although it is trite, who is very truly a victim of mere words and verbal associations. He is the fool who has grown so furious with paper roses that he will not believe that the real rose has a root; nor (till he discovers it with an abrupt and profane ejaculation) that it has a thorn.

The truth is that the modern world has had a mental breakdown; much more than a moral breakdown. Things are being settled by mere associations because there is a reluctance to settle them by arguments. Nearly all the talk about what is advanced and what is antiquated has become a sort of giggling excitement about fashions. The most modern of the moderns stare at a picture of a man making love to a lady in a crinoline with exactly the same sort of vacant grin with which yokels stare at a stranger in an outlandish sort of hat. They regard their fathers of another age exactly as the most insular would regard the foreigners from another country. They seem mentally incapable of getting any further than the statement that our girls are shingled and short-skirted while their silly old great-grandmothers wore ringlets and hoops. That seems to satisfy all their appetite for satire; they are a simple race, a little like savages. They are exactly like the sort of cockney tripper who would roar with laughter because French soldiers wore red trousers and blue coats, while English soldiers were dressed properly in blue trousers and red coats. I have not altered my lines of thought for people who think in this fashion. Why should I?

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In breve, ciò che i critici chiamerebbero romanticismo è in realtà l’unica forma di realismo. È anche l’unica forma di razionalismo. Quanto più un uomo usa la ragione sulle realtà, tanto più vedrà che le realtà restano pressoché le stesse, benché le rappresentazioni siano assai diverse. Ed è soltanto delle rappresentazioni che sono ripetizioni. Le sensazioni sono sempre sincere; gli individui sono sempre individuali. Se la fanciulla reale sta vivendo un romanzo reale, sta vivendo qualcosa di antico, ma non qualcosa di trito. Se ha colto qualcosa da un vero roseto, sta tenendo un simbolo assai antico, ma una rosa assai recente. Ed è esattamente nella misura in cui un uomo sa schiarirsi la mente, così da vedere le cose reali come sono, che egli vedrà queste cose come permanentemente importanti quali sono. Esattamente nella misura in cui la sua mente è confusa dalle mode correnti e dai modi estetici del momento, egli non vedrà in ciò nient’altro se non che assomiglia a un quadretto su una scatola di cioccolatini, e non a un quadro alla Galleria Post-Futurista. Esattamente nella misura in cui pensa a persone reali, egli vedrà che esse sono davvero romantiche. Esattamente nella misura in cui pensa soltanto a quadri e poesie e stili decorativi, egli penserà che il romanticismo sia uno stile falso o antiquato. Egli sa vedere le persone solo come imitatrici di quadri; laddove le persone reali non imitano nulla. Sono soltanto se stesse: come saranno sempre. Le rose restano radiose e misteriose, per quanti boccioli rosa siano spruzzati come semi sulle carte da parati a buon mercato. L’innamorarsi resta radioso e misterioso, per quanto logora sia la millesima ripetizione di una rima come un biglietto di San Valentino o un motto da cotillon. Vedere questo fatto è vivere in un mondo di fatti. Pensare sempre alla banalità delle brutte carte da parati e dei biglietti di San Valentino è vivere in un mondo di finzioni.

Ora, la principale verità su tutta questa rivolta scettica, e tutto il resto, è che essa nacque in un mondo di finzioni. Venne dall’Intelligentsia, che discuteva perpetuamente di romanzi e drammi e quadri anziché di persone. Insisteva a mettere la «vita reale» sul palcoscenico e non la vedeva mai per strada. Professava di mettere il realismo nei propri romanzi quando ve n’era sempre meno nella propria conversazione, in confronto alla conversazione della gente comune. E quel perpetuo esperimento, e spostamento del punto di vista, che era naturale abbastanza in un artista in cerca di certi effetti (come è naturale in un fotografo che gira attorno mettendo a fuoco e armeggiando con la macchina), era del tutto inapplicabile a qualsiasi studio delle regole e delle relazioni permanenti della società. Quando questa gente cominciò a trastullarsi con la morale e la metafisica, produsse semplicemente una serie di mondi folli là dove avrebbe potuto innocuamente produrre una serie di quadri folli. I quadri sono sempre intesi a cogliere un certo aspetto, a un certo angolo, in una certa luce; talvolta in una luce quasi breve come il lampo. Ma quando gli artisti divennero anarchici e cominciarono a esibire la comunità e il cosmo mediante questi bagliori di lampo, il risultato non fu realismo ma semplicemente incubo. Poiché un particolare pittore, per un particolare scopo, poteva dipingere di nero la rosa rossa, il pessimista deduceva che la rosa rossa dell’amore e della vita era in realtà nera quanto era dipinta. Poiché un artista, da un angolo, colse un’impressione momentanea del chiaro di luna come verde, il filosofo inforcò solennemente un paio di occhiali verdi e dichiarò che ormai era una solida certezza scientifica che la luna dovesse brulicare di vermi, poiché era fatta di formaggio verde.

In breve, poteva esservi un certo valore nel vecchio grido dell’arte per gli artisti; se avesse significato che gli artisti si sarebbero confinati al mezzo dell’arte. Di fatto, essi si intromettevano sempre nel mezzo della morale e della religione; e vi importavano l’inquietudine, gli umori mutevoli e i meri trucchi sperimentali del proprio mestiere. Ma un uomo con un solido senso della realtà sa vedere che ciò è del tutto irreale. Quali che siano le leggi della vita e dell’amore e delle relazioni umane, è mostruosamente improbabile che esse debbano mutare a ogni moda in poesia più di quanto debbano mutare a ogni moda nei calzoni. È folle che vi debba essere un nuovo modello di cuori o di teste ogni volta che vi è un nuovo modello di cappelli. Queste cose sono realtà, come un’alta marea o un suolo argilloso; e non ci si sbarazza delle alte maree e dei suoli argillosi chiamando antiquati e sentimentali le rose e il chiaro di luna. Oserò dire, dunque, e confido senza indebita vanità, di essere rimasto radicato in certe relazioni e tradizioni, non perché sia un sentimentale o persino un romantico; ma perché sono un realista. E mi rendo conto che la morale non deve mutare con gli umori, come il Cubismo non deve significare fare a pezzi case reali in cubi, né il Vorticismo inghiottire navi reali in gorghi.

Non ho mutato le mie vedute su queste cose perché non vi è mai stata alcuna ragione di mutarle. Poiché chiunque sia mosso dalla ragione e non dal correre con la folla, per esempio, percepirà che vi sono sempre gli stessi argomenti a favore di un Fine e dunque di una Personalità nelle cose, se è una persona che pensa. Solo che ora gli si rende facile ammettere vagamente che possa esservi un Fine, pur negando che vi sia una Personalità, purché gli capiti di essere una persona che pensa assai poco. È altrettanto certo di quanto sia mai stato che la vita è un dono di Dio immensamente prezioso e immensamente pregiato, e chiunque può provarlo puntando una pistola alla testa di un pessimista. Solo che un certo genere di moderno non gradisce alcun problema presentato alla sua testa; e detesterebbe una domanda schietta quasi quanto una pistola. È ovvio buon senso, e ovviamente consono alla vita reale, che l’amore romantico sia normale alla gioventù e abbia il suo naturale sviluppo nel matrimonio e nella genitorialità quali condizioni corrispondenti dell’età matura. Nessuna delle sciocchezze dette su questa, quella o quell’altra irritazione o licenza individuale ha mai fatto alcuna differenza a quella solida verità sociale, per chiunque si curi se le cose siano vere, a prescindere dal fatto che siano trite. È l’uomo che non sa vedere che una cosa è vera, benché sia trita, a essere davvero vittima delle mere parole e delle associazioni verbali. Egli è lo sciocco che si è tanto infuriato con le rose di carta da non voler credere che la rosa vera abbia una radice; né (finché non lo scopre con un’esclamazione brusca e profana) che abbia una spina.

La verità è che il mondo moderno ha avuto un tracollo mentale; assai più che un tracollo morale. Le cose vengono decise da mere associazioni perché c’è una riluttanza a deciderle mediante argomenti. Quasi tutto il parlare di ciò che è avanzato e di ciò che è antiquato è divenuto una sorta di eccitazione ridacchiante sulle mode. Il più moderno dei moderni fissa un quadro di un uomo che fa la corte a una dama in crinolina con esattamente lo stesso ghigno vacuo con cui gli zotici fissano un forestiero con un cappello di foggia bizzarra. Considerano i loro padri di un’altra epoca esattamente come il più insulare guarderebbe gli stranieri di un altro paese. Paiono mentalmente incapaci di andare oltre l’affermazione che le nostre ragazze hanno i capelli alla maschietta e le gonne corte mentre le loro sciocche vecchie bisnonne portavano riccioli e cerchi. Ciò pare soddisfare tutto il loro appetito di satira; sono una stirpe semplice, un po’ come i selvaggi. Sono esattamente come quel genere di gitante londinese che sghignazzerebbe fragorosamente perché i soldati francesi portavano pantaloni rossi e giubbe blu, mentre i soldati inglesi erano vestiti a modo con pantaloni blu e giubbe rosse. Non ho alterato le mie linee di pensiero per la gente che pensa in questa foggia. Perché dovrei?

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THE USUAL ARTICLE

THE Editor of an evening paper published recently what he announced as, and even apologized for as “an unusual article.” He anxiously guarded himself from expressing any opinion on the dreadful and dangerous views which the unusual article set forth. Needless to say, before I had read five lines of the unusual article, I knew it was a satisfactory sample of the usual article. It was even a careful and correct copy of the usual article; a sort of prize specimen, as if a thing could be unusually usual. I had read the article before, of course—thousands and thousands of times (as it seems to me)—and had always found it the same; but never before, somehow, had it seemed so exactly the same.

There are things of which the world to-day is subconsciously very weary. It does not always know what they are; for they commonly bear large though faded labels, describing them as the New Movement or the Latest Discovery. For instance, men are already as tired of the Socialist State as if they had been living in it for a thousand years. But there are some things on which boredom is becoming acute. It is now very near the surface; and may suddenly wake up in the form of suicide or murder or tearing newspapers with the teeth. So it is with this familiar product, the Usual Article. It is not only too usual; it has become intolerably, insupportably, unbearably usual. It is appropriately described as “A Woman’s Cry to the Churches.” And I beg to announce that, though I am of a heavy and placid habit, and have never been accused of any such feminine graces as hysteria, yet, if I have to read this article three more times, I shall scream. My scream will be entitled, “A Man’s Cry to the Newspapers.”

I will repeat somewhat hurriedly what the lady in question cried; for the reader knows it already by heart. The message of Christ was perfectly “simple”: that the cure of everything is Love; but since He was killed (I do not quite know why) for making this remark, great temples have been put up to Him and horrid people called priests have given the world nothing but “stones, amulets, formulas, shibboleths.” They also “quarrel eternally among themselves as to the placing of a button or the bending of a knee.” All this gives no comfort to the unhappy Christian, who apparently wishes to be comforted only by being told that he has a duty to his neighbour. “How many men in the time of their passing get comfort out of the thought of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Predestination, Transubstantiation, the doctrine of eternal punishment, and the belief that Christ will return on the Seventh Day?” The items make a curious catalogue; and the last item I find especially mysterious. But I can only say that, if Christ was the giver of the original and really comforting message of love, I should have thought it DID make a difference whether He returned on the Seventh Day. For the rest of that singular list, I should probably find it necessary to distinguish. I certainly never gained any deep and heartfelt consolation from the thought of the Thirty-Nine Articles. I never heard of anybody in particular who did. Of the idea of Predestination there are broadly two views; the Calvinist and the Catholic; and it would make a most uncommon difference to MY comfort, if I held the former instead of the latter. It is the difference between believing that God knows, as a fact, that I choose to go to the devil; and believing that God has given me to the devil, without my having any choice at all. As to Transubstantiation, it is less easy to talk currently about that; but I would gently suggest that, to most ordinary outsiders with any common sense, there would be a considerable practical difference between Jehovah pervading the universe and Jesus Christ coming into the room.

But I touch rapidly and reluctantly on these examples, because they exemplify a much wider question of this interminable way of talking. It consists of talking as if the moral problem of man were perfectly simple, as everyone knows it is not; and then depreciating attempts to solve it by quoting long technical words, and talking about senseless ceremonies without enquiring about their sense. In other words, it is exactly as if somebody were to say about the science of medicine: “All I ask is Health; what could be simpler than the beautiful gift of Health? Why not be content to enjoy for ever the glow of youth and the fresh enjoyment of being fit? Why study dry and dismal sciences of anatomy and physiology; why enquire about the whereabouts of obscure organs of the human body? Why pedantically distinguish between what is labelled a poison and what is labelled an antidote, when it is so simple to enjoy Health? Why worry with a minute exactitude about the number of drops of laudanum or the strength of a dose of chloral, when it is so nice to be healthy? Away with your priestly apparatus of stethoscopes and clinical thermometers; with your ritualistic mummery of feeling pulses, putting out tongues, examining teeth, and the rest! The god Esculapius came on earth solely to inform us that Life is on the whole preferable to Death; and this thought will console many dying persons unattended by doctors.”

In other words, the Usual Article, which is now some ten thousand issues old, was always stuff and nonsense even when it was new. There may be, and there has been, pedantry in the medical profession. There may be, and there has been, theology that was thin or dry or without consolation for men. But to talk as if it were possible for any science to attack any problem, without developing a technical language, and a method always methodical and often minute, merely means that you are a fool and have never really attacked a problem at all. Quite apart from the theory of a Church, if Christ had remained on earth for an indefinite time, trying to induce men to love one another, He would have found it necessary to have some tests, some methods, some way of dividing true love from false love, some way of distinguishing between tendencies that would ruin love and tendencies that would restore it. You cannot make a success of anything, even loving, entirely without thinking. All this is so obvious that it would seem unnecessary to repeat it; and yet it is necessary to repeat it, because it is the flat contradiction of it that is now incessantly repeated. Its flatness stretches around us like a vast wilderness on every side.

It is a character of the Usual Article that it alludes occasionally to the New Religion; but always in a rather timid and remote fashion. It suggests that there will be a better and broader belief; though it seldom touches on the belief, but only on the broadness. There is never in it by any chance anything resembling even the note of the true innovator. For the true innovator must be in some sense a legislator. We may put it in a hostile fashion, by saying that the revolutionist always becomes the tyrant. We may put it in a friendly fashion, by saying that the reformer must return to the idea of form. But anybody really founding a new religion, even a false religion, must have a certain quality of responsibility. He must make himself responsible for saying that some things shall be forbidden and some permitted; that there shall be a certain plan or system that must be defended from destruction. And all the things in any way resembling new religions, to do them justice, do show this quality and suffer this disadvantage. Christian Science is theoretically based on peace and almost on the denial of struggle. But for all that there has been not a little struggle in the councils of that creed; and the relations of all the successors of Mrs. Eddy have by no means been relations of peace. I do not say it as a taunt, but rather as a tribute; I should say that these proceedings did prove that the people involved were trying to found a real religion. It is a compliment to Christian Scientists to say that they also had their tests and their creeds, their anathemas and their excommunications, their encyclicals and their heresy-hunts. But it is a compliment to Christian Scientists which they can hardly use as an insult to Christians. Communism, even in its final form of Marxian materialism, had some of the qualities of a fresh and sincere faith. It had one of them at least; that it did definitely expel men for denying the creed. Both the Communist and the Christian Scientist were under this grave disadvantage; that they did turn a faith into a fact. There is such a thing as a Bolshevist government and it governs, even if it misgoverns. There are such things as Christian Science healers; there probably is such a thing as Christian Science healing, even if we do not fully admit that the healing is health. There is a Church in active operation; and for that reason it exhibits all the dogmas and differences charged against the Church of Christ. But the philosophy expressed in the Usual Article avoids all these disadvantages by never coming into the world of reality at all. Its god is afraid to be born; its scripture is afraid to be written; it only manages to remain as the New Religion by always coming to-morrow and never to-day. It puffs itself out with spiritual pride, because it does not impose what it cannot even invent. It shines with Pharisaical self-satisfaction, because there are no crimes committed for its creed and no creed to be the motive of its crimes. This sort of critic is a surgeon who never performs an unsuccessful operation because he never operates; a soldier who never falls because he never fights. Anybody can talk for ever about a non-existent religion which shall be free from all the evils of existence. Anybody can dream of that entirely humane and harmonious Christianity, whose Christ is never born and never crucified. It is so easy to do, that half a hundred people in the papers and the public discussions have been doing nothing else for the last twenty or thirty years. But it is every bit as futile as applied to a spiritual ideal as it would be if applied to a scientific theory or a political programme; and I only mention it because I have just heard it for the hundredth time; and feel a faint hope that I may be mentioning it for the last time.

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IL SOLITO ARTICOLO

IL Direttore di un giornale della sera ha pubblicato di recente ciò che annunciava come, e persino di cui si scusava come «un articolo insolito». Si guardava ansiosamente dall’esprimere alcuna opinione sulle terribili e pericolose vedute che l’articolo insolito esponeva. Inutile dire che, prima di aver letto cinque righe dell’articolo insolito, sapevo che era un soddisfacente esemplare del solito articolo. Era persino una copia accurata e corretta del solito articolo; una sorta di esemplare da premio, come se una cosa potesse essere insolitamente solita. Avevo già letto l’articolo prima, s’intende: migliaia e migliaia di volte (così mi pare), e l’avevo sempre trovato uguale; ma mai prima, chissà come, m’era parso così esattamente uguale.

Vi sono cose di cui il mondo d’oggi è subconsciamente assai stanco. Non sempre sa quali siano; poiché esse recano comunemente ampie sebbene sbiadite etichette, che le descrivono come il Nuovo Movimento o l’Ultima Scoperta. Per esempio, gli uomini sono già stanchi dello Stato socialista come se vi avessero vissuto per mille anni. Ma vi sono alcune cose sulle quali la noia sta divenendo acuta. È ormai assai vicina alla superficie; e può d’un tratto destarsi sotto forma di suicidio o assassinio o lacerazione di giornali coi denti. Così è con questo familiare prodotto, il Solito Articolo. Non è soltanto troppo solito; è divenuto intollerabilmente, insopportabilmente, insostenibilmente solito. Viene appropriatamente descritto come «Il Grido di una Donna alle Chiese». E mi permetto di annunciare che, benché io sia di indole greve e placida, e non sia mai stato accusato di alcuna di quelle grazie femminili come l’isteria, tuttavia, se dovrò leggere questo articolo altre tre volte, mi metterò a strillare. Il mio strillo sarà intitolato: «Il Grido di un Uomo ai Giornali».

Ripeterò un po’ frettolosamente ciò che la dama in questione gridava; poiché il lettore lo sa già a memoria. Il messaggio di Cristo era perfettamente «semplice»: che il rimedio a ogni cosa è l’Amore; ma poiché Egli fu ucciso (non so bene perché) per aver fatto questa osservazione, gli sono stati eretti grandi templi e orribili persone chiamate preti non hanno dato al mondo altro che «pietre, amuleti, formule, shibboleth». Costoro inoltre «litigano eternamente fra loro sulla collocazione di un bottone o sul piegamento di un ginocchio». Tutto ciò non reca alcun conforto all’infelice cristiano, il quale a quanto pare desidera essere consolato soltanto sentendosi dire che ha un dovere verso il prossimo. «Quanti uomini nel momento del loro trapasso traggono conforto dal pensiero dei Trentanove Articoli, della Predestinazione, della Transustanziazione, della dottrina del castigo eterno, e della credenza che Cristo tornerà il Settimo Giorno?» Gli elementi formano un curioso catalogo; e l’ultimo elemento lo trovo particolarmente misterioso. Ma posso solo dire che, se Cristo fu il datore dell’originario e davvero consolante messaggio di amore, avrei pensato che facesse davvero differenza se Egli tornasse il Settimo Giorno. Quanto al resto di quel singolare elenco, troverei probabilmente necessario distinguere. Di certo non ho mai tratto alcuna profonda e sentita consolazione dal pensiero dei Trentanove Articoli. Non ho mai udito di alcuno in particolare che l’abbia fatto. Dell’idea della Predestinazione vi sono in larga massima due vedute; quella calvinista e quella cattolica; e farebbe una differenza quanto mai rara al MIO conforto, se sostenessi la prima anziché la seconda. È la differenza fra credere che Dio sappia, come fatto, che io scelgo di andare al diavolo; e credere che Dio mi abbia consegnato al diavolo, senza che io abbia alcuna scelta. Quanto alla Transustanziazione, è meno agevole parlarne correntemente; ma suggerirei con garbo che, per la maggior parte dei comuni estranei dotati di un po’ di buon senso, vi sarebbe una considerevole differenza pratica fra Jehovah che pervade l’universo e Gesù Cristo che entra nella stanza.

Ma tocco rapidamente e con riluttanza questi esempi, perché essi esemplificano una questione assai più ampia di questo interminabile modo di parlare. Consiste nel parlare come se il problema morale dell’uomo fosse perfettamente semplice, come tutti sanno che non è; e nel deprezzare poi i tentativi di risolverlo citando lunghe parole tecniche, e parlando di cerimonie insensate senza indagarne il senso. In altre parole, è esattamente come se qualcuno dicesse a proposito della scienza medica: «Tutto ciò che chiedo è la Salute; che cosa potrebbe esserci di più semplice del bel dono della Salute? Perché non accontentarsi di godere per sempre il fervore della gioventù e il fresco piacere di essere in forma? Perché studiare le aride e tetre scienze dell’anatomia e della fisiologia; perché indagare l’ubicazione di oscuri organi del corpo umano? Perché distinguere pedantescamente fra ciò che è etichettato come veleno e ciò che è etichettato come antidoto, quando è così semplice godersi la Salute? Perché angustiarsi con minuta esattezza sul numero di gocce di laudano o sulla forza di una dose di cloralio, quando è così bello essere sani? Via il vostro apparato sacerdotale di stetoscopi e termometri clinici; via la vostra pantomima ritualistica di tastare polsi, far cavar fuori la lingua, esaminare i denti, e il resto! Il dio Esculapio venne sulla terra unicamente per informarci che la Vita è nel complesso preferibile alla Morte; e questo pensiero consolerà molti moribondi non assistiti da medici».

In altre parole, il Solito Articolo, che conta ormai quasi diecimila edizioni, è sempre stato baggianate e assurdità anche quando era nuovo. Vi può essere, e vi è stata, pedanteria nella professione medica. Vi può essere, e vi è stata, teologia sottile o arida o priva di consolazione per gli uomini. Ma parlare come se fosse possibile a una scienza qualsiasi affrontare un problema qualsiasi senza sviluppare un linguaggio tecnico, e un metodo sempre metodico e spesso minuto, significa semplicemente che sei uno sciocco e non hai mai realmente affrontato affatto un problema. Del tutto a prescindere dalla teoria di una Chiesa, se Cristo fosse rimasto sulla terra per un tempo indefinito, cercando di indurre gli uomini ad amarsi l’un l’altro, avrebbe trovato necessario avere alcune prove, alcuni metodi, un qualche modo di dividere il vero amore dal falso amore, un qualche modo di distinguere fra le tendenze che rovinerebbero l’amore e le tendenze che lo restaurerebbero. Non si può fare una riuscita di alcunché, nemmeno dell’amare, del tutto senza pensare. Tutto ciò è così ovvio che parrebbe superfluo ripeterlo; e tuttavia è necessario ripeterlo, perché è la piatta contraddizione di esso a essere ora incessantemente ripetuta. La sua piattezza si stende attorno a noi come una vasta landa da ogni lato.

È un carattere del Solito Articolo che esso allude occasionalmente alla Nuova Religione; ma sempre in foggia piuttosto timida e remota. Suggerisce che vi sarà una credenza migliore e più ampia; benché di rado tocchi la credenza, ma solo l’ampiezza. Non vi è mai in esso, per caso, nulla che rassomigli anche solo alla nota del vero innovatore. Poiché il vero innovatore dev’essere in un certo senso un legislatore. Possiamo esprimerlo in foggia ostile, dicendo che il rivoluzionario diviene sempre il tiranno. Possiamo esprimerlo in foggia amichevole, dicendo che il riformatore deve tornare all’idea di forma. Ma chiunque fondi realmente una nuova religione, persino una falsa religione, deve avere una certa qualità di responsabilità. Deve rendersi responsabile di dire che alcune cose saranno proibite e altre permesse; che vi sarà un certo piano o sistema che dev’essere difeso dalla distruzione. E tutte le cose che in qualche modo rassomigliano a nuove religioni, per rendere loro giustizia, mostrano davvero questa qualità e patiscono questo svantaggio. La Scienza Cristiana è teoricamente fondata sulla pace e quasi sulla negazione della lotta. Ma malgrado ciò non vi è stata poca lotta nei consigli di quel credo; e le relazioni di tutti i successori della signora Eddy non sono state affatto relazioni di pace. Non lo dico come frecciata, ma piuttosto come tributo; direi che questi procedimenti provarono davvero che le persone coinvolte stavano cercando di fondare una vera religione. È un complimento agli Scienziati Cristiani dire che anch’essi avevano le loro prove e i loro credi, i loro anatemi e le loro scomuniche, le loro encicliche e le loro cacce all’eresia. Ma è un complimento agli Scienziati Cristiani che essi possono a stento usare come insulto ai Cristiani. Il Comunismo, persino nella sua forma finale di materialismo marxiano, aveva alcune delle qualità di una fede fresca e sincera. Ne aveva almeno una: che espelleva decisamente gli uomini per aver negato il credo. Tanto il Comunista quanto lo Scienziato Cristiano erano sotto questo grave svantaggio: che tramutavano davvero una fede in un fatto. Esiste una cosa come un governo bolscevico ed esso governa, anche se malgoverna. Esistono cose come i guaritori della Scienza Cristiana; esiste probabilmente una cosa come la guarigione della Scienza Cristiana, anche se non ammettiamo pienamente che la guarigione sia salute. Vi è una Chiesa in attiva operazione; e per questa ragione essa esibisce tutti i dogmi e le divergenze imputati alla Chiesa di Cristo. Ma la filosofia espressa nel Solito Articolo evita tutti questi svantaggi non entrando mai affatto nel mondo della realtà. Il suo dio ha paura di nascere; la sua scrittura ha paura di essere scritta; riesce a rimanere Nuova Religione soltanto venendo sempre domani e mai oggi. Si gonfia di orgoglio spirituale, perché non impone ciò che non sa nemmeno inventare. Risplende di autocompiacimento farisaico, perché non vi sono delitti commessi per il suo credo né credo alcuno che sia il movente dei suoi delitti. Questo genere di critico è un chirurgo che non compie mai un’operazione fallita perché non opera mai; un soldato che non cade mai perché non combatte mai. Chiunque può parlare in eterno di una religione inesistente che sarà libera da tutti i mali dell’esistenza. Chiunque può sognare quel Cristianesimo interamente umano e armonioso, il cui Cristo non nasce mai e non è mai crocifisso. È così facile da fare, che una cinquantina di persone sui giornali e nelle pubbliche discussioni non hanno fatto altro negli ultimi venti o trent’anni. Ma è del tutto altrettanto futile applicato a un ideale spirituale di quanto lo sarebbe applicato a una teoria scientifica o a un programma politico; e lo menziono soltanto perché l’ho appena udito per la centesima volta; e nutro una fioca speranza di poterlo menzionare per l’ultima volta.

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WHY I AM A CATHOLIC

A LEADING article in a daily paper was recently devoted to the New Prayer Book; without having anything very new to say about it. For it mostly consisted in repeating for the nine-hundredth-and-ninety-nine-thousandth time that what the ordinary Englishman wants is a religion without dogma (whatever that may be), and that the disputes about Church matters were idle and barren on both sides. Only, suddenly remembering that this equalisation of both sides might possibly involve some slight concession or consideration for our side, the writer hastily corrected himself. He proceeded to suggest that though it is wrong to be dogmatic, it is essential to be dogmatically Protestant. He suggested that the ordinary Englishman (that useful character) was quite convinced, in spite of his aversion to all religious differences, that it was vital to religion to go on differing from Catholicism. He is convinced (we were told) that “Britain is as Protestant as the sea is salt.” Gazing reverently at the profound Protestantism of Mr. Michael Arlen or Mr. Noel Coward, or the latest jazz dance in Mayfair, we might be tempted to ask: If the salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? But since we may rightly deduce from this passage that Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. James Douglas and Mr. Hannen Swaffer, and all their following, are indeed stern and unbending Protestants (and as we know that Protestants are famous for the close and passionate study of the Scriptures, unhindered by Pope or priest), we might even take the liberty of interpreting the saying in the light of a less familiar text. Is it possible that in comparing Protestantism to the salt of the sea they were haunted with some faint memory of another passage, in which the same Authority spoke of one single and sacred fountain that is of living water, because it is of life-giving water, and really quenches the thirst of men; while all other pools and puddles are distinguished from it by the fact that those who drink of them will thirst again. It is a thing that does occasionally happen to people who prefer to drink salt water.

This is perhaps a somewhat provocative way of opening the statement of my strongest conviction; but I would respectfully plead that the provocation came from the Protestant. When Protestantism calmly claims to rule all the souls in the tone of Britannia ruling all the seas, it is permissible to retort that the very quintessence of such salt can be found thickest in the stagnation of the Dead Sea. But it is still more permissible to retort that Protestantism is claiming what no religion at this moment can possibly claim. It is calmly claiming the allegiance of millions of agnostics, atheists, hedonistic pagans, independent mystics, psychic investigators, theists, theosophists, followers of Eastern cults and jolly fellows living like the beasts that perish. To pretend that all these are Protestants is considerably to lower the prestige and significance of Protestantism. It is to make it merely negative; and salt is not negative.

Taking this as a text and test of the present problem of religious choice, we find ourselves faced from the first with a dilemma about the traditional religion of our fathers. Protestantism as here named is either a negative or a positive thing. If Protestantism is a positive thing, there is no doubt whatever that it is dead. In so far as it really was a set of special spiritual beliefs it is no longer believed. The genuine Protestant creed is now hardly held by anybody—least of all by the Protestants. So completely have they lost faith in it, that they have mostly forgotten what it was. If almost any modern man be asked whether we save our souls solely through our theology, or whether doing good (to the poor, for instance) will help us on the road to God, he would answer without hesitation that good works are probably more pleasing to God than theology. It would probably come as quite a surprise to him to learn that, for three hundred years, the faith in faith alone was the badge of a Protestant, the faith in good works the rather shameful badge of a disreputable Papist. The ordinary Englishman (to bring in our old friend once more) would now be in no doubt whatever on the merits of the long quarrel between Catholicism and Calvinism. And that was the most important and intellectual quarrel between Catholicism and Protestantism. If he believes in a God at all, or even if he does not, he would quite certainly prefer a God who has made all men for joy, and desires to save them all, to a God who deliberately made some for involuntary sin and immortal misery. But that was the quarrel; and it was the Catholic who held the first and the Protestant who held the second. The modern man not only does not share, he does not even understand, the unnatural aversion of the Puritans to all art and beauty in relation to religion. Yet that was the real Protestant protest; and right into the Mid-Victorian time Protestant matrons were shocked at a white gown, let alone a coloured vestment. On practically every essential count on which the Reformation actually put Rome in the dock, Rome has since been acquitted by the jury of the whole world.

It Is perfectly true that we can find real wrongs, provoking rebellion, in the Roman Church just before the Reformation. What we cannot find is one ot those real wrongs that the Reformation reformed. For instance, it was an abominable abuse that the corruption of the monasteries sometimes permitted a rich noble to play the patron and even play at being the Abbot, or draw on the revenues supposed to belong to a brotherhood of poverty and charity. But all that the Reformation did was to allow the same rich noble to take over ALL the revenue, to seize the whole house and turn it into a palace or a pig-sty, and utterly stamp out the last legend of the poor brotherhood. The worst things in worldly Catholicism were made worse by Protestantism. But the best things remained somehow through the era of corruption; nay, they survived even the era of reform. They survive to-day in all Catholic countries, not only in the colour and poetry and popularity of religion, but in the deepest lessons of practical psychology. And so completely are they justified, after the judgment of four centuries, that every one of them is now being copied, even by those who condemned it; only it is often caricatured. Psycho-analysis is the Confessional without the safeguards of the Confessional; Communism is the Franciscan movement without the moderating balance of the Church; and American sects, having howled for three centuries at the Popish theatricality and mere appeal to the senses, now “brighten” their services by super-theatrical films and rays of rose-red light falling on the head of the minister. If we had a ray of light to throw about, we should not throw it on the minister.

PERCHÉ SONO CATTOLICO

UN articolo di fondo su un quotidiano è stato di recente dedicato al Nuovo Libro delle Preghiere; senza avere nulla di molto nuovo da dirne. Poiché consisteva perlopiù nel ripetere per la novecentonovantanovemillesima volta che ciò che l’inglese comune vuole è una religione senza dogmi (qualunque cosa ciò possa essere), e che le dispute intorno alle questioni di Chiesa erano oziose e sterili da entrambe le parti. Solo che, ricordandosi a un tratto che questa equiparazione delle due parti poteva forse comportare qualche lieve concessione o considerazione per la nostra parte, lo scrivente si corresse in fretta. Proseguì suggerendo che, benché sia sbagliato essere dogmatici, è essenziale essere dogmaticamente Protestanti. Suggerì che l’inglese comune (quell’utile personaggio) era del tutto convinto, a dispetto della sua avversione a tutte le divergenze religiose, che fosse vitale per la religione continuare a differire dal Cattolicesimo. Egli è convinto (ci veniva detto) che «la Britannia è protestante quanto il mare è salato». Contemplando reverentemente il profondo Protestantesimo del signor Michael Arlen o del signor Noel Coward, o dell’ultimo ballo jazz a Mayfair, potremmo essere tentati di chiedere: se il sale perde il suo sapore, con che cosa sarà salato? Ma poiché possiamo giustamente dedurre da questo passo che Lord Beaverbrook e il signor James Douglas e il signor Hannen Swaffer, e tutto il loro seguito, sono davvero rigidi e inflessibili Protestanti (e poiché sappiamo che i Protestanti sono famosi per lo studio attento e appassionato delle Scritture, non impacciati da Papa o prete), potremmo perfino prenderci la libertà di interpretare il detto alla luce di un testo meno familiare. È possibile che nel paragonare il Protestantesimo al sale del mare essi fossero perseguitati da qualche fioca memoria di un altro passo, in cui la medesima Autorità parlava di un’unica e sacra sorgente che è di Acqua viva, perché è di Acqua datrice di vita, e che davvero spegne la sete degli uomini; mentre tutti gli altri stagni e pozzanghere si distinguono da essa per il fatto che coloro che ne bevono avranno di nuovo sete. È una cosa che accade occasionalmente alle persone che preferiscono bere Acqua salata.

Questo è forse un modo alquanto provocatorio di aprire l’enunciazione della mia più forte convinzione; ma vorrei rispettosamente addurre che la provocazione è venuta dal Protestante. Quando il Protestantesimo pretende con calma di governare tutte le anime col tono di Britannia che governa tutti i mari, è lecito ribattere che la quintessenza stessa di tale sale si trova più densa nella stagnazione del Mar Morto. Ma è ancor più lecito ribattere che il Protestantesimo rivendica ciò che nessuna religione in questo momento può in alcun modo rivendicare. Rivendica con calma l’obbedienza di milioni di agnostici, atei, pagani edonisti, mistici indipendenti, investigatori dello psichico, teisti, teosofi, seguaci di culti orientali e allegri compari che vivono come le bestie che periscono. Pretendere che tutti costoro siano Protestanti significa abbassare considerevolmente il prestigio e il significato del Protestantesimo. Significa renderlo meramente negativo; e il sale non è negativo.

Prendendo ciò come testo e prova del presente problema della scelta religiosa, ci troviamo di primo acchito di fronte a un dilemma sulla religione tradizionale dei nostri padri. Il Protestantesimo, così come qui denominato, è o una cosa negativa o una cosa positiva. Se il Protestantesimo è una cosa positiva, non v’è alcun dubbio che sia morto. In quanto era davvero un insieme di speciali credenze spirituali, non è più creduto. Il genuino credo protestante non è ormai sostenuto quasi da nessuno, meno che mai dai Protestanti. Così completamente vi hanno perduto fede, che ne hanno perlopiù dimenticato ciò che era. Se si chiedesse a quasi qualsiasi uomo moderno se salviamo le nostre anime unicamente attraverso la nostra teologia, oppure se fare il bene (ai poveri, per esempio) ci aiuterà sulla via verso Dio, egli risponderebbe senza esitazione che le opere buone sono probabilmente più gradite a Dio della teologia. Gli giungerebbe probabilmente come una vera sorpresa apprendere che, per trecento anni, la fede nella fede sola fu il distintivo di un Protestante, la fede nelle opere buone il distintivo piuttosto vergognoso di un disonorevole Papista. L’inglese comune (per richiamare in scena il nostro vecchio amico ancora una volta) non sarebbe ormai in alcun dubbio sui meriti della lunga contesa fra Cattolicesimo e Calvinismo. E quella era la più importante e intellettuale contesa fra Cattolicesimo e Protestantesimo. Se egli crede affatto in un Dio, o persino se non ci crede, preferirebbe quasi certamente un Dio che ha fatto tutti gli uomini per la gioia, e desidera salvarli tutti, a un Dio che deliberatamente ne fece alcuni per il peccato involontario e la miseria immortale. Ma quella era la contesa; ed era il Cattolico a sostenere la prima e il Protestante a sostenere la seconda. L’uomo moderno non solo non condivide, ma non comprende nemmeno, l’innaturale avversione dei Puritani a ogni arte e bellezza in relazione alla religione. Eppure quella era la vera protesta protestante; e fin dentro l’epoca Medio-Vittoriana le matrone protestanti erano scandalizzate da una veste bianca, per non dire di un paramento colorato. Su praticamente ogni punto essenziale sul quale la Riforma mise davvero Roma sul banco degli imputati, Roma è stata da allora assolta dalla giuria del mondo intero.

È perfettamente vero che possiamo trovare torti reali, provocanti la ribellione, nella Chiesa Romana proprio prima della Riforma. Ciò che non possiamo trovare è uno di quei torti reali che la Riforma riformò. Per esempio, era un abominevole abuso che la corruzione dei monasteri talvolta permettesse a un ricco nobile di fare il patrono e persino di giocare a fare l’Abate, o di attingere alle rendite che si supponeva appartenessero a una confraternita di Povertà e Carità. Ma tutto ciò che la Riforma fece fu permettere allo stesso ricco nobile di appropriarsi di TUTTA la rendita, di impossessarsi dell’intera casa e di tramutarla in un palazzo o in un porcile, e di calpestare del tutto l’ultima leggenda della povera confraternita. Le cose peggiori nel Cattolicesimo mondano furono rese peggiori dal Protestantesimo. Ma le cose migliori sopravvissero in qualche modo attraverso l’era della corruzione; anzi, sopravvissero persino all’era della riforma. Sopravvivono oggi in tutti i paesi cattolici, non solo nel colore e nella poesia e nella popolarità della religione, ma nelle più profonde lezioni di psicologia pratica. E sono così completamente giustificate, dopo il giudizio di quattro secoli, che ciascuna di esse viene ora copiata, persino da coloro che la condannavano; solo che spesso è caricaturata. La psicoanalisi è il Confessionale senza le salvaguardie del Confessionale; il Comunismo è il movimento francescano senza il moderante equilibrio della Chiesa; e le sette americane, avendo urlato per tre secoli contro la teatralità papista e il mero appello ai sensi, ora «ravvivano» i loro riti con film super-teatrali e raggi di luce color rosa che cadono sul capo del ministro. Se noi avessimo un raggio di luce da gettare attorno, non lo getteremmo sul ministro.

Next, Protestantism may be a negative thing. In other words, it may be a new and totally different list of charges against Rome; and only in continuity because it is still against Rome. That is very largely what it is; and that is presumably what the DAILY EXPRESS really meant, when it said that our country and our countrymen are soaked in Protestantism as in salt. In other words, the legend that Rome is wrong anyhow, is still a living thing, though all the features of the monster are now entirely altered in the caricature. Even this is an exaggeration, as applied to the England of to-day; but there is still a truth in it. Only the truth, when truly realised, can hardly be very satisfactory to honest and genuine Protestants. For, after all, what sort of a tradition is this, that tells a different story every day or every decade, and is content so long as all the contradictory tales are told against one man or one institution? What sort of holy cause is it to inherit from our ancestors, that we should go on hating something and being consistent only in hatred; being fickle and false in everything else, even in our reason for hating it? Are we really to settle down seriously to make up a new set of stories against the bulk of our fellow-Christians? Is that Protestantism; and is that worth comparing to patriotism or the sea?

Anyhow, that was the situation I found myself facing when I began to think of these things, the child of a purely Protestant ancestry and, in the ordinary sense, of a Protestant household. But as a fact my family, having become Liberal, was no longer Protestant. I was brought up a sort of Universalist and Unitarian; at the feet of that admirable man, Stopford Brooke. It was not Protestantism save in a very negative sense. Often it was the flat contrary of Protestantism, even in that sense. For instance, the Universalist did not believe in hell; and he was emphatic in saying that heaven was a happy state of mind—“a temper.” But he had the sense to see that most men do not live or die in a state of mind so happy that it will alone ensure them a heaven. If heaven is a temper, it is certainly not a universal temper; and a good many people pass through this life in a devil of a temper. If all these were to have heaven, solely through happiness, it seemed clear that something must happen to them first. The Universalist therefore believed in a progress after death, at once punishment and enlightenment. In other words, he believed in Purgatory; though he did not believe in Hell. Right or wrong, he obviously and flatly contradicted the Protestant, who believed in Hell but not in Purgatory. Protestantism, through its whole history, had waged ceaseless war on this one idea of Purgatory or Progress beyond the grave. I have come to see in the complete Catholic view much deeper truths on all three ideas; truths concerned with will and creation and God’s most glorious love of liberty. But even at the start, though I had no thought of Catholicism, I could not see why I should have any concern with Protestantism; which had always said the very opposite of what a Liberal is now expected to say.

I found, in plain words, that there was no longer any question of clinging to the Protestant faith. It was simply a question of whether I should cling to the Protestant feud. And to my enormous astonishment, I found a large number of my fellow Liberals eager to go on with the Protestant feud, though they no longer held the Protestant faith. I have no title to judge them; but to me, I confess, it seemed like a rather ugly breach of honour. To find out that you have been slandering somebody about something, to refuse to apologise, and to make up another more plausible story against him, so that you can carry on the spirit of the slander, seemed to me at the start a rather poor way of behaving. I resolved at least to consider the original slandered institution on its own merits and the first and most obvious question was: Why were Liberals so very illiberal about it? What was the meaning of the feud, so constant and so inconsistent? That question took a long time to answer and would now take much too long a time to record. But it led me at last to the only logical answer, which every fact of life now confirms; that the thing is hated, as nothing else is hated, simply because it is, in the exact sense of the popular phrase, like nothing on earth.

There is barely space here to indicate this one thing out of the thousand things that confirm the same fact and confirm each other. I would undertake to pick up any topic at random, from pork to pyrotechnics, and show that it illustrates the truth of the only true philosophy; so realistic is the remark that all roads lead to Rome. Out of all these I have here only taken one fact; that the thing is pursued age after age by an unreasonable hatred that is perpetually changing its reason. Now of nearly all the dead heresies it may be said that they are not only dead, but damned; that is, they are condemned or would be condemned by common sense, even outside the Church, when once the mood and mania of them is passed. Nobody now wants to revive the Divine Right of Kings which the first Anglicans advanced against the Pope. Nobody now wants to revive the Calvinism which the first Puritans advanced against the King. Nobody now is sorry that the Iconoclasts were prevented from smashing all the statues of Italy. Nobody now is sorry that the Jansenists failed to destroy all the dramas of France. Nobody who knows anything about the Albigensians regrets that they did not convert the world to pessimism and perversion. Nobody who really understands the logic of the Lollards (a much more sympathetic set of people) really wishes that they had succeeded in taking away all political rights and privileges from everybody who was not in a state of grace. “Dominion founded on Grace” was a devout ideal, but considered as a plan for disregarding an Irish policeman controlling the traffic in Piccadilly, until we have discovered whether he has confessed recently to his Irish priest, it is wanting in actuality. In nine cases out of ten the Church simply stood for sanity and social balance against heretics who were sometimes very like lunatics. Yet at each separate moment the pressure of the prevalent error was very strong; the exaggerated error of a whole generation, like the strength of the Manchester School in the ‘fifties, or of Fabian Socialism as a fashion in my own youth. A study of the true historical cases commonly shows us the spirit of the age going wrong, and the Catholics at least relatively going right. It is a mind surviving a hundred moods.

As I say, this is only one aspect; but it was the first that affected me and it leads on to others. When a hammer has hit the right nail on the head a hundred times, there comes a time when we think it was not altogether by accident. But these historical proofs would be nothing without the human and personal proofs, which would need quite a different sort of description. It is enough to say that those who know the Catholic practice find it not only right, but always right when everything else is wrong; making the Confessional the very throne of candour where the world outside talks nonsense about it as a sort of conspiracy; upholding humility when everybody is praising pride; charged with sentimental charity when the world is talking a brutal utilitarianism; charged with dogmatic harshness when the world is loud and loose with vulgar sentimentalism—as it is to-day. At the place where the roads meet there is no doubt of the convergence. A man may think all sorts of things, most of them honest and many of them true, about the right way to turn in the maze at Hampton Court. But he does not think he is in the centre; he knows.

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Inoltre, il Protestantesimo può essere una cosa negativa. In altre parole, può essere un nuovo e del tutto diverso elenco di capi d’accusa contro Roma; e in continuità soltanto perché è ancora contro Roma. È in larghissima parte ciò che esso è; ed è presumibilmente ciò che il DAILY EXPRESS intendeva davvero, quando disse che il nostro paese e i nostri connazionali sono intrisi di Protestantesimo come di sale. In altre parole, la leggenda che Roma abbia comunque torto è ancora una cosa viva, benché tutti i tratti del Mostro siano ora del tutto alterati nella caricatura. Persino questo è un’esagerazione, applicato all’Inghilterra d’oggi; ma vi è ancora una verità in esso. Solo che la verità, quando è veramente compresa, può a stento riuscire assai soddisfacente a Protestanti onesti e genuini. Poiché, in fin dei conti, che sorta di tradizione è questa, che racconta una storia diversa ogni giorno o ogni decennio, e si accontenta purché tutte le contraddittorie storie siano raccontate contro un solo uomo o una sola istituzione? Che sorta di santa causa è questa da ereditare dai nostri antenati, per cui dovremmo continuare a odiare qualcosa ed essere coerenti solo nell’odio; essendo volubili e falsi in tutto il resto, persino nella nostra ragione per odiarlo? Dobbiamo davvero metterci seriamente all’opera per inventare un nuovo insieme di storie contro la maggior parte dei nostri fratelli cristiani? È questo il Protestantesimo; e vale la pena paragonarlo al patriottismo o al mare?

Comunque, quella era la situazione che mi trovai ad affrontare quando cominciai a pensare a queste cose, figlio di una discendenza puramente protestante e, nel senso comune, di una famiglia protestante. Ma di fatto la mia famiglia, essendo divenuta Liberale, non era più protestante. Fui allevato come una sorta di Universalista e Unitariano; ai piedi di quell’ammirevole uomo, Stopford Brooke. Non era Protestantesimo se non in un senso assai negativo. Spesso era il piatto contrario del Protestantesimo, persino in quel senso. Per esempio, l’Universalista non credeva nell’inferno; ed era enfatico nel dire che il paradiso era un felice stato d’animo, «un temperamento». Ma aveva il buon senso di vedere che la maggior parte degli uomini non vive né muore in uno stato d’animo tanto felice da assicurar loro, da solo, un paradiso. Se il paradiso è un temperamento, di certo non è un temperamento universale; e un buon numero di persone attraversa questa vita con un umore indiavolato. Se tutti costoro dovessero avere il paradiso, unicamente attraverso la felicità, pareva chiaro che qualcosa dovesse prima accader loro. L’Universalista dunque credeva in un progresso dopo la morte, insieme castigo e illuminazione. In altre parole, credeva nel Purgatorio; benché non credesse nell’Inferno. A torto o a ragione, egli ovviamente e piattamente contraddiceva il Protestante, che credeva nell’Inferno ma non nel Purgatorio. Il Protestantesimo, attraverso tutta la sua storia, aveva mosso guerra incessante a questa sola idea del Purgatorio o Progresso oltre la tomba. Sono giunto a vedere nella completa veduta cattolica verità assai più profonde su tutte e tre le idee; verità concernenti la volontà e la creazione e il più glorioso amore di Dio per la libertà. Ma persino all’inizio, benché non avessi alcun pensiero rivolto al Cattolicesimo, non riuscivo a vedere perché avessi dovuto avere alcun interesse per il Protestantesimo; il quale aveva sempre detto proprio l’opposto di ciò che ci si aspetta ora che un Liberale dica.

Trovai, in parole chiare, che non vi era più alcuna questione di aggrapparmi alla fede protestante. Era semplicemente una questione se dovessi aggrapparmi alla faida protestante. E con mio enorme stupore, trovai un gran numero dei miei compagni Liberali ansiosi di proseguire con la faida protestante, benché non sostenessero più la fede protestante. Non ho titolo per giudicarli; ma a me, lo confesso, pareva una violazione piuttosto brutta dell’onore. Scoprire di aver calunniato qualcuno su qualcosa, rifiutare di scusarsi, e inventare un’altra storia più plausibile contro di lui, così da poter portare avanti lo spirito della calunnia, mi pareva sin dall’inizio un modo di comportarsi piuttosto meschino. Decisi almeno di considerare l’originaria istituzione calunniata secondo i suoi propri meriti, e la prima e più ovvia domanda era: perché i Liberali erano così illiberali al riguardo? Qual era il significato della faida, così costante e così incoerente? Quella domanda impiegò un lungo tempo a trovare risposta e impiegherebbe ora un tempo fin troppo lungo a essere riferita. Ma mi condusse infine all’unica risposta logica, che ogni fatto della vita ora conferma; ossia che quella cosa è odiata, come nient’altro è odiato, semplicemente perché è, nel senso esatto della frase popolare, come nulla al mondo.

Vi è appena spazio qui per indicare quest’unica cosa fra le mille cose che confermano il medesimo fatto e si confermano l’un l’altra. Mi impegnerei a scegliere un qualsiasi argomento a caso, dal maiale alla pirotecnica, e a mostrare che esso illustra la verità dell’unica vera filosofia; tanto realistica è l’osservazione che tutte le strade conducono a Roma. Fra tutte queste ne ho qui preso un solo fatto; che quella cosa è perseguitata epoca dopo epoca da un odio irragionevole che muta perpetuamente la propria ragione. Ora, di quasi tutte le eresie morte si può dire che non sono soltanto morte, ma dannate; ossia che sono condannate o sarebbero condannate dal buon senso, persino fuori della Chiesa, una volta passati l’umore e la mania che le animavano. Nessuno ora vuole far rivivere il Diritto Divino dei Re che i primi Anglicani opposero al Papa. Nessuno ora vuole far rivivere il Calvinismo che i primi Puritani opposero al Re. Nessuno ora si rammarica che gli Iconoclasti siano stati impediti dallo sfracellare tutte le statue d’Italia. Nessuno ora si rammarica che i Giansenisti non siano riusciti a distruggere tutti i drammi di Francia. Nessuno che sappia alcunché sugli Albigesi rimpiange che essi non abbiano convertito il mondo al pessimismo e alla perversione. Nessuno che comprenda davvero la logica dei Lollardi (una schiera di persone assai più simpatica) desidera davvero che essi fossero riusciti a sottrarre tutti i diritti e i privilegi politici a chiunque non si trovasse in stato di grazia. «Il Dominio fondato sulla Grazia» era un devoto ideale, ma considerato come piano per ignorare un poliziotto irlandese che regola il traffico a Piccadilly, finché non abbiamo scoperto se egli si sia confessato di recente al suo prete irlandese, difetta di attualità. In nove casi su dieci la Chiesa si erse semplicemente a favore della Sanità mentale e dell’equilibrio sociale contro eretici che talvolta somigliavano assai a lunatici. Eppure in ogni singolo momento la pressione dell’errore prevalente era assai forte; l’errore esagerato di un’intera generazione, come la forza della Scuola di Manchester negli anni Cinquanta, o del Socialismo Fabiano come moda nella mia stessa giovinezza. Uno studio dei veri casi storici comunemente ci mostra lo spirito dell’epoca andare storto, e i Cattolici andare almeno relativamente diritto. È una mente che sopravvive a cento umori.

Come dico, questo è solo un aspetto; ma fu il primo che mi toccò e conduce ad altri. Quando un martello ha colpito il chiodo giusto sulla testa cento volte, giunge un momento in cui pensiamo che non fosse del tutto per caso. Ma queste prove storiche non sarebbero nulla senza le prove umane e personali, che richiederebbero una descrizione di tutt’altro genere. Basti dire che coloro che conoscono la pratica cattolica la trovano non solo giusta, ma sempre giusta quando ogni altra cosa è sbagliata; facendo del Confessionale il vero trono del candore là dove il mondo esterno ne parla come di una sorta di cospirazione; sostenendo l’Umiltà quando tutti lodano l’Orgoglio; accusata di Carità sentimentale quando il mondo parla di un brutale utilitarismo; accusata di durezza dogmatica quando il mondo è rumoroso e sciolto di volgare sentimentalismo, com’è oggi. Nel luogo dove le strade s’incontrano non v’è alcun dubbio della convergenza. Un uomo può pensare ogni sorta di cose, la maggior parte oneste e molte vere, sul modo giusto di svoltare nel labirinto di Hampton Court. Ma egli non pensa di essere al centro; egli lo sa.

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WHAT DO THEY THINK?

ALL science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive. The Catholic Church remains in the best sense a mystery even to believers. It would be foolish of them to complain if it is a riddle to unbelievers. But in a more practical sense we may well ask a question. What do they think it really is? What do they think we think it really is? What do they think it is all about, or even supposed to be all about? That problem becomes darker and darker for me, the more I stare at it. It becomes black as midnight, for instance, when I stare at such a sentence as I saw recently in TRUTH, a singularly intelligent and often a highly valuable paper. It stated that Rome tolerates, in her relation with the Russian Uniats, “strange heresies and even bearded and wedded clergy.”

In that one extraordinary phrase, what formless monster begins to take form in their visions? In those eight words it is not too much to say that every term is startling in its inconsequence. As somebody tumbling down the stairs bumps upon every step, the writer comes a crash upon every word. The word “strange” is strange enough. The word “heresy” is stranger. Perhaps at first sight the word “bearded,” with its joyous reminiscences of the game of Beaver, may appear the most funny. “Wedded” is also funny. Even the “and” between bearded and wedded is funny. But by far the funniest and most fantastic thing in all that fantastic sentence is the word “even.”

It is not everybody who can thus bestrew a page with comic conjunctions and farcical particles of speech. Only a wild unreason, about the whole way the thing hangs together, could thus make even the joints and hinges of that rickety statement rattle and creak with laughter. We can hardly say of this version of the Roman Catholic faith that it is a false version, or that it differs from the true version, or even that it differs from our version. What is the version; and how can it be even their version? There is in the world, they would tell us, a powerful and persecuting superstition, intoxicated with the impious idea of having a monopoly of divine truth, and therefore cruelly crushing and exterminating everything else as error. It burns thinkers for thinking, discoverers for discovering, philosophers and theologians who differ by a hair’s breadth from its dogmas; it will tolerate no tiny change or shadow of variety even among its friends and followers; it sweeps the whole world with one encyclical cyclone of uniformity; it would destroy nations and empires for a word, so wedded is it to its fixed idea that its own word is the Word of God. When it is thus sweeping the world, it comes to a remote and rather barbarous region somewhere on the borders of Russia; where it stops suddenly; smiles broadly; and tells the people there that they can have the strangest heresies they like. Strange heresies, by the standard of strangeness likely to exist in an experience so long as that of the Roman Church, may well be very strange indeed. The Church is no stranger to heresies that involved human sacrifice, or the worship of demons, or the practice of perversions. We might well suppose, therefore, that the Church says benevolently to these fortunate Slavs, “By all means worship Baphomet and Beelzebub; say the Lord’s Prayer backwards; continue to drink the blood of infants—nay, even,” and here her voice falters, till she rallies with an effort of generous resolution, “—yes, even, if you really must, grow a beard.” And then, I suppose, we must call up yet darker and more dreadful visions, of the heretic hiding himself in secret places, in caverns of witchcraft or sealed gardens of black magic, while the blasphemous beard is grown. Nobody explains why these particular Eastern Europeans should be regarded with so much favour, or why a number of long hairs on the chin should be regarded with so much disfavour. It is presumably a problem on which this intolerant spiritual tyranny will suffer no question to be asked.

Does the reader realise the despair that falls upon the hapless Catholic journalist at such moments; or how wild a prayer he may well send up for the intercession of St. Francis of Sales? What is he to say; or at what end of that sentence is he to begin? What is the good of his laboriously beginning to explain that a married clergy is a matter of discipline and not doctrine, that it can therefore be allowed locally without heresy—when all the time the man thinks a beard as important as a wife and more important than a false religion? What is the sense of explaining to him the peculiar historical circumstances that have led to preserving some local habits in Kiev or Warsaw, when the man at any moment may receive a mortal shock by seeing a bearded Franciscan walking through Wimbledon or Walham Green? What we want to get at is the mind of the man who can think so absurdly about us as to suppose we could have a horror of heresy, and then a weakness for heresy, and then a greater horror of hair. To what does he attribute all the inconsistent nonsense and inconsequent bathos that he associates with us? Does he think we are all joking; or all dreaming; or all out of our minds; or what does he think? Until we have got at that, we have really got very little further.

The notion that he merely thinks the Church is all nonsense is not very consistent with the way in which he talks about her in other aspects; as when he says she has always resisted such and such changes, which he perhaps approves; or that she can be counted on as an influence for such and such principles, which he perhaps dislikes; or that she is forbidden to accept this doctrine or committed to defending that. But what he can possibly suppose to be the principle upon which she accepts or rejects doctrines I never can imagine. And the more we really come in contact with the puzzle, the more we shall feel, I think, something quite unique and even creepy about it. It is like the old fable of the five blind men who tried to explore an elephant; a fable that used to be told as a sort of farce; but which I can well imagine being told by Maeterlinck or some modern mystic so as to make the flesh creep with mysteries. The thing is at once so obvious and so invisible; so public and so impalpable; so universal and so secret. They say so much about it; and they say so little. They see so much of it; and they see so little. There is a sort of colossal contradiction, such as can only be conceived between different dimensions or different planes of thought, in the coexistence of such familiar fact and such utterly unknown truth. Indeed, there is only one combination of words I know of, which ever did exactly express so huge a human and historical paradox; and they also are familiar and unfathomable: “The light shone in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not.”

Some part of the difficulty is doubtless due to the odd way in which so many people are at once preoccupied with it and prejudiced against it. It is queer to observe so much ignorance with so little indifference. They love talking about it and they hate hearing about it. It would seem that they especially hate asking about it. If, for instance, a man contributing to TRUTH, in the middle of educated London, really were a little puzzled by Rome making an exception of the Uniats, and were perhaps especially puzzled by an exception to the celibacy of the clergy (I omit his dark and inscrutable broodings on the subject of Beavers) might it not have occurred to him to go and ask some Catholic priest, or for that matter, some Catholic layman, and thus gain some sort of rough idea of the relative importance attached in our system to celibacy and heresy and hair on the face? Could he not have gained a glimpse of the usual order or hierarchy of these ideas, which would have prevented him from writing the staggering word “and” or the stunning word “even”? But I am inclined to suspect that even this omission, negative as it may seem, has in it something deeper than mere negligence. I fancy that there is more than meets the eye in this curious controversial attitude; the desire to ask rhetorical questions and not to ask real questions; the wish to heckle and not to hear. It may well be connected with more mystical aspects of the whole question, on which I am certainly not going to speculate, since they are admittedly the most subtle problems of the trained theologian; all those questions about the will to believe and the operations of grace; and the fact that something more than reason is needed to bring any of us into the most reasonable of all philosophies.

But apart from these mysteries, I think there is another reason that is human and historical. The thing that causes Catholic philosophy to be neglected is the very thing that really makes it impossible to neglect. It is the fact that it was something left for dead; and now rather incredibly come to life. An ordinary man would not mind very much whether he knew the exact ritual with which Roman augurs examined the entrails of beasts or watched the movements of birds; because he is certain that the world will not go back to that Roman religion. The world was once almost as certain that it would not go back to this other Roman religion. A man would not be very much ashamed of having put the metals in the wrong order in the imaginary formula of an alchemist, described in a historical romance; because he is convinced that alchemists can only return in romance and can never return in history. There was a time when he felt quite as safe about abbots as about alchemists. That time has already passed. That mere confident contempt, as I have said, has already been succeeded by a rather restless curiosity. But mental habits overlap; and the dead momentum of the old disregard of facts goes along side by side with a new movement of anxiety about possibilities. They would not be so ignorant about it if they had not decided that it was dead. They would not be so irritated about it if they had not discovered that it was alive. For ignorance accumulates like knowledge; and these newly aroused critics are the inheritors of the accruing interest of four hundred years of an ignorance that became an indifference. At this moment they are no longer indifferent; but they are still ignorant. They have been awakened suddenly in the watches of the night, and what they see they can neither deny nor understand. For they see one that was dead walking; and the blaze of that living death blasts or obliterates all the older details of life; and all the fables they have believed and all the facts they have forgotten are alike swallowed up in the miracle they can neither believe nor forget.

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CHE COSA PENSANO?

OGNI scienza, persino la scienza divina, è una sublime storia poliziesca. Solo che non è disposta per scoprire perché un uomo è morto; ma il più oscuro segreto del perché egli è vivo. La Chiesa Cattolica rimane nel senso migliore un mistero persino per i credenti. Sarebbe sciocco da parte loro lamentarsi se essa è un enigma per i non credenti. Ma in un senso più pratico possiamo ben porre una domanda. Che cosa pensano essi che essa sia realmente? Che cosa pensano essi che noi pensiamo che essa sia realmente? Che cosa pensano essi che sia tutto quanto, o persino che si supponga sia tutto quanto? Quel problema si fa sempre più oscuro per me, quanto più lo fisso. Diventa nero come la mezzanotte, per esempio, quando fisso una frase come quella che ho veduto di recente su TRUTH, un giornale singolarmente intelligente e spesso assai pregevole. Esso affermava che Roma tollera, nel suo rapporto con gli Uniati russi, «strane eresie e persino un clero barbuto e ammogliato».

In quell’unica straordinaria frase, quale informe Mostro comincia a prender forma nelle loro visioni? In quelle otto parole non è troppo dire che ogni termine è sconcertante nella sua incongruenza. Come chi rotola giù dalle scale urta contro ogni gradino, lo scrivente va a schiantarsi contro ogni parola. La parola «strane» è già abbastanza strana. La parola «eresia» è più strana. Forse a prima vista la parola «barbuto», con le sue gioiose reminiscenze del gioco del Castoro, può apparire la più buffa. «Ammogliato» è pure buffo. Persino la «e» fra barbuto e ammogliato è buffa. Ma di gran lunga la cosa più buffa e fantastica in tutta quella fantastica frase è la parola «persino».

Non è chiunque che sappia così cospargere una pagina di comiche congiunzioni e di farsesche particelle del discorso. Solo una selvaggia irragionevolezza, riguardo a tutto il modo in cui la cosa sta insieme, poteva così far scricchiolare e cigolare di risa persino le giunture e le cerniere di quella traballante affermazione. Difficilmente possiamo dire di questa versione della Fede Cattolica Romana che è una versione falsa, o che differisce dalla versione vera, o persino che differisce dalla nostra versione. Qual è la versione; e come può essere persino la loro versione? Vi è nel mondo, ci direbbero, una potente e persecutrice superstizione, inebriata dall’empia idea di avere il monopolio della verità divina, e perciò crudelmente schiacciante e sterminante ogni altra cosa come errore. Essa arde i pensatori per aver pensato, gli scopritori per aver scoperto, i filosofi e i teologi che differiscono di un capello dai suoi dogmi; non tollera alcun minimo cambiamento o ombra di varietà nemmeno fra i suoi amici e seguaci; spazza il mondo intero con un solo ciclone enciclico di uniformità; distruggerebbe nazioni e imperi per una parola, tanto è sposata alla sua idea fissa che la sua stessa parola sia la Parola di Dio. Quando così sta spazzando il mondo, giunge a una regione remota e piuttosto barbara da qualche parte ai confini della Russia; dove si arresta d’un tratto; sorride largamente; e dice alla gente di là che possono avere le più strane eresie che vogliono. Strane eresie, secondo il metro di stranezza che è probabile esista in un’esperienza tanto lunga quanto quella della Chiesa Romana, possono ben essere assai strane davvero. La Chiesa non è nuova a eresie che comportavano il sacrificio umano, o il culto dei demoni, o la pratica di perversioni. Potremmo ben supporre, dunque, che la Chiesa dica benevolmente a questi fortunati Slavi: «Adorate pure Bafometto e Belzebù; recitate la Preghiera del Signore all’incontrario; continuate a bere il sangue dei lattanti; anzi, persino», e qui la sua voce vacilla, finché non si riprende con uno sforzo di generosa risolutezza, «sì, persino, se proprio dovete, fatevi crescere la barba». E poi, suppongo, dobbiamo evocare visioni ancor più oscure e più tremende, dell’eretico che si nasconde in luoghi segreti, in caverne di stregoneria o in giardini sigillati di nera Magia, mentre la blasfema barba viene fatta crescere. Nessuno spiega perché questi particolari Europei dell’Est debbano essere riguardati con tanto favore, o perché un certo numero di lunghi peli sul mento debba essere riguardato con tanto disfavore. È presumibilmente un problema sul quale questa intollerante tirannia spirituale non permetterà che si ponga alcuna domanda.

Si rende conto il lettore della disperazione che coglie lo sventurato giornalista cattolico in tali momenti; o di quanto selvaggia preghiera egli possa ben innalzare per l’intercessione di san Francesco di Sales? Che cosa deve dire; o da quale estremità di quella frase deve cominciare? A che serve che egli cominci laboriosamente a spiegare che un clero ammogliato è materia di disciplina e non di dottrina, che può perciò essere permesso localmente senza eresia, quando per tutto il tempo quell’uomo ritiene una barba importante quanto una moglie e più importante di una falsa religione? Che senso ha spiegargli le peculiari circostanze storiche che hanno condotto a preservare alcune abitudini locali a Kiev o a Varsavia, quando quell’uomo può in qualunque momento ricevere uno shock mortale nel vedere un francescano barbuto attraversare Wimbledon o Walham Green? Ciò che vogliamo cogliere è la mente dell’uomo che può pensare di noi in modo tanto assurdo da supporre che noi possiamo avere un orrore dell’eresia, e poi una debolezza per l’eresia, e poi un più grande orrore dei capelli. A che cosa attribuisce egli tutte le incoerenti insensatezze e gli inconseguenti bathos che associa a noi? Pensa egli che scherziamo tutti; o che sogniamo tutti; o che siamo tutti fuori di senno; o che cosa pensa? Finché non abbiamo colto ciò, non siamo davvero andati molto più avanti.

L’idea che egli pensi semplicemente che la Chiesa sia tutta un’assurdità non è molto coerente col modo in cui egli parla di lei sotto altri aspetti; come quando dice che ella ha sempre resistito a questo o quel cambiamento, che egli forse approva; o che si può contare su di lei come influenza a favore di questo o quel principio, che egli forse detesta; o che le è proibito accettare questa dottrina o è impegnata a difendere quella. Ma quale principio egli possa mai supporre che sia quello secondo cui ella accetta o respinge le dottrine, io non riesco proprio a immaginare. E quanto più veniamo davvero a contatto con l’enigma, tanto più sentiremo, penso, qualcosa di del tutto unico e persino inquietante in esso. È come la vecchia Favola dei cinque ciechi che tentarono di esplorare un elefante; una Favola che si soleva raccontare come una sorta di farsa; ma che posso ben immaginare narrata da Maeterlinck o da qualche mistico moderno così da far accapponare la pelle di misteri. La cosa è a un tempo così ovvia e così invisibile; così pubblica e così impalpabile; così universale e così segreta. Ne dicono tanto; e ne dicono così poco. Ne vedono tanto; e ne vedono così poco. Vi è una sorta di colossale contraddizione, quale può concepirsi soltanto fra diverse dimensioni o diversi piani del pensiero, nella coesistenza di un fatto tanto familiare e di una verità tanto del tutto ignota. Anzi, vi è una sola combinazione di parole che io conosca, che abbia mai espresso con esattezza un Paradosso umano e storico tanto immenso; e anch’esse sono familiari e insondabili: «La luce risplendette nelle tenebre, e le tenebre non la compresero».

Parte della difficoltà è indubbiamente dovuta al modo bizzarro in cui tante persone sono a un tempo preoccupate di essa e prevenute contro di essa. È strano osservare tanta ignoranza con così poca indifferenza. Essi amano parlarne e odiano sentirne parlare. Parrebbe che odino specialmente domandarne. Se, per esempio, un uomo che collabora a TRUTH, nel mezzo della Londra colta, fosse davvero un po’ perplesso per il fatto che Roma faccia un’eccezione per gli Uniati, e fosse forse specialmente perplesso per un’eccezione al celibato del clero (ometto le sue oscure e imperscrutabili meditazioni sull’argomento dei Castori), non avrebbe potuto venirgli in mente di andare a chiedere a qualche prete cattolico, o se è per questo a qualche laico cattolico, e così ottenere una sorta di rozza idea della relativa importanza attribuita nel nostro sistema al celibato e all’eresia e ai peli sul viso? Non avrebbe potuto cogliere uno scorcio del consueto ordine o gerarchia di queste idee, che gli avrebbe impedito di scrivere la sconcertante parola «e» o la stordente parola «persino»? Ma sono incline a sospettare che persino questa omissione, per quanto negativa possa sembrare, abbia in sé qualcosa di più profondo della mera negligenza. Immagino che vi sia più di quanto appaia all’occhio in questo curioso atteggiamento polemico; il desiderio di porre domande retoriche e non di porre domande reali; la voglia di provocare e non di ascoltare. Può ben essere connesso con aspetti più mistici dell’intera questione, sui quali di certo non intendo speculare, poiché sono riconosciutamente i più sottili problemi del teologo esperto; tutte quelle questioni sulla volontà di credere e sulle operazioni della grazia; e il fatto che occorra qualcosa di più della ragione per condurre chiunque di noi nella più ragionevole di tutte le filosofie.

Ma a parte questi misteri, penso che vi sia un’altra ragione che è umana e storica. La cosa che fa sì che la filosofia cattolica sia trascurata è la stessa cosa che rende davvero impossibile trascurarla. È il fatto che essa era qualcosa lasciato per morto; e ora piuttosto incredibilmente tornato in vita. Un uomo comune non si curerebbe molto se conoscesse l’esatto rituale con cui gli auguri romani esaminavano le viscere delle bestie o osservavano i movimenti degli uccelli; perché è certo che il mondo non tornerà a quella religione romana. Il mondo era un tempo quasi altrettanto certo che non sarebbe tornato a quest’altra religione romana. Un uomo non si vergognerebbe molto di aver posto i metalli nell’ordine sbagliato nella formula immaginaria di un alchimista, descritta in un romanzo storico; perché è convinto che gli alchimisti possano tornare solo nel romanzo e non possano mai tornare nella storia. Vi fu un tempo in cui egli si sentiva altrettanto al sicuro riguardo agli abati quanto riguardo agli alchimisti. Quel tempo è già passato. Quel mero sicuro disprezzo, come ho detto, è già stato sostituito da una curiosità piuttosto irrequieta. Ma le abitudini mentali si sovrappongono; e il morto slancio del vecchio disprezzo dei fatti procede fianco a fianco con un nuovo movimento di ansia sulle possibilità. Non sarebbero così ignoranti al riguardo se non avessero deciso che era morta. Non sarebbero così irritati al riguardo se non avessero scoperto che era viva. Poiché l’ignoranza si accumula come la conoscenza; e questi critici di recente destati sono gli eredi dell’interesse maturato di quattrocento anni di un’ignoranza divenuta indifferenza. In questo momento essi non sono più indifferenti; ma sono ancora ignoranti. Sono stati risvegliati d’un tratto nelle veglie della Notte, e ciò che vedono non sanno né negare né comprendere. Poiché vedono uno che era morto camminare; e il bagliore di quella viva Morte acceca o oblitera tutti i più antichi dettagli della vita; e tutte le favole in cui hanno creduto e tutti i fatti che hanno dimenticato sono egualmente inghiottiti nel miracolo che non sanno né credere né dimenticare.

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THE MASK OF THE AGNOSTIC

SIR ARTHUR KEITH, in his recent remarks on the soul, let the cat out of the bag. He let it out of that very prim and proper professional bag which is carried by the “medical man” whom he described as conscientiously compelled to assert that the life of the soul ceases with the breath of the body. Perhaps the figure which fits in so well with the bag is less fortunate in the case of the cat; a mystic animal, whose nine lives might rather be supposed to represent immortality, at least in the form of reincarnation. But anyhow, he let the cat out of the bag; in the sense of revealing a secret which such wise men would be wiser to keep. It is the secret that such scientists do not speak as scientists, but simply as materialists. That is, they do not give their conclusions, but simply their opinions; and a very shaky sort of opinions some of them are.

