G. K. CHESTERTON
The Apostle and the Wild Ducks and other essays
Edited by DOROTHY E. COLLINS
Contents
IN GENERAL
A Sermon on Cheapness The Speaker, 29 March 1902 1
On Manners Daily News, 18 July 1902 5
For Persons of the Name of Smith Daily News, 28 November 1902 9
The True Vanity of Vanities Daily News, 27 February 1904 12
Written in the Sand Daily News, 19 August 1905 15
A Case of Comrades Daily News, 14 March 1908 18
Something Daily News, 9 July 1910 22
Asparagus New Witness, 18 June 1914.
The English Spirit and the Flea Illustrated London News, 25 September 1915 28
The Hobby and the Head Waiter New Witness, composite essay, 17 and 24 March 1922 31
In Praise of Pie G.K.’s Weekly, 1 October 1927 36
Culture versus Civilisation Illustrated London News, 24 March 1934 38
The Winter Feast probably written for an American magazine 42
They Tell a Story Introduction to a book on art, source and date unknown 49
HERE AND THERE
Walking Tours Daily News, 23 September 1901 55
The Blindness of the Sightseer Daily News, 24 July 1902 59
The Aesthetes in the Kitchen Garden Daily News, composite essay, 13 and 20 August 1904 63
The Need of Personalities in Politics Daily News, 22 July 1905 66
The Largest Window in the World contributed to King Albert’s Book, 1914 69
The Apostle and the Wild Ducks New Witness, 27 October 1922 71
Travellers’ Joys Illustrated London News, 2 October 1926 75
Understanding France Illustrated London News, 5 September 1931 79
Salute to New York New York American, 19 September 1931 83
The British Beech G.K.’s Weekly, 17 December 1932 85
Public Monuments Illustrated London News, 21 April 1934 88
THE MAKING OF HISTORY
Statues Illustrated London News, 1 June 1907 95
A Theory of Tyrants Daily News, 13 June 1908 99
On Anecdote of Persecution Daily News, 1 August 1908 102
The Return of Pageantry Eye-Witness, 29 June 1911 106
Rational History Illustrated London News, 10 May 1913 109
The Unknown Warrior Illustrated London News, 20 November 1920 112
William Penn and his Royalist Friends Illustrated London News, 24 January 1931 116
ON LITERATURE
Ruskin: The Humorist The Speaker, 28 April 1900 123
Literature of Information The Speaker, 3 August 1901 126
Eulogy of Robin Hood Daily News, 6 June 1903 131
A Plea for Hasty Journalism The World, 13 September 1904 135
The Voice of Shelley Daily News, 10 June 1905 138
The Great Translation Daily News, 25 March 1911 141
Jane Austen’s Juvenilia Preface to Love and Friendship and Other Early Works, Chatto & Windus, 1923 144
The Countrymen of Mary Webb and Thomas Hardy Illustrated London News, 12 May 1928 150
The Words of Strong Poetry Illustrated London News, 1 April 1933 154
The Refrain of the Rover New York American, 15 December 1934 157
ON REFLECTION
What is Right with the World? T.P.’s Weekly, 1910 161
IN GENERAL
A Sermon on Cheapness
It is really time that the absurd pretence of the vices to be romantic were given up. Ever since the time of Byron there has been vague and foolish conception clinging to all men’s minds that there is some connection between lawlessness and poetry, between orderly images and disorderly acts. A thousand instances might be given to show the shallowness of this idea. For instance, blasphemy has been regarded as something bold and splendid, as if the very essence of blasphemy were not the commonplace. It is the very definition of profanity that it thinks and speaks of certain things prosaically, which other men think and speak of poetically. It is thus a defeat of the imagination, and a volume full of the wildest pictures and most impious jests remains in its essential character a piece of poor literalism, a humdrum affair. The same general truth might be pursued through all the Ten Commandments. Murder, for instance, is quite overrated, aesthetically. I am assured by persons on whose judgment I rely, and whose experience has, presumably, been wide, that the feelings of a murderer are of a quite futile character. What could be stupider than kicking to pieces, like a child, a machine you know nothing about, the variety and ingenuity of which should keep any imaginative person watching it delightedly day and night? Say we are acquainted with such a human machine; let us say, a rich uncle. A human engine is inexhaustible in its possibilities; however long and unrewarding has been our knowledge of the avuncular machine, we never know that the very moment that we lift the assassin’s knife the machine is not about to grind forth some exquisite epigram which it would make life worth living to hear, or even, by some spasm of internal clockwork, produce a cheque. To kill him is clearly prosaic. Alive, he is a miracle; dead, he is merely a debris, a debris of unpleasant gore and quite inappropriate and old-fashioned clothes. Objection is sometimes brought against the absolute legal and medical doctrine that life should under all circumstances and at all costs be kept burning. It may or may not be moral and humane but there can be no doubt of its impressiveness as a purely poetical ideal. It is the desire, so natural in an imaginative man of science, to preserve the only thing that can really be of any interest to anyone.
I have taken these two instances, as the first that come to hand, of the general fact of the mean and matter-of-fact character of the vices, the wild and thrilling character of the virtues. Many other examples might be taken of the raptures and roses of virtue, the lilies and languors of vice. But an example, stranger both in its truth and in its unfamiliarity than any other, chiefly occupies my mind. Of all the conventional virtues there is none that is so completely despised by the aesthetic and Bohemian philosophers as economy. It is represented as the very meanest of human standards, a merit for cowards and greasy burgesses, a thing that is even base when it is a virtue and dull when it is a vice. But in truth there is no quality so truly romantic as economy.
Economy is essentially imaginative because it is a realisation of the value of everything. The real objection to murder, aesthetically speaking, is that it is uneconomical. It is a failure in efficiency (I want to write that word down and look at it) to waste a whole man in order to procure a momentary emotion which is often disappointing. And the real objection to waste is that all waste is a kind of murder, a merely negative and destructive thing, the obliteration of something which we can neither value nor understand. We slay an uncle because we do not realise the strange dumb poetry of an uncle; we fling away a penny because we cannot realise the gorgeous possibilities of a penny. I have murdered many pennies, many trusting halfcrowns, in my life. For let it be clearly understood that I do not maintain for a moment that this poetry of economy is an easy thing for any of us to keep up. We tend to forget the poetry of pennies just as we tend to forget the poetry of skies and woods and great buildings, because we see them so often. In practice it is most difficult to be the Economic Man. We have all heard of the clergyman who spoke in defence of teetotalism, saying that for twenty years he had tried to teach drunkards to drink moderately, and had never once succeeded. The reporters, with unintentional kindness, described him as having said that for twenty years he had tried to drink moderately and had never once succeeded. So it is with this great question of economy.
For a long period the writer of the present article has tried to be economical and has never once succeeded. But I impute this entirely to a lack of true poetry in myself. I do not for a moment dream of shielding myself behind so transparent and canting a plea as the notion that there is anything artistic or romantic in being extravagant. The man who does not look at his change is no true poet. To give away a penny deliberately is indeed one of the highest triumphs of imagination: it means that the giver can realise the meaning of the existence of some ragged family herded in the lairs of East London. But to throw away a penny is sheer lack of imagination; it means that the giver cannot realise even the meaning of a penny. It means that he forgets the first and most thrilling of all the lessons of the universe, the lessons of every seed and germ, the lesson of the infinite and terrible power that may be found in small things. The French, the most poetical of all peoples, are also the most economical. The English working man, with his sterling, solid common sense, throws away every rag and bone that does not appear to him useful at the first glance; the French cottager turns those rags and bones into exquisite and civilised dishes. Economy is only another name for universalism; the true poet regards every earthly object as having some value and secret utility— with the possible exception of a dust-cart. The old romance of life was held to consist in expense—in the jewels and perfumes of the ‘Arabian Nights’, in the cushion and cigars of Ouida. The newer and truer romance will be the romance of cheapness. It will address itself to the truly imaginative task of realising what is the real worth (a worth running into millions) of the penny cup of coffee to the tired pedestrian at midnight or the pennyworth of tobacco, to the poor man in his half-hour holiday. It will celebrate the cheapness of ecstasy.
My bosom friend the Pessimist and I were standing outside a small toy shop, glueing our noses to the glass, when the long silence was broken by my remarking on the beauty of a solid stick of blue chalk, which was offered for sale (in some tempest of generosity) for a halfpenny. ‘Have you considered,’ I asked, ‘all that this stick of blue chalk means? For a halfpenny I am possessed of it. I go home at night under the stars, between dark walls and through mazy streets. I shall be free to write upon those walls beautiful or stern sentiments, arraigning the powers of the earth, and write them in the very colour of heaven. At home I may beguile the evening in a thousand innocent sports, designing barbaric patterns upon the new table-cloth, drawing dreamy and ideal landscapes upon the note-paper, decorating my own person in the manner of our British predecessors, sketching strange and ideal adventures for strange and ideal characters. And all this blue river of dreams is loosened by a halfpenny.’
The Pessimist replied, in his sad, stern way, ‘Drivel. It is only the blue chalk you buy for a halfpenny. You do not buy the stars for a halfpenny; you do not buy the streets for a halfpenny; you do not buy your dreams or your love of drawing or your tastes and imaginations for a halfpenny.’
‘True,’ I replied. ‘The stars and the dreams and myself are cheaper than chalk: for I bought them for nothing.’
He burst into tears and became immediately convinced of the basis of true religion. For our very word for God means Economy: is not improvidence the opposite of Providence?
On Manners
One of the greatest difficulties in any philosophical discussion of manners is the fact that the presence of bad manners and the absence of any manners are treated as identical. We say indifferently of a man of a more or less repulsive social ineptitude either that he has no manners or that he has bad manners. How entirely different these two things are may be tested by the fact that in no other affairs do we treat these phrases as synonymous. There is all the difference in the world between saying that a man has no wine and saying that he has bad wine. There is all the difference in the world between the comparatively trifling biographical statement, ‘He has no sons,’ and the really disquieting one, ‘He has bad sons’. If, when we were about to breakfast with a friend, a common acquaintance were to approach us and whisper impressively, ‘You will eat no eggs,’ the expression would amount to little more than an interesting detail; if he were to whisper, ‘You will eat bad eggs,’ an element of tragedy would at once appear. But the difference between no manners and bad manners is quite as definite and important as the difference between no eggs and bad eggs.
The absence of manners is an unconscious and chaotic thing, the product of vagueness, of monomania, of absence of mind, of ignorance of the world. But the presence of bad manners is a perfectly solemn, deliberate, and artificial thing, the result of pride and vainglory, hypocrisy and blindness and hardness of heart. A great mass of human society may thus be simply and satisfactorily divided into two definite sections. But the actual nature of the bad manners which constitute the chief characteristic of good society is worthy, it may be, of somewhat more profound examination and definition. For the manners which we see in the centres of social life such as the House of Commons are really bad, not in the sense that they are insufficient or ignorant, but in the sense that they violate what is the whole object and meaning of manners.
Courtesy is a mystical thing; it may be defined as a spontoneous worship. Politeness is, indeed, even more fantastically reverential than religion itself, for it treats a landlady’s parlour as the religionist treats a temple. To him all houses are holy, and whenever or wherever it be found, the covered place demands the uncovered head. Politeness is thus a thing mysterious and elemental, going down to the foundations of the world. Since no man can express how surprising and terrifying and beautiful is every object upon which we gaze, on the day when we all become truly primitive we shall all become extravagantly polite; we shall take off our hats to the sparrows, and apologise for treading on the daisies. Politeness of this kind is simply imagination. That is the inevitable result of realising that things are there. Here, as in so many other cases, we see the singular dullness of all those sections of society who call themselves unconventional. They imagine that unconventionality is a mark of being artistic or imaginative. It is, of course, a mark of being especially prosaic and limited. For the great conventions are, as their name grammatically implies, simply the great agreements, and agreement is essential to all art, and to all ceremony, and, indeed, to everything, except mere rowdy competition and free fights. If a man is ceremonious he is conventional, and if he is poetical he is ceremonious.
In so far, therefore, as the artistic classes believe in a lounging and Bohemian existence, they are fighting against the very nature of art, and also against the very nature of a vivid realisation of things. If once we realised things vividly, and saw how valuable they are, we should become more elaborately urbane than any dandy of the old school. What was wrong with the dandies of the old school was not the fact that their politeness was extravagant, but the fact that they did not really believe in it. The Brummell type was wrong, not because it bowed repeatedly over a lady’s hand, but because it did not respect her either in act or conversation. The bowing was entirely right; if we saw things for one moment as they are we should stand bowing for several minutes over the hand of the news-boy or the crossing-sweeper, thus creating some sensation in the neighbourhood.
Now if it be once granted that politeness is reverence, an expression of reverence for our environment, it does not particularly matter by what actual physical pantomime it is expressed. It may be expressed, as in the case of the Christian and Jewish religions, by taking off your hat, or by putting it on. In many Oriental countries it is expressed by taking off one’s boots, and in some of the great Republics of the Antipodes it may, for all I know, be expressed by taking off your collar or your waistcoat. Certain savages rub each other’s noses when they meet, and I have no doubt that they rub them reverentially. The form matters nothing, so long as the spirit which it is meant to convey is a spirit of chivalry and of a poetic humility. But the great central and remarkable thing about society manners in this decade is that they are not intended to express the idea of courtesy, the idea, that is to say, that we are impressed with our surroundings, but, on the contrary, specially and elaborately intended to express the idea that we do not care a brass farthing for anyone for a mile round. The old-fashioned bowing and scraping may have been ludicrous and hypocritical, when taken in conjunction with the materialistic or immoral practices which went along with it, but at least the form itself, the actual bow and scrape, did express deference and self-subordination. But the modern manners of the richer class are actually framed, like a careful artistic work, to express indifference to everything and everybody.
The modern gentleman is not the man who knows how to be polite; he is the man who knows how to be rude in an entirely gentlemanly manner. His only scruple is that he must not be rude in the same way that an omnibus conductor is rude—that is to say, in an amusing way. It is the object of modern urbanity not to cultivate the hypocritical subservience of the old bucks and beaux, but to cultivate a way of bowing to a lady which is a great deal more personally offensive than hitting her in the face. It is not, in short, courtesy at all; it is not an awkward and clownish attempt to indicate that we care for our surroundings; it is a perfectly polished, deliberate and successful attempt to indicate that we care for nothing in earth or Heaven. Uneducated people, that is to say, have no manners, educated people have bad manners.
Nobody can visit the House of Commons without coming away with the general impression that the art cultivated by the young country gentleman is the art of doing his worst elegantly; and to do one’s worst, however elegantly, remains what it is, the one and solitary supreme insult. If a man throws his worst or his tenth best to anything, it matters nothing if the thing he throws be the Iliad or a casket of sapphires, it still remains an insult. And this insult to the ancient English Parliament is expressed in every line of the figures of the well-dressed Members of the House. A man with a million genuine and intellectual charms, is supposed to be a man with good manners. This simply means that he exhibits an unusual degree of physical grace in the act of putting his boots within a foot or two of the Mace of the King of England. It is a terrible thing that while true courtesy is a transcendental virtue and involves admiration, the most courteous man in modern politics is also the incarnation of indifference.
For Persons of the Name of Smith
Some time ago Mr C. F. G. Masterman led a vigorous attack upon my timid and humble optimism, and declared in effect that when I maintained a poetry in all things it was I who supplied it. I wish I could claim that I had ever supplied poetry to anything; it seems to me that I am at the very best a humdrum scientific student noting it down. The sentimentalists, the sons of a passionate delusion, are those who do not think everything poetical. For they are wholly under the influence of words, of the vague current phraseology, which thinks ‘castle’ a poetical word and ‘Post-office’ an unpoetical word, which thinks ‘knight’ a poetical word and ‘policeman’ an unpoetical word, which thinks ‘eagle’ a poetical ward and ‘pig’ an unpoetical word. I do not say that there is not truth in this as a matter of literature; I do not say that in pure technical style there is not a difference between eagles and pigs. All I wish to point out is that the ordinary man in the street when he says that there is no poetry in a pig or a post-office is, in fact, merely intoxicated with literary style. He is not looking at the thing itself; if he did that he would see that it was not only poetical, but obviously and glaringly poetical. He thinks a railway-signal, let us say, must be prosaic, because the word sounds funny, and there is no rhyme in it. But if he looked straight and square at what a railway-signal is, he would realise that it was, to take a casual case, a red fire or light kindled to keep people from death, as poetical a thing as the spear of Britomart or the lamp of Aladdin. It is, in short, the man who thinks ordinary things common who is really the man living in an unreal world.
But of all the examples of this general fact that have recently been called to my notice, there is none more peculiar and interesting than that of the family name of Smith, in which we have a splendid example of the fact that the poetry of common things is a mere fact, while the commonplace character of common things is a mere delusion. For, if we look at the name Smith in a casual and impressionable way, remembering how we commonly hear it, what is commonly said about it, we think of it as something funny and trivial; we think of pictures in Punch, of jokes in comic songs, of all the cheapness and modernity which seem to centre round a Mr Smith. But, if we look at the plain word itself, we suddenly behold a poem. It is the name of a great rugged and primeval craft, a trade that is in the bones of every great epic of antiquity, a trade on which the ‘arma virumque’ have everlastingly depended, and which they have repeatedly acclaimed. It is a craft so poetical that even the babies of village yokels stand and stare into the cavern of its creative violence, with a dim sense that the dancing sparks and the deafening blows are in some way wonderful, as the shops of the village cobbler and the village baker are not wonderful. The mystery of flame, the mystery of metals, the fight between the hardest of earthly things and the weirdest of earthly elements, the defeat of the unconquerable iron by its only conqueror, the brute calm of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the origin of a thousand sciences and arts, the ploughing of fields, the hewing of wood, the arraying of armies, and the whole beginning of arms, these things are written with brevity indeed, but with perfect clearness, on the visiting card of Mr Smith. The Smiths are a house of arrogant antiquity, of prehistoric simplicity. It would not be at all remarkable if a certain contemptuous carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, marked people whose name was Smith. Yet novelists, when they wish to describe a hero as strong and romantic, persistently call him Vernon Aylmer, which means nothing, or Bertrand Vallance, which means nothing; while all the time it is in their power to give him the sacred name of Smith, this name made of iron and fire. From the very beginnings of history and fable this clan has gone forth to battle; their trophies are in every hand, their name is everywhere; they are older than the nations, and their sign is the Hammer of Thor.
Anyone whose name is Smith may be connected with a Smith who was a lawyer in the reign of Henry VIII, or a Smith who was a Colonel in the British army at Blenheim, or a Smith who was a Cavalier, or a Smith who was a Puritan, or a Smith who was a Bishop, or a Smith who was hanged. All this kind of historic information exists in a very perfect form. But it must be remembered that the origin of a great family should be not merely historic, but also prehistoric. Every single practical and triumphant thing in this world has begun, not with an accuracy, but with a legend. These dim, gigantic fables are the origins of all practical things. And behind the dimmest and most gigantic Smith, we may see the more tremendous outlines of the formless and fabulous Smith who was the son of Vulcan and the first conqueror of iron. The shame which many people seem to feel about owning to such a patronymic or tracing its origin, is an extraordinary thing, but it is part of a very deep and general evil which has been going on for some time back. The interest in race, the interest in genealogy, which were professed by the ancient aristocratic world, were not bad things; they were in themselves good things. It is, at least, as reasonable to investigate the origin of a man as to investigate the origin of a cowslip, or a periwinkle, or a prairie dog; the herald with his tabard and trumpet holds his perfectly legitimate place beside the botanist and the conchologist and the natural history expert. What was wrong with the old heraldic speculations was not that they existed, but that they did not go far enough. They did not interest themselves in the blood of the yokel and the mystic paternity of the tinker. In other words, the evil was not that there was too much genealogy, but that there was not enough. And the real work to which democracy ought to address itself is that of extending this racial interest to the case of all ordinary men, of teaching the butcher to be proud of his grandfather, and the railway porter to remember his name with pride. For the single case of the name ‘Smith’ is sufficient to indicate what profundities of origin and significance lie in all our names. The case of Smith is no mere accident; the case would be the same with any one of the common names which we account prosaic or absurd. ‘Jones’ is more mean and preposterous even than Smith, and even those who bear the name of Jones do not probably remember that it is but a corruption of the name that Christ loved. There is not one of us that is not noble in origin, whatever we may be in essence.
The True Vanity of Vanities
It will not, I imagine, be disputed that the one black and inexcusable kind of pride is the pride of the man who has something to be proud of. It is true that you often do hear people saying, as they say other idle and unmeaning things while they are really watching a bird fly or expecting the dinnerbell, that such and such a person is vain, but has some right to be. But you do not find these people actually regarded with anything short of the most delightful loathing; whereas the nice old donkeys who are vain without any earthly ground for vanity at all, are not only universally and rightly beloved, but are made Cabinet Ministers and Bishops, and covered with a continual admiration. And this popular feeling is right. The universal objection to the people who are proud of genuine calibre is not any mere jealousy of them; it is not a paltry or panic-stricken resentment of their admitted superiority. It is, like a great many other things which ordinary people feel in a flash and could not possibly defend, entirely philosophical. The instinct of the human soul perceives that a fool may be permitted to praise himself, but that a wise man ought to praise God. A man who really has a head with brains in it ought to know that this head has been gratuitously clapped on top of him like a new hat. A man who by genius can make masterpieces ought to know that he cannot make genius. A man whose thoughts are as high as the stars ought to know that they roll almost as regardless of his power. A man who possesses great powers ought to know that he does not really possess them.
So it certainly does in practice come about that the more right a man has to vanity the less the sensible human race permits him to be vain. The most really ennobling, the most really health-giving orders of conceit are those that concern something of which a man has no obvious right at all to be conceited, the things over which he exercises no control, which he did not create and which he could not terminate. If we want what we should all regard as the very kindliest and most harmless kind of pride a man could have, the kind of pride that does not in effect make him offensive and unbrotherly, we should all mention something like the love of country or the dim pride of some very ancient race. The people who, profess these are mostly dear old buffers, because they are proud of something they have not procured. Far more brutal than these are the people who have in some sort of way deserved their position—the capitalists, the parvenus, the children of the modern mercantile ferocity. Yet they, too, in their way have a silvery thread of graciousness, because they are stupid, and have been, like the aristocrats, the acceptors of some beautiful accident.
The sin of pride blackens into an unbearable infamy when we came to the artistic and literary people who are proud of their intellects. They are worse than the scientific people, because the scientific people have far less reason to be proud than the artistic and literary people. The scientists to a great extent inherit, like the aristocrats, and are thus kept tolerable; the literary people—such, for instance, as the present writer—create, and are too disgusting for words. The literary arrogance is very nearly the worst, but is not the worst. Those who swagger because they have intellects suppose that intellect is the most important thing on earth, and theirs would be an easy existence only that it happens that it is not. Those who pride themselves on intelligence are priding themselves on a quite subordinate and suburban sort of excellence. The highest thing in the world is goodness. It is so high that, fortunately, the great majority of people who have it are horribly frightened of it, and keep their own virtue as they would keep some sort of wild horse or griffin. But every now and then there do appear people who are good and who know they are good, and who are proud of being good. And if there be any reality burning through the written phrase, if there be any passion which strains at the strings of language, if there be any emotion which, through translations and re-translations and versions and diversions, is still alive, these were the people whom Jesus Christ could hardly forbear to scourge.
This is, I suppose, the whole subtlety of the sin of pride; all other sins attack men when they are weak and weary; but this attacks when men are happy and valuable and nearer to all the virtues. And when it attacks most easily the results are vilest. The whole difference betwen the religion of Christianity and such a religion, for instance, as that of Brahminism, is merely this. The castes of Christian Europe are insolent, abominable, unendurable things, which have been endured, as a matter of fact, for centuries; but they have one great virtue, they are irreligious. But in Brahminism the castes are religious things; it is a virtue to be aristocratic. And against any people who claim to rule me by spiritual superiority, I will everlastingly and happily rebel, conscious of that image of deity which equalises us all.
Written in the Sand
In the mid-way of this our mortal life, I find myself (as in one of the changes of a dream) at a watering-place on the East Coast. I find among other things that it is raining and that my fellow creatures, or at least my fellow visitors, are in a state of irrational indignation over that circumstance. ‘How paradoxical it is in you,’ I say to them with astonishment, ‘to come to a watering-place and exhibit distress when it waters you.’ I explain to them how unjust, how fundamentally unpoetic is the current prejudice against rain.
I point out to them how singular an example this prejudice affords of the perverse and artificial nature of our modern English patriotism… All Englishmen join in reviling that lovable and admirable English thing, the English climate. Everybody blasphemously rails against those mutable and magnificent skies which are a perpetual transformation scene. Everybody vilifies this land of violent and benignant clouds, the only land that could have produced the stormy summers of Constable or the red apocalypse of Turner. Of these mysterious phases rain is only one, and not the least beautiful. When I point this out to my fellow Englishmen their spirit takes on something of the turbid transformations of the English sky. ‘How colossal, how cosmic a vision,’ I say to them, ‘is the rain upon the sea. Worms, you are permitted to gaze upon a reversal of the fifth day of creation. The waters below the firmament were divided from the waters that were above the firmament. And lo! they are wedded again.’ This kind of conversation naturally makes me popular.
I am particularly beloved by those who are frustrated in their desire for sea-bathing. ‘What,’ I exclaim, ‘your whole heart is set on wetting yourself in that silly pool of salt. Give me,’ I cry ecstatically, ‘the Baths of Heaven!’ After thus discussing the matter with various groups of people, I find myself thrown back on a gentle solitude. I wander along the lean sands by the bright, bleak sea. The weather is clearing, and sky and sea shine like pale steel, as if they had been washed and rubbed by the rain. Along the empty sands two small boys are trailing their feet disconsolately. They do not know what to do; they do not know where to go. Only a dim and blind gregarious instinct, a brotherhood as deep as the brutes, leads them to do nothing together and to go nowhere together. They do not speak, they are too weary even to quarrel, though they have made no exertion; they are sunk in that strange and sudden and very occasional boredom which belongs to boyhood, and which is like all boyhood’s experiences, like its love and its fear, pure and intense, the undiluted essence of ennui.
At last, after what seems like leagues of drifting, something happens. Either the sun paints one strip of silver on the leaden sea, or, more likely, the soul itself, with its mysterious silences and activities, rebels and flashes; but one of the boys bounds suddenly into an excavation in the sand, the remains of some other boy’s fortress, and begins to bank it up again furiously, as if he were walling the wild sea out of the flats of England. The other stares a little while with a stupid curiosity, as at a trifle; then on him also comes the primeval will to action which drives metaphysicians to madness, and he also leaps, like Remus, over the wall and begins to build the city. Three minutes afterwards they are talking; six minutes afterwards, still happier sign, they are fighting.
I will not go so far as to say that these two boys were some dark and dreadful cherubim sent to act before my eyes a spiritual mystery, however fine a background for it would have been the grey edge of the sea and that strange blank light so white and wet which grows in the clearing sky. But it is certainly true that the episode of the two little boys depicts as in a small miracle play one of the least of the truths that lie behind our modern civilisation, and constitute the answer to that question which is asked in large letters all over the newspapers, ‘What is Wrong?’
The thing that is wrong is a certain fallacy with which we English have comforted ourselves for same decades, which may be called the fallacy of unity, or in another and slighter form, the fallacy of sociability. What I mean is this, that we have fallen into a habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is full of quarrelling as a sign that it is weak. And we have fallen into the more dangerous habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is not full of quarrelling as a sign that it is strong or energetic. The reason that the Irish fight each other, and even hate each other, is not that they are Celts. It is not even that they are Irish. It is simply that they have something to do. The reason that the French groups split and fight is not that they are Latins; it is not even that they are French. It is simply that they have something to do. And the reason that English politicians work together in unity is certainly not that they are English. It is that they have nothing to do; when, for instance, they had James II to dethrone, or when they had Walpole to howl against, or when they had Napoleon to fight, they behaved exactly as the French and the Irish do; parties were broken by secessions; heads were broken by sticks.
We are like the two little boys walking along the sands. We go together easily enough as long as we are going nowhere. We can do as others do cheerfully enough, as long as we are doing nothing. But the moment we agree to do anything we begin to disagree about it.
A Case of Comrades
There was once a lady of a very beautiful character (delicate, yet decisive, for that is the definition of a lady) who asked me whether I did not believe in the possibility of a simple comradeship between the sexes. Being somewhat in a corner, I replied that, as I understood the word comradeship, I did not.
I gave some of my reasons. I did not give my first and firmest and most unhesitating reason, which was this: that I knew quite well that if I had treated the lady herself for four consecutive minutes as a comrade she would have ordered me out of the house. But I gave some other reasons. I remarked that comradeship was a quite special thing; that it was quite different from friendship. I said (and this, oddly enough, I believe to be profoundly true) that a man can be the friend of a woman, but not her comrade. For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.
In the Greek grammar, which I learnt with difficulty and forgot with ease, there was one thing, I remember, which would by itself prove that the Greeks were a great people. I mean the fact that there is in Greek a dual as well as a plural. Two is quite different from any other number, just as one is quite different from any other number: that truth is the basis of marriage. When I knew there was a Greek dual I could easily realise that the Greeks gave philosophy to the world.
My concern here is that comradeship is essentially plural. Now, women are not plural. The very word ‘women’ has about it, I think, a sort of bad taste: it smacks of polygamous Turks or tired and cynical men-about-town. There are no such things as women. There is only the woman you are at this particular moment afraid of or in love with, or inclined to reverence or inclined to assassinate. I think a real crowd of women would be like fifty suns or half a hundred moons—it would be weaker for its numbers. The sun would not have room to shine.
In any case, what I had to say about comradeship to this particular lady was tolerably clear. I merely pointed out that comradeship is a particular sort of human association; and the essential paradox of it is this; that it is at once violent and cool. People talking in twos talk gently, because they feel emphatically: people talking in tens or twenties talk emphatically because they do not care a dump about anything. Friendship becomes comradeship when you have forgotten the presence of your friend. You are addressing the abstract thing, the club, which, when two or three are gathered together (of the male sort at least) is always in the midst of them. Men’s debating clubs have a pedantic phrase which exactly expresses this truth: they talk of ‘speaking to the motion’. It is true; men do speak to a motion, not about it; they talk to a topic. Women talk to each other; that is why their conversations are frightfully fascinating, but too terrible for us to listen to for long without running away.
Do you remember how Thackeray cries out, ‘O les laches que les hommes!’ when George Warrington and Lord Castlewood rush from the room merely because the young American girl has begun a sweet satiric conversation with old Beatrix Esmond? It is almost the truest thing in Thackeray. Our sex is not strong or bold enough to endure that agony of directly personal conversation in which women are supreme. We must have a topic— an impersonal one. And as I told my admirable lady friend, a male friend becomes a comrade when one has forgotten him. To forget a male friend is only to behave like a comrade. But to forget a woman friend is only to behave like a cad. She is herself; he is the club.
But if either that lady or any other lady really wants to know whether she and her sex should share masculine camaraderie; whether they would really be stronger and happier by doing so; whether, in short, we are in such a matter keeping them out of something they would naturally enjoy, I am just now in a position to enlighten them, by giving them an instance, realistically exact and universally typical, of what our masculine comradeship really is.
If any lady wants to know what she is letting herself in for if she goes in for Comradeship, what really happens when comrades meet together, this is what happens. It happened yesterday morning. I was breakfasting with a mob of undergraduates of one of our great Universities, and the whole company was broken up into groups of two or three extravagantly engaged in some argument. I myself was engaged in two arguments. I was trying to prove to an Agnostic on my right that there was such a place as Heaven, and to an Imperialist on my left that there was such a place as England: when suddenly all our minor clamours were cloven with a monstrous and crashing noise from the other end of the table. Ten men were talking at once, three were beating on the table in pure passion, one was screaming above the din, and then (as is common in such crises) there was, for an instant, an unmeaning silence, and then the voice of one of the best orators of the Union rose, piercing and pathetic, throbbing to the echoes of the roof, alone:
‘I do not say that the corridor ran the whole length of the train. What I say, what I say emphatically and with the full responsibility of my intellect, is that it ran on the left-hand side of our carriage. And I know that I speak the truth.’