Not long ago, in his famous address on Anthropoids to the Congress at Leeds, Sir Arthur Keith said that he spoke simply as the foreman of a jury. It is true that he had not apparently consulted the jury; and it was rapidly made clear that the jury violently disagreed; which is unusual in a jury after the foreman has delivered the verdict. Still, in using this image he meant to claim complete impartiality of a judicial sort. He meant that a juryman is bound by oath to go entirely by the facts and the evidence, without fear or favour. And this effect would be a hundred times more effective if we were left free to imagine that the juryman’s personal sympathies might be on the other side; or at least, if we did not know that they were very keenly on the one side. Sir Arthur should have been careful to preserve the impression that, speaking strictly and solely as an anthropologist, he was forced to accept the natural selection of anthropoids. He should then have left it to be inferred that, merely as a private person, he might be yearning for seraphic visions and celestial hopes; he might be searching the Scriptures or awaiting the Apocalypse. For all it was any business of ours, or any business of anybody’s, he might be in private life a Mormon multiplying the stars in his heavenly crown or a Holy Roller continually convulsed by the Holy Ghost. The point was that the facts forced the Darwinian conclusion upon him. And a man of that sort, being forced to accept them, would be a real witness because a reluctant witness. In the trial of Darwin the man might feel for the plaintiff, but the juryman would be forced to find for the defendant.

And now Sir Arthur Keith has thrown the whole of that imperial impartiality away. He has gone out of his way to dogmatise and lay down the law about the soul; which has nothing to do with his subject, except in so far as it is everybody’s subject. But while it does not relate to what is his subject, it has told everybody which is his side. It has turned the foreman of the jury into a very unmistakable advocate for that side. Indeed, such a partisan is more like a party to the suit than an advocate; since it is the whole point that as a private person he has long had the private prejudice. Henceforth it is obvious that Keith deciding for Darwin is simply like Bradlaugh deciding for Darwin, or Ingersoll deciding for Darwin, or any atheist on a stool in Hyde Park deciding for Darwin. When THEY choose the side of natural selection, we can all agree that it is a very natural selection.

As to the conclusion itself, it seems almost incredibly inconclusive. Unless Sir Arthur Keith is very badly misreported, he specially stated that spiritual existence ceases with the physical functions; and that no medical man could conscientiously say anything else. However grave be the injury called death (which indeed is often fatal), this strikes me as a case in which it is quite unnecessary to call in a medical man at all. There is always a certain irony, even in the simple pages of my favourite detective stories, in the fact that everybody rushes for a doctor as soon as they are quite certain that a man is dead. But in the detective story there may at least be something to be learnt by the doctor from the dead body. In the doctrinal speculation there is nothing whatever; and it does but confuse the eternal detective story for the doctor of medicine to pretend to be a doctor of divinity. The truth is that all this business about “a medical man” is mere bluff and mystagogy. The medical man “sees” that the mind has ceased with the body. What the medical man sees is that the body can no longer kick, talk, sneeze, whistle or dance a jig. And a man does not need to be very medical in order to see that. But whether the principle of energy, that once made it kick, talk, sneeze, whistle and dance, does or does not still exist on some other plane of existence— a medical man knows no more about that than any other man. And when medical men were clear-headed, some of them (like an ex-surgeon named Thomas Henry Huxley) said they did not believe that medical men or any men could know anything about it. That is an intelligible position; but it does not seem to be Sir Arthur Keith’s position. He has been put up publicly to DENY that the soul survives the body; and to make the extraordinary remark that any medical man must say the same. It is as if we were to say that any competent builder or surveyor must deny the possibility of the Fourth Dimension; because he has learnt the technical secret that a building is measured by length, breadth and height. The obvious query is—Why bring in a surveyor? Everybody knows that everything is in fact measured by three dimensions. Anybody who thinks there is a fourth dimension thinks so in spite of being well aware that things are generally measured by three. Or it is as if a man were to answer a Berkeleian metaphysician, who holds all matter to be an illusion of mind, by saying, “I can call the evidence of an intelligent navvy who actually has to deal with solid concrete and cast iron; and he will tell you they are quite real.” We should naturally answer that we do not need a navvy to tell us that solid things are solid; and it is quite in another sense that the philosopher says they are not solid. Similarly, there is nothing to make a medical man a materialist, except what might make any man a materialist. And it is when a man has absorbed all that obvious materialism that he begins to use his mind. And, as some hold, does not stop.

LA MASCHERA DELL’AGNOSTICO

SIR ARTHUR KEITH, nelle sue recenti osservazioni sull’anima, ha fatto uscire il gatto dal sacco. Lo ha fatto uscire da quella borsa oltremodo compìta e corretta, la borsa professionale portata da quel «medico» ch’egli descriveva come coscienziosamente costretto ad affermare che la vita dell’anima cessa col respiro del corpo. Forse la figura che s’accorda così bene con la borsa è meno felice nel caso del gatto; animale mistico, le cui nove vite si potrebbero piuttosto supporre rappresentino l’immortalità, almeno nella forma della reincarnazione. Ma comunque sia, ha fatto uscire il gatto dal sacco; nel senso di rivelare un segreto che uomini tanto saggi sarebbero più saggi a custodire. È il segreto che simili scienziati non parlano come scienziati, ma semplicemente come materialisti. Vale a dire, non danno le loro conclusioni, ma semplicemente le loro opinioni; e opinioni di sorta assai malferma sono alcune di esse.

Non molto tempo fa, nel suo celebre discorso sugli Antropoidi al Congresso di Leeds, Sir Arthur Keith disse di parlare semplicemente come il capo dei giurati. È vero che non aveva, a quanto pare, consultato la giuria; e ben presto fu reso chiaro che la giuria dissentiva violentemente; cosa insolita in una giuria dopo che il capo ha pronunciato il verdetto. Tuttavia, adoperando questa immagine intendeva rivendicare la completa imparzialità di ordine giudiziario. Intendeva che un giurato è vincolato dal giuramento ad attenersi interamente ai fatti e alle prove, senza timore né favore. E tale effetto sarebbe cento volte più efficace se ci fosse lasciata la libertà d’immaginare che le simpatie personali del giurato potessero stare dall’altra parte; o almeno, se non sapessimo che stavano assai vivamente da una sola parte. Sir Arthur avrebbe dovuto badare a preservare l’impressione che, parlando rigorosamente e unicamente come antropologo, egli fosse costretto ad accettare la selezione naturale degli antropoidi. Avrebbe poi dovuto lasciar dedurre che, semplicemente come persona privata, egli potesse anelare a visioni serafiche e speranze celesti; potesse scrutare le Scritture o attendere l’Apocalisse. Per quanto fosse affar nostro, o affare di chicchessia, egli poteva nella vita privata essere un mormone che moltiplica le stelle della sua corona celeste, o un Holy Roller di continuo scosso dallo Spirito Santo. Il punto era che i fatti gli imponevano la conclusione darwiniana. E un uomo di tal fatta, costretto ad accettarli, sarebbe un testimone autentico perché testimone riluttante. Nel processo a Darwin l’uomo poteva parteggiare per l’attore, ma il giurato sarebbe stato costretto a pronunciarsi per il convenuto.

E ora Sir Arthur Keith ha gettato via tutta quell’imperiale imparzialità. È andato fuori strada per dogmatizzare e dettar legge sull’anima; il che nulla ha a che vedere col suo argomento, se non in quanto è argomento di tutti. Ma se pure non attiene a ciò che è il suo argomento, ha rivelato a tutti da quale parte egli stia. Ha trasformato il capo dei giurati in un patrono affatto inequivocabile di quella parte. Anzi, un simile fazioso somiglia più a una parte in causa che a un patrono; giacché il punto sta tutto in ciò, che come persona privata egli ha da lungo tempo il privato pregiudizio. D’ora in poi è ovvio che Keith il quale decide per Darwin è semplicemente come Bradlaugh che decide per Darwin, o Ingersoll che decide per Darwin, o un qualsiasi ateo su uno sgabello ad Hyde Park che decide per Darwin. Quando SONO LORO a scegliere la parte della selezione naturale, possiamo tutti convenire che si tratta di una selezione assai naturale.

Quanto alla conclusione in sé, essa pare quasi incredibilmente inconcludente. A meno che Sir Arthur Keith non sia riferito assai malamente, egli ha espressamente dichiarato che l’esistenza spirituale cessa con le funzioni fisiche; e che nessun medico potrebbe coscienziosamente dire altrimenti. Per quanto grave sia la lesione chiamata morte (la quale è invero spesso fatale), questo mi appare un caso in cui è del tutto superfluo chiamare in causa un medico. C’è sempre una certa ironia, persino nelle semplici pagine dei miei prediletti racconti polizieschi, nel fatto che tutti si precipitano a cercare un dottore non appena sono ben certi che un uomo è morto. Ma nel racconto poliziesco vi può almeno essere qualcosa da apprendere per il dottore dal corpo morto. Nella speculazione dottrinale non v’è nulla di nulla; e non fa che confondere l’eterno racconto poliziesco che il dottore in medicina pretenda d’essere dottore in teologia. La verità è che tutta questa faccenda del «medico» è mero bluff e mistagogia. Il medico «vede» che la mente è cessata col corpo. Ciò che il medico vede è che il corpo non può più scalciare, parlare, starnutire, fischiare o danzare una giga. E non occorre esser molto medici per vedere questo. Ma se il principio d’energia, che una volta lo fece scalciare, parlare, starnutire, fischiare e danzare, esista ancora o no su qualche altro piano dell’esistenza — un medico non ne sa più di qualsiasi altro uomo. E quando i medici erano di mente lucida, alcuni di essi (come un ex chirurgo di nome Thomas Henry Huxley) dicevano di non credere che i medici o alcun uomo potessero saperne alcunché. Questa è una posizione intelligibile; ma non pare essere la posizione di Sir Arthur Keith. Egli è stato messo su pubblicamente a NEGARE che l’anima sopravviva al corpo; e a fare la straordinaria osservazione che ogni medico debba dire lo stesso. È come se dicessimo che ogni competente costruttore o agrimensore debba negare la possibilità della Quarta Dimensione; perché ha appreso il segreto tecnico che un edificio si misura per lunghezza, larghezza e altezza. L’ovvia domanda è: perché tirare in ballo un agrimensore? Tutti sanno che ogni cosa si misura di fatto secondo tre dimensioni. Chiunque pensi che vi sia una quarta dimensione lo pensa a dispetto dell’essere ben consapevole che le cose in genere si misurano secondo tre. Oppure è come se un uomo rispondesse a un metafisico berkeleiano, il quale ritiene che ogni materia sia un’illusione della mente, dicendo: «Posso chiamare a testimone un intelligente sterratore che ha realmente a che fare con calcestruzzo solido e ghisa; ed egli vi dirà che sono del tutto reali.» Risponderemmo naturalmente che non ci occorre uno sterratore per dirci che le cose solide sono solide; ed è in tutt’altro senso che il filosofo dice che esse non sono solide. Similmente, non v’è nulla che renda un medico materialista, se non ciò che potrebbe rendere materialista qualsiasi uomo. Ed è quando un uomo ha assorbito tutto quell’ovvio materialismo che egli comincia a usare la mente. E, come alcuni sostengono, non smette.

This very unphilosophical irruption into philosophy was, however, in one way enlightening. It threw a light backwards on the speaker’s previous proclamation on things on which he has more right to speak. Even in those things he betrayed a curious simplicity common among such official scientists. The truth is that they become steadily less scientific and more official. They develop that thin disguise that is the daily wear of politicians. They perform before us the most artful tricks with the most artless transparency. It is like watching a child trying to hide something. They are perpetually trying to bluff us with big words and learned allusions; on the assumption that we have never learnt anything—even of their own funny little ways. Every leader-writer who thunders “Galileo” at us assumes that we know even less about Galileo than he does. Every preacher of popular science who throws a long word at us thinks we shall have to look it up in the dictionary and hopes we shall not study it seriously even in the encyclopaedia. Their use of science is rather like the use made of it by the heroes of certain adventure stories, in which the white men terrify the savages by predicting an eclipse or producing an electric shock. These are in a sense true demonstrations of science. They are in a sense right in saying that they are scientists. Where they are perhaps wrong is in supposing that we are savages.

But it is rather amusing for us who watch the preparations for giving us an electric shock, when we are seriously expected to be shocked by the shock. It is rather a joke when we, the benighted savages, are ourselves not only quite capable of predicting the eclipse, but capable of predicting the prediction. Now, among these facts that have been familiar to us for a long time is the fact that men of science stage and prepare their effects exactly as politicians do. They also do it rather badly—exactly as politicians do. Neither of these two modern mystagogues has yet realised how transparent his tricks have become. One of the most familiar and transparent of them is what is known as the “official contradiction.” It is a strange symbolic way of declaring that something has happened by denying that it has happened. So whitewashing reports are published after political scandals as regularly as bluebooks. So the Right Honourable Gentleman hopes it is not necessary for him to contradict what he feels sure the Honourable Member could not have intended to insinuate. So a Cabinet Minister is put up to deny from a platform that there is any change in the Government’s policy about Damascus. And so Sir Arthur Keith is put up to deny that there is any change in the scientific attitude about Darwin.

And when we hear that, we all give a sort of sigh of satisfaction; for we all know exactly what THAT means. It means more or less the opposite of what it says. It means that there has been a devil of a row about Damascus inside the Party, or, in other words, that there is beginning to be a devil of a scandal about discredited Darwinians inside the scientific world. The curious thing is that in the latter case the officials are not only solemn in uttering the official contradiction, but much more simple in supposing that nobody will realize that it is official. In the case of the similar legal fiction in politics, the politicians by this time not only know the truth, but often know that we know the truth. Everybody knows by this time, by the gossip that is repeated everywhere, exactly what is meant by the absolute agreement on everything which binds the Prime Minister and all his colleagues. The Prime Minister does not really expect us to believe that he is the holy and beloved king of a brotherhood of knights sworn to a faith and giving their hearts to him alone. But Sir Arthur Keith does really expect us to believe that he is the foreman of a jury containing all the different men of science, all absolutely agreed that Darwin’s particular opinion was “eternal.” That is what I mean by childish concealment; and the artless or transparent trick. That is why I say that they do not even know how much we know.

For the politician is less pompously absurd than the anthropologist, even if we test it by what they both call Progress; which is mostly only another word for Time. We all know the official optimism which always defends the present government. But this is like an official defence of all the past governments. If a man were to say that the politics of Palmerston were eternal, we should think him a little out of date. Yet Darwin was prominent at about the same date as Palmerston; and is quite equally dated. If Mr. Lloyd George were to get up and say that the great Liberal Party had not receded from one single position taken up by Gobden and Bright, the only true Tribunes of the People, we should reluctantly conclude (if such a thing be conceivable) that he was talking party claptrap to people ignorant of the history of the party. If a social reformer were to affirm solemnly that all social philosophy was still proceeding strictly on the principles of Herbert Spencer, we should know it was doing nothing of the sort, and that only an absolutely fossilized official could pretend that it was. Yet Darwin and Spencer were not only contemporaries but comrades and allies; and the Darwinian biology and the Spencerian sociology were regarded as parts of the same movement, which our grandfathers regarded as a very modern movement. Even considered a priori as a matter of probability it therefore seems rather unlikely that the science of that generation was any more infallible than its ethics and politics. Even on the principles Sir Arthur professes, it seems very queer that there should now be no more to be said about Darwinism than he said about it. But we do not need to appeal to those principles or those probabilities. We can appeal to the facts. As it happens, we do know something about the facts; and Sir Arthur Keith does not seem to know that we know.

Questa irruzione affatto antifilosofica nella filosofia fu, tuttavia, per un verso illuminante. Gettò una luce retrospettiva sulla precedente proclamazione dell’oratore intorno a cose sulle quali ha maggior diritto di parlare. Persino in quelle cose egli tradiva una curiosa ingenuità comune fra tali scienziati ufficiali. La verità è che essi diventano via via meno scientifici e più ufficiali. Sviluppano quel sottile travestimento che è l’abito quotidiano dei politici. Eseguono davanti a noi i trucchi più artificiosi con la più candida trasparenza. È come guardare un bambino che tenta di nascondere qualcosa. Cercano di continuo di ingannarci con paroloni e dotte allusioni; nel presupposto che noi non abbiamo mai imparato nulla — nemmeno delle loro buffe piccole abitudini. Ogni articolista di fondo che ci tuona addosso «Galileo» presume che noi sappiamo di Galileo persino meno di quanto ne sappia lui. Ogni predicatore di scienza popolare che ci scaglia contro una parola lunga pensa che dovremo cercarla nel dizionario, e spera che non la studieremo seriamente neppure nell’enciclopedia. Il loro uso della scienza somiglia piuttosto all’uso che ne fanno gli eroi di certi romanzi d’avventura, in cui gli uomini bianchi atterriscono i selvaggi predicendo un’eclissi o producendo una scossa elettrica. Queste sono in un certo senso vere dimostrazioni di scienza. Hanno in un certo senso ragione a dire d’essere scienziati. Dove forse sbagliano è nel supporre che noi siamo selvaggi.

Ma è piuttosto divertente per noi che osserviamo i preparativi per somministrarci una scossa elettrica, quando sul serio ci si aspetta che restiamo scioccati dalla scossa. È piuttosto uno scherzo quando noi, i selvaggi ottenebrati, siamo noi stessi non solo del tutto capaci di predire l’eclissi, ma capaci di predire la predizione. Ora, tra questi fatti che ci sono familiari da lungo tempo v’è il fatto che gli uomini di scienza allestiscono e preparano i loro effetti esattamente come fanno i politici. E lo fanno anche piuttosto male — esattamente come i politici. Nessuno di questi due moderni mistagoghi ha ancora compreso quanto trasparenti siano diventati i suoi trucchi. Uno dei più familiari e trasparenti fra essi è ciò che si conosce come la «smentita ufficiale». È uno strano modo simbolico di dichiarare che qualcosa è accaduto negando che sia accaduto. Così i rapporti insabbianti vengono pubblicati dopo gli scandali politici con la stessa regolarità dei libri blu. Così l’Onorevolissimo Signore spera che non gli sia necessario contraddire ciò che è sicuro l’Onorevole Membro non poteva aver inteso insinuare. Così un Ministro del Gabinetto viene messo su a negare da una tribuna che vi sia alcun mutamento nella politica del Governo riguardo a Damasco. E così Sir Arthur Keith viene messo su a negare che vi sia alcun mutamento nell’atteggiamento scientifico riguardo a Darwin.

E quando udiamo ciò, tutti mandiamo una sorta di sospiro di soddisfazione; ché tutti sappiamo esattamente cosa QUELLO significhi. Significa più o meno l’opposto di ciò che dice. Significa che c’è stato un putiferio d’inferno a proposito di Damasco all’interno del Partito, o, in altre parole, che comincia ad esserci uno scandalo d’inferno a proposito dei darwiniani screditati all’interno del mondo scientifico. La cosa curiosa è che in quest’ultimo caso i funzionari non solo sono solenni nel proferire la smentita ufficiale, ma assai più ingenui nel supporre che nessuno si accorgerà che essa è ufficiale. Nel caso dell’analoga finzione legale in politica, i politici a quest’ora non solo conoscono la verità, ma spesso sanno che noi conosciamo la verità. Tutti sanno a quest’ora, per il pettegolezzo ripetuto dappertutto, esattamente cosa s’intenda per l’assoluto accordo su ogni cosa che vincola il Primo Ministro e tutti i suoi colleghi. Il Primo Ministro non si aspetta davvero che noi crediamo ch’egli sia il santo e amato re di una confraternita di cavalieri votati a una fede e che a lui soltanto donano il cuore. Ma Sir Arthur Keith si aspetta davvero che noi crediamo ch’egli sia il capo di una giuria contenente tutti i diversi uomini di scienza, tutti assolutamente concordi che la particolare opinione di Darwin fosse «eterna». Questo è ciò che intendo per occultamento puerile; e per il trucco candido o trasparente. Ecco perché dico che essi non sanno neppure quanto noi sappiamo.

Poiché il politico è meno pomposamente assurdo dell’antropologo, anche se lo mettiamo alla prova con ciò che entrambi chiamano Progresso; il quale è per lo più solo un altro nome per Tempo. Tutti conosciamo l’ottimismo ufficiale che sempre difende il governo presente. Ma questo è come una difesa ufficiale di tutti i governi passati. Se un uomo dicesse che la politica di Palmerston era eterna, lo riterremmo un po’ fuori tempo. Eppure Darwin era in auge press’a poco nella stessa data di Palmerston; ed è esattamente altrettanto datato. Se il signor Lloyd George si levasse a dire che il grande Partito Liberale non aveva arretrato di un solo punto assunto da Cobden e Bright, gli unici veri Tribuni del Popolo, concluderemmo a malincuore (se cosa simile fosse concepibile) ch’egli stava spacciando ciarpame di partito a gente ignara della storia del partito. Se un riformatore sociale affermasse solennemente che tutta la filosofia sociale procedeva ancora rigorosamente secondo i princìpi di Herbert Spencer, sapremmo che non faceva nulla del genere, e che solo un funzionario assolutamente fossilizzato potrebbe pretendere che così fosse. Eppure Darwin e Spencer non furono soltanto contemporanei ma camerati e alleati; e la biologia darwiniana e la sociologia spenceriana erano considerate parti del medesimo movimento, che i nostri nonni consideravano un movimento assai moderno. Persino considerata a priori come questione di probabilità, sembra dunque piuttosto improbabile che la scienza di quella generazione fosse più infallibile della sua etica e della sua politica. Persino secondo i princìpi che Sir Arthur professa, appare assai strano che ora non vi sia più nulla da dire sul darwinismo di quanto egli ne abbia detto. Ma non abbiamo bisogno di appellarci a quei princìpi o a quelle probabilità. Possiamo appellarci ai fatti. Si dà il caso che noi sappiamo qualcosa dei fatti; e Sir Arthur Keith non pare sapere che noi lo sappiamo.

It was in a Catholic paper that certain statements were made about Darwinism to-day; statements which Sir Arthur Keith himself went out of his way to contradict; and about which Sir Arthur Keith himself was proved sensationally and disastrously wrong. Probably the story is now known to all readers of that paper; but it will possibly never come to the knowledge of most other journalists, and it certainly will not be recorded in most of the other papers. Touching this cosmic controversy, most of the other papers are emphatically party papers; and they support the party leader when he publishes the official contradiction. They will not let the public know how triumphantly his other contradiction was contradicted.

When Mr. Belloc stated that these Darwinians were out of date and ignorant of recent biology, he quoted among a great many other recent authorities the French biologist Vialleton as denying the possibility of natural selection in a particular case connected with reptiles and birds. Sir Arthur Keith, coming to the rescue of Mr. H. G. Wells, and eager to prove that he and Mr. Wells were not out of date or ignorant of recent biology, proceeded to contradict Mr. Belloc flatly. He said that there was no such statement in Vialleton’s book; in other words, he accused Mr. Belloc of having misquoted or misrepresented Vialleton’s book. It then appeared, to the amazement of everybody, and especially of Mr. Belloc, that Sir Arthur Keith did not even know of the existence of the book. He was referring only to an early and elementary work by the same author published long ago. That was the last he had ever read of Vialleton. The important book, of which even I, a mere unscientific man in the street, had heard at least something, had never come to his ears at all. In short, the general charge, that Darwinians are out of date in their information, was proved about as completely as anything controversial can ever be proved in this world.

Now, when a thing like that has happened, above all when it has happened to us, in the pages of a paper in which I write, in the experience of one of my own friends, how can it be expected that people in our position should take seriously the speech at the opening of the British Association at Leeds? How can we keep a straight face when the President strikes an attitude as if pointing to the stars and declaring Darwinism equally eternal? That sort of thing is not meant for us; but for the reporters; just as the true story of Wells and Belloc is generally kept out of the reports.

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Fu su un giornale cattolico che vennero fatte oggi certe affermazioni sul darwinismo; affermazioni che Sir Arthur Keith in persona si diede la pena di contraddire; e a proposito delle quali lo stesso Sir Arthur Keith si rivelò clamorosamente e disastrosamente in errore. Probabilmente la vicenda è ormai nota a tutti i lettori di quel giornale; ma forse non giungerà mai a conoscenza della maggior parte degli altri giornalisti, e di certo non sarà registrata nella maggior parte degli altri giornali. Riguardo a questa cosmica controversia, la maggior parte degli altri giornali sono decisamente giornali di partito; e sostengono il capo del partito quando egli pubblica la smentita ufficiale. Non lasceranno che il pubblico sappia con quanto trionfo la sua altra smentita fu a sua volta smentita.

Quando il signor Belloc affermò che questi darwiniani erano superati e ignari della biologia recente, citò, tra moltissime altre autorità recenti, il biologo francese Vialleton, il quale negava la possibilità della selezione naturale in un caso particolare legato ai rettili e agli uccelli. Sir Arthur Keith, accorrendo in soccorso del signor H. G. Wells, e ansioso di dimostrare che lui e il signor Wells non erano superati né ignari della biologia recente, si mise a contraddire recisamente il signor Belloc. Disse che nel libro di Vialleton non c’era alcuna affermazione del genere; in altre parole, accusò il signor Belloc di aver citato erroneamente o travisato il libro di Vialleton. Emerse allora, con stupore di tutti, e specialmente del signor Belloc, che Sir Arthur Keith non conosceva neppure l’esistenza del libro. Si riferiva soltanto a un’opera giovanile ed elementare dello stesso autore, pubblicata molto tempo prima. Era l’ultima cosa che avesse mai letto di Vialleton. Il libro importante, di cui perfino io, mero uomo della strada privo di scienza, avevo sentito almeno qualcosa, non era mai giunto affatto alle sue orecchie. In breve, l’accusa generale, che i darwiniani siano superati nelle loro informazioni, fu dimostrata quasi con la stessa completezza con cui qualcosa di controverso possa mai essere dimostrato a questo mondo.

Ora, quando è accaduta una cosa simile, soprattutto quando è accaduta a noi, sulle pagine di un giornale in cui scrivo, nell’esperienza di uno dei miei stessi amici, come ci si può aspettare che persone nella nostra posizione prendano sul serio il discorso all’inaugurazione della British Association a Leeds? Come possiamo trattenere il riso quando il Presidente assume un atteggiamento come se indicasse le stelle e dichiarasse il darwinismo altrettanto eterno? Roba del genere non è destinata a noi; ma ai cronisti; proprio come la vera storia di Wells e Belloc viene generalmente tenuta fuori dai resoconti.

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THE EARLY BIRD IN HISTORY

ST. JOAN OF ARC, a star and a thunderbolt, strange as a meteoric stone whose very solidity is not of this earth, may be compared also to a diamond among pebbles; the one white stone of history. Like a diamond, she is clear but not simple, as some count simplicity; but having many facets or aspects. There is one aspect of the discussion on St. Joan which I have never seen specially noted, and it seems to be worth a note. It concerns that common and current charge against the Catholic Church that she is, as the phrase goes, always behind the times.

When I became a Catholic, I was quite prepared to find that in many respects she really was behind the times. I was very tolerant of the idea of being behind the times, having had long opportunities of studying the perfectly ghastly people who were abreast of the times; or the still more pestilent people who were in advance of the times. I was prepared to find Catholicism rather Conservative, and in that sense slow; and so, of course, in some aspects it is. I knew that being in the movement generally meant only being in the fashion. I knew that fashions had an extraordinary way of being first omnipresent and oppressive and then suddenly blank and forgotten. I knew how publicity seems fixed like a spotlight and vanishes like a lightning-flash. I had seen the whole public imagination filled with a succession of Krugers and Kaisers, who were to be hanged next week and about whom nobody cared a hang next month. I have lived through an overwhelming illusion that there was nobody in the world except General Gordon or Captain Dreyfus or the elephant Jumbo at the Zoo. If there is something in the world that takes no notice of these world-changes, I confess to finding a certain comfort in its indifference. I think it was just as well, from every point of view, that the ecclesiastical authorities delayed a decision about Darwinism or even Evolution; and declined altogether to be excited in that universal excitement. There were many, even among the sympathetic, who seemed to think that Catholics ought to put up an altar to the Missing Link, as Pagans did to the Unknown God. But Catholics prefer to wait until they know what they are doing; and would prefer to learn a little more about a thing besides the fact that nobody can find it. And of course it is true that in some matters, judged by the feverish pace of recent fashion, the Church has always been slow as well as sure. But there is another side of the truth, and one which is more commonly missed. As it happens, both sides are strikingly illustrated in the story of the status of St. Joan.

If we go back to the very beginning of a story, we very often find that the Church did actually do something which her foes ignored and even her friends forgot. Then other social tendencies set in, other questions occupied the world, the tides of time and change passed over the whole business; and when that business came again to the surface, the world had the impression that the Church was dealing with it after a very long delay. But the world itself had never dealt with it at all. The world, as a matter of fact, had never woken up to the fact at all, until it woke up with a start and began to abuse the Church for not having woken up before. During all those long intervening ages, the world had really been much more asleep than the Church. The Church, a very long time ago, had done something; and the world had done nothing. The case of St. Joan of Arc is one curious example.

The Canonisation of St. Joan came very slowly and very late. But the Rehabilitation of St. Joan came very promptly and very early. It is a very exceptional example of rapid reparation for a judicial crime or a miscarriage of justice. There have been any number of these judicial crimes in history. There have been any number of heroes and martyrs whom history regards as having suffered for their virtues. It has almost passed into a popular proverb, especially in modern times; as in the words of the American popular poet: “Right for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne.” But I can hardly remember another example of the throne paying so prompt a salute to the scaffold. The condemnation of St. Joan was reversed by the Pope in the lifetime of her contemporaries, at the appeal of her brothers; about as soon as anybody could have expected anything of the sort to be reversed. I do not know if the Athenian Republic did as much for Socrates or the Florentine for Savonarola; but I am pretty certain that nobody could have got the Carthaginians to apologise thus to Regulus or the Antiochi to Maccabaeus. The only really fair way of considering the fashionable subject of the crimes of Christendom would be to compare them with the crimes of heathenism; and the normal human practice of the Pagan world. And while it may be a weakness of human beings, of every age and creed, to stone the prophets and then build their sepulchres, it is really very seldom that the sepulchre is built even as quickly as that. When those who build the sepulchre are really and truly the representatives or inheritors of those who threw the stones, it does not generally happen for hundreds of years. To take the parallel passions of the secular side of the Middle Ages, we should be considerably surprised to learn that when the head of William Wallace had been stuck on a spike by Edward the First, his remains had been respectfully interred and his character cleared by Edward the Third. We should be considerably surprised if the courts of Queen Elizabeth had gone out of their way to repudiate and quash the case against Thomas More. It is generally long afterwards, when the actual ambitions and rivalries are dead, when the feuds and family interests have long been forgotten, that a rather sentimental though sincere tenderness is shown to the dead enemy. In the nineteenth century the English do make a romance about Wallace and a statue of Washington. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the English do produce a fine enthusiasm and a number of excellent books about St. Joan. And I for one hope to see the day when this measure of magnanimity shall be filled up where it has been most wanting; and some such payment made for the deepest debt of all. I should like to see the day when the English put up a statue of Emmett beside the statue of Washington; and I wish that in the Centenary of Emancipation there were likely to be as much fuss in London about the figure of Daniel O’Connell as there was about that of Abraham Lincoln.

L’UCCELLO MATTINIERO NELLA STORIA

SANTA GIOVANNA D’ARCO, stella e folgore, strana come una pietra meteorica la cui stessa solidità non è di questa terra, può essere paragonata anche a un diamante fra i ciottoli; l’unica pietra bianca della storia. Come un diamante, ella è limpida ma non semplice, secondo il modo in cui alcuni contano la semplicità; bensì dotata di molte facce o aspetti. V’è un aspetto della discussione su Santa Giovanna che non ho mai visto specialmente rilevato, e pare degno di una nota. Riguarda quell’accusa comune e corrente contro la Chiesa Cattolica, che essa sia, come si suol dire, sempre indietro rispetto ai tempi.

Quando divenni cattolico, ero ben preparato a scoprire che sotto molti aspetti essa era realmente indietro rispetto ai tempi. Ero assai tollerante verso l’idea di essere indietro rispetto ai tempi, avendo avuto lunghe occasioni di studiare la gente perfettamente spettrale che era al passo coi tempi; o la gente ancor più pestilenziale che era in anticipo sui tempi. Ero preparato a trovare il cattolicesimo piuttosto conservatore, e in tal senso lento; e così, naturalmente, sotto qualche aspetto è. Sapevo che essere nel movimento significava in genere solo essere alla moda. Sapevo che le mode avevano uno straordinario modo di essere dapprima onnipresenti e opprimenti e poi d’un tratto vuote e dimenticate. Sapevo come la notorietà paia fissa come un riflettore e svanisca come un lampo di folgore. Avevo veduto l’intera immaginazione pubblica colmarsi di una successione di Kruger e di Kaiser, che dovevano essere impiccati la settimana seguente e dei quali il mese dopo a nessuno importava un fico. Ho vissuto attraverso un’illusione travolgente, che non vi fosse nessuno al mondo tranne il generale Gordon o il capitano Dreyfus o l’elefante Jumbo allo Zoo. Se v’è qualcosa al mondo che non fa caso a questi mutamenti del mondo, confesso di trovare un certo conforto nella sua indifferenza. Penso che sia stato assai bene, da ogni punto di vista, che le autorità ecclesiastiche ritardassero una decisione sul darwinismo o perfino sull’Evoluzione; e rifiutassero del tutto di lasciarsi eccitare in quell’eccitazione universale. Vi furono molti, persino tra i solidali, che parevano pensare che i cattolici dovessero erigere un altare all’Anello Mancante, come i pagani facevano al Dio Ignoto. Ma i cattolici preferiscono attendere finché non sappiano ciò che stanno facendo; e preferirebbero imparare qualcosa di più su una cosa oltre al fatto che nessuno riesce a trovarla. E naturalmente è vero che in certe materie, giudicate secondo il ritmo febbrile della moda recente, la Chiesa è sempre stata tanto lenta quanto sicura. Ma v’è un altro lato della verità, ed è uno che più comunemente sfugge. Si dà il caso che entrambi i lati siano nettamente illustrati nella storia dello status di Santa Giovanna.

Se torniamo al principio stesso di una storia, assai spesso troviamo che la Chiesa fece realmente qualcosa che i suoi nemici ignorarono e che perfino i suoi amici dimenticarono. Poi subentrarono altre tendenze sociali, altre questioni occuparono il mondo, le maree del tempo e del mutamento passarono su tutta la faccenda; e quando quella faccenda tornò di nuovo alla superficie, il mondo ebbe l’impressione che la Chiesa la stesse trattando dopo un ritardo assai lungo. Ma il mondo stesso non l’aveva mai trattata affatto. Il mondo, in verità, non s’era mai destato al fatto, finché non si destò di soprassalto e cominciò a insultare la Chiesa per non essersi destata prima. Durante tutti quei lunghi secoli intermedi, il mondo era stato in realtà assai più addormentato della Chiesa. La Chiesa, assai lungo tempo fa, aveva fatto qualcosa; e il mondo non aveva fatto nulla. Il caso di Santa Giovanna d’Arco ne è un curioso esempio.

La Canonizzazione di Santa Giovanna venne assai lenta e assai tardi. Ma la Riabilitazione di Santa Giovanna venne assai pronta e assai presto. È un esempio del tutto eccezionale di rapida riparazione per un delitto giudiziario o un errore della giustizia. Vi sono stati un numero sterminato di questi delitti giudiziari nella storia. Vi sono stati un numero sterminato di eroi e di martiri che la storia considera aver sofferto per le loro virtù. È quasi passato in proverbio popolare, specialmente nei tempi moderni; come nelle parole del poeta popolare americano: «La ragione per sempre sul patibolo, il torto per sempre sul trono.» Ma a stento riesco a ricordare un altro esempio del trono che rendesse un così pronto saluto al patibolo. La condanna di Santa Giovanna fu ribaltata dal Papa ancor vivi i suoi contemporanei, su appello dei suoi fratelli; press’a poco appena qualcuno avrebbe potuto aspettarsi che cosa simile venisse ribaltata. Non so se la Repubblica ateniese fece altrettanto per Socrate o quella fiorentina per Savonarola; ma sono abbastanza certo che nessuno avrebbe potuto indurre i cartaginesi a scusarsi così con Regolo, o gli Antiochi con Maccabeo. L’unico modo davvero equo di considerare il soggetto di moda dei delitti della cristianità sarebbe paragonarli ai delitti del paganesimo; e alla normale pratica umana del mondo pagano. E se pure può essere una debolezza degli esseri umani, di ogni età e credo, lapidare i profeti e poi edificarne i sepolcri, è davvero assai raro che il sepolcro venga edificato anche solo con tanta prontezza. Quando coloro che edificano il sepolcro sono davvero e veramente i rappresentanti o gli eredi di coloro che scagliarono le pietre, ciò in genere non avviene se non dopo centinaia d’anni. Per prendere le passioni parallele del versante secolare del Medioevo, saremmo considerevolmente sorpresi di apprendere che, quando la testa di William Wallace fu infilzata su una picca da Edoardo Primo, i suoi resti fossero stati rispettosamente tumulati e il suo carattere riabilitato da Edoardo Terzo. Saremmo considerevolmente sorpresi se le corti della Regina Elisabetta fossero andate fuori strada per ripudiare e annullare il processo contro Thomas More. È in genere assai tempo dopo, quando le ambizioni e le rivalità reali sono morte, quando le faide e gli interessi di famiglia sono da lungo dimenticati, che una tenerezza piuttosto sentimentale benché sincera viene mostrata verso il nemico morto. Nel diciannovesimo secolo gli inglesi fanno bensì un romanzo intorno a Wallace e una statua di Washington. Nel diciannovesimo e ventesimo secolo gli inglesi producono bensì un bell’entusiasmo e un buon numero di eccellenti libri su Santa Giovanna. E io per parte mia spero di vedere il giorno in cui questa misura di magnanimità sarà colmata là dove è più mancata; e qualche simile pagamento sarà reso per il più profondo debito di tutti. Vorrei vedere il giorno in cui gli inglesi ergano una statua di Emmett accanto alla statua di Washington; e vorrei che nel Centenario dell’Emancipazione fosse probabile tanto scalpore a Londra intorno alla figura di Daniel O’Connell quanto ve ne fu intorno a quella di Abraham Lincoln.

But I mean the comment here in a rather larger sense; and in a larger sense it is an even stronger case. I mean that if we take the tale of St. Joan as a test, the really remarkable thing is not so much the slowness of the Church to appreciate her, as the slowness of everybody else. The world, especially the wisest men of the world, were extraordinarily late in realising what a remarkable thing had happened; very much later than the rather rigid religious officials of the fifteenth century. That rigidity of fifteenth century religion was very soon broken up, partly by good and partly by bad forces. Comparatively soon after St. Joan’s ashes were thrown into the Seine, quite soon after the Rehabilitation, the Renaissance had really begun. Very soon after that the Reformation had begun. The Renaissance produced a number of large and liberal views on all sorts of things. The Reformation produced numberless narrow views, divided among all sorts of sects. But at least there were plenty of differences and varied points of view, many of them now loosened from anything that may have been restrictive in the medieval discipline. Human reason and imagination, left to themselves, might at least have made as much of Jeanne d’Arc as of John Huss. As a fact, human reason and imagination, left to themselves, made extraordinarily little of her. Humanism and Humanitarianism and, in a general sense, Humanity, did not really rehabilitate Joan until about five hundred years after the Church had done so.

The history of what great men have said about this great woman is a very dismal tale. The greatest man of all, Shakespeare, has an unfortunate pre-eminence by his insular insults in HENRY THE SIXTH. But the thing went on long after Shakespeare; and was far worse in people who had far less excuse than Shakespeare. Voltaire was a Frenchman; he was a great Frenchman; he professed an admiration for many French heroes; he certainly professed to be a reformer and a friend of freedom; he most certainly might have seized on any mediaeval miscarriage of justice that might be turned to anti-clerical account. What Voltaire wrote about St. Joan it will be most decent to pass over in silence. But it is the same all along the line; it is the same far later in rationalistic history than Voltaire. Byron had with all his faults a sensibility to the splendid and heroic, especially in the matter of nations struggling to be free. He was far less insular than any other English poet; he had far more comprehension of France and of the Continent; and he is still comprehended and admired there. He called St. Joan of Arc a fanatical strumpet. That was the general tone of human culture, of history as taught and talked in the age of reason. Mr. Belloc has noted that, so strong was this secular social pressure, that even a Catholic, when he wished to be moderate, like Lingard, was more or less sceptical, not indeed of the morality, but certainly of the miraculous mission of St. Joan. It is true that Schiller was sympathetic, though sentimental—and therefore out of touch. But it was not till nearly the end of the nineteenth century, not fully until the beginning of the twentieth century, that ordinary men of genius awoke to the recognition of one of the most wonderful women of genius in the history of the world. One of the first really popular attempts at a rationalist rehabilitation came, of all people in the world, from Mark Twain. His notion of the Middle Ages was as provincial as the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur; but it is to the credit of this rather crude genius, of the late culture of a new country, that he did catch the flame from the pyre of Rouen, which so many cultivated sceptics had found cold. Then came a patronising pamphlet by Anatole France; which I for one think rather more insulting than the ribald verse of Voltaire. Then came the last great attempt; wrong in many ways in its contention, but conspicuously spirited and sincere—the play of St. Joan. On the whole, nobody can say that humanists and rationalists have been very early in the field. This heroine had to wait about five centuries for Bernard Shaw.

Now, in that comparison, nobody can say that the Church comes off very badly in comparison with the world. The truth is that the ecclesiastical apology to the martyr came so early that everybody had forgotten all about it, long before the rest of the world began to consider the question at all. And though I have taken here the particular case of St. Joan of Arc, I believe that something of the same sort could be traced through a great many other affairs in human history.

It is true of those who gave the Jesuits a bad name and hanged them; and the hanging was not always metaphorical. The simplified version of it is to say that the Jesuits, especially in their capacity of Casuists, suffered almost entirely from being two hundred years before their time. They tried to start in a cautious way what is now surging up on every side of us in a chaotic way; all that is implied in talking about problem novels and problem plays. In other words, they recognised that there really are problems in moral conduct; not problems about whether the moral law should be obeyed, but problems about how in a particular case the moral law really applies. But they were not remembered as pioneers who had begun to ask the questions of Ibsen and Hardy and Shaw. They were remembered only as wicked conspirators who had not always believed in the Divine Right of Kings. They pioneered early enough to be execrated by an earlier generation; but too early to be thanked by a later generation. Protestants have eagerly supported Pascal against them, without taking the trouble to discover that any number of the things that Pascal denounced are things that any modern man would defend. For instance, Pascal blamed the infamous Jesuits for saying that a girl might in some conditions marry against the wish of her parents. The Jesuits would have had all modern novels, let alone problem novels, on their side. But they were too early in the field to have anybody on their side. Moreover, they wished to fit these exceptions into the moral rule; the Moderns who did it two centuries later have produced no rule, but a welter of exceptions.

Here, again, is yet another example that occurs to me at the moment. Many have given long histories of the laborious slowness with which the idea of justice to the aborigines, to Red Indians or such races, has advanced step by step with the progress of modern humanitarian ideas. In such a history Penn, the great Quaker, appears like a primeval founder and father of the republic; and he was undoubtedly very early in the field—in the Puritan field. But Las Casas, the Apostle of the Indians, actually sailed in a ship with Christopher Columbus. It would be difficult to be earlier in the American field than that. He spent his life pleading for the rights of the savages; but he did it at a time when nobody in the north would listen to such a story about a saint of Spain. In this and in many other examples, I believe that the real history of the Catholic pioneer has been the same; to be first and to be forgotten.

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Ma intendo il commento qui in un senso piuttosto più ampio; e in un senso più ampio è un caso ancora più forte. Intendo dire che se prendiamo la storia di Santa Giovanna come test, la cosa veramente notevole non è tanto la lentezza della Chiesa nell’apprezzarla, quanto la lentezza di tutti gli altri. Il mondo, specialmente gli uomini più saggi del mondo, furono straordinariamente tardi nel rendersi conto di quale cosa notevole fosse accaduta; molto più tardi dei piuttosto rigidi funzionari religiosi del quindicesimo secolo. Quella rigidità della religione del quindicesimo secolo fu ben presto infranta, in parte da forze buone e in parte da forze cattive. Comparativamente poco dopo che le ceneri di Santa Giovanna furono gettate nella Senna, abbastanza presto dopo la Riabilitazione, la Rinascita era davvero cominciata. Poco dopo quella la Riforma era cominciata. La Rinascita produsse un certo numero di vedute ampie e liberali su ogni sorta di cose. La Riforma produsse innumerevoli vedute ristrette, divise tra tutte le sorta di sette. Ma almeno c’erano molte differenze e punti di vista variati, molti dei quali ormai allentati da qualsiasi cosa che potesse essere stata restrittiva nella disciplina medievale. La ragione umana e l’immaginazione, lasciate a se stesse, avrebbero almeno potuto fare altrettanto di Jeanne d’Arc quanto di John Huss. Di fatto, la ragione umana e l’immaginazione, lasciate a se stesse, fecero straordinariamente poco di lei. Umanesimo e Umanitarismo e, in senso generale, l’Umanità, non riabilitarono davvero Giovanna fino a circa cinquecento anni dopo che la Chiesa lo aveva fatto.

La storia di ciò che grandi uomini hanno detto su questa grande donna è una storia molto triste. Il più grande uomo di tutti, Shakespeare, ha un’infelice preminenza per i suoi insulari insulti in ENRICO VI. Ma la cosa continuò a lungo dopo Shakespeare; e fu molto peggio nelle persone che avevano molte meno scuse di Shakespeare. Voltaire era francese; era un grande francese; professava ammirazione per molti eroi francesi; certamente professava di essere un riformatore e un amico della libertà; molto certamente avrebbe potuto cogliere qualsiasi errore giudiziario medievale che si potesse trasformare in anticlericale. Quello che Voltaire scrisse su Santa Giovanna sarà più decoroso passarlo sotto silenzio. Ma è la stessa cosa lungo tutta la linea; è la stessa molto tempo dopo nel razionalistico periodo storico di Voltaire. Byron, con tutti i suoi difetti, aveva una sensibilità per ciò che era splendido ed eroico, specialmente nella questione delle nazioni che lottavano per essere libere. Era molto meno insulare di qualsiasi altro poeta inglese; aveva molta più comprensione della Francia e del Continente; ed è ancora compreso e ammirato là. Chiamò Santa Giovanna d’Arco una sgualdrina fanatica. Questo era il tono generale della cultura umana, della storia come insegnata e discorsa nell’età della ragione. Il signor Belloc ha notato che, così forte era questa pressione sociale secolare, che anche un cattolico, quando desiderava essere moderato, come Lingard, era più o meno scettico, non certo sulla moralità, ma certamente sulla missione miracolosa di Santa Giovanna. È vero che Schiller fu simpatico, sebbene sentimentale—e quindi fuori dal coro. Ma non fu fino quasi alla fine del diciannovesimo secolo, pienamente all’inizio del ventesimo secolo, che uomini comuni di genio si svegliarono al riconoscimento di una delle donne più straordinarie di genio nella storia del mondo. Uno dei primi veri tentativi popolari di riabilitazione razionalista venne, di tutte le persone al mondo, da Mark Twain. La sua idea del Medioevo era tanto provinciale quanto lo Yankee alla Corte di Re Artù; ma va dato atto a questo genio piuttosto grezzo, della tarda cultura di un nuovo paese, che colse la fiamma dal rogo di Rouen, che tanti scettici colti avevano trovato freddo. Poi venne un opuscolo paternalistico da Anatole France; che io per uno trovo piuttosto più insultante dei versi oscene di Voltaire. Poi venne l’ultimo grande tentativo; sbagliato in molti modi nella sua tesi, ma vistosamente energico e sincero—la pièce su Santa Giovanna. Nel complesso, nessuno può dire che umanisti e razionalisti siano stati molto precoci sul campo. Questa eroina ha dovuto aspettare circa cinque secoli per Bernard Shaw.

Ora, in questo confronto, nessuno può dire che la Chiesa ne esca molto male rispetto al mondo. La verità è che l’apologia ecclesiastica nei confronti della martire arrivò così presto che tutti se n’erano già dimenticati da tempo, ben prima che il resto del mondo cominciasse a considerare la questione. E anche se ho preso qui il caso particolare di Santa Giovanna d’Arco, credo che qualcosa dello stesso genere potrebbe essere rintracciato attraverso molti altri casi nella storia umana.

È vero di coloro che hanno dato ai Gesuiti una cattiva reputazione e li hanno impiccati; e l’impiccagione non era sempre metaforica. La versione semplificata è dire che i Gesuiti, specialmente nella loro veste di Casuisti, soffrirono quasi interamente per essere stati duecento anni prima del loro tempo. Provarono a iniziare con cautela ciò che ora sta sorgendo dappertutto intorno a noi in modo caotico; tutto ciò che è implicato nel parlare di romanzi e drammi problematici. In altre parole, riconobbero che ci sono davvero problemi nella condotta morale; non problemi sul fatto se la legge morale debba essere obbedita, ma problemi su come in un caso particolare la legge morale si applichi realmente. Ma non furono ricordati come pionieri che avevano cominciato a porre le domande di Ibsen e Hardy e Shaw. Furono ricordati solo come cattivi cospiratori che non avevano sempre creduto nel Diritto Divino dei Re. Pionierarono abbastanza presto da essere esecrati da una generazione precedente; ma troppo presto per essere ringraziati da una generazione successiva. I Protestanti hanno sostenuto con entusiasmo Pascal contro di loro, senza prendersi la briga di scoprire che molte delle cose che Pascal denunciava sono cose che qualsiasi uomo moderno difenderebbe. Per esempio, Pascal accusò i famigerati Gesuiti di dire che una ragazza potesse in alcune condizioni sposarsi contro il volere dei suoi genitori. I Gesuiti avrebbero avuto tutti i romanzi moderni, lasciando da parte i romanzi problematici, dalla loro parte. Ma erano troppo presto sul campo per avere qualcuno dalla loro parte. Inoltre, desideravano inserire queste eccezioni nella regola morale; i Moderni che lo fecero due secoli dopo non produssero alcuna regola, ma un groviglio di eccezioni.

Ecco ancora un altro esempio che mi viene in mente al momento. Molti hanno raccontato a lungo la lenta fatica con cui l’idea di giustizia verso gli aborigeni, i pellerossa o simili razze, ha fatto progressi passo dopo passo insieme all’avanzare delle moderne idee umanitarie. In una storia del genere Penn, il grande Quacchero, appare come un fondatore primordiale e padre della repubblica; e fu indubbiamente tra i primi sul campo, nel campo puritano. Ma Las Casas, l’apostolo degli indiani, navigò in una nave con Cristoforo Colombo. Sarebbe difficile essere arrivati prima di lui nel campo americano. Dedico la sua vita a battersi per i diritti dei selvaggi; ma lo fece in un periodo in cui nessuno al nord avrebbe ascoltato una storia del genere su un santo della Spagna. In questo e in molti altri esempi, credo che la vera storia dei pionieri cattolici sia stata la stessa: arrivare per primi ed essere dimenticati.

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PROTESTANTISM: A PROBLEM NOVEL

I HAVE been looking at the little book on Protestantism which Dean Inge has contributed to the sixpenny series of Sir Ernest Benn; and though I suppose it has already been adequately criticised, it may be well to jot down a few notes on it before it is entirely forgotten. The book, which is called “Protestantism,” obviously ought to be called “Catholicism.” What the Dean has to say about any real thing recognisable as Protestantism is extraordinarily patchy, contradictory and inconclusive. It is only what he has to say about Catholicism that is clear, consistent and to the point. It is warmed and quickened by the human and hearty motive of hatred; and it makes everything else in the book look timid and tortuous by comparison. I am not going to annotate the work considered as history. There are some curious, if not conscious, falsifications of fact, especially in the form of suppressions of fact. He begins by interpreting Protestantism as a mere “inwardness and sincerity” in religion; which none of the Protestant reformers would have admitted to be Protestantism, and which any number of Catholic reformers have made the very heart and soul of their reforms inside Catholicism. It might be suggested that self-examination is now more often urged and practised among Catholics than among Protestants. But whether or no the champions of sincerity examine themselves, they might well examine their statements. Some of the statements here might especially be the subject of second thoughts. It is really a startling suppression and falsification to say that Henry the Eighth had only a few household troops; so that his people must have favoured his policy, or they would have risen against it. It seems enough to reply that they did rise against it. And BECAUSE Henry had only a few household troops, he brought in bands of ferocious mercenaries from abroad to put down the religious revolt of his own people. It is an effort of charity to concede even complete candour to the story-teller, who can actually use such an argument, and then keep silent upon such a sequel. Or again, it is outrageously misleading to suggest that the Catholic victims of Tudor and other tyranny were justly executed as traitors and not as martyrs to a religion. Every persecutor alleges social and secular necessity; so did Caiaphas and Annas; so did Nero and Diocletian; from the first the Christians were suppressed as enemies of the Empire; to the last the heretics were handed over to the secular arm with secular justifications. But when, in point of plain fact, a man can be hanged, drawn and quartered merely for saying Mass, or sometimes for helping somebody who has said Mass, it is simply raving nonsense to say that a religion is not being persecuted. To mention only one of many minor falsifications of this kind, it is quite true to say that Milton was in many ways more of a Humanist than a Puritan; but it is quite false to suggest that the Milton family was a typical Puritan family, in its taste for music and letters. The very simple explanation is that the Milton family was largely a Catholic family; and it was the celebrated John who specially separated himself from its creed but retained its culture. Countless other details as definitely false could be quoted; but I am much more interested in the general scope of the work— which allows itself to be so curiously pointless about Protestantism, merely in order to make a point against Catholicism.

Here is the Dean’s attempt at a definition. “What is the main function of Protestantism? It is essentially an attempt to check the tendency to corruption and degradation which attacks every institutional religion.” So far, so good. In that case St. Charles Borromeo, for instance, was obviously a leading Protestant. St. Dominic and St. Francis, who purged the congested conventionalism of much of the monasticism around them, were obviously leading Protestants. The Jesuits who sifted legend by the learning of Bollandism, were obviously leading Protestants. But most living Protestant leaders are not leading Protestants. If degradation drags down EVERY institutional religion, it has presumably dragged down Protestant institutional religion. Protestants might possibly appear to purge Protestantism; but so did Catholics appear to purge Catholicism. Plainly this definition is perfectly useless as a DISTINCTION between Protestantism and Catholicism. For it is not a description of any belief or system or body of thought; but simply of a good intention, which all men of all Churches would profess and a few men in some Churches practise—especially in ours. But the Dean not only proves that modern Protestant institutions ought to be corrupt, he says that their primitive founders ought to be repudiated. He distinctly holds that we cannot follow Luther and Calvin.

Very well—let us go on and see whom we are to follow. I will take one typical passage towards the end of the book. The Dean first remarks, “The Roman Church has declared that there can be no reconciliation between Rome and modern Liberalism or Progress.” One would like to see the encyclical or decree in which this declaration was made. Liberalism might mean many things, from the special thing which Newman denounced and defined to the intention of voting at a by-election for Sir John Simon. Progress generally means something which the Pope has never, so far as I know, found it necessary to deny; but which the Dean himself has repeatedly and most furiously denied. He then goes on: “Protestantism is entirely free from this uncompromising preference for the Dark Ages.” “The Dark Ages,” of course, is cant and claptrap; we need take no notice of that. But we may perhaps notice, not without interest and amusement, that about twenty-five lines before, the Dean himself has described the popular Protestantism of America as if it were a barbarism and belated obscurantism. From which one may infer that the Dark Ages are still going on, exactly where there is Protestantism to preserve them. And considering that he says at least five times that the appeal of Protestants to the letter of Scripture is narrow and superstitious, it surely seems a little astonishing that he should sum up by declaring Protestantism, as such, to be “ENTIRELY free” from this sort of darkness. Then, on top of all this welter of wordy contradictions, we have this marvellous and mysterious conclusion: “It is in this direction that Protestants may look for the beginning of what may really be a new Reformation, a resumption of the unfinished work of Sir Thomas More, Giordano Bruno and Erasmus.”

In short, Protestants may look forward to a Reformation modelled on the work of two Catholics and one obscure mystic, who was not a Protestant and of whose tenets they and the world know practically nothing. One hardly knows where to begin, in criticising this very new Reformation, two-thirds of which was apparently started by men of the Old Religion. We might meekly suggest that, if it be regrettable that the work of Sir Thomas More was “unfinished,” some portion of the blame may perhaps attach to the movement that cut off his head. Is it possible, I wonder, that what the Dean really means is that we want a new Reformation to undo all the harm that was done by the old Reformation? In this we certainly have no reason to quarrel with him. We should be delighted also to have a new Reformation, of ourselves as well as of Protestants and other people; though it is only fair to say that Catholics did, within an incredibly short space of time, contrive to make something very like a new Reformation; which is commonly called the Counter-Reformation. St. Vincent de Paul and St. Francis of Sales have at least as good a right to call themselves inheritors of the courtesy and charity of More as has the present Dean of St. Paul’s. But putting that seventeenth century reform on one side, there is surely something rather stupendous about the reform that the Dean proposes for the twentieth century, and the patron saints he selects for it out of the sixteenth century.

For this, it seems, is how we stand. We are not to follow Luther and Calvin. But we are to follow More and Erasmus. And that, if you please, is the true Protestantism and the promise of a second Reformation. We are to copy the views and virtues of the men who found they could remain under the Pope, and especially of one who actually died for the supremacy of the Pope. We are to throw away practically every rag of thought or theory that was held by the people who did not remain under the supremacy of the Pope. And we are to bind up all these views in a little popular pamphlet with an orange cover and call them “Protestantism.” The truth is that Dean Inge had an impossible title and an impossible task. He had to present Protestantism as Progress; when he is far too acute and cultivated a man not to suspect that it was (as it was) a relapse into barbarism and a break away from all that was central in civilisation. Even by the test of the Humanist, it made religion inhuman. Even by the test of the liberal, it substituted literalism for liberalism. Even if the goal had been mere Modernism, it led its followers to it by a long, dreary and straggling detour, a wandering in the wilderness, that did not even discover Modernism till it had first discovered Mormonism. Even if the goal had been logical scepticism, Voltaire could reach it more rapidly from the school of the Jesuits than the poor Protestant provincial brought up among the Jezreelites. Every mental process, even the process of going wrong, is clearer in the Catholic atmosphere. Protestantism has done nothing for Dean Inge, except give him a Deanery which rather hampers his mental activity. It has done nothing for his real talent or scholarship or sense of ideas. It has not in history defended any of the ideas he defends, or helped any of the liberties in which he hopes. But it has done one thing: it has hurt something he hates. It has done some temporary or apparent harm to the heritage of St. Peter. It once made something that looked like a little crack in the wall of Rome. And because of THAT, the Dean can pardon anything to the Protestants—even Protestantism.

For this is the strange passion of his life; and he toils through all these pages of doubts and distinctions only for the moment when he can liberate his soul in one wild roar of monomaniac absurdity: “Let the innocent Dreyfus die in prison; let the Irishman who has committed a treacherous murder be told to leave ‘politics’ out of his confession; let the lucrative imposture of Lourdes…” That is the way to talk! It is so tiring, pretending to talk sense.

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IL PROTESTANTESIMO: UN ROMANZO A TESI

HO dato un’occhiata al piccolo libro sul protestantesimo che il decano Inge ha contribuito alla collana da sei pence di Sir Ernest Benn; e benché suppongo sia già stato adeguatamente criticato, può essere bene annotare qualche appunto su di esso prima che venga interamente dimenticato. Il libro, che s’intitola «Protestantesimo», dovrebbe ovviamente intitolarsi «Cattolicesimo». Ciò che il decano ha da dire intorno a una qualche cosa reale riconoscibile come protestantesimo è straordinariamente frammentario, contraddittorio e inconcludente. È soltanto ciò che ha da dire intorno al cattolicesimo a essere chiaro, coerente e pertinente. È riscaldato e ravvivato dal movente umano e cordiale dell’odio; e fa apparire per contrasto ogni altra cosa nel libro timida e tortuosa. Non mi metterò ad annotare l’opera considerata come storia. Vi sono alcune curiose, se non consapevoli, falsificazioni dei fatti, specialmente nella forma di soppressioni di fatti. Egli comincia interpretando il protestantesimo come una mera «interiorità e sincerità» nella religione; il che nessuno dei riformatori protestanti avrebbe ammesso essere protestantesimo, e che un numero qualsiasi di riformatori cattolici hanno fatto il cuore stesso e l’anima delle loro riforme dentro il cattolicesimo. Si potrebbe suggerire che l’autoesame sia oggi più spesso raccomandato e praticato fra i cattolici che fra i protestanti. Ma che i campioni della sincerità esaminino o no se stessi, potrebbero bene esaminare le loro affermazioni. Alcune delle affermazioni qui contenute potrebbero specialmente essere oggetto di ripensamenti. È davvero una sconcertante soppressione e falsificazione dire che Enrico Ottavo avesse solo poche truppe di casa; sicché il suo popolo doveva aver favorito la sua politica, altrimenti si sarebbe sollevato contro di essa. Pare sufficiente replicare che si sollevò davvero contro di essa. E PROPRIO PERCHÉ Enrico aveva solo poche truppe di casa, egli fece venire dall’estero bande di feroci mercenari per soffocare la rivolta religiosa del suo stesso popolo. È uno sforzo di carità concedere anche completa candidezza al narratore, il quale può realmente adoperare un tale argomento, e poi tacere su un tale seguito. O ancora, è oltraggiosamente fuorviante insinuare che le vittime cattoliche della tirannide dei Tudor e d’altri fossero giustamente giustiziate come traditori e non come martiri di una religione. Ogni persecutore adduce necessità sociale e secolare; così fecero Caifa e Anna; così fecero Nerone e Diocleziano; fin dal principio i cristiani furono repressi come nemici dell’Impero; sino all’ultimo gli eretici furono consegnati al braccio secolare con giustificazioni secolari. Ma quando, in schietto fatto, un uomo può essere impiccato, sventrato e squartato semplicemente per aver detto Messa, o talvolta per aver aiutato qualcuno che aveva detto Messa, è pura follia delirante dire che una religione non sia perseguitata. Per menzionare una soltanto di molte minori falsificazioni di questa specie, è del tutto vero dire che Milton fu per molti versi più un umanista che un puritano; ma è del tutto falso insinuare che la famiglia Milton fosse una tipica famiglia puritana, nel suo gusto per la musica e le lettere. La spiegazione assai semplice è che la famiglia Milton era in gran parte una famiglia cattolica; e fu il celebre John a separarsi specialmente dal suo credo pur conservandone la cultura. Innumerevoli altri particolari altrettanto decisamente falsi potrebbero essere citati; ma sono assai più interessato alla portata generale dell’opera — che si lascia essere così curiosamente insulsa sul protestantesimo, solo per segnare un punto contro il cattolicesimo.

Ecco il tentativo di definizione del decano. «Qual è la funzione principale del protestantesimo? Esso è essenzialmente un tentativo di frenare la tendenza alla corruzione e alla degradazione che assale ogni religione istituzionale.» Fin qui, tutto bene. In tal caso San Carlo Borromeo, per esempio, era ovviamente un protestante di primo piano. San Domenico e San Francesco, che purgarono il congestionato convenzionalismo di gran parte del monachesimo attorno a loro, erano ovviamente protestanti di primo piano. I gesuiti che vagliarono la leggenda con l’erudizione del bollandismo, erano ovviamente protestanti di primo piano. Ma la maggior parte dei capi protestanti viventi non sono protestanti di primo piano. Se la degradazione trascina in basso OGNI religione istituzionale, presumibilmente ha trascinato in basso la religione istituzionale protestante. I protestanti potrebbero forse apparire purgare il protestantesimo; ma così i cattolici apparivano purgare il cattolicesimo. Chiaramente questa definizione è perfettamente inutile come DISTINZIONE fra protestantesimo e cattolicesimo. Poiché non è una descrizione di alcuna credenza o sistema o corpo di pensiero; ma semplicemente di una buona intenzione, che tutti gli uomini di tutte le Chiese professerebbero e pochi uomini in alcune Chiese praticano — specialmente nella nostra. Ma il decano non solo prova che le moderne istituzioni protestanti dovrebbero essere corrotte, egli dice che i loro fondatori primitivi dovrebbero essere ripudiati. Sostiene distintamente che non possiamo seguire Lutero e Calvino.

Ebbene bene — proseguiamo e vediamo chi dobbiamo seguire. Prenderò un passo tipico verso la fine del libro. Il decano osserva dapprima: «La Chiesa di Roma ha dichiarato che non vi può essere alcuna riconciliazione fra Roma e il moderno liberalismo o Progresso.» Si vorrebbe vedere l’enciclica o il decreto in cui questa dichiarazione fu fatta. Il liberalismo potrebbe significare molte cose, dalla cosa particolare che Newman denunciò e definì all’intenzione di votare a un’elezione suppletiva per Sir John Simon. Il progresso in genere significa qualcosa che il Papa non ha mai, per quanto io sappia, trovato necessario negare; ma che il decano stesso ha ripetutamente e più furiosamente negato. Egli prosegue poi: «Il protestantesimo è interamente libero da questa intransigente preferenza per i secoli bui.» «I secoli bui», naturalmente, sono cianfrusaglia e ciarpame; non occorre farci caso. Ma possiamo forse notare, non senza interesse e divertimento, che circa venticinque righe prima, il decano stesso ha descritto il protestantesimo popolare d’America come se fosse una barbarie e un ritardato oscurantismo. Da cui si può desumere che i secoli bui sono ancora in corso, esattamente là dove c’è il protestantesimo a preservarli. E considerando ch’egli dice almeno cinque volte che l’appello dei protestanti alla lettera della Scrittura è angusto e superstizioso, pare invero un po’ stupefacente ch’egli concluda dichiarando il protestantesimo, in quanto tale, «INTERAMENTE libero» da questa sorta di oscurità. Poi, in cima a tutto questo guazzabuglio di contraddizioni verbose, abbiamo questa meravigliosa e misteriosa conclusione: «È in questa direzione che i protestanti possono cercare il principio di ciò che può davvero essere una nuova Riforma, una ripresa dell’opera incompiuta di Tommaso Moro, Giordano Bruno ed Erasmo.»

In breve, i protestanti possono attendersi una Riforma modellata sull’opera di due cattolici e di un oscuro mistico, che non era protestante e delle cui dottrine essi e il mondo non sanno praticamente nulla. Si sa a stento da dove cominciare, nel criticare questa nuovissima Riforma, due terzi della quale furono a quanto pare avviati da uomini della Vecchia Religione. Potremmo umilmente suggerire che, se è deplorevole che l’opera di Tommaso Moro sia rimasta «incompiuta», qualche porzione della colpa può forse spettare al movimento che gli tagliò la testa. È possibile, mi domando, che ciò che il decano realmente intende sia che vogliamo una nuova Riforma per disfare tutto il male che fu fatto dalla vecchia Riforma? In ciò non abbiamo certo alcun motivo di litigare con lui. Saremmo lieti anche noi di avere una nuova Riforma, di noi stessi non meno che dei protestanti e d’altra gente; benché sia giusto dire che i cattolici riuscirono, entro uno spazio di tempo incredibilmente breve, a compiere qualcosa di assai simile a una nuova Riforma; che si chiama comunemente la Contro-Riforma. San Vincenzo de’ Paoli e San Francesco di Sales hanno almeno altrettanto buon diritto di dirsi eredi della cortesia e della carità di Moro quanto ne ha l’attuale decano di San Paolo. Ma mettendo da parte quella riforma del diciassettesimo secolo, v’è certo qualcosa di piuttosto stupendo nella riforma che il decano propone per il ventesimo secolo, e nei santi patroni ch’egli le sceglie fuori dal sedicesimo secolo.

Poiché ecco, a quanto pare, come stiamo. Non dobbiamo seguire Lutero e Calvino. Ma dobbiamo seguire Moro ed Erasmo. E questo, se non vi dispiace, è il vero protestantesimo e la promessa di una seconda Riforma. Dobbiamo copiare le vedute e le virtù degli uomini che trovarono di poter rimanere sotto il Papa, e specialmente di uno che effettivamente morì per la supremazia del Papa. Dobbiamo gettar via praticamente ogni brandello di pensiero o teoria sostenuto dalla gente che non rimase sotto la supremazia del Papa. E dobbiamo raccogliere tutte queste vedute in un piccolo opuscolo popolare dalla copertina arancione e chiamarle «Protestantesimo». La verità è che il decano Inge aveva un titolo impossibile e un compito impossibile. Doveva presentare il protestantesimo come Progresso; mentre è un uomo troppo acuto e coltivato per non sospettare che esso fu (come fu) una ricaduta nella barbarie e una rottura da tutto ciò che era centrale nella civiltà. Persino alla prova dell’umanista, esso rese la religione disumana. Persino alla prova del liberale, sostituì il letteralismo al liberalismo. Persino se la meta fosse stata il mero Modernismo, esso condusse i suoi seguaci ad essa per una lunga, tediosa e serpeggiante deviazione, un errare nel deserto, che non scoprì nemmeno il Modernismo prima d’aver scoperto il Mormonismo. Persino se la meta fosse stata lo scetticismo logico, Voltaire poteva raggiungerla più rapidamente dalla scuola dei gesuiti che non il povero provinciale protestante allevato fra gli Jezreeliti. Ogni processo mentale, anche il processo dell’errare, è più chiaro nell’atmosfera cattolica. Il protestantesimo non ha fatto nulla per il decano Inge, se non dargli un decanato che piuttosto intralcia la sua attività mentale. Non ha fatto nulla per il suo vero talento o la sua erudizione o il suo senso delle idee. Non ha nella storia difeso alcuna delle idee ch’egli difende, né aiutato alcuna delle libertà in cui egli spera. Ma ha fatto una cosa: ha ferito qualcosa ch’egli odia. Ha arrecato qualche danno temporaneo o apparente al retaggio di San Pietro. Un tempo fece qualcosa che parve una piccola crepa nel muro di Roma. E a causa di QUELLO, il decano può perdonare ai protestanti qualunque cosa — persino il protestantesimo.

Poiché questa è la strana passione della sua vita; ed egli si affatica attraverso tutte queste pagine di dubbi e distinzioni solo per il momento in cui potrà liberare la propria anima in un selvaggio ruggito di assurdità monomaniaca: «Che l’innocente Dreyfus muoia in prigione; che all’irlandese che ha commesso un proditorio omicidio si dica di lasciar fuori la “politica” dalla sua confessione; che la lucrosa impostura di Lourdes…» Ecco come si deve parlare! È così stancante, fingere di parlar con senno.

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A SIMPLE THOUGHT

MOST men would return to the old ways in faith and morals if they could broaden their minds enough to do so. It is narrowness that chiefly keeps them in the rut of negation. But this enlargement is easily misunderstood, because the mind must be enlarged to see the simple things; or even to see the self-evident things. It needs a sort of stretch of imagination to see the obvious objects against the obvious background; and especially the big objects against the big background. There is always the sort of man who can see nothing but the spot on the carpet, so that he cannot even see the carpet. And that tends to irritation, which he may magnify into rebellion. Then there is the kind of man who can only see the carpet, perhaps because it is a new carpet. That is more human, but it may be tinged with vanity and even vulgarity. There is the man who can only see the carpeted room; and that will tend to cut him off too much from other things, especially the servants’ quarters. Finally, there is the man enlarged by imagination, who cannot sit in the carpeted room, or even in the coal-cellar, without seeing all the time the outline of the whole house against its aboriginal background of earth and sky. He, understanding that the roof is raised from the beginning as a shield against sun or snow, and the door against frost or slime, will know better and not worse than the rest the reasons of the rules within. He will know better than the first man that there ought not to be a spot on the carpet. But he will know, unlike the first man, why there is a carpet.

He will regard in the same fashion a speck or spot upon the records of his tradition or his creed. He will not explain it ingeniously; certainly he will not explain it away. On the contrary, he will see it very simply; but he will also see it very largely; and against the background of larger things. He will do what his critics never by any chance do; he will see the obvious thing and ask the obvious question. For the more I read of the modern criticisms of religion, especially of my own religion, the more I am struck by this narrow concentration and this imaginative incapacity to take in the problem as a whole. I have recently been reading a very moderate condemnation of current Catholic practices, coming from America, where the condemnation is often far from moderate. It takes the form, generally speaking, of a swarm of questions, all of which I should be quite willing to answer. Only I am vividly conscious of the big questions that are not asked, rather than of the little questions that are.

And I feel above all, this simple and forgotten fact; that whether certain charges are or are not true of Catholics, they are quite unquestionably true of everybody else. It never occurs to the critic to do anything so simple as to compare what is Catholic with what is Non-Catholic. The one thing that never seems to cross his mind, when he argues about what the Church is like, is the simple question of what the world would be like without it.