We all rushed to the spot. I dropped England with one hand and Heaven with the other. I craned my neck to find out what it was all about. It was about this very profound and urgent question: whether when three persons present travelled to Scotland about two years ago in a luncheon car, the shape of that car had been such that there was a corridor down the left-hand side or a kind of passage down the middle. Only three persons present had ever seen the car, and they could not agree; but we soon took it out of their puny hands. We argued it in the abstract. We discussed whether in the nature of things the passage would have been in the middle. I founded a sect of my own, midway between the Orthodox Passagist position and the Extreme Corridorians’ position. Some held that the nature of the luncheon should be taken into account in all evidence of the shape of the luncheon-car. We made maps of the car with forks and spoons on the table, and little lumps of sugar to show where the people sat. The whole discussion took nearly two hours.
But, indeed, temporal measurements cannot express the length, for we talked as if we were the immortal Gods and had all eternity before us: for to be outside time is one of the strange elements of fraternity. We were only interrupted by some academic custom which required that the Union officials should be photographed. And even then one of them moved. He kept on quivering and stirring until the photographer broke into pathetic complaint. Then he, in return, broke out, ‘I never denied that there was a case for the corridor at the side. What I said—’ But we crushed him, reluctantly. All this is, to the best of my recollection, quite true.
I fancy that I do not see any very approving expression on the faces of my lady friends. They are not moved by this Homeric war. They feel, perhaps, that the question of whether one luncheon-car two years ago was of a particular shape was not an urgent question. They feel that when argued by eighteen youths for two hours it might even have become a tiring question. O mightiest of all things, O mothers of the gods, they are only little things that you do not understand, only a few sports and follies of the stags of the herd. Be you content as you are secure: you understand everything except comradeship.
Something
It is customary for cultivated people from century to century to set up some artistic fashion and pretend to be more old-world or natural than they are. Thus the French noblesse played at being old Greek shepherds and shepherdesses; for the rich are always craving for barbarism while the poor are always pushing (rather blindly) for more civilisation. Within our own memory drawing-rooms have been full of dismal people in dingy garments who were supposed (I hardly know why) to recall the gay colours and coarse virtues of the Middle Ages. If ever I adopted one of these barbaric affectations it would be one which has been, I think, undeservedly neglected. In the British Museum, while others are admiring the bleak busts of Caesars or the placid horrors of Assyria, I always stray to a kindlier and more homely department. I am found worshipping the hairy and goggle-eyed images from the Sandwich Islands; idols to which I really feel a man might bow down. For the beautiful Gods of Greece are cruel; but one always feels that an ugly god might be kind. If therefore I ever arrange my house on one artistic plan (which God forbid) it shall be on a rugged Polynesion plan; it shall be on a goggle-eyed and hairy sort of plan. Everything I hear about these savages attracts me to them more and more. It is vain to tell me that under such a regime the man will be lazy and fond of pleasure while the woman is hard-working and practical; for that is already the case in the house which I inhabit at present. I do not mind painting myself; in fact, I never can paint anything else without doing so. If I colour so much as a cardboard figure for a toy theatre, I emerge painted like the leaves of autumn, painted like the sky of morning, as it says in Hiawatha.
I cannot imagine how the strange notion arose that ignorance is the origin of superstitions. It is true indeed, if we mean ignorance in the same sense that Plato and Bacon were ignorant; the common ignorance of all men about the meaning of their monstrous destiny. But if this be intended, the phrase that ignorance is the origin of all superstitions is a coarse and misleading way of stating the case. It would be much truer to say that agnosticism is the origin of all religions. That is true; the agnostic is at the beginning not the end of human progress. But those who speak of superstitions born of ignorance generally mean that myths and mystical assertions have arisen from mere accidental or animal incapacity to realise all the circumstances of the case. The old Victorian scientific theory was that men invented fairy tales because they had not yet grasped facts. They thought the moon was a woman because they had not the sense enough to see it was a moon. They thought the sea was a god because no kind scientist had ever passed by and pointed out that it was really the sea. They worshipped a stone as a fetish because their lack of geological knowledge prevented them from noting that it was a stone. They were so dull, inexperienced and narrowly materialistic that they could see no difference between a crackle in the clouds and a ringing hammer hurled by a red-headed giant; between a spat of yellow fire in the sky and a young god driving horses.
That is the materialistic theory of myths, and it is manifest nonsense. Nobody could ever have thought that the moon looked like a woman, even of the amplest contours. Nobody can ever have thought that the sun looked like a carriage and pair, because it doesn’t. If they used these terms in connection with sun or moon, mountain or river, rock or tree, they were certainly not using them because they knew no better. On the contrary, they were using them because they knew something much better; because a woman is more beautiful than moonlight and a young man more splendid than the sun.
This is essentially admitted about such fables as those of Phoebus and Artemis; or even Balder and Thor; here it is vaguely conceded that ‘poets’ and not mere ignorant savages, have had something to do with the matter. But what the folklorists of the Fraser type will not see is that the ruder savages also are poets; even if they are minor poets. All that they say about their totems, their taboos, their dances, and services to the dead must be understood with a certain poetic sympathy, as meant to be weird, glorious, shocking, or even impossible. They are the abrupt expressions of unique spiritual experiences, quiet and queerly coloured moods; dreams and glimpses that do really lie on the borderline between this existence and some other. If a savage says that a pepper-plant is his divine great-grandmother, he is not speaking from ignorance, for ignorance would leave him with the bare knowledge that it was a pepper-plant. Rather he is speaking from knowledge, fragmentary and perhaps dangerous knowledge. He may have seen something about a pepper-plant that it is better not to see.
There is one really tremendous question. The savage respecting the pepper-plant, the idolator adoring the stone, the sage choosing his star, the patriot dying for a boundary, all do unmistakably mean something—something far down in the abysses of the universe and the soul. Do they mean that everything is sacred? Or do they perhaps mean that something is sacred—something they have not found?
At about twenty-one minutes past two today I suddenly saw that asparagus is the secret of aristocracy. I was trying to put long limp stalks into my mouth, when the idea came into my head; and the stalk failed to do so. I do not refer to any merely metaphorical and superficial comparisons which could easily be made between them. We might say that most of the organism was left dead white; merely that a little button at the top might be bright green. We might draw the moral that average aristocrats are made out much stronger than they are; and illustrate it from average asparagi. They say that any stick is good enough to beat a dog with; but did anyone ever try to beat a dog with a stick of asparagus? We might draw the moral that aristocratic traditions are made out much more popular than they really were. ‘Norman’ gets mispronounced as English. In this way three French leopards were somehow turned into British lions. And in this way also the solemn word Asparagus, which means nothing so far as I know, was turned by the populace into ‘sparrowgrass’, which means two of the most picturesque things in the world. Asparagus, which I presume to have been the name of a Roman pro-consul, Marcus Asparagus Esculens, or what not, never deserved such luck as to lose its origin in two things so true and common as the bold birds of the town or the green democracy of the fields. Or again, we might say of sticks of asparagus that they have often lost their heads, and we might say the same of aristocrats. Both heads have been bitten off by the guillotine before now. But to complete the parallel we must maintain that the head of the aristocrat was the best part of him; and this is often hard to maintain. But, indeed, I do not base the view upon any such fancies from phraseology. Far deeper in earth are the roots of asparagus.
The one essential of an aristocracy is to be in advance of its age. That is, there must be something new known to a few. There must be a password; and it must always be a new password. Moreover, it must be by its nature, an irrational password, for anything quite rational might rapidly be calculated even by the uninitiated. In the same way it is essential to any social observance that involves a social distinction, that the observance should be, in this sense at least, artificial. That is, you can only know the observance as the soldier knows the password, because he has been told.
The working instance best known to us of the middle classes is the old arbitrary distinction about how to eat asparagus. Now, excluding cannibalism and the habit of eating sand (about which I can offer no opinion) there is really nothing one can eat which is less fitted to be eaten with the fingers than asparagus. It is long; it is greasy; it is loose and liable to every sort of soft yet sudden catastrophe; it is always eaten with some sort of oily sauce; and its nice conduct would involve the powers of a professional juggler confirmed with some practice in climbing the greasy pole. Most things could easily be eaten with one’s fingers. Cold beef could quite easily be eaten with one’s fingers; or simply with one’s teeth. I have seldom seen a noble cheese without an impulse merely to fix my fangs in it. New potatoes could be eaten with the fingers as cleanly as Easter eggs; and whitebait might as well be shovelled into our open mouths by a Whitebait Machine, for all the use we make of a knife and fork to dissect them. We could easily eat fish cakes as we eat seed cake. Cold Christmas pudding is a substance with all the majesty of coloured marble; far cleaner, stronger and more coherent than any ordinary bread or biscuit. Yet all these we are supposed to approach through the intervention of a little stunted sword or a stumpy trident. Only this one tiresome, toppling vegetable, I eat between my finger and thumb. I should be better off as a giraffe eating the top of a palm-tree: it doesn’t want any holding up.
We will not exaggerate. Eating soup with the fingers the young student should not attempt; and sauces, custards and even curries are no field for the manual labourer. I would not eat stewed rhubarb with my fingers, or, indeed, with any instrument that science could devise. Even with things involving treacle, I have not a good touch. But, while strictly avoiding anything like exaggeration or frivolity, I still note that the point of asparagus is that it is not the food—among other foods, specially fitted for the fingers. In other words, the principle could not have been deduced from abstract reason, or have grown out of the general instincts of men. It could not have been custom: that is why it was etiquette.
The brotherhood of man is a fact which in the long run wears down all other facts. Therefore, a privileged class, if it would avoid sliding naturally back into the body of mankind must keep up an incessant excitement about new projects, new cultures and new prejudices, new skirts and stockings. It must tell a new tale every day or perish, like the lady of the Arabian Nights. Tennyson, who was too much touched with this aristocratic—or snobbish—Futurism, wrote, ‘Lest one good custom should corrupt the world’, which really means lest everybody should learn the right way of eating asparagus. And so, out of luxury and waste and weariness, the fever they call Progress came into the world.
Do you tell me they don’t eat asparagus with their fingers now? Do I not know that in some of the best houses they have little tongs for each person, which are charming? Have I not heard that asparagus is now lowered into the open mouth on a string, or shot into the mouth with a small gun, or eaten with the toes, or not eaten at all? No; I do not know, that is what I wish to point out. They have changed the password.
The English Spirit and the Flea
I met a man who was awaiting a letter from his family in the Eastern Counties. Before the letter came he learnt that the place where his family lived had been singled out specially as one of the places where the Germans have lately made hell in heaven with their colossal and destructive flying ships. He did not show much perturbation; but when the letter from his nearest relatives at last arrived, he naturally opened it with some interest.
It was all about a flea. I will not develop the topic, though Swift allegorised infinity under that image, and William Blake thought it worthwhile to paint a most careful portrait of the Ghost of a Flea. In the East Anglian household, anyhow, there had never before been the ghost of a flea. The solitary specimen was by the householder connected in some way with the imprudence of his relative in some slumming adventure: and it was held up before him, as it were, in derision and pursued with a wealth of detail. Its arrival, adventures, and personal eccentricities were scientifically set forth. Any entomologist writing on the habits and habitat of the East Anglian flea would find it a most careful compilation. It contained no reference to the war. There is another animal, not the East Anglian flea, on which the entomologist might gradually have gained a little light. I do not refer to the Zeppelin. Zeppelins did not occur in the letter. I refer to a little-known animal called the Englishman, whose habits, habitat, and other curious constituent elements the German entomologists might find it worthwhile to study, and of which this letter is a fragmentary but not quite valueless record.
I do not idolatrize this animal. I do not expect the German to fall dawn and worship the East Anglian inhabitant any more than the East Anglian flea—like an ancient Egyptian worshipping a beetle. The qualities he displays in such cases are characteristics rather than abstract virtues. No good ever came of merely flattering one’s nation: a man flatters the land he fears, but not the land he loves. The Englishman does not neglect war merely because he is calm and wise and strong; there are many respects in which he can be wayward and foolish and weak. Like the other animal, he can be at his best an irritant and at his worst a parasite. The Englishman is not simply calm and wise and strong; but he is English. I do not set my country above human temptations, like an allegory on a ceiling; I do not say that enemies could not conceivably perturb the British Lion or fluster the British Bulldog. I do say that I am not, as a fact, perturbed, and specially not perturbed by people who say ‘The British Lion is drawing in his horns’—I perceive that they have no vivid mental picture of a lion. I am not flustered by people who say ‘The British Bulldog will soon have his wings clipped’, because I know such curtailment to be both unnecessary and impossible. And the distinction is important. Our very weaknesses are strengths so long as they are undiscovered weaknesses. It is possible to remind my own countrymen very generally of whereabouts the strengths and weaknesses lie. I would not do even that if there were the smallest chance of a German understanding it.
Some of the best things the English have done were the things they didn’t do. For instance, in spite of a seething fuss of small leagues and committees, they cannot really be induced to ‘do anything for Shakespeare’. Lord Melbourne (who was almost as English as Shakespeare) used to solve the most intense diplomatic crises by saying, ‘Can’t we let it alone?’ We can. We let Shakespeare alone. Just as we have an enormous negative monument to Shakespeare, so we have an enormous negative victory over Count Zeppelin. As a nation we receive his flaming visitations with something more insulting than defiance—absentmindedness. Such absence of mind can co-exist with considerable presence of mind at particular moments. It did in Hamlet, who always struck me as a particularly English character—which was, no doubt, the reason why he could not get on with the Danes, and had to be sent to England. His sudden lunge at the curtain was very like the sudden rush our mob sometimes makes at the alien. But, on the whole, it is the other attitude that is our ultimate strength. Not anything we have done against the Zeppelins, but all that we have not done against them, is our monument aere perennius. Let us continue not to notice Zeppelins. I do not mean this with a dull literalism; and I disclaim responsibility for anyone who should take it so. Notice them, of course— but not so much as fleas.
There is one kindred characteristic of the English which is very subtle and easily expressed wrongly, but which plays a very great part in practical things of this kind. I know not what to call it, except perhaps, somewhere-elseness. It is a sort of distant optimism. It is a refusal to accept as final the facts immediately in front of us— a strong belief in the other side of the world, or even the other side of the moon. It was rather pompously expressed by the phrase about the sun never setting on the British Empire. The same thought was much more sincerely expressed in the popular ejaculation, ‘Somewhere the sun is shining!’ This came, I think, from one of our noble comic songs, and used to be uttered by people when they broke valuable teapots, or put their feet into cucumber-frames. Its excess was well satirised by Mr John Burns when he summed up Imperialism under the text, ‘The eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth’. And it is true, as of every true national characteristic, that it has the defect of its quality, and often goes with an undue laxity about the rights of our own field or the laws of our own parish. But it goes also with more imaginative generosity about remote lands like Bulgaria or Japan than is common in more closely logical countries. And there really exists many a City clerk who is more concerned for bombs in Belgium than bombs in the City.
I repeat that I will have nothing to do with bragging about these good qualities as if they were the only good qualities. It is not a good quality, but a defect in us that we do not understand the French revanche; it only means that we have not long enough memories to make tyrants and enemies keep their promises. Our people are courageous, not because of pride and praise, but rather in spite of it. In spite of our education we are still intelligent; and it was often in spite of our athletics that we were strong. The Battle of Waterloo was not won on Eton playing fields. The Battle of Waterloo (as the same authority said, and he certainly knew something about it) was won by the scum of the earth. And today also we are largely saved by the people whom we have failed to educate, failed to rule, failed to provide with land or religion, and very nearly failed to save from starvation. It is these people who in the travail and agony of the hour, provide the note which is most needed and most unexpected; the note of frivolity. And it is they, even more than their social superiors, who have seen the heavens filled with fire; and thought it less than a flea-bite.
The Hobby and the Head Waiter
In the matter of property we may find an obvious but useful parable in the difference between living in a house and living in an hotel. There are some practical conveniences in the hotel; but there is first of all a sort of megalomaniac glamour of great spaces and gilded ceilings that is not practical at all. At best there is the romance of personal adventure and accident; but there is no corporate and communal life.
It is when we pass to the practical difference between a house and an hotel that we come to the creative nature of property. I have taken this figure of speech for convenience and clarity, because I do not think everybody understands what we mean by this creative quality. Now a man in an hotel is entirely receptive. He may receive as many things as an average man in an average house. He may receive more things than most modern men in most modern houses. But these things must all be of a certain recognised and conventional character. He cannot add anything to the hotel. If he were to attempt to improve the hotel in any sweeping and striking fashion, his adventures would be somewhat sensational. Rich people in a rich hotel are in one sense protected and too much protected; but though they have protection they have not property. The point, however, is this; that nobody can provide beforehand for the creative needs, as people can provide for the protective need. It is in the nature of any creation that it is in some sense original; and it is in the nature of anything original that it cannot be foreseen. There is no prophecy of poetry; there is not even any prophecy of prophecy. A Futurist cannot predict a song even if he can produce a song; which is not always the case. He cannot foresee a poem or foresee a picture; he cannot even foresee a practical joke. If he did, indeed, it might possibly not occur.
In some hotels of the American sort there used to be an instrument erected in the bedroom; it had rather the general appearance of a clock, with a finger pivoted so as to point at various inscriptions on the dial, and these were supposed to be a complete list of the needs of man, in his highest capacity of an American hotel-frequenter. Whenever he wanted a Prairie Oyster or a Horse’s Neck, a secretary or a sandwich, or anything (for all I know) from a daily paper to a dentist, he had only to move the hand on the clock and a bell rang and the person or object was somehow produced from the interior mechanism of the hotel. Now it is quite true that even the real list was long and detailed, and that it could be extended and applied to almost any length along certain lines. It would no doubt include not only a dentist but a detective.
But we may here turn from the fancies about what a man might desire to the facts about what he does desire. The simplest course is for each man to take himself as an example; as a typical and not necessarily an egotistic example. I am not a person especially prone by nature to be a nuisance in an hotel; I am not a vegetarian; I am not an epicure; I can eat and drink and smoke the ordinary things provided in ordinary places. But if it came to living my life in an hotel, especially that part of my life that is creative in the sense of being personal, I think I should find the list of things on the bedroom clock a little insufficient. For instance, if I have a hobby or a potential hobby, it is probably a toy theatre. Hobbies imply holidays; and while it is very arguable that journalists do no real work; it is also true that they have no real holidays. But if I had no need to earn my bread and cheese, and no country and no conscience and none of all those nonsensical things, I should settle down with a serious aim in life, which would be working a toy theatre. It is to me almost as much a box of miracles today, as it was when I first saw it as a baby; and I feel as if I knew that mimic world before I knew the real one. The gilded figures of a prince and princess glow in my memory against black oblivion, almost before the memory of my father who had made them for me; which things may be an allegory. Now this example is an understatement. I am in no sense alone in this taste; Stevenson and my father and many others evidently shared it. But it is an excellent example of something which, without being exactly eccentric, is just sufficiently out of the ordinary way to make it most improbable that any practical organizer would see it; or provide it, or put it into any definite class of things. I do not think I could say carelessly to a waiter, over my shoulder, ‘Just get me a black coffee and Benedictine and a toy theatre, will you?’ I cannot imagine the headwaiter roaring down the speaking tube, ‘Three Manhattan cocktails and a toy theatre’. I cannot imagine it was mentioned among the minor luxuries printed on the piece of clockwork in the bedroom. But even if it was, it would not meet the case. Even if the waiter returned laden with toy theatres, as he sometimes comes laden with cigar-boxes, it would not solve the problem. For a hobby implies work as well as play; a process as well as a result. It would be a little nearer the mark if the head waiter brought me trays of tinsel and cardboard and that glorious metallic paper as intoxicating as all his wines, a crimson richer even than his burgundy and a green better than the greenest Chartreuse. Even then it would only work if the head waiter would sit down on the floor with me and help to cut the things out; and of this one could never be absolutely certain.
As these reflections pass through my mind, my abstracted eye is riveted on an ordinary wooden chair such as they make at Wycombe from the woods of South Bucks. And I see, as in a vision, that if one were to saw off the back of the chair, knock its bars out and screw it like a frame on to the four feet, the whole would make an almost exact model of a toy theatre, the bars between the legs forming the slips for the wings. I cannot pause for the experiment just now, having something worse to do; but the fancy happens to be an exact example of the sort of thing I mean; a fancy that could not possibly be foreseen, yet which might quite possibly be fulfilled. No great organizing mind would say, ‘See that seven thousand chairs are ordered from High Wycombe in case somebody wishes to turn them into toy theatres.’ It is a hundred to one that nobody ever thought of this nonsensical notion before, and that nobody will ever think of it again. I do not say the world would have lost anything, but I do say I should have lost something, and that something is my own. It is private property.
Now, when I am in my sumptuous and select suite of apartments at the Hotel Beelzebub, reclining on rugs of leopard and tiger skin under tapestries of cloth of gold, it is quite certain that I shall not be encouraged to rush at one of the hotel chairs and begin cutting it up with a chopper or a saw. My explanation that I am turning it into a toy theatre will be coldly received. It may even lead to my being removed from that cushioned apartment to a still more cushioned apartment, commonly called a padded cell. But the point here is that the two forms of human comfort and convenience run distinct and parallel; and no increase of the one comes an inch nearer to the other. The hotel might multiply its chairs by the million, it might vary its pattern of chairs by the thousand, but it would never come into the same world as that perverse and personal day-dream of turning a chair, first into a stool and then into a stage. In that world are all the wonders of the creative side of property; and though I have taken for convenience the lighter and more portable types of property, the same psychology applies to the larger business of production. A man wishes to own his field, primarily because its productiveness is the protection of his honour and independence; but partly also because he wishes to do things with his field which he cannot explain to anybody, and is only vaguely shaping for himself. He is considering a balance between particular necessities and particular luxuries which escapes classification; he is ready, so to speak, to live on turnips on a chance of growing tobacco. I mean he is ready to act on a calculation exactly like the turning of a wooden chair into a wooden stage; something at once fantastic and thrifty. Where that power is democratically distributed men are more than citizens, they are all artists.
With this note on the purely creative or spiritual side of property I conclude the sketch I have here attempted against communism. I need not repeat for the hundredth time that the case against communism is not a case for capitalism; indeed the case against communism is that it is much too like capitalism. It matters little whether our allegorical hotel is called by capitalists an hotel or by communists a hostel. The case against it is that it is not a home, and that the spirit of man will never feel at home in it. It can only be a home when it has a sense of something at once restful and capricious, which is the mood of all creative action. It is only by narrowing itself to locality and privacy that the soul can broaden itself with real imagination and novelty. To listen to all the modern talk about organization and trade and transport is like watching a man wandering about carrying an uprooted tree. The tree is intended for transplantation; it is involved in problems of transport; it enjoys all the educational improvements of travel. It is carried by cosmopolitan trains through various countries with marvellous speed; it is unpacked or carted about in colossal railway stations with marvellous organization. But there are only two things worth saying about it. One is that the tree may be already dead. The other is that there is only one possible way of seeing it again alive. Only when it is planted finally in one fixed place on the face of the earth, will it ever bear fruit or blossom or become a greenhouse of birds.
In Praise of Pie
We should like to utter our fervid and enthusiastic thanks to the clergyman who wrote to The Times the other day to protest against the neglect, both as a title and an Institution, of the glorious English possession known to our fathers as ‘Apple Pie’; and shamefully described by various degraded outcasts and aliens as Apple Tart. As he very acutely pointed out, nobody says that a room is in apple tart order. As he warmly affirmed, no practical joker ever made an apple tart bed. Whether in the arrangements of rooms or the disarrangement of bedrooms, the traditions of our fathers testify to the true form of the word. A hundred inspiring battle-hymns rise to inspire the march; as in that truly national anthem which says
‘I’m not a glutton But I do like pie.’
as well as those lyrics that form the foundation of all education and told us that A was an apple pie. ‘Pie’ is a full and powerful word, like pig or pork; which fills the mouth with an appropriate and anticipatory fullness; it is impossible to say the words ‘I do like tart’ and produce the desired effect of talking with your mouth full.
It is not a light or trivial matter. There are questions, seemingly accidental, that divide Society by a spiritual chasm far more real than the artificial frontiers of the factions. The armies of Piemen and Tarters confront each other across an abyss. The passionate consumers of Pie are divided from the frigid triflers with Tart by something far more essential than ever divided Whigs from Tories or Liberals from Conservatives. We could almost guess a man’s religion, or at least the religion towards which he tends, by his ignorant instincts on this solemn and profound matter. It is not only that he who says Pie, and disdains to say Tart, is preserving the language of Shakespeare and the legend of the English and pure religion, breathing household laws. There are in it yet more subtleties of doctrine. He who says ‘Pie’ is he who, being assured that a bodily thing is lawful is not ashamed merely because it is bodily; but finds far more of Christian humility in the frank confession of the body. But he, who shrinks from the old gross word, feeling in it a suggestion of greed or ignominy, is of the tribe that turn into Theosophists and Esoteric Buddhists and end as mere Manichees and haters of the creative word. They, who would insinuate that they are merely toying with a sort of light confectionery, when confronted with the solid duty of eating pie, are of the sort who complains of the coarseness of the Marriage Service or the clamour of church bells or the habit of singing carols at Christmas. We do not mean to blame those who, being in invincible ignorance, happen to say ‘tart’ through habit and the teaching of ill-advised pastors and masters; but when the question is fairly faced, it would be found true that the obstinate and unrepentant are of this order. They are also of the kind that turn pale at a pun; or, what is worse, gravely discuss whether the example of Shakespeare makes it permissible. For the pleasure of annoying them, we utter in a loud voice this protest on behalf of the ‘Pie’ as a symbol of Piety.
Culture Versus Civilisation
An interesting distinction, which is almost a contradiction, has recently been drawn between Culture and Civilization. Two leading writers of the day, the one a Russian and the other a German, have accepted this difference, even if they use it rather differently. The German, being a freethinker and an agnostic, is, of course, rigidly bound by the iron rivets of the dogmas of materialism. The Russian, being a Greek Orthodox Christian and the relic of a ruined and persecuted Church, is a little more cheerful, and seems to think there is some such thing as human freedom and a chance for human liberty. But both agree, more or less, in a certain theory of the relation between Culture and Civilization; and it is roughly that Civilization is the end of Culture, even in the sense of the death of Culture.
Restating the matter roughly here, for my own purposes, the conception is that Culture is growth; the original sprouting of man’s spiritual or artistic nature, as it appears in the native folklore or primitive architecture of a whole people. Civilization is rather the limit or compromise laid upon this by the discovery that there are other peoples or other methods of production. In following Culture, a man develops his arts; that is to say, his tastes. Consequently, true Culture, like true Charity, begins at home. With Civilization there appears something that is not only purely public, but a little homeless. Culture is growing such flowering trees as you prefer in your own front garden, and planting them where you like. Civilization is having a lawsuit with the next-door neighbour about whether your trees overshadow his garden, or calling in the policeman to throw him out if he becomes violent upon the question.
It is possible to recognise a certain rough truth in this distinction, without committing oneself to the fatalistic and rather pessimistic view which Spengler takes of his geological epochs with their human fossils. It is enough to say that we are not fossils; and that Isaiah and Pythagoras and Augustine are not fossils. Spengler tends to treat the coming of a complete Civilization as the coming of an Ice Age, freezing all human life as the ice freezes all animal life. Berdyaev, the Russian, is, as I have said, rather more free and easy, but especially more free. It is not my purpose here, however, to adjudicate on the theory or on the two theorists. I am only concerned with one particular angle or aspect of it, which affects the Civilization in which most of my countrymen actually have to live—the Civilization of London and the big industrial towns— if you can call it a Civilization.
Here, for instance, is a doubt that troubles me. If there was one thing which we did suppose was done for us by Civilization, it was to make us civil. The very word politeness is really the Greek for civilization, just as the very word civilization is really the Latin for politeness. It is a pleasing thought that the word ‘policeman’ and the word ‘politeness’ not only have the same meaning, but are almost the same word. But the Romans inheriting from the Greeks had no sooner established the idea of what is civic, or belonging to a citizen, than there became somewhat vaguely attached to it the idea of civility. Up to a point, Civilization, or even public life, probably does act in this way. Men begin to feel a new and strange restraint, making them feel a little shy and bashful about knocking off the hats or pulling the noses of total strangers to whom they have not been introduced. A new delicacy, a new sense of what is tactful and fitting, leads them to beat, bash and kick only their nearest and dearest and their most intimate friends. But there is another side to the story, and it is becoming rather a tragic story, in the light of that thesis about Civilization as the fossilization and final end of the truly creative life of a culture. I think we have reason for grave criticism and apprehension when there is a tendency for civic and public life to become more coarse and brutal than private and educational life. It is a dark and sinister omen when men begin to be ruder to strangers than they are to friends.
After all, the home, insofar as any ruins of it are left standing, is still the school of good manners. Many make very great efforts, and most make some sort of effort, to train their children at least in some standard of social behaviour. Little trivial gestures of impatience in which you or I may have indulged—the soup-tureen hurled across the table, the carving-knife brandished with motions mistaken by the superficial for those prefatory to murder—do not alter the fact that, even in the same household, babies are still instructed with some care about spreading the jam or spilling the milk. The old traditions of behaviour, so far as they still exist, are still largely traditions of a household; they concern opening the door to a lady or passing the mustard to a guest. Almost all that remains of the forms of courtesy are the forms of hospitality. Whether you call it behaving like a gentleman or behaving like a snob, it is still inside a human house that the man generally tries to live up to his highest standards, and to perform what are, in fact, the ancient rites and ceremonies of his Culture.
But in public things have altered a good deal. There you have the sharp test and truth; that the man is generally not living up to the highest standards, even of his own family; but often abandoning them in despair, owing to the crush and crowding of modern street life. The man who would bow somebody else into a drawing room is content himself with barging into a tram. The man who would make room for his guest in a tiny villa will leave no room at all for his fellow-citizen in a great big Tube train. In other words, public life, the life that the Greeks called polite, the life that the Romans called civil, has become a great deal more barbarous than the solitary life or the life of the tribe.
We might tolerate the notion that civilization makes our culture more cold or official. But we cannot easily tolerate the notion that our civilization makes us more barbaric. Culture, in the connotation used by the writers I mention, is something interior and imaginative and almost sacred, which, when it takes form, we recognise as the characteristic work of a particular people; as we recognise certain art as the characteristic work of a certain artist. It is a growth of the English culture, for instance, that the poorest cottagers love to have a mass of flowers in their front gardens. It is even a growth of English culture, in a way, that English cottages and villages have a certain peculiar beauty, and are picturesque even when they are inconvenient. It would be with a certain sorrow, whatever our opinions, that we should yield to a more orderly civilization, which should make the village streets straight, or even the village buildings stately. But it does not do anything of the kind. Our civilization today does not make anything straight or anything stately. The romantic rubbish-heap of cottages and cottage gardens would not be replaced by ordered avenues or classical colonnades. They would be replaced by a patchwork of hoardings and a litter of bungalows. That is one aspect of the doom of civilization, over which these literary men lament. Civilization makes us more uncivil—like the man in the Tube.
The Winter Feast
These modern men, who are less anxious to be men than to be moderns, have one little habit that has not been spotted as it should be. They are very fond of first painting the lily, and then proving from the painted surface that it was always a paper flower. Nothing delights these intelligent little creatures more than gilding refined gold, and then scraping it furiously, on the plea of taking the gilt off the gingerbread. I mean that they will first take a natural thing, then daub it and disguise it and deface it with artificial things, and then complain that it is an unnatural thing and throw it away. At the beginning, such alteration must be accepted as an improvement. By the end, each improvement is used to show that the thing should be not so much altered as abolished.
Thus the seed of Democracy, the assembly of the village or the tribe, is as old as the world, and may perhaps go back to the similar assemblies of rooks or wolves. It still exists in many peasant communities, especially in the mountains, and when it is reasonably civilised, that is humanised, and above all when it is Christian, it is still about as just and decent and dignified a government as any, in a world whose governments are hardly its happiest products. Now we men of the modern and Western world took this ancient thing, and proceeded to improve it. We improved democracy by demagogy, that is by professional politicians; we improved election by electioneering, that is by organised lying; we improved announcement by advertisement; that is, we substituted for the horn blown to assemble men round the village tree the megaphone through which a statesman could speak like a salesman; facilitating every exchange in which the voters could sell their votes or the statesmen could sell his soul. We have been positively proud of it as a technical dexterity; that we could turn an act of representation into an art of misrepresentation. And then, when the whole idea has been improved out of recognition in this cynical fashion, we generally find that the cynics have become sceptics; and sceptics about the democratic idea itself. These men, with their wonderful progressive improvements, have themselves turned popular government into unpopular government. But since they also have probably become rather unpopular, they will now often turn round with a fine fastidious aristocratic pride, and express their contempt for popular opinion.