That is what I mean by being too narrow to see the house called the church against the background called the cosmos. For instance, the writer of whom I speak indulges in the millionth mechanical repetition of the charge of mechanical repetition. He says that we repeat prayers and other verbal forms without thinking about them. And doubtless there are many sympathisers who will repeat that denunciation after him, without thinking about it at all. But, before we come to explaining the Church’s real teaching about such things, or quoting her numberless recommendations of attention and vigilance, or expounding the reason of the reasonable exceptions that she does allow, there is a wide, a simple and a luminous truth about the whole situation which anybody can see if he will walk about with his eyes open. It is the obvious fact that ALL human forms of speech tend to fossilise into formalism; and that the Church stands unique in history not as talking a dead language among everlasting languages; but, on the contrary, as having preserved a living language in a world of dying languages. When the great Greek cry breaks into the Latin of the Mass, as old as Christianity itself, it may surprise some to learn that there are a good many people in church who really do say KYRIE ELEISON and mean exactly what they say. But anyhow, they mean what they say rather more than a man who begins a letter with “Dear Sir” means what he says. “Dear” is emphatically a dead word; in that place it has ceased to have any meaning. It is exactly what the Protestants would allege of Popish rites and forms; it is done rapidly, ritually, and without any memory even of the meaning of the rite. When Mr. Jones the solicitor uses it to Mr. Brown the banker, he does not mean that the banker is dear to him, or that his heart is filled with Christian love, even so much as the heart of some poor ignorant Papist listening to the Mass. Now, life, ordinary, jolly, heathen, human life, is simply chockful of these dead words and meaningless ceremonies. You will not escape from them by escaping from the Church into the world. When the critic in question, or a thousand other critics like him, say that we are only required to make a material or mechanical attendance at Mass, he says something which is NOT true about the ordinary Catholic in his feelings about the Catholic Sacraments. But he says something which IS true about the ordinary official attending official functions, about the ordinary Court levee or Ministerial reception, and about three-quarters of the ordinary society calls and polite visits in the town. This deadening of repeated social action may be a harmless thing; it may be a melancholy thing; it may be a mark of the Fall of Man; it may be anything the critic chooses to think. But those who have made it, hundreds and hundreds of times, a special and concentrated charge against the Church, are men blind to the whole human world they live in and unable to see anything but the thing they traduce.

There are, even in this record, any number of other cases of this queer and uncanny unconsciousness. The writer complains that priests are led blindfold into their calling and do not understand the duties involved in it. That also we seem to have heard before. But we have seldom heard it in so extraordinary a form as in his statement, that a man can be finally committed to the priesthood while he is still “a child.” He would appear to have odd and elastic ideas about the duration of childhood. As Mr. Michael Williams has pointed out in his most thoughtful and illuminating collection of essays, “Catholicism and the Modern Mind,” this is playing about with a matter of plain fact; since a priest is twenty-four at the earliest when he takes his vows. But here again I myself am haunted by this huge and naked and yet neglected comparison between the Church and everything outside the Church. Most critics of Catholicism declare it to be destructive of patriotism; and this critic says something about the disadvantages of the Church being merely “attached to an Italian diocese.” Well, I for one have always been a defender of the cult of patriotism; and nothing that I say here has any connection with what is commonly called pacifism. I think that our friends and brethren fell ten years ago in a just war against the hard heathenism of the north; I think the Prussianism they defeated was frozen with the pride of hell; and for these dead, I think it is well with them; and perhaps better than with us, who live to see how evil Peace can be.

But really—when we come to talk about the Church involving young people in vows! What are we to say to those who would pit patriotism or pagan citizenship against the Church on that issue? They conscript by violence boys of eighteen, they applaud volunteers of sixteen for saying they are eighteen, they throw them by thousands into a huge furnace and torture-chamber, of which their imaginations can have conceived nothing and from which their honour forbids them to escape; they keep them in those horrors year after year without any knowledge even of the possibility of victory; and kill them like flies by the million before they have begun to live. That is what the State does; that is what the World does; that is what their Protestant, practical, sensible, secular society does. And after that they have the astounding impudence to come and complain of us, because in dealing with a small minority of specialists, we allow a man finally to choose a charitable and peaceful life, not only long after he is twenty-one, but when he is well on towards thirty, and after he has had about ten years to think quietly whether he will do it or not!

In short, what I miss in all these things is the obvious thing: the question of how the Church compares with the world outside the Church, or opposed to the Church, or offered as a substitute for the Church. And the fact obviously is that the world will do all that it has ever accused the Church of doing, and do it much worse, and do it on a much larger scale, and do it (which is worst and most important of all) without any standards for a return to sanity or any motives for a movement of repentance. Catholic abuses can be reformed, because there is the admission of a form. Catholic sins can be expiated, because there is a test and a principle of expiation. But where else in the world to-day is any such test or standard found; or anything except a changing mood, which makes patriotism the fashion ten years ago and pacifism the fashion ten years afterwards?

The danger is to-day that men will not sufficiently enlarge their minds to take in the obvious things; and this is one of them. It is that men charge the Roman tradition with being half-heathen and then take refuge from it in a complete heathenism. It is that men complain because Christians have been infected with paganism; and then flee from the plague-spotted to take refuge with the pestilence. There is no single one of these faults alleged against the Catholic institution, which is not far more flagrant and even flamboyant in every other institution. And it is to these other institutions, the State, the School, the modern machinery of taxation and police, to which these people actually look to save them from the superstition of their fathers. That is the contradiction; that is the crashing collision; that is the inevitable intellectual disaster in which they have already involved themselves; and we have only to wait as patiently as we can, to see how long it is before they realise what has happened.

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UN SEMPLICE PENSIERO

LA MAGGIOR parte degli uomini tornerebbe alle antiche vie nella fede e nella morale se potesse allargare la mente abbastanza da farlo. È l’angustia che principalmente li tiene nel solco della negazione. Ma questo ampliamento è facilmente frainteso, perché la mente dev’essere ampliata per vedere le cose semplici; o persino per vedere le cose autoevidenti. Occorre una sorta di distensione dell’immaginazione per vedere gli oggetti ovvi contro lo sfondo ovvio; e specialmente i grandi oggetti contro il grande sfondo. C’è sempre quella sorta d’uomo che non sa vedere nulla se non la macchia sul tappeto, sicché non riesce neppure a vedere il tappeto. E ciò tende all’irritazione, ch’egli può ingrandire fino alla ribellione. Poi c’è il genere d’uomo che sa vedere solo il tappeto, forse perché è un tappeto nuovo. Questo è più umano, ma può essere tinto di vanità e persino di volgarità. C’è l’uomo che sa vedere solo la stanza tappezzata; e ciò tenderà a tagliarlo fuori troppo dalle altre cose, specialmente dagli alloggi della servitù. Infine, c’è l’uomo ampliato dall’immaginazione, il quale non può sedere nella stanza tappezzata, né persino nella carbonaia, senza vedere per tutto il tempo il profilo dell’intera casa contro il suo aborigeno sfondo di terra e cielo. Egli, comprendendo che il tetto è innalzato fin dal principio come scudo contro il sole o la neve, e la porta contro il gelo o la melma, conoscerà meglio e non peggio degli altri le ragioni delle regole interne. Saprà meglio del primo uomo che non dovrebbe esserci una macchia sul tappeto. Ma saprà, a differenza del primo uomo, perché c’è un tappeto.

Egli considererà nella stessa maniera un puntino o una macchia sui documenti della sua tradizione o del suo credo. Non lo spiegherà ingegnosamente; certo non lo spiegherà via. Al contrario, lo vedrà assai semplicemente; ma lo vedrà anche assai ampiamente; e contro lo sfondo di cose più grandi. Farà ciò che i suoi critici non fanno mai per caso alcuno; vedrà la cosa ovvia e porrà la domanda ovvia. Poiché quanto più leggo delle moderne critiche della religione, specialmente della mia stessa religione, tanto più sono colpito da questa angusta concentrazione e da questa incapacità immaginativa di abbracciare il problema nel suo insieme. Ho letto di recente una condanna assai moderata delle correnti pratiche cattoliche, proveniente dall’America, dove la condanna è spesso tutt’altro che moderata. Essa assume la forma, generalmente parlando, di uno sciame di domande, a tutte le quali sarei ben disposto a rispondere. Solo che sono vividamente consapevole delle grandi domande che non vengono poste, piuttosto che delle piccole domande che lo sono.

E sento soprattutto questo fatto semplice e dimenticato; che, siano o no vere certe accuse riguardo ai cattolici, esse sono del tutto incontestabilmente vere riguardo a chiunque altro. Non viene mai in mente al critico di fare qualcosa di tanto semplice quanto paragonare ciò che è cattolico con ciò che è non cattolico. L’unica cosa che pare non attraversare mai la sua mente, quand’egli discute di com’è fatta la Chiesa, è la semplice domanda di come sarebbe il mondo senza di essa.

Questo è ciò che intendo per essere troppo angusti da vedere la casa chiamata chiesa contro lo sfondo chiamato cosmo. Per esempio, lo scrittore di cui parlo si abbandona alla milionesima ripetizione meccanica dell’accusa di ripetizione meccanica. Egli dice che noi ripetiamo preghiere e altre formule verbali senza pensarci. E senza dubbio vi sono molti solidali che ripeteranno quella denuncia dopo di lui, senza pensarci affatto. Ma, prima di venire a spiegare il reale insegnamento della Chiesa su tali cose, o a citare le sue innumerevoli raccomandazioni di attenzione e vigilanza, o a esporre la ragione delle ragionevoli eccezioni ch’essa pur concede, v’è una vasta, semplice e luminosa verità sull’intera situazione, che chiunque può vedere se vorrà andare in giro con gli occhi aperti. È l’ovvio fatto che TUTTE le forme umane del discorso tendono a fossilizzarsi in formalismo; e che la Chiesa sta unica nella storia non come parlante una lingua morta fra lingue eterne; ma, al contrario, come avente preservato una lingua viva in un mondo di lingue morenti. Quando il grande grido greco irrompe nel latino della Messa, antico quanto il Cristianesimo stesso, può sorprendere alcuni apprendere che vi sono in chiesa parecchie persone che davvero dicono KYRIE ELEISON e intendono esattamente ciò che dicono. Ma comunque, intendono ciò che dicono un po’ più di quanto un uomo che comincia una lettera con «Egregio Signore» intenda ciò che dice. «Egregio» è enfaticamente una parola morta; in quel luogo ha cessato di avere qualsiasi significato. È esattamente ciò che i protestanti asserirebbero dei riti e delle forme papiste; è fatto rapidamente, ritualmente, e senza alcuna memoria neppure del significato del rito. Quando il signor Jones il procuratore lo adopera verso il signor Brown il banchiere, non intende che il banchiere gli sia caro, o che il suo cuore sia colmo di amore cristiano, nemmeno tanto quanto il cuore di qualche povero ignorante papista che ascolta la Messa. Ora, la vita, ordinaria, allegra, pagana, umana vita, è semplicemente stipata di queste parole morte e cerimonie prive di senso. Non sfuggirete loro sfuggendo dalla Chiesa nel mondo. Quando il critico in questione, o mille altri critici come lui, dice che ci è solo richiesta una materiale o meccanica presenza alla Messa, egli dice qualcosa che NON è vero riguardo all’ordinario cattolico nei suoi sentimenti verso i Sacramenti cattolici. Ma dice qualcosa che È vero riguardo all’ordinario funzionario che presenzia a funzioni ufficiali, riguardo all’ordinario ricevimento di Corte o alla ricezione ministeriale, e riguardo a tre quarti delle ordinarie visite mondane e delle cortesi visite di società in città. Questo intorpidimento dell’azione sociale ripetuta può essere una cosa innocua; può essere una cosa malinconica; può essere un segno della Caduta dell’Uomo; può essere qualunque cosa il critico scelga di pensare. Ma coloro che ne hanno fatto, centinaia e centinaia di volte, una speciale e concentrata accusa contro la Chiesa, sono uomini ciechi all’intero mondo umano in cui vivono e incapaci di vedere alcunché tranne la cosa che diffamano.

Vi sono, persino in questo scritto, un gran numero di altri casi di questa strana e perturbante incoscienza. Lo scrittore si lamenta che i sacerdoti siano condotti bendati alla loro vocazione e non comprendano i doveri in essa implicati. Anche questo ci pare d’averlo udito prima. Ma di rado l’abbiamo udito in forma tanto straordinaria quanto nella sua affermazione che un uomo può essere definitivamente vincolato al sacerdozio mentre è ancora «un fanciullo». Sembrerebbe avere idee bizzarre ed elastiche sulla durata della fanciullezza. Come il signor Michael Williams ha rilevato nella sua assai meditata e illuminante raccolta di saggi, «Il cattolicesimo e la mente moderna», questo è un giocare con una questione di schietto fatto; poiché un sacerdote ha ventiquattro anni al più presto quando pronuncia i voti. Ma anche qui io stesso sono ossessionato da questo immenso e nudo e pur trascurato paragone fra la Chiesa e tutto ciò che è fuori della Chiesa. La maggior parte dei critici del cattolicesimo lo dichiarano distruttore del patriottismo; e questo critico dice qualcosa sugli svantaggi dell’essere la Chiesa meramente «attaccata a una diocesi italiana». Ebbene, io per parte mia sono sempre stato un difensore del culto del patriottismo; e nulla di ciò che dico qui ha alcuna connessione con ciò che comunemente si chiama pacifismo. Penso che i nostri amici e fratelli caddero dieci anni fa in una guerra giusta contro il duro paganesimo del nord; penso che il prussianesimo ch’essi sconfissero fosse gelato dall’orgoglio dell’inferno; e per questi morti, penso che sia bene per loro; e forse meglio che per noi, che viviamo per vedere quanto malvagia possa essere la Pace.

Ma davvero — quando veniamo a parlare della Chiesa che coinvolge i giovani in voti! Che cosa dobbiamo dire a coloro che vorrebbero contrapporre il patriottismo o la cittadinanza pagana alla Chiesa su tale questione? Essi coscrivono con la violenza ragazzi di diciotto anni, applaudono volontari di sedici che dichiarano d’averne diciotto, li gettano a migliaia in una immensa fornace e camera di tortura, della quale la loro immaginazione non poteva aver concepito nulla e dalla quale il loro onore vieta loro di fuggire; li tengono in quegli orrori anno dopo anno senza alcuna conoscenza nemmeno della possibilità della vittoria; e li uccidono come mosche a milioni prima ch’essi abbiano cominciato a vivere. Ecco ciò che fa lo Stato; ecco ciò che fa il Mondo; ecco ciò che fa la loro protestante, pratica, assennata, secolare società. E dopo ciò hanno la sbalorditiva impudenza di venire a lagnarsi di noi, perché, trattando con una piccola minoranza di specialisti, noi permettiamo a un uomo di scegliere finalmente una vita caritatevole e pacifica, non solo assai dopo che ha ventun anni, ma quand’è bene avviato verso i trenta, e dopo ch’egli ha avuto circa dieci anni per riflettere tranquillamente se lo farà o no!

In breve, ciò che mi manca in tutte queste cose è la cosa ovvia: la questione di come la Chiesa si confronti con il mondo fuori della Chiesa, o opposto alla Chiesa, o offerto come surrogato della Chiesa. E il fatto ovviamente è che il mondo farà tutto ciò di cui abbia mai accusato la Chiesa di fare, e lo farà assai peggio, e lo farà su scala assai più vasta, e lo farà (il che è la cosa peggiore e più importante di tutte) senza alcun criterio per un ritorno alla ragione o alcun motivo per un moto di pentimento. Gli abusi cattolici possono essere riformati, perché v’è l’ammissione di una forma. I peccati cattolici possono essere espiati, perché v’è una prova e un principio d’espiazione. Ma dove altro nel mondo d’oggi si trova un simile criterio o metro; o alcunché tranne un umore mutevole, che rende il patriottismo la moda dieci anni fa e il pacifismo la moda dieci anni dopo?

Il pericolo oggi è che gli uomini non allarghino sufficientemente la mente da abbracciare le cose ovvie; e questa è una di esse. È che gli uomini accusano la tradizione romana di essere mezzo pagana e poi si rifugiano da essa in un completo paganesimo. È che gli uomini si lagnano perché i cristiani sono stati contagiati dal paganesimo; e poi fuggono dagli appestati per rifugiarsi presso la pestilenza. Non v’è un solo di questi difetti addotti contro l’istituzione cattolica, che non sia assai più flagrante e persino sfarzoso in ogni altra istituzione. Ed è a queste altre istituzioni, lo Stato, la Scuola, il moderno macchinario della tassazione e della polizia, che questa gente guarda realmente per salvarsi dalla superstizione dei loro padri. Ecco la contraddizione; ecco la fragorosa collisione; ecco l’inevitabile disastro intellettuale in cui si sono già coinvolti; e non ci resta che attendere quanto più pazientemente possiamo, per vedere quanto tempo passerà prima ch’essi comprendano ciò ch’è accaduto.

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THE CALL TO THE BARBARIANS

A BOOK was sent me the other day by a gentleman who pins his faith to what he calls the Nordic race; and who, indeed, appears to offer that race as a substitute for all religions. Crusaders believed that Jerusalem was not only the Holy City, but the centre of the whole world. Moslems bow their heads towards Mecca and Roman Catholics are notorious for being in secret communication with Rome. I presume that the Holy Place of the Nordic religion must be the North Pole. What form of religious architecture is exhibited in its icebergs, how far its vestments are modified by the white covering of Arctic animals, how the morning and evening service may be adapted to a day and a night each lasting for six months, whether their only vestment is the alb or their only service the angelus of noon, upon all these mysteries I will not speculate. But I can affirm with some confidence that the North Pole is very little troubled by heretical movements or the spread of modern doubt. Anyhow, it would seem that we know next to nothing about this social principle, except that anything is good if it is near enough to the North. And this undoubtedly explains the spiritual leadership of the Eskimo throughout history; and the part played by Spitzbergen as the spiritual arena of modern times. The only thing that puzzles me is that the Englishmen who now call themselves Nordic used to call themselves Teutonic; and very often even Germanic. I cannot think why they altered this so abruptly in the autumn of 1914. Some day, I suppose, when we have diplomatic difficulties with Norway, they will equally abruptly drop the word Nordic. They will hastily substitute some other—I would suggest Borealic. They might be called the Bores, for short.

But I only mention this book because of a passage in it which is rather typical of the tone of a good many other people when they are talking about Catholic history. The writer would substitute one race for all religions; in which he certainly differs from us, who are ready to offer one religion to all races. And even here, perhaps, the comparison is not altogether to his advantage. For anybody who likes can belong to the religion; whereas it is not very clear what is to be done with the people who do not happen to belong to the race. But even among religions he is ready to admit degrees of depravity; he will distinguish between these disgusting institutions; of course, according to their degree of latitude. It is rather unfortunate for him that many Eskimos are Catholics and that most French Protestants live in the south of France; but he proceeds on his general principle clearly enough. He points out, in his pleasant way, why it is exactly that Roman Catholicism is such a degrading superstition. And he adds (which is what interests me at the moment) that this was illustrated in the Dark Ages, which were a nightmare of misery and ignorance. He then admits handsomely that Protestantism is not quite so debased and devilish as Catholicism; and that men of the Protestant nations do exhibit rudimentary traces of the human form. But this, he says, “is not due to their Protestantism, but to their Nordic common sense.” They are more educated, more liberal, more familiar with reason and beauty, because they are what used to be called Teutonic; descended from Vikings and Gothic chiefs rather than from the Tribunes of Florence or the Troubadours of Provence. And in this curious idea I caught a glimpse of something much wider and more interesting; which is another note of the modern ignorance of the Catholic tradition. In speaking of things that people do not know, I have mostly spoken of things that are really within the ring or circle of our own knowledge; things inside the Catholic culture which they miss because they are outside it. But there are some cases in which they themselves are ignorant even of the things outside it. They themselves are ignorant, not only of the centre of civilisation which they slander, but even of the ends of the earth to which they appeal; they not only cannot find Rome on their map, but they do not even know where to look for the North Pole.

Take, for instance, that remark about the Dark Ages and the Nordic common sense. It is tenable and tolerable enough to say that the Dark Ages were a nightmare. But it is nonsense to say that the Nordic element was anything remotely resembling sense. If the Dark Ages were a nightmare, it was very largely because the Nordic nonsense made them an exceedingly Nordic nightmare. It was the period of the barbarian invasions; when piracy was on the high seas and civilisation was in the monasteries. You may not like monasteries, or the sort of civilisation that is preserved by monasteries; but it is quite certain that it was the only sort of civilisation there was. But this is simply one of the things that the Nordic gentleman does not know. He imagines that the Danish pirate was talking about Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference, with scientific statistics from Australia and Alaska, when he was rudely interrupted by a monk named Bede, who had never heard of anything but monkish fables. He supposes that a Viking or a Visigoth was firmly founded on the principles of the Primrose League and the English Speaking Union, and that everything else would have been founded on them if fanatical priests had not rushed in and proclaimed the savage cult called Christianity. He thinks that Penda of Mercia, the last heathen king, was just about to give the whole world the benefits of the British Constitution, not to mention the steam engine and the works of Rudyard Kipling, when his work was blindly ruined by unlettered ruffians with such names as Augustine and Dunstan and Anselm. And that is the little error which invalidates our Nordic friend’s importance as a serious historian; that is why we cannot throw ourselves with utter confidence and surrender into the stream of his historical enthusiasm. The difficulty consists in the annoying detail that nothing like what he is thinking about ever happened in the world at all; that the religion of race that he proposes is exactly what he himself calls the Dark Ages. It is what some scientific persons call a purely subjective idea; or in other words, a nightmare. It is very doubtful if there ever was any Nordic race. It is quite certain that there never was any Nordic common sense. The very words “common sense” are a translation from the Latin.

Now that one typical or even trivial case has a larger application. One very common form of Protestant or rationalist ignorance may be called the ignorance of what raw humanity is really like. Such men get into a small social circle, very modern and very narrow, whether it is called the Nordic race or the Rationalist Association. They have a number of ideas, some of them truisms, some of them very untrue, about liberty, about humanity, about the spread of knowledge. The point is that those ideas, whether true or untrue, are the very reverse of universal. They are not the sort of ideas that any large mass of mankind, in any age or country, may be assumed to have. They may in some cases be related to deeper realities; but most men would not even recognise them in the form in which these men present them. There is probably, for instance, a fundamental assumption of human brotherhood that is common to all humanity. But what we call humanitarianism is not common to humanity. There is a certain recognition of reality and unreality which may be called common sense. But the scientific sense of the special value of truth is not generally regarded as common sense. It is silly to pretend that priests specially persecuted a naturalist, when the truth is that all the little boys would have persecuted him in any village in the world, merely because he was a lunatic with a butterfly-net. Public opinion, taken as a whole is much more contemptuous of specialists and seekers after truth than the Church ever was. But these critics never can take public opinion as a whole. There are a great many examples of this truth; one is the case I have given, the absurd notion that a horde of heathen raiders out of the northern seas and forests, in the most ignorant epoch of history, were not likely to be at least as ignorant as anybody else. They were, of course, much more ignorant than anybody with the slightest social connection with the Catholic Church. Other examples may be found in the story of other religions. Great tracts of the globe, covered in theory by the other religions, are often covered in practice merely by certain human habits of fatalism or pessimism or some other human mood. Islam very largely stands for the fatalism. Buddhism very largely stands for the pessimism. Neither of them knows anything of either the Christian or the humanitarian sort of hope. But an even more convincing experience is to go out into the street, or into a tube or a tram, and talk to the actual cabmen, cooks and charwomen cut off from the Creed by the modern chaos. You will find that heathens are not happy, however Nordic. You will soon find that you do not need to go to Arabia for fatalism; or to the Thibetan desert for despair.

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L’APPELLO AI BARBARI

UN LIBRO mi è stato inviato l’altro giorno da un gentiluomo che ripone la propria fede in ciò ch’egli chiama la razza nordica; e che, invero, pare offrire quella razza come surrogato di tutte le religioni. I crociati credevano che Gerusalemme fosse non solo la Città Santa, ma il centro del mondo intero. I musulmani chinano il capo verso la Mecca e i cattolici romani sono notoriamente in segreta comunicazione con Roma. Presumo che il Luogo Santo della religione nordica debba essere il Polo Nord. Quale forma di architettura religiosa sia esibita nei suoi iceberg, quanto le sue vesti siano modificate dal bianco manto degli animali artici, come il servizio del mattino e della sera possa essere adattato a un giorno e a una notte ciascuno della durata di sei mesi, se la loro unica veste sia il camice o il loro unico servizio l’angelus del mezzogiorno, su tutti questi misteri non speculerò. Ma posso affermare con una certa sicurezza che il Polo Nord è assai poco turbato da movimenti eretici o dalla diffusione del moderno Dubbio. Ad ogni modo, parrebbe che noi non sappiamo quasi nulla di questo principio sociale, se non che qualsiasi cosa è buona se è abbastanza vicina al Nord. E questo indubbiamente spiega la guida spirituale dell’eschimese lungo tutta la storia; e la parte giocata dalle Spitzbergen come arena spirituale dei tempi moderni. L’unica cosa che mi lascia perplesso è che gli inglesi che ora si chiamano nordici solevano chiamarsi teutonici; e assai spesso persino germanici. Non riesco a pensare perché abbiano mutato ciò così bruscamente nell’autunno del 1914. Un giorno, suppongo, quando avremo difficoltà diplomatiche con la Norvegia, essi lasceranno cadere altrettanto bruscamente la parola nordici. Sostituiranno in fretta qualche altra — suggerirei borealici. Potrebbero essere chiamati i Bori, per brevità.

Ma menziono questo libro solo per via di un passo in esso, che è piuttosto tipico del tono di parecchie altre persone quando parlano di storia cattolica. Lo scrittore sostituirebbe una razza a tutte le religioni; in ciò certamente differisce da noi, che siamo pronti a offrire una religione a tutte le razze. E anche qui, forse, il paragone non è del tutto a suo vantaggio. Poiché chiunque voglia può appartenere alla religione; mentre non è troppo chiaro che cosa si debba fare con la gente che per caso non appartiene alla razza. Ma persino fra le religioni egli è pronto ad ammettere gradi di depravazione; distinguerà fra queste disgustose istituzioni; naturalmente, secondo il loro grado di latitudine. È piuttosto sfortunato per lui che molti eschimesi siano cattolici e che la maggior parte dei protestanti francesi viva nel sud della Francia; ma egli procede sul suo principio generale abbastanza chiaramente. Egli mette in luce, nel suo piacevole modo, perché è esattamente che il cattolicesimo romano è una superstizione tanto degradante. E aggiunge (il che è ciò che m’interessa al momento) che questo fu illustrato nei secoli bui, che furono un incubo di miseria e ignoranza. Ammette poi generosamente che il protestantesimo non è del tutto così degradato e diabolico quanto il cattolicesimo; e che gli uomini delle nazioni protestanti mostrano bensì tracce rudimentali della forma umana. Ma questo, egli dice, «non è dovuto al loro protestantesimo, bensì al loro buon senso nordico». Essi sono più istruiti, più liberali, più familiari con la ragione e la Bellezza, perché sono ciò che si soleva chiamare teutonici; discesi da vichinghi e capi gotici piuttosto che dai Tribuni di Firenze o dai Trovatori di Provenza. E in questa curiosa idea colsi un barlume di qualcosa di assai più ampio e più interessante; che è un’altra nota della moderna ignoranza della tradizione cattolica. Nel parlare di cose che la gente non conosce, ho parlato per lo più di cose che sono realmente entro l’anello o il cerchio della nostra propria conoscenza; cose dentro la cultura cattolica che a loro sfuggono perché ne sono fuori. Ma vi sono alcuni casi in cui essi stessi sono ignoranti persino delle cose fuori di essa. Essi stessi sono ignoranti, non solo del centro della civiltà che calunniano, ma persino dei confini della terra a cui si appellano; non solo non riescono a trovare Roma sulla loro mappa, ma non sanno nemmeno dove cercare il Polo Nord.

Si prenda, per esempio, quell’osservazione sui secoli bui e sul buon senso nordico. È sostenibile e tollerabile abbastanza dire che i secoli bui furono un incubo. Ma è un’assurdità dire che l’elemento nordico fosse alcunché di lontanamente somigliante al senno. Se i secoli bui furono un incubo, fu in gran parte perché l’insensatezza nordica ne fece un incubo oltremodo nordico. Fu il periodo delle invasioni barbariche; quando la pirateria era sull’alto mare e la civiltà era nei monasteri. Potreste non amare i monasteri, o la sorta di civiltà che è preservata dai monasteri; ma è del tutto certo che era l’unica sorta di civiltà che vi fosse. Ma questa è semplicemente una delle cose che il gentiluomo nordico non sa. Egli immagina che il pirata danese stesse parlando di Riforma doganale e di Preferenza Imperiale, con statistiche scientifiche dall’Australia e dall’Alaska, quando fu rudemente interrotto da un monaco di nome Beda, il quale non aveva mai udito di nulla se non di favole monacali. Egli suppone che un vichingo o un visigoto fosse fermamente fondato sui princìpi della Primrose League e dell’Unione di Lingua Inglese, e che ogni altra cosa sarebbe stata fondata su di essi se fanatici sacerdoti non fossero irrotti a proclamare il selvaggio culto chiamato Cristianesimo. Egli pensa che Penda di Mercia, l’ultimo re pagano, fosse sul punto di dare al mondo intero i benefici della Costituzione britannica, per non parlare della macchina a vapore e delle opere di Rudyard Kipling, quando la sua opera fu ciecamente rovinata da illetterati manigoldi con nomi come Agostino e Dunstano e Anselmo. Ed è questo il piccolo errore che invalida l’importanza del nostro amico nordico come serio storico; ecco perché non possiamo gettarci con assoluta fiducia e abbandono nel torrente del suo entusiasmo storico. La difficoltà consiste nel fastidioso particolare che nulla di simile a ciò ch’egli pensa accadde mai al mondo; che la religione della razza ch’egli propone è esattamente ciò ch’egli stesso chiama i secoli bui. È ciò che alcune persone scientifiche chiamano un’idea puramente soggettiva; o, in altre parole, un incubo. È assai dubbio che vi sia mai stata una razza nordica. È del tutto certo che non vi fu mai alcun buon senso nordico. Le parole stesse «buon senso» sono una traduzione dal latino.

Ora quell’unico caso tipico o persino banale ha un’applicazione più ampia. Una forma assai comune d’ignoranza protestante o razionalista può chiamarsi l’ignoranza di ciò che l’umanità grezza sia realmente. Simili uomini entrano in un piccolo circolo sociale, assai moderno e assai angusto, che si chiami la razza nordica o l’Associazione Razionalista. Hanno un certo numero di idee, alcune truismi, alcune assai false, sulla libertà, sull’umanità, sulla diffusione della conoscenza. Il punto è che quelle idee, vere o false che siano, sono l’esatto rovescio dell’universale. Non sono la sorta d’idee che una qualsiasi grande massa dell’umanità, in qualsiasi epoca o paese, si possa presumere abbia. Possono in certi casi essere connesse a realtà più profonde; ma la maggior parte degli uomini non le riconoscerebbe nemmeno nella forma in cui questi uomini le presentano. V’è probabilmente, per esempio, un fondamentale assunto di fratellanza umana comune a tutta l’umanità. Ma ciò che chiamiamo umanitarismo non è comune all’umanità. V’è un certo riconoscimento della realtà e dell’irrealtà che può chiamarsi buon senso. Ma il senso scientifico dello speciale valore della verità non è generalmente considerato buon senso. È sciocco pretendere che i sacerdoti perseguitassero specialmente un naturalista, quando la verità è che tutti i ragazzini l’avrebbero perseguitato in qualsiasi villaggio del mondo, semplicemente perché era un pazzo con un retino per farfalle. L’opinione pubblica, presa nel suo insieme, è assai più sprezzante degli specialisti e dei cercatori di verità di quanto la Chiesa sia mai stata. Ma questi critici non possono mai prendere l’opinione pubblica nel suo insieme. Vi sono moltissimi esempi di questa verità; uno è il caso che ho addotto, l’assurda nozione che un’orda di predoni pagani venuti dai mari e dalle foreste del nord, nell’epoca più ignorante della storia, non fosse probabilmente almeno tanto ignorante quanto chiunque altro. Erano, naturalmente, assai più ignoranti di chiunque avesse la benché minima connessione sociale con la Chiesa Cattolica. Altri esempi possono trovarsi nella storia di altre religioni. Grandi tratti del globo, coperti in teoria dalle altre religioni, sono spesso coperti in pratica soltanto da certe umane abitudini di fatalismo o pessimismo o qualche altro umore umano. L’Islam sta in gran parte per il fatalismo. Il buddismo sta in gran parte per il pessimismo. Nessuno dei due conosce alcunché della sorta di speranza cristiana o umanitaria. Ma un’esperienza ancor più convincente è uscire nella strada, o in un tram o in una metropolitana, e parlare con i veri vetturini, cuochi e sguattere tagliati fuori dal Credo dal moderno caos. Troverete che i pagani non sono felici, per quanto nordici. Presto scoprirete che non v’è bisogno di andare in Arabia per il fatalismo; o nel Deserto tibetano per la Disperazione.

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ON THE NOVEL WITH A PURPOSE

I SEE that Mr. Patrick Braybrooke and others, writing to the CATHOLIC TIMES, have raised the question of Catholic propaganda in novels written by Catholics. The very phrase, which we are all compelled to use, is awkward and even false. A Catholic putting Catholicism into a novel, or a song, or a sonnet, or anything else, is not being a propagandist; he is simply being a Catholic. Everybody understands this about every other enthusiasm in the world. When we say that a poet’s landscape and atmosphere are full of the spirit of England, we do not mean that he is necessarily conducting an Anti-German propaganda during the Great War. We mean that if he is really an English poet, his poetry cannot be anything but English. When we say that songs are full of the spirit of the sea, we do not mean that the poet is recruiting for the Navy or even trying to collect men for the merchant service. We mean that he loves the sea; and for that reason would like other people to love it. Personally, I am all for propaganda; and a great deal of what I write is deliberately propagandist. But even when it is not in the least propagandist, it will probably be full of the implications of my own religion; because that is what is meant by having a religion. So the jokes of a Buddhist, if there were any, would be Buddhist jokes. So the love-songs of a Calvinistic Methodist, should they burst from him, would be Calvinistic Methodist love-songs. Catholics have produced more jokes and love-songs than Calvinists and Buddhists. That is because, saving their holy presence, Calvinists and Buddhists have not got so large or human a religion. But anything they did express would be steeped in any convictions that they do hold; and that is a piece of common sense which would seem to be quite self-evident; yet I foresee a vast amount of difficulty about it in the one isolated case of the Catholic Church.

To begin with, what I have said would be true of any other real religion; but so much of the modern world is full of a religiosity that is rather a sort of unconscious prejudice. Buddhism is a real religion, or at any rate, a very real philosophy. Calvinism was a real religion, with a real theology. But the mind of the modern man is a curious mixture of decayed Calvinism and diluted Buddhism; and he expresses his philosophy without knowing that he holds it. We say what it is natural to us to say; but we know what we are saying; therefore it is assumed that we are saying it for effect. He says what it is natural to him to say; but he does not know what he is saying, still less why he is saying it. So he is not accused of uttering his dogma with the purpose of revealing it to the world; for he has not really revealed it to himself. He is just as partisan; he is just as particularist; he is just as much depending on one doctrinal system as distinct from another. But he has taken it for granted so often that he has forgotten what it is. So his literature does not seem to him partisan, even when it is. But our literature does seem to him propagandist, even when it isn’t.

Suppose I write a story, let us hope a short story, say, about a wood that is haunted by evil spirits. Let us give ourselves the pleasure of supposing that at night all the branches have the appearance of being hung with hundreds of corpses, like the orchard of Louis the Eleventh, the spirits of travellers who have hanged themselves when they came to that spot; or anything bright and cheery like that. Suppose I make my hero, Gorlias Fitzgorgon (that noble character) make the sign of the cross as he passes this spot; or the friend who represents wisdom and experience advise him to consult a priest with a view to exorcism. Making the sign of the cross seems to me not only religiously right, but artistically appropriate and psychologically probable. It is what I should do; it is what I conceive that my friend Fitzgorgon would do; it is also aesthetically apt, or, as they say, “in the picture.” I rather fancy it might be effective if the traveller saw with the mystical eye, as he saw the forest of dead men, a sort of shining pattern or silver tangle of crosses hovering in the dark, where so many human fingers had made that sign upon the empty air. But though I am writing what seems to me natural and appropriate and artistic, I know that the moment I have written it, a great roar and bellow will go up with the word “Propaganda” coming from a thousand throats; and that every other critic, even if he is kind enough to commend the story, will certainly add: “But why does Mr. Chesterton drag in his Roman Catholicism?”

Now let us suppose that Mr Chesterton has not this disgusting habit. Let us suppose that I write the same story, or the same sort of story, informed with a philosophy which is familiar and therefore unobserved. Let us suppose that I accept the ready-made assumptions of the hour, without examining them any more than the others do. Suppose I get into the smooth rut of newspaper routine and political catchwords; and make the man in my story act exactly like the man in the average magazine story. I know exactly what the man in the average magazine story would do. I can almost give you his exact words. In that case Fitzgorgon, on first catching a glimpse of the crowds of swaying spectres in the moon, will almost inevitably say: “But this is the twentieth century!”

In itself, of course, the remark is simply meaningless. It is far more meaningless than making the sign of the cross could ever be; for to that even its enemies attach some sort of meaning. But to answer a ghost by saying, “This is the twentieth century,” is in itself quite unmeaning; like seeing somebody commit a murder and then saying, “But this is the second Tuesday in August!” Nevertheless, the magazine writer who for the thousandth time puts these words into the magazine story, has an intention in this illogical phrase. He is really depending upon two dogmas; neither of which he dares to question and neither of which he is able to state. The dogmas are: first, that humanity is perpetually and permanently improving through the process of time; and, second, that improvement consists in a greater and greater indifference or incredulity about the miraculous. Neither of these two statements can be proved. And it goes without saying that the man who uses them cannot prove them, for he cannot even state them. In so far as they are at all in the order of things that can be proved, they are things that can be disproved. For certainly there have been historical periods of relapse and retrogression; and there certainly are highly organised and scientific civilizations very much excited about the super-natural; as people are about Spiritualism to-day. But anyhow, those two dogmas must be accepted on authority as absolutely true before there is any sense whatever in Gorlias Fitzgorgon saying, “But this is the twentieth century.” The phrase depends on the philosophy; and the philosophy is put into the story.

SUL ROMANZO A TESI

VEDO che il signor Patrick Braybrooke e altri, scrivendo al CATHOLIC TIMES, hanno sollevato la questione della propaganda cattolica nei romanzi scritti da cattolici. La frase stessa, che siamo tutti costretti a usare, è goffa e persino falsa. Un cattolico che mette il cattolicesimo in un romanzo, o in una canzone, o in un sonetto, o in qualsiasi altra cosa, non sta facendo il propagandista; sta semplicemente essendo cattolico. Tutti comprendono questo riguardo a ogni altro entusiasmo al mondo. Quando diciamo che il paesaggio e l’atmosfera di un poeta sono pieni dello spirito dell’Inghilterra, non intendiamo ch’egli stia necessariamente conducendo una propaganda antitedesca durante la Grande Guerra. Intendiamo che se è realmente un poeta inglese, la sua poesia non può essere altro che inglese. Quando diciamo che i canti sono pieni dello spirito del mare, non intendiamo che il poeta stia arruolando per la Marina o persino cercando di raccogliere uomini per il servizio mercantile. Intendiamo ch’egli ama il mare; e per tale ragione vorrebbe che altri lo amassero. Personalmente, sono tutto per la propaganda; e gran parte di ciò che scrivo è deliberatamente propagandistico. Ma anche quando non è per nulla propagandistico, sarà probabilmente pieno delle implicazioni della mia propria religione; perché è questo che si intende con l’avere una religione. Così le facezie di un buddista, se ve ne fossero, sarebbero facezie buddiste. Così le canzoni d’amore di un metodista calvinista, dovessero prorompere da lui, sarebbero canzoni d’amore metodiste calviniste. I cattolici hanno prodotto più facezie e canzoni d’amore dei calvinisti e dei buddisti. Questo perché, salva la loro santa presenza, i calvinisti e i buddisti non hanno una religione così ampia o umana. Ma qualsiasi cosa essi esprimessero sarebbe impregnata di qualsiasi convinzione essi sostengano; e questo è un pezzo di buon senso che parrebbe del tutto autoevidente; eppure prevedo una vasta quantità di difficoltà al riguardo nell’unico caso isolato della Chiesa Cattolica.

Per cominciare, ciò che ho detto sarebbe vero di ogni altra religione reale; ma tanta parte del mondo moderno è piena di una religiosità che è piuttosto una sorta di pregiudizio inconscio. Il buddismo è una religione reale, o quanto meno una filosofia assai reale. Il calvinismo era una religione reale, con una reale teologia. Ma la mente dell’uomo moderno è una curiosa mescolanza di calvinismo decaduto e buddismo diluito; ed egli esprime la sua filosofia senza sapere di sostenerla. Noi diciamo ciò che ci è naturale dire; ma sappiamo ciò che stiamo dicendo; perciò si presume che lo stiamo dicendo per fare effetto. Egli dice ciò che gli è naturale dire; ma non sa ciò che sta dicendo, ancor meno perché lo sta dicendo. Così non viene accusato di proferire il suo dogma con lo scopo di rivelarlo al mondo; poiché non lo ha realmente rivelato a se stesso. È altrettanto fazioso; è altrettanto particolarista; dipende altrettanto da un sistema dottrinale distinto da un altro. Ma lo ha dato per scontato così spesso da aver dimenticato cosa sia. Così la sua letteratura non gli pare faziosa, persino quando lo è. Ma la nostra letteratura gli pare propagandistica, persino quando non lo è.

Supponiamo ch’io scriva una storia, speriamo un racconto breve, diciamo, su un bosco infestato da spiriti maligni. Concediamoci il piacere di supporre che di notte tutti i rami abbiano l’aspetto d’essere carichi di centinaia di cadaveri, come il frutteto di Luigi Undicesimo, gli spiriti dei viandanti che si sono impiccati quando giunsero a quel luogo; o qualcosa di luminoso e allegro come questo. Supponiamo ch’io faccia sì che il mio eroe, Gorlias Fitzgorgon (quel nobile carattere), faccia il segno della croce mentre passa per quel luogo; o che l’amico che rappresenta la saggezza e l’esperienza gli consigli di consultare un sacerdote in vista di un esorcismo. Fare il segno della croce mi sembra non solo religiosamente giusto, ma artisticamente appropriato e psicologicamente probabile. È ciò ch’io farei; è ciò che concepisco che il mio amico Fitzgorgon farebbe; è anche esteticamente calzante, o, come si dice, «nel quadro». Immagino piuttosto che potrebbe essere efficace se il viandante vedesse con l’occhio mistico, mentre vedeva la foresta di uomini morti, una sorta di lucente disegno o argenteo groviglio di croci librantisi nel buio, là dove tante dita umane avevano tracciato quel segno sull’aria vuota. Ma benché io stia scrivendo ciò che a me pare naturale e appropriato e artistico, so che nell’istante in cui l’avrò scritto, un gran ruggito e muggito si leverà con la parola «Propaganda» proveniente da mille gole; e che ogni altro critico, anche se è tanto gentile da lodare la storia, aggiungerà certamente: «Ma perché il signor Chesterton tira in ballo il suo cattolicesimo romano?»

Ora supponiamo che il signor Chesterton non abbia questa disgustosa abitudine. Supponiamo ch’io scriva la stessa storia, o lo stesso genere di storia, informata da una filosofia che è familiare e perciò inosservata. Supponiamo ch’io accetti gli assunti belli e pronti dell’ora, senza esaminarli più di quanto facciano gli altri. Supponiamo ch’io m’infili nel liscio solco della routine giornalistica e degli slogan politici; e faccia sì che l’uomo nella mia storia agisca esattamente come l’uomo nella rivista media. So esattamente ciò che l’uomo nella storia da rivista media farebbe. Posso quasi darvi le sue parole esatte. In tal caso Fitzgorgon, al primo scorgere le folle di spettri ondeggianti nella luna, dirà quasi inevitabilmente: «Ma questo è il ventesimo secolo!»

In se stessa, naturalmente, l’osservazione è semplicemente priva di senso. È assai più priva di senso di quanto potrebbe mai esserlo fare il segno della croce; poiché a quest’ultimo persino i suoi nemici attribuiscono una sorta di significato. Ma rispondere a un fantasma dicendo «Questo è il ventesimo secolo» è in sé del tutto privo di senso; come vedere qualcuno commettere un omicidio e poi dire «Ma questo è il secondo martedì d’agosto!». Nondimeno, lo scrittore di riviste che per la millesima volta mette queste parole nella storia da rivista, ha un’intenzione in questa frase illogica. Egli dipende realmente da due dogmi; nessuno dei quali osa mettere in dubbio e nessuno dei quali è capace di enunciare. I dogmi sono: primo, che l’umanità va perpetuamente e permanentemente migliorando attraverso il processo del tempo; e, secondo, che il miglioramento consiste in una sempre maggiore indifferenza o incredulità verso il miracoloso. Nessuna di queste due affermazioni può essere provata. E va da sé che l’uomo che le adopera non può provarle, poiché non può nemmeno enunciarle. In quanto siano in qualche modo nell’ordine delle cose che possono essere provate, sono cose che possono essere confutate. Poiché certamente vi sono stati periodi storici di ricaduta e regresso; e vi sono certamente civiltà altamente organizzate e scientifiche assai eccitate riguardo al soprannaturale; come la gente lo è riguardo allo Spiritismo oggi. Ma ad ogni modo, quei due dogmi devono essere accettati sull’autorità come assolutamente veri prima che vi sia alcun senso in Gorlias Fitzgorgon che dice «Ma questo è il ventesimo secolo». La frase dipende dalla filosofia; e la filosofia è messa nella storia.

Yet nobody says the magazine story is propagandist. Nobody says it is preaching that philosophy because it contains that phrase. We do not say that the writer has dragged in his progressive party politics. We do not say that he is going out of his way to turn the short story into a novel with a purpose. He does not feel as if he were going out of his way; his way lies straight through the haunted wood, as does the other; and he only makes Gorlias say what seems to him a sensible thing to say; as I make him do what seems to me a sensible thing to do. We are both artists in the same sense; we are both propagandists in the same sense and non-propagandists in the same sense. The only difference is that I can defend my dogma and he cannot even define his.

In other words, this world of to-day does not know that all the novels and newspapers that it reads or writes are in fact full of certain assumptions, that are just as dogmatic as dogmas. With some of those assumptions I agree, such as the ideal of human equality implied in all romantic stories from CINDERELLA to OLIVER TWIST; that the rich are insulting God in despising poverty. With some of them I totally disagree; as in the curious idea of human inequality, which is permitted about races though not about classes. “Nordic” people are so much superior to “Dagoes,” that a score of Spanish desperados armed to the teeth are certain to flee in terror from the fist of any solitary gentleman who has learned all the military and heroic virtues in Wall Street or the Stock Exchange. But the point about these assumptions, true or false, is that they are felt as being assumed, or alluded to, or taken naturally as they come. They are not felt as being preached; and therefore they are not called propaganda. Yet they have in practice all the double character of propaganda; they involve certain views with which everyone does not agree; and they do in fact spread those views by means of fiction and popular literature. What they do not do is to state them clearly so that they can be criticised. I do not blame the writers for putting their philosophy into their stories. I should not blame them even if they used their stories to spread their philosophy. But they do blame us; and the real reason is that they have not yet realised that we have a philosophy at all.

The truth is, I think, that they are caught in a sort of argument in a circle. Their vague philosophy says to them: “All religion is dead; Roman Catholicism is a religious sect which must be particularly dead, since it consists of mere external acts and attitudes, crossings, genuflections and the rest; which these sectarians suppose they have to perform in a particular place at a particular time.” Then some Catholic will write a romance or a tragedy about the love of a man and woman, or the rivalry of two men, or any other general human affair; and they will be astonished to find that he cannot preach these things in an “unsectarian” way. They say, “Why does he drag in his religion?” They mean, “Why does he drag in his religion, which consists entirely of crossings, genuflections and external acts belonging to a particular place and time, when he is talking about the wide world and the beauty of woman and the anger and ambition of man?” In other words, they say, “When we have assumed that his creed is a small and dead thing, how dare he apply it as a universal and living thing? It has no right to be so broad, when we all know it is so narrow.”

I conclude therefore that, while Mr. Braybrooke was quite right in suggesting that a novelist with a creed ought not to be ashamed of having a cause, the more immediate necessity is to find some way of popularising our whole philosophy of life, by putting it more plainly than it can be put in the symbol of a story. The difficulty with a story is in its very simplicity and especially in its swiftness. Men do things and do not define or defend them. Gorlias Fitzgorgon makes the sign of the cross; he does not stop in the middle of the demon wood to explain why it is at once an invocation of the Trinity and a memorial of the Crucifixion. What is wanted is a popular outline of the way in which ordinary affairs are affected by our view of life, and how it is also a view of death, a view of sex, a view of social decencies, and so on. When people understood the light that shines for us upon all these facts, they would no longer be surprised to find it shining in our fictions.

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Eppure nessuno dice che il racconto da rivista sia propagandistico. Nessuno dice che esso predichi quella filosofia perché contiene quella frase. Non diciamo che lo scrittore vi abbia trascinato dentro la sua politica di partito progressista. Non diciamo che egli si stia scomodando per trasformare il racconto breve in un romanzo a tesi. Egli non sente affatto di scomodarsi; la sua strada passa dritta attraverso il bosco stregato, così come quella dell’altro; ed egli si limita a far dire a Gorlias ciò che a lui pare una cosa sensata da dire, come io gli faccio fare ciò che a me pare una cosa sensata da fare. Siamo entrambi artisti nello stesso senso; siamo entrambi propagandisti nello stesso senso e non-propagandisti nello stesso senso. L’unica differenza è che io posso difendere il mio dogma ed egli non riesce neppure a definire il suo.

In altre parole, questo mondo d’oggi non sa che tutti i romanzi e i giornali che legge o scrive sono in realtà pieni di certi presupposti, dogmatici quanto i dogmi. Con alcuni di quei presupposti sono d’accordo, come l’ideale dell’uguaglianza umana implicito in tutte le storie romantiche, da CENERENTOLA a OLIVER TWIST; che i ricchi insultino Dio disprezzando la povertà. Con alcuni di essi sono in totale disaccordo; come nella curiosa idea della disuguaglianza umana, che è ammessa riguardo alle razze ma non riguardo alle classi. I popoli «nordici» sono tanto superiori ai «Dagoes» che una ventina di disperati spagnoli armati fino ai denti fuggiranno certamente terrorizzati dinanzi al pugno di un qualsiasi solitario gentiluomo che abbia appreso tutte le virtù militari ed eroiche a Wall Street o alla Borsa. Ma il punto, riguardo a questi presupposti, veri o falsi, è che vengono percepiti come cose date per scontate, o accennate, o accolte con naturalezza così come vengono. Non vengono percepiti come predicati; e perciò non vengono chiamati propaganda. Eppure hanno in pratica tutto il duplice carattere della propaganda; comportano certe opinioni con cui non tutti concordano; e diffondono di fatto quelle opinioni per mezzo della narrativa e della letteratura popolare. Ciò che non fanno è enunciarle chiaramente, così che possano essere criticate. Non biasimo gli scrittori per aver messo la loro filosofia nelle loro storie. Non li biasimerei neppure se usassero le loro storie per diffondere la loro filosofia. Ma essi biasimano noi; e la vera ragione è che non hanno ancora compreso che noi abbiamo affatto una filosofia.

La verità, credo, è che essi sono presi in una sorta di ragionamento circolare. La loro vaga filosofia dice loro: «Ogni religione è morta; il cattolicesimo romano è una setta religiosa che dev’essere particolarmente morta, poiché consiste di meri atti e atteggiamenti esteriori, segni di croce, genuflessioni e via dicendo; che questi settari suppongono di dover compiere in un luogo particolare in un particolare momento.» Poi un qualche cattolico scriverà un romanzo o una tragedia sull’amore di un uomo e di una donna, o sulla rivalità di due uomini, o su qualsiasi altra generica vicenda umana; ed essi si stupiranno nel constatare che egli non può predicare queste cose in modo «non settario». Dicono: «Perché ci trascina dentro la sua religione?» Intendono: «Perché ci trascina dentro la sua religione, che consiste interamente di segni di croce, genuflessioni e atti esteriori appartenenti a un luogo e a un momento particolari, quando parla del vasto mondo e della bellezza della donna e dell’ira e dell’ambizione dell’uomo?» In altre parole, dicono: «Una volta che abbiamo dato per scontato che il suo credo sia una cosa piccola e morta, come osa applicarlo come una cosa universale e viva? Non ha alcun diritto d’essere così ampio, quando tutti sappiamo che è così angusto.»

Concludo perciò che, mentre il signor Braybrooke aveva perfettamente ragione nel suggerire che un romanziere dotato di un credo non dovrebbe vergognarsi di avere una causa, la necessità più immediata è trovare qualche modo di divulgare la nostra intera filosofia della vita, esponendola più chiaramente di quanto la si possa esporre nel simbolo di una storia. La difficoltà di una storia sta nella sua stessa semplicità e specialmente nella sua rapidità. Gli uomini compiono azioni e non le definiscono né le difendono. Gorlias Fitzgorgon fa il segno della croce; non si ferma in mezzo al bosco dei demoni a spiegare perché esso sia insieme un’invocazione della Trinità e un memoriale della Crocifissione. Ciò che occorre è un profilo divulgativo del modo in cui le faccende ordinarie sono influenzate dalla nostra visione della vita, e di come essa sia anche una visione della morte, una visione del sesso, una visione delle convenienze sociali, e così via. Quando la gente comprendesse la luce che per noi risplende su tutti questi fatti, non si stupirebbe più di trovarla risplendere nelle nostre finzioni.

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THE REVOLT AGAINST IDEAS

AT the time when the DAILY EXPRESS communiques provided some pretty awful revelations about Mexico, the DAILY EXPRESS correspondence column provided almost equally awful revelations about England. It gave us a glimpse of what monstrous and misshapen things are still living in our midst, veiled in red brick villas or disguised under bowler hats. The awful revelations about England were, of course, mainly psychological. It was not anarchy in the State, which is the failing of the fighting Latin peoples. It was anarchy in the mind, which is the special character of those whom we call, in moments of anger, Anglo-Saxons. A Mexican atheist would be quite capable of cutting the throat of a priest or training a cannon on a nunnery. But he would be quite incapable of arguing, as the English Protestants did in the newspaper, that it was quite right of Calles to persecute this belief on this occasion, because it was quite wrong of Catholics to persecute any belief on any occasion. No anarchist can be as anarchical as all that. Calles might blow up a St. Peter’s but he would not blame a Spaniard for having once done what he was praising a Mexican for trying to do. To that extent even Calles is more of a Catholic as well as more of a Latin. He wants to have his own way, and to prevent thousands of people from having their way; but he does not want to have it both ways. That wild sacrament, the miracle of the vanishing and reappearing cake, of the cake that is ever devoured and ever remaining—that miracle belongs to the religion of unreason and only takes place in the chapels of our own free country.

Amid a welter of such words there was a phrase in one of the letters which is of some sociological interest to us. One of these intolerant tolerationists was endeavouring to defend Calles by suggesting that only prejudice can accuse him of anarchical or anti-religious extremes of opinion. It is quite unfair (it was said) to call Calles an atheist or a Bolshevist. Indeed, we may learn from all these letters that Calles is probably a Wesleyan Methodist and regularly attends a chapel in East Croydon. But he is even worse. They appear to regard it as a favour to Calles to pay him the extraordinary compliment of comparing him to the sixteenth century Reformers. The correspondent here in question uses this as an argument against any alleged anarchism in the Mexican—if he is a Mexican. “Calles and his partisans are branded as Atheists and Bolsheviks—Why? Were the English Reformers Bolsheviks? Certainly not.”

Here we are happily all able to agree. With heartfelt unanimity we can repeat, “Certainly not.” The English Reformers were certainly not Bolshevists. None will withhold the handsome admission that the English Reformers were Capitalists. Few people in history have deserved to be described so exactly, so completely, so typically as Capitalists. They were a great many other things besides Capitalists; some of them were cads, some gentlemen, a few honest men, many thieves, a baser sort courtiers, a better sort monomaniacs; but they were all Capitalists and what they created was Capitalism. They all conducted their powerful political operations on a basis of much accumulated capital; but they never, even with their dying eyes, lost the light of hope and expectation; the promise and the vision of more capital.

But what concerns us nowadays is this; that it is their Capitalism that has remained. As a matter of fact, many of them did have other ideals of spiritual simplification which might in some ways be compared to Communism. We should never be likely to call a man like Cranmer or a man like Burleigh a Bolshevist. We could only say, with Hamlet, that we would he were so honest a man. But there were men in that movement, or that muddle, who were as mad and as honest as Bolshevists. There were theoretical, and especially theological enthusiasms which moved specially towards simplicity; like that of the Bolshevists. But the point to fix and rivet is that THOSE theories are dead. There was a logical and even lofty scheme of thought; but it is that which is utterly abandoned by modern thought. There were sincere ideals in some of the early Protestants; but they are not the ideals of any of the modern Protestants. Thus Calvinism was a clear philosophy; which is alone enough to distinguish it from Modern Thought. But in so far as they had an element of Calvinism, their Calvinism is dead. If they had had an element of Communism, as some of them might, that Communism would now be dead. Nothing but their Capitalism is alive.

We must remember that even to talk of the corruption of the monasteries is a compliment to the monasteries. For we do not talk of the corruption of the corrupt. Nobody pretends that the mediaeval institutions began in mere greed and pride. But the modern institutions did. Nobody says that St. Benedict drew up his rule of labour in order to make his monks lazy; but only that they became lazy. Nobody says that the first Franciscans practised poverty to obtain wealth; but only that later fraternities did obtain wealth. But it is quite certain that the Cecils and the Russells and the rest did from the first want to obtain wealth. That which was death to Catholicism was actually the birth of Capitalism. Since then we have had, not the inconsistency that a man who vowed to be poor became rich; but rather a shocking consistency, that the man who vowed to be rich became richer. After that there was no stopping a race of relative ambition; and a belief in bigger and bigger things. It is indeed true that the Reformers were not Communists. It might be aptly retorted that the Religious were Communists. But the more vital point is not Communism, but a certain comparative spirit. The English squire increased and the English yeoman diminished. Both found their pride in private ownership of land. But the pride was more and more in having a great estate, and not in having an estate. So, in his turn, the English shopkeeper ceased to be proud of minding his own business and could only be proud of the number of businesses he could mind. From this has come all the mercantile megalomania to-day; with its universal transformation of Trades into Trusts. It is the natural conclusion of the movement away from the transformation of all Trades into Guilds. But its genesis was the change from an ideal of humility, in which many failed, to an ideal of pride in which (by its nature) only a few can succeed.

LA RIVOLTA CONTRO LE IDEE

NEL tempo in cui i comunicati del DAILY EXPRESS fornivano rivelazioni piuttosto spaventose sul Messico, la colonna della corrispondenza del DAILY EXPRESS forniva rivelazioni quasi altrettanto spaventose sull’Inghilterra. Ci offriva uno scorcio di quali cose mostruose e deformi vivano ancora in mezzo a noi, velate in villette di mattoni rossi o travestite sotto bombette. Le spaventose rivelazioni sull’Inghilterra erano, naturalmente, soprattutto psicologiche. Non era anarchia nello Stato, che è il difetto dei bellicosi popoli latini. Era anarchia nella mente, che è il carattere peculiare di coloro che chiamiamo, nei momenti d’ira, anglosassoni. Un ateo messicano sarebbe pienamente capace di tagliare la gola a un prete o di puntare un cannone contro un convento di monache. Ma sarebbe del tutto incapace di sostenere, come fecero i protestanti inglesi sul giornale, che Calles avesse pienamente ragione a perseguitare questa fede in questa occasione, perché i cattolici avevano pienamente torto a perseguitare qualsiasi fede in qualsiasi occasione. Nessun anarchico può essere anarchico fino a tanto. Calles potrebbe far saltare in aria una San Pietro, ma non biasimerebbe uno spagnolo per aver fatto un tempo ciò che lodava un messicano per aver tentato di fare. In tale misura persino Calles è più cattolico oltre che più latino. Vuole avere la propria strada e impedire a migliaia di persone di avere la loro; ma non vuole la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca. Quel selvaggio sacramento, il miracolo della torta che scompare e riappare, della torta che è sempre divorata e sempre permanente — quel miracolo appartiene alla religione della sragione e ha luogo soltanto nelle cappelle del nostro libero paese.

In mezzo a un guazzabuglio di simili parole c’era, in una delle lettere, una frase che riveste per noi un certo interesse sociologico. Uno di questi intolleranti tolleranzialisti si sforzava di difendere Calles suggerendo che solo il pregiudizio può accusarlo di estremi anarchici o antireligiosi d’opinione. È del tutto ingiusto (si diceva) chiamare Calles ateo o bolscevico. Anzi, possiamo apprendere da tutte queste lettere che Calles è probabilmente un metodista wesleyano e frequenta regolarmente una cappella a East Croydon. Ma egli è persino peggio. Sembra che considerino un favore reso a Calles tributargli lo straordinario complimento di paragonarlo ai Riformatori del sedicesimo secolo. Il corrispondente qui in questione se ne serve come argomento contro qualsiasi presunto anarchismo nel messicano — se è un messicano. «Calles e i suoi partigiani sono bollati come atei e bolscevichi — perché? I Riformatori inglesi erano forse bolscevichi? Certamente no.»

Qui, per fortuna, possiamo tutti concordare. Con sentita unanimità possiamo ripetere: «Certamente no.» I Riformatori inglesi non erano certamente bolscevichi. Nessuno negherà la generosa ammissione che i Riformatori inglesi erano capitalisti. Poche persone nella storia hanno meritato d’essere descritte così esattamente, così completamente, così tipicamente come capitalisti. Erano moltissime altre cose oltre che capitalisti; alcuni di loro erano mascalzoni, alcuni gentiluomini, pochi uomini onesti, molti ladri, i più vili cortigiani, i migliori monomaniaci; ma erano tutti capitalisti e ciò che crearono fu il capitalismo. Condussero tutti le loro potenti operazioni politiche su una base di molto capitale accumulato; ma non persero mai, nemmeno con gli occhi morenti, la luce della speranza e dell’attesa; la promessa e la visione di ancora più capitale.

Ma ciò che ci riguarda oggigiorno è questo: che è il loro capitalismo ad essere rimasto. In verità, molti di loro avevano altri ideali di semplificazione spirituale che potrebbero per certi versi essere paragonati al comunismo. Non ci verrebbe mai di chiamare bolscevico un uomo come Cranmer o un uomo come Burleigh. Potremmo solo dire, con Amleto, che vorremmo fosse un uomo tanto onesto. Ma vi erano uomini in quel movimento, o in quel pasticcio, che erano folli e onesti quanto i bolscevichi. Vi erano entusiasmi teorici, e specialmente teologici, che tendevano in modo particolare verso la semplicità; come quello dei bolscevichi. Ma il punto da fissare e ribadire è che QUELLE teorie sono morte. Vi era uno schema di pensiero logico e persino elevato; ma è proprio quello ad essere del tutto abbandonato dal pensiero moderno. Vi erano ideali sinceri in alcuni dei primi protestanti; ma non sono gli ideali di alcuno dei protestanti moderni. Così il calvinismo era una filosofia chiara; il che basta da solo a distinguerlo dal Pensiero Moderno. Ma nella misura in cui avevano un elemento di calvinismo, il loro calvinismo è morto. Se avessero avuto un elemento di comunismo, come alcuni forse l’avevano, quel comunismo sarebbe ora morto. Nient’altro che il loro capitalismo è vivo.

Dobbiamo ricordare che persino parlare della corruzione dei monasteri è un complimento ai monasteri. Poiché non parliamo della corruzione dei corrotti. Nessuno pretende che le istituzioni medievali siano cominciate per mera avidità e orgoglio. Ma le istituzioni moderne sì. Nessuno dice che san Benedetto abbia redatto la sua regola del lavoro allo scopo di rendere pigri i suoi monaci; ma solo che essi divennero pigri. Nessuno dice che i primi francescani praticassero la povertà per ottenere ricchezza; ma solo che le fraternità posteriori la ricchezza la ottennero. Ma è del tutto certo che i Cecil e i Russell e gli altri vollero fin dal principio ottenere ricchezza. Ciò che fu morte per il cattolicesimo fu in realtà la nascita del capitalismo. Da allora abbiamo avuto, non l’incoerenza per cui un uomo che aveva fatto voto di povertà divenne ricco; ma piuttosto una sconvolgente coerenza, per cui l’uomo che aveva fatto voto di ricchezza divenne più ricco. Dopo di che non vi fu più modo di fermare una gara di ambizione relativa; e una fede in cose sempre più grandi. È in effetti vero che i Riformatori non erano comunisti. Si potrebbe acutamente ribattere che i Religiosi erano comunisti. Ma il punto più vitale non è il comunismo, bensì un certo spirito comparativo. Lo squire inglese crebbe e lo yeoman inglese si ridusse. Entrambi riponevano il loro orgoglio nella proprietà privata della terra. Ma l’orgoglio stava sempre più nel possedere una grande tenuta, e non nel possedere una tenuta. Così, a sua volta, il bottegaio inglese cessò d’essere fiero di badare ai propri affari e poté essere fiero soltanto del numero di affari a cui poteva badare. Da questo è venuta tutta la megalomania mercantile odierna; con la sua universale trasformazione dei Mestieri in Trust. È la naturale conclusione del movimento che si allontana dalla trasformazione di tutti i Mestieri in Gilde. Ma la sua genesi fu il passaggio da un ideale di umiltà, in cui molti fallirono, a un ideale di orgoglio in cui (per sua natura) solo pochi possono riuscire.

In this sense we may agree with the newspaper correspondent; that the Reformers were not Revolutionists. We can reassure that simple gentleman of our full realisation that they were not Bolshevists. We can entirely absolve the Cranmers and the Cromwells of any restless desire to raise the proletariat. We can clear the great names of Burleigh and Bacon of the stain of any dangerous sympathy with the poor. The distinguishing mark of the Reformers was a profound respect for the powers that be, but an even profounder respect for the wealth that was to be; and a really unfathomable reverence for the wealth that was to be their own. Some people like that spirit, and regard it as the soundest foundation of stable government; we need not argue about it here. It is, broadly speaking, what is regarded as respectability by all those who have nothing else to respect. Certainly nobody could confuse it with revolution. But the point of historical importance could be put in another fashion, also more or less favourable to the Reformers. Capitalism was not only solid, it was in a sense candid. It set up a class to be worshipped openly and frankly because of its wealth. That is the point at the moment and the real contrast between this and the older mediaeval order. Such wealth was the abuse of the monks and abbots; it was the use of the merchants and the squires. The avaricious abbot violated his ideals. The avaricious employer had no ideals to violate. For there never has been, properly speaking, such a thing as the ideal good of Capitalism; though there are any number of good men who are Capitalists following other ideals. The Reformation, especially in England, was above all the abandonment of the attempt to rule the world by ideals, or even by ideas. The attempt had undoubtedly failed, in part, because those who were supposed to be the idealists failed to uphold the ideals; and any number of people who were supposed to accept the general idea thwarted the fulfilment of the ideas. But it also fell under the attack of those who hated, not only those ideals, but any ideals. It was the result of the impatient and imperious appetites of humanity, hating to be restrained by bonds; but most of all to be restrained by invisible bonds. For the English Reformers did not really set up an opposite ideal or an alternative set of ideas. As our friend truly said, they were not Bolshevists. They set up certain very formidable things called facts. They set out almost avowedly to rule the realm merely by facts; by the fact that somebody called Russell had two hundred times more money than any of his neighbours; by the fact that somebody called Cecil had obtained the power of having any of his neighbours hanged. Facts are at least solid while they last; but the fatal thing about them is that they do not last. It is only the ideas that last. And to-day a man may be called Russell and have considerably less money than a man who is called Rockefeller; and history may see the amazing spectacle of a man called Cecil largely thrust out of practical politics and called an idealist and a failure.

The same progress of Capitalism that made the squires has destroyed the squires. The same commercial advance that exalted England before Europe has abased England before America. Exactly in so far as we have our affections healthily attached to this adventurous and patriotic England of the last few centuries, we shall see that our affections and attachments are bound to be betrayed. The process called practical, the attempt to rule merely by facts, has in its own nature the essence of all betrayal. We discover that facts, which seem so solid, are of all things the most fluid. As the professors and the prigs say, facts are always evolving; in other words, they are always evading or escaping or running away. Men who bow down to the wealth of a squire, because it enables him to behave like a gentleman, have to go on bowing down to the same wealth in somebody who cannot behave like a gentleman; and eventually perhaps to the same wealth not attached to any recognisable human being at all, but invested in an irresponsible company in a foreign country. Wealth does indeed take to itself wings, and even abide in the uttermost parts of the sea. Wealth becomes formless and almost fabulous; indeed, they were unconscious satirists who talked about “fabulous wealth.” Great financiers buy and sell thousands of things that nobody has ever seen; and which are for all practical purposes imaginary. So ends the adventure of trusting only to facts; it ends in a fairyland of fantastic abstractions.

We must go back to the idea of government by ideas. There is just that grain of truth in the already mentioned fantasy of Communism. But there were many richer, and subtler and better balanced ideas even in the mediaeval make-up of Catholicism. I repeat that this Catholicism was ruined by Catholics as well as Protestants. Mediaeval sins hampered and corrupted mediaeval ideas, before the Reformers decided to throw away all ideas. But that was the right thing to follow, or to try to follow; and there is not and never will be anything else to do except to try again. Many mediaeval men failed in the attempt to live up to those ideals. But many more modern men are more disastrously failing in the attempt to live without them. And through that failure we shall gradually come to understand the real advantages of that ancient scheme which only partly failed; according to which, in theory at least, the man of peace was higher than the man of war, and poverty superior to wealth.

There is one quaint little phrase in Macaulay’s essay on Bacon; that great outbreak of the Philistines against the Philosophers. In one small sentence the great Philistine betrays the weakness of his whole argument of utility. Speaking scornfully of the Schoolmen, he says that St. Thomas Aquinas would doubtless (such was his simplicity) have thought it more important to engage in the manufacture of syllogisms than in the manufacture of gunpowder. Not even the Gunpowder Plot could prevent that sturdy Protestant from assuming that gunpowder is always useful. Since his time we have seen a good deal more gunpowder. One does not need to be a pacifist to think that gunpowder need hardly go on being useful on quite such a grand scale. And a great part of the world has now reached a mood of reaction, in which it is disposed to cry out, “If there are any syllogisms that will save us from all this gunpowder, for God’s sake let us listen to them.” Even logic they are prepared, in their despair, to accept. They will not only listen to religion, they will even perhaps listen to reason, if it will promise them a little peace.

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In questo senso possiamo concordare con il corrispondente del giornale: che i Riformatori non erano Rivoluzionari. Possiamo rassicurare quel candido gentiluomo che ci rendiamo pienamente conto che non erano Bolscevichi. Possiamo assolvere del tutto i Cranmer e i Cromwell da qualsiasi inquieto desiderio di sollevare il proletariato. Possiamo mondare i grandi nomi dei Burleigh e dei Bacon dalla macchia di qualunque pericolosa simpatia verso i poveri. Il tratto distintivo dei Riformatori era un profondo rispetto per i poteri costituiti, ma un rispetto ancora più profondo per la ricchezza che stava per venire; e una riverenza davvero insondabile per la ricchezza che stava per divenire loro propria. A certuni piace questo spirito, e lo considerano il più solido fondamento di un governo stabile; non occorre discuterne qui. È, a grandi linee, ciò che viene considerato rispettabilità da tutti coloro che non hanno nient’altro da rispettare. Certo nessuno potrebbe confonderlo con la rivoluzione. Ma il punto di importanza storica potrebbe essere posto in un’altra maniera, anch’essa più o meno favorevole ai Riformatori. Il Capitalismo non era solo solido, era in un certo senso schietto. Erigeva una classe da adorare apertamente e francamente a motivo della sua ricchezza. È questo il punto, per il momento, e il vero contrasto tra questo e il più antico ordine medievale. Tale ricchezza era l’abuso dei monaci e degli abati; era l’uso dei mercanti e degli scudieri. L’abate avaro violava i propri ideali. Il datore di lavoro avaro non aveva ideali da violare. Poiché non è mai esistita, propriamente parlando, una cosa come il bene ideale del Capitalismo; benché vi sia un numero qualsiasi di uomini buoni che sono Capitalisti nel seguire altri ideali. La Riforma, specialmente in Inghilterra, fu innanzitutto l’abbandono del tentativo di governare il mondo mediante ideali, o persino mediante idee. Il tentativo era indubbiamente fallito, in parte, perché coloro che si supponeva fossero gli idealisti non seppero tenere alti gli ideali; e un numero qualsiasi di persone che si supponeva accettassero l’idea generale ostacolarono il compimento delle idee. Ma esso cadde anche sotto l’attacco di coloro che odiavano non solo quegli ideali, ma qualsiasi ideale. Fu il risultato degli appetiti impazienti e imperiosi dell’umanità, che detesta di essere trattenuta da vincoli; ma soprattutto di essere trattenuta da vincoli invisibili. Poiché i Riformatori inglesi non eressero davvero un ideale opposto o un insieme alternativo di idee. Come disse giustamente il nostro amico, non erano Bolscevichi. Eressero certe cose assai formidabili chiamate fatti. Si proposero, quasi dichiaratamente, di governare il regno unicamente mediante fatti; mediante il fatto che qualcuno chiamato Russell aveva duecento volte più denaro di ogni suo vicino; mediante il fatto che qualcuno chiamato Cecil aveva ottenuto il potere di far impiccare qualsiasi suo vicino. I fatti sono almeno solidi finché durano; ma la cosa fatale a loro riguardo è che non durano. Sono soltanto le idee a durare. E oggi un uomo può chiamarsi Russell e avere considerevolmente meno denaro di un uomo che si chiama Rockefeller; e la storia può assistere allo stupefacente spettacolo di un uomo chiamato Cecil in gran parte estromesso dalla politica pratica e definito un idealista e un fallito.

Lo stesso progresso del Capitalismo che fece gli scudieri ha distrutto gli scudieri. Lo stesso avanzamento commerciale che esaltò l’Inghilterra dinanzi all’Europa ha abbassato l’Inghilterra dinanzi all’America. Esattamente nella misura in cui abbiamo i nostri affetti sanamente legati a questa avventurosa e patriottica Inghilterra degli ultimi secoli, vedremo che i nostri affetti e attaccamenti sono destinati a essere traditi. Il processo detto pratico, il tentativo di governare unicamente mediante fatti, ha nella propria natura l’essenza di ogni tradimento. Scopriamo che i fatti, che sembrano tanto solidi, sono fra tutte le cose la più fluida. Come dicono i professori e i saccenti, i fatti sono sempre in evoluzione; in altre parole, sempre eludono, sfuggono o fuggono via. Gli uomini che si prostrano dinanzi alla ricchezza di uno scudiero, perché essa gli consente di comportarsi da gentiluomo, devono continuare a prostrarsi dinanzi alla stessa ricchezza in qualcuno che non sa comportarsi da gentiluomo; e infine, forse, dinanzi alla stessa ricchezza non legata ad alcun essere umano riconoscibile, ma investita in una società irresponsabile in un paese straniero. La ricchezza invero si mette le ali, e va perfino a dimorare nelle parti più remote del mare. La ricchezza diviene informe e quasi favolosa; invero, erano satirici inconsapevoli coloro che parlavano di «ricchezza favolosa». I grandi finanzieri comprano e vendono migliaia di cose che nessuno ha mai visto; e che sono, a tutti i fini pratici, immaginarie. Così finisce l’avventura del fidarsi soltanto dei fatti; finisce in un regno fatato di fantastiche astrazioni.

Dobbiamo tornare all’idea del governo mediante idee. C’è proprio quel granello di verità nella già menzionata fantasia del Comunismo. Ma vi erano molte idee più ricche, più sottili e meglio equilibrate anche nella struttura medievale del Cattolicesimo. Ripeto che questo Cattolicesimo fu rovinato dai Cattolici tanto quanto dai Protestanti. I peccati medievali intralciarono e corruppero le idee medievali, prima che i Riformatori decidessero di gettar via tutte le idee. Ma quella era la cosa giusta da seguire, o da cercare di seguire; e non c’è, né mai ci sarà, nient’altro da fare se non tentare di nuovo. Molti uomini medievali fallirono nel tentativo di essere all’altezza di quegli ideali. Ma molti più uomini moderni stanno fallendo in modo più disastroso nel tentativo di vivere senza di essi. E attraverso quel fallimento giungeremo gradualmente a comprendere i reali vantaggi di quell’antico disegno che solo in parte fallì; secondo il quale, almeno in teoria, l’uomo di pace era più alto dell’uomo di guerra, e la povertà superiore alla ricchezza.

C’è una curiosa piccola frase nel saggio di Macaulay su Bacon; quel grande scoppio dei Filistei contro i Filosofi. In una piccola frase il grande Filisteo tradisce la debolezza dell’intero suo argomento dell’utilità. Parlando con sdegno degli Scolastici, dice che san Tommaso d’Aquino avrebbe indubbiamente (tale era la sua semplicità) ritenuto più importante impegnarsi nella fabbricazione di sillogismi che nella fabbricazione della polvere da sparo. Nemmeno la Congiura delle Polveri poté impedire a quel robusto Protestante di dare per scontato che la polvere da sparo sia sempre utile. Dai suoi tempi in poi abbiamo visto parecchia altra polvere da sparo. Non occorre essere pacifisti per pensare che la polvere da sparo non abbia poi tanto bisogno di continuare a essere utile su una scala tanto grandiosa. E gran parte del mondo ha ormai raggiunto uno stato d’animo di reazione, in cui è propensa a gridare: «Se ci sono sillogismi che possano salvarci da tutta questa polvere da sparo, per amor di Dio ascoltiamoli». Sono disposti ad accettare, nella loro disperazione, perfino la logica. Non solo daranno ascolto alla religione, ma daranno forse ascolto perfino alla ragione, se essa prometterà loro un po’ di pace.

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THE FEASTS AND THE ASCETIC

I WAS reflecting in the course of the recent feast of Christmas (which, like other feasts, is preceded by a fast) that the combination is still a puzzle to many. The Modernist, or man who boasts of being modern, is generally rather like a man who overeats himself so much on Christmas Eve that he has no appetite on Christmas Day. It is called being In Advance of the Times; and is incumbent upon all who are progressive, prophetic, futuristic and generally looking towards what Mr. Belloc calls the Great Rosy Dawn: a dawn which generally looks a good deal rosier the night before than it does the morning after.

To many people, however, who are not offensively in advance of the times the combination of these ideas does seem to be a sort of contradiction or confusion. But in real fact it is not only not so confused, but even not so complicated. The great temptation of the Catholic in the modern world is the temptation to intellectual pride. It is so obvious that most his critics are talking without in the least knowing what they are talking about, that he is sometimes a little provoked towards the very un-Christian logic of answering a fool according to his folly. He is a little bit disposed to luxuriate in secret, as it were over the much greater subtlety and richness of the philosophy he inherits; and only answer a bewildered barbarian so as to bewilder him still more. He is tempted to ironical agreements or even to disguising himself as a dunce. Men who have an elaborate philosophical defence of their views sometimes take pleasure in boasting of their almost babyish credulity. Having reached their own goal through labyrinths of logic, they will point the stranger only to the very shortest short cut of authority; merely in order to shock the simpleton with simplicity. Or, as in the present case, they will find a grim amusement in presenting the separate parts of the scheme as if they were really separate; and leave the outsider to make what he can of them. So when somebody says that a fast is the opposite to a feast, and yet both seem to be sacred to us, some of us will always be moved merely to say, “Yes,” and relapse into an objectionable grin. When the anxious ethical enquirer says, “Christmas is devoted to merry-making, to eating meat and drinking wine, and yet you encourage this pagan and materialistic enjoyment,” you or I will be tempted to say, “Quite right, my boy,” and leave it at that. When he then says, looking even more worried, “Yet you admire men for fasting in caves and deserts and denying themselves ordinary pleasures; you are clearly committed, like the Buddhists, to the opposite or ascetic principle,” we shall be similarly inspired to say, “Quite correct, old bean,” or “Got it first time, old top,” and merely propose an adjournment for convivial refreshment.

Nevertheless, it is a temptation to be resisted. Not only is it obviously our duty to explain to the other people that what seems to them contradictory is really complementary, but we are not altogether justified in any such tone of superiority. We are not right in making our geniality an expression of our despair. We are not entitled to despair of explaining the truth; nor is it really so horribly difficult to explain. The real difficulty is not so much that the critic is crude as that we ourselves are not always clear, even in our own minds, far less in our public expositions. It is not so much that they are not subtle enough to understand it, as that they and we and everybody else are not simple enough to understand it. Those two things are obviously part of one thing, if we are straightforward enough to look at the thing; and to see it simply as it is. I suggested recently that people would see the Christian story if it could only be told as a heathen story. The Faith is simply the story of a God who died for men. But, queerly enough, if we were even to print the words without a capital G, as if it were the cult of some new and nameless tribe, many would realise the idea for the first time. Many would feel the thrill of a new fear and sympathy if we simply wrote, “the story of a god who died for men.” People would sit up suddenly and say what a beautiful and touching pagan religion that must be.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Church is out of the question; that we have nothing but the earth and the children of man pottering about on it, with their normal mortal tales and traditions. Then suppose there appears on this earth a prodigy, a portent, or what is alleged to be a portent. In some way heaven has rent the veil or the gods have given some new marvel to mankind. Suppose, for instance, it is a fountain of magic water, said to be flowing at the top of a mountain. It blesses like holy water; it heals diseases; it inspires more than wine, or those who drink of it never thirst again. Well, this story may be true or false; but among those who spread it as true, it is perfectly obvious that the story will produce a number of other stories. It is equally obvious that those stories will be of two kinds. The first sort will say: “When the water was brought down to the valley there was dancing in all the villages; the young men and maidens rejoiced with music and laughter. A surly husband and wife were sprinkled with the holy water and reconciled, so that their house was full of happy children. A cripple was sprinkled and he went capering about gaily like an acrobat. The gardens were watered and became gay with flowers,” and so on. It is quite equally obvious that there will be another sort of story from exactly the same source, told with exactly the same motive. “A man limped a hundred miles, till he was quite lame, to find the sacred fountain. Men lay broken and bleeding among the rocks on the mountainside in their efforts to climb after it. A man sold all his lands and the rivers running through them for one drop of the water. A man refused to turn back from it, when confronted with brigands, but was tortured and died calling for it,” and so on. There is nothing in the least inconsistent between these two types of legend. They are exactly what would naturally be expected, given the original legend of the miraculous fountain. Anyone who can really look at them simply, can see that they are both equally simple. But we in our time have confused ourselves with long words for unreal distinctions; and talking incessantly about optimism and pessimism, about asceticism and hedonism, about what we call Paganism and what we think about Buddhism, till we cannot understand a plain tale when it is told. The Pagan would have understood it much better.

This very simple truth explains another fact that I have heard the learned insist on with some excitement: the emphasis and repetition touching the ascetic side of religion. It is exactly what would happen with any human story, even if it were a heathen story. We remark upon the case of the man who starves to get the water more than on the case of the man who is merely glad to get the water. We remark upon it more because it is more remarkable. Any human tradition would make more of the heroes who suffered for something than of the human beings who simply benefited by it. But that does not alter the fact that there are more human beings than heroes; and that this great majority of human beings has benefited by it. It is natural that men should marvel more at the man who deliberately lames himself than at the man who dances when he is no longer lame. But that does not alter the fact that the countries where that legend prevails are, in fact, full of dancing. I have here only suggested how very simple, after all, is the contradiction between austerity and jollity which puzzles our critics so much. There is a higher application of it to ascetics, which I may consider on another occasion. Here I will only hint at it by saying: “The more a man could LIVE only on the water, the more he would prove it to be the water of life.”

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LE FESTE E L’ASCETA

RIFLETTEVO, nel corso della recente festa del Natale (che, come le altre feste, è preceduta da un digiuno), che la combinazione resta ancora un enigma per molti. Il Modernista, ossia l’uomo che si vanta di essere moderno, somiglia in genere piuttosto a un uomo che alla vigilia di Natale si rimpinza a tal punto da non avere più appetito il giorno di Natale. Lo si chiama Essere in Anticipo sui Tempi; ed è obbligo di tutti coloro che sono progressisti, profetici, futuristi e in generale rivolti verso ciò che il signor Belloc chiama la Grande Rosea Aurora: un’aurora che di solito appare assai più rosea la notte prima di quanto non lo sia il mattino dopo.

Per molti, tuttavia, che non sono offensivamente in anticipo sui tempi, la combinazione di queste idee sembra davvero una sorta di contraddizione o confusione. Ma in realtà essa non solo non è così confusa, ma non è nemmeno così complicata. La grande tentazione del cattolico nel mondo moderno è la tentazione all’orgoglio intellettuale. È così evidente che la maggior parte dei suoi critici parla senza sapere minimamente di che cosa stia parlando, che egli è talvolta un poco tentato di ricorrere alla ben poco cristiana logica di rispondere allo stolto secondo la sua stoltezza. È un poco incline a crogiolarsi in segreto, per così dire, nella ben maggiore sottigliezza e ricchezza della filosofia che eredita; e a rispondere a un barbaro sconcertato solo per sconcertarlo ancora di più. È tentato di consensi ironici o persino di camuffarsi da sciocco. Uomini che dispongono di un’elaborata difesa filosofica delle proprie idee talvolta si compiacciono di vantare la loro credulità quasi puerile. Avendo raggiunto la propria meta attraverso labirinti di logica, indicheranno allo straniero soltanto la più breve delle scorciatoie dell’autorità; solo per stupire il sempliciotto con la semplicità. Oppure, come nel caso presente, troveranno un cupo divertimento nel presentare le parti separate del disegno come se fossero davvero separate; e lasceranno all’estraneo di cavarne quel che può. Così, quando qualcuno dice che un digiuno è l’opposto di una festa, e tuttavia entrambi ci paiono sacri, alcuni di noi saranno sempre indotti semplicemente a dire «Sì», e a ricadere in un sogghigno riprovevole. Quando l’ansioso indagatore etico dice: «Il Natale è dedicato all’allegria, al mangiar carne e al bere vino, eppure voi incoraggiate questo godimento pagano e materialistico», voi o io saremo tentati di dire: «Giustissimo, ragazzo mio», e di lasciar cadere il discorso. Quando poi egli dice, con aria ancor più preoccupata: «Eppure ammirate gli uomini che digiunano in caverne e deserti e si negano i piaceri ordinari; siete chiaramente votati, come i buddisti, al principio opposto, ascetico», saremo del pari ispirati a dire: «Esattissimo, vecchio mio», oppure «Indovinato alla prima volta, caro il mio tipo», e a proporre semplicemente un rinvio per un ristoro conviviale.

Nondimeno, è una tentazione a cui bisogna resistere. Non solo è evidentemente nostro dovere spiegare agli altri che ciò che a loro pare contraddittorio è in realtà complementare, ma non siamo affatto giustificati in un simile tono di superiorità. Non abbiamo ragione di fare della nostra affabilità un’espressione della nostra disperazione. Non abbiamo il diritto di disperare di spiegare la verità; né è in realtà così tremendamente difficile spiegarla. La vera difficoltà non è tanto che il critico sia rozzo, quanto che noi stessi non siamo sempre chiari, nemmeno nella nostra mente, e tanto meno nelle nostre esposizioni pubbliche. Non è tanto che essi non siano abbastanza sottili da comprenderla, quanto che essi, noi e chiunque altro non siamo abbastanza semplici da comprenderla. Quelle due cose sono evidentemente parte di una sola, se siamo abbastanza schietti da guardare la cosa; e da vederla semplicemente com’è. Ho suggerito di recente che la gente vedrebbe la storia cristiana se solo potesse essere raccontata come una storia pagana. La Fede è semplicemente la storia di un Dio che morì per gli uomini. Ma, per quanto strano, se anche solo stampassimo le parole senza l’iniziale maiuscola, come se si trattasse del culto di qualche nuova e senza nome tribù, molti coglierebbero l’idea per la prima volta. Molti sentirebbero il brivido di un nuovo timore e di una nuova simpatia se scrivessimo semplicemente: «la storia di un dio che morì per gli uomini». La gente drizzerebbe di colpo la schiena e direbbe che bella e commovente religione pagana dev’essere quella.

Supponiamo, per amor di discussione, che la Chiesa sia fuori questione; che non abbiamo altro che la terra e i figli dell’uomo che vi si affaccendano, con i loro normali racconti e tradizioni mortali. Supponiamo allora che appaia su questa terra un prodigio, un portento, o ciò che si pretende essere un portento. In qualche modo il cielo ha squarciato il velo, oppure gli dèi hanno donato all’umanità qualche nuova meraviglia. Supponiamo, per esempio, che si tratti di una fonte di acqua magica, che si dice scorra in cima a una montagna. Benedice come l’acqua santa; guarisce le malattie; ispira più del vino, e chi ne beve non ha mai più sete. Ebbene, questa storia può essere vera o falsa; ma tra coloro che la diffondono come vera, è del tutto evidente che la storia produrrà una serie di altre storie. È del pari evidente che quelle storie saranno di due specie. La prima specie dirà: «Quando l’acqua fu portata giù nella valle, in tutti i villaggi si danzava; i giovani e le fanciulle esultavano con musica e risa. Un marito e una moglie scontrosi furono aspersi con l’acqua santa e si riconciliarono, sicché la loro casa si riempì di bimbi felici. Uno storpio fu asperso e se ne andò saltellando allegramente come un acrobata. I giardini furono irrigati e si fecero gai di fiori», e così via. È del pari del tutto evidente che vi sarà un’altra specie di storia, dalla medesima fonte, narrata con il medesimo intento. «Un uomo zoppicò per cento miglia, finché fu del tutto storpio, per trovare la sacra fonte. Uomini giacevano spezzati e sanguinanti tra le rocce del fianco della montagna nei loro sforzi di arrampicarsi verso di essa. Un uomo vendette tutte le sue terre e i fiumi che le attraversavano per una sola goccia dell’acqua. Un uomo si rifiutò di tornare indietro, messo di fronte ai briganti, ma fu torturato e morì invocandola», e così via. Non c’è nulla di minimamente incoerente tra questi due tipi di leggenda. Sono esattamente ciò che ci si aspetterebbe naturalmente, data la leggenda originaria della fonte miracolosa. Chiunque sappia davvero guardarle con semplicità, può vedere che entrambe sono ugualmente semplici. Ma noi, nel nostro tempo, ci siamo confusi con paroloni per distinzioni irreali; e parlando incessantemente di ottimismo e pessimismo, di ascetismo e edonismo, di ciò che chiamiamo Paganesimo e di ciò che pensiamo del Buddismo, finché non riusciamo più a capire un racconto piano quando ci viene narrato. Il Pagano l’avrebbe capito assai meglio.

Questa semplicissima verità spiega un altro fatto su cui ho udito i dotti insistere con una certa eccitazione: l’enfasi e la ripetizione riguardo al lato ascetico della religione. È esattamente ciò che accadrebbe con qualunque storia umana, anche se fosse una storia pagana. Notiamo il caso dell’uomo che patisce la fame per ottenere l’acqua più di quanto notiamo il caso dell’uomo che è semplicemente lieto di ottenere l’acqua. Lo notiamo di più perché è più notevole. Qualunque tradizione umana farebbe più conto degli eroi che soffrirono per qualcosa che degli esseri umani che semplicemente ne beneficiarono. Ma ciò non muta il fatto che vi sono più esseri umani che eroi; e che questa grande maggioranza di esseri umani ne ha beneficiato. È naturale che gli uomini si stupiscano più dell’uomo che deliberatamente si azzoppa che dell’uomo che danza quando non è più zoppo. Ma ciò non muta il fatto che i paesi in cui quella leggenda prevale sono, di fatto, pieni di danze. Qui ho soltanto accennato a quanto sia semplice, dopo tutto, la contraddizione tra austerità e allegria che tanto sconcerta i nostri critici. Ve n’è un’applicazione più alta agli asceti, che potrò considerare in un’altra occasione. Qui mi limiterò ad alludervi dicendo: «Quanto più un uomo riuscisse a VIVERE soltanto dell’acqua, tanto più proverebbe che essa è l’acqua della vita».

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WHO ARE THE CONSPIRATORS?

I CAME across, more or less indirectly, the other day, a lady of educated and even elegant pretensions, of the sort whom her foes would call luxurious and her friends cultured, who happened to mention a certain small West Country town, and added with a sort of hiss that it contained “a nest of Roman Catholics.” This apparently referred to a family with which I happen to be acquainted. The lady then said, her voice changing to a deep note of doom, “God alone knows what is said and done behind those closed doors.”

On hearing this stimulating speculation, my mind went back to what I remembered of the household in question, which was largely concerned with macaroons, and a little girl who rightly persuaded herself that I could eat an almost unlimited number of them. But when I contrasted that memory with that vision it was brought suddenly and stunningly to my mind what a vast abyss still yawns between us and many of our countrymen, and what extraordinary ideas are still entertained about us, by people who walk about the world without keepers or strait-waistcoats and are apparently, on all other subjects, sane. It is doubtless true, and theologically sound, to say that God alone knows what goes on in Catholic homes; as it is to say that God alone knows what goes on in Protestant heads. I do not know why a Catholic’s doors should be any more closed than anybody else’s doors; the habit is not unusual in persons of all philosophical beliefs when retiring for the night; and on other occasions depends on the weather and the individual taste. But even those who would find it difficult to believe that an ordinary Catholic is so eccentric as to bolt and padlock himself in the drawing-room or the smoking-room, whenever he strolls into those apartments, do really have a haunting idea that it is more conceivable of a Catholic than of a Calvinistic Methodist or a Plymouth Brother. There does remain the stale savour of a sort of sensational romance about us; as if we were all foreign counts and conspirators. And the really interesting fact is that this absurd melodrama can be found among educated people; though now rather in an educated individual than in an educated class. The world still pays us this wild and imaginative compliment of imagining that we are much less ordinary than we really are. The argument, of course, is the one with which we are wearily familiar in twenty other aspects; the argument that because the evidence against us cannot be produced, it must have been concealed. It is obvious that Roman Catholics do not generally shout to each other the arrangements of a St. Bartholomew Massacre across the public streets; and the only deduction any reasonable man can draw is that they do it behind closed doors. It is but seldom that the project of burning down London is proclaimed in large letters on the posters of the UNIVERSE; so what possible deduction can there be, except that the signals are given at the private tea-table by means of a symbolical alphabet of macaroons? It would be an exaggeration to say that it is my daily habit to leap upon aged Jews in Fleet Street and tear out their teeth; so, given my admitted monomania on the subject, it only remains to suppose that my private house is fitted up like a torture chamber for this mode of mediaeval dentistry. Catholic crimes are not plotted in public, so it stands to reason that they must be plotted in private. There is indeed a third remote and theoretical alternative; that they are not plotted anywhere; but it is unreasonable to expect our fellow-countrymen to suggest anything so fanciful as that.

Now this mysterious delusion, still far commoner than many suppose even in England, and covering whole interior spaces of America, happens to be another illustration of what I have been suggesting in an earlier essay; the fact that those who are always digging and prying for secret things about us, have never even glanced at the most self-evident things about themselves. We have only to ask ourselves, with a sort of shudder, what would have been said if we really had confessed to conspiracy as shamelessly as half our accusers have confessed to it themselves. What in the world would be said, either in America or in Europe, if we really had behaved like a secret society, in places where the groups of our enemies cannot even deny that they are secret societies? What in the world would happen if a Catholic Congress at Glasgow or Leeds really consisted entirely of hooded and white-robed delegates, all with their faces covered and their names unknown, looking out of slits in their ghastly masks of white? Yet this was, until just lately, the rigid routine of the great American organisation to destroy Catholicism; an organisation which recently threatened to seize all government in America. What would have been said, if there really was a definite, recognised, but entirely unknown thing, called the Secret of the Catholics; as there has been for long past a recognised but unknown reality called the Secret of the Freemasons? I dare say a great deal involved in such things is mere harmless foolery. But if we had done such things, would our critics have said it was harmless foolery? Suppose we had started to spread the propaganda of the Faith by means of a movement called “Know Nothing,” because we were in the habit of always shaking our heads and shrugging our shoulders and swearing that we knew nothing of the Faith we meant to spread. Suppose our veneration for the dignity of St. Peter were wholly and solely a veneration for the denial of St. Peter; and we used it as a sort of motto or password to swear that we knew not Christ. Yet that was admittedly the policy of a whole political movement in America, which aimed at destroying the citizenship of Catholics. Suppose that the Mafia and all the murderous secret associations of the Continent had been notoriously working on the Catholic side, instead of the other side. Should we ever have heard the last of it? Would not the world have rung with indignant denunciation of a disgrace clinging to all our conduct, and a treason that must never be forgot? Yet these things are done constantly, and at regular intervals, and right down to the present day, by the Anti-Catholic parties; and it is never thought necessary to recall them, or say a word of apology for them, in the writings of any Anti-Catholic partisan. It would be just our Jesuitical way to dare to look over hedges, when everybody else is only stealing horses.

In short, what I recently said of bigotry is even more true of secrecy. In so far as there is something merely antiquated about a certain type of doctrinal narrowness, it is much more characteristic of Dayton, Tennessee, than of Louvain or Rome. And in the same way, in so far as there is something antiquated about all these antics in masks and cloaks, it has been much more characteristic of the Ku Klux Klan than of the Jesuits. Indeed, this sort of Protestant is a figure of old-fashioned melodrama in a double sense and in a double aspect. He is antiquated in the plots he attributes to us and in the plots that he practises himself.

As regards the latter, it is probable that the whole world will discover this fact a long time before he does. The anti-clerical will go on playing solemnly the pranks of Cagliostro, like a medium still blindfolded in broad daylight; and will open his mouth in mysteries long after everybody in the world is completely illuminated about the illuminati. And though the almost half-witted humour of the American society, which seemed to consist entirely of beginning as many words as possible with KL, has been rather abruptly toned down by a reaction of relative sanity, I have no doubt that there is still many a noble Nordic fellow going about hugging himself over the happy secret that he is a Kleagle or a Klemperor, long after everybody has ceased to klare a klam whether he is or not. On the political side the power of these conspiracies has been practically broken in both Continents; in Italy by the Fascists and in America by a rally of reasonable and public-spirited governors of both political parties. But the point of historical interest remains: that it was the very people who accused us of mummery and mystery who surrounded all their secularising activities with far more fantastic mysteries and mummeries; that they had not even the manhood to fight an ancient ritual with the appearance of republican simplicity, but boasted of hiding everything in a sort of comic complexity; even when there was nothing to hide. By this time such movements as the Ku Klux Klan have very little left which can be hidden or which is worth hiding; and it is therefore probable that our romantic curiosity about them will be considerably colder than their undying romantic curiosity about us. The Protestant lady will continue to resent the fact that God does not share with her his knowledge of the terrible significance of tea and macaroons in the Catholic home. But we shall probably in the future feel a fainter and fainter interest in whatever it is that Kleagues do behind closed— or perhaps I should say Klosed Doors.

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CHI SONO I CONGIURATI?

M’imbattei, più o meno indirettamente, l’altro giorno, in una signora di pretese colte e persino eleganti, del genere che i suoi nemici direbbero lussuosa e i suoi amici raffinata, la quale venne a menzionare una certa cittadina del West Country, e aggiunse con una sorta di sibilo che essa conteneva «un nido di cattolici romani». Ciò a quanto pare si riferiva a una famiglia che mi accade di conoscere. La signora poi disse, con la voce che mutava in una cupa nota di sventura: «Dio solo sa che cosa si dice e si fa dietro quelle porte chiuse.»

All’udire questa stimolante congettura, la mia mente tornò a ciò che ricordavo della famiglia in questione, che aveva a che fare in gran parte con gli amaretti, e con una bambina che si era giustamente persuasa che io potessi mangiarne un numero pressoché illimitato. Ma quando misi a contrasto quel ricordo con quella visione, mi si affacciò all’improvviso e con effetto sbalorditivo quale vasto abisso ancora si spalanchi tra noi e molti dei nostri connazionali, e quali idee straordinarie si nutrano ancora sul nostro conto, da parte di gente che va in giro per il mondo senza guardiani né camicie di forza ed è, a quanto pare, su ogni altro argomento, sana di mente. È senza dubbio vero, e teologicamente corretto, dire che Dio solo sa che cosa accade nelle case cattoliche; come lo è dire che Dio solo sa che cosa accade nelle teste protestanti. Non so perché le porte di un cattolico debbano essere più chiuse di quelle di chiunque altro; l’abitudine non è insolita in persone di ogni credo filosofico quando si ritirano per la notte; e in altre occasioni dipende dal tempo e dal gusto individuale. Ma anche coloro che troverebbero difficile credere che un cattolico qualunque sia tanto eccentrico da sprangarsi e incatenarsi nel salotto o nel fumoir ogniqualvolta entri in quelle stanze, hanno davvero l’ossessionante idea che ciò sia più concepibile in un cattolico che in un metodista calvinista o in un Fratello di Plymouth. Rimane in effetti lo stantìo sentore di una sorta di romanzo sensazionale intorno a noi; come se fossimo tutti conti stranieri e congiurati. E il fatto davvero interessante è che questo assurdo melodramma si può trovare tra le persone istruite; benché ormai più in un individuo istruito che in una classe istruita. Il mondo ci rende ancora questo selvaggio e fantasioso complimento d’immaginare che siamo molto meno ordinari di quanto in realtà siamo. L’argomento, s’intende, è quello che ci è stancamente familiare sotto venti altri aspetti; l’argomento secondo cui, poiché la prova contro di noi non può essere prodotta, essa dev’essere stata occultata. È ovvio che i cattolici romani non si gridano l’un l’altro, in genere, i preparativi di un massacro di San Bartolomeo attraverso le pubbliche vie; e l’unica deduzione che un uomo ragionevole possa trarre è che lo facciano dietro porte chiuse. Assai di rado il progetto d’incendiare Londra viene proclamato a grandi lettere sui manifesti dell’UNIVERSE; e dunque quale deduzione possibile vi può essere, se non che i segnali vengano dati al privato tavolo del tè per mezzo di un alfabeto simbolico di amaretti? Sarebbe un’esagerazione dire che è mia abitudine quotidiana assalire vecchi ebrei in Fleet Street e strappar loro i denti; sicché, data la mia riconosciuta monomania in materia, non resta che supporre che la mia casa privata sia allestita come una camera di tortura per questo genere di odontoiatria medievale. I delitti cattolici non si tramano in pubblico, e perciò va da sé che debbano tramarsi in privato. Vi è in verità una terza remota e teorica alternativa; che non si tramino affatto, in alcun luogo; ma è irragionevole aspettarsi che i nostri connazionali suggeriscano qualcosa di tanto fantasioso.

Ora questa misteriosa illusione, ancora assai più comune di quanto molti suppongano perfino in Inghilterra, e che copre interi spazi interni dell’America, si dà il caso che sia un’altra illustrazione di ciò che sono venuto suggerendo in un saggio precedente; il fatto che coloro i quali sono sempre a scavare e a spiare per scoprire cose segrete sul nostro conto non abbiano mai gettato nemmeno un’occhiata alle cose più autoevidenti sul proprio. Non abbiamo che da domandarci, con una sorta di brivido, che cosa si sarebbe detto se avessimo davvero confessato la congiura con la stessa sfrontatezza con cui metà dei nostri accusatori l’hanno confessata di sé. Che cosa mai si direbbe, in America o in Europa, se ci fossimo davvero comportati come una società segreta, in luoghi dove i gruppi dei nostri nemici non possono nemmeno negare di essere società segrete? Che cosa mai accadrebbe se un Congresso cattolico a Glasgow o a Leeds fosse davvero composto interamente di delegati incappucciati e vestiti di bianco, tutti col volto coperto e il nome ignoto, che guardano fuori dalle fessure delle loro spettrali maschere bianche? Eppure questa era, fino a poco tempo fa, la rigida consuetudine della grande organizzazione americana volta a distruggere il cattolicesimo; un’organizzazione che di recente minacciò d’impadronirsi di tutto il governo in America. Che cosa si sarebbe detto, se ci fosse stata davvero una cosa definita, riconosciuta, ma del tutto ignota, chiamata il Segreto dei Cattolici; come da lungo tempo è esistita una realtà riconosciuta ma ignota chiamata il Segreto dei Massoni? Oso dire che molto di ciò che simili cose comportano è mera innocua buffoneria. Ma se noi avessimo fatto tali cose, i nostri critici avrebbero detto che era innocua buffoneria? Supponiamo che avessimo cominciato a diffondere la propaganda della Fede per mezzo di un movimento chiamato «Know Nothing», perché avevamo l’abitudine di scuotere sempre la testa e di alzare le spalle giurando di non sapere nulla della Fede che intendevamo diffondere. Supponiamo che la nostra venerazione per la dignità di san Pietro fosse tutta e soltanto una venerazione per il rinnegamento di san Pietro; e che la usassimo come una sorta di motto o parola d’ordine per giurare di non conoscere Cristo. Eppure quella fu, per ammissione generale, la politica di un intero movimento politico in America, che mirava a distruggere la cittadinanza dei cattolici. Supponiamo che la Mafia e tutte le micidiali associazioni segrete del Continente avessero notoriamente operato dalla parte cattolica, anziché dall’altra. Ne avremmo mai sentito la fine? Non avrebbe il mondo echeggiato d’indignata denuncia di un’onta appiccicata a tutta la nostra condotta, e di un tradimento che non si deve mai dimenticare? Eppure queste cose vengono fatte di continuo, e a intervalli regolari, e fino ai giorni nostri, dai partiti anticattolici; e non si ritiene mai necessario rammentarle, o spendere una parola di scusa per esse, negli scritti di alcun partigiano anticattolico. Sarebbe proprio da noi, alla maniera gesuitica, osare guardare oltre la siepe, mentre tutti gli altri si limitano a rubare i cavalli.

In breve, ciò che ho detto di recente sul bigottismo è ancor più vero della segretezza. Nella misura in cui vi è qualcosa di semplicemente antiquato in un certo tipo di angustia dottrinale, esso è assai più caratteristico di Dayton, nel Tennessee, che di Lovanio o di Roma. E allo stesso modo, nella misura in cui vi è qualcosa di antiquato in tutte queste buffonate di maschere e mantelli, esso è stato assai più caratteristico del Ku Klux Klan che dei gesuiti. Anzi, questa specie di protestante è una figura da melodramma all’antica in un duplice senso e sotto un duplice aspetto. È antiquato nei complotti che attribuisce a noi e nei complotti che egli stesso pratica.

Quanto a quest’ultimo aspetto, è probabile che il mondo intero scopra questo fatto molto tempo prima di lui. L’anticlericale continuerà a recitare solennemente le buffonerie di Cagliostro, come un medium ancora bendato in pieno giorno; e aprirà la bocca in misteri molto dopo che tutti al mondo saranno completamente illuminati riguardo agli illuminati. E benché l’umorismo quasi da mezzo scemo della società americana, che pareva consistere interamente nel cominciare quante più parole possibile con KL, sia stato piuttosto bruscamente smorzato da una reazione di relativo buonsenso, non ho dubbio che vi sia ancora più d’un nobile compagnone nordico che se ne va in giro tutto compiaciuto del felice segreto di essere un Kleagle o un Klemperor, molto dopo che tutti hanno smesso d’importarsene un klaccidente se lo sia o no. Sul piano politico il potere di queste congiure è stato praticamente spezzato in entrambi i Continenti; in Italia dai fascisti e in America da un’adunata di ragionevoli governatori animati da spirito civico di entrambi i partiti politici. Ma il punto d’interesse storico rimane: che furono proprio coloro i quali ci accusavano di pantomime e di mistero a circondare tutte le loro attività secolarizzatrici di misteri e pantomime assai più fantastici; che non ebbero nemmeno la virilità di combattere un antico rituale con l’apparenza della semplicità repubblicana, ma si vantavano di nascondere ogni cosa in una sorta di comica complessità; anche quando non c’era nulla da nascondere. A questo punto movimenti come il Ku Klux Klan hanno ben poco che resti da nascondere o che valga la pena di nascondere; ed è perciò probabile che la nostra romantica curiosità verso di loro sarà considerevolmente più fredda della loro imperitura romantica curiosità verso di noi. La signora protestante continuerà a risentirsi del fatto che Dio non condivida con lei la sua conoscenza del terribile significato del tè e degli amaretti nella casa cattolica. Ma noi probabilmente in futuro proveremo un interesse sempre più fioco per qualunque cosa sia che i Kleagle combinano dietro porte chiuse—o forse dovrei dire Porte Klhiuse.

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THE HAT AND THE HALO

PERHAPS it is a little ungenerous to refer again to the fiasco of the unfortunate Bishop of Birmingham, when he made an exhibition of himself on the subject of St. Francis. That he should be unable to restrain himself from attacking one whom so many free-thinkers have loved and reverenced is interesting as showing how far sectarians can go. But the tone of the attack raises a question more interesting than the personal one. It may be called broadly the question of Sentiment; but it involves the whole question of what things in life are deep and what things shallow; what is central and what is merely external. It is needless to say that people like the Bishop invariably and instinctively get them the wrong way round.

For instance, he said something to the effect that people are now seeing St. Francis in a halo of false sentiment, or through a haze of false sentiment. I am not sure which he said and I doubt whether he knew which he meant. If the Bishop had a halo it would probably be rather like a haze. But anyhow he implied that the hero-worship of St. Francis was a sort of external and extraneous thing, a dazzling distraction or a distorting medium, something added to his figure afterwards; whereas the facts about the real St. Francis were quite different and decidedly repulsive to a refined person. Well, the poor Bishop got all his facts about St. Francis quite wrong; and his claim to talk about the REAL St. Francis, even in an ordinary historical sense, was pretty rapidly shown up. But there was something behind it which interests me much more. It is the curious trick of turning everything inside out; so that the really central things become external and the merely external things central. The inmost soul of St. Francis is a haze of false sentiment; but the accidents of his historical setting, as viewed by people without any historical sense, are a sort of dreadful secret of his soul.

According to this sort of criticism, St. Francis had a great soul; which was merely a cloak for a miserable body. It is sentimental to consider what he felt like. But it is realistic to consider what he looked like. Or rather it is realistic to consider what he would have looked like to the best-dressed people in Birmingham who never saw him, or the fashionable tailor in Bond Street who never had the opportunity of making him a suit of clothes. The critic tells us what some hypothetical suburban snob of the twentieth century would have thought of the Saint he never saw; and THAT is the real truth about the Saint. We can tell him what the Saint would have thought of the suburban snob (and his thoughts would have been full of the simple and spontaneous tenderness which he showed to all small and helpless creatures) but that is only sentiment about St. Francis. What St Francis himself felt about all other creatures is only a misleading and artificial addition to his character. But what some of the most limited and least imaginative of those creatures might possibly think about him, or rather about his clothes or his meals—that alone is reality.

When the admirers of St. Francis, who number myriads of Protestants and Agnostics as well as Catholics, say that they admire that great man, they mean that they admire his mind, his affections, his tastes, his point of view. They mean that, like any other poet, he puts them in a position to view the world in a certain way; and that life looked at from his mental standpoint is more inspiring or intelligible. But when the Bishop tells them that they do not know the facts about St. Francis, he does not mean that St. Francis had some other mind or some other standpoint. He means that St. Francis did not have hot and cold water laid on in the bathroom, did not put on a clean collar every morning, did not send a sufficient number of shirts to the Birmingham Imperial Laundry every week, did not have black mud smeared on his boots or white mud to stiffen his shirt front, and all the rest of it. And THAT is what he calls the truth about St. Francis! Everything else, including everything that St. Francis did do, is a haze of sentiment.

That is the deeper problem of which this foolish affair happens to be an illustration. How are we to make these superficial people understand that we are not being sentimental about St. Francis, that we are not presenting an elegant and poetical picture of St. Francis; that we are not presenting irresponsible emotional ravings about St. Francis; that we are simply presenting St. Francis? We are presenting a remarkable mind; just as Plato presented a remarkable mind, whether it was his own or somebody else’s. We think no more of Bishop Barnes and his nonsense than a Platonist would think about some joke in Aristophanes about Socrates catching fleas. There may have been people who saw that mind through a haze of false sentiment; there were people who saw it through a haze of exaggerated enthusiasm; like those heretics who made St. Francis greater than Christ and the founder of a new dispensation. But even those fanatics were more like philosophers than a gentleman who is content to say either of a true saint or a false god, that his taste in linen and steam laundries was “not ours.” In short, the true situation is simple and obvious enough. It is we who are thinking about the real Francis Bernadone, even the realistic Francis Bernadone, the actual man whose mind and mood we admire. It is the critic who is thinking of the unreal Francis, a fantastic phantom produced by looking at him in a Bond Street looking-glass or comparing him with the fashion-plates of 1926. If it is well for a man to be happy, to have the way of welcoming the thing that happens and the next man that comes along, then St. Francis was happy; happier than most modern men. If it be good that a man should be sympathetic, should include a large number of things in his imaginative sympathy, should have a hospitality of the heart for strange things and strange people, then St. Francis was sympathetic; more sympathetic than most modern men. If it be good that a man should be original, should add something creative and not merely customary or conventional, should do what he thinks right in his own way and without fear of worldly consequences in ruin or starvation, then St. Francis was original; more original than most modern men. All these are tests at once personal and permanent; they deal with the very essence of the ego or individual and they are not affected by changes in external fashion. To say that these things are mere sentiment is to say that the inmost sense of the inmost self is mere sentiment. And yet how are we to stop superficial people from calling it mere sentiment? How are we to make them realise that it is not we who have a sentimental attachment to a mediaeval friar, but they who have an entirely sentimental attachment to certain modern conventions?

Such critics have never really thought of asking what they mean by “sentiment,” still less what they mean by “false sentiment.” “False” is simply a conventional term of abuse to be applied to “sentiment”; and “sentiment” is simply a conventional term of abuse to be applied to Catholicism. But it is very much more applicable nowadays to Protestantism. It is especially applicable to Bishop Barnes’s own rather nebulous type of Protestantism. Men of his school always complain of our thinking too much of theology, just as they complained a few centuries before of our thinking too little of theology. But theology is only the element of reason in religion; the reason that prevents it from being a mere emotion. There are a good many broad-minded persons for whom it is only an emotion; and it would hardly be unfair to say it is only a sentiment. And we have not to look far for them in cases like these.

If a school of critics were found prepared to pay divine honours to a certain person while doubting whether he was divine, men who took off their hats in his churches while denying that he was present on his altars, who hinted that he was only a religious teacher and then hinted again that he must be served as if he were the only teacher of religion; who are always ready to treat him as a fallible individual in relation to his rivals, and then to invoke him as an infallible authority against his followers, who dismiss every text they choose to think dogmatic and then gush over every text they choose to think amiable, who heckle him with Higher Criticism about three-quarters of what he said and then grovel before a mawkish and unmanly ideal made by misunderstanding the little which is left—if there were a school of critics in THIS relation to a historical character, we might very well admit that they were not getting to grips with it, but surrounding it with “a halo of false sentiment.”

That is the vital distinction. At least we do not admit sentiment as a substitute for statement; still less as a contradiction of something that we state. There may be devotional expressions that are emotional, and even extravagantly emotional; but they do not actually distort any definition that is purely intellectual. But in the case of our critics, the confusion is in the intellect. We do not claim that all our pictorial or poetical expressions are adequate; but the fault is in the execution not in the conception. And there is a conception which is not a confusion. We do not say that every pink and blue doll from an Art Repository is a satisfactory symbol of the Mother of God. But we do say that it is less of a contradiction than exists in a person who says there is no Original Sin in anybody, and then calls it Mariolatry to say there was no Original Sin in Mary. We do not profess to admire the little varnished pictures of waxen angels or wooden children around the Communion Table. But we do most strongly profess and proclaim that they are less of a blot on the intellectual landscape than a bishop who suggests that the Host may actually be the divine Presence, but that High Church curates will do his lordship a personal favour if they take no notice of it. We are under no illusions about the literary quality of a large number of hymns in our hymn-books, or any other hymn-books. But we modestly submit that though they are doggerel they are not nonsense; and that saying that we can assert a personal God, a personal immortality, a personal divine love that extends to the least and worst, and do all this without holding “a Creed,” IS nonsense. We know that the nearest sane agnostic or atheist would agree that it is nonsense. Devotional art and literature are often out of balance or broken in expression; sometimes because the emotion is too real and too strong for the reason, the same thing which makes the love-letters of the wisest men like the letters of lunatics; sometimes from a real deficiency in the individual power of reason; but never from a theoretical repudiation of reason, like that of the Pragmatists and about three-quarters of the Modernists. And in the same way it is the very reverse of the truth to say that a mere emotional distortion of the facts has drawn the modern mind towards St. Francis. It is, on the contrary, emphatically an attraction of mind to mind; and the more purely mental the process, the less it will be interrupted by ignorant irritation against the strangeness of Italian manners or mediaeval conditions. And in this case there is no international problem. Thousands of Englishmen who know nothing but England glow with love and understanding of St. Francis. We may well feel an unaffected pity for the one unlucky Englishman who cannot understand.

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IL CAPPELLO E L’AUREOLA

FORSE è un poco poco generoso tornare a rammentare il fiasco dello sfortunato Vescovo di Birmingham, quando fece di sé stesso uno spettacolo a proposito di san Francesco. Che egli non sia stato capace di trattenersi dall’attaccare un uomo che tanti liberi pensatori hanno amato e venerato è interessante, in quanto mostra fino a che punto possano spingersi i settari. Ma il tono dell’attacco solleva una questione più interessante di quella personale. La si può chiamare, in senso largo, la questione del Sentimento; ma essa coinvolge l’intera questione di quali cose nella vita siano profonde e quali superficiali; che cosa sia centrale e che cosa sia meramente esterno. È inutile dire che le persone come il Vescovo, immancabilmente e per istinto, le rovesciano nel senso sbagliato.

Per esempio, egli disse qualcosa nel senso che oggi la gente vede san Francesco in un’aureola di falso sentimento, oppure attraverso una foschia di falso sentimento. Non sono sicuro di quale delle due abbia detto, e dubito che egli stesso sapesse quale intendesse. Se il Vescovo avesse un’aureola, essa somiglierebbe probabilmente piuttosto a una foschia. Ma comunque egli lasciava intendere che il culto eroico di san Francesco fosse una specie di cosa esterna ed estranea, una distrazione abbagliante o un mezzo deformante, qualcosa aggiunto in seguito alla sua figura; mentre i fatti riguardanti il vero san Francesco erano assai diversi e decisamente ripugnanti per una persona raffinata. Ebbene, il povero Vescovo aveva tutti i suoi fatti su san Francesco del tutto sbagliati; e la sua pretesa di parlare del VERO san Francesco, anche in un ordinario senso storico, fu assai rapidamente smascherata. Ma vi era dietro qualcosa che mi interessa molto di più. È il curioso trucco di rovesciare ogni cosa alla rovescia; sicché le cose realmente centrali divengono esterne e le cose meramente esterne divengono centrali. L’anima più intima di san Francesco è una foschia di falso sentimento; ma gli accidenti della sua cornice storica, veduti da persone prive di ogni senso storico, sono una sorta di terribile segreto della sua anima.

Secondo questo genere di critica, san Francesco aveva una grande anima; la quale era soltanto un mantello per un misero corpo. È sentimentale considerare come egli si sentisse. Ma è realistico considerare come egli apparisse. O piuttosto è realistico considerare come sarebbe apparso alle persone meglio vestite di Birmingham che non lo videro mai, o al sarto alla moda di Bond Street che non ebbe mai l’occasione di confezionargli un abito. Il critico ci dice che cosa un qualche ipotetico snob di periferia del ventesimo secolo avrebbe pensato del Santo che non vide mai; e QUELLA è la vera verità intorno al Santo. Noi possiamo dirgli che cosa il Santo avrebbe pensato dello snob di periferia (e i suoi pensieri sarebbero stati colmi della semplice e spontanea tenerezza che egli mostrava a tutte le creature piccole e indifese), ma questo è soltanto sentimento a proposito di san Francesco. Ciò che san Francesco stesso provava riguardo a tutte le altre creature è soltanto un’aggiunta ingannevole e artificiosa al suo carattere. Ma ciò che alcune delle più limitate e meno fantasiose di quelle creature potrebbero forse pensare di lui, o piuttosto dei suoi abiti o dei suoi pasti — quello soltanto è realtà.

Quando gli ammiratori di san Francesco, che contano miriadi di Protestanti e di Agnostici come pure di Cattolici, dicono di ammirare quel grande uomo, intendono che ne ammirano la mente, gli affetti, i gusti, il punto di vista. Intendono che, come ogni altro poeta, egli li mette nella condizione di guardare il mondo in un certo modo; e che la vita, veduta dal suo punto di vista mentale, è più ispiratrice o più intelligibile. Ma quando il Vescovo dice loro che non conoscono i fatti su san Francesco, non intende che san Francesco avesse qualche altra mente o qualche altro punto di vista. Intende che san Francesco non aveva l’acqua calda e fredda installata nel bagno, non metteva un colletto pulito ogni mattina, non mandava un numero sufficiente di camicie alla Birmingham Imperial Laundry ogni settimana, non aveva fango nero spalmato sugli stivali né fango bianco a inamidargli lo sparato della camicia, e tutto il resto. E QUELLO è ciò che egli chiama la verità su san Francesco! Ogni altra cosa, comprese tutte le cose che san Francesco fece davvero, è una foschia di sentimento.

Questo è il problema più profondo di cui questa sciocca faccenda si dà il caso di essere un’illustrazione. Come dobbiamo fare a far comprendere a queste persone superficiali che non stiamo essendo sentimentali riguardo a san Francesco, che non stiamo presentando un’immagine elegante e poetica di san Francesco; che non stiamo presentando deliri emotivi e irresponsabili su san Francesco; che stiamo semplicemente presentando san Francesco? Stiamo presentando una mente notevole; proprio come Platone presentò una mente notevole, fosse essa la propria o quella di qualcun altro. Non teniamo in maggior conto il Vescovo Barnes e le sue sciocchezze di quanto un platonico terrebbe conto di qualche battuta in Aristofane su Socrate che acchiappa le pulci. Vi possono essere state persone che videro quella mente attraverso una foschia di falso sentimento; vi furono persone che la videro attraverso una foschia di entusiasmo esagerato; come quegli eretici che fecero di san Francesco qualcosa di più grande di Cristo e il fondatore di una nuova dispensazione. Ma perfino quei fanatici somigliavano più a filosofi di quanto vi somigli un gentiluomo che si contenta di dire, di un vero santo o di un falso dio, che il suo gusto in fatto di biancheria e di lavanderie a vapore «non era il nostro». In breve, la vera situazione è abbastanza semplice ed evidente. Siamo noi a pensare al reale Francesco Bernardone, anzi al realistico Francesco Bernardone, l’uomo effettivo di cui ammiriamo la mente e l’animo. È il critico a pensare all’irreale Francesco, un fantastico fantasma prodotto dal guardarlo in uno specchio di Bond Street o dal confrontarlo con i figurini di moda del 1926. Se è bene per un uomo essere felice, avere il modo di accogliere ciò che accade e il prossimo uomo che sopraggiunge, allora san Francesco era felice; più felice della maggior parte degli uomini moderni. Se è bene che un uomo sia comprensivo, che includa un gran numero di cose nella sua simpatia immaginativa, che abbia un’ospitalità del cuore per le cose strane e le persone strane, allora san Francesco era comprensivo; più comprensivo della maggior parte degli uomini moderni. Se è bene che un uomo sia originale, che aggiunga qualcosa di creativo e non meramente consuetudinario o convenzionale, che faccia ciò che ritiene giusto a modo suo e senza paura delle conseguenze mondane in rovina o inedia, allora san Francesco era originale; più originale della maggior parte degli uomini moderni. Tutte queste sono prove al tempo stesso personali e permanenti; riguardano la vera essenza dell’io o dell’individuo e non sono toccate dai mutamenti della moda esteriore. Dire che queste cose sono mero sentimento equivale a dire che il senso più intimo del sé più intimo è mero sentimento. Eppure come dobbiamo fare a impedire alle persone superficiali di chiamarlo mero sentimento? Come dobbiamo fare a far loro comprendere che non siamo noi ad avere un attaccamento sentimentale a un frate medievale, bensì loro ad avere un attaccamento del tutto sentimentale a certe convenzioni moderne?

Simili critici non hanno mai davvero pensato a domandarsi che cosa intendano per «sentimento», e ancor meno che cosa intendano per «falso sentimento». «Falso» è semplicemente un termine convenzionale di ingiuria da applicare a «sentimento»; e «sentimento» è semplicemente un termine convenzionale di ingiuria da applicare al Cattolicesimo. Ma è molto più applicabile, oggigiorno, al Protestantesimo. È applicabile in modo particolare al tipo piuttosto nebuloso di Protestantesimo dello stesso Vescovo Barnes. Gli uomini della sua scuola si lamentano sempre che noi pensiamo troppo alla teologia, proprio come si lamentavano, qualche secolo prima, che noi pensassimo troppo poco alla teologia. Ma la teologia è soltanto l’elemento di ragione nella religione; la ragione che le impedisce di essere una mera emozione. Vi è un buon numero di persone di larghe vedute per le quali essa è soltanto un’emozione; e non sarebbe troppo ingiusto dire che è soltanto un sentimento. E non dobbiamo cercare lontano per trovarle, in casi come questi.

Se si trovasse una scuola di critici disposti a tributare onori divini a una certa persona pur dubitando che fosse divina, uomini che si toglievano il cappello nelle sue chiese pur negando ch’egli fosse presente sui suoi altari, che lasciavano intendere ch’egli fosse soltanto un maestro religioso e poi lasciavano intendere di nuovo ch’egli dovesse essere servito come se fosse l’unico maestro della religione; che sono sempre pronti a trattarlo come un individuo fallibile in rapporto ai suoi rivali, e poi a invocarlo come un’autorità infallibile contro i suoi seguaci, che scartano ogni testo che scelgono di ritenere dogmatico e poi si effondono su ogni testo che scelgono di ritenere amabile, che lo assillano con l’Alta Critica su circa tre quarti di ciò che disse e poi si prostrano davanti a un ideale sdolcinato e poco virile foggiato fraintendendo il poco che ne resta — se vi fosse una scuola di critici in QUESTO rapporto con un personaggio storico, potremmo ben ammettere che essi non ne venivano a capo, ma lo circondavano di «un’aureola di falso sentimento».

Questa è la distinzione vitale. Almeno noi non ammettiamo il sentimento come surrogato dell’affermazione; e ancor meno come contraddizione di qualcosa che affermiamo. Vi possono essere espressioni devozionali che sono emotive, e perfino stravagantemente emotive; ma esse non distorcono affatto alcuna definizione che sia puramente intellettuale. Nel caso dei nostri critici, invece, la confusione è nell’intelletto. Non pretendiamo che tutte le nostre espressioni pittoriche o poetiche siano adeguate; ma il difetto è nell’esecuzione, non nella concezione. E vi è una concezione che non è una confusione. Non diciamo che ogni bambola rosa e azzurra proveniente da un Emporio d’Arte sia un simbolo soddisfacente della Madre di Dio. Ma diciamo che essa è meno una contraddizione di quanto ve ne sia in una persona che dice che non c’è alcun Peccato Originale in nessuno, e poi chiama Mariolatria il dire che non vi era alcun Peccato Originale in Maria. Non professiamo di ammirare i piccoli quadretti verniciati di angeli cerei o di bambini di legno attorno alla Mensa della Comunione. Ma professiamo e proclamiamo con la massima forza che essi sono meno una macchia sul paesaggio intellettuale di quanto lo sia un vescovo il quale suggerisce che l’Ostia possa realmente essere la divina Presenza, ma che i curati dell’Alta Chiesa faranno a sua signoria un favore personale se non vi presteranno attenzione. Non ci facciamo alcuna illusione sulla qualità letteraria di un gran numero di inni nei nostri libri di inni, o in qualsiasi altro libro di inni. Ma sommessamente sosteniamo che, per quanto siano versacci, non sono privi di senso; e che dire che possiamo affermare un Dio personale, un’immortalità personale, un amore divino personale che si estende all’ultimo e al peggiore, e fare tutto ciò senza tenere fermo «un Credo», QUELLO è privo di senso. Sappiamo che il più prossimo agnostico o ateo assennato converrebbe che è privo di senso. L’arte e la letteratura devozionali sono spesso sbilanciate o spezzate nell’espressione; talvolta perché l’emozione è troppo reale e troppo forte per la ragione, la stessa cosa che rende le lettere d’amore degli uomini più saggi simili alle lettere dei folli; talvolta per una reale deficienza nella facoltà individuale di ragione; ma mai per un ripudio teorico della ragione, come quello dei Pragmatisti e di circa tre quarti dei Modernisti. E allo stesso modo è l’esatto contrario della verità dire che una mera distorsione emotiva dei fatti abbia attratto la mente moderna verso san Francesco. Al contrario, si tratta enfaticamente di un’attrazione da mente a mente; e quanto più il processo è puramente mentale, tanto meno esso sarà interrotto da un’ignorante irritazione contro l’estraneità dei costumi italiani o delle condizioni medievali. E in questo caso non vi è alcun problema internazionale. Migliaia di Inglesi che non conoscono nulla se non l’Inghilterra ardono di amore e di comprensione per san Francesco. Possiamo ben provare una pietà non affettata per quell’unico sfortunato Inglese che non riesce a comprendere.

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ON TWO ALLEGORIES

PERHAPS it is only fair that the modern iconoclasm should be applied also to the ancient iconoclasts; and especially to the great Puritans, those idol-breakers who have long been idols. Mr. Belloc was recently tapping the Parliamentary statue of Cromwell with a highly scientific hammer; and Mr. Noyes has suddenly assailed the image of Bunyan with something more like a sledge-hammer. In the latter case I confess to thinking the reaction excessive; I should say nothing worse of Bunyan than of many old writers; that he is best known by his best passages, and that many, who fondly believe they have read him, would be mildly surprised at some of his worst passages. But that is not peculiar to Bunyan; and I for one should be content with saying what I said some years ago. A fair and balanced view of the culture and creeds involved can best be reached by comparing the Pilgrimage of Christian with the Pilgrimage of Piers Plowman. The Puritan allegory is much neater (even if it be not always neat) than the rather bewildering mediaeval medley. The Puritan allegory is more national, in the sense that the language and style have obviously become clearer and more fixed. But the Puritan allegory is certainly much narrower than the mediaeval allegory. Piers Plowman deals with the death or resurrection of a whole human society, where men are members of each other. In the later work schism has “isolated the soul”; and it is certainly mere individualism, when it is not mere terrorism. But I will only say now what I said then; I do not want to damage the statue of John Bunyan at Bedford, where it stands facing (symbolically in more ways than one) the site of his own prison. But I do wish there were a statue of John Langland, uplifted on a natural height into a more native air, and looking across all England from the Malvern hills.

But there is one intellectual side issue of the debate that does interest me very much. Mr. James Douglas, who once presented himself to me as a representative of Protestant truth, and who is certainly a representative of Protestant tradition, answered Mr. Alfred Noyes in terms very typical of the present state of that tradition. He said that we should salute Bunyan’s living literary genius, and not bother our heads about Bunyan’s obsolete theology. Then he added the comparison which seems to me so thought-provoking: that this is after all what we do, when we admire Dante’s genius and not HIS obsolete theology. Now there is a distinction to be made here; if the whole modern mind is to realize at all where it stands. If I say that Bunyan’s theology IS obsolete, but Dante’s theology is NOT obsolete—then I know the features of my friend Mr. Douglas will be wreathed in a refined smile of superiority and scorn. He will say that I am a Papist and therefore of course I think the Papist dogmatism living. But the point is that he is a Protestant and he thinks the Protestant dogmatism dead. I do at least defend the Catholic theory because it can be defended. The Puritans would presumably be defending the Puritan theory— if it could be defended. The point is that it is dead for them as much as for us. It is not merely that Mr. Noyes demands the disappearance of a disfigurement; it is that Mr. Douglas says it cannot be a disfigurement because it has already disappeared. Now the Thomist philosophy, on which Dante based his poetry has not disappeared. It is not a question of faith but of fact; anybody who knows Paris or Oxford, or the worlds where such things are discussed, will tell you that it has not disappeared. All sorts of people, including those who do not believe in it, refer to it and argue against it on equal terms.

I do not believe, for a fact, that modern men so discuss the seventeenth century sectarianism. Had I the privilege of passing a few days with Mr. Douglas and his young lions of the DAILY EXPRESS, I doubt not that we should discuss and differ about many things. But I do rather doubt whether Mr. Douglas would every now and again cry out, as with a crow of pure delight “Oh, I must read you this charming little bit from Calvin.” I do rather doubt whether his young journalists are joyously capping each other’s quotations from Toplady’s sermons on Calvinism. But eager young men do still quote Aquinas, just as they still quote Aristotle. I have heard them at it. And certain ideas are flying about, even in the original prose of St. Thomas, as well as in the poetry of Dante—or, for that matter, of Donne.

The case of Bunyan is really the opposite of the case of Dante. In Dante the abstract theory still illuminates the poetry; the ideas enlighten even where the images are dark. In Bunyan it is the human facts and figures that are bright; while the spiritual background is not only dark in spirit, but blackened by time and change. Of course it is true enough that in Dante the mere images are immensely imaginative. It is also true that in one sense some of them are obsolete; in the sense that the incidents are obsolete and the personal judgment merely personal. Nobody will ever forget how there came through the infernal twilight the figure of that insolent troubadour, carrying his own head aloft in his hand like a lantern to light his way. Everybody knows that such an image is poetically true to certain terrible truths about the unnatural violence of intellectual pride. But as to whether anybody has any business to say that Bertrand de Born is damned, the obvious answer is No. Dante knew no more about it than I do: only he cared more about it; and his personal quarrel is an obsolete quarrel. But that sort of thing is not Dante’s theology, let alone Catholic theology.

In a word; so far from his theology being obsolete, it would be much truer to say that everything is obsolete except his theology. That he did not happen to like a particular Southern gentleman is obsolete; but that was at most a private fancy, in demonology rather than theology. We come to theology when we come to theism. And if anybody will read the passage in which Dante grapples with the gigantic problem of describing the Beatific Vision, he will find it is uplifted into another world of ideas from the successful entry to the Golden City at the end of the Pilgrim’s Progress. It is a Thought; which a thinker, especially a genuine freethinker, is always free to go on thinking. The images of Dante are not to be worshipped, any more than any other images. But there is an idea behind all images; and it is before that, in the last lines of the Paradiso, that the spirit of the poet seems first to soar like an eagle and then to fall like a stone.

There is nothing in this comparison that reflects on the genius and genuineness of Bunyan in his own line or class; but it does serve to put him in his own class. I think there was something to be said for the vigorous denunciation of Mr. Noyes; but no such denunciation is involved in this distinction. On the contrary, it would be easy to draw the same distinction between two men both at the very top of all literary achievement. It would be true to say, I think, that those who most enjoy reading Homer care more about an eternal humanity than an ephemeral mythology. The reader of Homer cares more about men than about gods. So, as far as one can guess, does Homer. It is true that if those curious and capricious Olympians did between them make up a religion, it is now a dead religion. It is the human Hector who so died that he will never die. But we should remonstrate with a critic who, after successfully proving this about Homer, should go on to prove it about Plato. We should protest if he said that the only interest of the Platonic Dialogues to-day is in their playful asides and very lively local colour, in the gay and graceful picture of Greek life; but that nobody troubles nowadays about the obsolete philosophy of Plato. We should point out that there is no truth in the comparison; and that if anything the case is all the other way. Plato’s philosophy will be important as long as there is philosophy; and Dante’s religion will be important as long as there is religion. Above all it will be important as long as there is that lucid and serene sort of religion that is most in touch with philosophy. Nobody will say that the theology of the Baptist tinker is in that sense serene or even lucid; on many points it necessarily remains obscure. The reason is that such religion does not do what philosophy does; it does not begin at the beginning. In the matter of mere chronological order, it is true that the pilgrimage of Dante and that of Bunyan both end in the Celestial City. But it is in a very different sense that the pilgrimage of Bunyan begins in the City of Destruction. The mind of Dante, like that of his master St. Thomas, really begins as well as ends in the City of Creation. It begins as well as ends in the burning focus in which all things began. He sees his series from the right end, though he then begins it at the wrong end. But it is the whole point of a personal work like THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS that it does begin with a man’s own private sins and private panic about them. This intense individualism gives it great force; but it cannot in the nature of things give it great breadth and range. Heaven is haven; but the wanderer has not many other thoughts about it except that it is haven. It is typical of the two methods, each of them very real in its way, that Dante could write a whole volume, one-third of his gigantic epic, describing the things of Heaven; whereas in the case of Bunyan, as the gates of Heaven open the book itself closes.

I think it worth while to write this note on the critical remark of Mr. James Douglas, because it is a remark that would be made as readily by many other intelligent men to-day. But it is founded on a fallacy; on the idea that the choice between living philosophies and dead philosophies is the same as the choice between old philosophies and new. It is not true of Plato and it is not true of Dante; and, apart from whatever is our own philosophy, we should realise that some of the most ancient are the most alive.

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SU DUE ALLEGORIE

FORSE è solo giusto che il moderno iconoclasmo venga applicato anche agli antichi iconoclasti; e specialmente ai grandi Puritani, quei frantumatori di idoli che sono stati a lungo essi stessi idoli. Il signor Belloc di recente picchiettava la statua parlamentare di Cromwell con un martello altamente scientifico; e il signor Noyes ha improvvisamente assalito l’immagine di Bunyan con qualcosa di più simile a una mazza. In quest’ultimo caso confesso di ritenere la reazione eccessiva; non direi di Bunyan nulla di peggio di quanto direi di molti antichi scrittori: che lo si conosce meglio per i suoi passi migliori, e che molti, i quali credono affettuosamente di averlo letto, resterebbero lievemente sorpresi da alcuni dei suoi passi peggiori. Ma questo non è peculiare di Bunyan; e io per parte mia mi accontenterei di dire ciò che dissi alcuni anni fa. Una veduta equa ed equilibrata della cultura e dei credi in gioco si può raggiungere al meglio confrontando il Pellegrinaggio di Christian con il Pellegrinaggio di Piers Plowman. L’allegoria puritana è assai più lineare (anche se non sempre lineare) del piuttosto sconcertante guazzabuglio medievale. L’allegoria puritana è più nazionale, nel senso che la lingua e lo stile sono ovviamente divenuti più chiari e più fissi. Ma l’allegoria puritana è certamente assai più angusta dell’allegoria medievale. Piers Plowman tratta della morte o resurrezione di un’intera società umana, dove gli uomini sono membra gli uni degli altri. Nell’opera più tarda lo scisma ha «isolato l’anima»; ed è certamente puro individualismo, quando non è puro terrorismo. Ma dirò ora soltanto ciò che dissi allora; non voglio danneggiare la statua di John Bunyan a Bedford, dove sta rivolta (simbolicamente in più di un senso) verso il luogo della sua stessa prigione. Ma desidero davvero che vi fosse una statua di John Langland, innalzata su una naturale altura in un’aria più nativa, e che guarda attraverso tutta l’Inghilterra dalle colline di Malvern.

Ma c’è un aspetto intellettuale collaterale del dibattito che mi interessa moltissimo. Il signor James Douglas, che una volta si presentò a me come rappresentante della verità protestante, e che è certamente un rappresentante della tradizione protestante, rispose al signor Alfred Noyes in termini molto tipici dello stato presente di quella tradizione. Disse che dovremmo salutare il vivente genio letterario di Bunyan, e non affannarci la testa per l’obsoleta teologia di Bunyan. Poi aggiunse il paragone che a me pare tanto stimolante: che questo è in fondo ciò che facciamo quando ammiriamo il genio di Dante e non la SUA obsoleta teologia. Ora, c’è qui una distinzione da fare; se la mente moderna nel suo insieme deve rendersi conto di dove si trova. Se dico che la teologia di Bunyan È obsoleta, ma che la teologia di Dante NON è obsoleta — allora so che i lineamenti del mio amico signor Douglas si cingeranno di un raffinato sorriso di superiorità e di scherno. Dirà che sono un papista e che perciò naturalmente ritengo vivo il dogmatismo papista. Ma il punto è che egli è protestante e ritiene morto il dogmatismo protestante. Io almeno difendo la teoria cattolica perché essa può essere difesa. I Puritani starebbero presumibilmente difendendo la teoria puritana — se potesse essere difesa. Il punto è che essa è morta per loro tanto quanto per noi. Non è soltanto che il signor Noyes esige la scomparsa di uno sfregio; è che il signor Douglas dice che non può essere uno sfregio perché è già scomparso. Ora la filosofia tomista, sulla quale Dante fondò la sua poesia, non è scomparsa. Non è questione di fede ma di fatto; chiunque conosca Parigi o Oxford, o i mondi dove tali cose si discutono, vi dirà che essa non è scomparsa. Ogni sorta di persone, comprese quelle che non vi credono, vi si riferiscono e vi argomentano contro alla pari.

Non credo, di fatto, che gli uomini moderni discutano così il settarismo del diciassettesimo secolo. Se avessi il privilegio di trascorrere qualche giorno con il signor Douglas e i suoi giovani leoni del DAILY EXPRESS, non dubito che discuteremmo e divergeremmo su molte cose. Ma piuttosto dubito che il signor Douglas ogni tanto esclami, come con un grido di puro diletto: «Oh, devo leggervi questo delizioso passaggio di Calvino». Piuttosto dubito che i suoi giovani giornalisti rilancino gioiosamente le citazioni gli uni degli altri dai sermoni di Toplady sul calvinismo. Ma i giovani uomini ardenti citano ancora Aquino, proprio come citano ancora Aristotele. Li ho sentiti farlo. E certe idee sono in circolazione, perfino nella prosa originale di san Tommaso, così come nella poesia di Dante — o, se è per questo, di Donne.

Il caso di Bunyan è in realtà l’opposto del caso di Dante. In Dante la teoria astratta illumina ancora la poesia; le idee rischiarano perfino là dove le immagini sono oscure. In Bunyan sono i fatti e le figure umane a essere luminosi; mentre lo sfondo spirituale non solo è oscuro nello spirito, ma annerito dal tempo e dal mutamento. Naturalmente è abbastanza vero che in Dante le sole immagini sono immensamente immaginifiche. È pure vero che in un senso alcune di esse sono obsolete; nel senso che gli episodi sono obsoleti e il giudizio personale meramente personale. Nessuno dimenticherà mai come attraverso il crepuscolo infernale giungesse la figura di quell’insolente trovatore, che portava alta in mano la propria testa come una lanterna per illuminarsi il cammino. Tutti sanno che una tale immagine è poeticamente fedele a certe terribili verità sulla violenza innaturale dell’orgoglio intellettuale. Ma quanto a stabilire se qualcuno abbia diritto di dire che Bertrand de Born sia dannato, la risposta ovvia è No. Dante non ne sapeva più di me: solo che gliene importava di più; e la sua contesa personale è una contesa obsoleta. Ma quel genere di cosa non è la teologia di Dante, e tanto meno la teologia cattolica.

In una parola; tanto lungi dall’essere obsoleta la sua teologia, sarebbe assai più vero dire che tutto è obsoleto tranne la sua teologia. Che egli non simpatizzasse per un particolare gentiluomo del Sud è obsoleto; ma quello era al più un capriccio privato, di demonologia più che di teologia. Veniamo alla teologia quando veniamo al teismo. E se qualcuno leggerà il passo in cui Dante si misura con il gigantesco problema di descrivere la Visione Beatifica, troverà che esso è innalzato in un altro mondo di idee rispetto al riuscito ingresso nella Aurea Città al termine del Pilgrim’s Progress. È un Pensiero; che un pensatore, specialmente un genuino libero pensatore, è sempre libero di continuare a pensare. Le immagini di Dante non vanno adorate, non più di qualsiasi altra immagine. Ma c’è un’idea dietro tutte le immagini; ed è dinanzi a quella, negli ultimi versi del Paradiso, che lo spirito del poeta sembra dapprima librarsi come un’aquila e poi cadere come una pietra.

Non c’è nulla in questo confronto che tocchi il genio e la genuinità di Bunyan nel suo proprio filone o classe; ma esso serve davvero a collocarlo nella sua propria classe. Penso che ci fosse qualcosa da dire a favore della vigorosa denuncia del signor Noyes; ma nessuna simile denuncia è implicata in questa distinzione. Al contrario, sarebbe facile tracciare la stessa distinzione tra due uomini entrambi al vertice assoluto di ogni conseguimento letterario. Sarebbe vero dire, penso, che coloro i quali più godono nel leggere Omero si curano più di un’umanità eterna che di una mitologia effimera. Il lettore di Omero si cura più degli uomini che degli dèi. Così, per quanto si possa indovinare, fa Omero. È vero che se quei curiosi e capricciosi Olimpî tra loro componessero una religione, essa è ormai una religione morta. È l’umano Ettore che morì in modo tale da non morire mai. Ma dovremmo rimostrare con un critico che, dopo aver provato con successo questo riguardo a Omero, procedesse a provarlo riguardo a Platone. Dovremmo protestare se dicesse che l’unico interesse dei Dialoghi platonici oggi sta nei loro giocosi incisi e nel loro assai vivace colore locale, nel gaio e grazioso quadro della vita greca; ma che nessuno si cura oggigiorno dell’obsoleta filosofia di Platone. Dovremmo far osservare che non c’è alcuna verità nel confronto; e che semmai il caso è tutto all’inverso. La filosofia di Platone sarà importante finché ci sarà filosofia; e la religione di Dante sarà importante finché ci sarà religione. Soprattutto sarà importante finché ci sarà quella lucida e serena specie di religione che è più in contatto con la filosofia. Nessuno dirà che la teologia del calderaio battista sia in quel senso serena o anche solo lucida; su molti punti essa rimane necessariamente oscura. La ragione è che tale religione non fa ciò che fa la filosofia; non comincia dal principio. Nella questione del mero ordine cronologico, è vero che il pellegrinaggio di Dante e quello di Bunyan finiscono entrambi nella Città Celeste. Ma è in un senso molto diverso che il pellegrinaggio di Bunyan comincia nella Città della Distruzione. La mente di Dante, come quella del suo maestro san Tommaso, comincia realmente così come finisce nella Città della Creazione. Comincia così come finisce nel fuoco ardente in cui tutte le cose ebbero inizio. Egli vede la sua serie dall’estremità giusta, benché poi la cominci dall’estremità sbagliata. Ma è tutto il punto di un’opera personale come THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS che essa cominci davvero con i peccati privati di un uomo e con il privato panico che ne prova. Questo intenso individualismo le conferisce grande forza; ma non può, per la natura stessa delle cose, conferirle grande ampiezza e portata. Il Cielo è approdo; ma il viandante non ha molti altri pensieri su di esso, se non che è un approdo. È tipico dei due metodi, ciascuno assai reale a suo modo, che Dante potesse scrivere un intero volume, un terzo del suo gigantesco poema, descrivendo le cose del Cielo; mentre nel caso di Bunyan, appena le porte del Cielo si aprono, il libro stesso si chiude.