The same sort of ironic injustice is applied to any old popular festival like Christmas. Moving step by step, in the majestic march of Progress, we have first vulgarised Christmas and then denounced it as vulgar. Christmas has become too commercial; so many of these thinkers would destroy the Christmas that has been spoiled, and preserve the commercialism that has spoiled it. They will think me but a belated and bemused being, if I here am found roaming or drifting backwards to consider what Christmas is when it is defined, or what it was before it was spoiled. And it is not surprising that the same modern gentlemen, who have performed this peculiar feat of first pelting a thing with mud and then complaining that it is muddy, have also made a similar muddle about the actual history of the thing which they bury with insults, because they have killed it with improvements.
Thus, the first thing that such people will probably tell you today is that Christmas is really a Pagan festival; because many traditional features of it were taken from Pagans. What they do not seem to see is that, in so far as this is in any sense true, it only proves that the ancient Pagans were much more sensible than the modern Pagans. There are many psychological truths about such a human habit, which are hidden from those who talk day and night about psychology; but who do not really care about any psychology except what they call the psychology of salesmanship. The old Pagans knew that such a ritual must be old, that it must be religious, that it must be concerned fundamentally with simple elements like wood or water or fire, but that it must also be, in a queer way of its own, revolutionary: exalting the humble or putting down the mighty from their seat. That was expressed in a hundred ways, both among heathens and Christians. The Saturnalia was made for a society of slaves; but it gave one wild holiday to those slaves. The medieval Christmas had to exist in a feudal society; but all its carols and legends told again and again a story in which angels spoke to shepherds and a devil inspired a king. An ancient revolt is enshrined in an ancient ritual. Now the reason why Christianity found it quite easy to absorb these Pagan customs is that they were in this way almost Christian customs. The man who does not see that the Saturnalia was almost Christian is a man who has never read the Magnificat.
It is thoroughly bad history to suppose that it was the Paganism that absorbed the Christianity; when there are a thousand things to show that it was the Christianity that absorbed the Paganism. For instance, anything that the Early Church really regarded as horrible among the heathens did completely disappear. The butchery of human beings in amphitheatres, which had been the huge uproarious popular sport of all the vast populace of antiquity, completely disappeared. Doubtless, it disappeared partly because Christian martyrs had suffered there; partly because St Telemachus, the heroic hermit, had hurled himself into the arena to cry aloud to God and the human conscience, against human blood being poured out in festivity like wine. But anyhow, and for whatever reason, it did disappear. If various old Pagan popular customs, like the Winter Feast, did not disappear, it was quite certainly because they did not so insult the innocence and indignation of Christianity in its youth. When Constantine had made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, that religion could have suppressed any heathen thing it really wanted to suppress. The interesting point to note is how very few heathen things it really did want to suppress. There is, for instance, the whole great glorious mass of the Pagan literature, in which there are hardly ten pages without something that a Christian might be excused for wanting to suppress. The mere fact that that mass of culture has come down to us at all, is to me much more remarkable than a few random examples of alleged suppression. For instance, the first generations of the saints might surely be excused for drawing the line at Sappho if she did really preach Sapphism. But in fact, there is hardly a rag of historical evidence either that she did preach it or that they did suppress her. To anybody with a general view of history, the really remarkable and interesting thing is the toleration of the last Pagans by the first Christians. The Church certainly never swept away all record of the ancient gods as Mahomet swept away the ancient idols. It never merely burned books as the Iconoclasts destroyed statues. The attitude of Augustine towards Plato, as of Aquinas towards Aristotle, is really much more respectful and understanding than the attitude of Hobbes or Hume towards Aquinas. In short, Christians have always committed countless crimes; but these Christians did not commit this one crime. They were not unhistorical. Christianity failed in practice in many ways; but this was one thing it did not fail to do; to preserve continuity. The Christians were often criminals; but they were not Vandals. Platonists like St Augustine, living in besieged cities, knew too much about Vandals.
It is, therefore, the greatest glory of the Christian tradition that it has incorporated so many Pagan traditions. But it is most glorious of all, to my mind, when they are popular traditions. And the best and most obvious example is the way in which Christianity did incorporate, in so far as it did incorporate, the old human and heathen conception of the Winter Feast. There are, indeed, two profound and mysterious truths to be balanced here. The first is that what was then heathen was still human; that is, it was both mystical and material; it expressed itself in sacred substances and sacramental acts; it understood the mystery of trees and waters and the holy flame. And the other, which will be a much more tactless and irritating assertion, is that while a thing is heathen it is not yet completely human. But the point here is that the Pagan element in Christmas came quite natural to Christians, because it was not in fact very far from Christianity.
Take, for example, the whole fundamental idea of a Winter Feast. There is a perfectly natural parallel between a religion that defies the world and a ritual that defies the weather. Heathenism in the sense of hedonism, the concentration of the mind on pure pleasure as such, would chiefly concentrate on the conception of a Summer Feast. But in winter even a rich man receives some faint hint of the problem of a poor man; he may avoid being hungry, but he cannot always avoid being cold. To choose that moment of common freezing for the assertion of common fraternity is, in its own intrinsic nature, a foreshadowing of what we call the Christian idea. It involves the suggestion that joy comes from within and not from without. It involves the suggestion that peril and the potentiality of pain are themselves a ground of gratitude and rejoicing. It involves the suggestion that even when we are merely Pagans we are not merely Pantheists. We are not merely Nature-worshippers; because Man smiles when Nature frowns. It has always involved, under varying limitations in varying societies, the idea of hospitality; especially hospitality to the stranger and generally to the poor. Of course, there are perfectly natural reasons for wanting to drink wine or warm ourselves at the fire in winter; but that is not an answer, except to those who already have the ill-informed prejudice that Christianity must be opposed to things merely because they are natural. The point is in making a point of it; the special interest is in the special occasion; in the fact that during the Winter Feast, whether Pagan or Christian, there always was, in some degree, the idea of extending the enjoyment to others; of passing round the wine or seating the wanderer by the hearth. It is no controversial point against the Christians that they felt they could take up and continue such traditions among the Pagans; it only shows that the Christians knew a Christian thing when they saw it.
It may seem a gloomy sentiment for the festive season; but the plain truth is that the old original Christians would have more reasons to quarrel with the new Christian Christmas than they had to quarrel with the old Pagan Christmas. In the congested commerce of our time, it has come to stand rather for goods being sold than for gifts being given. But if any revolutionary critic complains of it on this score, he must complain of his own revolutionary criticism; or at least of the previous revolutionary critics. I remember that Mr Bernard Shaw, the chief spokesman of the Socialism of the later nineteenth century, declared that Christmas is now only kept up for the sake of the tradesmen. I think he would find it hard to prove that every little boy or girl has hung up a stocking, or slept with one eye open on Christmas Eve, solely because they calculated that Santa Claus going his round would be Good for Trade. But if the complaint contains any truth, it is not to the disadvantage of the old tradition; but rather to the disadvantage of the recent revolutions. It is strangely forgotten that it was radicals and reformers who set up the Capitalism they now desire to pull down. It was done, if not by Socialists, certainly by revolutionists; in the sense of extreme pioneers of progress. For instance, it was precisely the progressive prophet of new things who brought Christmas, and everything else, out of the country into the town. It was he who told the young man that the streets of London were paved with gold; and that in great cities like Chicago and Philadelphia there was work for all. It was he who said that life on the farm was not life but death; that the rustics were all turnips and that their creeds were all turnip ghosts. Hence it was he who was responsible for making the old Christmas mysteries and mummeries relatively unmeaning; by taking them away from the fields where they grew to the markets where they could only be bought and sold. He took away the Yule Log from the place where it had really been part of a tree, to the place where it was only a lump of dead wood; he took away the mistletoe from where it was really gathered from the oak, to the store where it was only stacked like dead sticks; he would have brought in the Boar’s Head (supposing that he dealt at all in that delicacy) under conditions that made it highly improbable that he had himself slain the boar with a boar-spear in the forest, in the old heroic style of hunting, when men slew beasts stronger than themselves. All this genuine and even generous savour in the old Christmas symbols did undoubtedly suffer by being half-digested by the industrial town; but it was the same sort of reformer who built the town. True, he then called himself an Individualist and not a Socialist; and by this time he probably calls himself something else. But under all names, he is always exactly what the old Pagans and Christians would have called a profane person. He does not understand Christmas; he does not even understand the Saturnalia. Mr Scrooge hated Christmas because he was a Utilitarian; that is, he thought that economics only meant being economical. Mr Gradgrind of the Manchester School began by hating Christmas; but his partner Mr Bounderby soon perceived that he could make money by selling turkeys and toys, as well as coal or cotton. But these men in their day were all Reformers; they all called themselves Radicals. Perhaps it is time we ceased to concentrate on the Reform and went back again to the Form.
This real history of Christmas is very relevant to the real crisis of Christendom. We live in a terrible time of war and rumour of war; with a barbaric danger of the real reaction, that goes back not to the old form but to the old formlessness. International idealism in its effort to hold the world together, in a peace that can resist wars and revolutions, is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply that it does not go deep enough. Christianity could draw life out of the depths of Paganism; but mere Modernism cannot draw on the depths of either. Charity is too much of a manufactured article; and too little of a natural product. The League of Nations is too new to be natural. The modern materialistic humanitarianism is too young to be vigorous. If we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder, we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod. If we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the hunger of a human being, a pain as positive as toothache; and not as the fall in wages or the failure of imports, or even the lowering of the economic standard of living. We must say first of the beggar, not that there is insufficient housing accommodation, but that he has nowhere to lay his head. We must say first of the human family, not that there are no jobs for them in the factory, but that there is no room for them in the inn. That is, we must talk of the human family in language as plain and practical and positive as that in which mystics used to talk of the Holy Family. We must learn again to use the naked words that describe a natural thing; and dispense for a moment with all those sociological polysyllables, with which an artificial society has learned to talk of it as an artificial thing. Then we shall draw on the driving force of many thousand years; and call up a real humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity.
They Tell a Story
The statement that the work of the Old Masters can be effective for popular education is not such a platitude as it will at first appear. It is both more disputable and more true than it seems. For the truth is that the great art of the past can be used for this purpose where a great many other methods now generally adapted are quite clumsy and futile. Something of this utility is shared by the plays of Shakespeare; and by no other agency I know except the paintings of such men as Titian and Leonardo.
To explain this peculiar kind of public value one must understand one of the deepest differences, and perhaps diseases, of our time. It was the mark of the art of the past, especially the art of the Renaissance, that the great man was a man. He was an extraordinary man, but only in the sense of being an ordinary man with something extra. Shakespeare or Rubens went with the plain man as far as the plain man went; they ate and drank, and desired and died as he did. That is what people mean when they say that these Gods had feet of clay; their giant boots were heavy with the mire of the earth. That is what people mean when they say that Shakespeare was often coarse; that is what people mean when they say that he was often dull. They mean that a great poet of the elder kind had spaces which were idle and absent-minded; that his sub-consciousness often guided him; that he sprawled; that he was not ‘artistic’. It is not only true that Homer sometimes nodded; but nodding was part of the very greatness of Homer. His sleepy nod shakes the stars like the nod of his own Jupiter.
The old artists, then, were plain and popular in the more fundamental or (if you will) lower parts of their personality. But the typical modern artist sets out to be a separate and fantastic sort of creature, who feeds and feels in a strange manner of his own. Compare Velazquez with Whistler; compare Shakespeare with Shaw; compare even Addison with Stevenson. Whistler professed to be a butterfly, feasting on strange flowers and following incalculable flights; Stevenson was called by many of his friends an elf; and though this did not mean that he was inhumane, it did mean that he was in a manner disembodied. Bernard Shaw is certainly a fairy: and an Irish fairy, which is worse. Shakespeare, like the Shepherd in Iolanthe, was only a fairy down to the waist. He would undoubtedly, to quote the same work of art, have left his legs kicking behind if he had tried to get through the keyhole.
Now this distinction between two conceptions of genius, the Something more and the Something different, very deeply influences the effect of painting upon the public. The great painters had all the things which we call weaknesses in the great poets; they constantly pot-boiled, they occasionally pandered. They often seemed to care little for glory, and sometimes not quite enough for honour; they threw things off, and as Ruskin truly said, gave their great frescoes ‘to be blasted by the sea wind, or wasted by the worm’. But if they had the everyday vices, they had the everyday virtues also; and whether they were good men or no, their idea of a good man was the same as everybody else’s. If they too seldom attempted to reform their conduct, they never attempted to reform their conscience. The consequence is that they preserved a mass of primitive intuitions, appetites, and unconscious instincts, which are the same as those of the common people even in our corrupt modern cities; and which in our corrupt modern cities have now a great part to play.
For without raising, even in parentheses, the old argument of Swift’s and Temple’s time about the relative merits of Ancients and Moderns, we may be quite certain that for democratic purposes the ancients are better. A few scratches of grey and green on a piece of brown paper may really be as good in its own way as a ‘still life’ by a Flemish painter or a Holy Family by an Italian painter. But it must be perfectly obvious to anybody that the two latter are more likely to make a plain man understand what painting means. We talk somewhat lightly about ‘schools’ of art. Whether or no the art of Raphael be better as an art it is certainly better as a school. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Post-post-Impressionism and the rest, are developments which may be credited or criticised according to every man’s aesthetic philosophy. It may be the end of art, in the sense of the object of art. It may be the end of art in the sense of the abolition of art. But anyhow it is not the beginning of art; it is not the initiation, the origin, the introductory motive. What art is to begin with, what it obviously is, what is the reason that anyone ever made it, that people can learn today from the Old Masters. And they can learn it from nobody else.
A hundred cases could be taken, but take the case of a common phrase: a common sneer with the art critics. I mean the phrase ‘a picture that tells a story’. There could not be a sharper instance of the difference between the old hero who was man and more than man and the new hero who is not man at all. A picture by Leonardo da Vinci tells a story. A picture by Paul Veronese tells a story. A picture by Titian or Tintoretto tells a story. The first and most important question is, what story? Most medieval and Renaissance pictures tell the story; the story on which all our European civilisation is founded, and is founded as finally if the thing is a fairy tale or if the thing is a truth. The objection to pictures which ‘tell a story’ only began in our time, for the very simple reason that the story was a dull story. I will not discuss here whether the great story of God made Man has been destroyed. I will confine myself to saying that it has certainly not been replaced.
There are other qualities in which the Old Masters are demagogues as well as demi-gods. I mean there are other elements in which they eternally appeal to a popular instinct which was in them and in their patrons and in their populace. I should select the two examples of clarity and solidity. In Michelangelo’s ‘Vision of Judgment’ a real man appears in the real skies. The man is solid. The skies are lucid. To the cultured it may appear incredible; but it will be much more credible to mankind, that universal church of which culture is a small and doubtful sect. To mankind, to men as they ordinarily are, a complete man appearing in a clear sky, will not be incredible. It will be much more credible than an impressionist portrait of a real person or a post-impressionist picture of a real place.
I should therefore urge the re-publication of old and good pictures as a real part of that grossly neglected thing—public education. Our historians lie much more than our journalists; our fashionable conceptions of the past change with every fashion; and like most fashions, are fantastic and hideous. But the old colours and the old canvases do not lie; they were really achieved in the ages which we parody or pervert; and the squareness of their drawing, the brightness of their colours, the substantial sincerity of their subject, will still tell us something of the fathers we have forgotten. I do not go so far as to say we have relapsed into barbarism. But I do say that we can just now learn best from picture writing.
Here and There
Walking Tours
The close of the holiday season sets most of us reflecting on the philosophy of travel, and many of us upon the simplest form of it, the philosophy of walking tours. Among serious and imaginative pedestrians there are only two schools or parties, and one school maintains that the pedestrian should go forth without map or compass, and wander until a wood beckons to him or a pathway points like a finger. The other school maintains that he should map out with every circumstance of detail the place he is going to, and then go somewhere else. The idea of having a fixed intention on such an occasion, and adhering to it through thick and thin would make an excellent medieval religious vow, but makes a very poor holiday. Some people set out upon walking tours with the most horrible indifference to that idea of loneliness and liberty which is the essence of such an enterprise. Some even send a bag on before them to the hotels to which they intend to go: a dark and depraved aspect in which to regard human nature. They might as well station footmen in livery at intervals of every three miles carrying coffee and liqueurs. The whole beauty and meaning of pedestrianism vanishes if the pedestrian is once tied to a particular hotel, even if it is thirty miles away. Then he is no longer a wild thing like the hawk or the hare, he is only a cow on a particularly long tether. The sending on of bags is predestination: it is a sort of holiday Calvinism, when the very soul of walking is free will. If a travelling companion is sought he should always be sought among those lovers of the errant and the spontaneous. He should be sought among those true worshippers of liberty who feel a certain degradation whenever they take a return ticket. Those who are interested in antiquities should be avoided, but those who are interested in what they call nature are worse. Great public buildings were after all in some sense made to be stared at, but to regard our mother earth merely as a thing to be stared at is like exhibiting one’s maiden aunt in a cage. A man should walk in the country in order to become a part of the country, not in order to get to the top of a particular hill and see a distressing number of counties.
The man who goes upon a walking tour should be open to all the usual interests. He should enjoy the country and enjoy the churches and enjoy the beetles, but also, and as a very important item, he should enjoy the walk. He should not be consumed with any devouring preference for going anywhere. His desires should be no more fixed upon the end of the walk than the desire of a child upon the end of a sugarstick. The walk should be a work of art, the real colour and value of which do not appear until it is completed. The objects of a walk are often disappointing, but the accidents are magnificent. The true adventurer does not walk so much in the hope of finding cities or mountains as in the hope of discovering by the end of his journey why he came out. The darkness of this great mystery will always be present to his mind. Every twist of roadway, every knot of trees may conceal behind it the explanation of his own superb folly. He is in search of the central incident of his journey, and it may be a strange sunset or a fight with a foot-pad, a patch of primroses or a lunatic with a green umbrella. Just as some primitive hero trusted himself upon the back of a dragon or hippogriff, the traveller trusts himself upon that wildest of steeds—a runaway road. Upon the whole, it may be admitted that the pedestrian should carry a map, but he should not consult it often, and he should always cherish the thrilling and secret thought that it may be all wrong. In fact, a map should be taken chiefly because it is such a particularly beautiful thing in itself. A great many other things should be selected and retained on the same principle. A walking tour, for example, is unthinkable without a walking-stick, though the experienced will have the strongest internal doubts whether it is any use, and the walking-stick of all walking-sticks for such a purpose is one cut in the woods, as being the most rough and crooked and inconvenient. Carrying such a staff a man feels himself a thing of the earth. He is almost a walking portion of the woods, he carries a tree like the army which brought Birnam to Dunsinane. And if he has walked well and cheerfully, by the time he sticks his staff in the ground and sits down to rest in the evening he will do it in such a state of inward glory that he would scarcely be surprised if the staff broke into flower before him like the Pope’s rod in Tannhäuser. The essential ground of the unwisdom and unprofitableness of planning a walk too systematically with maps and guide books is a thing easy to feel, but not quite so easy to analyse. One point, however, may be noticed. In our days, when we have names for everything and accurate plans of everywhere, we tend very much to forget that there does exist a place called the world. The world was the place, for example, into which the heroes of the fairy tales went out to seek their fortune. It began at the end of their father’s garden, and it stretched away into infinity full of everything from birds’ nests to dragons, from apple trees to ogres. This remarkable place, the world, is the only place that is not marked even upon the latest and most accurate geographical charts. We have so cut up the face of the earth into our own arbitrary divisions, that it is always Sussex, or Essex, or Kent, or Norway, or Patagonia, and never simply the earth. Science has given us a vulgar familiarity with the earth, a familiarity without knowledge. We have set the seal of the commonplace upon inaccessible peaks that no man has ever trodden, and unfathomable seas inhabited by monsters that have never risen to the surface. We have names and tickets for sights and regions which we no more possess than if they existed only in someone else’s dreams. Thousands and thousands of leagues beyond the farthest limit of our possible personal experience the earth contains things as marvellous as any fairy tale. But we have not the wisdom as the men of the fairy tales had, the wisdom to call these places fairyland or the castle east of the sun and west of the moon. We call them Jonestown, and Smith’s River, and Snooksville, U.S.A.
The perfect pedestrian should always set forth like the third son in the fairy tale. It is a mystic and beautiful dispensation of Providence that every person in this world has an inward conviction that in the cosmic system he himself is the third son. He should go into Kent if he likes, or Buckinghamshire if he likes, or Normandy, or Italy, or China if he likes, but first and foremost into the world. He should go forth with any object he pleases: to shoot lions, or pick flowers, or collect fossils, or find a desert island, or find a wife, but first and foremost he should go out, in the old fairy tale phrase, to seek his fortune. In the life of industrial civilisation, where everything is done by a kind of clockwork, most of us have forgotten that we have a fortune. Most of us have forgotten that somewhere in the nooks and corners of the world there has, perhaps, been waiting for us all our lives a neglected destiny. When we praise the order of Nature it is only as we might praise a mangle or a mincing machine, useful for our own practical purpose, just as the old silversmiths cried ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Like them we have forgotten the true identity of the moon who was the patroness of lunatics and the goddess of crossroads.
The Blindness of the Sightseer
I once had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of an American, a very intelligent and inspiriting person, who, during a pause in a discussion on scenery, said, with the inimitable accent, ‘Well, I can’t see when you have seen the highest mountain in Switzerland what you want to see the rest for’. So completely obsessed was he with this American sense of competition that he admitted competition even among mountains, and judged of some hundreds of the towering crests of the earth as he would have judged of six American hotel servants who struggled at the station for his bag. There is a very general idea—how general I cannot imagine— that competition is productive of or conducive to individuality. The defenders of the extreme forms of competition invariably insist upon this argument, that the struggle develops personality and variety. Of course, it does nothing of the sort. Competition is simply imitation, and however fierce and ruthless competition may be it only becomes a fierce and ruthless imitation. When the most important object in a landscape must be the thing which is down in the guidebook—the highest hill, the largest tree, the roundest hole in the wall—thousands of other beauties for miles round waste themselves like the neglected talents of humanity. People see the Madeleine and the Louvre, but they do not see Paris. They see the Pfalz Castle and the Drachenfels, but they do not see the Rhine. They see Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon, but they have never seen England; England is still to them an undiscovered Atlantis. They see pyramids, dolmens, sloping towers, great walls, hanging gardens, catacombs, colossal statues; but they have never seen that one miracle to which all these are nothing. They have seen the seven wonders of the world, but they have never seen the world.
Let me hasten to say at once that I have not a gleam of sympathy with that contempt which is sometimes expressed by the languid for those who travel. My complaint is not that people are enthusiastic about the Drachenfels, but that they are not enthusiastic about other things. The real evil is that which takes these sights out of their setting and holds them up as the reason for travel. A man of any imagination gains enormously by travelling in France or Germany. My only suggestion is that he would gain scarcely an atom less if he never saw any one of the places to which such tours are universally and systematically directed. If a man could come upon these places suddenly and naturally the effect would be magnificent. Statues and cathedrals would waylay him like a patch of blossom in the hedges or a shape in the clouds. To walk across the magnificent hills of Sussex, to come upon the long lines of a great forest and a great fortress, and to be told that it is the Castle of the Howards. To walk along the sands of the great Norman coast, and behold out at sea a village clinging upon a spire of rock, and to know that it is the Mountain of St Michael; this would indeed be to be educated by travel. But, then, the great sights would come as the culmination of a series of lesser ones, enjoyed and admired in the same manner. The man who did not enjoy the Sussex Downs would not really enjoy the Castle of Arundel. The man who was not impressed by mere sand and sea would not be impressed by the awful crag of the Archangel. But the system of modern travel takes these things out of their environment, makes them prodigies, valuable in themselves. There is not a pin to choose in essential superstition between the medieval pilgrim who would walk miles that for a moment he might touch a particular stone and the modern tourist who will drive leagues that for a moment he may stare at it. We can all feel this essential difference between seeing a sight as an example of its environment and seeing a sight as an exception to its environment, if we merely imagine the principle applied to other forms in nature. If we walked down a long lane in Surrey, and saw, let us say, an incomparable hedge of wild roses extending apparently for miles, we might be stricken still with an exceptionable wonder at the height and splendour of some exceptionable branch or bloom. But if, because this branch was the highest in the lane, it was suddenly given a name, and advertised through the country; if we heard that a station had been opened near it, that omnibuses and excursion trains were run down to it on Bank Holidays, and that by these facilities some hundreds of harmless human beings were dragged out of London, dropped down in front of it for a minute or two to stare, and then dragged back again, we should say that the magic had departed. And if we were wise, we should see that the magic had not departed, as some superfine people suppose, because trains and trippers are ugly. Trains are very poetical things, and so are trippers; for only the wildest kind of poetry can furnish any explanation of why they trip. But the magic would have gone from that branch of wild roses for the very simple reason that the magic had not resided in that alone; the magic was partly the magic of the lane itself and of loneliness, of the combination of the two strangest and most impressive of things— silence and life. Now, steamers and conducted tours have done precisely this very thing for places like the Rhine: they have found the wild rose and they have lost the lane. It is better a hundred times to wander about the lane and never see its most glorious and natural product than to see that product and regard it as a monstrosity. In so far as a thing is what people call marvellous it is not and cannot be representative. To judge of Italy by the leaning tower is like judging of the human race by the bearded woman at a fair. That type of wonders of the world is based upon the principle that the wonderful consists in things going wrong: to a somewhat more essential imagination the genuine wonder is that things go right. The leaning tower of Pisa is, if we realise man’s history seriously, by no means so astonishing as the nearest waterworks tower. The marvel is that all our turrets and tenements do not reel this way and that, like a scene from the Day of Judgment.
In one sense, the great buildings and great cities which we labour to visit are less worth the labour than those common scenes and figures in the street which we pass easily by. For great buildings belong to great traditions of European civilisation which are akin throughout Europe, and whether or no a man could get as much education from Westminster Abbey as from Cologne Cathedral, at least it would be education upon the same lines. It is in a chance strip of landscape, a chance group in the street that we see the real difference which it is worth while to cross the sea to find. The architecture of a German cathedral and that of an English one belong to the same school; but the architecture of a German and that of an Englishman exhibit the most fascinating differences. Every land, every town, has its dark and sacred individuality. The man who has found this out, and he alone, has visited that land or town. And, perhaps, when we have wandered, in obedience to modern culture, among all the kingdoms of the earth, and gathered the knowledge of them, we may begin to penetrate into that most unexplored of all territories, our own country. We may realise what it is that consitutes an English landscape, and in the wild developments of some future century, may begin to be patriots.
The Aesthetes in the Kitchen Garden
When, a week or two ago, I came down among the hills of Kent, the country looked ancient and innocent enough. Save for birds and old men lapping hedges the visitor seemed to be in solitude. But all this was a mask—a delusion. This green England of ours is really bursting with literary men. Short story writers leap from behind hedges, minor poets drop from the trees like ripe fruit; you cannot walk through deep grass without stumbling over Sociologists. On dark, windy nights wild voices mingle with the wind, and the words ‘reactionary’, ‘superman’, ‘the Philistines’, and ‘raise the drama’ echo desolately from hill to hill. We see the vision of Fitz-James in ‘The Lady of the Lake’ which Scott describes in words (which I quote from memory):
At once from copse and heath arose Roundels and fugues and lyric prose, From shingles grey their nocturnes start, The bracken bush cries, ‘Art is Art’, And every tuft of broom is rife With highly beastly views of life.
I have met in meadows here some of the most terrible and beautiful people of Fleet Street. I have seen a cottage, decent and quiet on the outside, inside which, as I hope for heaven, there were Burne-Jones’s on the wall. In short, we are in the presence of a peculiar phenomenon. The people are not going ‘back to the land’ but the cultivated classes are.
But there is something about these intellectual people in flannel shirts who come out and live in the country, where they play tennis and read Thoreau which gives me a haunting notion that they do not really belong to the country; they dwell rather than live in it.
Now this is very false. Go into the country for your health; go into the country for your children; go into the country because the police are after you; go into the country because you like painting in water-colours, or because you like keeping chickens, or because you like spearing otters, or because you want beauty or contentment or the continual presence of cows. But do not go into the country because you like liberty, for there is of necessity less liberty in the country than anywhere else. The pressure of society on the individual must be much greater in a village than in a city. Public opinion must be much stronger; personal eccentricity much more difficult. And if the aesthetic people in the flannel shirts do not feel this pressure it is because they are not really living in the life of the village— that is to say, not really living in the life of the country. Liberty is a thing of the town; any Roman or Greek would have understood that. It is in the places where men live an intense and complicated life that they find the necessity for liberty, and that which is almost the same as liberty—loneliness. The routine of rural life, happy, dignified, sensible, but not inventive, and not free, has been going on almost unchanged from the beginning of the world.
Amid all these philosophers and artists who run like rabbits about the woods of Kent I met one who really loved the country. He was driving a sort of wagonette which was plastered all over with little bills and placards announcing that now for the first time people could go from Westerham or Limpsfield to various places that I have never heard of for some singularly small price which I did not read. He was trotting his coach up and down the country roads by way of a preliminary pageant or advertisement, giving free lifts to highly amused pedestrians, or proclaiming the nature and glories of the route to dazed stonebreakers or wild-eyed gypsies. Something led me to make the acquaintance of this individual, and I discovered that driving a coach was by no means the first of his adventures, nor the most amusing. He has written books; he has stood for Parliament; he has conducted, I believe, a kind of wild newspaper. His name is Stuart Gray, and will probably be familiar to many of my readers, especially if they are interested in the movement for the colonisation of England, the return of the people to the land. It was a single sentence of his that convinced me that he had that really poetic feeling which the minor poets in the neighbourhood tend to lack. Before us lay a roll of country like the back of an unbroken wave, spacious, silent, meeting the sky. He stretched out his whip towards it, and said in what I can only call an awestruck voice, ‘If this were all kitchen gardens! Then you’d have people—people—people.’ Three times he said the sacred word of the republic. This article, you will perceive, is also written in a kitchen garden, and a witchery of onions is wafted with it.
While standing in this kitchen garden I perceived what many of my readers must have perceived long ago, that of all things on earth the one perfectly beautiful thing is a kitchen garden. It has a hundred kinds of beauty richly blent into a solemn harmony. It has the beauty of an embroidery, for all the colours are quiet and yet varied infinitely. It has the beauty of an army, for all the vegetable regiments are set in ranks as if they had been drilled by God for the great battle against Nonentity. It has the beauty of a sepulchre, because so many of the shapes and colours that are seen are but the coloured crests or monuments upon the more precious bodies underground. It has the beauty of a store-cupboard, the beauty of a fairy tale. Cabbages alone have all the colours of the sea. I am forced, I find, to conclude these reflections for the moment. But I trust that before I resume my reflections on kitchen gardens someone will have brought out a book of amatory poems in which all the similes shall have been drawn from this nobler and more fruitful Eden. I do not see why he should not say that in a lady’s cheek the turnip and the carrot fought for supremacy. Such a description is far truer to the mellow and tawny quality in the human complexion than the violent similes of the rose and the lily. These latter, I may be fastidious, offend me as fantastic.
The Need of Personalities in Politics
The village I now inhabit (as a locum tenens in the temporary absence of the Village Beauty) was in a great stir last night, owing to the arrival of the Liberal Van, which was regarded with more gravity than I should have thought possible. It drew up on the village green; its speakers opened a meeting, and everything would have gone smoothly and respectably if it had not happened that among the promoters of the meeting, standing beside the van, was a man with that air of strained intellectuality which marks a reader of The Daily News. He heard my name by some social accident; and remembered seeing it in the paper. ‘I have read your articles,’ said this excellent Liberal, with a friendly smile, while I faintly condoled with him. Then he said, after a pause of some length, ‘I think I know what some of them mean’. I implored him to share with me this secret and painful knowledge, but he refused, and I shall go to my grave without it. But my encounter with the man had drawn me into the dangerous circle. And when the Chairman, a local Liberal magnate, was obliged to leave halfway through the meeting, they hoisted me into the chair instead of him. The chair was a kind of wooden ledge a little way above the shafts; and I took the chair with so dignified a decisiveness as almost to wreck the van. Then, I regret to say, the proceedings took on a more turbulent character. My rising to say anything was greeted (I cannot explain this phenomenon) with loud shouts coming exclusively from little boys. I think I somehow stirred in them a sickening hope that after all it was going to be a circus.
Then there was a sombre Conservative on the outskirts of the crowd, who interrupted so consistently and continuously that it came to be a rather delicate logical question whether he was interrupting our speeches or we were interrupting his. But it was not so much the quantity as the quality of his interruptions that pleased and at the same time perplexed me. One thing was firmly embedded in his mind, the fruitful seed of continuously flowering satire. This was the conviction that all of us in the van were persons of enormous wealth. He even professed to know the sources of that wealth. When I was making some remarks about poverty, he hurled at my head, with a deadly aim, this mysterious sarcasm: ‘Ha! We ain’t all on the Civil List.’ I made, of course, the somewhat obvious retort, that some of us seemed to be on the Uncivil List; but to this moment I cannot imagine what was the meaning of that unfathomable sneer. Is there something in my air and manner, something of official dignity and decorum, touched with a servile prosperity, that suggests that I am in receipt of a bloated pension? Or has somebody really given or left me some money (poignant and improbable thought) since I have been away from town?
Let us leave this merely personal enigma and pass on to the final development, which from a deeper point of view, at any rate, was the most interesting. The temperature of the meeting, I am proud to say, rose higher and higher: a perfect rattle of repartees, the sympathisers on each side rocked and roared, a large fat farmer of Conservative opinions was beginning with a dreadful and dangerous slowness to think of something to say; and when I wound up the meeting and thanked everybody for their patience, politeness, and good temper, they were ready to kick each other round the green.
And then an interesting thing happened. Ten minutes after the end of the meeting the large, deliberate farmer of Conservative opinions was delivered of the thing that he wanted to say; and eclipse and thunder accompanied that portentous birth. The thing he wanted to say was—Could anybody there say he’d ever cut down any man’s wages? This seemed to me a very essential, a very serious, and a very manly challenge, immeasurably more important not only than anything said at our meeting, but than anything that is ever said in the House of Commons.
It was followed by a kind of restless silence, such as occurs in such mobs at such moments, and in the next instant there was drama. A pale, coarse-looking lad, his arm half out of his coat with eagerness and anger, thrust his face forward. His wages had been cut down, he said; he had been underpaid, and underpaid by this man. The farmer, staring at him through the darkness, at first denied all knowledge of his face. Then a voice broke out of him, a loud and wrathful and decisive voice, crying, ‘Why, I know yer now. I know yer now, I sacked yer for—’. Then the sense of English respectability awoke suddenly in everybody, and the men were torn apart and soothed wildly by their friends. Whatever happened, we must not be asked to decide on a matter of real and diurnal right and wrong. Whatever happened we must not have a plain personal challenge answered by a plain personal reply. The farmer went away, shaking with his furious secret; the lad went away shaking with his. Yet here was present on that dark green, in that dim group, what is often the eternal substance and whole meaning of society and government. Two men were calling upon their neighbours to give judgment on their wrongs. This is politics. We had fixed the frontiers of India; we had examined the imports of Canada; we had meditated on the quarrels between Dutchmen and German Jews; we had criticised kindly but firmly the condition of the Prussian working classes; we had thought imperially and also in continents; we had seen the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.
But this doing of justice between one angry man and another never crossed our minds as a public duty. This was the last business that could be expected of us— this which would be the first business of a primitive community, this which would be the first business of a tribe of Zulus. Our politics for the night had ended. Our politics had ended exactly at the point where all politics ought to begin.
It seemed to me that on this little green, as on a green baize stage, was acted an allegory of the whole situation of our contemporary statesmanship. Everything goes on gaily as long as we are dealing with things. Everything stops abruptly the moment we come to men. We are allowed to say: ‘The supporters of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act are corrupt scoundrels.’ We are allowed to say, ‘Sir William Guppy is a supporter of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act’. We are not allowed to complete the syllogism. Everybody says with one accord in our English Parliament: ‘Let us have no personalities in politics.’ Every Briton says at his breakfast table: ‘At least, we are not like the French and the Irish; we have no personalities in our politics.’ And because we have no personalities we have no responsibilities.
The Largest Window in the World
It is a terrible thing to have trod on battlefields before they were fought. It gives a man a cold and ghostly shiver, as of being the babe unborn. But I was a boy, and almost a babe, when I was first in Belgium; and I can only write down the reality that impressed me then. Beyond some streets burning with brassware, which seemed perpetually on sale, almost out of sight of the great Belfry, there is (or was) a sort of museum of the great Memlinc. Among the pictures was one which even as a boy I could not forget; and very few poets or prophets can even imagine how much a boy can forget. It was a picture in which the window seemed hardly wider than the crack of a door. Yet through that crack the human eye could almost, in the strong Scripture rhetoric, take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea.
And I remember a voice near me speaking in an accent that was neither French nor Flemish nor my own: ‘You see how narrow the windows were in those days.’
I did. I also began to see, for the first time, how narrow the minds are in these days. I looked at the little window again and I thought it the largest window in the world. Simply because the aperture was narrow, I knew the landscape was wide. If modern artists had swept it in a larger style, I should have noticed it no more than some hundred miles of wallpaper. Then note not only the pride of a small nation, but the pride of the rich peasantry. Look from the slit of a turret in Cumberland or Calabria and there is a chance that your eye may strike something slightly depressing. But any strip of Belgium will be a string of jewels. Note, thirdly, that the thinness of the outlook is largely due to the thickness of the walls. There is no trace of what vulgar people call ‘a vista’: the house does not open up indefinitely to the world outside. The man of Memlinc sees the world from his window. But it is still the final fact that the window was his window and the world is not his world. I should have thought it, then, quite inconceivable that any one would assail that turret. But I should have thought it equally inconceivable that any one should fail to defend it. A man living in such a house might almost shut the front door to protect the beauty of the window.
I have never been in Belgium since; I have never met any who would possibly be in connection with any revolutionary or anti-national idea. Yet for me Belgium has continued to mean that small field of vision, making certain so vast a field of prosperity. That keyhole is still the largest window in the world.
Since then I have not seen the country, except in frightful photographs. I have gradually begun to understand what was meant by my alien friend when he spoke of the needless narrowness of the medieval window. To judge by the photographs, he has broadened architectural effects very much; he has blown window into window and enlarged the premises; he has left long lines of street in which it is impossible to say whether he has combined the windows that exist, or spared the windows that never existed. He cannot make anything except a window; for a window is simply a hole. When he has blown everything to atoms, when no stack or stone stands about us for many miles, he will say, with an insane simplicity: ‘I have made the largest window in the world.’
The Apostle and the Wild Ducks
Last week I learned a historical lesson in some sense by going on a wild-goose chase. Perhaps it might more correctly be described as a wild-duck chase. Not that I had any intention of shooting wild ducks, though the country I visited was, I believe, specially suited to the sport; the country round about the Fens of Lincoln and the Broads of Norfolk. Those eastern flats generally are famous for such wild-fowl, as also for the remains of the rich medieval civilisation founded on the Flemish trade, and for expansive opportunities for the admiration of the sunset; or, for those of suitable habits, of the sunrise. Yet the wild duck I pursued was not entirely symbolical, though he was among other things a symbol. What happened in my own case was merely this: that a friend of mine told me that far in the interior of the Fens, in the heart of a labyrinth of lanes and dykes there was a little church which contained some medieval paintings in remarkable preservation. These pictures were said to represent scenes of medieval sport, dealing especially with ducks. After wanderings which might have led to the other end of nowhere, only that the endless road seemed to be perpetually turning inward instead of outward, we came at last to the place, in a wilderness of dusty grass and stunted and sprawling trees; with one of the great square towers of fine flints, that mark the Norfolk churches, alone filling the empty sky and dwarfing everything at its feet. And it was here that I found the feature that seemed to me a sort of symbol or summary for our understanding of the Middle Ages.
Incidentally, of course that great tower was something of a symbol itself. It was not only a beacon or thing to be seen; it is a symbol of blindness as well as sight. Nothing is so strange in human history as the things men do not see. Over all those flat lands the only mountains were made by men; and they were made by medieval men. For that matter, in a thousand little villages all over England there has been for centuries only one tall, stately ornate and orderly building; all the rest was obvious patchwork and poverty. Yet the Puritans could successfully teach five generations of English people, and especially of East Anglian people, that the men who built the big systematic building were living in savagery and superstition, while the men who still tolerated the little hovels had emerged into liberty and enlightenment. In this case it is curiously true that faith can remove mountains; it can remove the mountain opposite a man’s door, if his prejudice has taught him that a mountain is only a myth. But this is a parenthesis; for my purpose here is not concerned with the old English churches in general, but with something that is to be found in this old Norfolk church in particular.
I say it is something that can be found, though at first it seemed rather like something that could not be found. In truth, in that remarkable little fane of the flats, we might be said to have found everything but what we were looking for. There were indeed medieval paintings; and very fine ones, by no means hidden but splendidly displayed. Fronting us as we entered the church door, in a great row across the rood-screen, stood the Twelve Apostles, six on each side, with their rich colours somewhat darkened but their gold in full glow, and their emblems and tools of martyrdom unmistakable. Facing inwards, opposite each other, were two figures of St Michael and St George, treated somewhat in a heraldic manner. I mean the manner that looks arbitrary until we realise that it is decorative. The armament of St George seemed fantastic and top-heavy even for the tilting armour of the fourteenth century; the feathers of St Michael seemed to be sprouting from strange parts of him, as from the body of a monster. Only when we consider it as we do a coat of arms, as a pattern more than a picture, we suddenly realise that every line of it is in exactly the right place. High above all these there was a much more faded figure of St Etheldreda, the great Christian foundress and patron of those parts; looking down perhaps the more impressively for seeming more like a ghost or a great shadow on the wall.
This was, in the strict sense of the word, all very fine; but it was not what we had come to see. The attitude of the Apostles however darkly traced, could not be mistaken for the postures of gentlemen when duck-shooting. St George was clearly occupied in killing a dragon and not a duck. St Michael’s wings might seem to be sticking out of him in an arbitrary and ornamental fashion; but they did not recall the wings of a duck, or even what the Psalmist coveted as the wings of a dove. Besides, St Michael is more associated with a goose. Nobody would venture to call St Etheldreda a duck. We concluded that the rumour about pictures of duck-hunting in the Fens must have been a rumour without foundation. In short, the duck was only a canard.
Just as we were trailing out of the church in disappointment and even despair, so far as our duck-hunting expedition was concerned, my friend gave a cry; and I turned in the very porch to look back at him. He was bending over the figure representing St Paul, which wore a long inner garment elaborately embroidered with gold; we had both passed it over as a pattern merely adding richness to the general design. But on looking closer, I found that the Apostle of the Gentiles was all over ducks. He was, so to speak, crawling with ducks, with ducks and dogs pursuing them in one pantomimic dance all over the gilded pattern. It was here that the artist had crowded all his comic sketches of the sports of his native fens. It was a very good pattern, but it was made of quite grotesque pictures. It might have been the design for the fancy waistcoat of a fat gentleman in one of the Dickens novels. The first of all the Dickens novels, by the way, was originally written to illustrate some grotesque sketches of sport. It is not too much to say that, in the original scheme of the publishers, Mr Pickwick merely existed for the sake of Mr Winkle. Mr Winkle might very well have gone duck-shooting in the fens, as he went skating on the ice or riding on the famous horse that went sideways. The sporting artist employed on that occasion would doubtless have been ready to depict him surrounded by any number of ducks and dogs. But he would have been mildly surprised if he had been asked to depict them as part of the decoration of the parish church, to say nothing of the vestments of the parson. But the older artist saw nothing incongruous in depicting them thus in mazy detail between the massive book and the mighty sword, that stood for that terrible convert who was struck down upon the road to Damascus.
Now that is the answer to the question I have already asked and that is why this pointless anecdote is also a parable. People were able to shut their eyes to the big church because it was only a church, however big; and they did not think of deducing anything from it about the number of houses or the nature of households. Because the framework of so much of medieval life was a religious framework, they never even looked at the picture in the frame. They passed it over exactly as anyone looking at the painted figures of the Twelve Apostles passed over all the lively little animals of which its ornament was made up. Thus, to take only one example, popular history seldom takes account of the large numbers of medieval people more or less loosely attached to the Church without being in the full sense either priests or monks: students, members of lay orders and men who were merely clerks in the sense of pleading benefit of clergy; that is, being under the milder law of the Church rather than the harsher law of the State. All this popular life, I suspect, moved normally within more or less clerical enclosures, as the details of the decoration seemed to dance within the enclosure of the main lines of the design. In the gradual revival of the study of such a period, we have had to investigate the religious life in order to discover the secular life. We have had to search the cathedrals to find the guilds; as my friend had to scrutinise the saint in order to find the hounds and the birds. There is no way to those things except through that Gothic porch; and this was realised even by the great men like Morris and Rossetti who might well have wished, for some other reason, to come in by some other way. But none ever came in by any other way except the thieves and the robbers.
There are thousands of little things like that to be found in every corner of what is left of medieval craft and culture. I have taken this small instance because it is small, and because it is the last that has occurred to me. The study of these old things has to be intensive study; just as the cultivation of them anew would have to be an intensive cultivation.
Travellers’ Joys
Once when I was wandering about in the beautiful city of Bath, I fell into a vein of meditation not concerned with any of the antiquities of the place, as such things are counted in a guidebook. My reflections, though profound and philosophical, were not concerned with the Bath of Bath, which recalls the Roman foundation of Britain. They were not concerned with the Abbey of Bath, which recalls the Middle Ages; nor with the Pump Room or Assembly Room which recall the stately frivolity of the eighteenth century. I was not even thinking of that noble theme, the Wife of Bath, a medieval monument which seems even more gigantic than an abbey.
If anyone really wants to know why some of us have a taste for what is called ‘medievalism’, he can find a great deal of it in that grand and grotesque personality. But the point is that the Wife of Bath was coming from Bath, and not going to Bath. When we consider what her errand was, and then what she was, we realise the wide reach and grasp of religion upon the motley mob of mankind. The Wife of Bath is a sort of caricature carved in brass; as brazen as Mrs Gamp and with as broad a grin. But who can imagine Dickens, who described so many wanderings in Kent, describing Mrs Gamp as going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint? I suppose the whole stretch of history from the medieval to the modern world, might be summed up in the reversal of that journey. It is the change from the time when the Wife of Bath went to sprinkle herself with holy water at Canterbury, to the time when the Archbishop of Canterbury probably went to sprinkle himself with medicinal water at Bath. But it was not of such trifles as the towers of Canterbury or the Roman floors of Bath that I was musing mystically at the moment.
My mind was uplifted and attuned to the subject of buns. I was reflecting upon the remarkable fact that, to a great extent, it is still necessary to go to Bath for Bath buns. I have, indeed, encountered in my travels in less civilised places something apparently intended for food, to which is attached the name of the Roman city of Somerset. But, after tasting it, I have come to the conclusion that the derivation is different. These other objects, I conceive, are very legitimately called Bath buns because they are made of soap and flannel. But to a great extent, in spite of the modern network of communications and dead level of standardisation, a Bath bun still means a bun of Bath. The same is true in its degree, I believe, in the case of Chelsey buns. It may be true, for all I know, of those unique cakes of Richmond, gloriously described as Maids of Honour. It may be that, before standardisation began, there were these local luxuries in nearly every locality. Perhaps there were Pimlico Pancakes which were the rich reward of crossing the meadows to the picturesque hamlet of Pimlico. Perhaps Clapham produced a sweetmeat as well as a sect; and Mayfair was famous for toffee before it was famous for toffs. But over all districts that have been surrounded and swallowed by the big industrial cities, there runs the rule of the great commercial combinations, and all such individual things have perished.
I do not insist that nobody must be allowed to eat Brussels sprouts except in Brussels. I do not demand that everyone who likes Jerusalem artichokes should take staff and scrip and make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I do not say that Turkish delight should delight none but Turks or travellers in Turkey. I do not even insist (though it would be a fine heroic idea, worthy of a romance of Scott or Stevenson) that no person should be permitted to taste Edinburgh Rock until he has earned it by scaling the steep and splendid facade of the Rock of Edinburgh. Some of these are merely names; and some of them do still carry with them something of the savour and the pride of nations. But in England, in those exquisitely English centres, the old provincial towns, we did manage to produce good things whose very glory was in being provincial.
It was worth a man’s while to go from one town to another, and even from one county to another, to find things that he could not find at home. Thus there was a very real romance of travel, for romantic as well as for religious pilgrims. The traveller plodded along the Bath Road sustained from afar by the vista of the Bath Bun. He saw the cake peculiar to Richmond shining like a guiding star more brilliant than the Star and Garter. And though this may not seem the loftiest sort of star for a wise man to follow, yet these material luxuries had their moral significance, and stand in social criticism today as the symbols of something much deeper and wider than themselves. They illustrate something that is not only wanting in our latest social development, but something not immediately likely to be developed.
Thus travel in the true sense has become impossible in the large urban or urbanised districts. There are twenty ways of going everywhere, and there is nowhere to go. There are a hundred improved means of communication and there is nothing to communicate. A traveller in simpler times travelled with two legitimate and even estimable objects; first to see strange things in the places he went to; and second, to boast about the country he came from. Both these admirable arts are bound to suffer neglect and negation under existing conditions, when the place he finds is exactly like the place he leaves. All such places are alike, plastered with the same advertisements, blocked up with the same big shops, selling the same newspapers, attending the same schools.
There is therefore no real meaning in his travels, apart from the permanent personal interest of humanity. But the general spirit of travel, the desire to see new folk or new customs, all that has been ruined by the commercial concentration of modern times. I do not object to a reasonable number of things being scattered over the whole world, to remind the traveller of home and of the bond of mankind. I have seen The Illustrated London News for instance, in remote mud villages of Spain, or in caravanserais on the edge of the desert; and I am quite prepared to find it in the dark forests of Africa or the islands of the Southern Seas. But the Spanish villages and the Arab settlements were themselves quite different from London and the London News.
If each of our separate towns and villages were cut off by some happy catastrophe such as being snowed up or turned into an island by a flood, that town or village might begin to produce its own magazines, It might produce its own style of architecture, its own school of poets. It might produce something of its own out of the soil, instead of passing on something from somewhere else to somewhere else; as if every human town were no more than a railway junction It might be encouraged to use all the talent within its reach; instead of having that talent swamped and swept away by mere floods of fashion and rumour, from the ends of the earth. Then the true type of the traveller and the pilgrim might reappear upon the earth. Then it would really be worth while to cross the hills from one valley to another; for, entering a new valley, he would enter a new world. There would be more fun to wander over a part of England than it is today to wander over all the earth. The old fairy-tales, that told of a man coming to one kingdom where the houses were built of gold, or another where the fountains ran with wine, were but the legitimate literary exaggeration of the experience of real travellers, who found one peasantry wearing gilded headdresses or another brewing golden ale. But in our present phase travel has destroyed the traveller; and there is nowhere for the pilgrim to go save on a spiritual journey— the only possible pilgrim’s progress.
Understanding France
It is curious, but very obvious, that internationalists are never interpreters between nations. It is what their name almost implies; it is what we should logically expect them to be, or at any rate try to be. And yet they do not do it, and I rather doubt whether they really try. What happens is that the internationalist, while he is often mildly but sincerely horrified at the nationalism of his own nation, is almost always even more horrified at the nationalism of some other nation. And it so happens, as the history of humanity has in fact developed, that very often the nationalism is the nation.
Take the nearest and clearest case; the ancient but by no means primeval rivalry between England and France. In the early Middle Ages they were very nearly one nation. In the later Middle Ages, they were the first of the new and clearly distinguishable nations: on the one side by the splendid accident of Agincourt; on the other by something rather too splendid to be called an accident: St Joan. But ever since then, roughly speaking the two nations drifted further and further apart. And for anybody who is content with nations as nations, or with a very crude and clean-cut sort of nationalism, that might be natural enough. But what has the internationalist been doing? What about the man who talks with particular earnestness about the need for peace among the peoples, for mutual understanding among men of every race and realm, about friendliness to foreigners or humanity to natives? Has he, for instance, ever attempted to explain France to England? The extraordinary fact is that he has never done anything of the kind. He has always been the very last to do anything of the kind.
Few ordinary Englishmen, whether Imperialist or Internationalist, have ever really grasped even what was meant by the greatness of France. But the Internationalist has grasped it much less than the Imperialist. There is much more sense of it in the poems of Mr Kipling than in the pamphlets of Mr Wells. But what is really needed is a widening of English culture, so as to understand what was really valued in French culture. Passing over all that earlier French history, in which the King of Paris had not yet fully become the King of France, we may note even in passing that the Crusades were a French affair; and we only fail to realise the fact because at that time our own monarchy and nobility were as French as the French. St Louis did not succeed in his Crusade; not even with the abortive success of Coeur de Lion. But St Louis does explain the Crusades, while Coeur de Lion rather confuses them. The main modern matter of which I speak, however, begins with the Renaissance and all that gigantic tradition that springs from Rabelais. Does it strike you that the worthy Nonconformist minister, who preaches against militarism and in favour of international pacifism, would be the very best man in the world to translate Rabelais?
Then follows what the French call with a pride that is perfectly logical in a Frenchman but has been allowed to remain almost unintelligible to an Englishman, the Great Century. Nobody knows anything about France, or even about Europe, who does not know that the Great Century was great. Our historians have seen nothing but bombast in the instinct or imagination which compared Louis the Fourteenth to the Sun. But there is no historical truth without historical imagination. And it is much nearer the truth to compare him to a sun-god than to compare him to a pompous dancing-master, in the manner of the narrow national bigotry of Macaulay. Some English literary men have begun to do justice to the great age of Racine and Pascal and the fullness of the Golden Age of classicism. Mr Sacheverell Sitwell, in an excellent study of the Baroque, has a truly imaginative and therefore understanding description of one of those great pageants in which royalty was such a reality that it could carry any load of artifice; and in which it seemed something quite spiritual and spontaneous, like a song, that the King should not only go clad in gold, but clothed with the sun. Mr Maurice Baring has repeatedly insisted with great force and humour, that the notion that Racine is merely stilted and dull is worth as much as the impression of a Breton fisherman that Milton is only stilted and dull: it arises from the rather simple cause of incapacity to read a foreign language.
There have been some good English translations of good French books on the tremendous and even tragic religious quarrel, the Jansenists and the Jesuits and the rest; a huge hinge or turning point in the whole history of Christianity. There have even been a few English critics capable of reading and reviewing the English translations. But the Rev. Timothy Tooting, who is a pacifist because he disapproves of all fights except bun-fights, who serves out cocoa but has never touched ‘alcohol’, and who holds meetings to promote the peace of the world—do you suppose that he has contributed very much to the understanding of the procession of the great Kings and the pride in the glory of Gaul? But until we understand that pride we shall never understand the point of view of a Frenchman. Again, the odd thing is that the Rev. Timothy Tooting was equally shocked at the great Kings and at the great rebellion against the great Kings. His remarks about the French Revolution and especially about Napoleon are just as silly and sniffy as his remarks about the French Monarchy, and especially about Louis the Fourteenth. And the remarks made about Napoleon by Mr Wells, who has some prejudices in common with Mr Tooting, are of the sort that might be excusable in a very stupid half-pay Tory captain who had served under Nelson, but are certainly not worthy either of Napoleon or of Mr Wells. Yet it is precisely men like Mr Wells who set out elaborately to reconcile the nations; to bring about what they call a better understanding between them. I suggest that he begin by reconciling England and France, and achieving a better understanding, or any sort of understanding, of France.
It has often been said that signs and portents will accompany the advent of the Millennium, or the coming of the heavenly kingdom upon earth. Oliver Wendell Holmes demanded that certain miracles should precede that apocalypse; as that raspberries and strawberries should grow bigger downwards through the box; or that lawyers should take what they would give and doctors give what they would take. I would respectfully suggest that before peace, perfect peace, reigns in the United States of Europe, we shall probably have seen some strange things. We shall see that particular sort of pacifist in our country no longer content with being at peace with the same particular sort of pacifist in every other country. We shall see him do what is really needed to avert war: attempt to understand the patriots of the other country. We shall see Earl Russell explaining the ideals of Fascism as clearly and fairly and sympathetically as he would explain the ideals of Socialism. We shall see Mr H. G. Wells fighting o’er again the hundred battles of Napoleon, shouting the war-songs of the Revolutionary War, and beginning to realise how much of the modern world which he admires, and the European unity he values, are due to those who carried the Code Napoleon to the palaces of Vienna or Madrid. We shall see the Rev. Tooting himself, of whose soul no Christian must despair, sitting down to write some rousing and romantic record of the charging chivalry of Poland. It is barely possible that all this, at the moment, may appear slightly improbable. But it is the only way in which we shall ever have international peace, and the only way in which these men can work for international peace. What they are doing at present is to consolidate all the people of one particular philosophy against all the people of the opposite philosophy. They are drawing them up like two long lines of battle. It may be defensible to prepare for war; anyhow, the peacemakers of this school are preparing for it very thoroughly.
Salute to New York
I said to somebody, as I was leaving New York and looking back at its aerial towers, that it was very lovely. I found I had only conveyed the impression that it was a very lovely place to leave. These double meanings or misunderstandings are common in such cases, and the stranger in America often feels that, while his blame sounds like insolence, his praise sounds like insincerity; or at least like irony. I remembered that I had myself been criticised, first for whitewashing Main Street in defiance of the Menckenites, and afterwards for saying that American villages were unsightly as compared with English villages. The general tendency is, however, to overrate the subtlety of the wicked foreigner. I said the skyline of New York was beautiful, because it is; and I said the ruck of the villages are ugly, because they are. The whole labyrinthine plot of perfidious Albion being thus laid bare, it occurred to me that there really is a parallel between the case of the city and of the villages; and that it offered a good opportunity of explaining to some of the more quarrelsome persons something which they did not seem to know; I mean what the quarrel was all about.
The queer thing about New York is that it goes on being new. It is the only case in which the name has not come to mean the very opposite of what it says. Nova Scotia does not sound particularly novel or particularly Scottish. New Orleans sounds older than Old Orleans. And if you meet anywhere a progressive prophet announcing the New Religion or the New Theology, you may be sure that they are about as recent and revolutionary as the New Forest. But New York is unique. It is truly to be called a vision; because a vision means something that is hardly ever visible. It is the dwelling place of a Spirit; which men may like or dislike in all kinds of ways, but which does express itself in a particular art; in an architecture that is akin to aviation. It is built out of winged stones; its architecture is like the law of gravity turned upside down. And those starry heights, those palaces riding the air like rainbows, those pale opalescent spears piercing the sky, lighter than the very light of heaven, have a meaning and are a sign. They do stand for something which the stranger, if he is wise, will recognise; however many things he may find alien to his own civilisation, however many he may think evil for any civilisation. It is a spirit not easy to name without cant, but much more real than all the cant with which it is covered… Lift up your heads, O ye gates… Lift up your hearts, O ye people… It is a sursum corda in the national soul that is not merely false or affected.
So that even all the old rant about the Starry Flag or the Bird of Freedom was right in its instinct for images exalted and far up in air; and a man in a sort of dream, grown dizzy with that dance of towers, may somewhere against the blinding sun, see suddenly the unblinded eagle.
Now suppose somebody said to me that New York was nothing but muck and money; that it might as well be carted away; that industrial capitalism is the same everywhere, I should tell him he was wrong. Industrialism began in England; but it never ended in anything like New York. The pilgrim approaching Pudsey does not behold palaces like rainbows. The traveller leaving Wigan does not look back on opalescent loveliness. The clerk in a poor suburb of Sheffield is not necessarily dizzy with stars and starry towers. This case is unique; it is a special spiritual expression; it probably could not be replaced. That is what I should say to them about New York. And that is what I said, to the protectors of rural England, about the English village.
The point was that a thing like English country life does not spring up merely out of living in the country. It does not spring up in America, or for that matter in Asia or Africa or a great part of Europe. It is the perfect artistic expression of something English, just as the best American architecture is the expression of something American. But you will not find the first in anything called a village or the second in anything called a city. And if you let it perish, you are like men who should look on at the ruin of the last Greek god or the last Christian cathedral.
The British Beech
I am happy to say that I live in Beaconsfield; I mean, of course, that I live in Bekonsfield. I believe that there are some people who live in Beaconsfield, but I do not know where it is, and I cannot imagine why anybody should live there. By the sound of it, I should suppose that it is in some Colony, and was probably named after Disraeli who ought to have called himself Earl of Hughenden if he had followed out his own rustic, rugged and feudal dreams and not been led astray by the temptation to pick up the abandoned coronet of Burke. Now about the origin of the name of this town there is some dispute; but about the pronunciation of the name, there is no dispute whatever. There is only knowledge as possessed by those who know; and the often invincible and therefore innocent ignorance of the world outside. I need hardly say that those who know are those who are now commonly called ignorant and uneducated people. When you have heard the name of your own town for twenty years on the tongues of hedgers, ditchers, rat-catchers, gamekeepers, poachers and village idiots, then you know absolutely for certain that it is the correct pronunciation. When the intellectual aristocracy comes down to such a place and pronounces it as it is spelt, you know for a simple fact that they are wrong. If you have any real education, you know that spelling was never in the past a great part of education; that it is now treated by these people as the whole of education; simply because it is the whole of their education; or the only education they have. It never occurs to them that, while Shakespeare would write his own name in two or three totally different but equally illegible scrawls, he trusted the whole great load of his glory to the sound of words, to be spoken by living men. In dealing therefore with a word like ‘Beaconsfield’, they do not know how to choose between the men who can speak and the men who can only spell. It was always pronounced right. Only it is still spelt wrong.
Subject to this philological parenthesis, it is true that some at least maintain that the name is derived from an old word for a beech tree. Certainly there could be no more appropriate name and no more symbolic and inspiring thing. For the beech tree has a special representative quality in all this rolling wooded landscape, which makes up the central and southern parts of Buckinghamshire; and through the county a real relation to the country. A Sussex man, himself boiling over with enthusiasm for Sussex, once said to me of the beech-woods about my Beaconsfield home, ‘This is really the most English part of England; I confess that compared with this, Sussex is a thing quite separate and apart.’
We have all heard about the British oak; and I am traditional enough not to quarrel with a tradition full of many heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams, or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into battleships. A modern naval enthusiast, by the way, would find it difficult to scatter screws and bolts in the hope that they would turn themselves into the war-machines of today. There is something in that parable of the organic and mechanic growth. But detaching my mind as much as possible, I am forced to feel that the oak has qualities less intimately national. The oak, dedicated to Jupiter of the Romans, has the jagged angular branches that are like the bolts of Jove. Its hard texture and rectangular corners belong almost to the logic of the Latins. If I were choosing an entirely English emblem, I should choose the beech-tree. It is equally strong and expressive of strength; but the smoothness is also expressive of a certain slowness that is akin to mercy and mildness. Its curves are of the gradual sort found in everything in these parts; in the slow speech of the rustics; in the gradual curves in the hills; even far away to the downs of Hampshire and Sussex, that are the only mountains of the South. They have a power like that of lazy waves that are lifted slowly; and allow villages to grow up in their hollows, only because they are too lazy to fall. There is nothing in them of the oak-blasting thunderbolts and very little of the oaks. But here especially, in this section of Bucks, the beeches surround and overshadow us and cover our home; so that it is no accident that has called this particular stretch of England the Home Counties.
Perhaps there is something profane and unhistorical in thus suggesting the belated substitution of the British Beech for the British Oak. And yet there is an important truth in this, if used as a literary symbol; even if we would never wish it to be actually used as a pictorial emblem. For much of the English error about England, which has misled us ever since our real origins were shut off by the obscurantism of the Reformation, is expressed in the undue emphasis on the oak and the neglect of the nobler qualities of the beech. The tendency to turn John Bull into a braggart, and from that into a bully, was only too readily represented by giving him a great oaken cudgel, supposed to be as invincible as the club of Hercules. It left out all the better elements in the native temperament; the humour, the good humour and especially the good nature. These would have been much better expressed in the smoothness that can co-exist with the strength of the beech. Moreover, noble as was the Nelson legend and all the earlier part of our maritime romance, the consideration of oaks only with reference to ships did turn English thoughts too exclusively outwards to the ends of the earth, and too little inwards to England. Thus Britannia became merely a statue to be seen from afar, rather than a real woman and mother, to be made happy in her own home. Hence the dangerous neglect of agriculture and internal economic conditions from which we are already suffering. The whole thing was altogether too emblematic. The British Oak was a thing like the British Lion; but lions are really rather rare in our Buckinghamshire lanes. On the other hand, the British Beech could not suggest anything except the British Pig. The swine feed on the beech-mast; and the pig is more realistic, even if he is growing almost equally rare. The return to a real England, with real pigs for real Englishmen, would be a return to the beech-woods; which still make this town like a home.