Ritengo valga la pena di scrivere questa nota sull’osservazione critica del signor James Douglas, perché è un’osservazione che oggi verrebbe fatta con altrettanta prontezza da molti altri uomini intelligenti. Ma è fondata su una fallacia; sull’idea che la scelta tra filosofie vive e filosofie morte sia la stessa cosa della scelta tra filosofie vecchie e nuove. Non è vero di Platone e non è vero di Dante; e, a prescindere da quale sia la nostra propria filosofia, dovremmo renderci conto che alcune delle più antiche sono le più vive.

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THE PROTESTANT SUPERSTITIONS

THAT delightful guessing game, which has long caused innocent merriment in so many Catholic families, the game of guessing at exactly which line of an article say on Landscape or Latin Elegiacs, we shall find the Dean of St. Paul’s introducing the Antidote to Antichrist; or the Popish Plot Revealed—that most familiar of our Catholic parlour games happened to be entertaining me some time ago, as a sort of substitute for a crossword puzzle, when I found I had hit on a very lucky example. I wrote above about “Catholic families,” and had almost, by force of associations written “Catholic firesides.” And I imagine that the Dean really does think that even in this weather we keep the home-fires burning, like the fire of Vesta, in permanent expectation of relighting the fires of Smithfield. Anyhow, this sort of guessing game or crossword puzzle is seldom disappointing. The Dean must by this time have tried quite a hundred ways of leading up to his beloved topic; and even concealing it, like a masked battery, until he can let loose the cannonade in a perfect tornado of temper. Then the crossword puzzle is no longer a puzzle, though the crosswords are apparent and appropriate enough; especially those devoted to the great historical process of crossing out the Cross.

In the case of this particular article, it was only towards the end of it that the real subject was allowed to leap out from an ambush upon the reader. I think it was a general article on Superstition; and, being a journalistic article of the modern type, it was of course devoted to discussing superstition without defining superstition. In an article of that enlightened sort, it seemed enough for the writer to suggest that superstition is anything that he does not happen to like. Some of the things are also things that I do not happen to like. But such a writer is not reasonable even when he is right. A man ought to have some more philosophical objection to stories of ill luck than merely calling them credulity; as certainly as a man ought to have some more philosophical objection to Mass than to call it Magic. It is hardly a final refutation of Spiritualists to prove that they believe in Spirits; any more than a refutation of Deists to prove that they believe in Deity. Creed and credence and credulity are words of the same origin and can be juggled backwards and forwards to any extent. But when a man assumes the absurdity of anything that anybody else believes, we wish first to know what he believes; on what principle he believes; and, above all, upon what principle he disbelieves. There is no trace of anything so rational in the Dean’s piece of metaphysical journalism. If he had stopped to define his terms, or in other words to tell us what he was talking about, such an abstract analysis would of course have filled up some space in the article. There might have been no room for the Alarum Against the Pope.

The Dean of St. Paul’s got to business, in a paragraph in the second half of his article, in which he unveiled to his readers all the horrors of a quotation from Newman; a very shocking and shameful passage in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his religion, and in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that he likes to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and beloved, that there is a sense of being protected by prayers, sacramentals and so on; and that happiness of this sort satisfies the soul. The Dean, having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the Cardinal’s spiritual condition, drops the curtain with a groan and says it is Paganism. How different from the Christian orthodoxy of Plotinus!

Now it was exactly that little glimpse that interested me in this matter; not so much a glimpse into the soul of the Cardinal as into the mind of the Dean. I suddenly seemed to see, in much simpler form than I had yet realised, the real issue between him and us. And the curious thing about the issue is this; that what he thinks about us is exactly what we think about him. What I for one feel most strongly, in considering a case like that of the Dean and his quotation from the Cardinal, is that the Dean is a man of distinguished intelligence and culture, that he is always interesting, that he is sometimes even just, or at least justified or justifiable; but that he is first and last the champion of a Superstition; the man who is really and truly defending a Superstition, as it would be understood by people who could define a Superstition. What makes it all the more amusing is that it is in a rather special sense a Pagan Superstition. But what makes it most intensely interesting, so far as I am concerned, is that the Dean is devoted to what may be called par excellence a superstitious Superstition. I mean that it is in a special sense a LOCAL superstition.

Dean Inge is a superstitious person because he is worshipping a relic; a relic in the sense of a remnant. He is idolatrously adoring the broken fragment of something; simply because that something happens to have lingered out of the past in the place called England; in the rather battered form called Protestant Christianity. It is as if a local patriot were to venerate the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham only because she was in Walsingham and without even remembering that she was in Heaven. It is still more as if he venerated a fragment chipped from the toe of the statue and forgot where it came from and ignored Our Lady altogether. I do not think it superstitious to respect the chip in relation to the statue, or the statue in relation to the saint, or the saint in relation to the scheme of theology and philosophy. But I do think it superstitious to venerate, or even to accept, the fragment because it happens to be there. And Dean Inge does accept the fragment called Protestantism because it happens to be there.

Let us for a moment consider the whole matter as philosophers should; in a universal air above all local superstitions like the Dean’s. It is quite obvious that there are three or four philosophies or views of life possible to reasonable men; and to a great extent these are embodied in the great religions or in the wide field of irreligion. There is the atheist, the materialist or monist or whatever he calls himself, who believes that all is ultimately material, and all that is material is mechanical. That is emphatically a view of life; not a very bright or breezy view, but one into which it is quite possible to fit many facts of existence. Then there is the normal man with the natural religion, which accepts the general idea that the world has a design and therefore a designer; but feels the Architect of the Universe to be inscrutable and remote, as remote from men as from microbes. That sort of theism is perfectly sane; and is really the ancient basis of the solid if somewhat stagnant sanity of Islam. There is again the man who feels the burden of life so bitterly that he wishes to renounce all desire and all division, and rejoin a sort of spiritual unity and peace from which (as he thinks) our separate selves should never have broken away. That is the mood answered by buddhism and by many metaphysicians and mystics. Then there is a fourth sort of man, sometimes called a mystic and perhaps more properly to be called a poet; in practice he can very often be called a pagan. His position is this; it is a twilight world and we know not where it ends. If we do not know enough for monotheism, neither do we know enough for monism. There may be a borderland and a world beyond; but we can only catch hints of it as they come; we may meet a nymph in the forest; we may see the fairies on the mountains. We do not know enough about the natural to DENY the preternatural. That was, in ancient times, the healthiest aspect of Paganism. That is, in modern times, the rational part of Spiritualism. All these are possible as general views of life; and there is a fourth that is at least equally possible, though certainly more positive.

The whole point of this last position might be expressed in the line of M. Cammaerts’s beautiful little poem about bluebells; LE CIEL EST TOMBE PAR TERRE. Heaven has DESCENDED into the world of matter; the supreme spiritual power is now operating by the machinery of matter, dealing miraculously with the bodies and souls of men. It blesses all the five senses; as the senses of the baby are blessed at a Catholic christening. It blesses even material gifts and keepsakes, as with relics or rosaries. It works through water or oil or bread or wine. Now that sort of mystical materialism may please or displease the Dean, or anybody else. But I cannot for the life of me understand why the Dean, or anybody else, does not SEE that the Incarnation is as much a part of that idea as the Mass; and that the Mass is as much a part of that idea as the Incarnation. A Puritan may think it blasphemous that God should become a wafer. A Moslem thinks it blasphemous that God should become a workman in Galilee. And he is perfectly right, from his point of view; and given his primary principle. But if the Moslem has a principle, the Protestant has only a prejudice. That is, he has only a fragment; a relic; a superstition. If it be profane that the miraculous should descend to the plane of matter, then certainly Catholicism is profane; and Protestantism is profane; and Christianity is profane. Of all human creeds or concepts, in that sense, Christianity is the most utterly profane. But why a man should accept a Creator who was a carpenter, and then worry about holy water, why he should accept a local Protestant tradition that God was born in some particular place mentioned in the Bible, merely because the Bible had been left lying about in England, and then say it is incredible that a blessing should linger on the bones of a saint, why he should accept the first and most stupendous part of the story of Heaven on Earth, and then furiously deny a few small but obvious deductions from it— that is a thing I do not understand; I never could understand; I have come to the conclusion that I shall never understand. I can only attribute it to Superstition.

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LE SUPERSTIZIONI PROTESTANTI

QUEL delizioso gioco d’indovinelli, che da lungo tempo ha suscitato innocente allegria in tante famiglie cattoliche, il gioco che consiste nell’indovinare a quale esatta riga di un articolo, poniamo sul Paesaggio o sugli Elegiaci latini, troveremo il Decano di San Paolo introdurre l’Antidoto contro l’Anticristo; oppure la Congiura Papista Svelata: quel più familiare dei nostri giochi cattolici da salotto mi stava intrattenendo qualche tempo fa, come una sorta di sostituto delle parole crociate, quando mi accorsi d’aver colto un esempio davvero fortunato. Avevo scritto poco sopra «famiglie cattoliche», e per forza d’associazione avevo quasi scritto «focolari cattolici». E immagino che il Decano creda davvero che, anche con questo tempo, noi teniamo accesi i fuochi del focolare, come il fuoco di Vesta, in permanente attesa di riaccendere i roghi di Smithfield. Comunque sia, questa specie di gioco d’indovinelli o di parole crociate raramente delude. Il Decano, ormai a quest’ora, deve aver tentato ben cento modi di condurre al suo argomento prediletto; e persino di celarlo, come una batteria mascherata, finché non può scatenare la cannonata in un perfetto tornado d’ira. Allora le parole crociate non sono più un enigma, per quanto gli incroci siano abbastanza evidenti e appropriati; specie quelli dedicati al grande processo storico che consiste nel cancellare la Croce.

Nel caso di questo particolare articolo, fu solo verso la sua fine che il vero soggetto poté balzare da un agguato sul lettore. Credo fosse un articolo generale sulla Superstizione; ed essendo un articolo giornalistico di tipo moderno, era naturalmente dedicato a discutere la superstizione senza definire la superstizione. In un articolo di quella sorta illuminata, sembrava sufficiente allo scrivente suggerire che la superstizione è tutto ciò che a lui per caso non piace. Alcune di quelle cose sono anche cose che a me per caso non piacciono. Ma un simile scrittore non è ragionevole nemmeno quando ha ragione. Un uomo dovrebbe avere qualche obiezione più filosofica alle storie di malasorte che non il semplice chiamarle credulità; così come, di certo, un uomo dovrebbe avere qualche obiezione più filosofica alla Messa che non il chiamarla Magia. Non è affatto una confutazione definitiva degli Spiritisti provare che essi credono negli Spiriti; non più di quanto sia una confutazione dei Deisti provare che essi credono nella Deità. Credo, credenza e credulità sono parole della stessa origine e possono essere palleggiate avanti e indietro a piacimento. Ma quando un uomo dà per assurdo tutto ciò in cui chiunque altro crede, noi desideriamo anzitutto sapere che cosa egli crede; su quale principio crede; e, soprattutto, su quale principio non crede. Non v’è traccia di nulla di così razionale nel pezzo di giornalismo metafisico del Decano. Se si fosse fermato a definire i suoi termini, o in altre parole a dirci di che cosa stesse parlando, una simile analisi astratta avrebbe naturalmente occupato un po’ di spazio nell’articolo. Non ci sarebbe stato posto per l’Allarme Contro il Papa.

Il Decano di San Paolo venne al sodo, in un paragrafo della seconda metà del suo articolo, in cui svelava ai suoi lettori tutti gli orrori di una citazione da Newman; un passo assai scioccante e vergognoso in cui il degradato apostata dice d’essere felice nella sua religione, e d’essere circondato dalle cose della sua religione; che gli piace avere oggetti che sono stati benedetti dal santo e amato, che vi è un senso d’essere protetti da preghiere, sacramentali e così via; e che una felicità di questo genere sazia l’anima. Il Decano, avendoci concesso quest’unico raccapricciante sguardo alla condizione spirituale del Cardinale, cala il sipario con un gemito e dice che è Paganesimo. Quanto diversa dall’ortodossia cristiana di Plotino!

Ora, fu proprio quel piccolo sguardo a interessarmi in questa faccenda; non tanto uno sguardo nell’anima del Cardinale quanto nella mente del Decano. Mi parve d’un tratto di vedere, in forma assai più semplice di quanto avessi finora compreso, la vera questione tra lui e noi. E la cosa curiosa riguardo a questa questione è che ciò che egli pensa di noi è esattamente ciò che noi pensiamo di lui. Ciò che, per parte mia, sento con più forza, considerando un caso come quello del Decano e della sua citazione dal Cardinale, è che il Decano è un uomo di intelligenza e cultura distinte, che è sempre interessante, che talvolta è persino giusto, o almeno giustificato o giustificabile; ma che egli è, prima e ultima cosa, il campione di una Superstizione; l’uomo che difende realmente e veramente una Superstizione, così come la intenderebbe chi sappia definire una Superstizione. Ciò che rende il tutto ancor più divertente è che si tratta, in un senso piuttosto speciale, di una Superstizione Pagana. Ma ciò che lo rende più intensamente interessante, per quanto mi riguarda, è che il Decano è devoto a ciò che potrebbe chiamarsi per eccellenza una Superstizione superstiziosa. Voglio dire che essa è, in un senso speciale, una superstizione LOCALE.

Il Decano Inge è una persona superstiziosa perché adora una reliquia; una reliquia nel senso di un residuo. Egli sta idolatricamente adorando il frammento spezzato di qualcosa; semplicemente perché quel qualcosa si dà il caso sia rimasto attardato dal passato nel luogo chiamato Inghilterra; nella forma piuttosto malconcia chiamata Cristianesimo protestante. È come se un patriota locale venerasse la statua di Nostra Signora di Walsingham solo perché ella era a Walsingham e senza neppure ricordare che ella era in Cielo. È ancor più come se venerasse un frammento scheggiato dall’alluce della statua e dimenticasse donde provenisse e ignorasse del tutto Nostra Signora. Non ritengo superstizioso rispettare la scheggia in relazione alla statua, o la statua in relazione al santo, o il santo in relazione allo schema della teologia e della filosofia. Ma ritengo superstizioso venerare, o anche solo accettare, il frammento perché si dà il caso che sia lì. E il Decano Inge accetta davvero il frammento chiamato Protestantesimo perché si dà il caso che sia lì.

Consideriamo per un momento l’intera faccenda come dovrebbero fare i filosofi; in un’aria universale al di sopra di tutte le superstizioni locali come quella del Decano. È del tutto ovvio che vi siano tre o quattro filosofie o concezioni della vita possibili agli uomini ragionevoli; e in gran parte esse sono incarnate nelle grandi religioni o nell’ampio campo dell’irreligione. Vi è l’ateo, il materialista o monista o comunque egli si chiami, il quale crede che tutto sia in ultima analisi materiale, e tutto ciò che è materiale sia meccanico. Questa è enfaticamente una concezione della vita; non una concezione molto luminosa o brillante, ma una nella quale è del tutto possibile far combaciare molti fatti dell’esistenza. Poi vi è l’uomo normale con la religione naturale, la quale accetta l’idea generale che il mondo abbia un disegno e perciò un disegnatore; ma sente l’Architetto dell’Universo come imperscrutabile e remoto, tanto remoto dagli uomini quanto dai microbi. Quella sorta di teismo è perfettamente sana; ed è realmente l’antica base della solida se pur alquanto stagnante saggezza dell’Islam. Vi è ancora l’uomo che sente il peso della vita così amaramente da desiderare di rinunciare a ogni desiderio e a ogni divisione, e di ricongiungersi a una sorta di unità e di pace spirituale dalla quale (come egli pensa) i nostri sé separati non avrebbero mai dovuto staccarsi. Questo è l’umore a cui rispondono il buddhismo e molti metafisici e mistici. Poi vi è un quarto tipo d’uomo, talvolta chiamato mistico e forse più propriamente da chiamarsi poeta; in pratica può assai spesso essere chiamato pagano. La sua posizione è questa; è un mondo crepuscolare e non sappiamo dove finisca. Se non sappiamo abbastanza per il monoteismo, neppure sappiamo abbastanza per il monismo. Vi può essere una terra di confine e un mondo al di là; ma possiamo coglierne solo cenni, così come vengono; possiamo incontrare una ninfa nella foresta; possiamo vedere le fate sulle montagne. Non sappiamo abbastanza del naturale per NEGARE il preternaturale. Quello era, nei tempi antichi, l’aspetto più sano del Paganesimo. Quello è, nei tempi moderni, la parte razionale dello Spiritismo. Tutte queste sono possibili come concezioni generali della vita; e ve n’è una quarta che è almeno ugualmente possibile, sebbene certamente più positiva.

Tutto il senso di quest’ultima posizione potrebbe esprimersi nel verso della bella poesiola di M. Cammaerts sulle campanule; LE CIEL EST TOMBÉ PAR TERRE. Il Cielo è DISCESO nel mondo della materia; la suprema potenza spirituale opera ora mediante il meccanismo della materia, trattando miracolosamente con i corpi e le anime degli uomini. Essa benedice tutti e cinque i sensi; come i sensi del neonato sono benedetti a un battesimo cattolico. Benedice persino i doni materiali e i ricordi, come con le reliquie o i rosari. Opera attraverso l’acqua o l’olio o il pane o il vino. Ora, quella sorta di materialismo mistico può piacere o dispiacere al Decano, o a chiunque altro. Ma non riesco in alcun modo a capire perché il Decano, o chiunque altro, non VEDA che l’Incarnazione è parte di quell’idea tanto quanto la Messa; e che la Messa è parte di quell’idea tanto quanto l’Incarnazione. Un Puritano può ritenere blasfemo che Dio si faccia ostia. Un Musulmano ritiene blasfemo che Dio si faccia operaio in Galilea. Ed egli ha perfettamente ragione, dal suo punto di vista; e dato il suo principio primo. Ma se il Musulmano ha un principio, il Protestante ha soltanto un pregiudizio. Cioè, egli ha soltanto un frammento; una reliquia; una superstizione. Se è profano che il miracoloso debba discendere sul piano della materia, allora certamente il Cattolicesimo è profano; e il Protestantesimo è profano; e il Cristianesimo è profano. Di tutti i credi o concetti umani, in quel senso, il Cristianesimo è il più assolutamente profano. Ma perché un uomo dovrebbe accettare un Creatore che fu un falegname, e poi tormentarsi per l’acqua santa, perché dovrebbe accettare una tradizione protestante locale secondo cui Dio nacque in un certo luogo particolare menzionato nella Bibbia, soltanto perché la Bibbia era stata lasciata in giro in Inghilterra, e poi dire che è incredibile che una benedizione possa attardarsi sulle ossa di un santo, perché dovrebbe accettare la prima e più stupenda parte della storia del Cielo sulla Terra, e poi negare furiosamente alcune piccole ma ovvie deduzioni che ne discendono — questa è una cosa che non capisco; non ho mai potuto capire; sono giunto alla conclusione che non capirò mai. Non posso attribuirla che alla Superstizione.

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ON COURAGE AND INDEPENDENCE

WHEN we are pressed and taunted upon our obstinacy in saying the Mass in a dead language, we are tempted to reply to our questioners by telling them that they are apparently not fit to be trusted with a living language. When we consider what they have done with the noble English language, as compared with the English of the Anglican Prayer-Book, let alone the Latin of the Mass, we feel that their development may well be called degenerate.

The language called dead can never be called degenerate. Surely even they might understand our taking refuge in it, by the time that (in the vernacular) the word “immaculate” is applied only to the shirt-fronts of snobs; or “unction” means not Extreme Unction, but only unctuous rectitude. It is needless to note once more how the moral qualities have lost their mystical quality; and with it all their dignity and delicacy and spontaneous spiritual appeal. Charity, that was the flaming heart of the world, has become a name for a niggardly and pompous patronage of the poor, generally amounting by this time to the enslavement of the poor.

But there are more subtle examples of this degeneration in ideal terms. And an even worse example, I think, than the cheapening of the word CHARITY is the new newspaper cheapening of the word COURAGE.

Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham and Surbiton, is described as “daring,” though nobody on earth knows what danger it is that he dares. I speak, of course, of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in. To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened, and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead, does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had the strength to endure it.

The dramatic critic of a Sunday paper, a little while ago, lashed himself into a frenzy of admiration for the “courage” of some dismal and dirty play or other, because it represented a soldier as raving like a hysterical woman against the cruelty of those who had expected him to defend his country. It may be amusing that his idea of courage should be a defence of cowardice. But it is the sort of defence of it that we have heard ten thousand times during the reaction after the War; and the courage required to utter it is exactly as great as the courage required to utter any other stale quotation from the cant and convention of the moment: such trifles as the absurdity of marriage or the sympathetic personality of Judas Iscariot. These things have become quite commonplace; but they still pretend to be courageous. So sham soldiers have been known to swagger about in uniform when the war was over.

The Catholic Church, as the guardian of all values, guards also the value of words. Her children will not fall, I hope, into this conventional and comfortable folly. We need not pretend that Catholics to-day are called upon to show anything worth calling courage, by the standard of the Catholics in other days. It did require some courage to be a Catholic when it involved the definite disinclination felt by most of us for being racked or ripped up with a knife. It did require some courage when there was only an intermittent possibility of being torn in pieces by a mob. Even that our subtle human psychology regards with some distaste.

But I hope we do not feel any distaste for being on the opposite side to Bishop Barnes, or for being regarded with alarm and suspicion by Jix. These things are almost intellectual pleasures. Indeed, they really involve a certain temptation to intellectual pride. Let us pray to be delivered from it; and let us hope that we are not left altogether without occasions for courage. But most of them will be present in private life and in other practical aspects of public life; in resisting pain or passion or defying the economic threat and tyranny of our time. But do not let us make fools of ourselves like the rationalists and the realists, by posing as martyrs who are never martyred or defying tyrants who have been dead for two hundred years.

But though the name of this virtue has been vulgarized so much that it is hard to use it even where it is exact, let alone where it is in any case exaggerative, there is a somewhat analogous quality which the modern world lauds equally loudly and has lost almost more completely. Putting aside the strict sense of a Catholic courage, the world ought to be told something about Catholic intellectual independence. It is, of course, the one quality which the world supposes that Catholics have lost. It is also, at this moment, the one quality which Catholics perceive that all the world has lost. The modern world has many marks, good as well as bad; but by far the most modern thing in it is the abandonment of individual reason, in favour of press stunts and suggestion and mass psychology and mass production. The Catholic Faith, which always preserves the unfashionable virtue, is at this moment alone sustaining the independent intellect of man.

Our critics, in condemning us, always argue in a circle. They say of mediaevalism that all men were narrow. When they discover that many of them were very broad, they insist that those men must have been in revolt, not only against mediaevalism, but against Catholicism. No Catholics were intelligent; for when they were intelligent, they cannot really have been Catholics. This circular argument appears with a slight difference in the matter of independent thought to-day. It consists of extending to all Catholicism what are in fact the independent ideas of different Catholics. Men start by assuming (what they have been told) that Rome rigidly suppresses ALL variety and therefore Romanists never differ on anything. Then if one of them advances an interesting view, they say that Rome must have imposed it on him and therefore on all the other Roman Catholics. I myself have advanced several economic and political suggestions, for which I never dreamed of claiming anything more than that a loyal Catholic can offer them. But I would rather take any other example than my own unimportant opinions.

SUL CORAGGIO E SULL’INDIPENDENZA

QUANDO ci siamo costretti e provocati sulla nostra ostinazione nel dire la Messa in una lingua morta, siamo tentati di rispondere ai nostri interrogatori dicendo loro che apparentemente non sono degni di fiducia con una lingua viva. Quando consideriamo ciò che hanno fatto con la nobile lingua inglese, a confronto dell’inglese del Libro delle Preghiere Anglicano, figuriamoci il latino della Messa, sentiamo che il loro sviluppo può benissimo essere chiamato degenerato.

La lingua chiamata morta non può mai essere definita degenerata. Sicuramente anche loro potrebbero capire il nostro rifugiarci in essa, quando (nel volgare) la parola “immacolato” è applicata solo ai polsini dei snob; o “unzione” significa non l’Estrema Unzione, ma solo rettitudine untuosa. Non serve notare ancora una volta come le qualità morali abbiano perso la loro qualità mistica; e con essa tutta la loro dignità e delicatezza e spontaneo appello spirituale. La carità, che era il cuore infuocato del mondo, è diventata un nome per una patronage avara e pomposa dei poveri, che in questo tempo si traduce generalmente nello schiavizzare i poveri.

Ma ci sono esempi più sottili di questa degenerazione in termini ideali. E un esempio ancora peggiore, credo, del banalizzare la parola CARITÀ è il nuovo banalizzare giornalistico della parola CORAGGIO.

Chiunque viva nel completo lusso e nella sicurezza e scelga di scrivere una commedia o un romanzo che provochi un certo fermento e uno scambio di complimenti a Chelsea e Chiswick, e un lieve brivido a Streatham e Surbiton, viene descritto come “audace”, anche se nessuno al mondo sa quale pericolo egli osa affrontare. Parlo, naturalmente, dei pericoli terreni; o dell’unica specie di pericoli in cui crede. Essere adulato esageratamente da tutti coloro che si considerano illuminati e piuttosto debolmente rimproverato da chiunque egli ritenga antiquato e morto, non sembra un pericolo così spaventoso da giustificare che uno venga guardato come un eroico guerriero e martire militante perché ha avuto la forza di sopportarlo.

Il critico teatrale di un giornale domenicale, qualche tempo fa, si è scatenato in una frenesia d’ammirazione per il “coraggio” di una certa triste e squallida pièce, perché rappresentava un soldato che delirava come una donna isterica contro la crudeltà di coloro che si aspettavano da lui che difendesse la patria. Può essere divertente che il suo concetto di coraggio sia una difesa della codardia. Ma è il genere di difesa che abbiamo sentito diecimila volte durante la reazione dopo la guerra; e il coraggio necessario per esprimerla è esattamente lo stesso del coraggio necessario per esprimere qualsiasi altra citazione logora dal canto e dalla convenzione del momento: come le banalità sull’assurdità del matrimonio o sulla personalità simpatica di Giuda Iscariota. Queste cose sono diventate piuttosto comuni; ma continuano a pretendere d’essere coraggiose. Così i soldati falsi si sono visti sfoggiare l’uniforme quando la guerra era finita.

La Chiesa Cattolica, come custode di tutti i valori, custodisce anche il valore delle parole. I suoi figli non cadranno, lo spero, in questa follia convenzionale e comoda. Non dobbiamo fingere che oggi ai cattolici sia richiesto di mostrare qualcosa che si possa chiamare coraggio, secondo il metro dei cattolici di altri tempi. Occorreva un certo coraggio per essere cattolici quando ciò comportava la netta avversione che quasi tutti noi proviamo a essere messi sulla ruota o squartati con un coltello. Occorreva un certo coraggio quando esisteva solo una possibilità intermittente di essere lacerati da una folla. Anche questo, la nostra sottile psicologia umana lo guarda con qualche disgusto.

Ma spero che non proviamo alcun disgusto per il fatto di trovarci dalla parte opposta a quella del Vescovo Barnes o per essere guardati con allarme e sospetto da Jix. Queste cose sono quasi piaceri intellettuali. In effetti, comportano davvero una certa tentazione verso l’orgoglio intellettuale. Preghiamo di essere liberati da esso; e speriamo che non siamo lasciati del tutto senza occasioni per il coraggio. Ma la maggior parte di esse sarà presente nella vita privata e in altri aspetti pratici della vita pubblica; nel resistere al dolore o alla passione, o sfidando la minaccia economica e la tirannia del nostro tempo. Ma non facciamo gli sciocchi come i razionalisti e i realisti, atteggiandoci a martiri che non sono mai stati martirizzati o sfidando tiranni morti da duecento anni.

Ma sebbene il nome di questa virtù sia stato volgarizzato a tal punto che è difficile usarlo anche dove è esatto, figuriamoci dove in ogni caso è eccessivo, c’è una qualità in qualche modo analoga che il mondo moderno loda altrettanto rumorosamente e ha perso quasi più completamente. Mettendo da parte il senso stretto di un coraggio cattolico, al mondo dovrebbe essere detto qualcosa sull’indipendenza intellettuale cattolica. È, naturalmente, l’unica qualità che il mondo suppone abbiano perso i Cattolici. È anche, in questo momento, l’unica qualità che i Cattolici percepiscono che tutto il mondo ha perso. Il mondo moderno ha molti segni, buoni come altresì cattivi; ma di gran lunga la cosa più moderna in esso è l’abbandono della ragione individuale, a favore di colpi di mano giornalistici e suggestioni e psicologia di massa e produzione di massa. La Fede Cattolica, che preserva sempre la virtù non convenzionale, in questo momento è sola a sostenere l’intelletto indipendente dell’uomo.

I nostri critici, nel condannarci, ragionano sempre in circolo. Dicono del medioevo che tutti gli uomini erano ristretti di vedute. Quando scoprono che molti di loro avevano invece una visione molto ampia, insistono sul fatto che quegli uomini devono essere stati in rivolta non solo contro il medioevo ma anche contro il cattolicesimo. Nessun cattolico era intelligente; perché quando lo erano, non potevano davvero essere cattolici. Questo ragionamento circolare appare con una lieve differenza nella questione del pensiero indipendente oggi. Consiste nell’estendere a tutto il cattolicesimo ciò che in realtà sono le idee indipendenti di diversi cattolici. Si parte dall’assumere (quello che ci è stato detto) che Roma reprime rigidamente qualsiasi varietà e quindi i cattolici romani non differiscono mai su nulla. Poi, se uno di loro propone una visione interessante, dicono che Roma deve averla imposta a lui e quindi a tutti gli altri cattolici romani. Io stesso ho avanzato diverse proposte economiche e politiche, per le quali non avrei mai sognato di rivendicare nulla più del fatto che un cattolico fedele può offrirle. Ma preferirei prendere qualsiasi altro esempio piuttosto che le mie opinioni senza importanza.

In any case, my own experience of the modern world tells me that Catholics are much more and not less individualistic than other men in their general opinions. Mr. Michael Williams, the spirited propagandist of Catholicism in America, gave this as a very cogent reason for refusing to found or join anything like a Catholic party in politics. He said that Catholics will combine for Catholicism, but it is quite abnormally difficult to get them to combine for anything else. This is confirmed by my own impressions and is contrasted very sharply with my recollections about most other religious groups. For instance, what we called the Free Churches, constituting what was also called the Nonconformist Conscience, represented a marvel of moral unity and the spreading of a special spiritual atmosphere. But the Free Churches were not free, whatever else they were. The most striking and even startling thing about them was the ABSENCE of any individual repudiations of the common ideals which the Conscience laid down. The Nonconformist Conscience was not the normal conscience; they would hardly themselves have pretended that the mass of mankind necessarily agreed with them about Drink or Armaments. But they all agreed with each other about Drink or Armaments. A Nonconformist minister standing up to defend public-houses, or public expenditure on guns and bayonets, was a much rarer thing than a heretic in much more hierarchical systems. It was broadly the fact that ALL such men supported what they called Temperance; which seemed to mean an intemperate denunciation of temperate drinking. It is almost as certain that ALL of them insisted on what they called Peace; which seemed, so far as I could make out, to mean such weakening of armament as would involve disaster and destruction in War. But the question here is not whether I disagreed with them; but whether they ever disagreed with each other. And one thing is at least certain, that on things of this sort they disagreed with each other infinitely less than Catholics do. Though the traditional culture and sacramental symbol of the vine makes most Catholics moderately favourable to fermented liquor in moderation, there have been many prominent Catholics who were teetotallers in a degree hardly to be called moderate. The great Cardinal Manning startled all his own supporters by the passion of this private conviction; just as he startled them by many other Radical eccentricities, such as making friends with Stead and championing the Salvation Army. Whether he was right is not here in question; the point is that he thought he was right when his own religious world thought he was wrong, and not unfrequently told him so. You would not have found a man in the Salvation Army to defend Irish whisky, as you found a man like Father Matthew to denounce it.

The same facts could be supported by a hundred facts in my own experience. Dean Inge observed the other day that Mr. Belloc was the only man in England who believed that Dreyfus was guilty. He might have added that he was nearly the only man in England who knew any of the actual facts of the case, which were suppressed in the English newspapers. In any case, the phrase is an exaggeration; for several men, like Lord Chief Justice Russell, whom no one will call incompetent to judge evidence, and old Harry Labouchere, whom no one will call a zealot for militarism, were of the same opinion. But substantially it is true that Mr. Belloc, in the days of his youth, found himself absolutely alone in almost any assembly of English people discussing the question. It is by no means the only occasion on which he has found himself alone. Merely from my own personal knowledge of him, I could give a list as long as this article of topics on which he was opposed to everyone else’s opinion and sometimes opposed to mine. To mention only a few things, large and small, he would probably be the only person in a drawing-room saying that Lewis Carroll was overrated, that Byron and Longfellow were not overrated, that wit is superior to humour, that ALLY SLOPE’S HALF-HOLIDAY was superior to PUNCH, that James the Second was chiefly notable as a stolid English patriot suspicious of French influence, that an Irish political murder might actually be as excusable as a Russian political murder (old regime), that half the modern legislation advanced in favour of Labour is part of a plan to re-establish pagan slavery, that it is the mark of the Protestant culture to tolerate Catholicism and the mark of the Catholic culture to persecute it, and a variety of other opinions which would at least be largely regarded as paradoxes. And he says such things because he is a Catholic: which does not mean that other Catholics would say the same. On the contrary, each would say something quite different. It is not that they need agree with him; but that he need not agree with them. Apart from his own genius, Catholics do differ thus more than a company of Anglican public-school patriots or solid Liberal Nonconformists; to say nothing of the middle class of the Middle West, with its rigid pattern of regular guys. Catholics know the two or three transcendental truths on which they do agree; and take rather a pleasure in disagreeing on everything else. A glance at the living literature, written by other Catholics besides Mr. Belloc, will confirm what I say.

I might take, for instance, a book like the remarkable recent work of Mr. Christopher Hollis, “The American Heresy.” Now surely nobody in his senses will say that all Catholics are bound to believe that the Slave States ought to have won the American Civil War, that America ought never to have extended westward of Tennessee, that Andrew Jackson was a savage, or that Abraham Lincoln was a failure, that Calhoun was like a heathen Roman or that Wilson was an arrogant and dishonest schoolmaster. These opinions are not part of the Catholic order; but they are illustrations of the Catholic liberty. And they illustrate exactly the sort of liberty which the modern world emphatically has not got; the real liberty of the mind. It is no longer a question of liberty from kings and captains and inquisitors. It is a question of liberty from catchwords and headlines and hypnotic repetitions and all the plutocratic platitudes imposed on us by advertisement and journalism.

It is strictly true to say that the average reader of the DAILY MAIL and the “Outline of History” is inhibited from these intellectual acts. It is true to say that he CANNOT think that Abraham Lincoln was a failure. It is true to say that he CANNOT think that a Republic should have refused to expand as it has expanded. He cannot move his mind to such a position, even experimentally; it means moving it out of too deep a rut, worn too smooth by the swift traffic of modern talk and journalism, all perpetually moving one way.

These modern people mean by mental activity simply an express train going faster and faster along the same rails to the same station; or having more and more railway carriages hooked on to it to be taken to the same place. The one notion that has vanished from their minds is the notion of voluntary movement even to the same end. They have fixed not only the ends, but the means. They have imposed not only the doctrines, but the words. They are bound not merely in religion, which is avowedly binding, but in everything else as well. There are formal praises of free thought; but even the praises are in a fixed form. Thousands who have never learned to think at all are urged to think whatever may take their fancy about Jesus Christ. But they are, in fact, forbidden to think in any way but one about Abraham Lincoln. That is why it is worth remarking that it is a Catholic who has thought for himself.

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In ogni caso, la mia personale esperienza del mondo moderno mi dice che i cattolici sono assai più, e non meno, individualisti degli altri uomini nelle loro opinioni generali. Il signor Michael Williams, l’animoso propagandista del cattolicesimo in America, adduceva questo come ragione assai stringente per rifiutarsi di fondare o di aderire a qualcosa come un partito cattolico in politica. Diceva che i cattolici si uniranno per il cattolicesimo, ma che è quanto mai difficile in modo anomalo indurli a unirsi per qualsiasi altra cosa. Ciò è confermato dalle mie stesse impressioni e contrasta assai nettamente con i miei ricordi riguardo alla maggior parte degli altri gruppi religiosi. Per esempio, quelle che chiamavamo le Chiese Libere, costituenti ciò che veniva anche detto la Coscienza Nonconformista, rappresentavano un prodigio di unità morale e la diffusione di una speciale atmosfera spirituale. Ma le Chiese Libere non erano libere, qualunque altra cosa fossero. La cosa più sorprendente e persino sconcertante che le riguardava era l’ASSENZA di qualsiasi ripudio individuale degli ideali comuni che la Coscienza stabiliva. La Coscienza Nonconformista non era la coscienza normale; essi stessi difficilmente avrebbero preteso che la massa dell’umanità concordasse necessariamente con loro riguardo all’Alcol o agli Armamenti. Ma essi concordavano tutti gli uni con gli altri riguardo all’Alcol o agli Armamenti. Un ministro nonconformista che si levasse a difendere le osterie, o la spesa pubblica in fucili e baionette, era cosa assai più rara di un eretico in sistemi ben più gerarchici. Era, a grandi linee, un fatto che TUTTI costoro appoggiavano ciò che chiamavano Temperanza; che pareva significare un’intemperante denuncia del bere temperato. È quasi altrettanto certo che TUTTI insistevano su ciò che chiamavano Pace; che pareva, per quanto io riuscissi a capire, significare un tale indebolimento degli armamenti da comportare disastro e distruzione in Guerra. Ma la questione qui non è se io fossi in disaccordo con loro; bensì se essi fossero mai in disaccordo l’uno con l’altro. E una cosa almeno è certa: che su cose di questo genere essi erano in disaccordo tra loro infinitamente meno di quanto lo siano i cattolici. Benché la cultura tradizionale e il simbolo sacramentale della vite rendano la maggior parte dei cattolici moderatamente favorevoli al liquore fermentato con moderazione, vi sono stati molti cattolici eminenti che erano astemi in un grado difficilmente definibile moderato. Il grande cardinale Manning sbalordì tutti i suoi stessi sostenitori con la passione di questa privata convinzione; così come li sbalordì con molte altre eccentricità radicali, quali lo stringere amicizia con Stead e il farsi campione dell’Esercito della Salvezza. Se avesse ragione non è qui in questione; il punto è che egli riteneva di aver ragione quando il suo stesso mondo religioso riteneva che avesse torto, e non di rado glielo diceva. Non avreste trovato un uomo nell’Esercito della Salvezza a difendere il whisky irlandese, come trovaste un uomo quale padre Matthew a denunciarlo.

Gli stessi fatti potrebbero essere avvalorati da un centinaio di fatti tratti dalla mia esperienza personale. Il decano Inge osservava l’altro giorno che il signor Belloc era l’unico uomo in Inghilterra a credere che Dreyfus fosse colpevole. Avrebbe potuto aggiungere che era quasi l’unico uomo in Inghilterra a conoscere alcuno dei fatti reali del caso, che furono soppressi nei giornali inglesi. In ogni caso, la frase è un’esagerazione; poiché parecchi uomini, come il Lord Giudice Supremo Russell, che nessuno dirà incompetente a valutare le prove, e il vecchio Harry Labouchere, che nessuno chiamerà uno zelota del militarismo, erano della stessa opinione. Ma è sostanzialmente vero che il signor Belloc, nei giorni della sua giovinezza, si trovò assolutamente solo in quasi ogni assemblea di inglesi che discutessero la questione. Non è affatto la sola occasione in cui egli si sia trovato solo. Per la mia sola conoscenza personale di lui, potrei stendere un elenco lungo quanto questo articolo di argomenti sui quali egli era opposto all’opinione di tutti gli altri e talvolta opposto alla mia. Per menzionare solo poche cose, grandi e piccole, egli sarebbe probabilmente l’unica persona in un salotto a dire che Lewis Carroll era sopravvalutato, che Byron e Longfellow non erano sopravvalutati, che l’arguzia è superiore all’umorismo, che ALLY SLOPER’S HALF-HOLIDAY era superiore a PUNCH, che Giacomo II era notevole soprattutto come impassibile patriota inglese diffidente dell’influenza francese, che un omicidio politico irlandese potrebbe in effetti essere scusabile quanto un omicidio politico russo (del vecchio regime), che metà della moderna legislazione promossa a favore del Lavoro è parte di un piano per ristabilire la schiavitù pagana, che è segno della cultura protestante il tollerare il cattolicesimo e segno della cultura cattolica il perseguitarlo, e una varietà di altre opinioni che sarebbero perlomeno largamente considerate paradossi. Ed egli dice tali cose perché è cattolico: il che non significa che altri cattolici direbbero lo stesso. Al contrario, ciascuno direbbe qualcosa di del tutto diverso. Non è che debbano concordare con lui; ma che egli non deve concordare con loro. A parte il suo proprio genio, i cattolici differiscono così più di una compagnia di patrioti anglicani usciti dalle public school o di solidi nonconformisti liberali; per non dire della classe media del Middle West, con il suo rigido modello di regolari bravi ragazzi. I cattolici conoscono le due o tre verità trascendentali sulle quali concordano; e provano piuttosto piacere nel discordare su tutto il resto. Uno sguardo alla letteratura vivente, scritta da altri cattolici oltre al signor Belloc, confermerà ciò che dico.

Potrei prendere, per esempio, un libro come la notevole opera recente del signor Christopher Hollis, «L’eresia americana». Ora, di certo nessuno sano di mente dirà che tutti i cattolici siano tenuti a credere che gli Stati Schiavisti avrebbero dovuto vincere la Guerra Civile Americana, che l’America non avrebbe mai dovuto estendersi a occidente del Tennessee, che Andrew Jackson fosse un selvaggio, o che Abraham Lincoln fosse un fallito, che Calhoun fosse simile a un pagano romano o che Wilson fosse un arrogante e disonesto maestro di scuola. Queste opinioni non fanno parte dell’ordine cattolico; ma sono illustrazioni della libertà cattolica. Ed esse illustrano esattamente quel genere di libertà che il mondo moderno enfaticamente non possiede; la vera libertà della mente. Non si tratta più di una questione di libertà da re e capitani e inquisitori. Si tratta di una questione di libertà da slogan e titoli di giornale e ripetizioni ipnotiche e tutte le plutocratiche banalità imposteci dalla pubblicità e dal giornalismo.

È rigorosamente vero dire che il lettore medio del DAILY MAIL e dell’«Outline of History» è inibito da questi atti intellettuali. È vero dire che egli NON PUÒ pensare che Abraham Lincoln fosse un fallito. È vero dire che egli NON PUÒ pensare che una Repubblica avrebbe dovuto rifiutarsi di espandersi come si è espansa. Egli non può muovere la mente verso una tale posizione, nemmeno in via sperimentale; ciò significa cavarla fuori da un solco troppo profondo, reso troppo liscio dal rapido traffico dei discorsi e del giornalismo moderni, tutti perpetuamente muoventisi in una sola direzione.

Questa gente moderna intende per attività mentale semplicemente un treno espresso che va sempre più veloce lungo le medesime rotaie verso la medesima stazione; oppure a cui si agganciano sempre più vagoni ferroviari per essere condotti nel medesimo luogo. L’unica nozione svanita dalla loro mente è la nozione del movimento volontario anche verso il medesimo fine. Essi hanno fissato non solo i fini, ma i mezzi. Hanno imposto non solo le dottrine, ma le parole. Sono vincolati non soltanto nella religione, che è dichiaratamente vincolante, ma in ogni altra cosa del pari. Vi sono lodi formali del libero pensiero; ma persino le lodi sono in una forma fissa. Migliaia di persone che non hanno mai imparato affatto a pensare sono sollecitate a pensare qualsiasi cosa possa piacer loro riguardo a Gesù Cristo. Ma è loro, in realtà, proibito pensare in altro modo che in uno solo riguardo ad Abraham Lincoln. Ecco perché vale la pena notare che è un cattolico ad aver pensato da sé.

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THE NORDIC HINDOO

I CANNOT, as some do, find Dr. Barnes a very exciting Bishop merely because he is an Evolutionist in the style of fifty years ago and a Protestant persecutor in the style of eighty years ago. His views are stale enough; but I admit that his arguments are sometimes amusing.

Thus, he reached the last limit of wildness in one remark which he made in the course of explaining that the folklore of the Mediterranean had been forced upon the Nordic nations—whatever that may mean. He added abruptly that Indian and Chinese metaphysics are now much more important than ours. But, above all, he made the crowning assertion that Rome is thus stamped as Provincial. This seems to suggest to the educational mind the construction of an examination paper in elementary general knowledge. It might run something like this:

1. From what language is the word “provincial” derived?

2. To what provinces did it generally refer?

3. If Athens, Antioch, Rome and Jerusalem were provincial towns, what was their Metropolitan city?

4. What reasons are there for supposing that Birmingham occupied this Metropolitan position from the earliest times?

5. Give a short account of the conquest of Southern Europe and the Near East by the Emperors of Birmingham.

6. At what date did the Papacy rebel against the Diocese of Birmingham?

7. Explain the old proverb, “All roads lead to Birmingham.”

8. Discuss the following remark, “The most charmingly Nordic people I know are those dear Chinamen.”

9. Why is the folklore of the Hindoos so much more reasonable than that of the Romans?

10. When will the Bishop of Birmingham go touring in the Provinces?

Answers must be sent in before the time of the Disestablishment of the Church of England, and priests are forbidden to give their crafty assistance to the candidates.

Really, I do not know any other way of dealing with even a pretence of seriousness with such an extraordinary remark. It was rendered even more extraordinary, of course, by the further remarks on the subject of Chinamen and Hindoos. Now we know all about the Nordic Man, so far as anybody can know anything about a person who does not exist. We know, for instance, that up to the autumn of 1914 he used to be called the Teutonic Man. Dean Inge used to be frightfully fond of him in those days; even fonder than he is now. He once quoted lavishly, and still quotes occasionally, from that great and glorious English patriot, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

We quite understood that all Nordic Men were like gods, having long golden hair and gigantic stature; and this made it all the more pleasant to realize that we ourselves were Nordic Men, Unfortunately, the Germans were even more Nordic and gigantic and beautiful to gaze upon; they said so; and they ought to know. The poor Teuton was a little unpopular for five years or so; but now he is creeping out again to feel the sun, like the kings after Napoleon’s fall in Mrs. Browning’s poem. Like several other people, he changed his name during the War. He is now entirely Nordic and not at all Teutonic. And, as it is, and always was, his whole profession in life to praise himself and exalt the virtue of pride, so much undervalued by Christians, it is perfectly natural that he should despise “Dagos” and talk about the lower culture of lesser breeds without the law. It is natural that he should insist that all Spaniards are cowardly bullfighters and all Italians luxurious organ-grinders. He may be expected to point out at intervals the sluggish incompetence of Napoleon and the impotent languor of Mussolini.

All this we were used to; it was what we expected from the Nordic Man; for nobody ever expected a Nordic Man to face facts staring him in the face, or to learn anything even from his own experience. We thought we had it all clear and complete, like a mutual understanding; there was the Nordic Man who was noble because he was Protestant and had light hair; and there was the Southern Catholic who was a lower sort of animal, because he was swarthy and superstitious. But why Hindoos? 0 Venerable Father in God and gentle shepherd of souls, why Hindoos?

Why are we now told to learn from people who are even less light-haired and even further off from the Arctic Circle? Are they not a lower race, conquered by the earth-shaking Imperialism of Birmingham? Are they not a lesser breed without the law? Are we to go to Asia to escape from the folklore and magic? Do the dear Indians never exhibit any of the errors that deface the deplorable Romans? If the Latins are idolaters, do the Indians never have idols? If Southern Europe is attached to mythology, is Southern Asia a world of pure reason that has never been defaced by a myth?

The explanation, the only explanation that I can suggest, is the one I have already suggested; and it is in a simple word; the word DESPAIR. Everybody knows that when a military campaign begins to fail there is an inevitable and even pardonable temptation to every military commander on the defeated side to lower the standard of military fitness and collect soldiers from anywhere, whatever be their military quality. This has happened again and again even among the white races; something similar is constantly happening in their relation to the other races. So both the Dutch and the English in the South African quarrel have been continually tempted to make use of the natives for war as well as labour. France has been blamed for relying on dark troops; though I never could see why she should be blamed by us, who drew dark troops from all over our own Empire.

Anyhow, it is a process that defeated or embarrassed captains fall back upon regularly but often reluctantly. It is a very exact parallel to the defeat of the Bishop of Birmingham and his cry for help to the Hindoos. He has reached the position in which he will accept reinforcements from anywhere except Rome. Rome must be provincial; even if it is the only place in the world that is provincial. Rome must be barbaric; if all the barbarians of the earth are called up to sack the city.

L’INDUO SETTENTRIONALE

Non posso, come fanno alcuni, trovare nell’evoluzionismo di cinquant’anni fa e nel ruolo di persecutore protestante di ottant’anni fa del dottor Barnes un vescovo davvero entusiasmante. Le sue opinioni sono abbastanza stantie; ma ammetto che i suoi argomenti siano talvolta divertenti.

Così egli raggiunse l’ultimo limite della follia con una frase che pronunciò nel corso di un’esposizione sulla pretesa imposizione del folklore mediterraneo alle nazioni nordiche, qualunque cosa ciò voglia dire. Aggiunse bruscamente che la metafisica indiana e cinese è oggi molto più importante della nostra. Ma soprattutto egli fece l’affermazione culminante per cui Roma è così marchiata come provinciale. Ciò sembra suggerire alla mente educativa la costruzione di un compito d’esame in conoscenze generali elementari. Potrebbe essere qualcosa del genere:

1. Da quale lingua deriva la parola “provinciale”?

2. A quali province si riferiva generalmente?

3. Se Atene, Antiochia, Roma e Gerusalemme erano città di provincia, qual era la loro città metropolitana?

4. Quali sono le ragioni per cui si può supporre che Birmingham occupasse questa posizione metropolitana fin dai tempi più antichi?

5. Fornisci un breve resoconto della conquista dell’Europa meridionale e del Vicino Oriente da parte degli Imperatori di Birmingham.

6. A che data il papato ha ribellato contro la diocesi di Birmingham?

7. Spiegate il vecchio proverbio: «Tutte le strade portano a Birmingham».

8. Discutete la seguente osservazione: «Le persone più affascinantemente nordiche che conosco sono quei cari cinesi».

9. Perché il folklore degli Indiani è molto più ragionevole di quello dei Romani?

10. Quando il Vescovo di Birmingham farà un tour nelle Province?

Le risposte devono essere inviate prima del momento dello smantellamento della Chiesa d’Inghilterra e ai sacerdoti è vietato fornire la loro astuta assistenza ai candidati.

In verità non so trovare altro modo di trattare con serietà anche solo apparente una simile osservazione straordinaria. Era resa ancora più straordinaria, naturalmente, dalle ulteriori considerazioni sull’argomento dei cinesi e degli indiani. Ora conosciamo tutto dell’uomo nordico, almeno per quanto si possa sapere di una persona che non esiste. Sappiamo, ad esempio, che fino all’autunno del 1914 era solito essere chiamato l’uomo teutonico. Il decano Inge in quei giorni lo amava moltissimo; addirittura più di quanto non lo ami ora. Una volta citò abbondantemente, e ancora di tanto in tanto cita, quel grande e glorioso patriota inglese, il signor Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Abbiamo ben capito che tutti gli uomini nordici erano come dei, con lunghi capelli dorati e una statura gigantesca; e questo rendeva ancora più piacevole renderci conto che noi stessi eravamo uomini nordici. Sfortunatamente, i tedeschi erano ancora più nordici, giganteschi e belli da guardare; lo dicevano loro; e dovevano saperlo. Il povero teutone era un po’ impopolare per cinque anni circa; ma ora sta tornando fuori a sentire il sole, come i re dopo la caduta di Napoleone nel poema della signora Browning. Come molte altre persone, cambiò il suo nome durante la guerra. Ora è completamente nordico e non affatto teutonico. E, dato che è, e sempre è stato, tutta la sua professione nella vita lodare se stesso ed esaltare la virtù dell’orgoglio, così sottovalutata dai cristiani, è perfettamente naturale che disprezzi i “Dagos” e parli della cultura inferiore delle razze minori senza legge. È naturale che insista sul fatto che tutti gli spagnoli sono toreri codardi e tutti gli italiani lussuosi suonatori di organo. Si può aspettarsi che puntualmente segnali l’incompetenza pigra di Napoleone e il languore impotente di Mussolini.

Eravamo abituati a tutto questo; era ciò che ci aspettavamo dall’uomo nordico; perché nessuno si è mai aspettato che un uomo nordico affrontasse i fatti davanti ai suoi occhi, o imparasse qualcosa anche dalla propria esperienza. Pensavamo di averlo tutto chiaro e completo, come una reciproca comprensione; c’era l’uomo nordico che era nobile perché protestante e aveva capelli chiari; e c’era il cattolico del sud che era una specie di animale inferiore, perché scuro di carnagione e superstizioso. Ma perché gli indiani? O venerabile padre in Dio e mite pastore delle anime, perché gli indiani?

Perché ora ci viene detto di imparare da persone che hanno i capelli ancora meno chiari e sono ancora più lontane dal Circolo Polare Artico? Non sono forse una razza inferiore, conquistata dall’imperialismo sconvolgente di Birmingham? Non sono forse una specie minore senza legge? Dobbiamo andare in Asia per sfuggire al folklore e alla magia? Gli amati indiani non mostrano mai nessuno degli errori che deturpano i deplorabili romani? Se i latini sono idolatri, gli indiani non hanno mai avuto idoli? Se l’Europa meridionale è legata alla mitologia, l’Asia meridionale è forse un mondo di pura ragione che non è mai stato deturpato da un mito?

La spiegazione, l’unica che io possa suggerire, è quella che ho già proposto ed è racchiusa in una semplice parola: la disperazione. Tutti sanno che quando una campagna militare comincia a fallire ogni comandante delle forze sconfitte cade inevitabilmente e anche perdonabilmente nella tentazione di abbassare gli standard di idoneità militare e reclutare soldati da qualsiasi parte, indipendentemente dalla loro qualità come militari. Questo è accaduto più volte anche tra le razze bianche; qualcosa di simile succede costantemente nelle relazioni con le altre razze. Così sia gli olandesi che gli inglesi nel conflitto sudafricano sono stati continuamente tentati di utilizzare i nativi non solo per il lavoro ma anche per la guerra. La Francia è stata criticata per aver fatto affidamento su truppe scure; anche se io non ho mai capito perché dovrebbe essere biasimata da noi, che abbiamo reclutato truppe scure in tutto l’Impero britannico.

Comunque sia, è un processo a cui i capitani sconfitti o imbarazzati si affidano regolarmente ma spesso con riluttanza. È un parallelo molto preciso alla sconfitta del Vescovo di Birmingham e al suo grido di aiuto agli indiani. Ha raggiunto la posizione in cui accetterà rinforzi da qualsiasi parte tranne che da Roma. Roma deve essere provinciale; anche se è l’unico posto al mondo che lo è. Roma deve essere barbarica; se tutti i barbari della terra sono chiamati a saccheggiare la città.

And when we have reached that point, it is not difficult to see that the very invasion and spoliation proclaim it to be a Holy City; unique and universal and towering over the tribes of men.

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A SPIRITUALIST LOOKS BACK

WE hear much about new religions; many of them based on the very latest novelties of Buddha and Pythagoras. But I have come to a conclusion which I fear will offend still more. I fancy that all modern religions are counter-religions; attacks on, or alternative to the Catholic Church. They bear no likeness to the natural pagan speculations that existed before the Catholic Church, or would exist if it had never existed. The attitude of Dean Inge is certainly much more like that of Plotinus than that of Plato. But it is even more like that of Porphyry than that of Plotinus. He is exactly like some pagan of the decline; it is not necessary for him to know very much about the Christian superstition; as soon as he heard of it, he hated it.

In a recent work, which I have considered in this place, he is careful to insist that the word PROTESTANT had an old meaning which was not merely negative. And he has certainly fulfilled an old meaning that is positive; if the word Protestant means a man who doth protest too much. He is so very anxious to explain what he thinks about the Catholic Church that he cannot keep it out of any article about M. Coue or Monkey Glands.

The Dean stands by himself; and must be presumably described as an Anglican, for want of anything else in particular to call him. But it is very interesting to observe that even those who seem to go out into the wilderness to stake out their own Promised Land, like the Mormons, are eventually found to be as much a mere reaction against orthodoxy as the Modernists. Their march towards the new Utopia is found to be only a rather longer and more elaborate manoeuvre of one of the armies besieging the Holy City. We imagined that these new schismatics had finally gone off to pray; but we always find (a little while afterwards) that they have remained to scoff. They always come back to boo and riot in our churches when they have got tired of trying to build their own.

One who thus reveals all that he does not know, and certainly ought to know, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He broke out the other day into a diatribe, which was supposed to begin with the relations of his new religion to others, but which turned with incalculable rapidity into mere abuse of his old original family religion, as if there were no other in the world.

Perhaps he is right; and there is not. But you would think a man fresh from founding a new religion might have a few new things to say about that; instead of old and negative things to say about something else. But the special strictures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on Catholic orthodoxy had a certain very curious character, which alone makes them worth noting at all. In themselves they are almost indescribably stale and thin and shabby; and have been thrashed threadbare in a hundred controversies. But the odd thing which I want to remark about them is this; that they are not only old, but old-fashioned, in the sense that they do not even fit into what is now fashionable. They had some meaning sixty years ago. They have no meaning at all for anybody who looks at the living world as it is— even at the world of new faiths or fads like Spiritualism. But the Spiritualist is not looking even at the Spiritualist world. He is not looking at the human world, or the heathen world, or even at the worldly world. He is looking only at the thing he hates.

For instance, he says, exactly as did our Calvinist great-grandmother, that the Confessional is a most indelicate institution; and that it is highly improper for a young lady of correct deportment, in the matter of prunes and prisms, to mention such things as sins to a strange gentleman who is a celibate. Well, of course, all Catholics know the answer to that; and hundreds of Catholics have answered it to Protestants who had some sort of right or reason to ask it.

Nobody, or next to nobody, has ever had to go into so much morbid detail in confessing to a priest as in confessing to a doctor. And the joke of it is that the Protestant great-grandmother, who objected to the gentleman priest, would have been the very first to object to a lady doctor. What matters in the confessional is the moral guilt and not the material details. But the material details are everything in medicine, even for the most respectable and responsible physician, let alone all the anarchical quacks who have been let loose to hear confessions in the name of Psychoanalysis or Hypnotic Cures. But though we all know the old and obvious answers, what I find startling is this: that our critic does not see the new and obvious situation.

What in the world is the sense of his coming with his prunes and prisms into the sort of society that surrounds us to-day? If a girl must not mention sin to a man in a corner of a church, it is apparently the only place nowadays in which she may not do so. She may sit side by side with him on a jury and discuss the details of the foulest and most perverted wickedness in the world, perhaps with a man’s life hanging on the minuteness of the detail. She may read in novels and newspapers sins she has never heard of, let alone sins she is likely to commit or confess. She must not whisper to an impersonal presence behind a grating the most abstract allusion to the things that she hears shouted and cat-called in all the theatrical art and social conversation of the day.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must know as well as I do that modesty of that sort is not being regarded at all by the modern world; and that nobody dreams of attempting to safeguard it so strictly as it is safeguarded in Catholic conversation and Catholic confessions. We can say of Rome and Purity what Swinburne said, in another sense, about Rome and Liberty—“Who is against but all her men, and who is beside her but Thou?” And yet the critic has the impudence to accuse us of the neglect of what all but we are neglecting; simply because that charge was used against us a century ago, and anything used against us can be used over and over again, until it drops to pieces. The old stick of the old grandmother is still good enough to beat the old dog with, though if the old grandmother could rise from the dead, she would think the dog the only decent object in the landscape.

E quando abbiamo raggiunto quel punto, non è difficile vedere che la stessa invasione e spoliazione la proclamano una Santa Città; unica e universale e torreggiante sopra le tribù degli uomini.

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UNO SPIRITISTA GUARDA INDIETRO

MOLTO sentiamo dire di nuove religioni; molte di esse fondate sulle più recenti novità di Buddha e Pitagora. Ma sono giunto a una conclusione che temo offenderà ancor di più. Immagino che tutte le religioni moderne siano contro-religioni; attacchi alla Chiesa Cattolica, o alternative ad essa. Non recano alcuna somiglianza con le naturali speculazioni pagane che esistevano prima della Chiesa Cattolica, o che esisterebbero se essa non fosse mai esistita. L’atteggiamento del decano Inge è certamente assai più simile a quello di Plotino che a quello di Platone. Ma è ancor più simile a quello di Porfirio che a quello di Plotino. Egli è esattamente come qualche pagano della decadenza; non gli è necessario sapere molto della superstizione cristiana; non appena ne udì parlare, la odiò.

In un’opera recente, che ho preso in esame in questa sede, egli ha cura di insistere che la parola PROTESTANTE aveva un antico significato che non era meramente negativo. Ed egli ha certamente adempiuto un antico significato che è positivo; se la parola Protestante significa un uomo che protesta troppo. Egli è così ansioso di spiegare ciò che pensa della Chiesa Cattolica da non riuscire a tenerlo fuori da alcun articolo, fosse pure sul signor Coué o sulle Ghiandole di Scimmia.

Il decano sta per conto suo; e va presumibilmente descritto come un anglicano, in mancanza di qualcos’altro di particolare con cui chiamarlo. Ma è assai interessante osservare che perfino coloro che paiono uscire nel deserto per delimitare la propria Terra Promessa, come i Mormoni, si scoprono alla fine essere una mera reazione contro l’ortodossia non meno dei Modernisti. La loro marcia verso la nuova Utopia si rivela essere soltanto una manovra alquanto più lunga ed elaborata di uno degli eserciti che assediano la Santa Città. Immaginavamo che questi nuovi scismatici se ne fossero finalmente andati a pregare; ma sempre scopriamo (poco tempo dopo) che sono rimasti a schernire. Tornano sempre a fischiare e a far tumulto nelle nostre chiese quando si sono stancati di tentare di costruire le proprie.

Uno che così rivela tutto ciò che non sa, e che certamente dovrebbe sapere, è Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Egli proruppe l’altro giorno in una diatriba, che si supponeva cominciasse con le relazioni della sua nuova religione con le altre, ma che si volse con incalcolabile rapidità in una mera ingiuria contro la sua vecchia originaria religione di famiglia, come se non ve ne fosse altra al mondo.

Forse ha ragione; e non ve n’è. Ma si penserebbe che un uomo fresco dal fondare una nuova religione potrebbe avere qualche cosa nuova da dire su di essa; invece di cose vecchie e negative da dire su qualcos’altro. Ma le speciali censure di Sir Arthur Conan Doyle contro l’ortodossia cattolica avevano un carattere assai curioso, che solo le rende degne di nota. In sé sono quasi indescrivibilmente trite e fiacche e logore; e sono state sfibrate fino alla corda in un centinaio di controversie. Ma la cosa strana che voglio rilevare a loro riguardo è questa: che sono non solo vecchie, ma antiquate, nel senso che non si adattano nemmeno a ciò che è oggi di moda. Avevano un qualche significato sessant’anni fa. Non hanno alcun significato per chiunque guardi al mondo vivente com’è — perfino al mondo delle nuove fedi o manie come lo Spiritismo. Ma lo Spiritista non guarda nemmeno al mondo spiritista. Non guarda al mondo umano, né al mondo pagano, e neppure al mondo mondano. Guarda soltanto alla cosa che odia.

Per esempio, egli dice, esattamente come la nostra bisnonna calvinista, che il Confessionale è un’istituzione quanto mai indelicata; e che è altamente sconveniente per una signorina di corretto contegno, in materia di susine e prismi, menzionare cose come i peccati a un signore estraneo che è celibe. Ebbene, naturalmente, tutti i cattolici conoscono la risposta a ciò; e centinaia di cattolici l’hanno data a protestanti che avevano una qualche sorta di diritto o ragione di porla.

Nessuno, o quasi nessuno, ha mai dovuto entrare in tanto morboso dettaglio confessandosi a un prete quanto confessandosi a un medico. E il buffo è che la bisnonna protestante, che obiettava al signor prete, sarebbe stata la prima a obiettare a una signora dottoressa. Ciò che conta nel confessionale è la colpa morale e non i dettagli materiali. Ma i dettagli materiali sono tutto in medicina, perfino per il più rispettabile e responsabile dei medici, per non dire nulla di tutti gli anarchici ciarlatani che sono stati sguinzagliati a udire confessioni in nome della Psicoanalisi o delle Cure Ipnotiche. Ma benché conosciamo tutti le vecchie e ovvie risposte, ciò che trovo sorprendente è questo: che il nostro critico non vede la nuova e ovvia situazione.

Che senso ha mai, al mondo, il suo venire con le sue susine e i suoi prismi nel genere di società che oggi ci circonda? Se una fanciulla non deve menzionare il peccato a un uomo in un angolo di chiesa, quello è a quanto pare l’unico luogo al giorno d’oggi in cui non può farlo. Ella può sedere fianco a fianco con lui in una giuria e discutere i dettagli della più turpe e più perversa malvagità del mondo, magari con la vita di un uomo appesa alla minuzia del dettaglio. Può leggere in romanzi e giornali peccati di cui non ha mai sentito parlare, per non dire nulla dei peccati che è probabile commetta o confessi. Non deve sussurrare a una presenza impersonale dietro una grata la più astratta allusione alle cose che ode gridate e schiamazzate in tutta l’arte teatrale e la conversazione mondana del giorno.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle deve sapere bene quanto me che una modestia di quel genere non è affatto tenuta in conto dal mondo moderno; e che nessuno si sogna di tentare di salvaguardarla così rigorosamente come è salvaguardata nella conversazione cattolica e nelle confessioni cattoliche. Possiamo dire di Roma e della Purezza ciò che Swinburne disse, in altro senso, di Roma e della Libertà — «Chi è contro di lei se non tutti i suoi uomini, e chi è al suo fianco se non Tu?». Eppure il critico ha la sfrontatezza di accusarci della negligenza di ciò che tutti tranne noi stanno trascurando; semplicemente perché quell’accusa fu usata contro di noi un secolo fa, e qualsiasi cosa usata contro di noi può essere usata più e più volte, finché non cade a pezzi. Il vecchio bastone della vecchia nonna è ancora abbastanza buono per bastonare il vecchio cane, benché, se la vecchia nonna potesse levarsi dai morti, penserebbe che il cane sia l’unico oggetto decente del paesaggio.

I mean nothing flippant when I say that the only interesting thing about all this is its staleness. I have no unfriendly feelings towards Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to whom we all owe so much gratitude in the realm of literature and entertainment, and who often seems to me entirely right in his manner of defending Spiritualism against Materialism. But I do realize, even if he does not realize, that, at the back of the whole business, he is not defending Spiritualism, and not attacking Materialism; he is attacking Rome.

By a deep and true ancestral instinct with him, he knows that this is ultimately the one Thing to be either attacked or defended; and that he that is not against it is for it. Unless the claim of the Church can be challenged in the modern world, it is impossible really to set up an alternative modern religion. He feels that to be a fact, and I am glad to sympathize with him. Indeed, it is because I would remain so far sympathetic that I take only one example among the doctrines he denounced; and deliberately avoid, for instance, his strangely benighted remarks on the cult of the Blessed Virgin. For I confess to a difficulty in remaining patient with blindness about that topic. But there are other parallel topics.

He has some very innocent remarks about what he considers grotesque in the sacramental system; innocent, because apparently unconscious of what everybody else in the world considers grotesque in the spiritualistic system. If any Christian service was so conducted as to resemble a really successful seance, the world might well be excused for falling back on the word “grotesque,” a favourite word of Dr. Watson. Indeed, we may well question whether the institution of the Red-Headed League or the episode of the Yellow Face at the window, or any of the fantasies of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, were any more fantastic than some that have been submitted to us seriously enough by the school of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I do not say that this test of external extravagance ought to be final, or that no defence of such details could be made. But when Sir Arthur deliberately gibes at our ceremonies, we may at least be allowed to smile at his. Suppose any Catholic rite before the altar consisted of binding a human being hand and foot with ropes; should we ever hear the last of the horrible survival of human sacrifice? Suppose we declared that the priest went into a trance and that clouds of thick white stuff like cotton-wool came out of his mouth, as a manifestation of celestial grace; might not some of our critics be heard to murmur the word, “grotesque”? If we conducted a quiet little evening service in which a big brass trumpet careered about in the air and patted people on the head, caressed a lady with intimate gestures of affection, and generally exhibited itself as about as attractive an object as a philandering trombone or an amorous big drum, would not our critics have something to say about the unwholesome hysteria and senseless excitement of Popery? If the Spiritualist goes out of his way to challenge us to a duel in the matter of dignity, I do not really think it can be reasonably said that he is on stronger ground than we.

But I remark on all these charges, not in order to show how they recoil upon themselves, but in order to show how the Spiritualist is driven to return upon himself, and to react against his origins, and to forget all else in making war upon his mother.

The man of the modern religion does not quarrel with the modern world, as he well might, for its neglect of modesty. He quarrels with the ancient mother, who is alone teaching it any modesty at all. He does not devote himself to condemning the modern dances or the fashionable comedies for their vulgar and obvious indifference to dignity. He brings his special charge of grotesque extravagance against the only ceremonial that really retains any dignity. It seems to him, somehow, more important that the Catholic Church should be, on the most minute point, open to misunderstanding, than that the whole world should go to the devil in a dance of death before his very eyes. And he is quite right; at least, the instinct of which this is a symbol is quite right.

The world really pays the supreme compliment to the Catholic Church in being intolerant of her tolerating even the appearance of the evils which it tolerates in everything else. A fierce light does indeed beat upon that throne and blacken every blot; but the interest here is in the fact that even those who profess to be setting up new thrones or throwing new light are perpetually looking backwards at the original blaze if only to discover the blots. They have not really succeeded in getting out of the orbit of the system which they criticize. They have not really found new stars; they are still pointing at alleged spots on the sun, and thereby admitting that it is their native daylight and the centre of their solar system.

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Non intendo nulla di frivolo quando dico che l’unica cosa interessante in tutto ciò è la sua stantìezza. Non nutro sentimenti ostili verso Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, al quale tutti dobbiamo tanta gratitudine nel regno della letteratura e del divertimento, e che spesso mi pare del tutto nel giusto nel suo modo di difendere lo Spiritismo contro il Materialismo. Ma io mi rendo conto, anche se egli non se ne rende conto, che, sul fondo di tutta la faccenda, egli non sta difendendo lo Spiritismo, e non sta attaccando il Materialismo; sta attaccando Roma.

Per un profondo e verace istinto ancestrale insito in lui, egli sa che questa è in ultima analisi l’unica Cosa da attaccare o da difendere; e che chi non è contro di essa è per essa. A meno che la pretesa della Chiesa non possa essere messa in discussione nel mondo moderno, è impossibile davvero erigere una religione moderna alternativa. Egli sente che ciò è un fatto, e io sono lieto di simpatizzare con lui. Anzi, è proprio perché vorrei rimanere fin qui solidale che prendo un solo esempio fra le dottrine che egli ha denunciato; ed evito deliberatamente, per esempio, le sue stranamente ottenebrate osservazioni sul culto della Beata Vergine. Poiché confesso una difficoltà a rimanere paziente di fronte alla cecità su quel tema. Ma vi sono altri temi paralleli.

Egli ha alcune osservazioni assai innocenti su ciò che considera grottesco nel sistema sacramentale; innocenti, perché a quanto pare inconsapevoli di ciò che tutti gli altri al mondo considerano grottesco nel sistema spiritista. Se una qualche funzione cristiana fosse condotta così da rassomigliare a una seduta spiritica davvero riuscita, il mondo potrebbe ben essere scusato di ricadere sulla parola «grottesco», parola prediletta del Dottor Watson. Anzi, possiamo ben domandarci se l’istituzione della Lega dei Capelli Rossi o l’episodio della Faccia Gialla alla finestra, o alcuna delle fantasie del signor Sherlock Holmes, fossero più fantastiche di certe che ci sono state sottoposte con serietà sufficiente dalla scuola di Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Non dico che questa prova della stravaganza esteriore debba essere definitiva, o che nessuna difesa di tali particolari possa essere fatta. Ma quando Sir Arthur si fa beffe deliberatamente delle nostre cerimonie, ci sia almeno concesso di sorridere delle sue. Supponiamo che un qualche rito cattolico dinanzi all’altare consistesse nel legare un essere umano mani e piedi con corde; non udremmo mai la fine dell’orribile sopravvivenza del sacrificio umano? Supponiamo di dichiarare che il sacerdote entrava in trance e che nubi di spessa materia bianca simile a ovatta gli uscivano di bocca, quale manifestazione della grazia celeste; non potrebbe udirsi qualcuno dei nostri critici mormorare la parola «grottesco»? Se conducessimo una tranquilla piccola funzione serale in cui una grande tromba d’ottone volteggiasse per l’aria e desse pacche sul capo alla gente, accarezzasse una signora con intimi gesti d’affetto, e in generale si esibisse come oggetto press’a poco attraente quanto un trombone amoreggiante o una gran cassa innamorata, non avrebbero i nostri critici qualcosa da dire sull’insano isterismo e sulla insensata eccitazione del Papismo? Se lo Spiritista esce dal suo seminato per sfidarci a duello in materia di dignità, non credo davvero si possa ragionevolmente sostenere ch’egli sia su terreno più saldo del nostro.

Ma io faccio notare tutte queste accuse, non per mostrare come esse ricadano su sé stesse, ma per mostrare come lo Spiritista sia spinto a ripiegare su sé stesso, e a reagire contro le proprie origini, e a dimenticare tutto il resto nel far guerra a sua madre.

L’uomo della religione moderna non si querela col mondo moderno, come ben potrebbe, per la sua trascuratezza della modestia. Egli si querela con l’antica madre, che è la sola a insegnargliene alcuna. Non si dedica a condannare le danze moderne o le commedie alla moda per la loro volgare e ovvia indifferenza alla dignità. Egli rivolge la sua speciale accusa di grottesca stravaganza contro l’unico cerimoniale che conservi davvero una qualche dignità. Gli pare, in qualche modo, più importante che la Chiesa Cattolica sia, sul punto più minuto, esposta al malinteso, che non il fatto che il mondo intero vada al diavolo in una danza di morte sotto i suoi stessi occhi. Ed egli ha del tutto ragione; almeno, l’istinto di cui questo è un simbolo ha del tutto ragione.

Il mondo rende davvero il supremo omaggio alla Chiesa Cattolica nell’essere intollerante ch’ella tolleri anche solo l’apparenza dei mali che esso tollera in ogni altra cosa. Una luce feroce batte in effetti su quel trono e annerisce ogni macchia; ma l’interesse qui sta nel fatto che perfino coloro che professano di erigere nuovi troni o di gettare nuova luce guardano perpetuamente all’indietro verso il fuoco originario, non fosse che per scoprirne le macchie. Non sono riusciti davvero a uscire dall’orbita del sistema che criticano. Non hanno davvero trovato nuove stelle; puntano ancora il dito verso presunte macchie sul sole, e con ciò ammettono che esso è la loro nativa luce del giorno e il centro del loro sistema solare.

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THE ROOTS OF SANITY

THE Dean of St. Paul’s, when he is right, is very right. He is right with all that ringing emphasis that makes him in other matters so rashly and disastrously wrong. And I cannot but hail with gratitude the scorn with which he spoke lately of all the newspaper nonsense about using monkey-glands to turn old men into young men; or into young monkeys, if that is to be the next step towards the Superman. Not unnaturally, he tried to balance his denunciation of that very experimental materialism which he is always accusing us of denouncing, by saying that this materialism is one evil extreme and that Catholicism is the other. In that connection he said some of the usual things which he commonly finds it easy to say, and we generally find it tolerably easy to answer.

For instance, it is a good example of the contradictory charges brought against Rome that the Dean apparently classes us with those who leave children entirely “unwarned” about the moral dangers of the body. Considering that we have been abused for decades on the ground that we forced on the young the infamous suggestions of the Confessional, this is rather funny.

Only the other day I noted that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle revived this charge of an insult to innocence; and I will leave Dean Inge and Sir Arthur to fight it out. And when he charges us with indifference to Eugenics and the breeding of criminals and lunatics, it is enough that he has himself to denounce the perversion of science manifested in the monkey business. He might permit others to resent equally the schemes by which men are to act like lunatics and criminals in order to avoid lunacy and crime.

There is, however, another aspect of this matter of being right or wrong, which is not so often associated with us, but which is equally consistent with our philosophy. And it has a notable bearing on the sort of questions here raised by Dean Inge. It concerns not only the matters in which the world is wrong, but rather especially the matters in which the world is right. The world, especially the modern world, has reached a curious condition of ritual or routine; in which we might almost say that it is wrong even when it is right. It continues to a great extent to do the sensible things. It is rapidly ceasing to have any of the sensible reasons for doing them. It is always lecturing us on the deadness of tradition; and it is living entirely on the life of tradition. It is always denouncing us for superstition; and its own principal virtues are now almost entirely superstitions.

I mean that when we are right, we are right by principle; and when they are right, they are right by prejudice. We can say, if they prefer it so, that they are right by instinct. But anyhow, they are still restrained by healthy prejudice from many things into which they might be hurried by their own unhealthy logic. It is easiest to take very simple and even extreme examples; and some of the extremes are nearer to us than some may fancy.

Thus, most of our friends and acquaintances continue to entertain a healthy prejudice against Cannibalism. The time when this next step in ethical evolution will be taken seems as yet far distant. But the notion that there is not very much difference between the bodies of men and animals—that is not by any means far distant, but exceedingly near. It is expressed in a hundred ways, as a sort of cosmic communism. We might almost say that it is expressed in every other way except cannibalism.

It is expressed, as in the Voronoff notion, in putting pieces of animals into men. It is expressed, as in the vegetarian notion, in not putting pieces of animals into men. It is expressed in letting a man die as a dog dies, or in thinking it more pathetic that a dog should die than a man. Some are fussy about what happens to the bodies of animals, as if they were quite certain that a rabbit resented being cooked, or that an oyster demanded to be cremated. Some are ostentatiously indifferent to what happens to the bodies of men; and deny all dignity to the dead and all affectionate gesture to the living. But all these have obviously one thing in common; and that is that they regard the human and bestial body as common things. They think of them under a common generalisation; or under conditions at best comparative. Among people who have reached this position, the REASON for disapproving of cannibalism has already become very vague. It remains as a tradition and an instinct. Fortunately, thank God, though it is now very vague, it is still very strong. But though the number of earnest ethical pioneers who are likely to begin to eat boiled missionary is very small, the number of those among them who could explain their own real reason for not doing so is still smaller.

The real reason is that all such social sanities are now the traditions of old Catholic dogmas. Like many other Catholic dogmas, they are felt in some vague way even by heathens, so long as they are healthy heathens. But when it is a question of their not being merely felt but formulated, it will be found to be a formula of the Faith. In this case it is all those ideas that Modernists most dislike, about “special creation” and that Divine image that does not come merely by evolution, and the chasm between man and the other creatures. In short, it is those very doctrines with which men like Dean Inge are perpetually reproaching us, as things that forbid us a complete confidence in science or a complete unity with animals. It is these that stand between men and cannibalism—or possibly monkey glands. They have the prejudice; and long may they retain it! We have the principle, and they are welcome to it when they want it.

If Euclid were demonstrating with diagrams for the first time and used the argument of the REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM, he would now only produce the impression that his own argument was absurd. I am well aware that I expose myself to this peril by extending my opponent’s argument to an extreme, which may be considered an extravagance. The question is, why is it an extravagance? I know that in this case it will be answered that the social feature of cannibalism is rare in our culture. So far as I know, there are no cannibal restaurants threatening to become fashionable in London like Chinese restaurants. Anthropophagy is not like Anthroposophy, a subject of society lectures; and, varied as are the religions and moralities among us, the cooking of missionaries is not yet a mission. But if anyone has so little of logic as to miss the meaning of an extreme example, I should have no difficulty in giving a much more practical and even pressing example. A few years ago, all sane people would have said that Adamitism was quite as mad as Anthropophagy. A banker walking down the streets with no clothes on would have been quite as nonsensical as a butcher selling man instead of mutton. Both would be the outbreak of a lunatic under the delusion that he was a savage. But we have seen the New Adamite or No Clothes Movement start quite seriously in Germany; start indeed with a seriousness of which only Germans are capable. Englishmen probably are still English enough to laugh at it and dislike it. But they laugh by instinct; and they only dislike by instinct. Most of them, with their present muddled moral philosophy, would probably have great difficulty in refuting the Prussian professor of nakedness, however heartily they might desire to kick him. For if we examine the current controversies, we shall find the same negative and defenceless condition as in the case of the theory of cannibalism. All the fashionable arguments used against Puritanism do in fact lead to Adamitism. I do not mean, of course, that they are not often practically healthy as against Puritanism; still less do I mean that there are no better arguments against Puritanism. But I mean that in pure logic the civilised man has laid open his guard; and is, as it were, naked against the inroads of nakedness. So long as he is content merely to argue that the body is beautiful or that what is natural is right, he has surrendered to the Adamite in theory, though it may be, please God, a long time before he surrenders in practice. Here again the modern theorist will have to defend his own sanity with a prejudice. It is the mediaeval theologian who can defend it with a reason. I need not go into that reason at length; it is enough to say that it is founded on the Fall of Man, just as the other instinct against cannibalism is founded on the Divinity of Man. The Catholic argument can be put shortly by saying that there is nothing the matter with the human body; what is the matter is with the human soul.

In other words, if man were completely a god, it might be true that all aspects of his bodily being were godlike; just as if he were completely a beast, we could hardly blame him for any diet, however beastly. But we say that experience confirms our theory of his human complexity. It has nothing to do with the natural things themselves. If red roses mysteriously maddened men to commit murder, we should make rules to cover them up; but red roses would be quite as pure as white ones.

In most modern people there is a battle between the new opinions, which they do not follow out to their end, and the old traditions, which they do not trace back to their beginning. If they followed the new notions forward, it would lead them to Bedlam. If they followed the better instincts backward, it would lead them to Rome. At the best they remain suspended between two logical alternatives, trying to tell themselves, as does Dean Inge, that they are merely avoiding two extremes. But there is this great difference in his case, that the question on which he is wrong is, in however perverted a form, a matter of science, whereas the matter in which he is right is by this time simply a matter of sentiment. I need not say that I do not use the word here in a contemptuous sense, for in these things there is a very close kinship between sentiment and sense. But the fact remains that all the people in his position can only go on being sensible. It is left for us to be also reasonable.

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LE RADICI DELLA SANITÀ MENTALE

IL Decano di San Paolo, quando ha ragione, ha ragione da vendere. Ha ragione con tutta quella squillante enfasi che in altre materie lo rende così avventatamente e disastrosamente in errore. E non posso non salutare con gratitudine lo scherno con cui parlò di recente di tutte le sciocchezze giornalistiche sull’uso delle ghiandole di scimmia per trasformare i vecchi in giovani; o in giovani scimmie, se questo dev’essere il prossimo passo verso il Superuomo. Non innaturalmente, egli cercò di bilanciare la sua denuncia di quel materialismo assai sperimentale, del quale sempre ci accusa di far denuncia, dicendo che questo materialismo è un estremo malvagio e che il cattolicesimo è l’altro. A tal proposito disse alcune delle cose consuete che comunemente trova facile dire, e che noi generalmente troviamo tollerabilmente facile confutare.

Per esempio, è un buon esempio delle accuse contraddittorie mosse a Roma il fatto che il Decano a quanto pare ci annovera fra coloro che lasciano i fanciulli del tutto «non avvertiti» dei pericoli morali del corpo. Considerando che siamo stati vituperati per decenni con l’accusa di imporre ai giovani le infami suggestioni del Confessionale, ciò è piuttosto buffo.

Proprio l’altro giorno rilevavo che Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rispolverava questa accusa di un insulto all’innocenza; e lascerò il decano Inge e Sir Arthur a sbrigarsela tra loro. E quando ci accusa di indifferenza verso l’Eugenetica e la selezione di criminali e pazzi, basta che egli stesso debba denunciare la perversione della scienza manifestata nell’affare delle scimmie. Potrebbe permettere ad altri di risentirsi del pari degli schemi per cui gli uomini dovrebbero agire da pazzi e criminali al fine di evitare la pazzia e il crimine.

Vi è, tuttavia, un altro aspetto di questa faccenda dell’aver ragione o torto, che non è così spesso associato a noi, ma che è del pari coerente con la nostra filosofia. Ed esso ha una notevole attinenza col genere di questioni qui sollevate dal decano Inge. Concerne non solo le materie in cui il mondo ha torto, ma anzi specialmente le materie in cui il mondo ha ragione. Il mondo, specialmente il mondo moderno, ha raggiunto una curiosa condizione di rito o routine; nella quale potremmo quasi dire che esso ha torto anche quando ha ragione. Continua in gran misura a fare le cose sensate. Va rapidamente cessando di avere alcuna delle ragioni sensate per farle. Ci ammonisce di continuo sulla mortificazione della tradizione; e vive interamente della vita della tradizione. Ci denuncia sempre per superstizione; e le sue stesse virtù principali sono ormai quasi interamente superstizioni.

Voglio dire che quando noi abbiamo ragione, abbiamo ragione per principio; e quando essi hanno ragione, hanno ragione per pregiudizio. Possiamo dire, se così preferiscono, che hanno ragione per istinto. Ma in ogni caso, essi sono ancora trattenuti da un salutare pregiudizio da molte cose entro le quali potrebbero essere trascinati dalla loro stessa malsana logica. È più facile prendere esempi assai semplici e persino estremi; e alcuni degli estremi sono più vicini a noi di quanto taluni possano immaginare.

Così, la maggior parte dei nostri amici e conoscenti continua a nutrire un salutare pregiudizio contro il Cannibalismo. Il tempo in cui questo prossimo passo dell’evoluzione etica verrà compiuto sembra ancora assai remoto. Ma la nozione che non vi sia gran differenza tra i corpi degli uomini e degli animali — quella non è affatto remota, bensì assai prossima. È espressa in cento modi, come una sorta di comunismo cosmico. Potremmo quasi dire che è espressa in ogni altro modo eccetto il cannibalismo.

È espressa, come nella nozione di Voronoff, nel mettere pezzi di animali negli uomini. È espressa, come nella nozione vegetariana, nel non mettere pezzi di animali negli uomini. È espressa nel lasciar morire un uomo come muore un cane, o nel ritenere più patetico che muoia un cane piuttosto che un uomo. Alcuni si preoccupano assai di ciò che accade ai corpi degli animali, come se fossero ben certi che un coniglio si risenta d’esser cucinato, o che un’ostrica esiga d’esser cremata. Alcuni sono ostentatamente indifferenti a ciò che accade ai corpi degli uomini; e negano ogni dignità ai morti e ogni gesto affettuoso ai vivi. Ma tutti costoro hanno evidentemente una cosa in comune; ed è che considerano il corpo umano e quello bestiale come cose comuni. Li pensano sotto una comune generalizzazione; o sotto condizioni al meglio comparative. Fra le persone che hanno raggiunto questa posizione, la RAGIONE per disapprovare il cannibalismo è già divenuta assai vaga. Rimane come tradizione e come istinto. Fortunatamente, grazie a Dio, benché sia ora assai vaga, è ancora assai forte. Ma per quanto il numero dei ferventi pionieri etici che probabilmente cominceranno a mangiare missionario bollito sia assai piccolo, il numero di coloro fra loro che saprebbero spiegare la propria vera ragione per non farlo è ancor più piccolo.

La vera ragione è che tutte queste sanità sociali sono ormai le tradizioni di antichi dogmi cattolici. Come molti altri dogmi cattolici, esse sono sentite in qualche modo vago perfino dai pagani, finché sono pagani sani. Ma quando è questione non del loro essere semplicemente sentite bensì formulate, si troverà che si tratta di una formula della Fede. In questo caso sono tutte quelle idee che i Modernisti più detestano, sulla «creazione speciale» e su quell’immagine Divina che non viene semplicemente per evoluzione, e sull’abisso tra l’uomo e le altre creature. In breve, sono proprio quelle dottrine con cui uomini come il decano Inge perpetuamente ci rimproverano, come cose che ci vietano una completa fiducia nella scienza o una completa unità con gli animali. Sono queste che stanno tra gli uomini e il cannibalismo — o forse le ghiandole di scimmia. Essi hanno il pregiudizio; e a lungo possano ritenerlo! Noi abbiamo il principio, e sono i benvenuti a servirsene quando lo vorranno.

Se Euclide dimostrasse con diagrammi per la prima volta e usasse l’argomento della REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM, egli ora produrrebbe soltanto l’impressione che il suo stesso argomento fosse assurdo. Sono ben consapevole di espormi a questo pericolo estendendo l’argomento del mio avversario a un estremo, che potrà essere considerato una stravaganza. La questione è: perché è una stravaganza? So che in questo caso si risponderà che il carattere sociale del cannibalismo è raro nella nostra cultura. Per quanto ne so, non vi sono ristoranti cannibali che minaccino di divenire alla moda a Londra come i ristoranti cinesi. L’antropofagia non è come l’antroposofia, argomento di conferenze mondane; e, per quanto varie siano le religioni e le morali tra noi, la cottura dei missionari non è ancora una missione. Ma se qualcuno ha così poca logica da mancare il significato di un esempio estremo, non avrei difficoltà a fornire un esempio assai più pratico e persino incalzante. Pochi anni fa, tutte le persone sane avrebbero detto che l’Adamitismo era folle quanto l’Antropofagia. Un banchiere che passeggiasse per le strade senza vestiti sarebbe stato altrettanto insensato di un macellaio che vendesse uomo invece di montone. Entrambi sarebbero l’accesso di un pazzo sotto la delusione di essere un selvaggio. Ma abbiamo visto il Nuovo Adamita o Movimento Senza Vestiti prender le mosse assai seriamente in Germania; prender le mosse anzi con una serietà di cui solo i Tedeschi sono capaci. Gli Inglesi sono probabilmente ancora abbastanza inglesi da riderne e da detestarlo. Ma ridono per istinto; e solo per istinto lo detestano. La maggior parte di essi, con la loro presente confusa filosofia morale, avrebbe probabilmente grande difficoltà a confutare il professore prussiano di Nudità, per quanto di cuore possano desiderare di prenderlo a calci. Poiché se esaminiamo le controversie correnti, troveremo la medesima condizione negativa e indifesa che nel caso della teoria del cannibalismo. Tutti gli argomenti alla moda usati contro il Puritanesimo conducono in effetti all’Adamitismo. Non intendo, naturalmente, che non siano spesso praticamente sani contro il Puritanesimo; ancor meno intendo che non vi siano argomenti migliori contro il Puritanesimo. Ma intendo che in pura logica l’uomo civilizzato ha scoperto la propria guardia; ed è, per così dire, nudo contro le incursioni della Nudità. Finché egli si accontenta meramente di argomentare che il corpo è bello o che ciò che è naturale è giusto, egli si è arreso all’Adamita in teoria, per quanto possa passare, piaccia a Dio, molto tempo prima ch’egli si arrenda in pratica. Anche qui il teorico moderno dovrà difendere la propria sanità mentale con un pregiudizio. È il teologo medievale a poterla difendere con una ragione. Non ho bisogno di addentrarmi in quella ragione per esteso; basti dire ch’essa è fondata sulla Caduta dell’Uomo, proprio come l’altro istinto contro il cannibalismo è fondato sulla Divinità dell’Uomo. L’argomento cattolico può esser posto brevemente dicendo che non c’è nulla di sbagliato nel corpo umano; ciò che è sbagliato è nell’anima umana.

In altre parole, se l’uomo fosse compiutamente un dio, potrebbe esser vero che tutti gli aspetti del suo essere corporeo fossero divini; proprio come, se fosse compiutamente una bestia, difficilmente potremmo biasimarlo per qualsiasi dieta, per quanto bestiale. Ma noi diciamo che l’esperienza conferma la nostra teoria della sua complessità umana. Ciò non ha nulla a che vedere con le cose naturali in sé. Se le rose rosse misteriosamente facessero impazzire gli uomini fino a commettere omicidio, faremmo regole per coprirle; ma le rose rosse sarebbero altrettanto pure di quelle bianche.

Nella maggior parte delle persone moderne vi è una battaglia tra le nuove opinioni, che esse non seguono fino in fondo, e le antiche tradizioni, che esse non risalgono fino al principio. Se seguissero le nuove nozioni fino in avanti, ciò le condurrebbe a Bedlam. Se seguissero i migliori istinti all’indietro, ciò le condurrebbe a Roma. Nella migliore delle ipotesi rimangono sospese tra due alternative logiche, cercando di dirsi, come fa il decano Inge, che stanno semplicemente evitando due estremi. Ma vi è questa grande differenza nel suo caso, che la questione sulla quale egli ha torto è, per quanto in forma pervertita, materia di scienza, mentre la materia in cui ha ragione è a questo punto semplicemente materia di sentimento. Non ho bisogno di dire che non uso qui la parola in senso spregiativo, poiché in queste cose vi è una strettissima parentela tra sentimento e senno. Ma resta il fatto che tutte le persone nella sua posizione possono solo continuare a essere sensate. È lasciato a noi di essere anche ragionevoli.

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SOME OF OUR ERRORS

THE thoughtful reader, studying the literature of the enlightened and scientific when they advise us about ethics and religion, will be arrested by one phrase which really has a meaning. Nay, he will observe, with increasing interest and excitement, that it really contains a truth. Most of the phrases that are supposed to go along with it, and to be of the same sort, will be found to be not only untrue but almost unmeaning. When the Modernist says that we must free the human intellect from the mediaeval syllogism, it is as if he said we must free it from the multiplication-table. Some people can count or reason quicker than others; some people put in all the steps and are safe; some people leave out the steps and are still right; many leave out the steps and are consequently wrong. But the process of multiplication is the same, and the process of demonstration is the same. Men think in that way, except when they escape from it by ceasing to think. Or again, when we find in the same context the remark that some Christian doctrine which we do know is “only a form of” some Pagan cult that nobody really knows, we realise that the mathematician is treating the unknown quantity as the known. But when we find among these fallacies the remark I speak of, we shall be wise to pause upon it with greater patience. It is the remark, “We need a restatement of religion”; and though it has been said thirty thousand times, it is quite true.

It is also true that those who say it often mean the very opposite of what they say. As I have remarked elsewhere, they very often intend not to restate anything, but to state something else, introducing as many of the old words as possible. By this time not only the word religion, but also the word restatement, is becoming rather an old word. But anyhow the point is that they do not really mean that we should give freshness and a new aspect to religion by calling it roly-poly or rumpti-foo. On the contrary, they mean that we should take something totally different and agree to call it religion. I mention, with some sadness, that I have said this before; because I have found it quite difficult to get them to see a fact of almost heart-breaking simplicity. It seems to strike them as being merely a fine shade of distinction; but it strikes me as a rather grotesque and staggering reversal. There would be the same fine shade of difference, if somebody of a sartorial sort came to me protesting that my aged father was waiting in rags on my door-step, and urgently needing a new hat and coat, and indeed a complete equipment; if he made the most animated preparations for the reclothing of my parent, and the whole episode ended by his introducing me to a total stranger begging for my father’s old hat.

Now I do really believe that there is a need for the restatement of religious truth; but not the statement of something quite different, which I do not believe to be true. I believe there is a very urgent need for a verbal paraphrase of many of the fundamental doctrines; simply because people have ceased to understand them as they are traditionally stated. It does not follow from this that the traditional statement is not the true statement. It only means that the traditional statement now needs to be translated; although translation is seldom true. This is especially the case in connection with Catholic ideas; because they were originally stated in what some call a dead language and some an everlasting language. But anyhow, they were stated in a language that has since broken up into other languages, and mixed with other dialects, and produced a popular PATOIS which is spirited, and often splendid, but necessarily less exact. Now I do think that the Catholic culture suffers very much from the popular misunderstanding of its original terminology. I do think that Catholics are themselves to blame, in many cases, for not realising that their doctrines need to be stated afresh, and not left in language that is intrinsically correct but practically misleading. Those who call themselves liberal, commonly take for granted that the fault is with a dead language, as against a language that has developed. If they were really liberal, they could enlarge their minds to see that there is a case for the language having degenerated. But in either case, it is practically true that there are misunderstandings, and that we ought chiefly to desire to make people understand. And I think we have faults and follies of our own in this matter; and that it is not always the fault of our enemies that they misunderstand. There are cases in which we, more or less unconsciously, misinform them. We do not allow enough, in justifying the words that we speak, for the difference in the words that they hear. And I propose to say a few words in this article upon what I may call Catholic criticisms of Catholic faults; or what are (in many cases) merely Catholic accidents and misunderstanding.

For instance, there is a sort of misunderstanding that is simply mistranslation. Probably we have never properly explained to them the real case for using Latin for something that must be immutable and universal. But as half of them are howling day and night for an international language, and accepting a journalese jibberish with plurals in “oj” because they can get no better, some glimmering of the old use of Latin by Erasmus or Bacon might reasonably be expected of them. Of the full defence of such a hieratic tongue I may say something later. But for the moment I am thinking of certain mistakes which arise very largely by our fault and not theirs. It is not the Church’s Latin that is to blame; it is the English Catholic’s English. It is not because we do not translate it into the vulgar tongue that we are wrong; it is because we do. Sometimes, I am sorry to say, we translate it into a very vulgar tongue. When we do translate things into English, they often only serve as a luminous argument for leaving them in Latin. Latin is Latin, and always says exactly what it means. But popular versions of Latin things often only serve to make them unpopular.

ALCUNI DEI NOSTRI ERRORI

IL lettore riflessivo, studiando la letteratura degli illuminati e degli scienziati quando ci consigliano intorno all’etica e alla religione, sarà arrestato da una frase che ha davvero un significato. Anzi, egli osserverà, con crescente interesse ed eccitazione, che essa contiene davvero una verità. La maggior parte delle frasi che si suppone l’accompagnino, e siano dello stesso genere, si troverà essere non solo non vera ma quasi priva di senso. Quando il Modernista dice che dobbiamo liberare l’intelletto umano dal sillogismo medievale, è come se dicesse che dobbiamo liberarlo dalla tavola pitagorica. Alcuni sanno contare o ragionare più in fretta di altri; alcuni inseriscono tutti i passaggi e sono al sicuro; alcuni tralasciano i passaggi e hanno ancora ragione; molti tralasciano i passaggi e di conseguenza sbagliano. Ma il processo della moltiplicazione è il medesimo, e il processo della dimostrazione è il medesimo. Gli uomini pensano in quel modo, salvo quando se ne sottraggono cessando di pensare. O ancora, quando troviamo nel medesimo contesto l’osservazione che una qualche dottrina cristiana che conosciamo è «soltanto una forma di» qualche culto pagano che nessuno realmente conosce, ci accorgiamo che il matematico sta trattando la quantità ignota come quella nota. Ma quando troviamo tra queste fallacie l’osservazione di cui parlo, faremo bene a soffermarci su di essa con maggiore pazienza. È l’osservazione: «Abbiamo bisogno di una riformulazione della religione»; e benché sia stata detta trentamila volte, è del tutto vera.

È altresì vero che coloro che la pronunciano spesso intendono l’esatto opposto di ciò che dicono. Come ho osservato altrove, essi assai spesso intendono non riformulare alcunché, bensì affermare qualcos’altro, introducendo quante più delle vecchie parole possibile. A questo punto non solo la parola religione, ma anche la parola riformulazione, sta divenendo piuttosto una vecchia parola. Ma comunque il punto è che essi non intendono davvero che dovremmo dare freschezza e un nuovo aspetto alla religione chiamandola pasticcio o cianfrusaglia. Al contrario, intendono che dovremmo prendere qualcosa di totalmente diverso e convenire di chiamarlo religione. Menziono, con una certa tristezza, di aver già detto questo; perché ho trovato assai difficile far loro vedere un fatto di quasi straziante semplicità. Pare colpirli come una mera sottile sfumatura di distinzione; ma colpisce me come un rovesciamento piuttosto grottesco e sbalorditivo. Vi sarebbe la medesima sottile sfumatura di differenza, se qualcuno di indole sartoriale venisse da me protestando che il mio anziano padre attende in cenci sulla soglia di casa mia, e ha urgente bisogno di un cappello e di un cappotto nuovi, e anzi di un equipaggiamento completo; se facesse i più animati preparativi per rivestire il mio genitore, e l’intero episodio si concludesse con l’introdurmi a un perfetto sconosciuto che mendica il vecchio cappello di mio padre.

Ora io credo davvero che vi sia bisogno di una riformulazione della verità religiosa; ma non dell’affermazione di qualcosa di del tutto diverso, che io non credo sia vero. Credo che vi sia un bisogno assai urgente di una parafrasi verbale di molte delle dottrine fondamentali; semplicemente perché la gente ha cessato di comprenderle come sono tradizionalmente affermate. Da ciò non consegue che l’affermazione tradizionale non sia l’affermazione vera. Significa soltanto che l’affermazione tradizionale ha ora bisogno di essere tradotta; benché la traduzione sia di rado veritiera. Ciò vale specialmente in connessione con le idee cattoliche; perché esse furono originariamente formulate in ciò che alcuni chiamano una lingua morta e altri una lingua eterna. Ma comunque, furono formulate in una lingua che da allora si è disgregata in altre lingue, e mescolata con altri dialetti, e ha prodotto un popolare PATOIS che è vivace, e spesso splendido, ma necessariamente meno esatto. Ora io penso davvero che la cultura cattolica soffra assai per il popolare fraintendimento della sua terminologia originaria. Penso davvero che i cattolici siano essi stessi da biasimare, in molti casi, per non rendersi conto che le loro dottrine hanno bisogno di essere riaffermate, e non lasciate in un linguaggio che è intrinsecamente corretto ma praticamente fuorviante. Coloro che si dicono liberali danno comunemente per scontato che la colpa sia di una lingua morta, in contrapposizione a una lingua che si è sviluppata. Se fossero davvero liberali, potrebbero allargare la mente fino a vedere che vi è un argomento per il fatto che la lingua sia degenerata. Ma in un caso come nell’altro, è praticamente vero che vi sono fraintendimenti, e che dovremmo soprattutto desiderare di far comprendere la gente. E penso che noi abbiamo colpe e follie nostre in questa materia; e che non è sempre colpa dei nostri nemici se essi fraintendono. Vi sono casi in cui noi, più o meno inconsciamente, li disinformiamo. Non teniamo sufficientemente conto, nel giustificare le parole che pronunciamo, della differenza nelle parole che essi odono. E mi propongo di dire alcune parole in questo articolo su ciò che posso chiamare critiche cattoliche di difetti cattolici; o su ciò che sono (in molti casi) meri accidenti e fraintendimenti cattolici.

Per esempio, vi è una sorta di fraintendimento che è semplicemente errore di traduzione. Probabilmente non abbiamo mai spiegato loro come si deve il vero argomento per l’uso del latino per qualcosa che dev’essere immutabile e universale. Ma poiché metà di loro reclama giorno e notte una lingua internazionale, e accetta un giornalistico gergo farfugliante con plurali in «oj» perché non riesce a ottenere di meglio, ci si potrebbe ragionevolmente aspettare da loro qualche barlume dell’antico uso del latino da parte di Erasmo o Bacone. Della piena difesa di una tale lingua ieratica dirò forse qualcosa più avanti. Ma per il momento sto pensando a certi errori che sorgono in gran parte per colpa nostra e non loro. Non è il latino della Chiesa a essere da biasimare; è l’inglese del cattolico inglese. Non è perché non lo traduciamo nella lingua volgare che siamo in errore; è perché lo facciamo. Talvolta, mi duole dirlo, lo traduciamo in una lingua assai volgare. Quando traduciamo le cose in inglese, esse spesso servono soltanto da luminoso argomento per lasciarle in latino. Il latino è latino, e dice sempre esattamente ciò che intende. Ma le versioni popolari di cose latine spesso servono soltanto a renderle impopolari.

I will venture to take one example, about which I feel very strongly. Will somebody with better authority than I have announce in a voice of thunder, through a trumpet or with a salute of big guns, the vital and very much needed truth that “dulcis” is not the Latin for “sweet”? “Sweet” is not the English word for “dulcis”; any more than for “doux” or “douce.” It has a totally different connotation and atmosphere. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” does not mean “it is sweet and decorous to die for our country.” It means something untranslatable like everything that means anything; but something more like “It is a gracious thing and of good report to die for our country.” When Roland was dying in the mountains, having blown his horn and broken his sword, and thought of “La doulce France” and the men of his line, he did not sully his lips by saying “sweet France,” but something like “beautiful and gracious France.” In English the word “sweet” has been rendered hopelessly sticky by the accident of the word “sweets.” But in any case it suggests something much more intense and even pungent in sweetness like the tabloids of saccharine that are of concentrated sugar. It is at once too strong and too weak a word. It has not the same savour as the same word in the Latin languages, which often means no more than the word “gentle” as it was used of “a perfect gentle knight.” But English Catholicism, having in the great calamity of our history gone into exile in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (at the very moment when our modern language was being finally made) naturally had to seek for its own finest enthusiasms in foreign languages. It could not find a salutation to the Mass or the Blessed Virgin except in French or Italian or Spanish or some such tongue; and it translated these things back into a language with which the exile had lost touch and in which his taste was not quite firm and sure. It seemed to be thought necessary to use the word “sweet” in every single case of the kind; which produces not only something that did not sound English; but something which did not sound in the least as the Latin or French sounded. In a certain number of cases, of course, it is exactly the right word; just as it is from time to time in ordinary English poetry. Sometimes it is right because it is so obviously the natural and inevitable word that it would seem more affected not to use it than to use it; as in the song of Burns; “My love is like the melody that’s sweetly played in tune.” Sometimes it is right because there is something to be a salt to its sweetness, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s line; “Before the eyes of that sweet enemy France.” Similarly it is often exactly right in good Catholic translations or compositions in English. But this fixed notion that it must always be used wherever some such tender expression would be used in Romance literature is simply a blunder in translation; and a blunder that has had very bad effects in fields much more important than literature. I believe that this incongruous and inaccurate repetition of the word “sweet” has kept more Englishmen out of the Catholic Church than all the poison of the Borgias or all the poisonous lies of the people who have written about them.

Ours is at this moment the most rational of all religions. It is even, in a sense, the most rationalistic of all religions. Those who talk about it as merely or mainly emotional simply do not know what they are talking about. It is all the other religions, all the modern religions, that are merely emotional. This is as true of the emotional salvationism of the first Protestants as of the emotional intuitionalism of the last Modernists. We alone are left accepting the action of the reason and the will, without any necessary assistance from the emotions. A convinced Catholic is easily the most hard-headed and logical person walking about the world to-day. But this old slander, of a slimy sentimentalism in all we say and do, is terribly perpetuated by this mere muddle about words. We are still supposed to have a silly sort of devotion, when we really have the most sensible sort, merely because we have taken a foreign phrase and translated it wrong; instead of either leaving it in Latin for those who can read Latin or trusting it in English to people who can write English. But if in this case we admit that the misunderstanding is more our fault than our opponents’ fault, the fault which we confess is the very reverse of the fault of which the opponents complain. It has not arisen through the Catholic practice of saying prayers in Latin. On the contrary, it has arisen through the Protestant practice of always saying them in English. It has come through yielding merely weakly and mechanically to the Protestant pressure in the days when our tradition was completely out of fashion. In other words, it has come through doing exactly what they advised us to do, and not doing it well. Of course I do not mean that it is not a good thing to have good popular translation when it is done well. I think it is a very good thing indeed. But while I see what there is to be said for the cult of the vernacular, the Protestant critic does not see what there is to be said for the fixed form of the classic tongue. He does not see that there is something to be said even for the general idea that Catholic poetry should be in the vernacular like the Divine Comedy and Catholic worship in the fundamental language like the Mass.

It is a question between a dead language and a dying language. Every living language is a dying language, even if it does not die. Parts of it are perpetually perishing or changing their sense; there is only one escape from that flux; and a language must die to be immortal. The style of the English Jacobean translation is as noble and simple a thing as any in the world; but even there the words degenerate. It is not their fault; but ours who misuse them; but they are misused. No language could lift itself into a loftier or simpler strain than that which begins, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”; but even then, when we pass on to “speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,” we stumble over a word we have vulgarised.

Mi arrischierò a prendere un esempio, riguardo al quale nutro un sentimento assai forte. Vorrà qualcuno con maggiore autorità di quanta ne abbia io annunciare con voce di tuono, attraverso una tromba o con una salva di grossi cannoni, la vitale e quanto mai necessaria verità che «dulcis» non è il latino di «sweet»? «Sweet» non è la parola inglese di «dulcis»; non più che di «doux» o «douce». Ha una connotazione e un’atmosfera totalmente diverse. «Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori» non significa «è dolce e decoroso morire per la nostra patria». Significa qualcosa di intraducibile come tutto ciò che significa qualcosa; ma qualcosa di più simile a «È cosa graziosa e di buona fama morire per la nostra patria». Quando Orlando moriva sui monti, avendo suonato il suo corno e spezzato la sua spada, e pensava a «La doulce France» e agli uomini della sua stirpe, egli non insozzò le sue labbra dicendo «dolce Francia», bensì qualcosa come «bella e graziosa Francia». In inglese la parola «sweet» è stata resa irrimediabilmente stucchevole dall’accidente della parola «sweets» (dolciumi). Ma in ogni caso essa suggerisce qualcosa di assai più intenso e persino pungente nella dolcezza, come le pastiglie di saccarina che sono di zucchero concentrato. È a un tempo una parola troppo forte e troppo debole. Non ha lo stesso sapore della medesima parola nelle lingue latine, dove spesso non significa più della parola «gentile» quale era usata di «un perfetto gentile cavaliere». Ma il cattolicesimo inglese, essendo andato, nella grande sciagura della nostra storia, in esilio nel sedicesimo e diciassettesimo secolo (proprio nel momento in cui la nostra lingua moderna veniva definitivamente formata), naturalmente dovette cercare i suoi più fini entusiasmi in lingue straniere. Non poteva trovare un saluto alla Messa o alla Beata Vergine se non in francese o italiano o spagnolo o qualche simile lingua; e traduceva queste cose di nuovo in una lingua con cui l’esule aveva perso contatto e nella quale il suo gusto non era del tutto fermo e sicuro. Pareva ritenersi necessario usare la parola «sweet» in ogni singolo caso del genere; il che produce non solo qualcosa che non suonava inglese, ma qualcosa che non suonava minimamente come suonava il latino o il francese. In un certo numero di casi, naturalmente, è esattamente la parola giusta; proprio come lo è di tanto in tanto nella comune poesia inglese. Talvolta è giusta perché è così ovviamente la parola naturale e inevitabile che parrebbe più affettato non usarla che usarla; come nella canzone di Burns: «My love is like the melody that’s sweetly played in tune». Talvolta è giusta perché vi è qualcosa che fa da sale alla sua dolcezza, come nel verso di Sir Philip Sidney: «Before the eyes of that sweet enemy France». Similmente è spesso esattamente giusta in buone traduzioni o composizioni cattoliche in inglese. Ma questa fissa nozione che debba sempre essere usata ovunque una qualche tale tenera espressione sarebbe usata nella letteratura Romanza è semplicemente un errore di traduzione; ed è un errore che ha avuto effetti assai cattivi in campi ben più importanti della letteratura. Credo che questa incongrua e inaccurata ripetizione della parola «sweet» abbia tenuto più inglesi fuori dalla Chiesa Cattolica di tutto il veleno dei Borgia o di tutte le velenose menzogne di coloro che hanno scritto su di essi.

La nostra è in questo momento la più razionale di tutte le religioni. È persino, in un certo senso, la più razionalistica di tutte le religioni. Coloro che ne parlano come meramente o principalmente emotiva semplicemente non sanno di che cosa parlano. Sono tutte le altre religioni, tutte le religioni moderne, a essere meramente emotive. Ciò è vero tanto del salvazionismo emotivo dei primi protestanti quanto dell’intuizionismo emotivo degli ultimi Modernisti. Noi soli restiamo ad accettare l’azione della ragione e della volontà, senza alcun necessario aiuto dalle emozioni. Un cattolico convinto è facilmente la persona più pratica e logica che oggi cammini per il mondo. Ma questa vecchia calunnia, di un vischioso sentimentalismo in tutto ciò che diciamo e facciamo, è terribilmente perpetuata da questo mero pasticcio intorno alle parole. Si suppone ancora che noi abbiamo una sciocca sorta di devozione, quando in realtà ne abbiamo la più assennata sorta, semplicemente perché abbiamo preso una frase straniera e l’abbiamo tradotta male; invece o di lasciarla in latino per chi sa leggere il latino o di affidarla in inglese a persone che sanno scrivere l’inglese. Ma se in questo caso ammettiamo che il fraintendimento è più colpa nostra che colpa dei nostri avversari, la colpa che confessiamo è l’esatto contrario della colpa di cui gli avversari si lagnano. Essa non è sorta attraverso la pratica cattolica di dire le preghiere in latino. Al contrario, è sorta attraverso la pratica protestante di dirle sempre in inglese. È venuta cedendo meramente in modo debole e meccanico alla pressione protestante nei giorni in cui la nostra tradizione era completamente fuori moda. In altre parole, è venuta facendo esattamente ciò che essi ci consigliavano di fare, e non facendolo bene. Naturalmente non intendo che non sia una buona cosa avere buone traduzioni popolari quando sono fatte bene. Penso anzi che sia una cosa assai buona. Ma mentre io vedo che cosa vi è da dire a favore del culto della lingua volgare, il critico protestante non vede che cosa vi è da dire a favore della forma fissa della lingua classica. Egli non vede che vi è qualcosa da dire perfino a favore dell’idea generale che la poesia cattolica dovrebbe essere in volgare come la Divina Commedia e il culto cattolico nella lingua fondamentale come la Messa.

È una questione tra una lingua morta e una lingua morente. Ogni lingua vivente è una lingua morente, anche se non muore. Parti di essa perpetuamente periscono o mutano il loro senso; vi è una sola via di scampo da quel flusso; e una lingua deve morire per essere immortale. Lo stile della traduzione inglese giacobiana è cosa nobile e semplice quanto qualsiasi altra al mondo; ma perfino lì le parole degenerano. Non è colpa loro; ma nostra, che ne facciamo cattivo uso; eppure ne è fatto cattivo uso. Nessuna lingua potrebbe innalzarsi a una vena più elevata o più semplice di quella che comincia: «Comfort ye, comfort ye my people»; ma perfino allora, quando passiamo a «speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem», inciampiamo su una parola che abbiamo volgarizzato.

But the world plays havoc with all such words, whether they are in the English Bible or the Latin Canon. There are many words of Catholic usage which have in practice been thus misused. When an outsider hears that a Catholic has refrained from something for fear of “causing scandal,” he instantly has an irritated impression that it means a fear of setting all the silly old women in the town talking gossip. Of course it means nothing of the kind. It does not mean that in Greek. It does not mean that in Latin. It ought not to mean that in English. It ought to mean what it says; the fear of tripping somebody up, of putting a stumbling-block in the way of some struggling human being. If I encourage to carousals a man who must be kept off drink, I am causing scandal. If I talk what might be a wholesome realism for some hearers, to a young and innocent person who is certain to feel it as mere obscenity, I am causing scandal. I am doing what for me is right, at the risk of making him do what for him is wrong. To say that that is unjustifiable is manifest moral common sense. But it is not conveyed in modern English by talking about causing scandal. All that is conveyed in modern English is that the person so acting is disdaining idle chatter and irresponsible criticism; which is exactly what all the saints and martyrs have consistently lived and died by doing. And that is a good example of what I mean by translation; or, if the word be preferred, by restatement. But that does not mean turning round and abusing the old statement, which was really quite correctly stated. It only means restating exactly what the old statement states.

I could give many other examples of words which were right in their Latin use, but which have become obscured in their English misuse. I always feel it in the necessarily frequent phrase “offending” God; which had originally almost the awful meaning of wounding God. But the word has degenerated through its application to man, until the sound of it is quite petty and perverted. We say that Mr. Binks was quite offended or that Aunt Susan will take offence; and lose sight of the essential truth, and even dogma that (in that lower sense) God is the very last to take offence. But here again we should not abuse the Latin language; we should abuse our own vulgarisation of the English language. Upon this one point, of the restatement of religious ideas, the reformers are right in everything except the one essential; which is knowing where to throw the blame.

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Ma il mondo fa scempio di tutte queste parole, siano esse nella Bibbia inglese o nel Canone latino. Vi sono molte parole d’uso cattolico che nella pratica sono state a questo modo stravolte. Quando un estraneo sente che un cattolico si è astenuto da qualcosa per timore di “dare scandalo”, riceve subito l’irritata impressione che ciò significhi il timore di mettere in chiacchiera tutte le vecchie comari sciocche della città. Naturalmente non significa nulla del genere. Non significa questo in greco. Non significa questo in latino. Non dovrebbe significare questo in inglese. Dovrebbe significare ciò che dice: il timore di far inciampare qualcuno, di porre una pietra d’intoppo sul cammino di qualche essere umano che fatica ad andare avanti. Se induco a gozzoviglie un uomo che va tenuto lontano dal bere, sto dando scandalo. Se dico ciò che potrebbe essere un sano realismo per certi ascoltatori, a una persona giovane e innocente che di sicuro lo avvertirà come mera oscenità, sto dando scandalo. Sto facendo ciò che per me è giusto, a rischio di fargli fare ciò che per lui è sbagliato. Dire che questo è ingiustificabile è manifesto buon senso morale. Ma non è ciò che si trasmette nell’inglese moderno parlando di dare scandalo. Tutto ciò che si trasmette nell’inglese moderno è che la persona che così agisce sta disprezzando le chiacchiere oziose e la critica irresponsabile; il che è esattamente ciò per cui tutti i santi e i martiri hanno con coerenza vissuto e sono morti. Ed è questo un buon esempio di ciò che io intendo per traduzione; o, se si preferisce la parola, per riformulazione. Ma ciò non significa voltarsi indietro a insultare la vecchia formulazione, che era in realtà del tutto correttamente enunciata. Significa soltanto riformulare esattamente ciò che la vecchia formulazione enuncia.

Potrei dare molti altri esempi di parole che erano giuste nel loro uso latino, ma che si sono oscurate nel loro abuso inglese. Lo avverto sempre nella frase, necessariamente frequente, “offendere” Dio; che in origine aveva quasi il significato tremendo di ferire Dio. Ma la parola è degenerata attraverso la sua applicazione all’uomo, finché il suono di essa è del tutto meschino e travisato. Diciamo che il signor Binks si è offeso, o che zia Susanna se la prenderà a male; e perdiamo di vista la verità essenziale, e persino il dogma, che (in quel senso più basso) Dio è l’ultimo a prendersela a male. Ma anche qui non dovremmo insultare la lingua latina; dovremmo insultare la nostra volgarizzazione della lingua inglese. Su questo unico punto, la riformulazione delle idee religiose, i riformatori hanno ragione in tutto tranne che nell’unica cosa essenziale: sapere dove gettare la colpa.

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THE SLAVERY OF THE MIND

I HAVE chosen the subject of the slavery of the mind because I believe many worthy people imagine I am myself a slave. The nature of my supposed slavery I need not name and do not propose specially to discuss. It is shared by every sane man when he looks up a train in Bradshaw. That is, it consists in thinking a certain authority reliable; which is entirely reasonable. Indeed it would be rather difficult to travel in every train to find out where it went. It would be still more difficult to go to the destination in order to discover whether it was safe to begin the journey. Suppose a wild scare arose that Bradshaw was a conspiracy to produce railway accidents, a man might still believe the Guide to be a Guide and the scare to be only a scare; but he would know of the existence of the scare. What I mean by the slavery of the mind is that state in which men do not know of the alternative. It is something which clogs the imagination, like a drug or a mesmeric sleep, so that a person cannot possibly think of certain things at all. It is not the state in which he says, “I see what you mean; but I cannot think that because I sincerely think this” (which is simply rational): it is one in which he has never thought of the other view; and therefore does not even know that he has never thought of it. Though I am not discussing here my own religion, I think it only right to say that its authorities have never had this sort of narrowness. You may condemn their condemnations as oppressive; but not in this sense as obscurantist. St. Thomas Aquinas begins his enquiry by saying in effect, “Is there a God? It would seem not, for the following reasons”; and the most criticised of recent Encyclicals always stated a view before condemning it. The thing I mean is a man’s inability to state his opponent’s view; and often his inability even to state his own.

Curiously enough, I find this sort of thing rather specially widespread in our age, which claims to possess a popular culture or enlightenment. There is everywhere the habit of assuming certain things, in the sense of not even imagining the opposite things. For instance, as history is taught, nearly everybody assumes that in all important past conflicts, it was the right side that won. Everybody assumes it; and nobody knows that he assumes it. The man has simply never seriously entertained the other notion. Say to him that we should now all of us be better off if Charles Edward and the Jacobites had captured London instead of falling back from Derby, and he will laugh. He will think it is what he calls a “paradox.” Yet nothing can be a more sober or solid fact than that, when the issue was undecided, wise and thoughtful men were to be found on both sides; and the Jacobite theory is not in any way disproved by the fact that Cumberland could outflank the clans at Drummossie. I am not discussing whether it was right as a theory; I am only noting that it is never allowed to occur to anybody as a thought. The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination. If somebody says that the world would now be better if Napoleon had never fallen, but had established his Imperial dynasty, people have to adjust their minds with a jerk. The very notion is new to them. Yet it would have prevented the Prussian reaction; saved equality and enlightenment without a mortal quarrel with religion; unified Europeans and perhaps avoided the Parliamentary corruption and the Fascist and Bolshevist revenges. But in this age of free-thinkers, men’s minds are not really free to think such a thought.

What I complain of is that those who accept the verdict of fate in this way accept it without knowing why. By a quaint paradox, those who thus assume that history always took the right turning are generally the very people who do not believe there was any special providence to guide it. The very rationalists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history. In the war of the North and South in America, some of the Southern rebels wrote on their flags the rhyme, “Conquer we must for our cause is just.” The philosophy was faulty; and in that sense it served them right that their opponents copied and continued it in the form “Conquer they didn’t; so their cause wasn’t.” But the latter logic is as bad as the former. I have just read a book called, “The American Heresy,” by Mr. Christopher Hollis. It is a very brilliant and original book; but I know it will not be taken sufficiently seriously; because the reader will have to wrench his mind out of a rut even to imagine the South victorious; still more to imagine anybody saying that a small, limited and agricultural America would have been better for everybody—especially Americans.

I could give many other examples of what I mean by this imaginative bondage. It is to be found in the strange superstition of making sacred figures out of certain historical characters; who must not be moved from their stiff symbolic attitudes. Even their bad qualities are sacred. Much new light has lately been thrown on Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart. It is not only favourable to Mary but on the whole favourable to Elizabeth. It seems pretty certain that Mary did not plot to kill Darnley. It seems highly probable that Elizabeth did not plot to kill Mary. But many people are quite as tenderly attached to the idea of a merciless Elizabeth as to that of a murderous Mary. That a man devoted to Protestantism should rejoice that Elizabeth succeeded, that a man devoted to Catholicism should wish that Mary had succeeded—all that would be perfectly natural and rational. But Elizabeth was not Protestantism; and it ought not to disturb anybody to discover that she was hardly a Protestant. It ought to be even less gratification to her supporters to insist that she was a tyrant. But there is a sort of waxwork history, that cannot be happy unless Elizabeth has an axe and Mary a dagger. This sense of fixed and sacred figures ought to belong to a religion; but a historical speculation is not a religion. To believe in Calvinism by faith alone is comprehensible. To believe in Cromwell by faith alone is incomprehensible. It is supremely incomprehensible that when Calvinists left off believing in Calvinism, they still insisted on believing in Cromwell. To a simple rationalist like myself, these prejudices are hard to understand.

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LA SCHIAVITÙ DELLA MENTE

HO scelto il tema della schiavitù della mente perché credo che molte degne persone immaginino che io stesso sia uno schiavo. La natura della mia presunta Schiavitù non ho bisogno di nominarla e non mi propongo particolarmente di discuterla. Essa è condivisa da ogni uomo sano quando consulta un treno sul Bradshaw. Vale a dire, consiste nel ritenere affidabile una certa autorità; il che è del tutto ragionevole. Anzi, sarebbe piuttosto difficile viaggiare su ogni treno per scoprire dove va. Sarebbe ancor più difficile andare fino a destinazione al fine di scoprire se fosse sicuro intraprendere il viaggio. Poniamo che sorgesse un selvaggio spavento che il Bradshaw fosse una cospirazione per provocare incidenti ferroviari: un uomo potrebbe pur credere che la Guida sia una Guida e lo spavento sia soltanto uno spavento; ma saprebbe dell’esistenza dello spavento. Ciò che intendo per schiavitù della mente è quello stato in cui gli uomini non sanno dell’alternativa. È qualcosa che intasa l’immaginazione, come una droga o un sonno mesmerico, cosicché una persona non può affatto pensare a certe cose. Non è lo stato in cui egli dice: «Vedo ciò che intendi; ma non posso pensarlo, perché sinceramente penso questo» (il che è semplicemente razionale): è quello in cui egli non ha mai pensato all’altra veduta; e perciò non sa nemmeno di non averci mai pensato. Benché io non stia qui discutendo la mia religione, credo sia giusto dire che le sue autorità non hanno mai avuto questa sorta di angustia. Puoi condannare le loro condanne come oppressive; ma non in questo senso come oscurantiste. San Tommaso d’Aquino comincia la sua indagine dicendo in sostanza: «Vi è un Dio? Parrebbe di no, per le seguenti ragioni»; e la più criticata delle recenti Encicliche esponeva sempre una veduta prima di condannarla. La cosa che intendo è l’incapacità di un uomo di esporre la veduta del suo avversario; e spesso la sua incapacità di esporre persino la propria.

Curiosamente, trovo questa sorta di cosa piuttosto specialmente diffusa nella nostra epoca, che pretende di possedere una cultura o illuminazione popolare. Vi è dappertutto l’abitudine di dare per assodate certe cose, nel senso di non immaginare nemmeno le cose opposte. Per esempio, così come si insegna la storia, quasi tutti danno per assodato che in tutti gli importanti conflitti passati sia stata la parte giusta a vincere. Tutti lo danno per assodato; e nessuno sa di darlo per assodato. L’uomo semplicemente non ha mai seriamente preso in considerazione l’altra nozione. Ditegli che ora saremmo tutti in condizioni migliori se Carlo Edoardo e i Giacobiti avessero preso Londra invece di ripiegare da Derby, ed egli riderà. Penserà che sia ciò che chiama un «paradosso». Eppure nulla può essere fatto più sobrio e solido di questo: che, quando la questione era indecisa, uomini saggi e riflessivi erano da trovarsi in entrambi i campi; e la teoria giacobita non è affatto smentita dal fatto che Cumberland potesse aggirare i clan a Drummossie. Non sto discutendo se fosse giusta come teoria; sto solo notando che non è mai concesso a nessuno che essa gli sfiori la mente come pensiero. Le cose che avrebbero potuto essere non sono nemmeno presenti all’immaginazione. Se qualcuno dice che il mondo sarebbe ora migliore se Napoleone non fosse mai caduto, ma avesse fondato la sua dinastia Imperiale, la gente deve aggiustarsi la mente con uno strattone. La nozione stessa è nuova per loro. Eppure avrebbe impedito la reazione prussiana; salvato l’uguaglianza e l’illuminazione senza una mortale contesa con la religione; unificato gli Europei e forse evitato la corruzione parlamentare e le vendette fasciste e bolsceviche. Ma in questa epoca di liberi pensatori, le menti degli uomini non sono realmente libere di pensare un tale pensiero.

Ciò di cui mi lagno è che coloro che accettano il verdetto del fato in questo modo lo accettano senza sapere perché. Per un bizzarro paradosso, coloro che così presumono che la storia abbia sempre imboccato la svolta giusta sono generalmente proprio le persone che non credono vi fosse alcuna speciale Provvidenza a guidarla. I razionalisti stessi che dileggiano la prova per combattimento, nell’antica ordalia feudale, in effetti accettano una prova per combattimento come decisiva di tutta la storia umana. Nella guerra del Nord e del Sud in America, alcuni dei ribelli del Sud scrissero sulle loro bandiere la rima: «Conquer we must for our cause is just». La filosofia era difettosa; e in quel senso servì loro giusto che i loro avversari la copiassero e la continuassero nella forma: «Conquer they didn’t; so their cause wasn’t». Ma la seconda logica è cattiva quanto la prima. Ho appena letto un libro intitolato «L’eresia americana», del signor Christopher Hollis. È un libro assai brillante e originale; ma so che non sarà preso sufficientemente sul serio; perché il lettore dovrà strappare la sua mente da un solco anche solo per immaginare il Sud vittorioso; ancor più per immaginare qualcuno che dica che una piccola, limitata e agricola America sarebbe stata migliore per tutti — specialmente per gli Americani.

Potrei fornire molti altri esempi di ciò che intendo per questa schiavitù immaginativa. Essa si trova nella strana superstizione di fare figure sacre di certi personaggi storici; che non devono essere smossi dai loro rigidi atteggiamenti simbolici. Persino le loro cattive qualità sono sacre. Molta nuova luce è stata di recente gettata su Regina Elisabetta e su Maria Stuarda. Essa è non solo favorevole a Maria ma nel complesso favorevole a Elisabetta. Pare abbastanza certo che Maria non tramò per uccidere Darnley. Pare altamente probabile che Elisabetta non tramò per uccidere Maria. Ma molte persone sono tanto teneramente attaccate all’idea di un’Elisabetta spietata quanto a quella di una Maria assassina. Che un uomo devoto al protestantesimo si rallegri che Elisabetta abbia avuto la meglio, che un uomo devoto al cattolicesimo desideri che Maria avesse avuto la meglio — tutto ciò sarebbe perfettamente naturale e razionale. Ma Elisabetta non era il protestantesimo; e non dovrebbe turbare nessuno lo scoprire ch’ella era a stento una protestante. Dovrebbe essere ancor meno una gratificazione per i suoi sostenitori l’insistere ch’ella fosse una tiranna. Ma vi è una sorta di storia da museo delle cere, che non può essere felice a meno che Elisabetta abbia una scure e Maria un pugnale. Questo senso di figure fisse e sacre dovrebbe appartenere a una religione; ma una speculazione storica non è una religione. Credere nel Calvinismo per la Fede soltanto è comprensibile. Credere in Cromwell per la Fede soltanto è incomprensibile. È sommamente incomprensibile che, quando i Calvinisti smisero di credere nel Calvinismo, insistessero ancora nel credere in Cromwell. Per un semplice razionalista come me, questi pregiudizi sono difficili da comprendere.

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INGE VERSUS BARNES

NONE of us I hope ever wished to be unjust to Dean Inge: though in such fights the button will sometimes come off the foil. And a cruel injustice is being done to him, in the suggestion widely circulated that he agrees with Dr. Barnes. Such things should not be lightly said of any gentleman. It is in accordance with the current legend, at least, that the Gloomy Dean even when he comes to bless should remain to curse. But if there is one isolated human being whom he can be imagined as wanting to bless, one would think it would be his ally, Bishop Barnes of Birmingham. And yet the alliance only serves to soften the curse and not to secure the blessing. If we may use such popular terms of such dignified ecclesiastics, we might be tempted to say that the Dean has found it necessary to throw over the Bishop. An interesting review by the Dean of the Bishop’s recent book of sermons contains, of course, a certain number of rather conventional compliments and a certain number of rather abrupt sneers, we might say snarls, at various other people including the greater part of Christendom. But on the two striking and outstanding matters on which Bishop Barnes was condemned by the Catholics, he is almost as strongly condemned by the Dean of St. Paul’s. Dean Inge is far too intelligent and cultivated a man to pretend to have much patience with the nonsense about testing Transubstantiation either by chemical experiments or psychical research. He tries to break it to his Broad Church colleague as gently as possible that the latter has made himself a laughing stock. But allowing for such necessary politeness between partners, it could hardly be stated better or even more plainly. He curtly refers the Bishop to the responsible definition of the doctrine in Father Rickaby’s book on metaphysics; and drily observes that it will be found rather more subtle and plausible than the Bishop seems to be aware of. He also adds, with a grim candour which is rather attractive, that it is pretty disastrous to challenge Catholics about whether the Mass does them any spiritual good, since they would quite certainly unite in testifying that it does. After these frank and arresting admissions, it is a mere matter of routine, and almost of respectability, that the Dean should agree with the Bishop that all such sacramentalism is very deplorable; that the admittedly intelligent people he knows who say they have found Christ in the Mass and not in the Morning Service must be “natural idolaters” and that it is “obvious” that the Blessed Sacrament has an affinity with the lower religions. Also with the lower classes. That, I fancy, is what the Dean really finds so disgusting about it.

The point is, however, that the Dean definitely snubs the Bishop on the one great point on which the newspapers have boomed and boosted him. And he does exactly the same thing, if in a lesser degree, on the second and lesser matter which was similarly boosted. I mean, of course, the matter of Evolution. The Dean, of course, believes in Evolution, as do a good many other people, Catholic and Protestant as well as agnostic. But though he believes in Evolution, he does not believe in Bishop Barnes’s Evolution. He comments with admirable clarity and decision on the folly of identifying progress with evolution; or even mere complication with progress. Nothing could be better than the brief and brisk sentences in which he disposes altogether of that idealisation of the scientific theory, which is in fact simply ignorance of it. In plain words, Bishop Barnes, for all his bluster, knows almost as little about Evolution as he does about Transubstantiation. The Dean of St. Paul’s does not, of course, put this truth in such plain words; but he manages to make it pretty plain. His candour in this case also has to be balanced by general expressions of agreement with the Bishop, and somewhat heartier expressions of disagreement with everybody else, especially with the Bishop’s enemies. The Dean alludes scornfully to the orthodox world, as if it necessarily repudiated certain biological theories; or as if it mattered very much if it did. The difference between the Broad Churchman and the Catholic Church is not that the former thinks Evolution true and the latter thinks it false. It is that the former thinks Evolution an explanation and the latter knows it is not an explanation. Hence the former thinks it all important; and the latter thinks it rather unimportant. Being unable to grasp this principle, the Dean has to fall back on quoting an old Victorian cant phrase; and saying that a new scientific discovery passes through three stages: that of being called absurd; of being called anti-scriptural; and of being discovered to be quite old and familiar. He might have added that it generally goes on to a fourth stage; that of being discovered to be quite untrue.

For that is the very simple fact which both Dean Inge and Bishop Barnes leave out; and which seems to be as utterly unknown to the more lucid rationalism of the one as to the cruder secularism of the other. Not only was the Archbishop of Canterbury right in suggesting that old gentlemen like himself had been familiar with Evolution all their lives; but he might have added that they were much more certain of it in the earlier part of their lives than they will be by the end of their lives. Those of them who have really read the most recent European enquiries and speculations know that Darwinism is every day becoming much less of a dogma and much more of a doubt. Those who have not read the speculations and the doubts simply go on repeating the dogma. While Dr. Barnes was preaching sermons carefully founded on the biology of fifty years ago, Mr. Belloc was proving conclusively before the whole world that Mr. H. G. Wells and Sir Arthur Keith were unacquainted with the biology of five years ago. In short, it is only just, as we have said, to insist on the difference between Dean Inge and Dr. Barnes; which is like the difference between Huxley and Haeckel. Everybody would be better and happier if Dean Inge were known as Professor Inge; and if Dr. Barnes were not only a Professor but a Prussian Professor. Then he could be boomed along with other barbarians attacking Christianity, without having the ecclesiastical privilege of actually persecuting Christians. But there are heathens and heathens and there are persecutors and persecutors. The Dean is a pagan Roman of the Senate House. The Bishop is a pagan Teuton of the swamps and fens. The Dean dislikes the Christian tradition in the spirit of Diocletian and Julian. The Bishop dislikes it in the simpler spirit of a Danish pirate staring at the rigid mystery of a Roman-British Church. Even the common cause and broad brotherly maxim of CHRISTIANI AD LEONES did not always, I fancy, reconcile the Roman and the Goth. These historical comparisons may seem fanciful; and indeed in one sense both parties are very much tied to their own historical period. They are both very Victorian; but even here there is a difference and a superiority. The superiority of the Dean is that he knows it and says so. He is man enough to boast of being Victorian and not to mind being called reactionary. Whereas the Bishop seems really to cherish the truly extraordinary notion that his notions are new and up-to-date.

Of course they have a philosophy in common; and it would be a cheap simplification to call it Materialism. Indeed, we should be almost as shallow in talking about Materialism as they are in talking about Magic. The truth is that the strange bigotry, which leads the Bishop to scream and rail at all sacramentalism as Magic, is in its inmost essence the very reverse of Materialism. Indeed it is nothing half so healthy as Materialism. The root of this prejudice is not so much a trust in matter as a sort of horror of matter. The man of this philosophy is always asking that worship shall be wholly spiritual, or even wholly intellectual; because he does really feel a disgust at the idea of spiritual things having a body and a solid form. It probably does really give him a mystical shudder to suppose that God can become as bread and wine; though I never understood why it should not give the same shudder to say that God could become flesh and blood. But whether or no these thinkers are logical in their philosophy, I think this is their philosophy. It has a very long history and an ancient name. It is not Materialist but Manichee.

Indeed the Dean uttered an unconscious truth when he said the sacramentalists must be “natural idolaters.” He shrinks from it not only because it is idolatrous, but also because it is natural. He cannot bear to think how natural is the craving for the supernatural. He cannot tolerate the idea of it actually working through the elements of nature. Unconsciously, no doubt, but very stubbornly, that sort of intellectual does feel that our souls may belong to God, but our bodies only to the devil or the beast. That Manichean horror of matter is the only INTELLIGENT reason for any such sweeping refusal of supernatural and sacramental wonders. The rest is all cant and repetition and arguing in a circle; all the baseless dogmatism about science forbidding men to believe in miracles; as if SCIENCE could forbid men to believe in something which science does not profess to investigate. Science is the study of the admitted laws of existence; it cannot prove a universal negative about whether those laws could ever be suspended by something admittedly above them. It is as if we were to say that a lawyer was so deeply learned in the American Constitution that he knew there could never be a revolution in America. Or it is as if a man were to say he was so close a student of the text of Hamlet that he was authorised to deny that an actor had dropped the skull and bolted when the theatre caught fire. The constitution follows a certain course, so long as it is there to follow it; the play follows a certain course, so long as it is being played; the visible order of nature follows a certain course if there is nothing behind it to stop it. But that fact throws no sort of light on whether there IS anything behind it to stop it. That is a question of philosophy or metaphysics and not of material science. And out of respect for the intelligence of both these reverend gentlemen, and especially for the high intelligence of the Dean of St. Paul’s, I much prefer to think that they are opposed to what they call Magic as consistent philosophers and not as inconsistent scientists. I prefer to think that they are thinking along the lines of great Gnostics and Buddhists and other mystics of a dark but dignified historical tradition; rather than that they are blundering in plain logic in the interests of cheap popular science. I can even understand or imagine that thrill of repulsion that seizes them in the presence of the divine materialism of the Mass. But I still think they would be more consistent and complete, if they made it quite clear that they carried their principle to completion; and said, as the Moslem says about Christmas, “Far be it from Him to have a Son,” or the terrified disciples who cried, “Far be this from Thee,” when God was going up to be crucified.

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INGE CONTRO BARNES

Nessuno di noi, lo spero, ha mai desiderato essere ingiusto verso il Decano Inge: benché in simili duelli talora il bottone salti via dal fioretto. E gli viene fatta una crudele ingiustizia, nell’insinuazione largamente diffusa che egli concordi con il Dr. Barnes. Simili cose non dovrebbero dirsi alla leggera di alcun gentiluomo. È conforme almeno alla leggenda corrente che il Decano Tetro, anche quando viene a benedire, resti a maledire. Ma se c’è un solo isolato essere umano che si possa immaginare egli voglia benedire, si penserebbe che sia il suo alleato, il Vescovo Barnes di Birmingham. Eppure l’alleanza serve soltanto ad ammorbidire la maledizione e non ad assicurare la benedizione. Se possiamo usare termini così popolari per ecclesiastici così dignitosi, saremmo tentati di dire che il Decano ha trovato necessario scaricare il Vescovo. Un’interessante recensione del Decano al recente libro di sermoni del Vescovo contiene, naturalmente, un certo numero di complimenti piuttosto convenzionali e un certo numero di sogghigni piuttosto bruschi, potremmo dire ringhi, verso varie altre persone, inclusa la maggior parte della Cristianità. Ma sui due punti spiccati e salienti sui quali il Vescovo Barnes fu condannato dai Cattolici, egli è condannato quasi altrettanto fortemente dal Decano di San Paolo. Il Decano Inge è un uomo troppo intelligente e coltivato per fingere di avere molta pazienza con le sciocchezze sul mettere alla prova la Transustanziazione mediante esperimenti chimici o ricerche psichiche. Cerca di far capire al suo collega della Broad Church, con la maggior delicatezza possibile, che quest’ultimo si è reso uno zimbello. Ma tenuto conto della necessaria cortesia fra soci, ciò difficilmente potrebbe essere affermato meglio o anche più chiaramente. Rimanda seccamente il Vescovo alla responsabile definizione della dottrina nel libro di metafisica di padre Rickaby; e osserva asciuttamente che la si troverà piuttosto più sottile e plausibile di quanto il Vescovo sembri consapevole. Aggiunge anche, con un cupo candore che è piuttosto attraente, che è abbastanza disastroso sfidare i Cattolici sul fatto se la Messa faccia loro qualche bene spirituale, poiché essi si unirebbero certamente tutti a testimoniare che lo fa. Dopo queste franche e sorprendenti ammissioni, è mera questione di routine, e quasi di rispettabilità, che il Decano concordi col Vescovo che tutto tale sacramentalismo è assai deplorevole; che le persone dichiaratamente intelligenti che egli conosce e che dicono di aver trovato Cristo nella Messa e non nel Servizio Mattutino debbano essere «idolatri naturali», e che sia «ovvio» che il Santissimo Sacramento abbia un’affinità con le religioni inferiori. Anche con le classi inferiori. Questo, immagino, è ciò che il Decano trova davvero tanto disgustoso in esso.

Il punto è, tuttavia, che il Decano decisamente snobba il Vescovo sull’unico grande punto su cui i giornali l’hanno propagandato e osannato. E fa esattamente la stessa cosa, se in misura minore, sul secondo e minore argomento che fu similmente osannato. Intendo, naturalmente, la questione dell’Evoluzione. Il Decano, naturalmente, crede nell’Evoluzione, come fanno molte altre persone, cattoliche e protestanti nonché agnostiche. Ma benché creda nell’Evoluzione, non crede nell’Evoluzione del Vescovo Barnes. Commenta con ammirevole chiarezza e decisione la follia di identificare il progresso con l’evoluzione; o persino la mera complicazione col progresso. Nulla potrebbe essere migliore delle frasi brevi e vivaci in cui liquida del tutto quell’idealizzazione della teoria scientifica, che in realtà è semplicemente ignoranza di essa. In parole povere, il Vescovo Barnes, con tutta la sua spavalderia, sa dell’Evoluzione quasi altrettanto poco di quanto sappia della Transustanziazione. Il Decano di San Paolo non mette, naturalmente, questa verità in parole così povere; ma riesce a renderla abbastanza chiara. Anche in questo caso il suo candore dev’essere bilanciato da espressioni generali di accordo col Vescovo, e da espressioni alquanto più cordiali di disaccordo con tutti gli altri, specialmente coi nemici del Vescovo. Il Decano allude sprezzantemente al mondo ortodosso, come se necessariamente ripudiasse certe teorie biologiche; o come se importasse molto se lo facesse. La differenza fra l’uomo della Broad Church e la Chiesa Cattolica non è che il primo pensa l’Evoluzione vera e la seconda la pensa falsa. È che il primo pensa l’Evoluzione una spiegazione e la seconda sa che non è una spiegazione. Perciò il primo la pensa importantissima; e la seconda la pensa piuttosto irrilevante. Incapace di afferrare questo principio, il Decano deve ripiegare sul citare una vecchia frase fatta vittoriana; e dire che una nuova scoperta scientifica attraversa tre stadi: quello dell’essere chiamata assurda; dell’essere chiamata antiscritturale; e dell’essere scoperta del tutto vecchia e familiare. Avrebbe potuto aggiungere che generalmente prosegue verso un quarto stadio; quello dell’essere scoperta del tutto falsa.