At least, they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that several beech-forests have been removed to enable a motorist temporarily deaf and blind to go from Birmingham to Brighton.
Public Monuments
I happened to have occasion recently to behold again the celebrated monument of King Victor Emmanuel in Rome, and it turned my thoughts backwards to monuments in general, and to the controversies about our own Cenotaph. They are, as I shall suggest in a moment, rather controversies about the place, the scale, and the formal use of the Cenotaph than controversies about the Cenotaph. It might be argued that the thing itself fulfils it own laws— and limitations. It may be unfair to complain that it is thin, when it is inherent in its intentional proportions to be thin. It may be unjust to object that it is naked and negative, when it was obviously meant to be naked and negative; it may be illogical to protest that it contains no symbol of any special spiritual significance, when it was obviously most carefully designed to contain nothing of the sort. But touching the emplacement and employment of the memorial, there is a great deal more to be said.
Nobody can complain that the Victor Emmanuel monument is too thin. Its thickness has the effect of a huge fortified wall which it is difficult to get round and unthinkable to get over. What is worse, this new Citadel actually bars the way to the old and real Citadel. The original rock of Rome, the high place from which the eagles flew, is practically overshadowed by this new wall of white marble. Victor Emmanuel of Savoy appears in the perspective of topography, if not precisely of history, as a considerably more important person than Julius Caesar. The road to the temple of Capitoline Jove, up which Caesar went with his roaring Triumphs, the place of the Capitol, where he met the end of the greatest human glory, seems no longer to dominate Rome, as I believe it did before the excited Liberals of the nineteenth century planned a mountain of marble that seemed ambitious to rise higher than the Seven Hills. And somehow, with all respect and sympathy, the purpose and the ambition seem hardly to fit. A particular Piedmontese prince, not without many virtues, and certainly not without most distressing difficulties, considerable as were, doubtless, his services to United Italy, does not now, in fact, bulk quite so big in history as Julius Caesar or even many a great Latin leader like Scipio or Marius. Its proportions in relation to the Capitol and the streets of Rome may yet need some explaining. It will probably be very difficult to convince our immediate posterity that it is not a monument to Mussolini.
Those whom in England we call Victorians, or, more properly, the men of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, are more completely misunderstood by most modern writers than if they were Ancient Britons. They are now always represented as stodgy and slow and paralysed by mere caution. The fact is that in most ways they were far too impetuous and enthusiastic. As romantic love was almost their religion, so in other ways they worshipped things, worthy indeed, but without enough discrimination between the sort of love that is fleeting and the sort of love that is lasting. They fell in love with public heroes, instead of merely following them. It is true that some return of this passion has appeared in some parts of Europe which were always specially prone to it, but I doubt whether even now the idolatries are so great as the noble idolatries of the English Victorians, and certainly not so great in England. Even in England we hear much of new movements and a need for leadership. But, with the greatest possible respect to all concerned, I doubt whether any mob actually makes a god out of Sir Oswald Mosley, as the middle-class Victorian mobs made a huge heroic legend out of Garibaldi or General Gordon. Remember that Victorianism was much more affected by its romantic side than by the later claims made on its scientific side. It was much more really moved by Carlyle than by Mill, let alone Herbert Spencer. And it did largely accept, among the apparent decay of many forms of religion, the form of religion which Carlyle invented and called ‘Hero-Worship’. And it acted on this religion, which it did not always do in relation to the other religions. The trouble is that it acted much too swiftly and ardently. It acted with a blind impetuosity which was the very reverse of stodgy. The evidence for it can be seen in many eyesores that we call public monuments. It is true that in England this is as far as their rage and madness went. In Europe as a whole, a great part of the nineteenth century might be called, and was called, the age of revolutions. It is true that the Victorians in England prided themselves on not being destructive, but only constructive. But those who have gazed on certain sculptured memorials, dedicated to eternal fame, have sometimes been tempted to think that construction can be more devastating than destruction.
By the way, may I be here excused if I enter once more a protest against that most meaningless distinction? If a man cuts down a tree and makes a mast, is he destructive or constructive? The emotional effect depends entirely on whether you happen to want a woodland shade or a sea-voyage. Except some of the Manichee heretics who attacked the Early Church, an Albigensian or two, and perhaps some of the old Russian Nihilists, I know of no political group which admits that it is destroying for the sake of destroying. And all political groups, if they are doing anything (a large assumption), are constructing by means of destroying. Compare this journalese jargon with the shrewd proverbs of popular life. It must have been a French peasant, I think, who invented the much wiser phrase: ‘You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.’
Victor Emmanuel’s monument has one great merit not easily to be found in London. It may seem to some merely to block the traffic, but it can seem to others to be really the goal of the traveller. The very fact that it fills the whole view, like a back-scene, does enable it to play the part of a great temple or theatre to which processions can march and seem to find their final goal. In other words, it is a shrine. It is a place to receive pilgrimages, if only patriotic pilgrimages. And when I saw an army of Italian Scouts grounding their poles or lowering their flags, like pilgrims laying down their staves, I thought they did really convey, by that halt and that salute, some sense of having come to the heart of their country.
Now, what is primarily the matter with the Cenotaph in London is simply what the Londoners did with it. They did not put it on a height or in an enclosure or with a background of finality, where it could possibly look like a national shrine to be the goal of pilgrimages. They put it down at random in the middle of the road, a road running both ways; and turned it into a mere stage in the traffic, one of many other objects, like a lamp-post. In fact, the Cenotaph looks like an unfortunate pedestrian who has started from one side of the street and is very doubtful of his chances of reaching the other. Under these disadvantages, he has even something a little weak-minded about his hesitation; as if, by some inversion of Einstein, the Hollow Tomb could be hollow outside as well as inside. But the fault is really in a lack of the sense, the true sense, of town-planning. And the moral is that we cannot make public monuments unless we recover the old imaginative instinct of public life; which did not mean sitting on committees, but marching in processions, organising into effective crowds, and learning how to salute the altar or the tomb.
THE MAKING OF HISTORY
STATUES
Monuments last for ever. Therefore the mistakes of monuments last forever. That is what the modern world does not understand about the ancient dignity of marble or of stone. If I make a mistake in writing an article, I can cross it out. But if I make a mistake in carving a colossal figure of Rameses the Seventh (if there was a Rameses the Seventh) there is a tendency for that mistake to remain, and become unalterable; you cannot cross it out. If in carving Rameses you have given that slight curl to the nostril which suggests that his cynicism was cruel (as his enemies unreasonably maintained) rather than kindly (as those who knew him best are quite prepared to assert emphatically), in that case it is to be feared that your mistake about Rameses will remain, and be perpetuated for ever in that face of marble. If you have done him any injustice, you have done him an eternal injustice. If you have slandered him at all, you have slandered him forever.
Of course there is the method of smashing every statue you see. Personally I am in favour of it. I agree with the ancient Jews that the graven image has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind. That is, it has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind if mankind has no religion; and I am speaking of the modern world. Moreover, the ordinary statue has a curious power of falsifying the ordinary person. There was a great deal to be said for the old eighteenth century method of making monumental statues of great men. The eighteenth century method of making a statue of a great man was quite simple. You simply made the statue of the great man as unlike the great man as possible; you then gave him bare shoulders and a Roman toga, and you called it the classical style, which perhaps it was. There is something to be said for this classical style. There is also something to be said for the modern realistic style of Monsieur Rodin, in which you leave out a man’s leg or arm at random, to indicate that you have forgotten it in the frenzy of your genius. Both these styles have real ideas behind them; but I think there was an unfortunate period between them, especially in England, and that this period gave rise to the general disposition to smash statues which exists in all the healthy-minded English. I wonder if all the statues were as bad at the time when the army of Oliver Cromwell had finally defeated the army of Charles I. If they were as bad it would go a long way to explain the iconoclasm of the Puritans. We feel reasonably angry with them because they smashed to pieces many beautiful and celebrated images. Still, we never saw the images.
Perhaps the most pathetic instance of this English sculpture applied to the wrong purpose can be found in the five or six statues which stand in the square opposite the Houses of Parliament. The personality of the politician is there not expressed even in the smallest degree. Punch’s caricatures of Palmerston make him more dignified than his statue makes him. Punch, which hated Disraeli, represented him as a more real and admirable creature than the shapeless one before whom bunches of primroses are offered on Primrose Day. If the spirit of these statesmen could return they would prefer the fleeting caricatures of the comic papers to these everlasting caricatures in stone. They would prefer the thing drawn in ill-nature by their enemies to this thing conceived in adoration by their friends. And yet the definition of the deficiency is not quite easy to state. The figures are reasonably well designed; reasonably well dressed. There are no mistakes in costume or in anatomy that the eye of a layman can detect or denounce. Lord Palmerston wears a frock-coat; I suppose he did wear a frock-coat. He holds out his hand; I suppose that from time to time in the course of his animated and interesting career he did sometimes hold out his hand. He has whiskers; I presume he had whiskers. Sometimes, in a dark dream of ecstasy, I venture to hope not such whiskers; still I never saw him, and it may be so. There is nothing essentially unreasonable or unlikely about any part of his appearance or the appearance of the other stone statesmen who share with him that sacred and most impressive place. And yet when one thinks what a place it is, one suddenly sees that all those figures are hopelessly and incurably comic. If there is any England, this is the high historic Senate of England. If there is any England, there runs the sacred English river. And when we think of England as anything everlasting, even when we think of England as anything moderately lasting, those Victorian stone figures become suddenly like silly dolls. There must be some reason for this. And I think the reason is exactly that the men who put up those statues did not really feel as if they were putting up anything permanent at all; as if there was nothing in Palmerston (or at least, in their view of Palmerston), as if there was nothing in Beaconsfield (or at least, in their admiration of Beaconsfield), that suggested any line that was eternal, any grouping or massing that seemed able to endure the open day. For this is the real and final test of a statue. Its test is in two forms of trial. First, it must be able to endure publicity. Second, it must be able to endure solitude. One must be able to think of it as abandoned. The epic of war is for the feast of great princes; the old wives’ tale is for the circle of gossips and rustics; the picture is for the inhabited room; the miniature is for the locket. Even the carved church is mostly conceived for a common need, and even a common comfort. But the stone statue is something that one can leave alone under the stars.
It would be a strange thing if, after all, those four or five stone figures expressed all that has been wrong with England for so long a time. It would be strange if the bad carving of Lord Palmerston’s frock-coat were the only thing that really expressed what is wrong with the Party system. Yet I fancy that it is exactly there or thereabout that the truth lies. We admire our Party leaders. We do not believe in them. We praise them for making so much of our case, as if all the time it were really a bad case. They are all advocates and they were better in the eighteenth century, when they all wore wigs. You cannot make an enduring statue of an advocate, for you cannot make a statue unless you have an idea; and the essence of an advocate is that he has any ideas or all ideas. Exactly what men admired in Palmerston is exactly what men cannot carve in stone; his easy variety, his quickness to leap, which seemed almost like omnipresence. ‘What a faculty that fellow has,’ said Macaulay admiringly, ‘for falling on his feet!’ It is a splendid capacity, doubtless, to fall on one’s feet; but if one is a statue it is dangerous to fall on anything else.
What people admired in Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, was simply his jumpiness. But jumpiness cannot be expressed in stone. I am aware that Monsieur Rodin and others have brought the eccentricity of statuary to a high point; but even they have not yet succeeded in making a statue of a man who has jumped clean off the ground. It was the whole point of Beaconsfield that he jumped clean off the ground. Seriously speaking, I am not sure that he had ever been on the ground; hence he was a subject inappropriate for statuary, and his statue in front of the Houses of Parliament is simply a great gown with a goatish face on top of it. But indeed the sculptors are scarcely to be blamed if they showed inadequate results, for their art can only express eternal ideas, and they were called upon to deal with personalities whose whole boast was that no ideas could be eternal. What could the best sculptors do when they were told to make characteristic statues of six acrobats?
A Theory of Tyrants
I have come to be convinced of late of a certain theory of the nature of tyranny. It may be right or wrong, but I think it is at least worthy of thought in connection with a highly interesting matter. Broadly speaking, the common theory of tyranny has been this: That men have groaned under some system for centuries, and have at last rebelled against it. But I think that men have actually done quite otherwise; they have rebelled against the system against which they have not groaned. But the matter is so mixed and also so acute that I may be permitted to state it in a more explanatory manner.
Let us take, for the sake of argument, the two risings against tyranny most commonly considered in current literature— the English rebellion of the early seventeenth century and the French Revolution. According to the common theory, Charles I should have been the heir of at least twenty intolerable despots. The truth is that he was the heir of one tolerable despot (who had not quite effected despotism), and beyond that everything was different. Queen Elizabeth was not tolerable, and she was not tolerated. In so far as she was endured she was adored. Cavaliers and Puritans alike looked back to her reign (most mistakenly, doubtless, but most certainly) as a midsummer of popular monarchy.
In short the English Puritans did not rebel against an old system; whatever else it was it was not old. Even if Charles I had been a much worse king than he was there would not have been enough time for him to have created a complete and cruel tradition against the tradition of Elizabeth. A few years before Charles’ head was cut off, most Englishmen would have died to keep Elizabeth’s on. If you turn to the case of the French Monarchy before the French Revolution you will find exactly the same thing. A very short time before the Revolution the French Monarchy was the generally accepted French symbol. The King before Louis the Guillotined was Louis the Well Beloved. The Monarchy (in France as in England) became the most unpopular thing very soon after it had been the most popular thing. There was no weakness, there was no long decline: the defeat of the thing followed swiftly on its first victory. Charles I was not the last of the English despots. He was one of the first of the English despots— only there happened to have been no more of them. Encouraged by the arrogance and popularity of Elizabeth, who had stood for patriotism and Protestantism and the defiance of Spain, Charles tried to work with Elizabethan England and found that Elizabethan England was not there. It was not too old to last, it was too new to last. Louis XVI was not the last of a line of unpopular kings. On the contrary, he was the first of a line of popular kings to be unpopular.
I can only explain all this by my private theory of tyrants; which is this. Men do not rebel against the old; rather they rebel against the new. They turn upon something when they find that it has them in a trap. They do not revolt against something that has been unpopular. They revolt (and very rightly) against something that has been popular. They hated Charles I because they had loved Elizabeth. They killed Louis XVI because they had been killed for Louis XIV. In fact, this is probably what is meant by that seemingly meaningless phrase, the fickleness of the mob. It probably means that the mob is quicker than other people in discovering that man has walked into a man-trap. England went mad with joy for the English Monarchy, because the Armada had not conquered England. And then England suddenly went mad with rage because it discovered that (during that exciting interlude) the English Monarchy had conquered England. We had escaped the snare of Philip; we walked into the snare of Elizabeth; we broke out of the snare of Charles I.
This is the essential mark of tyranny: that it is always new. Tyranny always enters by the unguarded gate. The tyrant is always shy and unobtrusive. The tyrant is always a traitor. He has always come there on the pretence that he was protecting something which people really wanted protected—religion, or public justice, or patriotic glory. Men staring at the Armada; did not watch the King; so they strengthened the King. Later when they watched the King they unconsciously strengthened the aristocracy. Again, when they attacked the aristocracy, they did not watch the big merchants who were attacking it— and who wanted watching. All tyrannies are new tyrannies. There are no such things really as old tyrannies; there are hardly any such things as old superstitions.
There is one moral to these evident facts of history. When you look for tyrants, do not look for them among the obvious types that have oppressed men in the past—the king, the priest, or the soldier. If you do, you are merely looking at the Spanish Armada while England is being turned into a despotism behind your back. Monarchy was once a popular organ; yet it was turned against the people. Remember that newspapers are popular organs that may be turned against the people. Whatever the new tyrant is, he will not wear the exact uniform of the old tyrant.
An Anecdote of Persecution
There are many tales in Joinville’s reminiscences of St Louis which would be worth retelling; I will, however, be reasonable, and retell only one of them. I will tell it with strict reference to the record; I will only expand it in so far as obvious inference and historical circumstances are clear in the case; whenever I am ornamenting it I will say so, and anybody can buy the book and bowl me out. But it is a tale which seems to me to tell in the most vivid and everyday style how it is in practice that persecution arises. It is common talk in these days that we ought to be imaginative, if only in order to be charitable. If a man commits forgery we must try to understand his temptations and his original trend. But no such mercy is generally shown to the enthusiast for ideas. The sins of the intolerant are seldom considered with any intellectual tolerance. It seems that we are to find excuses for the crimes of good men.
Wherever we have read history we have noticed one class of statements or allegations. I mean simply incredible allegations; and statements that cannot be believed. For instance, it cannot be believed (at least, I cannot believe it) that the French Jacobins who ran the Terror were diseased and hysterical doctrinaires. They fought all Europe and beat it; the thing is impossible. Now exactly in this sense it is impossible to believe the ordinary modern version of the position of the Jew in the Middle Ages. Whatever else the Jew was, he was important. If he had really lived like Isaac in Ivanhoe he could not have been important; he could not have been at all. A man from whom anybody could steal money would not have any money to steal. A man utterly outlawed must perish. Now I will tell a little tale out of Joinville. The Monastery of Our Lady at Cluny was prosperous and charitable; when the snow was on the ground in winter it showed a maze of footprints of the poor folk who came to its doors. Most of these, of course, were not only poor but of plain rank; but it sometimes happened that a man of good estate was so impoverished as to receive such aid. Among the many figures familiar at the door was one especially who crawled to it more slowly than the others, for he was crippled and hung upon a crutch. He was an old knight with white hair, quite disabled, and entirely penniless; but his eyes (I think) were fierce and restless, as are the eyes of all those. whose activity has been shifted from the body to the mind. His clothes were dropping off his back; he was a perfect gentleman, and very much of a nuisance.
Now it happened that he came to the Monastery on a day that was somewhat solemnly set apart for one of those intellectual tournaments which the men of the Middle Ages loved as much as bodily tournaments. The Abbot was presumably something of a philosopher as well as a philanthropist, and he was liberal in his mental interests as well as liberal with his corn. In the exact words of Joinville’s Chronicle, ‘There was a great disputation between clergy and Jews at the Monastery of Cluny.’ That single sentence knocks flat for ever the whole picture and conception of the medieval Jew which we all have from Scott’s romances or from general report. Ignorant fools who insult a strange sect merely because it is strange, do not arrange public debates to give it a chance of explaining itself. People bent on rooting out a tribe ruthlessly like rats or weeds do not invite the heads of the tribe to make speeches about themselves on a platform. The truth is, of course, that the medievals, like all other sane human beings, started with a preference for reasonable argument and peaceable settlement. It is always afterwards, if at all, that these excellent intentions break down. And they did, unfortunately, break down in the philanthropic and philosophical Monastery of Cluny; as you shall hear.
I think we can call up some rude and dim conception of the scene. The architecture would still be Norman with the low, almost sullen arch and short, almost brutal columns; for though no date is given to the story, the Gothic can hardly have been greatly spread. Such laymen as were present would be people of all conditions; and while there would be more initial ceremony of precedence between these classes, there would be far less practical shyness or contemptuous shrinking than at the present day. Prominently, and probably in a row, would sit the Christian theologians, eager with the eagerness of all men who live much with their own sex in schools and clubs and universities, for an unending war of words. Like all men who have a complete theory of things, they would be fretting and on fire with the chance of expounding it, many of them stirring and stamping. For men who have much to say are more nervous than men who have nothing to say.
Over against them, probably calmer, probably more prosperous in appearance, certainly more observant of all that was going on, would sit the great Rabbis of the mysterious race. In their hands they would hold parchments undecipherable to all the children of the West; but their very faces would be more undecipherable parchments. Their smiles would seem carved like hieroglyphics. Into that place of plain arches and Latin logicians with shaven heads they brought the memory of things cloudy and monstrous, as of many-headed cherubim or winged bulls walking enormous in the desert. For though both theologies were by this time twisted and elaborate, each worked back like a tangled tree to its original root. All the arabesque of Rabbinical riddle and commentary referred eventually to the ultimate Jewish idea; the idea of the awful distance between man and God. All the roaring and grinding syllogisms of the Schoolmen were tools and symbols of the awful union of God and man. The Jewish angel had ten eyes or twelve wings to express the idea that if ever we saw the beauty and wisdom of God it would seem to us outrageous or frightful. The Christian angel often had two wings only, in addition to eyes and two arms; to show that human beauty and dignity were divine realities which would survive and break the doors of death. Two sublime creeds were in collision; the creed that flesh is grass, and the creed that flesh was God. And at the moment, before any of the philosophers could move, the old man of the crutch stood up and asked to speak.
Joinville in his Chronicle gently says that this was received ‘with doubt’. Human life is so startlingly the same in all ages that one can see the scene as clearly as if it were a modern meeting when some peppery and impractical Colonel insists on addressing the meeting. One can imagine the whispers between the Abbot and his chief supporters. ‘If he speaks there will be a row,’ and the unanswerable answer, ‘If we stop him there will be a worse row’. The assembled philosophers, who had been about to pose the Rabbis with the awful rationalism of medieval argument, ‘Why do you believe in God if He is not manifest?’ or ‘Could anyone believe in Heaven except through revelation?’ stood for a moment aside. The old cripple said, ‘At least you admit that Our Lady was the Mother of God.’
The Rabbi who was addressed smiled, perhaps, that rich smile which some find repulsive even when it is benevolent, and said that he did not admit this. The old man said steadily, ‘Then if you do not love Our Lady you were very silly to come into her house.’ He plucked the crutch from under his arm, and whirling it suddenly aloft, caught the Jew a stunning crack behind the ear, bringing him to the ground. Instantly, of course, there was a scuffle, and the Jews were driven from the place. The Abbot rushed up to the old Knight and told him in no measured terms that he had made a horrible fool of himself. The old gentleman, still panting and blowing, no doubt from his exertion, told the Abbot that he thought him the greater fool of the two. Thus unfortunately ended the great experiment of religious inquiry in the Monastery of Cluny. I leave it to anyone to say whether it is not as human a tale as any that might have happened in Surbiton during the War.
The Return of Pageantry
The Puritans, in their hours of pride, seem actually to claim that our nation is fundamentally Puritan, was made by the Puritan spirit. They put Cromwell in the place of Alfred; they put him not only at the head of English patriotism, but at the beginning of English history. They make old England a sort of Puritan colony like New England. All this is, of course, a ludicrous delusion. The first facts or names that jump to the mind will remind any Englishman that his country had a splendid national literature and a very unmistakable type of national life before the hat of a single Puritan had been seen and hooted in England. Chaucer is even more English than Bunyan; Shakespeare is certainly more English than Milton. The Tabard and the Mermaid, Lady Godiva and St George, Robin Goodfellow and Robin Hood, belong to a national tradition that has not even been touched by Puritanism; yet which is quite different from the tradition of Spain, of Scotland, or of France. Chaucer’s Franklin, whose beard was white as a daisy, and in whose house ‘it snewed meate and drinke’, was as certainly an Englishman as he most certainly was not a Puritan.
Puritanism was something put into the Englishman after he had grown to his full national stature. Some hated it as an alien poison; some praised it as a violent medicine. But nobody pretended that it was the natural bread and ale that had built up the countrymen of Colet or Ben Jonson. It might indeed be maintained that in all the three cases of nations thus raided by Puritanism, the Scotch, the English and the Dutch, this religion has been rather a sort of spell or possession than a true change of personality. It might be suggested that in each case a merrier and more medieval nation went alive into that land of bondage and is now coming alive out of it. Thus the Scotch romance and witchery which Scott and Stevenson have brought to life is only the return of a spirit most marked in the old Scottish ballads and chronicles, in the tales of Tamlane in the Forest, and Thomas the Rhymer among the fairies; and in that almost Arthurian romance of the roving court of Robert Bruce, which left, like a gypsy blood for generations, a tradition of wandering Scottish kings. Even in Scotland, I believe, Calvinism has only been an episode. The Scotch are taking off their ‘blacks’ and appearing again in the purple of their ancient poetry. We may yet hear the twang of the last precentor before we really hear the Lay of the Last Minstrel.
Even in the third case of Holland, of which I know far less, something of the same kind could be suggested. Before the coming of the Puritan, the people of the flat country had already shown that talent for a certain detail and domesticity in art which fills so many galleries with their quaint interiors and their convincing still life. It might well be maintained that the same note of half religious realism, of an almost mystical silence and solidity, is being sounded in much of the new literature of the Netherlands. It is marked in Maeterlinck’s love of interiors and the unconscious shapes of things; in the way in which he writes of a window standing open or a passage leading to a door. He lives in a dumb fairyland of furniture. Nothing could be more like the almost conventual quietude and neatness of the pre-Reformation art among the Flemings. And nothing certainly could be more unlike the somewhat vulgar yet really demonic energy, the curious mixture of bourgeois smugness and visionary anarchy that marked the mighty days of the Puritan. Nothing could be further from the sensational art and literature of the Protestant extremists, as you may see it in old Bibles or illustrations of Bunyan; an atmosphere at once monstrous and prosaic, mixed of a mild view of this world, and a mad view of the other; the earth an endless Clapham and the sky a permanent apocalypse. It left on the mind a confused sense that angels had whiskers and saints had top hats; and certainly the dull energy in it was at the opposite extreme from the spirit of a small room either described by Maeterlinck or painted by Memlinc.
But the case of England at least admits of no mistake. Not only did England produce a most anti-Puritan literature before the Puritans existed, but it went on, under the Puritans and in spite of the Puritans, producing a literature that was quite anti-Puritan. There is as little that is Puritan about Fielding and Dickens as there is about Chaucer and Shakespeare. Dickens quite obviously existed to champion everything that the Puritans existed to destroy; when Mr Scrooge is converted to Christmas, the Puritan would have thought that Scrooge was relapsing and not repenting. When Scrooge and his clerk sit down to ‘a bowl of smoking Bishop’, the Puritan would have been equally disgusted with the spirit and with the name. Nevertheless the Ironside element, though alien to England, was to a certain extent mixed with it; and I myself believe that it is to this partial mingling of a foreign and a native idea that we owe the curious attitude of the English, until lately, towards processions and pomps.
The Calvinist colour, mixing with each separate national colour, made in each case a different blend or tint. The Scotch had been restless, rebellious, fond of mystery, valiant, and sometimes cruel. The combinations of Calvinism with this produced a sort of sombre romanticism which one can feel very strongly in Burns and in the blacker tales of Stevenson. The Dutch, I imagine, were domestic and devout; the combination of Calvinism with this produced a slight dullness and a rage for keeping things clean. The English certainly were lusty, casual and fond of broad fun. The combination of Calvinism with this produced a curious kind of bourgeois embarrassment, part humour, part respectability and part good sense. Since the Englishman was not to wear crimson clothes carelessly, the next most English thing was to wear black clothes casually and unobtrusively. Where the Catholic Englishman had been modest enough to make a fool of himself, the Protestant Englishman had only that lower sort of modesty that will not make a show of itself. He objected to making a Pageant, because it is, literally speaking, ‘making a scene’. It is said that the Frenchman shrugs his shoulders; but the Victorian Englishman was born with his shoulders shrugged. His whole attitude until lately has been ‘What’s the good of making a fuss?’ It is a sensible and pleasant temper; it is the remains of the real Englishman who gave its patient Pickwickian cheerfulness to the Canterbury Pilgrimage. But it will be gain and not loss if this minor humility of drab and grey can give place to that higher, and much more humble humility, which can forget itself in flowers and fireworks and in the colours of Carnival.
Rational History
There is a sort of phrase or joke about ‘whitewashing’ the villains of history; but to be quite just there ought to be some phrase such as ‘blackwashing’ also. For the truth is that such rehabilitations are of two very different kinds. One is a mere anarchist itch to upset a traditional and universal verdict. The other is a reasonable petition to appeal against a very hasty and sectarian verdict. In other words, we may appeal for whitewashing if we can prove that there has been blackwashing. There are men in history who may rationally be held to be better than they appear in history. And they are those who have been, for fairly obvious reasons, blackened immediately after their death. We have a right to doubt in every case where it was indispensable (to a new dynasty or regime) that a man who was dead should also be damned. Two very interesting cases of such rational rehabilitation have appeared of late. An American writer has written a romantic sketch of the sympathetic view of Richard III. A French writer has written a scholarly and historic study of the sympathetic view of Napoleon. In both cases there is the same real and intellectual reason for a reconsideration. We are right to remember that these victorious soldiers were at the mercy of their ultimate victors. It is common sense to ask ourselves what tales would most probably be set about by the enemies of one after Bosworth or of the other after Waterloo.
Shakespeare was a very English type of genius; but so was Gillray. And it may fairly be said that Shakespeare’s version of Richard is pretty much like Gillray’s version of Napoleon. He is a diabolic dwarf, far less temperately and sanely conceived than Quilp. But Richard of Gloucester was not a dwarf, either physically or morally. And Napoleon was not a devil, either in incredible crime or incredible capacity. He made many concessions—and many mistakes. It was his normality that succeeded not his abnormality. In so far as he conquered Europe, it was as Man not as Superman. The Rights of Man formed his only working and real droits de seigneur. He was popular with soldiers not only because he was a conqueror, but also because he was a soldier. He ruled France not because he had conquered it, but because he had conquered its enemies. A great French writer put the truth in its unfavourable form by saying that men of the world sympathise with Napoleon because he had no internal life. He did not think about himself; he was not a Higher Thinker, a Buddhist. He was a creator—that is, a Christian. He did not know his own portrait till he saw it in his own works.
The sins of the Superman are unpardonable. But the sins of man are as the hairs of his head. So long as we regard Napoleon as a Superman, we are bound to regard all his cruelties as cold-blooded, all his pride as blasphemous, all his diplomacy as ‘black causeless duplicity’ (as Stevenson said of his own Master of Ballantrae), all his sins, in short, as sins against the Holy Ghost—and, above all, all his misfortunes as deserved. But if we regard him as Man, we pretty soon find that his sins were the sins of a selfish, simple, generous, crude Corsican officer of artillery. His few cruelties were of the half-constrained kind—the kind that twenty other officers of artillery would have committed if they had been in the same hole. His pride was pure vanity; as innocent and as active as the vanity of a schoolboy. His diplomacy was at once less secret and less bullying than nearly all the diplomacy before and after his time. Compared with Metternich or with Bismarck, he was a straightforward but persuasive person. Unlike these other diplomatists, he did appeal to the reason and conscience of other nations and other Kings. He did not merely try to conceal; he did not merely try to convict. He did not even merely try to conquer. He did really try to convert—that is, to convince. And as for his misfortunes, he may have deserved to be called the Corsican Ogre, but he never really deserved to be called the Man of Destiny. It was a slander of which his misfortunes should have purged him for ever.
Much of the same is true, as I have said, of the last stand of the remote Plantagenet at Bosworth: when Henry Tudor rode as best he could into battle, making up his pedigree as he went along. The real medieval king was the man who died calling out ‘Treason’ and killing men on every side of him. Richard III was doing exactly what would have been expected of Richard I. But nothing was ever expected of the Tudors except the unexpected. They were the first English monarchs who were Sultans instead of Kings. They acted by a caprice, and not by a creed. It was owing to their brief and impatient despotism that England, ever since, has been capricious and creedless. One can almost see the lean, long face of the Welsh usurper, as he rode with the great nobles who had deserted to his standard; one can see his smile as he entered London; and one can guess what kind of tale he would tell of the fallen King.
The Unknown Warrior
The recent ritual of Armistice Day was overshadowed, as everyone knows, by the shadowy figure of the Unknown Warrior. And this was well; for that figure, however like a shadow, alone possesses something of the character of a statue. It is one of the very few monumental things in modern civilisation. The world will never forget that altar which St Paul saw as he passed by, where the Greeks had built a shrine to the Unknown God. So it is in this case, almost alone among all modern cases; it is really possible that the world may never forget that we built a shrine to the Unknown Man.
For whatever the future is like, it will not be Futurist. The very notion of always talking in terms of tomorrow is a passing taste that will soon be a thing of yesterday. Those who are concerned for the coming thing are really rather concerned for the vanishing thing, concerned to catch a fashion before it vanishes. Most of the artistic experiments and social prophecies which appeal to the next age, are in fact stamped with all the special marks and limitations of this age. Our Utopian predictions may not be very easily fulfilled, but they will be very easily dated. Our Futurist pictures may be mistaken at the first glance for the primitive drawings of the Sandwich Islanders, but a more expert examination will certainly reveal the characteristic conventions of the twentieth century. This is as true of War Memorials as of everything else; and those who insisted on things of immediate usefulness were mostly denying and destroying the whole of their ultimate use. Whatever else might be said of such War Memorials, they do not happen to discharge the function of being memorials of the war. With a changing Society these practical things will become impracticable; these useful things will be disused. The building of cottages, let us say, is vital to the present shortage of housing; but it might become almost unintelligible in a society with a decently distributed power over the means of production, where a common man could afford to build his own cottage. A club or institute may be established with enthusiasm and applause; it may be regarded as a mere saving of wealth and life by ‘keeping people out of the public house’. But it may be regarded as a meaningless waste by people who will, perhaps, have restored the public house to the proper public dignity, and made the old Christian inn a place for Christian men. These things are at best modern medicines for modern maladies. They will appear to another age like some special provisions against the Black Death, or some particular warning against the Norse pirates. But though the advanced ideas of our own age are the very last that are likely to endure into another age, neither is it enough to express common ideas in the sense of conventional ideas. That is, it is not enough to express common ideas in a conventional way.
If there are many mad pamphlets and queer pictures and fantastic flags of revolt in the dust-bin of the ages, it is equally true that there are whole rubbish-heaps of lost Latin epitaphs and dead English epics, and pompous monuments like the urns and nymphs in a deserted garden. The thing that survives is that which has a certain combination of normality with distinction. It has simplicity with a slight touch of strangeness; as has the style of Milton or Michelangelo. It is a tale just sufficiently unusual to be worth telling, and yet immediately intelligible when told. It is what the hero is to the human being; a thing magnified but made to scale. Of this really enduring quality I know no other modern example except the burial of the Unknown Warrior, with a King for his chief Mourner.
It is a tale that could be told in any future society, and remain simple and striking. It is a monument that could be looked at by any future generation, with any customs or costumes, and looked at with the same mixture of mystery and familiarity. If we wish to imagine the feelings of the future, the best approximation to it is not to trust the fancies of our own futurism, but to note the facts of our own attitude towards the past, especially the remote past. Now this story of the Unknown Warrior would have a point and a pathos if it were told about a prehistoric tribe burying a man in a barrow, or an ancient Egyptian procession bearing a faceless mummy to a pyramid. If we read that a nameless legionary was buried high upon the Capitol, and that the Roman Emperor offered some sacrifice or libation to his manes, we should understand what was meant. If we were told that some great medieval king spent wealth on masses to be sung in some great cathedral for the soul of some unknown archer, picked up at random on the field of Courtrai or Crecy, we should feel what we were meant to feel. We should feel what we felt on Armistice Day in London. It is something perhaps better expressed, in any age, by the silent symbol of gesture and action than by any definition of a thing so deep. It is strange that the same thinkers who disapprove of dogma often disapprove of ritualism. For ritualism is the only possible alternative to dogma. In this case the dogma is so deep and vital that its verbal definition invariably leads to disputes and absurd misunderstandings. It is a truth that worries people when put into words; so that they talk the wildest nonsense about it, and especially against it. Perhaps, therefore, it is just as well that their subconscious faith in this dogma should only be expressed in a grave and graceful ceremonial action. But the dogma itself, the truth symbolised itself, is something that was almost rediscovered in the realities of war: it is that in the darkness of battle, and in the very heart of the whirlwind of death, is discovered that mystery whose name is the quality of men.
Men are not equal in their realisation of equality. They are really equal in many other essentials of the true egalitarian idea, but they are not equal in that. Certain conditions favour the growth of plutocratic fashions obscuring our brotherhood; certain other conditions make intensely vivid the great things we have in common, as compared with the small things that divide us. And anyone who understands the real doctrine of equality (there are not very many in the modern world who do) will understand that some sense of it vaguely but invariably comes to the surface under the hideous conditions of war. An army, which in one sense would seem the very home of subordination, has nevertheless an ultimate tendency to encourage equality; because, whatever may be the rule or the orders, the facts are those of an intense independence. If any man really fails to understand the mystical dogma of the equality of man, he can immediately test it by thinking of two men, of totally different types and fortunes, falling on the same field at some terrible crisis in the war which saved our country. One might be, and often was, a gentleman of the finer tradition, fortunate in his friends, in his tastes, in his culture as well as his character.
Another might be some stunted serf of our servile industrial slums, a man whom all modern life conspired to crush and deform. In the hour when the flag of England was saved, there was no man who dared to say, or would have dreamed of saying, that one death was less glorious than the other.
William Penn and His Royalist Friends
The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England. I know this is still regarded as a historical heresy by those who have long ceased to worry about a religious heresy. For while these persons still insist that the Pilgrim Fathers were champions of religious liberty nothing is more certain than the fact that an ordinary modern liberal sailing with them would have found no liberty and would have intensely disliked almost all that he found of religion. Even Thanksgiving Day itself, though it is now kept in a most kindly and charming fashion by numbers of quite liberal and large-minded Americans, was originally intended, I believe, as a sort of iconoclastic expedient for destroying the celebration of Christmas, which does not encourage me, for one, to develop a special and spiritual fervour for Puritanism. Oddly enough, however, the Puritan tradition in America has always celebrated Thanksgiving Day by often eliminating the Christmas Pudding but preserving the Christmas Turkey. I do not know why, unless the very name of Turkey reminded them of the Prophet of Islam, who was also the first Prophet of Prohibition.
It is not, however, in connection with either Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day, that I recur for a moment to the somewhat controversial question of the Pilgrim Fathers. It is merely to note anew that there has always seemed to me too much emphasis on the Pilgrim Fathers, as compared with many others who were at least as truly Fathers of the Republic. There has certainly been in recent times a considerable combination between Puritanism and Publicity. The Puritans may not always have approved of the stage, but for all that they got a great deal of the limelight. Somebody managed to make the Mayflower as legendary as the Ark or the Argo; indeed, it is legendary in more ways than one, so far as the aim and atmosphere of the expedition are concerned. But I doubt whether most people even know the names of the ships in which many of the other devoted or heroic colonists of America sailed; I, for one, most certainly do not. I will not insist especially on the very noble example of Lord Baltimore and the founders of the State of Maryland, who established the first system of religious toleration in history, for there I might be accused of favouring my own religious sympathies and ideas. But I am at least detached and impartial in the subsequent and somewhat similar story of the founding of the State of Pennsylvania. And whatever ship brought the great Quakers to that settlement has a rather better right than the Mayflower to be called a Peace Ship.
These reflections occurred to me when I was recently standing in the city of Philadelphia, on which looks down the great statue of William Penn, whose unmarked grave lies a mile or two from my own house at home. And it struck me as very strange that all the millions of men with modern humanitarian sympathies have said so little of the immense superiority of that intellectual and spiritual leader to the clamorously advertised Calvinists of the Mayflower. I gravely fear that a great many of them do not see much difference between the two.
Among the most curious of all curiosities of literature or of legend, I have actually heard a sort of romantic rumour (which I have never been able either to trace or test) that portions of the timber of the Mayflower were found in some strange way attached to the old Quaker meeting-house which stands beside Penn’s grave. I cannot imagine what the story could possibly mean, or how the incident can possibly be supposed to have come about; unless, indeed, some enthusiastic American globetrotter merely threw fragments of Mayflower furniture (said to be rather suspiciously common in the States) at any house that had any connection with any founder of any American State. Anyhow, he might just as well have said that Sir Walter Raleigh sailed in the Mayflower as connect William Penn and his people with the fanaticism that filled that famous vessel. He might as well have hung the first Calvinistic meeting-house with rosaries and relics and scapularies belonging to the Catholic Calverts as pretend to have patched up the house of the first Friends with the relics of their mortal enemies and persecutors, the Old Puritans.
An American Puritan in the seventeenth century would have regarded a Quaker very much as an American Puritan in the twentieth century would regard a Bolshevist. And, though Bolshevists are supposed to be fierce and Quakers were supposed to be meek, they were at least like each other in this: they were what modern America would call Radical, in the sense of going to the real root of the question and answering it rightly or wrongly. In short, they were really Fundamentalists, and most Fundamentalists are not Fundamentalists. For whatever we think of the thing now called Fundamentalism, it is not fundamental. It is not particularly fundamental to throw a big Bible at people’s heads (or rather, a particular translation of the Bible, with a lot of books left out as Apocrypha) any more than to throw the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Institutes of Calvin. Even if it be a truth, it is not a first principle. But it is fundamental and it is a first principle, right or wrong, to go back, as William Penn did, to the doctrine of the Inner Light. For William Penn really was a great man and not merely a seventeenth-century sectarian; his thoughts, whether we think with him or no, having a meaning in the twentieth century or any century; and he founded something much larger than Pennsylvania and much greater than Philadelphia—a faith that has not yet failed.
I think I know why Penn has been thrown into the shade by the Pilgrim Fathers. It was his politics; and for some they are still a dreadful secret. I was once asked by some worthy modern pacifists, of the Nonconformist culture, to lecture on something in one of the oldest meeting-houses of the Society of Friends. I agreed to lecture upon William Penn and with secret and malignant joy drew up an elaborate plan for a eulogium on that Quaker hero. I set myself specially to express boundless admiration for all those parts of his life and opinion which his modern Puritan admirers do not admire. I proposed to praise extravagantly his loyal and devoted sympathy with the House of Stuart. I intended to point out eagerly how worthy he was of the gracious and glorious friendship of a man like Charles the Second. I meant to rub in every detail of his diplomatic and political support of the admirable political designs of James the Second. I intended to insist on the intellectual amity, almost amounting to intellectual alliance which so often bound him to Cavaliers and even to Catholics. In short, it was my evil intention to praise him for everything for which Macaulay blamed him. Then, I thought, when I had explained how intimately identified was Penn with Royalists, and especially with Papists, then surely all the Nonconformist ministers would be frightfully pleased. Then should I be acclaimed and admired by all the modern Puritans for my perfect understanding of the great seventeenth-century sectary. Then should I become the idol of all the people who glorify the Pilgrim Fathers and talk enthusiastically about the Mayflower. Then it would be admitted that I also was a grand, grim old Puritan, like all the rest of them. Unfortunately, I fancy I must have boasted of my intention, and some rumour of it must have reached them. For I received at the eleventh hour a hurried request to give a lecture on Dickens. And from this we may learn that, if Dickens was an enemy of the Puritans, he was not so much of an enemy as Penn.
On Literature
Ruskin: the Humorist
I do not think any one could find any fault with the way in which Mr Collingwood has discharged his task in The Life of John Ruskin except, of course, Mr Ruskin himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies in passionate red ink and declared that his dear friend had selected for admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless and revolting. That, however, was merely Ruskin’s humour, and one of the deepest disappointments with Mr Collingwood is that he, like every one else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humorist. Yet he was a great humorist: half the explosions which are solemnly scolded as ‘one-sided’ were simply meant to be one-sided, were mere laughing experiments in language. Like a woman, he saw the humour of his own prejudices, did not sophisticate them by logic, but deliberately exaggerated them by rhetoric. One-tenth of his paradoxes would have made the fortune of a modern young man with gloves of an art yellow. He was as fond of nonsense as Mr Max Beerbohm. Only … he was fond of other things too. He did not ask humanity to dine on pickles.
But while his kaleidoscope of fancy and epigram gives him some kinship with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type: he was the last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit above the head of his fellows. Many elements, good and bad, have destroyed it, humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as scepticism, have bred in us a desire to give our advice lightly and persuasively, to mask our morality, to whisper a word and glide away. The contrast was in some degree typified in the House of Commons under the last leadership of Mr Gladstone: the old order with its fist on the box, and the new order with its feet on the table. Doubtless the wine of that prophesy was too strong even for the strong heads that carried it. It made Ruskin capricious and despotic, Tennyson lonely and whimsical, Carlyle harsh to the point of hatred, and Kingsley often rabid to the ruin of logic and charity. One alone of that race of giants, the greatest and most neglected, was sober after the cup. No mission, no frustration could touch with hysteria the humanity of Robert Browning.
But though Ruskin seems to close the roll of the militant prophets, we feel how needful are such figures when we consider with what pathetic eagerness men pay prophetic honours even to those who disclaim the prophetic character. Ibsen declares that he only depicts life, that as far as he is concerned there is nothing to be done, and still armies of ‘Ibsenites’ rally to the flag and enthusiastically do nothing. I have found traces of a school which avowedly follows Mr Henry James: an idea full of humour. I like to think of a crowd with pikes and torches shouting passages from The Awkward Age. It is right and proper for a multitude to declare its readiness to follow a prophet to the end of the world, but if he himself explains, with pathetic gesticulations, that he is only going for a walk in the park, there is not much for the multitude to do. But the disciple of Ruskin had plenty to do. He made roads; in his spare moments he studied the whole of geology and botany. He lifted up paving stones and got down into early Florentine cellars, where, by hanging upside down, he could catch a glimpse of a Cimabue unpraisable but by divine silence. He rushed from one end of a city to the other comparing ceilings. His limbs were weary, his clothes were torn, and in his eyes was that unfathomable joy of life which man will never know again until once more he takes himself seriously.
Mr Collingwood’s excellent chapters on the art criticism of Ruskin would be better, in my opinion, if they showed more consciousness of the after revolutions that have reversed, at least in detail, much of Ruskin’s teaching. We no longer think that art became valueless when it was first corrupted with anatomical accuracy. But if we return to that Raphaelism to which he was so unjust, let us not fall into the old error of intelligent reactionaries, that of ignoring our own debt to revolutions. Ruskin could not destroy the market of Raphaelism, but he could and did destroy its monopoly. We may go back to the Renaissance, but let us remember that we go back free. We can picnic now in the ruins of our dungeon and deride our deliverer.
But neither in Mr Collingwood’s book nor in Ruskin’s own delightful Praeterita shall we ever get to the heart of the matter. The work of Ruskin and his peers remains incomprehensible by the very completeness of their victory. Fallen for ever is that vast brick temple of Utilitarianism, of which we may find the fragments but never renew the spell. Its records read with something of the mysterious arrogance of Chinese: hardly a generation away from us, we read of a race who believed in the present with the same sort of servile optimism with which the Oriental believes in the past. It may be that banging his head against that roof for twenty years did not improve the temper of the prophet. But he made what he praised in the old Italian pictures—‘an opening into eternity’.
Literature of Information
It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition stored up in detective stories, and the replete and solid sweet-stuff shops which are called sentimental novelettes, should be popular with the ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realise that all of us, ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with the most indisputed and depressing facts; men are not apparently so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latch-key which exist in London, or the time it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely circulated papers, such as Tit Bits, Science Siftings, and many of the illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous passages in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings. It is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother Seigel’s Syrup, because he wished to know what eventually happened to the young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap detective stories and cheap novelettes we can most of us feel, whatever our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures. But the literature of information is absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory. To read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise. It is this fact which constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this particular branch of popular literature.
Primarily, at least, there is one rather peculiar thing which must, in justice, be said about it. The readers of this strange science must be allowed to be, upon the whole, as disinterested as a prophet seeing visions or a child reading fairy tales. Here, again, we find, as we so often do, that whatever view of this matter of popular literature we can trust, we can trust least of all the comment and censure current among the vulgar educated. The ordinary version of the ground of this popularity for information, which would be given by a person of greater cultivation, would be that common men are chiefly interested in those sordid facts that surround them on every side. A very small degree of examination will show us that whatever ground there is for the popularity of these insane encyclopaedias, it cannot be the ground of utility. The version of life given by a penny novelette may be very moonstruck and unreliable, but it is at least more likely to contain facts relevant to daily life than compilations and the subject of the number of cows’ tails that would reach the North Pole. There are many more people who are in love than there are people who have any intention of counting or collecting cows’ tails. It is evident to me that the grounds of this widespread madness of information for information’s sake must be sought in other and deeper parts of human nature than those daily needs that lie so near the surface that even social philosophers have discovered them, somewhere in that profound and eternal instinct for enthusiasm and minding other people’s business which made great popular movements like the Crusades or the Gordon Riots.
I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who actually talked in private life after the manner of these papers. His conversation consisted of fragmentary statements about height and weight and depth, and time and population, and his conversation was a nightmare of dullness. During the shortest pause he would ask whether his interlocutors were aware how many tons of rust were scraped every year off the Menai Bridge, and how many rival shops Mr Whiteley had bought up since he opened his business. The attitude of his acquaintances towards this inexhaustible entertainer varied according to his presence or absence between indifference and terror. It was frightful to think of a man’s brain being stocked with such inexpressibly profitless treasures. It was like visiting some imposing British Museum and finding its galleries and glass cases filled with specimens of London mud, of common mortar, or broken walking sticks, and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered that this intolerable prosaic bore had been in fact a poet. I learnt that every item of this multitudinous information was totally and unblushingly untrue, that for all I knew he had made it up as he went along, that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that the rival tradesmen and Mr Whiteley were creatures of the poet’s brain. Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him it must have been a case of art for art’s sake. The joke sustained so gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true, immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they were inventions of the human fancy. And here, as it seems to me, I laid my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which prevents it, and will, perhaps, always prevent it, from seeing with the eyes of popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place; when they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested, but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art, though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous. They look to life for interest with the same kind of cheerful and ineradicable assurance with which we look for interest at a comedy, for which we have paid money at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary fastidiousness, the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-coloured picture, the scrawling in circles of a baby upon the slate of night; its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a wallpaper, its flowers and fruits have a Cockney brilliancy, like the holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art to its own level, they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man, the taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of one hundred and ten in South Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip. When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only because it was good, but also because it was news. So it is that if any of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always supposed to be, for his benefit, but in the fact that an unusually large whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading millionaire like Mr Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralised with the mere indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and splendid disinterestedness of the reader of Pearson’s Weekly. He still keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of men, the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and with a truly sportsmanlike instinct the average man takes most pleasure in the details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the were-wolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature, a refuge indicating the dullness of the world; it was an incident pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.
That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial, it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it may spoil the chance of better work, certainly by wasting time, possibly by ruining taste. But these obvious objections are the objections which we hear so persistently from everyone that one cannot help wondering where the papers in question procure their myriads of readers. The natural necessity and natural good underlying such crude institutions is far less often a subject of speculation; yet the healthy hungers which lie at the back of the habits of modern democracy are surely worthy of the same sympathetic study that we give to the dogmas of the fanatics long dethroned and the intrigues of commonwealths long obliterated from the earth. And this is the base and consideration which I have to offer: that perhaps the taste for the shreds and patches of journalistic science and history is not, as is continually asserted, the vulgar and senile curiosity of a people that has grown old, but simply the babyish and indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young, and entering history for the first time. In other words, I suggest that they only tell each other in magazines the same kind of stories of commonplace portents and conventional eccentricities which, in any case, they would tell each other in taverns. Science itself is only the exaggeration and specialisation of this thirst for useless fact, which is the mark of the youth of man. But science has become strangely separated from the mere news and scandal of flowers and birds; men have ceased to see that a pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower, that a flower is as monstrous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind. We have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can be contented with a planet of miracles.
Eulogy of Robin Hood
The notion that the historic past, and particularly the Middle Ages, was a mass of negligible darkness is pretty well gone by this time; and there are quite a large number of people engaged in collecting the original costumes, and the genuine ballads, and the authentic frying pans of the twelfth century. The only thing that I never can understand about these people is why instead of admiring the doings of these ages, they do not merely do them. If ever there does appear a valid instance of these ancient observances continuing in actual operation at the present day, the antiquarians simply faint in the street at the sight of it. For example, most of my aesthetic friends lie awake at night dreaming of the reinstitution of some beautiful pagan festival, and yet none of them (for I have tempted them all) can eat four helpings of Christmas pudding. Christmas, with its sausages and its stars, is the very historic thing that they are talking about, but they resent it merely because it is still alive.
Another and much stronger instance of this truth occurred to me the other day. I was walking down a small and ugly street and happened to be reading the first printed version of a ballad of Robin Hood. Raising my eyes (I had just knocked over a man selling matches) I found myself staring at a glaring stack of ‘penny dreadfuls’ in a dirty paper shop. They were inscribed, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘I have at last an unbroken English tradition, known in the time of Edward I, known in the time of Mr Harmsworth.’ And the more I compared the old ballad with the ‘penny dreadful’, the more I saw their resemblance to each other. Both were traditional; both contained repetitions; both were multiplied endlessly; both were adventurous; both were popular; both were anonymous. In both cases the great bulk of the work was not interesting from a literary, but most interesting from an ethical and historic point of view. Both kinds of work were profoundly English; both were profoundly, and almost depressingly, moral. In one point only they differed; that the antiquarians and the aesthetes adore the one without any reason, and despise the other without any reason. Both stand as an everlasting protest of the human spirit against the modern idolatry of art; and in nothing more than in their most fascinating characteristic, their inordinate length. The modern world thinks short stories artistic, mistaking a weak digestion for a fine palate. So has arisen the preposterous paradox that the old spirit exhibited in the long books and the long ballads was not literary, because it liked to have so much literature. It is somewhat parallel to the equally strange assertion that religion was at enmity with life because it refused to believe in the finality and victory of death. Sceptics say that the saints were the foes of life because they desired life to last for ever. And pedants say that the old story-tellers were the foes of literature because they desired a book to last for ever.
In these Robin Hood ballads there is almost every bracing and popular element; there is one above all, the moral and melodramatic. We can all remember when we began first to feel that there was something pompous and ludicrous in the morals of the melodrama, began to feel uncomfortable when the heroine said, ‘Would you have me sell my child?’ or when the burglar spared the infant because of the little ones at home. Then we read Kipling and the realists, and were refreshed and invigorated with their salt and stinging candour; we wept sacred tears when we read of a woman whose personal affection expressed itself not by saying, ‘How can I sell my own child?’ but by saying, ‘Took for a common drunk. Gawd send they don’t look at ‘is boots.’ Artistically we were quite right. The Kipling story, with its savage pleasantry and its colossal cynicism, is immeasurably superior in almost everything there is to the strained romantic melodrama; but it has one inferiority. It is not so like life. The Adelphi play gives a much more accurate version of the solemn, magnanimous, vainglorious pose which the average man really adopts in matters he thinks important. The poor do, indeed, employ a gross fantasy of speech (such as ‘Gawd send’, etc.) when they wish to be satiric or frivolous; but that is simply their literature; slang is a kind of deliberate song. But when they are talking seriously they do talk pompously. A man has only to walk down the Battersea Highroad on a Saturday night to hear round him one universal chatter of such things as ‘How can I sell my own child?’ And as for the burglar who thinks of the little ones at home, every evidence in life and the newspapers seems to support the hypothesis that criminals are sentimental, and I can readily believe in that burglar.
Now, these Robin Hood ballads, as I say, show among other things an amusing proof of this popularity, this antiquity, this intense realism of sentimental melodrama. Let me give an example. Mr W. S. Gilbert (perhaps the most brilliant Rationalist writer of the nineteenth century) made admirable fun in The Pirates of Penzance of the preposterous tradition of the generosity of freebooters. He represented the pirate as making it a rule to spare orphans, and being in consequence somewhat perplexed to find them apparently crossing the sea in shiploads. But when we look at these rude and bloody legends of a rude and bloody age, the ballads of Robin Hood, we find an altruism wilder than that of the Pirate of Penzance. The capering satire of the nineteenth century is positively less fantastic than the reality of the thirteenth. For while Mr Gilbert’s pirate only marked off one class, that of orphans, the oldest ballad of Robin Hood (which I was reading in the street) depicts that hero as giving a whole catalogue of people who are not to be molested. And it is scarcely any exaggeration to say that the catalogue includes almost everyone whom it would occur to an outlaw to molest. No honest yeoman working his plot of land, no good farmer, no brave knight kind to his people, etc., etc., is to be touched by these discriminating bandits. What is the use of denouncing sentimentalism as something artificial and protected when we have it here plainly written in the black letter of a brutal and naked age? No, it is realism that is artificial and melodrama that is human. The slangy short stories are written by pale men in libraries; the melodramas are written by men of the people. The case of the people is very like the similar case of schoolboys. Stalky and Co. is undoubtedly a much more artistic creation than Eric or Little by Little. But Eric is immeasurably more like school life, and more like it precisely because it is crude, because it is precocious, because it is moral.
I may be carried away by an excessive patriotism (I hope I am), but I cannot help fancying that there is something about this egregious nobility in the old ballads that is peculiarly English. There is certainly in these Robin Hood tales an element which can only be described as a sort of stupid magnanimity, a certain kind of generosity which is quite distinct in its colour from the chivalry of France or the tenderness of Ireland. It consists in a great natural gusto in the recognition of opponents. The collected records of Robin Hood become perfectly monotonous at last, as they relate the number of people who vanquished the hero, and whom he warmly commended. There is, of course, a great deal of English vanity about these admissions; the implication is, ‘How splendid you must be, as you have conquered such a one as I’. But this self-satisfaction is an eternal English trait. The great English generosity is really in these ballads. There is nothing that Robin Hood seems to like so much as being knocked down by somebody, and getting up and telling him how fine a fellow he must be. It is useless for Mr Henley and such prophets of revenge to go back to our old English literature; they will not find what they want. Here are songs written by a rude people in an age of bludgeons and gibbets, here is the rawest and plainest utterance of primitive England, and if there be one truth that runs from one end of it to the other, it is ‘the policy of Majuba’.
A Plea for Hasty Journalism
My last week’s article, which reads worse in print than anything I have ever had the misfortune to read, was written under an opulent beech-tree on a walking tour, and only just caught the post. I do not mention this fact merely in order to introduce the adjective ‘opulent’—admirable as it is—nor do I do it out of mere egotism; for egotism is even more of a nuisance to the ego than it is to other people. The precept ‘know thyself’ did not fall from heaven; it fell upstairs from the other place. I decline to know myself; he is not in my set. He is an unknown benefactor of mine, who prefers to remain anonymous. Nor do I mention it out of any pride in the walking tour; for, to tell the truth, my walking tour chiefly consisted of sitting under opulent beech-trees for very long periods and at very short intervals. I state the circumstances under which the article was written because I am convinced that this is the only moral thing to do. Journalism would be far more honest if it dropped its tone of monastic meditation and Papal gravity, and talked a little more about the commonplace conditions of muddle and procrastination and flurry and scurry in which it is really produced. And I wish that at the beginning or end of all the articles we read, there were a brief note stating the situation in which the work was written. Thus we should read, ‘Will Australia adopt Bimetallism?’ then, in small letters, ‘Top of Omnibus’; or some such place in which we journalists do most of our learned research and compilation. We should see in some excited morning paper the headlines, ‘Battle at Ping Cho still in Progress, by an Eyewitness. Latest’. Then in the usual place would be the note, ‘A.B.C. shop, Strand’. The title, ‘Should Spinsters Marry Widowers?’ would be annotated with ‘Swan and Elephant, 12.15’, and so on. Perhaps, as rather longer descriptions would often be required, it might be as well to confine the matter to a system of easily recognised initials. Thus, for instance, ‘How England could be Invaded. L.S.R.D.’ (Lodgings at the Seaside. Rainy Day); or ‘Buddhism and the German Pessimists: a Parallel. C.W.P.P.S.’ (Cottage. Wallpaper with Pink Spots). The thing would throw a kind of flush of colour into our articles. Nature would creep into them as she creeps into the colour of flowers and wine.
Of course I am for righteousness, and all that. But, as I say, I think this plan of talking about the way the thing is done is really a vast deal more righteous than the present habit of keeping up an enormous pomposity of veil and temple. A good many people who say they want journalism to be honest really want it to be solemn. But honesty is never solemn; it is only hypocrisy that can be that. Honesty always laughs, because things are so laughable. It remembers what a queer thing is man—a creature that picks up objects lying all round him (eggs, water-melons, sheep, and so on), and packs them into himself as if he were a carpetbag. It remembers that the very bones of our heads are grinning. And so you will always find in every age that very sincere men are accused of what is called ‘blasphemy’ (it was Caiaphas’s charge)—blasphemy, which means taking things too lightly. The people who can be consistently and entirely solemn are the people who have no convictions at all. Look at them, as they walk down Band Street, in their burnished hats. No belief on any earthly subject has ever broken into the perfection of that innocent and colossal gravity. It is the same, I fear, with most of the great bigwigs of our trade, with the men who write leading articles especially. They are not sincere enough to take anything lightly. If the leader-writer on The Times were sincere (intellectually sincere, I mean), if he became in his own mind serious and real for a second, the consequences would be awful. The terrified sub-editors would peer into his room and see him rolling about on the floor in an agony of laughter, curled up, screaming and kicking—a new problem in the office.
The first step in the making and keeping of journalism an honest thing, is to confess that it is journalism and nothing more. It is a thing produced in a violent hurry, generally in the middle of the night, by men who (terrible as it may sound to say so) are commonly of the average human intelligence. It cannot be accurate. It can be honest; and if it is honest it will own—nay, vaunt— its ingrained and necessary inaccuracy. Its object is not to tell the absolute truth about Russian gunnery or Canadian finance. But its object is, or ought to be, to tell the absolute truth about the minds and convictions of the men who write it.
The real journalistic sin is not that the leading article should misrepresent history (for who will ever be certain what represents history?); the real sin is that the articles should misrepresent the journalist’s own soul. This is vile and by no means uncommon. But it is less likely, obviously, to happen when a man writes hastily than when he writes carefully. The slap-dash style is all on the side of morality.
A paper ought not to be an encyclopaedia—nor, perhaps, to puff one. Both the paper and the encyclopaedia have, of course, eventually the same fate. They are both proved wrong. But the difference is this: that the paper comes out so quickly that even its mistakes are important, while the encyclopaedia comes out so late that even its discoveries do not matter. The newspaper should be the best account of the daily impressions of an intelligent man on one side or the other. If it is anything else but this, it is, or tends to be, a fraud. Honest milk is milk that is milky; honest wine is wine that is wine, and nothing else; honest journalism is journalism that is journalistic. To be journalistic is to be daily, to be constantly receiving impressions vividly and expressing them with absolute fidelity. Give us a frivolous journalism, and we will save England.
The Voice of Shelley
I have recently been remonstrated with upon two points—first, that I called Nero an artist; and second, that I called Shelley a typical aristocrat. The first query is somewhat easily answered. I called Nero an artist because he was an artist. He loved art in every form all his life, and his last words were a poetical quotation. If he fiddled while Rome was burning, he thought quite as much of the fiddle as he did of the fire. And if he thought a great deal of the fire, it was from the simple, and from his point of view unanswerable, reason that a fire is a very artistic thing. Mr Max Beerbohm in one of his most delightful and absurd essays has denounced the fire brigade as a band of vandals who destroy a ‘fair thing’. He has threatened to start an opposition fire brigade whose pipes shall be filled not with water but with oil. Nero was only Max made serious; Nero was only Max without his good nature; Nero was only Max in action.
But the aim I had in mentioning him is very simple. A defender of undenominationalism spoke of giving his hand to every man who was working for his highest, thereby implying, as it seemed to me, that if a man put something or other highest it did not in practice matter very much what it was. To this I replied that it seemed to me a very awful and urgent matter whether a man put the right thing or the wrong thing highest; that to put the right thing highest was very difficult, and to put the wrong thing very deadly. A salient example of this is the pursuit of mere art or beauty. The moment a man puts beauty higher than love Nero becomes a logical possibility.
The other matter, it may be, is less obvious, but not, I think, less true. When I call Shelley a typical aristocrat; I have fully in remembrance all his revolutionary ardour and his almost anarchic ideality; I do not call Shelley an aristocrat in spite of these things; I call him an aristocrat because of them. The true aristocrat is by nature an anarchist. The aristocrat was and is the person desiring to do as he liked. His castle was a defiance of the decent orders of the king. His motorcar was a defiance of the decent orders of the democracy. The gentlemen of real history were never anything but rowdy. They were admired for being rowdy. They were hanged for being rowdy. They are no longer hanged which seems to me to mark a considerable falling-off in the fullness of the control of the democracy. They are still admired.