Poiché questo è il fatto assai semplice che sia il Decano Inge sia il Vescovo Barnes tralasciano; e che sembra essere tanto totalmente ignoto al razionalismo più lucido dell’uno quanto al secolarismo più rozzo dell’altro. Non solo l’Arcivescovo di Canterbury aveva ragione nel suggerire che vecchi signori come lui erano stati familiari con l’Evoluzione per tutta la vita; ma avrebbe potuto aggiungere che ne erano molto più certi nella prima parte della loro vita di quanto lo saranno alla fine di essa. Quelli fra loro che hanno realmente letto le più recenti indagini e speculazioni europee sanno che il Darwinismo diventa ogni giorno molto meno un dogma e molto più un dubbio. Quelli che non hanno letto le speculazioni e i dubbi continuano semplicemente a ripetere il dogma. Mentre il Dr. Barnes predicava sermoni accuratamente fondati sulla biologia di cinquant’anni fa, il signor Belloc provava in modo conclusivo davanti al mondo intero che il signor H. G. Wells e Sir Arthur Keith ignoravano la biologia di cinque anni fa. Insomma, è solo giusto, come abbiamo detto, insistere sulla differenza fra il Decano Inge e il Dr. Barnes; che è come la differenza fra Huxley e Haeckel. Tutti sarebbero migliori e più felici se il Decano Inge fosse conosciuto come Professor Inge; e se il Dr. Barnes non fosse soltanto un Professore ma un Professore Prussiano. Allora potrebbe essere osannato insieme ad altri barbari che attaccano il Cristianesimo, senza avere il privilegio ecclesiastico di perseguitare effettivamente i Cristiani. Ma ci sono pagani e pagani e ci sono persecutori e persecutori. Il Decano è un pagano Romano della Casa del Senato. Il Vescovo è un pagano Teutone delle paludi e degli acquitrini. Il Decano detesta la tradizione cristiana nello spirito di Diocleziano e Giuliano. Il Vescovo la detesta nello spirito più semplice di un pirata danese che fissa il rigido mistero di una Chiesa Romano-Britannica. Persino la causa comune e il fraterno ampio motto di CHRISTIANI AD LEONES non sempre, immagino, riconciliava il Romano e il Goto. Questi confronti storici possono sembrare fantasiosi; e invero in un senso entrambe le parti sono molto legate al proprio periodo storico. Sono entrambi molto vittoriani; ma anche qui c’è una differenza e una superiorità. La superiorità del Decano è che lo sa e lo dice. È abbastanza uomo da vantarsi di essere vittoriano e da non curarsi di essere chiamato reazionario. Mentre il Vescovo sembra davvero coltivare la nozione veramente straordinaria che le sue nozioni siano nuove e aggiornate.

Naturalmente essi hanno una filosofia in comune; e sarebbe una semplificazione a buon mercato chiamarla Materialismo. Anzi, saremmo quasi altrettanto superficiali nel parlare di Materialismo quanto lo sono loro nel parlare di Magia. La verità è che la strana bigotteria, che induce il Vescovo a strillare e inveire contro ogni sacramentalismo come Magia, è nella sua più intima essenza l’esatto rovescio del Materialismo. Anzi non è nulla di così sano come il Materialismo. La radice di questo pregiudizio non è tanto una fiducia nella materia quanto una sorta di orrore della materia. L’uomo di questa filosofia chiede sempre che il culto sia interamente spirituale, o persino interamente intellettuale; perché prova davvero disgusto all’idea che le cose spirituali abbiano un corpo e una forma solida. Probabilmente gli dà davvero un brivido mistico supporre che Dio possa diventare pane e vino; benché non abbia mai capito perché non dovrebbe dargli lo stesso brivido dire che Dio potrebbe diventare carne e sangue. Ma che questi pensatori siano o no logici nella loro filosofia, credo che questa sia la loro filosofia. Ha una lunghissima storia e un nome antico. Non è Materialista ma Manichea.

Invero il Decano pronunciò una verità inconscia quando disse che i sacramentalisti devono essere «idolatri naturali». Egli rifugge da ciò non solo perché è idolatrico, ma anche perché è naturale. Non sopporta di pensare quanto sia naturale la brama del soprannaturale. Non può tollerare l’idea che esso operi effettivamente attraverso gli elementi della natura. Inconsciamente, senza dubbio, ma assai ostinatamente, quel tipo di intellettuale sente davvero che le nostre anime possono appartenere a Dio, ma i nostri corpi solo al diavolo o alla bestia. Quell’orrore manicheo della materia è l’unica ragione INTELLIGENTE per un simile radicale rifiuto delle meraviglie soprannaturali e sacramentali. Il resto è tutto ipocrisia e ripetizione e ragionare in circolo; tutto l’infondato dogmatismo sulla scienza che vieta agli uomini di credere nei miracoli; come se la SCIENZA potesse vietare agli uomini di credere in qualcosa che la scienza non pretende di indagare. La scienza è lo studio delle ammesse leggi dell’esistenza; non può provare una negazione universale sul fatto se quelle leggi possano mai essere sospese da qualcosa dichiaratamente al di sopra di esse. È come se dicessimo che un avvocato era così profondamente dotto nella Costituzione Americana da sapere che non potrebbe mai esserci una rivoluzione in America. O è come se un uomo dicesse di essere uno studioso così attento del testo dell’Amleto da essere autorizzato a negare che un attore avesse lasciato cadere il teschio e fosse fuggito quando il teatro prese fuoco. La costituzione segue un certo corso, finché essa è lì a seguirlo; il dramma segue un certo corso, finché viene recitato; l’ordine visibile della natura segue un certo corso se non c’è nulla dietro di esso a fermarlo. Ma quel fatto non getta alcuna luce sul fatto se ci SIA qualcosa dietro di esso a fermarlo. Questa è una questione di filosofia o metafisica e non di scienza materiale. E per rispetto dell’intelligenza di entrambi questi reverendi signori, e specialmente per l’alta intelligenza del Decano di San Paolo, preferisco di gran lunga pensare che essi si oppongano a ciò che chiamano Magia come filosofi coerenti e non come scienziati incoerenti. Preferisco pensare che stiano pensando lungo le linee dei grandi Gnostici e Buddhisti e altri mistici di una oscura ma dignitosa tradizione storica; piuttosto che stiano commettendo errori di semplice logica nell’interesse della scienza popolare a buon mercato. Posso persino capire o immaginare quel brivido di repulsione che li coglie in presenza del divino materialismo della Messa. Ma continuo a pensare che sarebbero più coerenti e completi se rendessero del tutto chiaro di portare il loro principio fino in fondo; e dicessero, come dice il musulmano riguardo al Natale: «Lungi da Lui l’avere un Figlio», o come i discepoli terrorizzati che gridarono: «Lungi da Te questo», quando Dio saliva a essere crocifisso.

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WHAT WE THINK ABOUT

I WAS looking the other day at a weekly paper of the sort that is supposed to provide popular culture; in this case rather especially what may be called popular science. In practice it largely provides what its supporters optimistically call Modern Thought and what we more commonly call Modernism. It is, however, a paper by no means unfair or exclusive of the opposite point of view; it has more than once permitted me to reply to these views; and in looking at the issue in question, my eye was arrested by my own name.

It occurred in an article on the religious doctrines of Mr. Arnold Bennett. Indeed the prominence in the press of this name in this connection is one of the standing mysteries of modern journalism. I have not only a great admiration for the artistic genius, but in many ways a strong liking for the human personality of Mr. Arnold Bennett. I like his liveliness and contempt for contempt. I like his humanity and merciful curiosity about every thing human. I like that essential absence of snobbishness that enables him to sympathise even with snobs. But talking about the religious beliefs of Mr. Arnold Bennett seems to me exactly like talking about the foxhunting adventures of Mr. Bernard Shaw or the favourite vintages of Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson or the celestial visions of Sir Arthur Keith or the monastic vows of Mr. Bertrand Russell. Mr. Arnold Bennett has never disguised, as it seems to me, the essential fact that he has not got any religious beliefs; as religious beliefs were understood in the English language as I learnt it. That he has a number of highly estimable moral sentiments and sympathies I do not for a moment doubt. But the matter of Mr. Arnold Bennett is, for the moment, a parenthesis. I mention it here merely because it was in the course of such an article that I found myself mentioned; and I confess I thought the reference a little odd. It will not surprise the reader to learn that the writer found me less Modernist than Mr. Arnold Bennett. My religious beliefs did not present so pure and virgin and blameless a blank, but were defaced with definite statements about various things. But the writer professed to find something dubious or mysterious about my attitude; and what mystifies me is his mystification. He delicately implied that there was more in me than met the eye; that I had that within, which passed all these Papistical shows, but that it was hopeless to vivisect me and discover the secret. He said: “Mr. Chesterton does not mean to enlighten us; for all we know he is Modernist enough in his own thoughts.”

Now it would be thought a little annoying if an atheist were to say of some harmless Protestant Christian like General Booth; “For all we know, he is atheist enough in his own thoughts.” We might even venture to enquire how the atheist could possibly form any notion of what General Booth thought, in such complete contradiction to everything he said. Or I myself, on the other hand, might seem less than graceful, if I were to suggest that Mr. Arnold Bennett must be concealing his conversion out of cowardice; and were to express it in the form: “Mr. Bennett will never tell us the truth about it; for all we know he is Papist enough in his own thoughts.” I might even be cross-examined about how I had come to form these suspicions about the secret thoughts of Mr. Arnold Bennett; as to whether I had hidden under his bed and heard him muttering Latin prayers in his dreams, or sent a private detective to verify the existence of his hair-shirt and his concealed relics. It might be hinted that, until I could produce some such PRIMA FACIE case for my suspicions, it would be more polite to suppose that the opinions of Mr. Bennett were what he himself said they were. And if I were sensitive on such things, I might make a rather sharp request, that people who cannot possibly know anything about me except what I say, should for the sake of our general convenience believe what I say. On the subject of Modernism, at any rate, there has never been the least doubt or difficulty about what I say. For, as it happens, I had a strong intellectual contempt for Modernism, even before I really believed in Catholicism.

But I belong, as a biological product of evolution, to the order of the pachyderms. And I am not in the least moved by any annoyance in the matter; but only by a very strong mystification and curiosity about the real reason for this remarkable point of view. I know that the writer did not mean any harm; but I am much more interested in trying to understand what he did mean. And the truth is, I think, that there is hidden in this curious and cryptic phrase the secret of the whole modern controversy about Catholicism. What the man really meant was this: “Even poor old Chesterton must think; he can’t have actually left off thinking altogether; there must be some form of cerebral function going forward to fill the empty hours of his misdirected and wasted life; and it is obvious that if a man begins to THINK, he can only think more or less in the direction of Modernism.” The Modernists do really think that. That is the point. That is the joke.

Now what we have really got to hammer into the heads of all these people, somehow, is that a thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism, and not deeper and deeper into difficulties about Catholicism. We have got to make them see that conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful, progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect. For THAT is the thing that they cannot at present bring themselves to believe. They honestly say to themselves: “What can he be thinking about, if he is not thinking about the Mistakes of Moses, as discovered by Mr. Miggles of Pudsey, or boldly defying all the terrors of the Inquisition which existed two hundred years ago in Spain?” We have got to explain somehow that the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity or the Blessed Sacrament are the starting-points for trains of thought far more stimulating, subtle and even individual, compared with which all that sceptical scratching is as thin, shallow and dusty as a nasty piece of scandalmongering in a New England village. Thus, to accept the Logos as a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St. John the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the world. To accept the Logos as a “text” or an “interpolation” or a “development” or a dead word in a dead document, only used to give in rapid succession about six different dates to that document, is to be altogether on a lower plane of human life; to be squabbling and scratching for a merely negative success; even if it really were a success. To exalt the Mass is to enter into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections. To set out to belittle and minimise the Mass, by talking ephemeral back-chat about what it had in common with Mithras or the Mysteries, is to be in altogether a more petty and pedantic mood; not only lower than Catholicism but lower even than Mithraism.

CIÒ CHE PENSIAMO

L’altro giorno guardavo un settimanale del genere che si suppone fornisca cultura popolare; in questo caso piuttosto specialmente ciò che si può chiamare scienza popolare. In pratica esso fornisce in larga misura ciò che i suoi sostenitori chiamano ottimisticamente Pensiero Moderno e che noi più comunemente chiamiamo Modernismo. È, tuttavia, un giornale per nulla ingiusto o escludente del punto di vista opposto; mi ha permesso più di una volta di replicare a queste opinioni; e nel guardare il numero in questione, il mio occhio fu arrestato dal mio stesso nome.

Esso compariva in un articolo sulle dottrine religiose del signor Arnold Bennett. Invero la prominenza sulla stampa di questo nome in tale connessione è uno dei misteri permanenti del giornalismo moderno. Non ho soltanto una grande ammirazione per il genio artistico, ma per molti versi una forte simpatia per la personalità umana del signor Arnold Bennett. Mi piace la sua vivacità e il suo disprezzo per il disprezzo. Mi piace la sua umanità e la sua misericordiosa curiosità per tutto ciò che è umano. Mi piace quell’essenziale assenza di snobismo che gli consente di simpatizzare persino con gli snob. Ma parlare delle credenze religiose del signor Arnold Bennett mi sembra esattamente come parlare delle avventure di caccia alla volpe del signor Bernard Shaw o delle annate predilette del signor Pussyfoot Johnson o delle visioni celesti di Sir Arthur Keith o dei voti monastici del signor Bertrand Russell. Il signor Arnold Bennett non ha mai dissimulato, a quanto mi pare, il fatto essenziale che non possiede alcuna credenza religiosa; nel senso in cui le credenze religiose si intendevano nella lingua inglese come l’ho appresa io. Che egli abbia numerosi sentimenti e simpatie morali del tutto stimabili non lo metto per un momento in dubbio. Ma la questione del signor Arnold Bennett è, per il momento, una parentesi. La menziono qui soltanto perché fu nel corso di un tale articolo che mi trovai menzionato; e confesso che trovai il riferimento un po’ strano. Non sorprenderà il lettore apprendere che lo scrittore mi trovava meno Modernista del signor Arnold Bennett. Le mie credenze religiose non presentavano un vuoto tanto puro e verginale e irreprensibile, ma erano deturpate da affermazioni definite su varie cose. Ma lo scrittore dichiarava di trovare qualcosa di dubbio o di misterioso nel mio atteggiamento; e ciò che mi disorienta è la sua perplessità. Insinuava delicatamente che in me c’era più di quanto apparisse all’occhio; che io avevo dentro qualcosa che oltrepassava tutte queste esibizioni papiste, ma che era inutile vivisezionarmi e scoprirne il segreto. Diceva: «Il signor Chesterton non intende illuminarci; per quanto ne sappiamo, egli è abbastanza Modernista nei propri pensieri.»

Ora si troverebbe un po’ irritante se un ateo dicesse di qualche innocuo cristiano protestante come il Generale Booth: «Per quanto ne sappiamo, egli è abbastanza ateo nei propri pensieri.» Potremmo persino azzardarci a chiedere come l’ateo potesse mai formarsi una qualche nozione di ciò che il Generale Booth pensava, in così completa contraddizione con tutto ciò che diceva. Oppure io stesso, d’altro canto, potrei sembrare meno che aggraziato se suggerissi che il signor Arnold Bennett debba star celando la propria conversione per codardia; e lo esprimessi nella forma: «Il signor Bennett non ci dirà mai la verità al riguardo; per quanto ne sappiamo, egli è abbastanza Papista nei propri pensieri.» Potrei persino essere controinterrogato su come fossi giunto a formare questi sospetti sui pensieri segreti del signor Arnold Bennett; se mi fossi nascosto sotto il suo letto e lo avessi udito mormorare preghiere latine nei suoi sogni, o se avessi mandato un investigatore privato a verificare l’esistenza del suo cilicio e delle sue reliquie nascoste. Si potrebbe suggerire che, finché non potessi produrre una qualche prova PRIMA FACIE dei miei sospetti, sarebbe più educato supporre che le opinioni del signor Bennett fossero quelle che egli stesso diceva fossero. E se fossi sensibile su tali cose, potrei avanzare una richiesta piuttosto netta, che le persone che non possono affatto sapere nulla di me se non ciò che dico, per il bene della nostra generale comodità credano ciò che dico. Sul tema del Modernismo, in ogni caso, non c’è mai stato il minimo dubbio o difficoltà su ciò che dico. Poiché, guarda caso, io avevo un forte disprezzo intellettuale per il Modernismo, ancor prima di credere davvero nel Cattolicesimo.

Ma io appartengo, come prodotto biologico dell’evoluzione, all’ordine dei pachidermi. E non sono minimamente turbato da alcun fastidio nella faccenda; ma soltanto da una fortissima perplessità e curiosità circa la vera ragione di questo notevole punto di vista. So che lo scrittore non intendeva alcun male; ma sono molto più interessato a cercare di capire ciò che intendeva. E la verità è, credo, che si nasconde in questa curiosa e criptica frase il segreto dell’intera controversia moderna sul Cattolicesimo. Ciò che l’uomo realmente intendeva era questo: «Persino il povero vecchio Chesterton deve pur pensare; non può aver del tutto smesso di pensare; ci dev’essere qualche forma di funzione cerebrale in corso a riempire le ore vuote della sua sviata e sprecata esistenza; ed è ovvio che, se un uomo comincia a PENSARE, egli può pensare solo più o meno in direzione del Modernismo.» I Modernisti pensano davvero questo. Questo è il punto. Questa è la battuta.

Ora ciò che dobbiamo davvero martellare nella testa di tutte queste persone, in qualche modo, è che un uomo pensante può pensare se stesso sempre più profondamente dentro il Cattolicesimo, e non sempre più profondamente dentro difficoltà sul Cattolicesimo. Dobbiamo far loro vedere che la conversione è l’inizio di una vita dell’intelletto attiva, feconda, progressiva e persino avventurosa. Poiché QUELLA è la cosa che al momento non riescono a indursi a credere. Si dicono onestamente: «A cosa può mai pensare, se non pensa agli Errori di Mosè, come scoperti dal signor Miggles di Pudsey, o non sfida arditamente tutti i terrori dell’Inquisizione che esisteva duecento anni fa in Spagna?» Dobbiamo spiegare in qualche modo che i grandi misteri come la Santissima Trinità o il Santissimo Sacramento sono i punti di partenza per catene di pensiero assai più stimolanti, sottili e persino individuali, in confronto alle quali tutto quello scettico grattare è tanto sottile, superficiale e polveroso quanto una spiacevole diceria maldicente in un villaggio della Nuova Inghilterra. Così, accettare il Logos come una verità è trovarsi nell’atmosfera dell’assoluto, non solo con San Giovanni Evangelista, ma con Platone e tutti i grandi mistici del mondo. Accettare il Logos come un «testo» o un’«interpolazione» o uno «sviluppo» o una parola morta in un documento morto, usata soltanto per assegnare in rapida successione una mezza dozzina di date diverse a quel documento, è trovarsi del tutto su un piano inferiore della vita umana; è azzuffarsi e grattare per un successo meramente negativo; anche se fosse davvero un successo. Esaltare la Messa è entrare in un magnifico mondo di idee metafisiche, che illuminano tutte le relazioni fra materia e mente, fra carne e spirito, fra le più impersonali astrazioni nonché i più personali affetti. Mettersi a sminuire e minimizzare la Messa, chiacchierando in modo effimero su ciò che essa aveva in comune con Mitra o i Misteri, è trovarsi in uno stato d’animo del tutto più meschino e pedante; non solo inferiore al Cattolicesimo ma inferiore persino al Mitraismo.

As I have said before, it is very difficult to say how we can best set about these things. We and our critics have come to talk in two different languages; so that the very names by which we describe the things inside stand for totally different things in the absurd labels they have stuck upon the wall outside. Often if we said the great things we have to say, they would sound like the small things they accuse us of saying. A philosophical process can only begin at the right end; and they have got hold of everything by the wrong end. But I am myself disposed to think that we should begin by challenging one very common phrase or form of words; a thing that has become a catch-word and a caption; or in the ordinary popular phrase a headline. Because the journalists incessantly repeat it, and draw attention to it by repeating it, we may possibly draw attention by denying it.

When the journalist says for the thousandth time, “Living religion is not in dull and dusty dogmas, etc.” we must stop him with a sort of shout and say, “There—you go wrong at the very start.” If he would condescend to ask what the dogmas are, he would find out that it is precisely the dogmas that are living, that are inspiring, that are intellectually interesting. Zeal and charity and unction are admirable as flowers and fruit; but if you are really interested in the living principle you must be interested in the root or the seed. In other words, you must be intelligently interested in the statement with which the whole thing started; even if it is only to deny it. Even if the critic cannot come to agree with the Catholic, he can come to see that it is certain ideas about the Cosmos that make him a Catholic. He can see that being Cosmic in that way, and Catholic in that way, is what makes him different from other people; and what makes him, at the very least, a not uninteresting figure in human history. He will never get anywhere near it by sentimentalising against Catholic sentiment or pontificating against Catholic pontiffs. He must get hold of the ideas as ideas; and he will find that the most interesting of all the ideas are those which the newspapers dismiss as dogmas.

For instance; the doctrine of the Dual Nature of Christ is in the most genuine sense interesting; it ought to be interesting to anybody who can understand it, long before he can believe it. It has what can be called with all reverence a stereoscopic interest; the interest of having the two eyes in the head that create an object; of having the two angles in the triangle that determine the third. The old Monophysite sect declared that Christ had only the one divine nature. The new Monophysite sect declares that He had only the one human nature. But it is not a pun or a trick, but a truth, to say that the Monophysite is by nature monotonous. In either of his two forms, he is naturally on one note. The question of objective historical truth is another question, which I am not arguing here, though I am ready to argue it anywhere. I am talking about intellectual stimulation and the starting point of thought and imagination. And these, like all living things, breed from the conjunction of two, and not from one alone. Thus I read, with sympathy but a sympathy that hardly goes beyond sentiment, the studies of the modern Monophysites in the life of the limited and merely mortal Jesus of Nazareth. I respect their respect; I admire their admiration; I know that all they say about human greatness or religious genius is true as far as it goes. But it goes along one line; and cannot convince like the things that can converge. And then, after reading such a tribute to an ethical teacher in the manner of the Essenes, perhaps I turn another page of the same or some similar book; and come upon some phrase used about a real though a pagan religion; perhaps some supposed parallel of what is called a Pagan Christ. I find it said, if only of Atys or Adonis, “There was a conception that the god sacrificed himself to himself.” The man who can read those words without a thrill is dead.

The thrill is deeper for us, of course, because it is concerned with a fact and not a fancy. In that sense we do not admit that there is any such parallel with the legends of the ancient pagans as is implied in the books of the modern pagans. And indeed we are surely entitled to call it mere common sense to say that there can be no complete parallel between what was admittedly a myth or mystery and what was admittedly a man. But the point here is that the truth hidden even in myths and mysteries is altogether lost if we are confined to the consideration of a man. In this sense there is an ironic and unconscious truth in the words of the modern pagan, who sang that “the heathen outface and outlive us,” and that “our lives and our longings are twain.” It is true of the Modernists, but it is not true of us, who find simultaneously the realisation of a longing and the record of a life. It is perfectly true that there were in many pagan myths the faint foreshadowing of the Christian mysteries; though even in saying so we admit that the foreshadowings were shadows. But when all imaginative kinship has been explored or allowed for, it is not true that mythology ever rose to the heights of theology. It is not true that a thought so bold or so subtle as this one ever crossed the mind that created the centaurs and the fauns. In the wildest and most gigantic of the primitive epic fancies, there is no conception so colossal as the being who is both Zeus and Prometheus.

But I only advert to it here, not as arguing its truth against those who do not believe it, but only as insisting on its intense and intellectual interest for those who do believe it. I only wish to explain to those who are worried in this way, that a mind filled with the true conception of this Duality has plenty to think about along those lines and has no need to dig up dead gods to discredit the Everlasting Man. There is no necessity for me to be Modernist in my own thoughts, or Monophysite in my own thoughts; because I think these views much duller and more trivial than my own. In the beautiful words of the love-song in THE WALLET OF KAI LUNG, one of the few truly psychological love-songs of the world: “This insignificant and universally despised person would unhesitatingly prefer his thoughts to theirs.”

Come ho già detto, è molto difficile dire come possiamo meglio metterci all’opera su queste cose. Noi e i nostri critici siamo giunti a parlare due lingue diverse; sicché i nomi stessi con cui descriviamo le cose che stanno dentro stanno per cose totalmente diverse nelle assurde etichette che essi hanno appiccicato sul muro di fuori. Spesso, se dicessimo le grandi cose che abbiamo da dire, esse suonerebbero come le piccole cose di cui ci accusano di dire. Un processo filosofico può cominciare solo dal capo giusto; ed essi hanno afferrato ogni cosa dal capo sbagliato. Ma io stesso sono propenso a pensare che dovremmo cominciare col contestare una frase o formula assai comune; una cosa che è diventata uno slogan e una didascalia; o, nella comune frase popolare, un titolo di giornale. Poiché i giornalisti la ripetono incessantemente, e vi attirano l’attenzione ripetendola, noi possiamo forse attirare l’attenzione negandola.

Quando il giornalista dice per la millesima volta: «La religione viva non sta in dogmi cupi e polverosi, eccetera», noi dobbiamo fermarlo con una sorta di grido e dire: «Ecco: sbagli fin dall’inizio.» Se si degnasse di chiedere quali siano i dogmi, scoprirebbe che sono precisamente i dogmi a essere vivi, a essere ispiranti, a essere intellettualmente interessanti. Zelo e carità e unzione sono ammirevoli come fiori e frutto; ma se sei davvero interessato al principio vivente devi essere interessato alla radice o al seme. In altre parole, devi essere intelligentemente interessato all’affermazione con cui l’intera faccenda cominciò; anche se solo per negarla. Anche se il critico non riesce a giungere a concordare col Cattolico, può giungere a vedere che sono certe idee sul Cosmo a farne un Cattolico. Può vedere che essere Cosmico in quel modo, e Cattolico in quel modo, è ciò che lo rende diverso dalle altre persone; e ciò che ne fa, come minimo, una figura non priva di interesse nella storia umana. Non vi si avvicinerà mai sentimentaleggiando contro il sentimento Cattolico o pontificando contro i pontefici Cattolici. Deve afferrare le idee come idee; e scoprirà che le più interessanti di tutte le idee sono quelle che i giornali liquidano come dogmi.

Per esempio: la dottrina della Duplice Nature di Cristo è nel senso più genuino interessante; dovrebbe essere interessante per chiunque sappia comprenderla, molto prima di poterla credere. Ha ciò che si può chiamare, con ogni riverenza, un interesse stereoscopico; l’interesse di avere i due occhi nella testa che creano un oggetto; di avere i due angoli nel triangolo che determinano il terzo. L’antica setta Monofisita dichiarava che Cristo aveva soltanto l’unica natura divina. La nuova setta Monofisita dichiara che Egli aveva soltanto l’unica natura umana. Ma non è un bisticcio o un trucco, bensì una verità, dire che il Monofisita è per natura monotono. In entrambe le sue due forme, egli è naturalmente su una sola nota. La questione della verità storica oggettiva è un’altra questione, che non sto discutendo qui, benché io sia pronto a discuterla ovunque. Sto parlando di stimolo intellettuale e del punto di partenza del pensiero e dell’immaginazione. E questi, come tutte le cose viventi, si generano dalla congiunzione di due, e non da uno solo. Così io leggo, con simpatia ma una simpatia che a stento va oltre il sentimento, gli studi dei moderni Monofisiti sulla vita del limitato e meramente mortale Gesù di Nazaret. Rispetto il loro rispetto; ammiro la loro ammirazione; so che tutto ciò che dicono sulla grandezza umana o sul genio religioso è vero fin dove arriva. Ma va lungo una sola linea; e non può convincere come le cose che possono convergere. E poi, dopo aver letto un tale tributo a un maestro etico alla maniera degli Esseni, forse volto un’altra pagina dello stesso o di qualche libro simile; e m’imbatto in qualche frase usata a proposito di una religione reale benché pagana; forse qualche presunto parallelo di ciò che si chiama un Cristo Pagano. Trovo detto, non fosse che di Attis o di Adone: «Vi era una concezione secondo cui il dio sacrificava se stesso a se stesso.» L’uomo che sa leggere quelle parole senza un brivido è morto.

Il brivido è più profondo per noi, naturalmente, perché riguarda un fatto e non una fantasticheria. In quel senso non ammettiamo che vi sia un tale parallelo con le leggende degli antichi pagani come è implicito nei libri dei pagani moderni. E invero abbiamo certamente il diritto di chiamarlo mero buon senso dire che non vi può essere alcun completo parallelo fra ciò che era dichiaratamente un mito o mistero e ciò che era dichiaratamente un uomo. Ma il punto qui è che la verità nascosta persino nei miti e nei misteri va del tutto perduta se siamo confinati alla considerazione di un uomo. In questo senso vi è una ironica e inconscia verità nelle parole del pagano moderno, che cantò che «i pagani ci sopravanzano e ci sopravvivono», e che «le nostre vite e i nostri aneliti sono divisi». È vero dei Modernisti, ma non è vero di noi, che troviamo simultaneamente la realizzazione di un anelito e il ricordo di una vita. È perfettamente vero che vi erano in molti miti pagani i deboli presagi dei misteri cristiani; benché anche nel dirlo ammettiamo che i presagi erano ombre. Ma quando ogni parentela immaginativa è stata esplorata o ammessa, non è vero che la mitologia si sia mai innalzata alle altezze della teologia. Non è vero che un pensiero così ardito o così sottile come questo abbia mai attraversato la mente che creò i centauri e i fauni. Nelle più selvagge e gigantesche delle primitive fantasie epiche, non vi è concezione così colossale come l’essere che è insieme Zeus e Prometeo.

Ma vi accenno qui, non per argomentarne la verità contro coloro che non la credono, ma solo per insistere sul suo intenso e intellettuale interesse per coloro che la credono. Desidero soltanto spiegare a coloro che sono in tal modo angustiati, che una mente colma della vera concezione di questa Dualità ha molto su cui pensare lungo quelle linee e non ha bisogno di dissotterrare dèi morti per screditare l’Uomo Eterno. Non vi è alcuna necessità per me di essere Modernista nei miei propri pensieri, o Monofisita nei miei propri pensieri; poiché ritengo queste opinioni molto più insulse e banali delle mie. Nelle belle parole della canzone d’amore in THE WALLET OF KAI LUNG, una delle poche canzoni d’amore veramente psicologiche del mondo: «Questa insignificante e universalmente disprezzata persona preferirebbe senza esitazione i propri pensieri ai loro.»

Any number of other examples could of course be given. This person (if I may use once more the graceful Chinese locution) would very soon exhaust the excitement of discovering that Mary and Maia both begin with an M, or that the Mother of Christ and the Mother of Cupid were both represented as women. But I know that I shall never exhaust the profundity of that unfathomable paradox which is defined so defiantly in the very title of the Mother of God. I know that there are not only far deeper, but far fresher and freer developments of thought and imagination, in that riddle of the perfectly human having once had a natural authority over the supernaturally divine, than in any sort of iconoclastic identification which assimilates all the sacred images by flattening all their faces. By the time that Christ is really made the same as Osiris, there can be very little left of either of them; but Christ, as conceived by the Catholic Church, is himself a complex and a combination, not of two unreal things, but of two real ones. In the same way an Ashtaroth exactly like one of Raphael’s Madonnas, or vice versa, would seem a somewhat featureless vision in any case; whereas there is something that is, in the most intellectual sense, unique about the conception of the THEOTOKOS. In short, in all this mere unification of traditions, true or false, there is something that may be quite simply described as dull. But the dogmas are not dull. Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve, but giving life. It is easy enough to flatten out everything for miles round with dynamite, if our only object is to give death. But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues, so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line. It is the custom, though by this time; already a rather stale custom, to complain that the Greeks or Italians who disputed about the Trinity or the Sacrament were splitting hairs. I do not know that even splitting hairs is any drearier than bleaching hairs, in the vain attempt to match the golden hair of Freya and the black hair of Cotytto. The subdivision of a hair does at least tell us something of its structure; whereas its mere discoloration tells us nothing at all. Theology does introduce us to the structure of ideas; whereas theosophical syncretism merely washes all the colours out of the coloured fairy-tales of the world. But my only purpose in this place is to reassure the kind gentleman who was troubled about the secret malady of modernity that must be eating away my otherwise empty mind. I hasten earnestly to explain that I am quite well, thank you; and that I have plenty of things to think about without falling back on a Baconian madness of pagan parallels, or establishing the connection between the tale of the bull killed by Mithras and the tune the old cow died of.

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Si potrebbe naturalmente addurre un numero qualsiasi di altri esempi. Costui (se posso usare ancora una volta la garbata locuzione cinese) avrebbe ben presto esaurito l’ebbrezza di scoprire che Maria e Maia cominciano entrambe con la M, o che la Madre di Cristo e la madre di Cupido erano entrambe raffigurate come donne. Ma so che non esaurirò mai la profondità di quell’ insondabile paradosso definito con tanta sfida nel titolo stesso di Madre di Dio. So che vi sono sviluppi non soltanto assai più profondi, ma assai più freschi e più liberi del pensiero e dell’immaginazione, in quell’enigma dell’umano perfetto che ebbe un tempo naturale autorità sul soprannaturalmente divino, che in qualunque sorta di identificazione iconoclasta che assimila tutte le immagini sacre appiattendone i volti. Nel tempo in cui Cristo sarà davvero reso identico a Osiride, ben poco potrà restare dell’uno o dell’altro; ma Cristo, come lo concepisce la Chiesa Cattolica, è egli stesso un composto e una combinazione, non di due cose irreali, ma di due reali. Allo stesso modo un’Astarte identica a una delle Madonne di Raffaello, o viceversa, parrebbe comunque una visione alquanto priva di lineamenti; mentre c’è qualcosa che è, nel senso più intellettuale del termine, unico nella concezione della THEOTOKOS. Insomma, in tutta questa mera unificazione di tradizioni, vere o false, c’è qualcosa che si può descrivere assai semplicemente come noioso. Ma i dogmi non sono noiosi. Perfino quelle che si chiamano sottili distinzioni dottrinali non sono noiose. Sono come le più fini operazioni della chirurgia: separano un nervo dall’altro, ma danno la vita. È facile spianare ogni cosa per miglia all’intorno con la dinamite, se il nostro unico scopo è dare la morte. Ma proprio come il fisiologo ha a che fare con tessuti viventi, così il teologo ha a che fare con idee viventi; e se traccia una linea tra esse, è naturalmente una linea sottilissima. È usanza, benché a questo tempo sia già un’usanza piuttosto stantia, lamentarsi che i Greci o gli Italiani i quali disputavano sulla Trinità o sul Sacramento spaccassero il capello. Non so che spaccare capelli sia più tetro dello sbiancarli, nel vano tentativo di far combaciare la chioma d’oro di Freya e quella nera di Cotytto. La suddivisione d’un capello ci dice almeno qualcosa della sua struttura; mentre la sua semplice scoloritura non ci dice nulla. La teologia ci introduce alla struttura delle idee; mentre il sincretismo teosofico si limita a lavar via tutti i colori dalle colorate fiabe del mondo. Ma il mio unico scopo, in questa sede, è rassicurare il gentile signore che si angustiava per il segreto malanno della modernità che dovrebbe rodere la mia mente, per il resto vuota. Mi affretto con fervore a spiegare che sto proprio bene, grazie; e che ho un mucchio di cose a cui pensare senza dover ripiegare su una baconiana follia di paralleli pagani, o stabilire il nesso tra la storia del toro ucciso da Mitra e la nenia con cui morì la vecchia vacca.

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THE OPTIMIST AS A SUICIDE

FREETHINKERS are occasionally thoughtful, though never free. In the modern world of the West, at any rate, they seem always to be tied to the treadmill of a materialist and monist cosmos. The universal sceptic, in Asia or in Antiquity, has probably been a bolder thinker, though very probably a more unhappy man. But what we have to deal with as scepticism is not scepticism; but a fixed faith in monism. The freethinker is not free to question monism. He is forbidden, for instance, in the only intelligible modern sense, to believe in a miracle. He is forbidden, in exactly the same sense in which he would say that we are forbidden to believe in a heresy. Both are forbidden by first principles and not by force. The Rationalist Press Association will not actually kidnap, gag or strangle Sir Arthur Keith if he admits the evidence for a cure at Lourdes. Neither will the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster have me hanged, drawn and quartered if I announce that I am an agnostic tomorrow. But of both cases it is true to say that a man cannot root up his first principles without a terrible rending and revolutionising of his very self. As a matter of fact, we are the freer of the two; as there is scarcely any evidence, natural or preternatural, that cannot be accepted as fitting into our system somewhere; whereas the materialist cannot fit the most minute miracle into his system anywhere. But let us leave that on one side as a separate question; and agree, if only for the sake of argument, that both the Catholic and the materialist are limited only by their fundamental conviction about the cosmic system; in both thought is in that sense forbidden and in that sense free. Consequently, when I see in some newspaper symposium, like that on Spiritualism, a leading materialist like Mr. John M. Robertson discussing the evidence for spiritualism, I feel exactly as I imagine him to feel when he hears a bishop in a mitre or a Jesuit in a cassock discussing the evidence for materialism. I know that Mr. Robertson cannot accept the evidence without becoming somebody quite different from Mr. Robertson; which also is within the power of the grace of God. But I know quite well he is not a freethinker; except in the sense in which I am a freethinker. He has long ago come to a conclusion which controls all his other conclusions. He is not driven by scientific evidence to accept Materialism. He is forbidden by Materialism to accept scientific evidence.

But there is another way in which the freethinker is not only thoughtful, but useful. The man who rejects the Faith altogether is often very valuable as a critic of the man who rejects it piecemeal, or bit by bit, or by fits and starts. The man who picks out some part of Catholicism that happens to please him, or throws away some part that happens to puzzle him, does in fact produce, not only the queerest sort of result, but generally the very opposite result to what he intends. And his inconsistency can often be effectively exposed from the extreme negative as well as the extreme positive point of view. It has been said that when the half-gods go, the gods arrive; it might be said in amiable parody that when the no-goddites arrive, the half-goddites go; and I am not sure it is not a good riddance. Anyhow, even the atheist can illustrate how important it is to keep the Catholic system altogether, even if he rejects it altogether.

A curious and amusing instance comes from America; in connection with Mr. Clarence Darrow, the somewhat simple-minded sceptic of that land of simplicity. He seems to have been writing something about the impossibility of anybody having a soul; of which nothing need be said except that (as usual) it seems to be the sceptic who really thinks of the soul superstitiously, as a separate and secret animal with wings; who considers the soul quite apart from the self. But what interests me about him at the moment is this. One of his arguments against immortality is that people do not really believe in it. And one of his arguments for that is that if they did believe in certain happiness beyond the grave, they would all kill themselves. He says that nobody would endure the martyrdom of cancer, for instance, if he really believed (as he apparently assumes all Christians to believe) that in any case the mere fact of death would instantly introduce the soul to perfect felicity and the society of all its best friends. A Catholic will certainly know what answer he has to give. But Mr. Clarence Darrow does not really in the least know what question he has asked.

Now there we have the final flower and crown of all modern optimism and universalism and humanitarianism in religion. Sentimentalists talk about love till the world is sick of the most glorious of all human words; they assume that there can be nothing in the next world except the sort of Utopia of practical pleasure which they promise us (but do not give us) in this world. They declare that all will be forgiven, because there is nothing to forgive. They insist that “passing over” is only like going into the next room, they insist that it will not even be a waiting-room. They declare that it must immediately introduce us to a cushioned lounge with all conceivable comforts, without any reference to how we have got there. They are positive that there is no danger, no devil; even no death. All is hope, happiness and optimism. And, as the atheist very truly points out, the logical result of all that hope, happiness and optimism would be hundreds of people hanging from lamp-posts or thousands of people throwing themselves into wells or canals. We should find the rational result of the modern Religion of Joy and Love in one huge human stampede of suicide. Pessimism would have killed its thousands, but optimism its ten thousands.

Now, of course, as I say, a Catholic knows the answer; because he holds the complete philosophy, which keeps a man sane; and not some single fragment of it, whether sad or glad, which may easily drive him mad. A Catholic does not kill himself because he does not take it for granted that he will deserve heaven in any case, or that it will not matter at all whether he deserves it at all. He does not profess to know exactly what danger he would run; but he does know what loyalty he would violate and what command or condition he would disregard. He actually thinks that a man might be fitter for heaven because he endured like a man; and that a hero could be a martyr to cancer as St. Lawrence or St. Cecilia were martyrs to cauldrons or gridirons. The faith in a future life, the hope of a future happiness, the belief that God is Love and that loyalty is eternal life, these things do not produce lunacy and anarchy, IF they are taken along with the other Catholic doctrines about duty and vigilance and watchfulness against the powers of hell. They might produce lunacy and anarchy, if they were taken alone. And the Modernists, that is, the optimists and the sentimentalists, did want us to take them alone. Of course, the same would be true, if somebody took the other doctrines of duty and discipline alone. It would produce another dark age of Puritans rapidly blackening into Pessimists. Indeed, the extremes meet, when they are both ends clipped off what should be a complete thing. Our parable ends poetically with two gibbets side by side; one for the suicidal pessimist and the other for the suicidal optimist.

The point is that in this passage the American sceptic is answering the Modernist; but he is not answering the Catholic. The Catholic has an extremely simple and sensible reason for not cutting his throat in order to fly instantly into Paradise. But he might really raise a question for those who talk as if Paradise were invariably and instantly populated with people who had cut their throats. And this is only one example out of a long list of historical examples; in which those who tried to make the Faith more simple invariably made it less sane. The Moslems imagined that they were merely being sensible when they cut down the creed to a mere belief in one God; but in the world of practical psychology they really cut it down to one Fate. The actual effect on ordinary men was simply fatalism; like that of the Turk who will not take his wound to a hospital because he is resigned to Kismet or the will of Allah. The Puritans thought they were simplifying things by appealing to what they called the plain words of Scripture; but as a fact they were complicating things by bringing in half a hundred cranky sects and crazy suggestions. And the modern universalist and humanitarian thought they were simplifying things when they interpreted the great truth that God is Love, as meaning that there can be no war with the demons or no danger to the soul. But in fact they were inventing even darker riddles with even wilder answers; and Mr. Clarence Darrow has suggested one of them. He will be gratified to receive the thanks of all Catholics for doing so.

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L’OTTIMISTA COME SUICIDA

I LIBERI PENSATORI sono occasionalmente pensosi, benché mai liberi. Nel mondo moderno dell’Occidente, in ogni caso, essi sembrano sempre legati alla ruota del mulino di un cosmo materialista e monista. Lo scettico universale, in Asia o nell’Antichità, è stato probabilmente un pensatore più ardito, benché assai probabilmente un uomo più infelice. Ma ciò con cui abbiamo a che fare come scetticismo non è scetticismo; bensì una fede fissa nel monismo. Il libero pensatore non è libero di mettere in dubbio il monismo. Gli è vietato, per esempio, nell’unico senso moderno intelligibile, credere in un miracolo. Gli è vietato, esattamente nello stesso senso in cui egli direbbe che a noi è vietato credere in un’eresia. Entrambe le cose sono vietate da princìpi primi e non dalla forza. La Rationalist Press Association non rapirà, imbavaglierà o strangolerà effettivamente Sir Arthur Keith se egli ammette la prova di una guarigione a Lourdes. Né il Cardinale Arcivescovo di Westminster mi farà impiccare, sventrare e squartare se domani annuncio di essere agnostico. Ma di entrambi i casi è vero dire che un uomo non può sradicare i propri princìpi primi senza un terribile lacerarsi e sconvolgersi del suo stesso io. In verità, noi siamo i più liberi dei due; poiché non c’è quasi alcuna prova, naturale o preternaturale, che non possa essere accettata come rientrante da qualche parte nel nostro sistema; mentre il materialista non può far rientrare il più minuto miracolo nel suo sistema da nessuna parte. Ma lasciamo questo da un lato come questione a sé; e conveniamo, non fosse che per amor di discussione, che sia il Cattolico sia il materialista sono limitati soltanto dalla loro fondamentale convinzione sul sistema cosmico; in entrambi il pensiero è in quel senso vietato e in quel senso libero. Di conseguenza, quando vedo in qualche simposio di giornale, come quello sullo Spiritualismo, un materialista di primo piano come il signor John M. Robertson discutere le prove dello spiritualismo, provo esattamente ciò che immagino provi lui quando sente un vescovo in mitra o un gesuita in tonaca discutere le prove del materialismo. So che il signor Robertson non può accettare le prove senza diventare qualcuno del tutto diverso dal signor Robertson; il che pure rientra nel potere della grazia di Dio. Ma so bene che egli non è un libero pensatore; se non nel senso in cui sono io un libero pensatore. Egli è giunto molto tempo fa a una conclusione che governa tutte le sue altre conclusioni. Non è spinto dalla prova scientifica ad accettare il Materialismo. Gli è vietato dal Materialismo accettare la prova scientifica.

Ma vi è un altro modo in cui il libero pensatore è non solo pensoso, ma utile. L’uomo che rifiuta del tutto la Fede è spesso assai prezioso come critico dell’uomo che la rifiuta a pezzi, o poco per volta, o a strappi. L’uomo che sceglie una parte del Cattolicesimo che gli piace, o getta via una parte che lo imbarazza, produce di fatto non solo il più bizzarro genere di risultato, ma in generale il risultato esattamente opposto a quello che intende. E la sua incoerenza può spesso essere efficacemente smascherata dall’estremo punto di vista negativo nonché dall’estremo punto di vista positivo. È stato detto che quando i semidèi se ne vanno, arrivano gli dèi; si potrebbe dire, in amabile parodia, che quando arrivano i seguaci del nessun-dio, se ne vanno i seguaci del semidio; e non sono sicuro che non sia un buon liberarsene. Comunque, persino l’ateo può illustrare quanto sia importante mantenere il sistema Cattolico nel suo insieme, anche se lo rifiuta nel suo insieme.

Un esempio curioso e divertente viene dall’America; in connessione con il signor Clarence Darrow, lo scettico alquanto ingenuo di quella terra di semplicità. Sembra abbia scritto qualcosa sull’impossibilità che qualcuno abbia un’anima; di cui nulla occorre dire, se non che (come al solito) sembra essere lo scettico a pensare davvero all’anima in modo superstizioso, come un animale separato e segreto con le ali; colui che considera l’anima del tutto a parte dall’io. Ma ciò che di lui mi interessa al momento è questo. Uno dei suoi argomenti contro l’immortalità è che la gente non ci crede davvero. E uno dei suoi argomenti a favore di ciò è che, se credessero davvero in una felicità certa oltre la tomba, si ucciderebbero tutti. Egli dice che nessuno sopporterebbe il martirio del cancro, per esempio, se credesse davvero (come egli apparentemente presume che tutti i Cristiani credano) che in ogni caso il mero fatto della morte introdurrebbe istantaneamente l’anima alla perfetta felicità e alla società di tutti i suoi migliori amici. Un Cattolico saprà certamente quale risposta debba dare. Ma il signor Clarence Darrow non sa affatto, in realtà, quale domanda abbia posto.

Ora, qui abbiamo il fiore ultimo e la corona di tutto il moderno ottimismo e universalismo e umanitarismo in religione. I sentimentalisti parlano d’amore finché il mondo è nauseato della più gloriosa di tutte le parole umane; danno per scontato che nell’altro mondo non possa esservi nulla se non quella sorta di Utopia di piacere pratico che promettono a noi (ma non ci danno) in questo mondo. Dichiarano che tutto sarà perdonato, perché non c’è nulla da perdonare. Insistono che il «trapassare» è solo come entrare nella stanza accanto, insistono che non sarà nemmeno una sala d’attesa. Dichiarano che ci deve introdurre immediatamente in un salotto imbottito con ogni concepibile comodità, senza alcun riferimento a come vi siamo giunti. Sono positivi che non vi sia alcun pericolo, alcun diavolo; nemmeno alcuna morte. Tutto è speranza, felicità e ottimismo. E, come l’ateo assai giustamente fa notare, il risultato logico di tutta quella speranza, felicità e ottimismo sarebbero centinaia di persone appese ai lampioni o migliaia di persone che si gettano in pozzi o canali. Troveremmo il risultato razionale della moderna Religione della Gioia e dell’Amore in un’unica enorme fuga precipitosa umana di suicidio. Il pessimismo avrebbe ucciso i suoi mille, ma l’ottimismo i suoi diecimila.

Ora, naturalmente, come dico, un Cattolico conosce la risposta; perché egli possiede la filosofia completa, che mantiene un uomo sano di mente; e non un solo frammento di essa, sia esso triste o gaio, che può facilmente farlo impazzire. Un Cattolico non si uccide perché non dà per scontato che meriterà il cielo in ogni caso, o che non importerà affatto se lo merita o no. Non pretende di sapere esattamente quale pericolo correrebbe; ma sa quale lealtà violerebbe e quale comando o condizione ignorerebbe. Egli pensa realmente che un uomo possa essere più adatto al cielo perché ha sopportato da uomo; e che un eroe potrebbe essere martire del cancro come San Lorenzo o Santa Cecilia furono martiri delle caldaie o delle graticole. La fede in una vita futura, la speranza di una felicità futura, la credenza che Dio è Amore e che la lealtà è vita eterna, queste cose non producono follia e anarchia, SE sono prese insieme alle altre dottrine Cattoliche sul dovere e la vigilanza e la guardia contro le potenze dell’inferno. Potrebbero produrre follia e anarchia, se fossero prese da sole. E i Modernisti, cioè gli ottimisti e i sentimentalisti, volevano che le prendessimo da sole. Naturalmente, lo stesso sarebbe vero se qualcuno prendesse le altre dottrine del dovere e della disciplina da sole. Produrrebbe un’altra età oscura di Puritani che rapidamente si incupiscono in Pessimisti. Invero, gli estremi si toccano, quando sono entrambi capi mozzati da ciò che dovrebbe essere una cosa completa. La nostra parabola finisce poeticamente con due patiboli affiancati; uno per il pessimista suicida e l’altro per l’ottimista suicida.

Il punto è che in questo passaggio lo scettico americano sta rispondendo al Modernista; ma non sta rispondendo al Cattolico. Il Cattolico ha una ragione estremamente semplice e sensata per non tagliarsi la gola allo scopo di volare istantaneamente in Paradiso. Ma egli potrebbe davvero sollevare una questione per coloro che parlano come se il Paradiso fosse invariabilmente e istantaneamente popolato di gente che si è tagliata la gola. E questo è solo un esempio in una lunga lista di esempi storici; in cui coloro che tentarono di rendere la Fede più semplice la resero invariabilmente meno sana. I musulmani immaginarono di essere semplicemente sensati quando ridussero il credo a una mera credenza in un solo Dio; ma nel mondo della psicologia pratica lo ridussero in realtà a un solo Fato. L’effetto reale sugli uomini ordinari fu semplicemente fatalismo; come quello del Turco che non porta la sua ferita all’ospedale perché è rassegnato al Kismet o alla volontà di Allah. I Puritani pensarono di semplificare le cose appellandosi a ciò che chiamavano le semplici parole della Scrittura; ma di fatto complicavano le cose introducendo mezzo centinaio di sette bislacche e di suggerimenti folli. E il moderno universalista e umanitario pensarono di semplificare le cose quando interpretarono la grande verità che Dio è Amore, nel senso che non ci può essere guerra con i demoni né alcun pericolo per l’anima. Ma di fatto essi inventavano enigmi persino più oscuri con risposte persino più folli; e il signor Clarence Darrow ne ha suggerito uno. Sarà gratificato di ricevere i ringraziamenti di tutti i Cattolici per averlo fatto.

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FALL

I HAVE remarked on the curious rearguard action of bluff that is being fought to cover the retreat of the Darwinians. An example of the same thing has appeared in connection with a much more famous name; indeed, with two famous names. Mr. H. G. Wells has replied to Mr. Belloc, who wrote a criticism of the “Outline of History,” chiefly to protest against a certain tone of arbitrary generalisation and sham knowledge of the unknown. A typical case was that in which Mr. Wells said of the men who drew reindeers in caves: “There seems no scope in such a life for speculation or philosophy,” and Mr. Belloc not unnaturally answered: “Why on earth not?” But the details of the various works in question do not concern me immediately here; they mostly depend on that habit of talking as if every cave-drawing had its date obligingly inscribed on it; or any stone hatchet might bear the inscription 400,000 B.C. or possibly, B.O.H., or Before the Outline of History. At the moment the only point of contact is that which affects a continuation of our previous criticism, touching the present state of Darwinism. And what strikes me is that even Mr. Wells, often a sufficiently warm controversialist, is relatively and really cold in the matter; and his defence of Darwin is much more of an apology than an apologia. Indeed, like so many other modern apologies, it almost amounts to pleading that Darwin was not a Darwinian.

The Victorian evolutionists devoted themselves to declaring how great Darwin’s thesis was. The new evolutionists seem to devote themselves to explaining how small it was. They really seem to plead, as in the old anecdote, that it gave birth to a theory, but a very little one. Some of Mr. Wells’s words may surely, without unfairness, be called apologetic. He does not, like the professor previously mentioned, try to get over the word “origin” by talking about “the cause of the origin.” So he concentrates on the word “species,” as if evolution had not only applied to a sub-division. He adds that Darwin did not at the beginning even apply it to man. What in the world would the Victorian Darwinians have said had they heard it urged in defence of Darwinism that it was not applied to man? Are we to understand that only the first book of Darwin is divinely inspired? Again, Mr. Wells says that natural selection is common sense. And doubtless, if it only means that things fitted for survival do survive, it is common sense. We may also add that it is common knowledge. Has it come to this, that Darwin is defended because he only discovered what was common knowledge? The real question, of course, is that stated by Mr. Belloc; when he said that nobody needs to be told that in a flood fish live and cattle die. The question is, How soon do cattle turn into fish? That would be an example of the true Darwinian theory; and it is now merely minimised, represented as only one element of evolution and without even the elements of an explanation. We fancy there is a healthy prejudice behind it all. Mr. Wells indignantly repudiates the slander uttered by Mr. Belloc, who called him a patriot. But it is true; the deep English national pride has much to do with this devotion. And rather than deprive England of her Darwin, they have deprived Darwin of his discovery.

When a man is as great a genius as Mr. Wells, I admit it sounds provocative to call him provincial. But if he wants to know why anybody does it, it will be enough to point silently to the headline of one of his pages, which runs: “Where is the Garden of Eden?” To come down to a thing like that, and to think it telling, when talking to an intelligent Catholic about the Fall, that IS provinciality; proud and priceless provinciality. The French peasants of whom Mr. Wells speaks are not in that sense provincial. As Mr. Wells says, they do not know anything about Darwin and Evolution. They do not know and they do not care. That is where they are much better philosophers than Mr. Wells. They hold the philosophy of the Fall, in the form of a simple story which may be historic or symbolic, but anyhow cannot be more important than what it symbolises. In comparison with that truth, it does not matter twopence whether any evolutionary theory is true or not. Whether or no the garden was an allegory, the truth itself can be very well allegorised as a garden. And the point of it is that Man, whatever else he is, is certainly NOT merely one of the plants of the garden that has plucked its roots out of the soil and walked about with them like legs, or on the principle of a double dahlia has grown duplicate eyes and ears. He is something else, something strange and solitary; and more like the statue that was once the god of the garden; but the statue has fallen from its pedestal and lies broken among the plants and weeds. This conception has nothing to do with materialism as it refers to materials. The image might be made of wood; the wood might have come from the garden; the sculptor presumably might, and probably did, allow for the growth and grain of the wood in what he carved and expressed. But my fable fixes the two truths of the true scripture. The first is that the wood was graven or stamped with an image, deliberately, and from the outside; in this case the image of God. The second is that this image has been damaged and defaced, so that it is now both better and worse than the mere plants in the garden, which are perfect according to their own plan. There is room for any amount of speculation about the history of the tree before it was turned into an image; there is room for any amount of doubt and mystery about what really happened when it was turned into an image; there is room for any amount of hope and imagination about what it will look like when it is really mended and made into the perfect statue we have never seen. But it has the two fixed points, that man was uplifted at the first and fell; and to answer it by saying, “Where is the Garden of Eden?” is like answering a philosophical Buddhist by saying, “When were you last a donkey?”

The Fall is a view of life. It is not only the only enlightening, but the only encouraging view of life. It holds, as against the only real alternative philosophies, those of the Buddhist or the Pessimist or the Promethean, that we have misused a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one. It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will. Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate. A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not a word to say. For instance, on the colossal contrast between the completeness of man’s machines and the continued corruption of his motives; on the fact that no social progress really seems to leave self behind; on the fact that the first and not the last men of any school or revolution are generally the best and purest; as William Penn was better than a Quaker millionaire or Washington better than an American oil magnate; on that proverb that says: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin; on those extremes of good and evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans and sceptics: “We look before and after, and pine for what is not”; which cries against all prigs and progressives out of the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory; and that we are all kings in exile.

Now to people who feel that this view of life is more real, more radical, more universal than the cheap simplifications opposed to it, it comes with quite a shock of bathos to realise that anybody let alone a man like Mr. Wells, supposes that it all depends on some detail about the site of a garden in Mesopotamia, like that identified by General Gordon. It is hard to find any parallel to such an incongruity; for there is no real similarity between our muddled mortal affairs and events that were divine if they were mysterious, and scriptures that are sacred even if they are symbolical. But some shadow of a comparison could be made out of the modern myths. I mean the sort of myths that men like Mr. Wells generally do believe in; such as the Myth of Magna Carta or the Myth of the Mayflower. Now many historians will maintain that Magna Carta was really nothing to speak of; that it was largely a piece of feudal privilege. But suppose one of the historians who holds this view began to argue with us excitedly about the fabulous nature of our ordinary fancy picture of Magna Carta. Suppose he produced maps and documents to prove that Magna Carta was not signed at Runnymede, but somewhere else; as I believe some scholars do maintain. Suppose he criticised the false heraldry and fancy-dress costumes of the ordinary sort of waxwork historical picture of the event. We should think he was rather unduly excited about a detail of mediaeval history. But with what a shock of astonishment should we realise at last that the man actually thought that all modern attempts at democracy must be abandoned, that all representative government must be wrong, that all Parliaments would have to be dissolved and all political rights destroyed, if once it were admitted that King John did not sign that special document in that little island in the Thames! What should we think of him, if he really thought we had no reasons for liking law or liberty, except the authenticity of that beloved royal signature? That is very much how I feel when I find that Mr. Wells really imagines that the luminous and profound philosophy of the Fall only means that Eden was somewhere in Mesopotamia. Now the only explanation of a great man like Mr. Wells having a small prejudice, like this about the snake, is that he does come of a religious tradition that regarded the text of Hebrew Scripture as the only authority and had forgotten all about the great mediaeval metaphysic and the discussion of fundamental ideas. The man who does that is provincial; and there is no harm in saying so even when he is one of the greatest men of letters and a glory to the English name.

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I LINEAMENTI DELLA CADUTA

HO osservato l’insolita azione di retroguardia basata sull’intimidazione che si sta combattendo per coprire la ritirata dei darwinisti. Un esempio dello stesso fenomeno è emerso in relazione a un nome molto più famoso; anzi, a due nomi celebri. Il signor H.G. Wells ha risposto al signor Belloc, che aveva scritto una critica del “Compendio di storia”, principalmente per protestare contro un certo tono di generalizzazione arbitraria e di presunta conoscenza dell’ignoto. Un caso tipico è quello in cui il signor Wells ha affermato riguardo agli uomini che disegnavano renne nelle caverne: “Non sembra esserci spazio in una vita del genere per la speculazione o la filosofia”, e il signor Belloc, non senza ragione, ha risposto: “Perché mai no?” Ma i dettagli delle varie opere in questione qui non mi interessano immediatamente; dipendono per lo più da quell’abitudine di parlare come se ogni disegno su roccia avesse la data gentilmente iscritta sopra, o come se un qualsiasi ascia di pietra potesse portare l’iscrizione 400.000 a.C., o forse B.O.H., cioè Prima del Compendio di storia. In questo momento, il solo punto di contatto è quello che riguarda la continuazione della nostra precedente critica, relativa allo stato attuale del darwinismo. E ciò che mi colpisce è che persino il signor Wells, spesso un polemista abbastanza acceso, si dimostra relativamente e realmente freddo in materia; e la sua difesa di Darwin è più una scusa che un’apologia. Anzi, come molte altre apologie moderne, sfiora quasi la richiesta di considerare Darwin non un darwiniano.

Gli evoluzionisti vittoriani si dedicarono a dichiarare quanto fosse grande la tesi di Darwin. I nuovi evoluzionisti sembrano invece dedicarsi a spiegare quanto essa fosse piccola. Sembrano davvero sostenere, come nella vecchia barzelletta, che essa diede alla luce una teoria, ma molto piccola. Alcune parole del signor Wells possono certamente, senza ingiustizia, essere chiamate apologetiche. Egli non cerca, a differenza del professore precedentemente citato, di superare la parola “origine” parlando di “la causa dell’origine”. Così si concentra sulla parola “specie”, come se l’evoluzione non avesse applicato solo una sottodivisione. Aggiunge che Darwin all’inizio non la applicò nemmeno all’uomo. Che cosa al mondo avrebbero detto i darwiniani vittoriani se avessero sentito sostenere in difesa del darwinismo che esso non era stato applicato all’uomo? Dobbiamo capire che solo il primo libro di Darwin è divinamente ispirato? Ancora, il signor Wells dice che la selezione naturale è buon senso. E senza dubbio, se significa solo che le cose adatte alla sopravvivenza sopravvivono, è buon senso. Possiamo anche aggiungere che è una conoscenza comune. È arrivata a questo, che Darwin viene difeso perché ha scoperto solo ciò che era di comune conoscenza? La vera questione, naturalmente, è quella enunciata dal signor Belloc; quando disse che nessuno ha bisogno di essere informato che in un’alluvione i pesci vivono e il bestiame muore. La domanda è: quanto presto il bestiame si trasforma in pesce? Questo sarebbe un esempio della vera teoria darwiniana; e ora viene semplicemente minimizzata, rappresentata come solo un elemento dell’evoluzione e senza nemmeno gli elementi di una spiegazione. Immaginiamo che ci sia un sano pregiudizio dietro tutto questo. Il signor Wells respinge indignato la calunnia pronunciata dal signor Belloc, che lo chiamò patriota. Ma è vero; il profondo orgoglio nazionale inglese ha molto a che fare con questa devozione. E piuttosto che privare l’Inghilterra del suo Darwin, hanno privato Darwin della sua scoperta.

Quando un uomo è un genio grande come il signor Wells, ammetto che suoni provocatorio chiamarlo provinciale. Ma se vuole sapere perché qualcuno lo fa, basterà indicare silenziosamente il titolo di una delle sue pagine, che recita: “Dov’è l’orto del Paradiso?” Scendere a una cosa del genere e pensare che sia efficace quando si parla con un cattolico intelligente della Caduta, QUESTO è provincialità; provincialità orgogliosa e inestimabile. I contadini francesi di cui parla il signor Wells non sono provinciali in quel senso. Come dice il signor Wells, essi non sanno nulla di Darwin ed evoluzione. Non lo sanno e non gliene importa. È qui che sono filosofi molto migliori del signor Wells. Essi aderiscono alla filosofia della Caduta, nella forma di una semplice storia che può essere storica o simbolica, ma comunque non può essere più importante di ciò che essa simboleggia. In confronto a questa verità, non importa nulla se qualche teoria evolutiva è vera o no. Che il giardino fosse un’allegoria o meno, la verità stessa può essere benissimo allegorizzata come un giardino. E il punto è che l’uomo, qualunque altra cosa sia, non è CERTAMENTE solo una delle piante del giardino che ha strappato le sue radici dal suolo e cammina con esse come se fossero gambe, o secondo il principio di un’ibrida dalia ha sviluppato occhi e orecchie doppi. Egli è qualcos’altro, qualcosa di strano e solitario; più simile alla statua che una volta era la divinità del giardino; ma la statua è caduta dal suo piedistallo e giace rotta tra le piante ed erbacce. Questa concezione non ha nulla a che fare col materialismo in quanto si riferisce ai materiali. L’immagine potrebbe essere fatta di legno; il legno potrebbe provenire dal giardino; lo scultore presumibilmente poteva, e probabilmente ha fatto, tenere conto della crescita e del venato del legno in ciò che ha intagliato ed espresso. Ma la mia favola fissa le due verità della vera scrittura. La prima è che il legno era inciso o stampato con un’immagine, deliberatamente, dall’esterno; in questo caso l’immagine di Dio. La seconda è che questa immagine è stata danneggiata e deturpata, cosicché ora è sia migliore che peggiore delle semplici piante nel giardino, che sono perfette secondo il loro piano. C’è spazio per qualsiasi speculazione sulla storia dell’albero prima che fosse trasformato in un’immagine; c’è spazio per qualsiasi quantità di dubbio e mistero su ciò che è realmente accaduto quando fu trasformato in un’immagine; c’è spazio per qualsiasi quantità di speranza e fantasia su come apparirà quando sarà veramente riparato e fatto diventare la statua perfetta che non abbiamo mai visto. Ma ha i due punti fissi, che l’uomo fu innalzato all’inizio e cadde; e rispondere dicendo “Dov’è il giardino dell’Eden?” è come rispondere a un buddista filosofico dicendogli: “Quando sei stato l’ultima volta un asino?”

La Caduta è una visione della vita. Non solo è l’unica illuminante, ma anche l’unica incoraggiante visione della vita. Afferma, contro le uniche alternative filosofiche reali, quelle del buddista o dello scettico o del prometeico, che abbiamo abusato di un mondo buono e non siamo stati semplicemente intrappolati in uno cattivo. Riconduce il male all’uso sbagliato della volontà, e così dichiara che può essere corretto dall’uso giusto della volontà. Ogni altra credenza tranne quella è una forma di resa al destino. Un uomo che abbraccia questa visione della vita la troverà illuminante su mille cose; su cui l’etica evoluzionistica non ha nulla da dire. Per esempio, sul contrasto colossale tra la completezza delle macchine dell’uomo e la continua corruzione dei suoi motivi; sul fatto che nessun progresso sociale sembra davvero lasciare dietro di sé il sé; sul fatto che i primi non gli ultimi uomini di una scuola o rivoluzione sono generalmente i migliori e più puri; come William Penn era migliore di un milionario quacchero o Washington di un magnate del petrolio americano; su quel proverbio che dice: “Il prezzo della libertà è la vigilanza eterna”, che non è altro che ciò che gli teologi dicono di ogni altra virtù, ed è esso stesso solo un modo di affermare la verità del peccato originale; su quegli estremi di bene e male per cui l’uomo supera tutti gli animali della misura del cielo e dell’inferno; su quel senso sublime di perdita che è nel suono stesso di tutta la grande poesia, e da nessuna parte più che nella poesia dei pagani e degli scettici: “Guardiamo avanti e indietro, e languiamo per ciò che non c’è”; che grida contro tutti i puritani e progressisti dalle profondità stesse e gli abissi del cuore infranto dell’uomo, che la felicità non è solo una speranza, ma anche in qualche strano modo un ricordo; e che siamo tutti re in esilio.

Ora, per le persone che ritengono questa visione della vita più reale, più radicale e più universale delle semplificazioni banali che si oppongono ad essa, è un vero shock scoprire che qualcuno, figuriamoci poi un uomo come il signor Wells, supponga che tutto dipenda da qualche dettaglio sul luogo di un giardino in Mesopotamia, come quello identificato dal generale Gordon. È difficile trovare un paragone per una tale incongruenza; perché non c’è alcuna vera somiglianza tra le nostre confuse faccende mortali e eventi che furono divini se misteriosi, e scritture che sono sacre anche se simboliche. Ma si potrebbe trovare qualche ombra di un paragone nei miti moderni. Intendo il tipo di miti in cui generalmente credono uomini come il signor Wells; come il Mito della Magna Carta o il Mito del Mayflower. Ora molti storici sosterranno che la Magna Carta non fosse davvero nulla di cui parlare; che fosse in gran parte un pezzo di privilegio feudale. Ma supponiamo che uno degli storici che condivide questa visione cominci ad argomentare con noi eccitato sulla natura favolosa della nostra ordinaria immagine fantastica della Magna Carta. Supponiamo che egli produca mappe e documenti per provare che la Magna Carta non fu firmata a Runnymede, ma da qualche altra parte; come credo alcuni studiosi sostengano. Supponiamo che critichi l’araldica falsa e i costumi di fantasia del tipo ordinario di immagine storica in cera dell’evento. Penseremmo che sia piuttosto eccessivamente eccitato per un dettaglio della storia medievale. Ma con quale shock di stupore dovremmo renderci conto infine che l’uomo pensava davvero che tutti i moderni tentativi di democrazia dovessero essere abbandonati, che ogni rappresentanza di governo fosse sbagliata, che tutti i Parlamenti dovrebbero essere sciolte e tutti i diritti politici distrutti, se una volta si ammettesse che Re Giovanni non firmò quel documento speciale in quell’isola piccola nel Tamigi! Cosa penseremmo di lui, se davvero pensasse che non abbiamo ragioni per apprezzare la legge o la libertà, eccetto l’autenticità di quella amata firma reale? È più o meno così che mi sento quando scopro che il signor Wells si immagina davvero che la filosofia luminosa e profonda della Caduta significhi solo che Eden fosse da qualche parte in Mesopotamia. Ora, l’unica spiegazione di un grande uomo come il signor Wells che abbia un piccolo pregiudizio, come questo riguardo al serpente, è che egli proviene da una tradizione religiosa che considerava il testo della Scrittura Ebraica come l’unica autorità e aveva dimenticato tutto sulla grande metafisica medievale e la discussione delle idee fondamentali. L’uomo che fa questo è provinciale; e non c’è niente di male a dirlo anche quando è uno dei più grandi letterati e una gloria per il nome inglese.

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THE IDOLS OF SCOTLAND

THE thing that strikes me most in current controversy is that our opponents are talking almost entirely in terms of the past, and that an entirely dead past; whereas we are making some sort of attempt, whether it be considered impertinent or eccentric or meddlesome or paradoxical, to deal with the practical conditions of the present. An amusing comedy on these lines seems to have arisen on the subject of Scottish Nationalism or the notion of Home Rule for North Britain. A worthy Presbyterian has warned his fellow-countrymen that the movement is tainted by the presence of Roman Catholics, and especially by that of Mr. Compton Mackenzie; and that no little degree of the deadly peril is indicated by the fact that Mr. Cunninghame Graham is interested in a book by Mr. Belloc; in which the hideous sentiment is uttered that the Reformation was the shipwreck of Christendom. Personally I should have thought it was obvious to anybody on any side, in one solid and objective sense, that it was the shipwreck of Christendom. I should imagine that it would be obvious to anybody, for instance, who desires or even discusses the Reunion of Christendom. There certainly was a united vessel or vehicle and it certainly did break up into different parts. Some people may think the ship was a rotten old-fashioned three-decker that was bound to break up; and that the people were lucky who got away from it in boats. But it is certain that it did break up and that the boats were not the same as the original ship. A man might as well resent our saying that the rise of the feudal kingdoms and the modern nationalities was part of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This is only one of the marks of such bigotry; but it is worth noting at the outset. One of the peculiarities of this sort of bigot is that he cannot distinguish between provocative statements and plain inevitable statements. If I say that the Reformation was a relapse into barbarism, a return to all that was worst in the Dark Ages without anything of what was best in them, an idolatry of dead Hebrew documents full of visions and symbols without any Daniel to interpret the dreams, a stampede of brutal luxury and pride with a vulgar howl of hot-gospelling for an excuse, a riot of thieves and looters with a few foaming and gibbering lunatics carried in front of it like live mascots for luck; the return of the Manichee, the dirty ape of the ascetic, conspiring with the devil to destroy the world— if I were to say all this I should think that these remarks about Protestantism certainly had a slightly provocative flavour. But if I were to say, with Mr. Belloc, that Protestantism was the shipwreck of Christendom, I should regard it as an ordinary historical statement, like saying that the American War of Independence was a split in the British Empire. The bigot cannot see the difference between these two types of statement, whether made by us or by himself.

The next interesting thing to note about the protest is that the Protestant goes on to say that Mr. Compton Mackenzie and his friends are going to ruin Scotland by removing the stern teaching of John Knox, which has apparently created the Scottish character. This seems a little hard on the Scottish character. I cannot quite bring myself to believe that the character of Scott or of Stevenson, the character of Burns or Barrie, are exact and unaltered reproductions of the stern teaching of John Knox. But before we come to any such comparisons, it is worth remarking, on the face of the thing that a rather more living world, a life more in touch with modern conditions, a grasp of the actual problems of the present and the immediate future, is rather more indicated by saying the words “Compton Mackenzie” than by saying the words “John Knox.” Many very modern young men have recently joined the same religion as Mr. Compton Mackenzie. No such modern young men, that I ever heard of, have ever exhibited the smallest desire to go back to the religion of John Knox. As a matter of plain fact, there is hardly one modern Scotsman in a thousand who has the smallest sympathy with the real religion of John Knox. He may vaguely respect John Knox as a Scottish hero, on the supposition (quite startlingly false) that he was a Scottish patriot. As a matter of fact, the patriotic party in Scotland was the wicked Papistical party; Knox and his Presbyterians were all for helping the pressure of England and Elizabeth. They would have justified themselves by saying that they had the one, true and only right religion. The question is, who is left even in Scotland who believes that it was the one, true and only right religion? I repeat, about one in a thousand; perhaps only a few splendidly fanatical old Wee Frees in the Highlands. Anybody who knows anything of the Scottish Presbyterian Churches, during the last fifty years, knows that the prevailing doctrine taught in them has NOT been the severe Calvinism of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, still less the wild Calvinism of the sixteenth. It has been a mild hash of Hegelian philosophy and Higher Criticism, all borrowed from Germany and carefully learnt by Scotch students in German Universities. And anybody who has noticed what the modern Scottish character is really like, knows that it does not by this time (thank heaven) bear the smallest resemblance to the sternness of John Knox. It is rather sentimental than otherwise, though its sentiment finds expression in more than one brilliant and admirable man of genius. Modern Scotland is not even remotely represented by John Knox. It is represented much more accurately, and much more honourably, by Sir Harry Lauder and Sir James Barrie.

This dull habit of invoking dead things, in a world in which we are surrounded by more and more interesting living things, is the second mark of the sort of bigot I am describing. It would be an extremely interesting business to write a real, respectful and sympathetic history of the remarkable episode of Scottish Puritanism; insisting on its integrity and its intellectual vigour while it lasted. But any sincere study of it must conclude with the statement that it did not last. One of the most brilliant and distinguished of Scottish professors, at Edinburgh University, himself of an origin wholly Puritan and of sympathies the very reverse of Catholic, used to me the true and forcible expression about the old Scottish Sabbatarianism, “It covered all Scotland; and then one morning, it had suddenly vanished everywhere like the snow.” And though the story might be told truly from either standpoint, or from many others, it is but natural that we should draw our own moral from it. And the moral is, of course, one which we find running through the whole of our history.

The birth and death of every heresy has been essentially the same. A morbid or unbalanced Catholic takes one idea out of the thousandfold throng of Catholic ideas; and announces that he cares for that Catholic idea more than for Catholicism. He takes it away with him into a wilderness, where the idea becomes an image and the image an idol. Then, after a century or two, he suddenly wakes up and discovers that the idol is an idol; and, shortly after that, that the wilderness is a wilderness. If he is a wise man, he calls himself a fool. If he is a fool, he calls himself an evolutionary progressive who has outgrown the worship of idols; and he looks round him at the wilderness, spreading bare and desolate on every side and says, in the beautiful words of Mr. H. G. Wells: “I see no limit to it at all.”

That is what happened to the Calvinistic Scotsman; and the chief comfort in the prospect is that the Scotsman is not generally a fool, even when he has ceased to be a Calvinist. But he very often becomes an atheist; and the fact that so many of the hard destructive sceptics, from Hume downwards, came from Scotland, was the early and significant evidence of the discovery of the idol and the wilderness. But in any case, that is the compact parable of what occurred. The Calvinist was a Catholic whose imagination had been in some way caught and overpowered by the one isolated theological truth of the power and knowledge of God; and he offered to it human sacrifice, not only of every human sentiment, but of every other divine quality. Something in that bare idea of all-seeing, all-searching and pitiless power intoxicated and exalted certain men for a certain period, as certain men are intoxicated by a storm of wind or some terrible stage tragedy. The more moderate Protestants, the Anglicans and to a large extent the Lutherans, had something of the same queer feeling about the King. Hence came the Cavalier doctrine of Divine Right—and the court chaplains of Prussia. Nothing is more intriguing and challenging to the imagination than the necessity of trying to understand how men in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries felt a sort of abstract altruistic joy in the mere might and triumph of the Prince; in the mere autocracy of the earthly ruler. The Calvinists, to do them justice, felt it only about the heavenly ruler. In that sense the Scots can look proudly back on their Calvinism. But they cannot look proudly forward to Calvinism. They really know, as well as anybody else, that this isolated religious idea can no longer be kept separate from all the other religious ideas to which it belongs. The Calvinism of the Puritan is as dead as the Divine Right of the Cavaliers; men can no longer worship the idol, whether it is Presbyterianism or Erastianism. They can only worship the wilderness; which is atheism—or, as the more polite say, pantheism.

Whether it be called a Catholic tendency or no, all the movements of all the sects of late have been in the direction of trying to put together again those separate pieces that were pulled apart in the sixteenth century. The main feature of our time has been the fact that one person after another has recovered one piece after another, and added it to the new scheme by borrowing it from the old. There is one sufficient proof that there has indeed been a shipwreck. And that is that Robinson Crusoe has, ever since, been continually going back to get things from the wreck.

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GLI IDOLI DI SCOZIA

CIÒ che più mi colpisce nelle controversie odierne è che i nostri avversari parlano quasi interamente in termini del passato, e per giunta di un passato del tutto morto; mentre noi tentiamo in qualche modo, lo si giudichi pure impertinente o eccentrico o ficcanaso o paradossale, di misurarci con le condizioni pratiche del presente. Su questa falsariga sembra essere nata un’amena commedia a proposito del nazionalismo scozzese, ossia dell’idea di un’autonomia per la Britannia del Nord. Un degno presbiteriano ha ammonito i suoi conterranei che il movimento è contaminato dalla presenza di cattolici romani, e in particolare da quella del signor Compton Mackenzie; e che non poca parte del mortale pericolo è dimostrata dal fatto che il signor Cunninghame Graham si interessa di un libro del signor Belloc, in cui si pronuncia l’orrendo sentimento secondo cui la Riforma fu il naufragio della Cristianità. Personalmente avrei creduto che fosse evidente a chiunque, da qualunque parte stesse, in un senso solido e oggettivo, che essa fu il naufragio della Cristianità. Immaginerei che ciò risulti evidente a chiunque, per esempio, desideri o anche solo discuta la Riunificazione della Cristianità. Vi era certamente un unico vascello o veicolo, ed esso certamente si spezzò in parti diverse. Alcuni potranno ritenere che la nave fosse un vecchio e marcio tre ponti destinato a sfasciarsi, e che fortunati furono coloro che se ne allontanarono sulle scialuppe. Ma è certo che si spezzò e che le scialuppe non erano la medesima nave originaria. Tanto varrebbe che qualcuno si risentisse pure per il nostro dire che l’ascesa dei regni feudali e delle nazionalità moderne fu parte del declino e della caduta dell’Impero Romano. Questa è solo una delle impronte di simile bigottismo, ma vale la pena notarla fin da principio. Una delle peculiarità di questo genere di bigotto è che egli non sa distinguere tra affermazioni provocatorie e affermazioni semplici e inevitabili. Se io dicessi che la Riforma fu una ricaduta nella barbarie, un ritorno a tutto il peggio dei Secoli Bui senza nulla del meglio che vi era, un’idolatria di morti documenti ebraici pieni di visioni e simboli senza alcun Daniele a interpretare i sogni, una fuga precipitosa di lusso brutale e di orgoglio con un volgare urlo di predicazione fanatica per scusa, un tumulto di ladri e saccheggiatori con qualche invasato schiumante e farfugliante portato in testa come mascotte vivente per buon augurio; il ritorno del Manicheo, la lurida scimmia dell’asceta, in combutta col diavolo per distruggere il mondo — se dicessi tutto questo, penserei che tali osservazioni sul protestantesimo avessero di certo un sapore lievemente provocatorio. Ma se dicessi, con il signor Belloc, che il protestantesimo fu il naufragio della Cristianità, lo considererei un’ordinaria affermazione storica, come dire che la Guerra d’Indipendenza americana fu una scissione nell’Impero Britannico. Il bigotto non sa vedere la differenza tra questi due tipi di affermazione, sia che li faccia lui o che li facciamo noi.

La cosa successiva e interessante da notare in questa protesta è che il protestante prosegue affermando che il signor Compton Mackenzie e i suoi amici rovineranno la Scozia rimuovendo il severo insegnamento di John Knox, il quale a quanto pare avrebbe forgiato il carattere scozzese. La cosa mi pare un po’ dura verso il carattere scozzese. Non riesco proprio a persuadermi che il carattere di Scott o di Stevenson, il carattere di Burns o di Barrie, siano esatte e immutate riproduzioni del severo insegnamento di John Knox. Ma prima di venire a tali paragoni, vale la pena osservare, di primo acchito, che un mondo alquanto più vivo, una vita più in contatto con le condizioni moderne, una presa sui problemi reali del presente e dell’immediato futuro, è indicata assai meglio pronunciando le parole «Compton Mackenzie» che pronunciando le parole «John Knox». Molti giovani modernissimi hanno da poco abbracciato la stessa religione del signor Compton Mackenzie. Nessun giovane moderno, che io sappia, ha mai manifestato il benché minimo desiderio di tornare alla religione di John Knox. Di fatto, non c’è quasi uno scozzese moderno su mille che nutra la minima simpatia per la vera religione di John Knox. Potrà vagamente rispettare John Knox come un eroe scozzese, nella supposizione (clamorosamente falsa) che fosse un patriota scozzese. In realtà il partito patriottico in Scozia era il malvagio partito papista; Knox e i suoi presbiteriani erano tutti per assecondare la pressione dell’Inghilterra e di Elisabetta. Si sarebbero giustificati dicendo di possedere l’unica, vera e sola giusta religione. La questione è: chi resta, anche in Scozia, a credere che essa fosse l’unica, vera e sola giusta religione? Ripeto, circa uno su mille; forse solo pochi splendidamente fanatici vecchi Wee Frees delle Highlands. Chiunque conosca un poco le Chiese presbiteriane scozzesi degli ultimi cinquant’anni sa che la dottrina prevalente insegnata in esse NON è stata il severo calvinismo del Settecento e del Seicento, e ancor meno il selvaggio calvinismo del Cinquecento. È stato un blando guazzabuglio di filosofia hegeliana e di Alta Critica, tutto preso in prestito dalla Germania e diligentemente appreso dagli studenti scozzesi nelle università tedesche. E chiunque abbia notato com’è davvero il carattere scozzese moderno sa che a questo punto esso non porta più (grazie al cielo) la minima somiglianza con la severità di John Knox. È piuttosto sentimentale, semmai, benché il suo sentimento trovi espressione in più di un brillante e ammirevole uomo di genio. La Scozia moderna non è nemmeno lontanamente rappresentata da John Knox. È rappresentata assai più fedelmente, e assai più onorevolmente, da Sir Harry Lauder e da Sir James Barrie.

Questa opaca abitudine di invocare cose morte, in un mondo in cui siamo circondati da cose vive sempre più interessanti, è il secondo segno del genere di bigotto che sto descrivendo. Sarebbe un’impresa oltremodo interessante scrivere una vera, rispettosa e comprensiva storia del notevole episodio del puritanesimo scozzese, insistendo sulla sua integrità e sul suo vigore intellettuale finché durò. Ma ogni studio sincero di esso deve concludersi con l’affermazione che non durò. Uno dei più brillanti e insigni professori scozzesi, all’Università di Edimburgo, egli stesso di origine interamente puritana e di simpatie del tutto opposte a quelle cattoliche, usò con me la vera ed efficace espressione, a proposito dell’antico sabbatarianismo scozzese: «Copriva tutta la Scozia; e poi, una mattina, era d’un tratto svanito ovunque come la neve.» E per quanto la storia possa essere narrata fedelmente dall’uno o dall’altro punto di vista, o da molti altri, è ben naturale che noi ne traiamo la nostra morale. E la morale è, s’intende, una di quelle che ricorrono lungo tutta la nostra storia.

La nascita e la morte di ogni eresia sono state essenzialmente le stesse. Un cattolico morboso o squilibrato prende una sola idea dalla folla infinita delle idee cattoliche, e proclama di tenere a quell’idea cattolica più che al cattolicesimo. La porta via con sé in un deserto, dove l’idea diventa un’immagine e l’immagine un idolo. Poi, dopo un secolo o due, egli si risveglia d’un tratto e scopre che l’idolo è un idolo; e, poco dopo, che il deserto è un deserto. Se è un uomo saggio, si dà dello sciocco. Se è uno sciocco, si proclama un progressista evoluzionista che ha superato il culto degli idoli; e si guarda attorno nel deserto, che si stende nudo e desolato da ogni lato, e dice, con le belle parole del signor H. G. Wells: «Non gli vedo alcun limite.»

Questo è ciò che accadde allo scozzese calvinista; e il principale conforto, in tale prospettiva, è che lo scozzese non è di norma uno sciocco, anche quando ha cessato di essere calvinista. Ma assai spesso diventa ateo; e il fatto che tanti degli scettici duri e distruttivi, da Hume in poi, provenissero dalla Scozia fu il primo e significativo indizio della scoperta dell’idolo e del deserto. Ma in ogni caso, questa è la compatta parabola di ciò che avvenne. Il calvinista era un cattolico la cui immaginazione era stata in qualche modo catturata e sopraffatta dall’unica isolata verità teologica della potenza e della conoscenza di Dio; e ad essa offriva sacrificio umano, non solo di ogni sentimento umano, ma di ogni altra qualità divina. Qualcosa in quella nuda idea di una potenza che tutto vede, tutto scruta ed è spietata inebriò ed esaltò certi uomini per un certo periodo, come certi uomini sono inebriati da una tempesta di vento o da qualche terribile tragedia teatrale. I protestanti più moderati, gli anglicani e in larga misura i luterani, provavano qualcosa della stessa strana sensazione a proposito del Re. Di qui venne la dottrina cavalieristica del Diritto Divino — e i cappellani di corte della Prussia. Nulla è più affascinante e stimolante per l’immaginazione della necessità di tentare di comprendere come gli uomini del Cinquecento e del primo Seicento provassero una sorta di astratta gioia altruistica nella semplice potenza e nel trionfo del Principe; nella pura autocrazia del sovrano terreno. I calvinisti, per rendere loro giustizia, la provavano solo verso il sovrano celeste. In quel senso gli scozzesi possono guardare con orgoglio indietro al loro calvinismo. Ma non possono guardare con orgoglio avanti al calvinismo. Sanno davvero, bene quanto chiunque altro, che questa isolata idea religiosa non può più essere tenuta separata da tutte le altre idee religiose a cui appartiene. Il calvinismo del puritano è morto quanto il Diritto Divino dei cavalieri; gli uomini non possono più adorare l’idolo, sia esso il presbiterianesimo o l’erastianismo. Possono solo adorare il deserto; che è ateismo — o, come dicono i più garbati, panteismo.

Che la si chiami tendenza cattolica o no, tutti i movimenti di tutte le sette, di recente, sono andati nella direzione di tentare di rimettere insieme quei pezzi separati che furono divelti nel Cinquecento. Il tratto principale del nostro tempo è stato il fatto che una persona dopo l’altra ha recuperato un pezzo dopo l’altro, aggiungendolo al nuovo disegno prendendolo in prestito dal vecchio. C’è una prova sufficiente che vi è stato davvero un naufragio. Ed è che Robinson Crusoe, da allora, è tornato di continuo a recuperare cose dal relitto.

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IF THEY HAD BELIEVED

ONE of the things our enemies do not know is the real case for their own side. It is always for me a great matter of pride that the proudest, the most genuine and the most unanswerable boast, that the Protestants of England could ever make, was made for them by a Catholic. Very few of the Protestants, of his time at any rate, would have had the historical enlargement or enlightenment to make it. For it was said by Newman, when that great master of English was surveying the glorious triumphs of our tongue from Bacon and Milton, to Swift and Burke, and he reminded us firmly that, though we convert England to the true faith a thousand times over, “English literature will always HAVE BEEN Protestant.”

That generous piece of candour might well be represented as even too generous; but I think it is very wise for us to be too generous. It is not entirely, or at least not exclusively true. The name of Chaucer is alone enough to show that English literature was English a long time before it was Protestant. Even a Protestant, if he were also English, could ask for nobody more entirely English than Chaucer. He was, in the essential national temper, very much more English than Milton. As a matter of fact, the argument is no stronger for Chaucer than it is for Shakespeare. But in the case of Shakespeare the argument is long and complicated, as conducted by partisans; though sufficiently simple and direct for people with a sense of reality. I believe that recent discoveries, as recorded in a book by a French lady, have very strongly confirmed the theory that Shakespeare died a Catholic. But I need no books and no discoveries to prove to me that he had lived a Catholic, or more probably, like the rest of us, tried unsuccessfully to live a Catholic; that he thought like a Catholic and felt like a Catholic and saw every question as a Catholic sees it. The proofs of this would be matter for a separate essay; if indeed so practical an impression can be proved at all. It is quite self-evident to me that he was a certain real and recognisable Renaissance type of Catholic; like Cervantes; like Ronsard. But if I were asked offhand for a short explanation, I could only say that I know he was a Catholic from the passages which are now used to prove he was an agnostic.

But that is another and much more subtle question, which is not the question I proposed to myself in starting this essay. In starting it, I proposed to grant the whole sound and solid truth of Newman’s admission; that there has indeed arisen out of the disunion of Europe a great and glorious English Protestant literature; and to make some further speculations upon the point. And I think that nothing could make clearer to the modern English, the one supreme thing that they don’t know (which is what our religion really is and why we think it real) than to put this rather interesting historical question. What difference would it have made to the great masters of English literature, if they had been Catholics?

Of course, the question cannot be strictly and scientifically answered; because nobody knows what difference would be made to anybody by any change in the circumstances of his life. But taking the matter broadly, as a question of ideas or even of doctrines it is worth asking as a matter of religious history. How far did the great Protestant writers depend on Protestantism?

I have no intention of discussing it adequately here; and indeed this is not so much an essay as an essay to suggest an essay. It is, in fact, a delicate indication, to people more learned than myself, that I am in possession of a very good title and subject for an essay. But at least it will be safe to say that the common or conventional impression among English people on this point is wildly wrong. It is wrong because it imagines that purely Protestant ideas were in some vague way the same as liberal and emancipated ideas. And it is wrong in a more special sense, because it is founded on the utterly false history, which supposes that the Renaissance was the same as the Reformation. It would be very difficult to say what English literature owes to the Reformation as distinct from the Renaissance. There is the splendid sincerity that inspired the plain English of Bunyan; but even Bunyan was a sort of exception that proved the rule. He was a Puritan; but he was emphatically not a Puritan of the Puritans. He was a man actually suspected by his fellow Puritans, because he was not so much a Puritan as a Christian. It was remarked at the time, and it has often been remarked since, that his theory is not very sectarian by the standard of seventeenth century sects. Among the Calvinists he was so much of a moderate, that thousands must have read his great book without thinking about Calvinism at all. And if we take the great scenes in his great book, the battle with Apollyon, the Mission of Greatheart, the death of Valiant-for-the-Truth, when all the trumpets sounded on the other side—there is really no reason whatever why they should not have been written by a Catholic. I do not affirm that they WOULD have been written by a Catholic, if the course of history had left the common people Catholics; for that is a question which nobody can possibly answer one way or the other. But I am speaking strictly of doctrines in their relation to ideas and images; and there is no possible reason why a Catholic should be prevented by his Catholicism from writing such a story of the pilgrimage of Man and the fight to attain to God.

Milton in one way is an even stronger case; since he had much more in him of Shakespeare and the Catholic Renaissance. And I really cannot think of any deep difference that it would have made to his poetry, as poetry, if he had followed other members of his family in the old faith; I do not see that he need have been much altered, except possibly by being a much jollier man. Many will not realise this, because they insist on regarding artistic and intellectual freedom as something that was closed to the Catholic countries and open only to the Protestant. But all history is in flat contradiction to this view. The tide of culture in the seventeenth century flowed from France to England, not from England to France. Milton might have been as central as Moliere and still remained a Catholic man in a Catholic atmosphere. Descartes the Catholic was more truly than Bacon the Protestant, the PHILOSOPHER of rationalist science. The experiments, the new forms, the great names in criticism and philosophy, appeared during the last two or three centuries quite as much in the Catholic countries as in the Protestant, if not rather more. England could have produced a great English literature, as France produced a great French literature, without any change in the ancient European religion.

The real test case, to be considered in some such essay, would be a case like that of Cowper. There you do most emphatically have the Protestant theology; and there you do most emphatically have the English poetry. But the two have precious little to do with each other; until the coming of that dark hour when the theology destroyed the poetry. Poor Cowper’s Calvinism drove him mad; and only his poetry managed for some time to keep him sane. But there was nothing whatever either in the poetry or the sanity that could have prevented him from being a Catholic. On the contrary, he was exactly the sort of man who would have been very happy as a Catholic. He was the sort of man to have been devoted to the memory of St. Francis, if he had ever heard of him; and there was nothing to prevent the one any more than the other from keeping pet birds or stroking wild hares out of the woods. It was the brutal blow of Calvin, two centuries before, that broke the heart of that natural saint; and it is not the least of his crimes.

After the time of Cowper, there does indeed begin to appear another type of difficulty; but it is not the presence but rather the absence of Protestant theology. There were elements even in Burns and Byron, there were still more elements in Shelley and Swinburne, which would doubtless have been at issue with their Catholic tradition, if they had had it. But it would not have been a revolt against Catholicism half so much as it was a revolt against Protestantism. In so far as they tended to mere scepticism, they could have found their way to it more quickly from reading Rabelais and Montaigne in a Catholic country than from reading Shakespeare and Milton in a Protestant one. As soon as the Revolution has begun, in a sense as soon as the Romantic Movement has begun, the positive Puritan theology is left behind even more completely than the mediaeval theology. Indeed the Romantics did develop a faint and hazy sympathy, if not with mediaeval theology, at least with mediaeval religion. It is true that Byron or Hugo probably preferred an abbey to be a ruined abbey; but they would not have visited a Baptist chapel even for the pleasure of seeing it ruined. It is true that Scott advised us to see mediaeval Melrose by moonlight; with the delicate implication that the mediaeval religion was moonshine. But he would not in any case have wanted to see Exeter Hall by gaslight; and he would have thought its theology not moonshine but gas. The tributes which he occasionally forces himself to make to the official Puritanism of his own country are, it will be generally agreed, the most sullen and insincere words to be found in his works. On the negative side, therefore, the conclusion is altogether negative. It is very difficult to find, at least after the doubtful case of Bunyan and the deadly case of Cowper, anything that can be called a purely literary inspiration coming from the purely Protestant doctrines. There is plenty of inspiration coming more or less indirectly from Paganism; but after the first excitement, hardly any from Protestantism.

If this is true on the negative side, it is even truer on the positive side. I take it that the imaginative magnificence of Milton’s epic, in such matters as the War in Heaven, would have been much more convincing, if it had been modelled more on the profound mediaeval mysteries about the nature of angels and archangels, and less on the merely fanciful Greek myths about giants and gods. PARADISE LOST is an immortal poem; but it has just failed to be an immortal religious poem. Those are most happy in reading Milton who can read him as they would read Hesiod. It is doubtful whether those seeking spiritual satisfaction now read him even as naturally as they would read Crashaw. I suppose nobody will dispute that the pageantry of Scott might have taken on a tenfold splendour if he could have understood the emblems of an everlasting faith as sympathetically as he did the emblems of a dead feudalism. For him it was the habit that made the monk; but the habit would have been quite as picturesque if there had been a real monk inside it; let alone a real mind inside the monk, like the mind of St. Dominic or St. Hugh of Lincoln. “English literature will always have been Protestant”; but it might have been Catholic; without ceasing to be English literature, and perhaps succeeding in producing a deeper literature and a happier England.

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SE AVESSERO CREDUTO

UNA delle cose che i nostri nemici non conoscono è il vero argomento a favore della loro stessa parte. È sempre per me motivo di grande orgoglio che il più fiero, il più genuino e il più inconfutabile vanto che i Protestanti d’Inghilterra abbiano mai potuto formulare fu formulato per loro da un Cattolico. Pochissimi dei Protestanti, del suo tempo almeno, avrebbero avuto l’ampiezza o l’illuminazione storica per formularlo. Poiché fu detto da Newman, quando quel grande maestro dell’inglese passava in rassegna i gloriosi trionfi della nostra lingua da Bacone e Milton, fino a Swift e Burke, ed egli ci rammentò fermamente che, per quanto mille volte convertissimo l’Inghilterra alla vera fede, «la letteratura inglese SARÀ SEMPRE STATA Protestante».

Quel generoso atto di candore potrebbe bene essere rappresentato come persino troppo generoso; ma penso che sia molto saggio per noi essere troppo generosi. Non è interamente, o almeno non esclusivamente vero. Il nome di Chaucer è da solo sufficiente a mostrare che la letteratura inglese era inglese molto tempo prima di essere Protestante. Persino un Protestante, se fosse anche inglese, non potrebbe chiedere nessuno di più interamente inglese di Chaucer. Egli era, nell’essenziale temperamento nazionale, molto più inglese di Milton. In verità, l’argomento non è più forte per Chaucer di quanto lo sia per Shakespeare. Ma nel caso di Shakespeare l’argomento è lungo e complicato, come è condotto dai faziosi; benché sufficientemente semplice e diretto per persone dotate di senso della realtà. Credo che recenti scoperte, come registrate in un libro di una signora francese, abbiano molto fortemente confermato la teoria che Shakespeare sia morto Cattolico. Ma non ho bisogno di libri né di scoperte per provare a me stesso che egli aveva vissuto da Cattolico, o più probabilmente, come il resto di noi, aveva tentato senza successo di vivere da Cattolico; che egli pensava da Cattolico e sentiva da Cattolico e vedeva ogni questione come la vede un Cattolico. Le prove di ciò sarebbero materia per un saggio a parte; se pure un’impressione così pratica possa affatto essere provata. È del tutto autoevidente per me che egli era un certo reale e riconoscibile tipo di Cattolico del Rinascimento; come Cervantes; come Ronsard. Ma se mi si chiedesse su due piedi una breve spiegazione, potrei solo dire che so che egli era Cattolico dai passi che ora si usano per provare che era agnostico.

Ma questa è un’altra e assai più sottile questione, che non è la questione che mi proponevo nell’iniziare questo saggio. Nell’iniziarlo, mi proponevo di concedere l’intera solida e valida verità dell’ammissione di Newman; che è davvero sorta dalla disunione dell’Europa una grande e gloriosa letteratura inglese Protestante; e di fare alcune ulteriori speculazioni sul punto. E penso che nulla potrebbe rendere più chiara ai moderni Inglesi la suprema cosa che essi non conoscono (che è ciò che davvero è la nostra religione e perché la riteniamo reale) quanto porre questa questione storica piuttosto interessante. Che differenza avrebbe fatto ai grandi maestri della letteratura inglese, se fossero stati Cattolici?

Naturalmente, la domanda non può essere risposta rigorosamente e scientificamente; perché nessuno sa quale differenza sarebbe fatta a chiunque da un qualsiasi mutamento nelle circostanze della sua vita. Ma prendendo la faccenda in senso ampio, come questione di idee o persino di dottrine, vale la pena di porla come questione di storia religiosa. Fino a che punto i grandi scrittori Protestanti dipesero dal Protestantesimo?

Non ho alcuna intenzione di discuterla adeguatamente qui; e invero questo non è tanto un saggio quanto un saggio per suggerire un saggio. È, di fatto, un delicato cenno, a persone più dotte di me, che sono in possesso di un ottimo titolo e argomento per un saggio. Ma almeno sarà prudente dire che l’impressione comune o convenzionale fra gli Inglesi su questo punto è selvaggiamente errata. È errata perché immagina che le idee puramente Protestanti fossero in qualche modo vago le stesse delle idee liberali ed emancipate. Ed è errata in un senso più speciale, perché è fondata sulla storia del tutto falsa, che suppone che il Rinascimento fosse la stessa cosa della Riforma. Sarebbe assai difficile dire che cosa la letteratura inglese debba alla Riforma in quanto distinta dal Rinascimento. C’è la splendida sincerità che ispirò il semplice inglese di Bunyan; ma persino Bunyan fu una sorta di eccezione che conferma la regola. Egli era un Puritano; ma non era enfaticamente un Puritano dei Puritani. Era un uomo effettivamente sospettato dai suoi compagni Puritani, perché non era tanto un Puritano quanto un Cristiano. Fu osservato al tempo, ed è stato spesso osservato da allora, che la sua teoria non è molto settaria per lo standard delle sette del diciassettesimo secolo. Fra i Calvinisti egli era tanto un moderato, che migliaia di persone devono aver letto il suo grande libro senza pensare affatto al Calvinismo. E se prendiamo le grandi scene del suo grande libro, la battaglia con Apollyon, la Missione di Cuoregrande, la morte di Valoroso-per-la-Verità, quando tutte le trombe suonarono dall’altra parte — non c’è davvero alcuna ragione per cui non avrebbero potuto essere scritte da un Cattolico. Non affermo che sarebbero state scritte da un Cattolico, se il corso della storia avesse lasciato Cattolico il popolo comune; poiché questa è una domanda a cui nessuno può possibilmente rispondere in un senso o nell’altro. Ma sto parlando strettamente di dottrine nella loro relazione con idee e immagini; e non c’è alcuna possibile ragione per cui un Cattolico debba essere impedito dal suo Cattolicesimo dallo scrivere una simile storia del pellegrinaggio dell’Uomo e della lotta per attingere a Dio.

Milton per un verso è un caso persino più forte; poiché egli aveva molto più in sé di Shakespeare e del Rinascimento Cattolico. E davvero non riesco a pensare ad alcuna profonda differenza che avrebbe fatto alla sua poesia, come poesia, se egli avesse seguito altri membri della sua famiglia nell’antica fede; non vedo che egli avrebbe avuto bisogno di essere molto alterato, se non forse per essere un uomo molto più gioviale. Molti non se ne rendono conto, perché insistono nel considerare la libertà artistica e intellettuale come qualcosa che era chiuso ai paesi Cattolici e aperto solo al Protestante. Ma tutta la storia è in netta contraddizione con questa opinione. La marea della cultura nel diciassettesimo secolo fluiva dalla Francia all’Inghilterra, non dall’Inghilterra alla Francia. Milton avrebbe potuto essere centrale quanto Molière e rimanere tuttavia un uomo Cattolico in un’atmosfera Cattolica. Cartesio il Cattolico era, più veramente di Bacone il Protestante, il FILOSOFO della scienza razionalista. Gli esperimenti, le nuove forme, i grandi nomi nella critica e nella filosofia, apparvero durante gli ultimi due o tre secoli tanto nei paesi Cattolici quanto nei Protestanti, se non piuttosto di più. L’Inghilterra avrebbe potuto produrre una grande letteratura inglese, come la Francia produsse una grande letteratura francese, senza alcun mutamento nell’antica religione europea.

Il vero caso di prova, da considerare in un tale saggio, sarebbe un caso come quello di Cowper. Là si ha nel modo più enfatico la teologia Protestante; e là si ha nel modo più enfatico la poesia inglese. Ma le due hanno pochissimo a che fare l’una con l’altra; finché non giunge quell’ora oscura in cui la teologia distrusse la poesia. Il Calvinismo del povero Cowper lo fece impazzire; e solo la sua poesia riuscì per qualche tempo a mantenerlo sano di mente. Ma non c’era nulla di che, né nella poesia né nella sanità di mente, che avrebbe potuto impedirgli di essere un Cattolico. Al contrario, egli era esattamente il tipo d’uomo che sarebbe stato assai felice da Cattolico. Era il tipo d’uomo che sarebbe stato devoto alla memoria di San Francesco, se mai ne avesse sentito parlare; e non c’era nulla che impedisse l’una cosa più dell’altra dal tenere uccelli domestici o accarezzare lepri selvatiche uscite dai boschi. Fu il brutale colpo di Calvino, due secoli prima, a spezzare il cuore di quel santo naturale; e non è il minore dei suoi crimini.

Dopo il tempo di Cowper, comincia in effetti ad apparire un altro tipo di difficoltà; ma non è la presenza, bensì piuttosto l’assenza della teologia Protestante. C’erano elementi persino in Burns e Byron, c’erano ancor più elementi in Shelley e Swinburne, che senza dubbio sarebbero stati in contrasto con la loro tradizione Cattolica, se l’avessero avuta. Ma non sarebbe stata una rivolta contro il Cattolicesimo nemmeno la metà di quanto fu una rivolta contro il Protestantesimo. Nella misura in cui tendevano al mero scetticismo, avrebbero potuto trovarvi la loro strada più rapidamente leggendo Rabelais e Montaigne in un paese Cattolico che leggendo Shakespeare e Milton in uno Protestante. Non appena la Rivoluzione è cominciata, in un certo senso non appena il Movimento Romantico è cominciato, la positiva teologia Puritana è lasciata indietro persino più completamente della teologia medievale. Invero i Romantici svilupparono una debole e nebulosa simpatia, se non con la teologia medievale, almeno con la religione medievale. È vero che Byron o Hugo probabilmente preferivano che un’abbazia fosse un’abbazia in rovina; ma non avrebbero visitato una cappella Battista nemmeno per il piacere di vederla in rovina. È vero che Scott ci consigliò di vedere la medievale Melrose al chiaro di luna; con la delicata implicazione che la religione medievale fosse un chiaro di luna. Ma egli non avrebbe in alcun caso voluto vedere Exeter Hall alla luce del gas; e ne avrebbe giudicato la teologia non chiaro di luna ma gas. I tributi che egli occasionalmente si sforza di rendere al Puritanesimo ufficiale del proprio paese sono, si converrà generalmente, le parole più cupe e insincere che si trovino nelle sue opere. Sul lato negativo, dunque, la conclusione è del tutto negativa. È assai difficile trovare, almeno dopo il caso dubbio di Bunyan e il caso letale di Cowper, alcunché che possa essere chiamato ispirazione puramente letteraria proveniente dalle dottrine puramente Protestanti. C’è abbondanza di ispirazione proveniente più o meno indirettamente dal Paganesimo; ma dopo la prima eccitazione, quasi nessuna dal Protestantesimo.

Se ciò è vero sul lato negativo, è ancor più vero sul lato positivo. Ritengo che la magnificenza immaginativa dell’epica di Milton, in materie come la Guerra in Cielo, sarebbe stata molto più convincente, se fosse stata modellata più sui profondi misteri medievali sulla natura degli angeli e degli arcangeli, e meno sui meri fantasiosi miti greci su giganti e dèi. Il PARADISO PERDUTO è un poema immortale; ma ha appena mancato di essere un poema religioso immortale. Sono più felici nel leggere Milton coloro che sanno leggerlo come leggerebbero Esiodo. È dubbio che coloro che cercano soddisfazione spirituale lo leggano ora persino così naturalmente come leggerebbero Crashaw. Suppongo che nessuno contesterà che lo sfarzo di Scott avrebbe potuto assumere uno splendore decuplicato se egli avesse potuto comprendere gli emblemi di una fede eterna con la stessa simpatia con cui comprese gli emblemi di un feudalesimo morto. Per lui era l’abito che faceva il monaco; ma l’abito sarebbe stato altrettanto pittoresco se ci fosse stato un vero monaco dentro di esso; figuriamoci una vera mente dentro il monaco, come la mente di San Domenico o di Sant’Ugo di Lincoln. «La letteratura inglese sarà sempre stata Protestante»; ma avrebbe potuto essere Cattolica; senza cessare di essere letteratura inglese, e forse riuscendo a produrre una letteratura più profonda e un’Inghilterra più felice.

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PEACE AND THE PAPACY

THERE is a famous saying which to some has seemed lacking in reverence, though in fact it is a support of one important part of religion; “If God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent Him.” It is not at all unlike some of the daring questions with which St. Thomas Aquinas begins his great defence of the faith. Some of the modern critics of his faith, especially the Protestant critics of it, have fallen into an amusing error, chiefly through ignorance of Latin and of the old use of the word DIVUS, and have accused Catholics of describing the Pope as God. Catholics, I need not say, are about as likely to call the Pope God as to call a grasshopper the Pope. But there is a sense in which they do recognise an eternal correspondence between the position of the King of Kings in the universe and of his Viceroy in the world, like the correspondence between a real thing and its shadow; a similarity something like the damaged and defective similarity between God and the image of God. And among the coincidences of this comparison may be classed the case of this epigram. The world will more and more find itself in a position in which even politicians and practical men will find themselves saying, “If the Pope had not existed, it would be necessary to invent him.”

It is not at all impossible that they may really try to invent him. The truth is that multitudes of them would already accept the Pope if he were not called the Pope. I firmly believe that it would be quite possible, in this and many other matters, to play a sort of pious practical joke on large numbers of heretics and heathens. I fancy it would be quite feasible to describe in accurate but abstract terms the general idea of an office or obligation, which would exactly correspond to the position of the Papacy in history, and which would be accepted on ethical and social ground by numbers of Protestants and free-thinkers; until they discovered with a reaction of rage and astonishment that they had been entrapped into accepting the international arbitration of the Pope. Suppose somebody were to advance the old idea as if it were a new idea; suppose he were to say; “I propose that there be erected in some central city in the more civilised part of our civilisation the seat of a permanent official to represent peace and the basis of agreement among all the surrounding nations; let him be by the nature of his post set apart from them all and yet sworn to consider the rights and wrongs of all; Let him be put there as a judge to expound an ethical law and system of social relations; let him be of a certain type and training different from that which encourages the ordinary ambitions of military glory or even the ordinary attachments of tribal tradition; let him be protected by a special sentiment from the pressure of kings and princes; let him be sworn in a special manner to the consideration of men as men.” There are not a few already, and there will soon be many more, who would be perfectly capable of proposing such an ideal international institution on their own account; there are also many who would really, in their innocence, suppose that it had never been attempted before.

It is true that as yet large numbers of such social reformers would shrink from the idea of the institution being an individual. But even that prejudice is weakening under the wear and tear of real political experience. We may be attached, as many of us are, to the democratic ideal; but most of us have already realised that direct democracy, the only true democracy which satisfies a true democrat, is a thing applicable to some things and not others; and not applicable at all to a question such as this. The actual speaking voice of a vast international civilisation, or of a vast international religion, will not in any case be the actual articulate distinguishable voices or cries of all the millions of the faithful. It is not the people who would be the heirs of a dethroned Pope; it is some synod or bench of bishops. It is not an alternative between monarchy and democracy, but an alternative between monarchy and oligarchy. And, being myself one of the democratic idealists, I have not the faintest hesitation in my choice between the two latter forms of privilege. A monarch is a man; but an oligarchy is not men; it is a few men forming a group small enough to be insolent and large enough to be irresponsible. A man in the position of a Pope, unless he is literally mad, must be responsible. But aristocrats can always throw the responsibility on each other; and yet create a common and corporate society from which is shut out the very vision of the rest of the world. These are conclusions to which many people in the world are coming; and many who would still be much astonished and horrified to find where those conclusions lead. But the point here is that even if our civilisation does not rediscover the need of a Papacy, it is extremely likely that sooner or later it will try to supply the need of something like a Papacy; even if it tries to do it on its own account. That will be indeed an ironical situation. The modern world will have set up a new Anti-Pope, even if, as in Monsignor Benson’s romance, the Anti-Pope has rather the character of an Antichrist.

The point is that men will attempt to put some sort of moral power out of the reach of material powers. It is the weakness of many worthy and well-meaning attempts at international justice just now, that the international council can hardly help being merely a microcosm or model of the world outside it, with all its little things and big things, including the things that are much too big. Suppose that in the international interchanges of the future some power, say Sweden, is felt to be disproportionate or problematical. If Sweden is powerful in Europe, she will be powerful in the council of Europe. If Sweden is too powerful in Europe, she will be too powerful in the council of Europe. And because she is the very thing that is irresistible, she is the very thing to be resisted; or at any rate to be restrained. I do not see how Europe can ever escape from that logical dilemma, except by discovering again an authority that is purely moral and is the recognised custodian of a morality. It may very reasonably be said that even those dedicated to that duty may not always practise what they profess. But the other rulers of the world are not even bound to profess it.

Again and again in history, especially in mediaeval history, the Papacy has intervened in the interests of peace and humanity; just as the greatest saints have thrown themselves between the swords and daggers of contending factions. But if there had been no Papacy and no saints and no Catholic Church at all, the world left to itself would certainly not have substituted social abstractions for theological creeds. As a whole, humanity has been far from humanitarian. If the world had been left to itself, let us say in the age of feudalism, all the decisions would have been rigidly and ruthlessly on the lines of feudalism. There was only one institution in that world that had existed before feudalism. There was only one institution which could possibly carry on some faint memory of the Republic and the Roman Law. If the world had been left to itself in the time of the Renaissance and the Italian statecraft of the Prince, it would have been arranged entirely in the current fashion of the glorification of princes. There was only one institution that could at any moment be moved to repeat, “Put not your trust in princes.” Had it been absent, the only result would have been that the famous settlement of CUJUS REGIO EJUS RELIGIO would have been all REGIO with precious little RELIGIO. And so, of course, our own day has its unconscious dogmas and its universal prejudices; and it needs a special, a sacred and what seems to many an inhuman separation to stand above them or to see beyond.

I know that this ideal has been abused like any other; I only say that even those who most denounce the reality will probably begin again to search for the ideal. But I do not, in fact, propose that any such spiritual tribunal should act like a legal tribunal or be given powers of practical interference with normal and national government. I am quite sure, for one thing, that it would never accept any such material entanglement. Nor do I, for that matter, desire that any of the secular tribunals now set up in the interests of international peace should thus have the power to interfere with nationality and local liberty. I would much rather give such power to a pope than to politicians and diplomatists of the sort to whom the world is giving it. But I do not want to give it to anybody and the authority in question does not want to accept it from anybody. The thing of which I speak is purely moral and cannot exist without a certain moral loyalty; it is a thing of atmosphere and even in a sense of affection. There is no space to describe here the manner in which such a general popular attachment grows up; but there is no doubt whatever that it did once grow up round such a religious centre of our civilisation; and that it is not likely to grow up again except for something which aims at a higher standard of humility and charity than the ordinary standard of the world. Men cannot have an affection for other people’s emperors, or even for other people’s politicians; they have sometimes been known to cool in affection even for their own politicians. I see no prospect of any such positive nucleus of amity except in some positive enthusiasm for something that moves the deepest parts of man’s moral nature; something which can unite us not (as the prigs say) by being entirely international, but by being universally human. Men cannot agree about nothing any more than they can disagree about nothing. And anything wide enough to make such an agreement must itself be wider than the world.

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LA PACE E IL PAPATO

VI è un celebre detto che ad alcuni è parso privo di riverenza, benché in realtà sia un sostegno di una parte importante della religione: «Se Dio non fosse esistito, sarebbe stato necessario inventarlo.» Non è affatto dissimile da alcune delle audaci questioni con cui San Tommaso d’Aquino apre la sua grande difesa della fede. Alcuni dei moderni critici della sua fede, specialmente i critici Protestanti di essa, sono caduti in un divertente errore, principalmente per ignoranza del latino e dell’antico uso della parola DIVUS, e hanno accusato i Cattolici di descrivere il Papa come Dio. I Cattolici, non ho bisogno di dirlo, sono più o meno disposti a chiamare Dio il Papa quanto a chiamare Papa una cavalletta. Ma vi è un senso in cui essi riconoscono un’eterna corrispondenza fra la posizione del Re dei Re nell’universo e quella del suo Viceré nel mondo, come la corrispondenza fra una cosa reale e la sua ombra; una somiglianza qualcosa come la danneggiata e difettosa somiglianza fra Dio e l’immagine di Dio. E fra le coincidenze di questo paragone può classificarsi il caso di questo epigramma. Il mondo si troverà sempre più in una posizione in cui persino i politici e gli uomini pratici si troveranno a dire: «Se il Papa non fosse esistito, sarebbe necessario inventarlo.»

Non è affatto impossibile che essi possano davvero tentare di inventarlo. La verità è che moltitudini di loro accetterebbero già il Papa se non fosse chiamato Papa. Credo fermamente che sarebbe del tutto possibile, in questa e in molte altre materie, giocare una sorta di pio scherzo pratico a gran numero di eretici e di pagani. Immagino che sarebbe del tutto fattibile descrivere in termini accurati ma astratti l’idea generale di un ufficio o di un’obbligazione, che corrisponderebbe esattamente alla posizione del Papato nella storia, e che sarebbe accettata su basi etiche e sociali da un gran numero di Protestanti e di liberi pensatori; finché non scoprissero, con una reazione di rabbia e di stupore, di essere stati indotti con l’inganno ad accettare l’arbitrato internazionale del Papa. Supponiamo che qualcuno avanzasse la vecchia idea come se fosse un’idea nuova; supponiamo che dicesse: «Propongo che venga eretta in qualche città centrale della parte più civile della nostra civiltà la sede di un funzionario permanente per rappresentare la pace e la base di accordo fra tutte le nazioni circostanti; sia egli per la natura del suo ufficio posto in disparte da tutte esse e tuttavia vincolato per giuramento a considerare i diritti e i torti di tutte; sia egli posto lì come giudice per esporre una legge etica e un sistema di relazioni sociali; sia egli di un certo tipo e formazione diversi da quelli che incoraggiano le ordinarie ambizioni di gloria militare o persino gli ordinari attaccamenti della tradizione tribale; sia egli protetto da uno speciale sentimento dalla pressione dei re e dei principi; sia egli vincolato in modo speciale alla considerazione degli uomini in quanto uomini.» Non sono pochi già ora, e presto ve ne saranno molti di più, coloro che sarebbero perfettamente capaci di proporre di propria iniziativa una tale ideale istituzione internazionale; ve ne sono anche molti che davvero, nella loro innocenza, supporrebbero che non fosse mai stata tentata prima.

È vero che finora gran numero di tali riformatori sociali rifuggirebbe dall’idea che l’istituzione sia un individuo. Ma persino quel pregiudizio si va indebolendo sotto l’usura della reale esperienza politica. Possiamo essere attaccati, come molti di noi lo sono, all’ideale democratico; ma la maggior parte di noi ha già compreso che la democrazia diretta, l’unica vera democrazia che soddisfa un vero democratico, è una cosa applicabile ad alcune cose e non ad altre; e non affatto applicabile a una questione come questa. La reale voce parlante di una vasta civiltà internazionale, o di una vasta religione internazionale, non sarà in alcun caso le reali voci articolate e distinguibili o le grida di tutti i milioni dei fedeli. Non è il popolo che sarebbe l’erede di un Papa detronizzato; è qualche sinodo o consesso di vescovi. Non è un’alternativa fra monarchia e democrazia, ma un’alternativa fra monarchia e oligarchia. E, essendo io stesso uno degli idealisti democratici, non ho la minima esitazione nella mia scelta fra le due ultime forme di privilegio. Un monarca è un uomo; ma un’oligarchia non è uomini; è un gruppo di pochi uomini abbastanza piccolo da essere insolente e abbastanza grande da essere irresponsabile. Un uomo nella posizione di un Papa, a meno che non sia letteralmente pazzo, deve essere responsabile. Ma gli aristocratici possono sempre gettare la responsabilità gli uni sugli altri; e tuttavia creare una società comune e corporativa da cui è esclusa la vista stessa del resto del mondo. Queste sono conclusioni a cui molte persone nel mondo stanno giungendo; e molte che sarebbero ancora assai stupite e inorridite di scoprire dove quelle conclusioni conducano. Ma il punto qui è che, anche se la nostra civiltà non riscopre il bisogno di un Papato, è estremamente probabile che prima o poi tenterà di supplire il bisogno di qualcosa come un Papato; anche se tenta di farlo di propria iniziativa. Quella sarà davvero una situazione ironica. Il mondo moderno avrà eretto un nuovo Antipapa, anche se, come nel romanzo di Monsignor Benson, l’Antipapa ha piuttosto il carattere di un Anticristo.

Il punto è che gli uomini tenteranno di mettere una qualche sorta di potere morale fuori dalla portata dei poteri materiali. È la debolezza di molti degni e ben intenzionati tentativi di giustizia internazionale in questo momento, che il consiglio internazionale non può quasi fare a meno di essere semplicemente un microcosmo o modello del mondo esterno a esso, con tutte le sue piccole cose e grandi cose, incluse le cose che sono fin troppo grandi. Supponiamo che negli scambi internazionali del futuro qualche potenza, diciamo la Svezia, sia avvertita come sproporzionata o problematica. Se la Svezia è potente in Europa, sarà potente nel consiglio d’Europa. Se la Svezia è troppo potente in Europa, sarà troppo potente nel consiglio d’Europa. E poiché è la cosa stessa che è irresistibile, è la cosa stessa da resistere; o in ogni caso da frenare. Non vedo come l’Europa possa mai sfuggire a quel dilemma logico, se non riscoprendo di nuovo un’autorità che è puramente morale ed è il riconosciuto custode di una moralità. Si può assai ragionevolmente dire che persino coloro che sono dedicati a quel dovere possono non sempre praticare ciò che professano. Ma gli altri governanti del mondo non sono nemmeno tenuti a professarlo.

Ancora e ancora nella storia, specialmente nella storia medievale, il Papato è intervenuto negli interessi della pace e dell’umanità; proprio come i più grandi santi si sono gettati fra le spade e i pugnali delle fazioni in lotta. Ma se non ci fosse stato alcun Papato e nessun santo e nessuna Chiesa Cattolica affatto, il mondo lasciato a se stesso certamente non avrebbe sostituito astrazioni sociali ai credi teologici. Nel complesso, l’umanità è stata assai lontana dall’essere umanitaria. Se il mondo fosse stato lasciato a se stesso, diciamo nell’età del feudalesimo, tutte le decisioni sarebbero state rigidamente e spietatamente sulle linee del feudalesimo. C’era una sola istituzione in quel mondo che era esistita prima del feudalesimo. C’era una sola istituzione che poteva possibilmente portare avanti qualche debole memoria della Repubblica e del Diritto Romano. Se il mondo fosse stato lasciato a se stesso nel tempo del Rinascimento e dell’arte di governo italiana del Principe, sarebbe stato ordinato interamente secondo la moda corrente della glorificazione dei principi. C’era una sola istituzione che poteva in ogni momento essere mossa a ripetere: «Non riponete la vostra fiducia nei principi.» Se essa fosse stata assente, l’unico risultato sarebbe stato che il famoso accordo di CUJUS REGIO EJUS RELIGIO sarebbe stato tutto REGIO con ben poca RELIGIO. E così, naturalmente, anche il nostro tempo ha i suoi dogmi inconsci e i suoi pregiudizi universali; ed esso ha bisogno di una speciale, sacra e a molti apparentemente disumana separazione per stare al di sopra di essi o per vedere al di là.

So che questo ideale è stato abusato come ogni altro; dico soltanto che persino coloro che più denunciano la realtà probabilmente ricominceranno a cercare l’ideale. Ma io non propongo, di fatto, che un tale tribunale spirituale agisca come un tribunale legale o sia dotato di poteri di interferenza pratica con il normale e nazionale governo. Sono del tutto sicuro, tanto per cominciare, che esso non accetterebbe mai un simile invischiamento materiale. Né io, del resto, desidero che alcuno dei tribunali secolari ora istituiti negli interessi della pace internazionale abbia così il potere di interferire con la nazionalità e la libertà locale. Preferirei di gran lunga dare tale potere a un papa piuttosto che ai politici e ai diplomatici del genere a cui il mondo lo sta dando. Ma non voglio darlo a nessuno e l’autorità in questione non vuole accettarlo da nessuno. La cosa di cui parlo è puramente morale e non può esistere senza una certa lealtà morale; è una cosa di atmosfera e persino in un certo senso di affetto. Non c’è spazio qui per descrivere il modo in cui un tale generale attaccamento popolare cresce; ma non c’è alcun dubbio che esso una volta crebbe davvero attorno a un tale centro religioso della nostra civiltà; e che non è probabile che cresca di nuovo se non per qualcosa che mira a uno standard di umiltà e carità più alto dello standard ordinario del mondo. Gli uomini non possono avere affetto per gli imperatori degli altri, né persino per i politici degli altri; è talvolta accaduto che si raffreddassero nell’affetto persino per i propri politici. Non vedo alcuna prospettiva di un simile positivo nucleo di amicizia se non in qualche positivo entusiasmo per qualcosa che muove le parti più profonde della natura morale dell’uomo; qualcosa che possa unirci non (come dicono i saccenti) per l’essere interamente internazionale, ma per l’essere universalmente umano. Gli uomini non possono accordarsi su niente più di quanto possano essere in disaccordo su niente. E qualcosa di abbastanza ampio da rendere possibile un tale accordo deve essere esso stesso più ampio del mondo.

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THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

I HAVE rather rashly undertaken to write of the Spirit of Christmas; and it presents a preliminary difficulty about which I must be candid. People are very curious nowadays in their way of talking about “the spirit” of a thing. There is, for example, a particular sort of prig who is always lecturing us about having the spirit of true Christianity, apart from all names and forms. As far as I can make out, he means the very opposite of what he says. He means that we are to go on using the names “Christian” and “Christianity,” and so on, for something in which it is quite specially the spirit that is not Christian; something that is a sort of combination of the baseless optimism of an American atheist with the pacifism of a mild Hindoo. In the same way, we read a great deal about the Spirit of Christmas in modern journalism or commercialism; but it is really a reversal of the same kind. So far from preserving the essentials without the externals, it is rather preserving the externals where there cannot be the essentials. It means taking two mere material substances, like holly and mistletoe, and spreading them all over huge and homeless cosmopolitan hotels or round the Doric columns of impersonal clubs full of jaded and cynical old gentlemen; or in any other place where the actual spirit of Christmas is least likely to be. But there is also another way in which modern commercial complexity eats out the heart of the thing, while actually leaving the painted shell of it. And that is the much too elaborate system of dependence on buying and selling, and therefore on bustle and hustle; and the actual neglect of the new things that might be done by the old Christmas.

Normally, if anything were normal nowadays, it would seem a truism to say that Christmas has been a family festival. But it is now possible (as I have had the good or bad luck to discover) to earn a reputation for paradox simply by going on saying that truisms are true. In this case, of course, the reason, the only reasonable reason, was religious. It was concerned with a happy family because it was consecrated to the Holy Family. But it is perfectly true that many men saw the fact without specially feeling the reason. When we say the root was religious, we do not mean that Sam Weller was concentrated on theological values when he told the Fat Boy to “put a bit of Christmas,” into some object, probably edible. We do not mean that the Fat Boy had gone into a trance of mystical contemplation like a monk seeing a vision. We do not even mean that Bob Cratchit defended punch by saying he was only looking on the wine when it was yellow; or that Tiny Tim quoted Timothy. We only mean that they, including their author, would have confessed humbly and heartily that there was someone historically quite anterior to Mr. Scrooge, who might be called the Founder of the Feast. But in any case, whatever the reason, all would have agreed about the result. Mr. Wardle’s feast centred in Mr. Wardle’s family; and none the less because the romantic shadows of Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass threatened to break it up for the formation of other families.

The Christmas season is domestic; and for that reason most people now prepare for it by struggling in tramcars, standing in queues, rushing away in trains, crowding despairingly into tea-shops, and wondering when or whether they will ever get home. I do not know whether some of them disappear for ever in the toy department or simply lie down and die in the tea-rooms; but by the look of them, it is quite likely. Just before the great festival of the home the whole population seems to have become homeless. It is the supreme triumph of industrial civilisation that, in the huge cities which seem to have far too many houses, there is a hopeless shortage of housing. For a long time past great numbers of our poor have become practically nomadic. We even confess the fact; for we talk of some of them as Street Arabs. But this domestic institution, in its present ironical phase, has gone beyond such normal abnormality. The feast of the family turns the rich as well as the poor into vagabonds. They are so scattered over the bewildering labyrinth of our traffic and our trade, that they sometimes cannot even reach the tea-shop; it would be indelicate, of course, to mention the tavern. They have a difficulty in crowding into their hotels, let alone separating to reach their houses. I mean quite the reverse of irreverence when I say that their only point of resemblance to the archetypal Christmas family is that there is no room for them at the inn.

Now Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home. But the other sort of paradox is not intentional and is certainly not beautiful. It is bad enough that we cannot altogether disentangle the tragedy of poverty. It is bad enough that the birth of the homeless, celebrated at hearth and altar, should sometimes synchronise with the death of the homeless in workhouses and slums. But we need not rejoice in this universal restlessness brought upon rich and poor alike; and it seems to me that in this matter we need a reform of the modern Christmas.

I will now emit another brilliant flash of paradox by remarking that Christmas occurs in the winter. That is, it is not only a feast dedicated to domesticity, but it is one deliberately placed under the conditions in which it is most uncomfortable to rush about and most natural to stop at home. But under the complicated conditions of modern conventions and conveniences, there arises this more practical and much more unpleasant sort of paradox. People have to rush about for a few weeks, if it is only to stay at home for a few hours. Now the old and healthy idea of such winter festivals was this; that people being shut in and besieged by the weather were driven back on their own resources; or, in other words, had a chance of showing whether there was anything in them. It is not certain that the reputation of our most fashionable modern pleasure-seekers would survive the test. Some dreadful exposures would be made of some such brilliant society favourites, if they were cut off from the power of machinery and money. They are quite used to having everything done for them; and even when they go to the very latest American dances, it seems to be mostly the Negro musicians who dance. But anyhow, on the average of healthy humanity I believe the cutting off of all these mechanical connections would have a thoroughly enlivening and awakening effect. At present they are always accused of merely amusing themselves; but they are doing nothing so noble or worthy of their human dignity. Most of them by this time cannot amuse themselves; they are too used to being amused.

Lo spirito del Natale

Ho intrapreso piuttosto temerariamente di scrivere dello Spirito del Natale; e presenta una difficoltà preliminare su cui devo essere sincero. Oggi la gente è molto curiosa nel modo in cui parla dello “spirito” di una cosa. C’è, per esempio, un particolare tipo di presuntuoso che ci fa sempre la predica sul fatto di avere lo spirito del vero cristianesimo, a parte tutti i nomi e le forme. Per quanto posso capire, intende proprio il contrario di quello che dice. Intende che dobbiamo continuare ad usare i nomi “Cristiano” e “cristianesimo”, e così via, per qualcosa in cui è proprio lo spirito a non essere cristiano; qualcosa che è una sorta di combinazione dell’ottimismo infondato di un ateo americano con il pacifismo di un mite indù. Allo stesso modo, leggiamo molto sullo Spirito del Natale nel giornalismo moderno o nel commercio; ma in realtà è una sorta di inversione dello stesso tipo. Lungi dal preservare l’essenziale senza le apparenze, si tratta piuttosto di preservare le apparenze dove non possono esserci gli elementi essenziali. Significa prendere due semplici sostanze materiali, come il vischio e l’agrifoglio, e spargerle dappertutto su enormi e senza fissa dimora hotel cosmopoliti o intorno alle colonne doriche di club impersonali pieni di vecchi signori jaded e cinici; o in qualsiasi altro posto dove lo spirito vero del Natale è meno probabile che sia. Ma c’è anche un altro modo in cui la complessità commerciale moderna erode il cuore della cosa, lasciando intatta solo la sua crosta dipinta. E questo è il sistema molto elaborato di dipendenza dall’acquisto e dalla vendita, e quindi dal trambusto; e l’effettivo trascurare le nuove cose che potrebbero essere fatte con il vecchio Natale.

Normalmente, se qualcosa fosse normale al giorno d’oggi, sembrerebbe un luogo comune dire che il Natale è stato una festa familiare. Ma ora è possibile (come ho avuto la fortuna o sfortuna di scoprire) guadagnarsi una reputazione per paradosso semplicemente continuando a dire che i luoghi comuni sono veri. In questo caso, ovviamente, il motivo, l’unico motivo ragionevole, era religioso. Era legato a una famiglia felice perché consacrata alla Sacra Famiglia. Ma è perfettamente vero che molti uomini vedevano il fatto senza sentire particolarmente la ragione. Quando diciamo che la radice era religiosa, non intendiamo dire che Sam Weller fosse concentrato sui valori teologici quando disse al Ragazzo Grassottello di “mettere un po’ di Natale” in qualche oggetto, probabilmente commestibile. Non intendiamo dire che il Ragazzo Grassottello sia entrato in trance di contemplazione mistica come un monaco che vede una visione. Non intendiamo nemmeno dire che Bob Cratchit difendesse la cioccolata calda dicendo che stava solo guardando il vino quando era giallo; o che Tiny Tim citasse Timoteo. Vogliamo solo dire che loro, incluso il loro autore, avrebbero confessato umilmente e sinceramente che c’era qualcuno storicamente assai anteriore a Mr. Scrooge, che si potrebbe chiamare il Fondatore della Festa. Ma in ogni caso, quale che fosse la ragione, tutti sarebbero stati d’accordo sul risultato. La festa di Mr. Wardle era incentrata sulla famiglia di Mr. Wardle; e non meno perché le ombre romantiche di Mr. Winkle e Mr. Snodgrass minacciavano di romperla per la formazione di altre famiglie.

La stagione di Natale è domestica; e per questo motivo la maggior parte delle persone si prepara ad essa lottando negli autobus, stando in fila, correndo sui treni, affollandosi disperatamente nelle taverne chiedendosi quando o se riusciranno mai a tornare a casa. Non so se alcuni di loro scompaiano per sempre nel reparto giocattoli o semplicemente si sdraino e muoiano nelle camere da tè; ma dal loro aspetto, è piuttosto probabile. Proprio prima della grande festa della casa l’intera popolazione sembra essere diventata senza fissa dimora. È il trionfo supremo della civiltà industriale che, nelle enormi città che sembrano avere troppe case, c’è una sperduta carenza di alloggi. Per un lungo periodo passato grandi numeri dei nostri poveri sono diventati praticamente nomadi. Confessiamo persino il fatto; perché parliamo di alcuni di loro come Arabi delle strade. Ma questa istituzione domestica, nella sua attuale fase ironica, è andata oltre tale normalità anormale. La festa della famiglia trasforma i ricchi così come i poveri in vagabondi. Sono così sparsi nel labirinto sconcertante del nostro traffico e commercio che a volte non riescono nemmeno ad arrivare alla camere da tè; sarebbe indiscreto, naturalmente, menzionare la taverna. Hanno difficoltà a stiparsi nei loro hotel, figuriamoci a separarsi per raggiungere le loro case. Intendo dire l’esatto contrario dell’irriverenza quando dico che il loro unico punto di somiglianza con la famiglia archetipica del Natale è che non c’è posto per loro all’osteria.

Ora il Natale è costruito su un bel e intenzionale paradosso; che la nascita del senzatetto debba essere celebrata in ogni casa. Ma l’altro tipo di paradosso non è intenzionale ed è certamente non bello. È già abbastanza brutto che non possiamo del tutto disfare la tragedia della povertà. È già abbastanza brutto che la nascita del senzatetto, celebrata presso il focolare e l’altare, a volte sincronizzi con la morte del senzatetto negli ospizi e nelle baraccopoli. Ma non dobbiamo rallegrarci di questo universale inquietudine portato su ricchi e poveri allo stesso modo; e mi sembra che in questa materia abbiamo bisogno di una riforma del Natale moderno.

Ecco ora un altro lampo brillante di paradosso, osservando che il Natale cade in inverno. Cioè, non è solo una festa dedicata alla vita domestica, ma è stata collocata appositamente nelle condizioni in cui è più scomodo correre di qua e di là e più naturale fermarsi a casa. Ma sotto le complicate condizioni delle convenzioni e dei comfort moderni, nasce questo tipo di paradosso molto più pratico e molto più spiacevole. Le persone devono correre di qua e di là per alcune settimane, anche solo per rimanere a casa per qualche ora. Ora l’idea vecchia e sana di tali feste d’inverno era questa: che le persone, chiuse dentro e assediate dal tempo, venivano costrette a fare affidamento sulle proprie risorse; o, in altre parole, avevano la possibilità di dimostrare se c’era qualcosa in loro. Non è certo che la reputazione dei nostri più alla moda cercatori di piacere moderni sopravvivrebbe alla prova. Si farebbero delle terribili rivelazioni su alcuni brillanti favoriti della società, se venissero tagliati fuori dalla possibilità di usare macchine e denaro. Sono abituati a far fare tutto per loro; e anche quando vanno alle ultime mode di balli americani, sembra che siano soprattutto i musicisti neri a ballare. Ma comunque, in media sulla sana umanità, credo che il taglio di tutte queste connessioni meccaniche avrebbe un effetto completamente vivificante e risvegliante. Attualmente sono sempre accusati di divertirsi soltanto; ma non stanno facendo nulla di così nobile o degno della loro dignità umana. La maggior parte di loro a questa ora non riesce più a divertirsi; sono troppo abituati ad essere intrattenuti.

Christmas might be creative. We are told, even by those who praise it most, that it is chiefly valuable for keeping up ancient customs or old-fashioned games. It is indeed valuable for both those admirable purposes. But in the sense of which I am now speaking it might once more be possible to turn the truth the other way round. It is not so much old things as new things that a real Christmas might create. It might, for instance, create new games, if people were really driven to invent their own games. Most of the very old games began with the use of ordinary tools or furniture. So the very terms of tennis were founded on the framework of the old inn courtyard. So, it is said, the stumps in cricket were originally only the three legs of the milking-stool. Now we might invent new things of this kind, if we remembered who is the mother of invention. How pleasing it would be to start a game in which we scored so much for hitting the umbrella-stand or the dinner-wagon, or even the host and hostess; of course, with a missile of some soft material. Children who are lucky enough to be left alone in the nursery invent not only whole games, but whole dramas and life-stories of their own; they invent secret languages; they create imaginary families; they laboriously conduct family magazines. That is the sort of creative spirit that we want in the modern world; want both in the sense of desiring and in the sense of lacking it. If Christmas could become more domestic, instead of less, I believe there would be a vast increase in the real Christmas spirit; the spirit of the Child. But in indulging this dream we must once more invert the current convention into the form of a paradox. It is true in a sense that Christmas is the time at which the doors should be open. But I would have the doors shut at Christmas, or at least just before Christmas; and then the world shall see what we can do.

I cannot but remember, with something of a smile, that on an earlier and more controversial page of this book I have mentioned a lady who shuddered at the thought of the things perpetrated by my co-religionists behind closed doors. But my memory of it is mellowed by distance and the present subject, and I feel quite the reverse of controversial. I hope that lady, and all of her way of thinking, may also have the wisdom to close their doors; and discover that only when all the doors are closed the best thing will be found inside. If they are Puritans, whose religion is only based on the Bible, let it for once indeed be a Family Bible. If they are Pagans, who can accept nothing but the winter feast, let it at least be a family feast. The discordance or discomfort complained of by modern critics, in the family reunion, is not due to that mystical focal fire having been left burning, but to its having been left to go cold. It is because cold fragments of a once living thing are clumsily lumped together; it is no argument against making the thing alive. Christmas toys are incongruously dangled before heavy and heathen uncles who wish they were playing golf. But that does not alter the fact that they might become much brighter and more intelligent if they knew how to play with toys; and they are horrible bores about golf. Their dullness is only the last deadly product of the mechanical progress of organised and professional sports, in that rigid world of routine outside the home. When they were children, behind closed doors in the home, it is probable that nearly every one of them had day-dreams and unwritten dramas that belonged to them as much as Hamlet belonged to Shakespeare or Pickwick to Dickens. How much more thrilling it would be if Uncle Henry, instead of describing in detail all the strokes with which he ought to have got out of the bunker, were to say frankly that he had been on a voyage to the end of the world and had just caught the Great Sea-Serpent. How much more truly intellectual would be the conversation of Uncle William if, instead of telling us the point to which he had reduced his handicap, he could still say with conviction that he was King of the Kangaroo Islands, or Chief of the Rango Dango Redskins. These things, projected from within, were in almost all human spirits; and it is not normal that the inspiration of them should be so utterly crushed by the things without. Let it not be supposed for a moment that I also am among the tyrants of the earth, who would impose my own tastes, or force all the other children to play my own games. I have no disrespect for the game of golf; it is an admirable game. I have played it; or rather, I have played at it, which is generally regarded as the very opposite. By all means let the golfers golf and even the organisers organise, if their only conception of an organ is something like a barrel-organ. Let them play golf day after day; let them play golf for three hundred and sixty-four days, and nights as well, with balls dipped in luminous paint, to be pursued in the dark. But let there be one night when things grow luminous from within: and one day when men seek for all that is buried in themselves, and discover, where she is indeed hidden, behind locked gates and shuttered windows, and doors thrice barred and bolted, the spirit of liberty.

Il Natale potrebbe essere creativo. Ci viene detto, anche da coloro che lo lodano di più, che è soprattutto prezioso per mantenere vive le antiche usanze o i giochi d’altri tempi. È davvero prezioso per entrambi questi ammirevoli scopi. Ma nel senso di cui sto parlando ora potrebbe essere possibile ribaltare nuovamente la verità. Non sono tanto le cose vecchie quanto quelle nuove che un vero Natale potrebbe creare. Potrebbe, per esempio, creare nuovi giochi, se le persone fossero davvero costrette a inventarli da sole. Molti dei più antichi giochi iniziarono con l’uso di semplici strumenti o mobili. Così i termini stessi del tennis furono fondati sulla struttura del vecchio cortile della locanda. Si dice che anche i paletti del cricket fossero originariamente solo le tre gambe dello sgabello per mungere. Ora potremmo inventare nuove cose di questo genere, se ricordassimo chi è la madre dell’invenzione. Quanto sarebbe piacevole iniziare un gioco in cui si segnasse tanto colpendo il portaparapiglio o il carrello della cena, o anche i padroni di casa; naturalmente con un proiettile di qualche materiale morbido. I bambini che hanno la fortuna di essere lasciati soli nella nursery inventano non solo interi giochi, ma intere drammi e storie della loro vita; inventano lingue segrete; creano famiglie immaginarie; si danno da fare con laboriose riviste familiari. Questo è il tipo di spirito creativo che vogliamo nel mondo moderno; lo vogliamo sia nel senso di desiderarlo che nel senso di mancarne. Se il Natale potesse diventare più domestico, invece che meno, credo che ci sarebbe un enorme aumento dello spirito natalizio autentico; lo spirito del Bambino. Ma indulgendo a questo sogno dobbiamo ancora una volta ribaltare la convenzione corrente nella forma di un paradosso. È vero in un certo senso che il Natale è il tempo in cui le porte dovrebbero essere aperte. Ma io vorrei che a Natale, o almeno poco prima del Natale, le porte fossero chiuse; e allora il mondo vedrà cosa siamo capaci di fare.

Non posso fare a meno di ricordare, con un certo sorriso, che su una pagina precedente e più controversa di questo libro ho menzionato una signora che rabbrividiva al pensiero delle cose perpetrate dai miei correligionari dietro porte chiuse. Ma il mio ricordo di ciò è ammorbidito dalla distanza e dall’argomento attuale, e mi sento tutto fuorché polemico. Spero che quella signora, e tutti i suoi modi di pensare, possano avere anche loro la saggezza di chiudere le loro porte; e scoprire che solo quando tutte le porte sono chiuse si troverà al loro interno la cosa migliore. Se sono Puritani, la cui religione è basata solo sulla Bibbia, facciano sì che sia davvero una Bibbia di famiglia. Se sono Pagani, che non possono accettare nulla se non il banchetto invernale, facciano almeno in modo che sia un banchetto di famiglia. La discordia o il disagio lamentati dai critici moderni nella riunione di famiglia non sono dovuti al fatto che quel fuoco focale mistico sia stato lasciato acceso, ma al fatto che sia stato lasciato spegnersi. È perché frammenti freddi di una cosa un tempo viva sono goffamente ammassati insieme; questo non è un argomento contro il far vivere la cosa. I giocattoli di Natale sono appesi in modo incongruo davanti a zii pesanti e pagani che vorrebbero giocare a golf. Ma ciò non cambia il fatto che potrebbero diventare molto più brillanti e intelligenti se sapessero come giocare con i giocattoli; e sono orribili noiosi riguardo al golf. La loro ottusità è solo l’ultimo prodotto letale del progresso meccanico degli sport organizzati e professionali, in quel mondo rigido di routine fuori dalla casa. Quando erano bambini, dietro porte chiuse nella casa, è probabile che quasi tutti avessero sogni ad occhi aperti e drammi non scritti che appartenevano loro tanto quanto Amleto apparteneva a Shakespeare o Pickwick a Dickens. Quanto sarebbe più emozionante se lo zio Henry, invece di descrivere in dettaglio tutti i colpi con cui avrebbe dovuto uscire dalla buca, dicesse francamente che è stato in un viaggio fino alla fine del mondo e ha appena catturato il Grande Serpente Marino. Quanto sarebbe più veramente intellettuale la conversazione dello zio William se, invece di raccontarci a quale punto ha ridotto il suo handicap, potesse ancora dire con convinzione che è Re delle Isole del Canguro o Capo dei Pellirosse Rango Dango. Queste cose, proiettate dall’interno, erano in quasi tutti gli spiriti umani; e non è normale che l’ispirazione di esse sia così completamente schiacciata dalle cose esterne. Non si pensi neanche per un momento che anch’io sia tra i tiranni della terra, che imporrebbero i miei gusti o costringerebbero tutti gli altri bambini a giocare ai miei giochi. Non ho alcun dispetto per il gioco del golf; è un gioco ammirevole. Ho giocato; o meglio, ho giocato al golf, che generalmente è considerato l’opposto. Permettiamo pure ai golfisti di giocare a golf e anche agli organizzatori di organizzare, se la loro unica concezione di un organo è qualcosa come un organo a manovella. Che giochino a golf giorno dopo giorno; che giochino a golf per trecentosessantaquattro giorni e notti altrettanto, con palline immerse in vernice luminosa, da inseguire al buio. Ma che ci sia una notte quando le cose diventano luminose dall’interno: e un giorno quando gli uomini cercano tutto ciò che è sepolto in loro stessi, e scoprono, dove è davvero nascosta, dietro porte chiuse a chiave e finestre oscurate, e porte triplamente sbarrate e assicurate, lo spirito della libertà.