Now all this patrician rebelliousness seems to me to have been built into the blood and bone of Shelley, as into the blood and bone of Byron. It was the subconscious foundation upon which he erected his republican idealism. Shelley loved liberty as all aristocrats love liberty. Shelley hated kings as all aristocrats hated kings; the feud between them has flamed since the beginning of the world. Shelley hated priests, and hated them most of all; for priests represent a startling and supernatural denial of the gradations of mankind; an aristocracy can submit to a king or humour a democracy, but another aristocracy is too much for them. Of course, Shelley, a man of quite crystalline sincerity, did not know that his anarchism had this feudal foundation; he imagined, I have no doubt, that he was a veritable voice of the people. His voice is the voice of liberty, it is the voice of beauty, it is the voice of change, and even the voice of revolution, but whatever it is it is never the voice of the people. There is not enough pain in it, and there is not enough laughter. There is not enough of that clean thing which Shelley and many other fine gentlemen would call coarseness. Shelley was idealistic; he was lyric; he was a hundred things, but there were two things that he never was. He was never comic and he was never tragic. Everything that comes out of the common heart, the heart of the real people, is comic and tragic.
There are only two kinds of ballads, recurrent and permanent, coming from the community itself. There are sad ballads about broken hearts and cheerful ballads about broken heads. There is not a trace of this popular quality in Shelley anywhere. It is not necessary, however, in order to indicate this truth to compare Shelley with any folk literature of other times or places. We can compare him with another poet, another democratic idealist, another man moved by the French Revolution, living almost in Shelley’s time, and almost in Shelley’s country, a man who differed from Shelley in nothing except that he was really a man of the people. To think of him after Shelley is like swallowing fire after swallowing water. It is not so easy to get out of one’s mouth the stinging taste of the sweetness and bitterness of Burns.
Shelley never came to that queer common place where grand passion meets the grotesque; where the cross is a sublime gibbet and the gibbet a caricature of the cross. That is the first and best reason why he was never of the people. But there were other reasons as well. One wholly non-popular element in him was his anarchism. The poor are not anarchists, and never can be anarchists. They live too close to life for such artistic trifling. When I speak of anarchism, of course I do not use the term in the exact sense which indicates a political programme. I do not mean that Shelley disapproved of all government though he sometimes used phrases which might be taken in this sense. But his trend and tone was to offer liberty and an escape from rule as a panacea for the misfortunes of the people; and this is not a genuine popular trend or tone. The people know that life cannot be conducted without rules. The people is the maker and keeper of all custom, tradition and convention, just as it is the maker and (except, perhaps, in modern England) the keeper of all religion. Shelley never understood any of these deep tides in the profanum vulgus. And with all his many princely virtues I do not think I am doing him any injustice if I say that he never tried to understand them.
The Great Translation
The Jacobean translation of the Bible has one real claim to be English. Many of the eulogies about its Protestant purity and its Anglo-Saxon empire building are partisan and fantastic. But it is in this immense sense national, that it is anonymous. The translation, as a translation, is as English as the ballads about Robin Hood, which were written by everybody and nobody. It is true that the learned bishops and dons who translated it were far from regarding themselves as nobodies. But in the history of English literature they are nobodies; only they are immortal nobodies. It is impossible to point to a single great man who is responsible for this masterpiece of verbal music. At the very time when the translation was being made there were in England greater literary men than she is ever likely to see again. But by no conceivable trick or turn of circumstance can Bacon or Burton, Jonson or Shakespeare, have had anything to do with the translation of the Bible. It was done by a mob of bishops; that is, a mob of simple and well-meaning men. The enemies of the Bible have been heard to describe it as Jewish folklore; of course, in a bad sense. In any case, our translation is English folklore—and that in the best sense. England wrote it; no mere Englishman could have done so.
‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good news.’ That is as light and as leaping and as classically pure as Spenser. But Spenser had nothing to do with it; some ordinary parson wrote it.
‘And his driving is as the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi; for he drives furiously.’ That is far more vigorous than Chapman or Ford. But Chapman and Ford had nothing to do with it; it was done by some common clergyman.
‘Where there is no vision the people perish.’ That is as plain and picturesque as Bunyan. But Bunyan had nothing to do with it; in fact, he was not born. It may seem a strange matter that these pompous big-wigs summoned by so stiff a Scotch pedant as James I should be ultimately urged as an argument for popularism and the populace. And yet they are one of its strongest arguments. They show how well quite commonplace people can write when they are writing about something that is not commonplace.
That is the plain element of patriotic importance in the translation. It is the last collective creation of our people. It is the last case in which everybody reads the book and nobody asks the author. After that England left off writing. Englishmen rushed into the breach and tried to write, not altogether without success. Milton, Dryden, Addison, Dr Johnson, made a very good show of it. But almost at once they were flooded by forces not English; by Irishmen like Swift and Goldsmith, by Scotchmen like Hume and Scott. We are right to treat this book, even as an English book, as authoritative. It may or may not record the real origin of the Jews; but I am sure that it records the real end of the English.
There comes a perfect moment when there is no difference between language and literature. Prose is poetry without knowing it; it is as if an absentminded poet always said good morning in metre, or asked us to pass the potatoes in impromptu and unconscious rhyme. Imagine that we all talked poetry all day long; suppose we asked for a ticket with a triolet; suppose we used a post-card only for the purpose (which its shape obviously suggests) of writing a sonnet. Suppose, whenever we talk about the weather, we talk as Shelley wrote about the weather. Suppose, whenever we use a term of affection, it is like one of the great love songs. If we fancy some such condition, we may begin to imagine what really happens when a language is in its perfection. Everything said goes to an inaudible tune; as to a march of totally muffled drums. The poetry has got inside the prose of life, and moves all its limbs into a rhythm and beat of beauty.
The English of the English Bible is not merely splendid about splendid things; it is splendid about everything. In any modern leading article we might see the words ‘We cannot understand why English watering-places like Bath or Brighton are not as adequate as foreign watering-places like Baden or Dieppe; nor why those who seek the one should not as reasonably seek the other.’ And that would be perfectly good modern English. It is not mere religious association that makes us see better English in ‘Are not Pharpar and Abanah, the waters of Damascus, better than all the waters of Jordan, and may I not wash in them and be clean?’ It is really the perfection of style; it is poetry inside prose.
Any magazine article might contain the paragraph: ‘The enthusiast must always be discouraged by certain perishability in all popular things. The mass of mankind seems so plainly a mere part of nature, that it is hard to believe that all their ideas are not at once as monotonous and as fickle as the physical universe; nevertheless, the best philosopher will always return to the idea of an order and a reason in things.’ That would be perfectly sound, intelligent modern English.
It is not mere religious tradition that makes us think that this is better: ‘The voice said, Cry; and he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.’
And then, as in an answer across an abyss: ‘The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.’
It is not the glamour of an ancient language. It is simply a much better use of the modern one.
In one of those tremendous passages that pierce through all languages and belong to the sacred Scripture itself, one of the prophets speaks of the perfect time as a time when all the vessels shall be as vessels before the altar, and on every pot in Jerusalem shall be written ‘Holy unto the Lord’. That is what the English translation, by a literary accident, really managed to achieve. The phrase ‘verbal inspiration’ may be orthodox or unorthodox about the Bible in its supernatural sense. But it is very nearly true about the English translation in a secondary and merely human sense. The dull parts of the narrative are not dull; the trivial details are not trivial, because they are all lifted up on this last great wave of the poetical English language. Everyone, revolutionist and reactionary, is in our time saying that domestic things must be dull, that common things must be commonplace. Everyone is saying, though with much less literary brevity, ‘Surely the people is grass’. But in our sterile time we have never guessed how tall the grass can grow.
Jane Austen’s Juvenilia
In a recent newspaper controversy about the conventional silliness and sameness of all the human generations previous to our own, somebody said that in the world of Jane Austen a lady was expected to faint when she received a proposal. To those who happen to have read any of the works of Jane Austen, the connection of ideas will appear slightly comic. Elizabeth Bennet, for instance, received two proposals from two very confident and even masterful admirers; and she certainly did not faint. It would be nearer the truth to say that they did. But in any case it may be amusing to those who are thus amused, and perhaps even instructive to those who thus need to be instructed, to know that the earliest work of Jane Austen might be called a satire on the fable of the fainting lady. ‘Beware of fainting fits … though at times they may be refreshing and agreeable yet believe me they will in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your Constitution.’ Such were the words of the expiring Sophia to the afflicted Laura; and there are modern critics capable of adducing them as a proof that all society was in a swoon in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But in truth it is the whole point of this little skit that the swoon of sensibility is not satirised solely because it was a fiction. Laura and Sophia are made ludicrously unlike life by being made to faint as real ladies do not faint. Those ingenious moderns, who say that the real ladies did faint, are actually being taken in by Laura and Sophia, and believing them against Jane Austen. They are believing, not the people of the period but the most nonsensical novels of the period, which even the people of the period who read them did not believe. They have swallowed all the solemnities of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and never even seen the joke of Northanger Abbey.
For if these juvenilia of Jane Austen anticipate especially any of her after works, they certainly anticipate the satiric side of Northanger Abbey. Of their considerable significance on that side something may be said presently; but it will be well to preface it by a word about the works themselves as items of literary history. Everyone knows that the novelist left an unfinished fragment, since published under the name of The Watsons, and a finished story called Lady Susan, in letters, which she had herself apparently decided not to publish. These preferences are all prejudices, in the sense of matters of unmanageable taste; but I confess I think it a strange historical accident that things so comparatively dull as Lady Susan should have been printed already, while things so comparatively lively as Love and Friendship should never have been printed until now. It is at least a curiosity of literature that such curiosities of literature should have been almost accidentally concealed. Doubtless it was very rightly felt that we may go much too far in the way of emptying the waste-paper basket of a genius on the head of the public; and that there is a sense in which the waste-paper basket is as sacred as the grave. But without arrogating to myself any more right in the matter than anybody has to his own taste, I hope I may be allowed to say that I for one would have willingly left Lady Susan in the waste-paper basket, if I could have pieced together Love and Friendship for a private scrap-book; a thing to laugh over again and again as one laughs over the great burlesques of Peacock or Max Beerbohm.
Jane Austen left everything she possessed to her sister Cassandra, including these and other manuscripts; and the second volume of them containing these was left by Cassandra to her brother, Admiral Sir Francis Austen. He gave it to his daughter Fanny, who left it in turn to her brother Edward, who was the Rector of Barfrestone in Kent, and the father of Mrs Sanders, to whose wise decision we owe the publication of these first fancies of her great-aunt; whom it might be misleading here to call her great great-aunt. Everyone will judge for himself; but I myself think she has added something intrinsically important to literature and to literary history; and that there are cartloads of printed matter, regularly recognised and printed with the works of all great authors, which are far less characteristic and far less significant than these few nursery jests.
For Love and Friendship, with some similar pages in the accompanying fragments, is really a rattling burlesque; something much better than what the ladies of the time called an agreeable rattle. It is one of those things that can be the more readily read with enjoyment through being written with enjoyment; in other words, it is all the better for being juvenile in the sense of being joyful. She is said to have written these things at the age of seventeen, evidently in much the same spirit in which people conduct a family magazine; for the medallions included in the manuscript were the work of her sister Cassandra. The whole thing is full of the sort of high spirits that are always higher in private than in public; as people laugh louder in the house than in the street. Many of her admirers would not expect, perhaps many of her admirers would not admire, the sort of fun to be found in the letter to the young lady ‘whose feelings were too strong for her judgment’, and who remarks incidentally ‘I murdered my father at a very early period in my life, I have since murdered my mother, and I am now going to murder my sister’. Personally, I think it admirable; not the conduct, but the confession. But there is much more than hilarity in the humour, even at this stage of its growth. There is almost everywhere a certain neatness in the nonsense. There is not a little of the true Austen irony. ‘The noble Youth informed us that his name was Lindsay—for particular reasons, however, I shall conceal it under that of Talbot.’ Did anyone really desire that to disappear into the waste-paper basket? ‘She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her— she was only an object of contempt.’ Is not that something like the first faint line in the figure of Fanny Price? When a loud knocking is heard on the door of the Rustic Cot by the Uske, the heroine’s father enquires the nature of the noise, and by cautious steps of inference they are enabled to define it as somebody outside striking the door. ‘“Yes” (exclaimed I) “I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance.” “That is another point” (replied he) “we must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock—tho’ that some one does rap at the door I am partly convinced”.’ In the aggravating leisure and lucidity of that reply, is there not the foreshadowing of another and more famous father; and do we not hear for a moment, in the rustic cottage by the Uske, the unmistakable voice of Mr Bennet?
But there is a larger critical reason for taking pleasure in the gaiety of these various travesties and trifles. Mr Austen-Leigh seems to have thought them not sufficiently serious for the reputation of his great relative; but greatness is not made up of serious things, in the sense of solemn things. The reason here, however, is as serious as even he or anyone else could desire; for it concerns the fundamental quality of one of the finest talents in letters.
A very real psychological interest, almost amounting to a psychological mystery, attaches to any early work of Jane Austen. And for that one reason, among others, which has hardly been sufficiently emphasised. Great as she was, nobody was likely to maintain that she was a poet. But she was a marked example of what is said of the poet; she was born, not made. As compared with her, indeed, some of the poets really were made. Many men who had the air of setting the world on fire have left at least a reasonable discussion about what set them on fire. Men like Coleridge or Carlyle had certainly kindled their first torches from the flambeaux of equally fantastic German mystics or Platonic speculators; they had gone through furnaces of culture where even less creative people might have been inflamed to creation. Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself; like the fire of the first man who rubbed two dry sticks together. Some would say that they were very dry sticks which she rubbed together. It is certain that she by her own artistic talent made interesting what thousands of superficially similar people would have made dull. There was nothing in her circumstances, or even in her materials, that seems obviously meant for the making of such an artist. It might seem a very wild use of the wrong word to say that Jane Austen was elemental. It might even seem even a little wanton to insist that she was original. Yet this objection would come from the critic not really considering what is meant by an element or an origin. Perhaps it might be as well expressed in what is really meant by an individual. Her ability is an absolute; it cannot be analysed into influences. She has been compared to Shakespeare; and in this sense she really does recall the joke about the man who said he could write like Shakespeare if he had the mind. In this case we seem to see a thousand spinsters sitting at a thousand tea-tables; and they could all have written Emma, if they had the mind.
There is therefore, in considering even her crudest early experiments, the interest of looking at a mind and not at a mirror. She may not be conscious of being herself; yet she is not, like so many more cultivated imitators, conscious of being somebody else. The force, at its first and feeblest, is coming from within and not merely from without. This interest, which belongs to her as an individual with a superior instinct for the intelligent criticism of life, is the first of the reasons that justify a study of her juvenile works; it is an interest in the psychology of the artistic vocation. I will not say of the artistic temperament; for nobody ever had less of the tiresome thing commonly so described than Jane Austen. But while this alone would be a reason for finding out how her work began, it becomes yet more relevant when we have found out how it did begin. This is something more than the discovery of a document; it is the discovery of an inspiration. And that inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter.
If it seemed odd to call her elemental, it may seem equally odd to call her exuberant. These pages betray her secret; which is that she was naturally exuberant. And her power came, as all power comes, from the control and direction of exuberance. But there is the presence and pressure of that vitality behind her thousand trivialities; she could have been extravagant if she liked. She was the very reverse of a starched or a starved spinster; she could have been a buffoon like the Wife of Bath if she chose. This is what gives an infallible force to her irony. This is what gives a stunning weight to her understatements. At the back of this artist also, counted as passionless, there was passion; but her original passion was a sort of joyous scorn and a fighting spirit against all that she regarded as morbid and lax and poisonously silly. The weapons she forged were so finely finished that we might never have known this, but for these glimpses of the crude furnace from which they came. Finally there are two additional facts involved which I will leave the modern critics and correspondents in newspapers to ponder and explain at their leisure. One is that this realist, in rebuking the romantics, is very much concerned with rebuking them for the very thing for which revolutionary sentiment has so much admired them; as for their glorification of ingratitude to parents and their easy assumption that the old are always wrong. ‘No!’ says the noble Youth in Love and Friendship, ‘never shall it be said that I obliged my father.’ And the other is that there is not a shadow of indication anywhere that this independent intellect and laughing spirit was other than contented with a narrow domestic routine, in which she wrote a story as domestic as a diary in the intervals of pies and puddings, without so much as looking out of the window to notice the French Revolution.
The Countrymen of Mary Webb and Thomas Hardy
The work of Mary Webb had an aspect distinct from all the debate about it merely as a case of something first neglected because it was not advertised and then advertised because it was neglected. I am not claiming to be one of the discoverers: nor am I one of those who hastened to discover the thing after it had been discovered. I only read one of the writer’s books, Precious Bane, and that struck me as strangely and very individually beautiful; but I thought it unique in every sense of the word, and never even knew if the writer’s name were known, or if she had written anything else. But the book left a very strong impression on my mind, and especially in one respect. It is very vivid and at the same time indescribable. Perhaps the hint is in the word ‘precious’ in Precious Bane. Not that Mrs Webb was in the least precious in the priggish sense. I mean in the things of price: a richness in things commonly connected with bareness and poverty. Something of what is spoken of as the gorgeous East, rested like the transparent colours of a rainbow, upon a landscape very typical of the West. Perhaps we sometimes forget, when we talk of Orient pearls and gold, that the sunset can be rich as well as the sunrise.
The romance described rustics in an age when they were even ruder than they were in the tales of Hardy or the poems of Housman. Nor was there the smallest attempt to idealise the life in the sense of suiting it to the rather low ideal of modern sentiment and comfort. The country was not turned into an Arcadia even of the really natural grace of Virgil or Theocritus; still less are the peasants turned into stage peasants or the shepherdess to a china shepherdess. The thing I mean by riches is something more subtle even than happiness. These peasants live a hard life; they probably on occasion live a hungry life; they are quite capable in some circumstances of living a gross or ferocious life. But they do, in a very deep sense, live a full life. And that is where the very atmosphere of the book differs from that of Hardy or of many striking and valuable books upon the same theme; books that have, indeed, found grandeur and even beauty in such a primitive existence, but have found only the beauty of bare rocks or the grandeur of the desert. The atmosphere of such books is that of stoicism, if not pessimism. The atmosphere of this book is that of mysticism; and we feel that the rustics themselves are not only the mysteries but also the mystics. It is inadequate to say, by one of those critical phrases which become only too quickly cant phrases, that the story is full of colour. The stories of Thomas Hardy, for instance, are undoubtedly full of colour. Men have used the metaphors of cloud and darkness in talking, whether justly or unjustly, of his metaphysical and moral ideas. But whatever may be true of his ideas, this is certainly not true of his imagery. The pictures that remain in my own memory, and I imagine in most other memories, of a first reading of the Wessex Tales, are rather specially picked out in strong sunlight. Nothing could be clearer than the outlines or brighter than the hues of some of those bright and cruel comedies of love and hate, along the white roads or on the great green hills. If his characters were indeed only puppets of destiny, they were often very gaily dressed puppets. There is no lack of light, if it be sometimes as deadly as lightning; and though he insisted too much that there is no rose without a thorn, he never failed to give very rich tints to the roses.
But there is in Hardy’s work, as in all work really belonging to a pagan world, this character: that all the light is shining on things and not through them. It is all the difference between the gaiety of an old pagan painting or mosaic and the burning clarity of a medieval window. And we do sometimes feel, in mere poverty, as in medieval austerity, that things may be bright by being transparent and transparent by being thin. If Hardy made a tragedy out of a tree and a well and a thunderstorm, he wanted to turn the strong sunlight on the scene almost like a theatrical limelight. He wanted the daylight to explore the well, we might almost say that he wanted the daylight to shine on and show up the darkness. But he did not mean, at any rate, not as the mystics can mean, that there was a mystery within the tree, making it truly a tree of life; or a special providence even in a falling thunderbolt. And if he thought that truth lay at the bottom of the well, I think it was commonly in the form of a corpse. At any rate, it was not in the form of a goddess or a nymph of the spring. He did not specially feel that a positive life, still less that a joyful life, was irradiating outwards through these things. He did not think that they meant something; he only thought that he meant something in saying that they meant nothing. The whole irony of his meaning is in that unmeaning world.
Now, Mary Webb and her peasants live in a very meaning world. Life, quite apart from the proportions of its sadness or gladness, is stuffed with significance. There is the silent pressure of a second sense in things; and a sort of halo round every object, whether of horror or tenderness. Thunderstorms are more than thunderstorms, and trees are more than trees, and the well is deeper than any man has known. This is expressed, merely externally, in a tangle of associations and traditions about all sorts of things; so that candles or cabbages or common objects of the kitchen may have dark properties. But it is the expression of a sense of fullness, as in the rain-cloud or even the thundercloud; and richness not only in the soul, but in the dark subsoil of existence. And I think this atmosphere is true, touching simple people, and all those who are near to the earth. Stupid people, hopelessly, hideously stupid people, generally call it superstition.
I mean that the more grimly realistic school is not wrong in being realistic, certainly not wrong in being tragic, but it is wrong, touching humanity of this type, in not being mystic. Common country folk like Tess or Jude the Obscure might well have been hurt as much as they were hurt, and cried out when they were hurt in a human fashion, and died when they were hurt too much, in the manner of all tragedy. But they would not have seen themselves in such hard and naked outline as the pessimistic novelist sees them. The whole thing would have been at once enriched and confused by the mystical traditions of mankind; by the remains of religion, by the hints of superstition, by the mystery of death which cuts both ways, like the two-edged sword of the angel. They would have felt desperate, but they would not have felt insignificant; they would have felt significant. That is the quality that clings to my memory out of that remarkable story, which I read so long ago—the story called Precious Bane. And it is connected with another quality in it, a quality very rare in recent literature; something which I can only call the note of nobility. Here again, there is something even in the title that suggests the truth. A precious thing does not merely mean a sumptuous thing, in the sense of something connected with gross luxury and wealth. A precious thing means something that is bought with a price; and in this case there is present the whole of that idea of the ancient price of sacrifice. That a bane can be precious is not a fashionable doctrine just now. Nor do I propose to debate its moral implications in this passing literary note. But it is certain that, wherever that conception is present in literature, there is made possible a poetic height and the breathing of a spiritual air that are never known where it is neglected; that even in the world of what is purely artistic, that degree of dignity is only attainable through something moral; and that, if there be art critics who care only for art, they would do well to keep martyrdom in the world, if only by making other people the martyrs.
The Words of Strong Poetry
The writing of Free Verse is currently compared to talking, as in the accepted French phrase about a causerie. And indeed any one who has conducted it so continuously and so long is apt to forget that anything he says may be taken down and used in evidence against him. I have always done my best to remember that I am rather in the dock than in the pulpit, and that I have very little to say, though I have said a good deal, to show why sentence of death should not be passed on me. When Science has really completed all these comforts which it promises mankind, and when all conversations are automatically taken down on a dictaphone or repeated on a phonograph, I rather doubt whether many people will want to put on the records. But, just as many a man has said that he hardly knew his own voice when it came back to him out of a gramophone, so I often wonder, when I chance to come in contact with some of the cracked and dreary records, how I failed to make my voice properly heard or my meaning sufficiently clear. Sometimes it arises from unavoidable hurry or pressure of work; sometimes from neglecting to explain things in their proper order and to put first things first. Sometimes I find I have taken things for granted, used words that have six or seven meanings, left out important steps of the argument, jumped to conclusions, and acted in short as if I were a Professor of Universal Science expounding an Outline of Universal History for Neglected Aunts and Uncles.
Many of these things are merely the inevitable disadvantages of the causerie; but there is one very real advantage in a causerie, even in the literal sense of a talk. Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed it excellently when he said that writing to a man was like firing at him with a gun, while talking to him was like playing on him with a garden-hose. In the first case it is hit and miss; in the second a man can correct his mistakes and correct his line of fire, or rather of water. In such a case, this kind of causerie has really some of the advantages of conversation. I will, therefore, have a shot at the free versifier; or rather (being too humane to shoot him, and very likely to miss him) I will continue to play on him benevolently with the hose, till he is soaked and dripping with the refreshing waters of Helicon, the true fount of free verse, with which I have the joy of sprinkling or asperging him.
I think the first truth about traditional metres is that there is a sort of speech that is stronger than speech. Not merely smoother or sweeter or more melodious or even more beautiful; but stronger. Words are jointed together like bones; they are mortared together like bricks; they are close and compact and resistant; whereas, in all common conversational speech, every sentence is falling to pieces. Perhaps we recognise this latter fact when we talk about letting fall a remark or dropping a hint or throwing out an observation. All conversational speech or writing is under the curse of the Fall; it is under the law of gravitation; it is perpetually falling down, like the universe of Lucretius. But great poets do not drop hints or let observations fall; they lift them and hold them aloft, as the keystone of a strong arch thrusts up the stones, defying the law of gravity and the devil and all his angels. The words of strong poetry are packed as tight and solid as the stones of the arch. The lines of a good sonnet are like bridges of sound across abysses of silence. The boast of the bridges is that you could march armies across them; that a man can rest his weight on every word. The awful cry out of the last tragic trance of Othello, when he realises that death is as real as love, finds words worthy of itself; megalithic words; words not only of weight but weight-bearing; words strong enough to support him above the abyss. ‘If I quench thee, thou flaming minister …’ The address to the candle might almost be called obscure, but it is not doubtful; it is not hesitant or wavering in words or the sound of words; it is rather as if a man were granted a greater thing than speech. And the effect is gained by this firmness in the words and the weight that can rest on them. ‘I know not where is that Promethean heat.’ You could stand an elephant on that line. It is true, first of all, as a mere fact of acoustics, that there is not one weak syllable in the line. At the same time, there is also that strength of style that is like the strength of gesture. ‘I know not where’ is the essential elemental cry of man, eternally ignorant of the beginning of life, or of how it may truly be renewed. And it is a plain and simple fact, whether we like it or not, that the words ‘I know not where’ do sound like some such ancestral city; while the words, ‘I don’t know where’ certainly do not.
Now half the current case for free against traditional verse turns simply on that. It consists in calling ‘I know not where’ pompous and theatrical; and calling ‘I don’t know where’ natural and sincere. It is not more natural and it is not more sincere; it is only more conversational. And the fact that it is conversational only means that it is conventional. In our time, especially, slang is merely the most conventional mode of address. But it is not a mode of expression, as poetry is a mode of expression, for the emotions and indescribable imaginations of men, for the simple reason that it does not express them. Common speech is not the thing by which men express their emotions; it is only the thing by which they fail to express them.
The distinction does not necessarily exclude all free verse; nor, indeed, do I wish to exclude it. But it does indicate why many poets, who would seem capable of writing good free verse, do in fact write bad free verse. They are misled by this fallacy of verse being free in the sense in which conversation is free. But conversation is not free; that is to say it is not free to sing and it is not free to satisfy. Above all, as above explained, it is not free to build; to pick words for their permanent and massive character; or to recast or rearrange them so, as to weld them closer together. A gentleman lighting a cigarette, in talk over the tea-table, would rather unduly suspend social intercourse if he refused to blow out the match until he had composed a line as full and satisfying as ‘If I quench thee, thou flaming minister’. In truth, of course, it would apply to tragic occasions as well as trivial occasions in real life. A man, after murdering a woman, would not talk about Prometheus; he is more likely to confess to the nearest policeman that he has done Desdemona in. But it is none the less true that ‘done in’ is a very weak description of what he has done. It is that weakness in the mere words, and especially in the relation of words, which seems to me to paralyse in practice a vast amount of what is called free verse. If anyone asks why free verse should not be written which included this close grip and gravity and resistant strength in a sentence, I am content to answer: ‘Why indeed!’ But the real repartee of the free versifier in such a case is not to ask why it should not be done, but to do it.
The Refrain of the Rover
A modern man of genius, Gauguin I think, said that an artist must be either a revolutionist or a plagiarist. He might, in fairness, have added that most of the very great artists were plagiarists. Antiquated authors of the type of Chaucer and Shakespeare were quite enthusiastic for copying; until more modern authors became more enthusiastic for copyright. But there runs through all poetry, through medieval down even to modern times, something like an everlasting echo that has in it an element of enchantment. There are refrains that recur in any sort of song; such as ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, or ‘On Christmas Day in the Morning’, or ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. But I was recently rather amused to note two or three cases in which two or three poets had repeated the same sentence, as well as the same sentiment. I mean that they had avowedly used a verbal repetition, which the vulgar might really call plagiarism. One series began, as I imagined, with that spirited song of Byron, ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’. Its chief beauty is that Byronic beauty of swiftness, which is often neglected. It consists of three verses of four lines each; but it could all be said in a breath. The one great quality which Byron always retained was exactly the duality which he was always boasting that he had lost. It was Gusto; a boyish power of enjoyment, especially of his own poetry. Now, it reappears in almost the same words, in the works of W. E. Henley, who professed the widely different creed of a rather stormy optimism; though its storminess sometimes led him to throw his crutch at his friends, when they differed on some fine shade of criticism. He is probably best known by the poem in which he thanks whatever gods there be for his unconquerable soul; though I have my private doubts about the unconquerable soul which goes with the unconquerable temper. Still, he was a fine fellow in his way, and his friends loved him, though he did throw his crutch at them. He wrote a lyric which simply changes, ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’, to ‘We’ll go no more a-roaming’. It might at least be called an echo; but I am now defending echoes. And now I discover, from the recent and most fascinating memoirs of a common sailor, that both the poems may have been echoes; and both the poets plagiarists. For he quotes a sea-shanty, as sung by common sailors, which I myself like better than either of the literary productions. I can imagine a seaman singing with the proper doleful boom:
A-roving—, a-roving—, since roving’s been my ru-u-in I’ll go no more a-roving With you, fair maid!
The small coincidence is worth noting; because it is well to remember that there is a whole literature which is lucky in being quite unconnected with literary men.
On Reflection
What is Right With the World
The above excellent title is not of my own invention. It was suggested to me by the Editor of this paper, and I consented to fill up the bill, partly because of the pleasure I have always had from the paper itself, and partly because it gives me an opportunity of telling an egotistical story, a story which may enlighten the public about the general origin of such titles.
I have always heard of the brutality of publishers and how they crush and obscure the author; but my complaint has always been that they push him forward far too much. I will not say that, so far from making too little of the author, they make too much of him; that this phrase is capable of a dark financial interpretation which I do not intend. But I do say that the prominent personalities of the literary world are very largely the creations of their publishers, in so far as they are not solely the creations of their wives. Here is a small incident out of my own existence. I designed to write a sort of essay, divided into sections, on one particular point of political error. This fallacy, though small and scholastic at first sight, seemed to me to be the real mistake in most modern sociological works. It was, briefly, the idea that things that have been tried have been found wanting. It was my purpose to point out that in the entanglements of practice this is untrue; that an old expedient may easily be the best thing for a new situation; that its principle may be useful though its practice failed; that its practice may have failed because its principle was abandoned; and so on. Therefore, I claimed, we should look for the best method, the ideal, whether it is in the future or the past. I imagined this book as a drab-coloured, decorous little philosophical treatise, with no chapters, but the page occasionally broken by section-headings at the side. I proposed to call my analysis of a radical error ‘What is wrong’, meaning where the mistake is in our logical calculation. But I had highly capable and sympathetic publishers, whose only weakness was that they thought my unhappy monologue much more important than I did. By some confusion of ecstasy (which entirely through my own fault I failed to check) the title was changed into the apocalyptic trumpet-blast ‘What’s Wrong With the World’. It was divided up into three short, fierce chapters, like proclamations in a French riot. Outside there was an enormous portrait of myself looking like a depressed hairdresser, and the whole publication had somehow got the violence and instancy of a bombshell. Let it be understood that I do not blame the publishers in the least for this. I could have stopped it if I had minded my own affairs, and it came out of their beautiful and ardent souls. I merely mention it as an instance of the error about publishers. They are always represented as cold and scornful merchants, seeking to keep your writers in the background. Alas (as Wordsworth so finely says), alas! the enthusiasm of publishers has oftener left me mourning.
Upon the whole, I am rather inclined to approve of this method of the publisher or editor making up the title, while the author makes up the remarks about it. Any man with a large mind ought to be able to write about anything. Any really free man ought to be able to write to order. Some of the greatest books in the world—Pickwick, for instance— were written to fulfil a scheme partly sketched out by a publisher. But I only brought together these two cases of titles that came to me from outside because they do illustrate the necessity of some restatement in such a case. For these two titles are, when it comes to the fulfilment, at once too complex and too simple. I would never have dreamed of announcing, like some discovery of my own, what is wrong with the world. What is wrong with the world is the devil, and what is right with it is God; the human race will travel for a few more million years in all sorts of muddle and reform, and when it perishes of the last cold or heat it will still be within the limits of that very simple definition. But in an age that has confused itself with such phrases as ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’, it is necessary to distinguish along more delicate lines. One of the strangest things about the use of the word ‘optimist’ is that it is now so constantly used about the future. The house of man is criticised not as a house, but as a kind of caravan; not by what it is; but by where it is going to. None are more vitally and recklessly otherworldly than those modern progressives who do not believe in another world.
Now, for the matter of that, I do think the world is getting very much better in very many vital respects. In some of them, I think, the fact could hardly be disputed. The one perfectly satisfactory element at the present crisis is that all the prophecies have failed. At least the people who have been clearly proved to be wrong are the people who were quite sure they were right. That is always a gratifying circumstance. Now why is it that all these prophecies of the wise have been confounded and why has the destiny of men taken so decisive and so different a course? It is because of the very simple fact that the human race consists of many millions of two-legged and tolerably cheerful, reasonably unhappy beings who never read any books at all and certainly never hear of any scientific predictions. If they act in opposition to the scheme which science has foreseen for them, they must be excused. They sin in ignorance. They have no notion that they are avoiding what was really unavoidable. But, indeed, the phrases loosely used of that obscure mass of mankind are a little misleading. To say of the bulk of human beings that they are uneducated is like saying of a Red Indian hunter that he has not yet taken his degree. He has taken many other things. And so, sincerely speaking, there are no uneducated men. They may escape the trivial examinations, but not the tremendous examinations of existence. The dependence of infancy, the enjoyment of animals, the love of woman, and the fear of death—these are more frightful and more fixed than all conceivable forms of the cultivation of the mind. It is idle to complain of schools and colleges being trivial. Schools and colleges must always be trivial. In no case will a college ever teach the important things. For before a man is twenty he has always learnt the important things. He has learnt them right or wrong, and he has learnt them all alone.
We therefore come back to the primary truth, that what is right with the world has nothing to do with future changes, but is rooted in original realities. If groups or peoples show an unexpected independence or creative power; if they do things no one had dreamed of their doing; if they prove more ferocious or more self-sacrificing than the wisdom of the world had ever given them credit for, then such inexplicable outbursts can always be referred back to some elementary and absolute doctrine about the nature of men. No traditions in this world are so ancient as the traditions that lead to modern upheaval and innovation. Nothing nowadays is so conservative as a revolution. The men who call themselves Republicans are men walking the streets of deserted and tiny city-states, and digging up the great bones of pagans. And when we ask on what republicanism really rests, we come back to that great indemonstrable dogma of the native dignity of man. And when we come back to the Lord of creation, we come back of necessity to creation; and we ask ourselves that ultimate question which St Thomas Aquinas (an extreme optimist) answered in the affirmative: Are these things ultimately of value at all?
What is right with the world is the world. In fact, nearly everything else is wrong with it. This is that great truth in the tremendous tale of Creation, a truth that our people must remember or perish. It is at the beginning that things are good, and not (as the more pallid progressives say) only at the end. The primordial things—existence, energy, fruition—are good so far as they go. You cannot have evil life, though you can have notorious evil livers. Manhood and womanhood are good things, though men and woman are often perfectly pestilent. You can use poppies to drug people, or birch trees to beat them, or stones to make an idol, or corn to make a corner; but it remains true that, in the abstract, before you have done anything, each of these four things is in strict truth a glory, a beneficent specialty and variety. We do praise the Lord that there are birch trees growing amongst the rocks and poppies amongst the corn; we do praise the Lord, even if we do not believe in Him. We do admire and applaud the project of a world, just as if we had been called to council in the primal darkness and seen the first starry plan of the skies. We are, as a matter of fact, far more certain that this life of ours is a magnificent and amazing enterprise than we are that it will succeed. These evolutionary optimists who call themselves Meliorists (a patient and poor-spirited lot they are) always talk as if we were certain of the end, though not of the beginning. In other words, they don’t know what life is aiming at, but they are quite sure it will get there. Why anybody who has avowedly forgotten where he came from should be quite so certain of where he is going to I have never been able to make out; but Meliorists are like that. They are ready to talk of existence itself as the product of purely evil forces. They never mention animals except as perpetually tearing each other in pieces; but a month in the country would cure that. They have a real giddy horror of stars and seas, as a man has on the edge of a hopelessly high precipice. They sometimes instinctively shrink from clay, fungoids, and the fresh young of animals with a quivering gesture that reveals the fundamental pessimist. Life itself, crude, uncultivated life, is horrible to them. They belong very largely to the same social class and creed as the lady who objected that the milk came to her from a dirty cow, and not from a nice clean shop. But they are sure how everything will end.
I am in precisely the opposite position. I am much more sure that everything is good at the beginning than I am that everything will be good at the end. That all this frame of things, this flesh, these stones, are good things, of that I am more brutally certain than I can say. But as for what will happen to them, that is to take a step into dogma and prophecy. I speak here, of course, solely of my personal feelings, not even of my reasoned creed. But on my instincts alone I should have no notion what would ultimately happen to this material world I think so magnificent. For all I know it may be literally and not figuratively true that the tares are tied into bundles for burning, and that as the tree falleth so shall it lie. I am an agnostic, like most people with a positive theology. But I do affirm, with the full weight of sincerity, that trees and flowers are good at the beginning, whatever happens to them at the end; that human lives were good at the beginning, whatever happens to them in the end. The ordinary modern progressive position is that this is a bad universe, but will certainly get better. I say it is certainly a good universe, even if it gets worse. I say that these trees and flowers, stars and sexes, are primarily, not merely ultimately, good. In the Beginning the power beyond words created heaven and earth. In the Beginning He looked on them and saw that they were good.
All this unavoidable theory (for theory is always unavoidable) may be popularly pulled together thus. We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from this is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being. The pessimist of the ordinary type, the pessimist who thinks he would be better dead, is blasted with the crime of Iscariot. Spiritually speaking, we should be justified in punishing him with death. Only, out of polite deference to his own philosophy, we punish him with life.
But this faith (that existence was fundamentally and purposely good) is not attacked only by the black, consistent pessimist. The man who says that he would sooner die is best answered by a sudden blow with the poker, for the reply is rightly logical, as well as physically very effective. But there has crept through the culture of modern Europe another notion that is equally in its own way an attack on the essential rightness of the world. It is not avowedly pessimistic, though the source from which it comes (which is Buddhism) is pessimistic for those who really understand it. It can offer itself—as it does among some of the high-minded and distinguished Theosophists—with an air of something highly optimistic. But this disguised pessimism is what is really wrong with the world— at least, especially with the modern world. It is essential to arrest and to examine it.
There has crept into our thoughts, through a thousand small openings, a curious and unnatural idea. I mean the idea that unity is itself a good thing; that there is something high and spiritual about things being blended and absorbed into each other. That all rivers should run into one river, that all vegetables should go into one pot— that is spoken of as the last and best fulfilment of being. Boys are to be ‘at one’ with girls; all sects are to be ‘at one’ in the New Theology; beasts fade into men and men fade into God; union in itself is a noble thing. Now union in itself is not a noble thing. Love is a noble thing; but love is not union. Nay, it is rather a vivid sense of separation and identity. Maudlin, inferior love poetry does, indeed, talk of lovers being ‘one soul’, just as maudlin, inferior religious poetry talks of being lost in God; but the best poetry does not. When Dante meets Beatrice, he feels his distance from her, not his proximity; and all the greatest saints have felt their lowness, not their highness, in the moment of ecstasy. And what is true of these grave and heroic matters (I do not say, of course, that saints and lovers have never used the language of union too, true enough in its own place and proper limitation of meaning)—what is true of these is equally true of all the lighter and less essential forms of appreciation of surprise. Division and variety are essential to praise; division and variety are what is right with the world. There is nothing specially right about mere contact and coalescence.
In short, this vast, vague idea of unity is the one ‘reactionary’ thing in the world. It is perhaps the only connection in which that foolish word ‘reactionary’ can be used with significance and truth. For this blending of men and women, nations and nations, is truly a return to the chaos and unconsciousness that were before the world was made. There is, of course, another kind of unity of which I do not speak here; unity in the possession of truth and the perception of the need for these varieties. But the varieties themselves; the reflection of man and woman in each other, as in two distinct mirrors; the wonder of man at nature as a strange thing at once above and below him; the quaint and solitary kingdom of childhood; the local affections and the colour of certain landscapes— these actually are the things that are the grace and honour of the earth; these are the things that make life worth living and the whole framework of things well worthy to be sustained. And the best thing remains; that this view, whether conscious or not, always has been and still is the view of the living and labouring millions. While a few prigs on platforms are talking about ‘oneness’ and absorption in ‘The All’, the folk that dwell in all the valleys of this ancient earth are renewing the varieties forever. With them a woman is loved for being unmanly, and a man loved for being unwomanly. With them the church and the home are both beautiful, because they are both different; with them fields are personal and flags are sacred; they are the virtue of existence, for they are not mankind but men.
The rooted hope of the modern world is that all these dim democracies do still believe in that romance of life, that variation of man, woman and child upon which all poetry has hitherto been built. The danger of the modern world is that these dim democracies are so very dim, and that they are especially dim where they are right. The danger is that the world may fall under a new oligarchy— the oligarchy of prigs. And if anyone should promptly ask (in the manner of the debating clubs) for the definition of a prig, I can only reply that a prig is an oligarch who does not even know he is an oligarch. A circle of small pedants sit on an upper platform, and pass unanimously (in a meeting of none) that there is no difference between the social duties of men and of women, the social instruction of men or of children. Below them boils that multitudinous sea of millions that think differently, that have always thought differently, that will always think differently. In spite of the overwhelming majority that maintains the old theory of life, I am in some real doubt about which will win. Owing to the decay of theology and all the other clear systems of thought, men have been thrown back very much upon their instincts, as with animals. As with animals, their instincts are right; but, as with animals, they can be cowed. Between the agile scholars and the stagnant mob, I am really doubtful about which will be triumphant. I have no doubt at all about which ought to be.
Europe at present exhibits a concentration upon politics which is partly the unfortunate result of our loss of religion, partly the just and needful result of our loss of our social inequality and iniquity. These causes, however, will not remain in operation forever. Religion is returning from her exile; it is more likely that the future will be crazily and corruptly superstitious than that it will be merely rationalist.
On the other hand, our attempts to right the extreme ill-balance of wealth must soon have some issue; something will be done to lessen the perpetual torture of incompetent compassion; some scheme will be substituted for our malevolent anarchy, if it be only one of benevolent servitude. And as these two special unrests about the universe and the State settle down into more silent and enduring system, there will emerge more and more those primary and archaic truths which the dust of these two conflicts has veiled. The secondary questions relatively solved, we shall find ourselves all the more in the presence of the primary questions of Man.
For at present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget how huge a part of a man’s life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under Nero or St Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won’t, to the end of the last evening. And the worst peril is that in our just modern revolt against intolerable accidents we may have unsettled those things that alone make daily life tolerable. It will be an ironic tragedy if, when we have toiled to find rest, we find we are incurably restless. It will be sad if, when we have worked for our holiday, we find we have unlearnt everything but work. The typical modern man is the insane millionaire who has drudged to get money, and then finds he cannot enjoy even money. There is danger that the social reformer may silently and occultly develop some of the madness of the millionaire whom he denounces. He may find that he has learnt how to build playgrounds but forgotten how to play. He may agitate for peace and quiet, but only propagate his own mental agitation. In his long fight to get a slave a half-holiday he may angrily deny those ancient and natural things, the zest of being, the divinity of man, the sacredness of simple things, the health and humour of the earth, which alone make a half-holiday even half a holiday or a slave even half a man.
There is danger in that modern phrase ‘divine discontent’. There is truth in it also, of course; but it is only truth of a special and secondary kind. Much of the quarrel between Christianity and the world has been due to this fact; that there are generally two truths, as it were, at any given moment of revolt or reaction, and the ancient underlying truism which is nevertheless true all the time. It is sometimes worth while to point out that black is not so black as it is painted; but black is still black, and not white. So with the merits of content and discontent. It is true that in certain acute and painful crises of oppression or disgrace, discontent is a duty and shame could call us like a trumpet. But it is not true that man should look at life with an eye of discontent, however high-minded. It is not true that in his primary, naked relation to the world, in his relation to sex, to pain, to comradeship, to the grave or to the weather, man ought to make discontent his ideal; it is black lunacy. Half his poor little hopes of happiness hang on his thinking a small house pretty, a plain wife charming, a lame foot not unbearable, and bad cards not so bad. The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.
T.P’s Weekly.
IN GENERAL A Sermon on Cheapness
It is really time that the absurd pretence of the vices to be romantic were given up. Ever since the time of Byron there has been vague and foolish conception clinging to all men’s minds that there is some connection between lawlessness and poetry, between orderly images and disorderly acts. A thousand instances might be given to show the shallowness of this idea. For instance, blasphemy has been regarded as something bold and splendid, as if the very essence of blasphemy were not the commonplace. It is the very definition of profanity that it thinks and speaks of certain things prosaically, which other men think and speak of poetically. It is thus a defeat of the imagination, and a volume full of the wildest pictures and most impious jests remains in its essential character a piece of poor literalism, a humdrum affair. The same general truth might be pursued through all the Ten Commandments. Murder, for instance, is quite overrated, aesthetically. I am assured by persons on whose judgment I rely, and whose experience has, presumably, been wide, that the feelings of a murderer are of a quite futile character. What could be stupider than kicking to pieces, like a child, a machine you know nothing about, the variety and ingenuity of which should keep any imaginative person watching it delightedly day and night? Say we are acquainted with such a human machine; let us say, a rich uncle. A human engine is inexhaustible in its possibilities; however long and unrewarding has been our knowledge of the avuncular machine, we never know that the very moment that we lift the assassin’s knife the machine is not about to grind forth some exquisite epigram which it would make life worth living to hear, or even, by some spasm of internal clockwork, produce a cheque. To kill him is clearly prosaic. Alive, he is a miracle; dead, he is merely a debris, a debris of unpleasant gore and quite inappropriate and old-fashioned clothes. Objection is sometimes brought against the absolute legal and medical doctrine that life should under all circumstances and at all costs be kept burning. It may or may not be moral and humane but there can be no doubt of its impressiveness as a purely poetical ideal. It is the desire, so natural in an imaginative man of science, to preserve the only thing that can really be of any interest to anyone.
I have taken these two instances, as the first that come to hand, of the general fact of the mean and matter-of-fact character of the vices, the wild and thrilling character of the virtues. Many other examples might be taken of the raptures and roses of virtue, the lilies and languors of vice. But an example, stranger both in its truth and in its unfamiliarity than any other, chiefly occupies my mind. Of all the conventional virtues there is none that is so completely despised by the aesthetic and Bohemian philosophers as economy. It is represented as the very meanest of human standards, a merit for cowards and greasy burgesses, a thing that is even base when it is a virtue and dull when it is a vice. But in truth there is no quality so truly romantic as economy.
Economy is essentially imaginative because it is a realisation of the value of everything. The real objection to murder, aesthetically speaking, is that it is uneconomical. It is a failure in efficiency (I want to write that word down and look at it) to waste a whole man in order to procure a momentary emotion which is often disappointing. And the real objection to waste is that all waste is a kind of murder, a merely negative and destructive thing, the obliteration of something which we can neither value nor understand. We slay an uncle because we do not realise the strange dumb poetry of an uncle; we fling away a penny because we cannot realise the gorgeous possibilities of a penny. I have murdered many pennies, many trusting halfcrowns, in my life. For let it be clearly understood that I do not maintain for a moment that this poetry of economy is an easy thing for any of us to keep up. We tend to forget the poetry of pennies just as we tend to forget the poetry of skies and woods and great buildings, because we see them so often. In practice it is most difficult to be the Economic Man. We have all heard of the clergyman who spoke in defence of teetotalism, saying that for twenty years he had tried to teach drunkards to drink moderately, and had never once succeeded. The reporters, with unintentional kindness, described him as having said that for twenty years he had tried to drink moderately and had never once succeeded. So it is with this great question of economy.
For a long period the writer of the present article has tried to be economical and has never once succeeded. But I impute this entirely to a lack of true poetry in myself. I do not for a moment dream of shielding myself behind so transparent and canting a plea as the notion that there is anything artistic or romantic in being extravagant. The man who does not look at his change is no true poet. To give away a penny deliberately is indeed one of the highest triumphs of imagination: it means that the giver can realise the meaning of the existence of some ragged family herded in the lairs of East London. But to throw away a penny is sheer lack of imagination; it means that the giver cannot realise even the meaning of a penny. It means that he forgets the first and most thrilling of all the lessons of the universe, the lessons of every seed and germ, the lesson of the infinite and terrible power that may be found in small things. The French, the most poetical of all peoples, are also the most economical. The English working man, with his sterling, solid common sense, throws away every rag and bone that does not appear to him useful at the first glance; the French cottager turns those rags and bones into exquisite and civilised dishes. Economy is only another name for universalism; the true poet regards every earthly object as having some value and secret utility— with the possible exception of a dust-cart. The old romance of life was held to consist in expense—in the jewels and perfumes of the ‘Arabian Nights’, in the cushion and cigars of Ouida. The newer and truer romance will be the romance of cheapness. It will address itself to the truly imaginative task of realising what is the real worth (a worth running into millions) of the penny cup of coffee to the tired pedestrian at midnight or the pennyworth of tobacco, to the poor man in his half-hour holiday. It will celebrate the cheapness of ecstasy.
My bosom friend the Pessimist and I were standing outside a small toy shop, glueing our noses to the glass, when the long silence was broken by my remarking on the beauty of a solid stick of blue chalk, which was offered for sale (in some tempest of generosity) for a halfpenny. ‘Have you considered,’ I asked, ‘all that this stick of blue chalk means? For a halfpenny I am possessed of it. I go home at night under the stars, between dark walls and through mazy streets. I shall be free to write upon those walls beautiful or stern sentiments, arraigning the powers of the earth, and write them in the very colour of heaven. At home I may beguile the evening in a thousand innocent sports, designing barbaric patterns upon the new table-cloth, drawing dreamy and ideal landscapes upon the note-paper, decorating my own person in the manner of our British predecessors, sketching strange and ideal adventures for strange and ideal characters. And all this blue river of dreams is loosened by a halfpenny.’
The Pessimist replied, in his sad, stern way, ‘Drivel. It is only the blue chalk you buy for a halfpenny. You do not buy the stars for a halfpenny; you do not buy the streets for a halfpenny; you do not buy your dreams or your love of drawing or your tastes and imaginations for a halfpenny.’
‘True,’ I replied. ‘The stars and the dreams and myself are cheaper than chalk: for I bought them for nothing.’
He burst into tears and became immediately convinced of the basis of true religion. For our very word for God means Economy: is not improvidence the opposite of Providence?
IN GENERALE Un sermone sul buon mercato
È davvero tempo che si rinunci all’assurda pretesa dei vizi di essere romantici. Fin dai tempi di Byron una concezione vaga e sciocca si è aggrappata alla mente di tutti gli uomini, secondo cui vi sarebbe un qualche legame tra l’illegalità e la poesia, tra le immagini ordinate e gli atti disordinati. Si potrebbero addurre mille esempi a mostrare la superficialità di questa idea. Per esempio, la bestemmia è stata considerata qualcosa di audace e splendido, come se l’essenza stessa della bestemmia non fosse la banalità. È proprio la definizione della profanità pensare e parlare di certe cose prosaicamente, laddove altri uomini le pensano e ne parlano poeticamente. È dunque una sconfitta dell’immaginazione, e un volume colmo delle immagini più sfrenate e degli scherzi più empi resta, nel suo carattere essenziale, un povero pezzo di letteralismo, una faccenda monotona. La medesima verità generale potrebbe essere inseguita attraverso tutti i Dieci Comandamenti. L’omicidio, per esempio, è assai sopravvalutato, esteticamente. Persone sul cui giudizio faccio affidamento, e la cui esperienza è stata, presumibilmente, vasta, mi assicurano che i sentimenti di un assassino sono di carattere del tutto vano. Cosa potrebbe esserci di più stupido che ridurre a pezzi, come un bambino, una macchina di cui non si sa nulla, la cui varietà e ingegnosità dovrebbero tenere qualsiasi persona dotata d’immaginazione a osservarla deliziata giorno e notte? Poniamo di conoscere una tale macchina umana; diciamo, un ricco zio. Un motore umano è inesauribile nelle sue possibilità; per quanto lunga e ingrata sia stata la nostra conoscenza della macchina avunculare, non sappiamo mai che, nel momento stesso in cui solleviamo il coltello dell’assassino, la macchina non stia per macinare qualche squisito epigramma che varrebbe la pena di vivere per udire, o addirittura, per qualche spasmo del suo congegno interno, non stia per produrre un assegno. Ucciderlo è chiaramente prosaico. Vivo, è un miracolo; morto, è soltanto un detrito, un detrito di sgradevole sangue coagulato e di abiti del tutto inadatti e fuori moda. Talvolta si muove obiezione contro l’assoluta dottrina legale e medica secondo cui la vita dovrebbe, in ogni circostanza e a ogni costo, essere mantenuta accesa. Sarà morale e umano oppure no, ma non vi può essere alcun dubbio sulla sua imponenza come ideale puramente poetico. È il desiderio, così naturale in un uomo di scienza dotato d’immaginazione, di preservare l’unica cosa che possa davvero interessare a chicchessia.
Ho preso questi due esempi, come i primi che mi capitano sotto mano, del fatto generale del carattere meschino e prosaico dei vizi, e del carattere selvaggio ed entusiasmante delle virtù. Molti altri esempi si potrebbero addurre dei rapimenti e delle rose della virtù, dei gigli e dei languori del vizio. Ma un esempio, più strano di ogni altro sia nella sua verità sia nella sua stranezza, occupa soprattutto la mia mente. Di tutte le virtù convenzionali non ve n’è alcuna così completamente disprezzata dai filosofi estetizzanti e bohémien quanto l’economia. È rappresentata come il più meschino degli standard umani, un merito da codardi e da untuosi borghesi, una cosa che è persino vile quando è virtù e insulsa quando è vizio. Ma in verità non c’è qualità tanto veramente romantica quanto l’economia.
L’economia è essenzialmente immaginativa perché è una presa di coscienza del valore di ogni cosa. La vera obiezione all’omicidio, esteticamente parlando, è che esso è antieconomico. È un difetto di efficienza (voglio scrivere questa parola e contemplarla) sprecare un uomo intero per procurarsi un’emozione momentanea che spesso è deludente. E la vera obiezione allo spreco è che ogni spreco è una specie di omicidio, una cosa meramente negativa e distruttiva, la cancellazione di qualcosa che non sappiamo né apprezzare né comprendere. Uccidiamo uno zio perché non ci rendiamo conto della strana muta poesia di uno zio; buttiamo via un penny perché non sappiamo cogliere le splendide possibilità di un penny. Ho assassinato molti penny, molte fiduciose mezze corone, nella mia vita. Sia infatti ben chiaro che non sostengo neppure per un momento che questa poesia dell’economia sia una cosa facile da mantenere, per alcuno di noi. Tendiamo a dimenticare la poesia dei penny proprio come tendiamo a dimenticare la poesia dei cieli e dei boschi e dei grandi edifici, perché li vediamo così spesso. In pratica è difficilissimo essere l’Uomo Economico. Abbiamo tutti sentito del pastore che parlava in difesa dell’astinenza totale, dicendo che per vent’anni aveva tentato d’insegnare agli ubriaconi a bere con moderazione, e non c’era mai riuscito neppure una volta. I cronisti, con involontaria gentilezza, riferirono ch’egli avesse detto di aver tentato per vent’anni di bere con moderazione senza riuscirci neppure una volta. Così è di questa grande questione dell’economia.
Per lungo tempo colui che scrive il presente articolo ha tentato di essere economo e non c’è mai riuscito neppure una volta. Ma imputo questo interamente a una mancanza di vera poesia in me stesso. Non sogno neppure per un istante di ripararmi dietro un pretesto tanto trasparente e ipocrita quanto l’idea che vi sia alcunché di artistico o romantico nell’essere prodighi. L’uomo che non guarda il proprio resto non è un vero poeta. Donare deliberatamente un penny è davvero uno dei più alti trionfi dell’immaginazione: significa che chi dona sa cogliere il senso dell’esistenza di qualche famiglia stracciona ammassata nelle tane della Londra orientale. Ma gettar via un penny è pura mancanza d’immaginazione; significa che chi dona non sa cogliere neppure il senso di un penny. Significa che dimentica la prima e più elettrizzante di tutte le lezioni dell’universo, la lezione di ogni seme e germe, la lezione dell’infinita e terribile potenza che può trovarsi nelle piccole cose. I Francesi, il più poetico di tutti i popoli, sono anche il più economo. L’operaio inglese, con il suo saldo e solido buon senso, butta via ogni straccio e ogni osso che non gli appaia utile a prima vista; il contadino francese trasforma quegli stracci e quelle ossa in piatti squisiti e civili. Economia è solo un altro nome per universalismo; il vero poeta considera ogni oggetto terreno come dotato di qualche valore e di una segreta utilità — con la possibile eccezione del carro della polvere. L’antico romanticismo della vita si riteneva consistesse nella spesa — nei gioielli e nei profumi delle «Mille e una notte», nel cuscino e nei sigari di Ouida. Il nuovo e più vero romanticismo sarà il romanticismo del buon mercato. Si volgerà al compito veramente immaginativo di comprendere quale sia il valore reale (un valore che ammonta a milioni) della tazza di caffè da un penny per il pedone stanco a mezzanotte, o del tabacco per un penny, per il pover’uomo nella sua mezz’ora di riposo. Celebrerà il buon mercato dell’estasi.
Il mio intimo amico il Pessimista ed io ce ne stavamo davanti a un piccolo negozio di giocattoli, incollando il naso al vetro, quando il lungo silenzio fu rotto dal mio osservare la bellezza di un solido gessetto azzurro, messo in vendita (in un qualche impeto di generosità) per mezzo penny. «Hai considerato», chiesi, «tutto ciò che questo gessetto azzurro significa? Per mezzo penny ne sono padrone. Torno a casa la notte sotto le stelle, fra muri oscuri e per vie intricate. Sarò libero di scrivere su quei muri sentimenti belli o severi, incriminando le potenze della terra, e di scriverli nel colore stesso del cielo. A casa potrò ingannare la sera con mille passatempi innocenti, disegnando motivi barbarici sulla tovaglia nuova, tracciando paesaggi sognanti e ideali sulla carta da lettere, adornando la mia persona alla maniera dei nostri predecessori britannici, abbozzando strane e ideali avventure per strani e ideali personaggi. E tutto questo azzurro fiume di sogni è liberato da mezzo penny.»
Il Pessimista rispose, nel suo modo triste e severo: «Sciocchezze. È solo il gesso azzurro che compri per mezzo penny. Non compri le stelle per mezzo penny; non compri le strade per mezzo penny; non compri i tuoi sogni né il tuo amore per il disegno né i tuoi gusti e le tue immaginazioni per mezzo penny.»
«Vero», risposi. «Le stelle e i sogni e me stesso costano meno del gesso: perché li ho comprati per nulla.»
Scoppiò in lacrime e fu immediatamente convinto del fondamento della vera religione. Poiché la nostra stessa parola per Dio significa Economia: l’imprevidenza non è forse l’opposto della Provvidenza?
On Manners
One of the greatest difficulties in any philosophical discussion of manners is the fact that the presence of bad manners and the absence of any manners are treated as identical. We say indifferently of a man of a more or less repulsive social ineptitude either that he has no manners or that he has bad manners. How entirely different these two things are may be tested by the fact that in no other affairs do we treat these phrases as synonymous. There is all the difference in the world between saying that a man has no wine and saying that he has bad wine. There is all the difference in the world between the comparatively trifling biographical statement, ‘He has no sons,’ and the really disquieting one, ‘He has bad sons’. If, when we were about to breakfast with a friend, a common acquaintance were to approach us and whisper impressively, ‘You will eat no eggs,’ the expression would amount to little more than an interesting detail; if he were to whisper, ‘You will eat bad eggs,’ an element of tragedy would at once appear. But the difference between no manners and bad manners is quite as definite and important as the difference between no eggs and bad eggs.
The absence of manners is an unconscious and chaotic thing, the product of vagueness, of monomania, of absence of mind, of ignorance of the world. But the presence of bad manners is a perfectly solemn, deliberate, and artificial thing, the result of pride and vainglory, hypocrisy and blindness and hardness of heart. A great mass of human society may thus be simply and satisfactorily divided into two definite sections. But the actual nature of the bad manners which constitute the chief characteristic of good society is worthy, it may be, of somewhat more profound examination and definition. For the manners which we see in the centres of social life such as the House of Commons are really bad, not in the sense that they are insufficient or ignorant, but in the sense that they violate what is the whole object and meaning of manners.
Courtesy is a mystical thing; it may be defined as a spontoneous worship. Politeness is, indeed, even more fantastically reverential than religion itself, for it treats a landlady’s parlour as the religionist treats a temple. To him all houses are holy, and whenever or wherever it be found, the covered place demands the uncovered head. Politeness is thus a thing mysterious and elemental, going down to the foundations of the world. Since no man can express how surprising and terrifying and beautiful is every object upon which we gaze, on the day when we all become truly primitive we shall all become extravagantly polite; we shall take off our hats to the sparrows, and apologise for treading on the daisies. Politeness of this kind is simply imagination. That is the inevitable result of realising that things are there. Here, as in so many other cases, we see the singular dullness of all those sections of society who call themselves unconventional. They imagine that unconventionality is a mark of being artistic or imaginative. It is, of course, a mark of being especially prosaic and limited. For the great conventions are, as their name grammatically implies, simply the great agreements, and agreement is essential to all art, and to all ceremony, and, indeed, to everything, except mere rowdy competition and free fights. If a man is ceremonious he is conventional, and if he is poetical he is ceremonious.
In so far, therefore, as the artistic classes believe in a lounging and Bohemian existence, they are fighting against the very nature of art, and also against the very nature of a vivid realisation of things. If once we realised things vividly, and saw how valuable they are, we should become more elaborately urbane than any dandy of the old school. What was wrong with the dandies of the old school was not the fact that their politeness was extravagant, but the fact that they did not really believe in it. The Brummell type was wrong, not because it bowed repeatedly over a lady’s hand, but because it did not respect her either in act or conversation. The bowing was entirely right; if we saw things for one moment as they are we should stand bowing for several minutes over the hand of the news-boy or the crossing-sweeper, thus creating some sensation in the neighbourhood.
Now if it be once granted that politeness is reverence, an expression of reverence for our environment, it does not particularly matter by what actual physical pantomime it is expressed. It may be expressed, as in the case of the Christian and Jewish religions, by taking off your hat, or by putting it on. In many Oriental countries it is expressed by taking off one’s boots, and in some of the great Republics of the Antipodes it may, for all I know, be expressed by taking off your collar or your waistcoat. Certain savages rub each other’s noses when they meet, and I have no doubt that they rub them reverentially. The form matters nothing, so long as the spirit which it is meant to convey is a spirit of chivalry and of a poetic humility. But the great central and remarkable thing about society manners in this decade is that they are not intended to express the idea of courtesy, the idea, that is to say, that we are impressed with our surroundings, but, on the contrary, specially and elaborately intended to express the idea that we do not care a brass farthing for anyone for a mile round. The old-fashioned bowing and scraping may have been ludicrous and hypocritical, when taken in conjunction with the materialistic or immoral practices which went along with it, but at least the form itself, the actual bow and scrape, did express deference and self-subordination. But the modern manners of the richer class are actually framed, like a careful artistic work, to express indifference to everything and everybody.
The modern gentleman is not the man who knows how to be polite; he is the man who knows how to be rude in an entirely gentlemanly manner. His only scruple is that he must not be rude in the same way that an omnibus conductor is rude—that is to say, in an amusing way. It is the object of modern urbanity not to cultivate the hypocritical subservience of the old bucks and beaux, but to cultivate a way of bowing to a lady which is a great deal more personally offensive than hitting her in the face. It is not, in short, courtesy at all; it is not an awkward and clownish attempt to indicate that we care for our surroundings; it is a perfectly polished, deliberate and successful attempt to indicate that we care for nothing in earth or Heaven. Uneducated people, that is to say, have no manners, educated people have bad manners.
Nobody can visit the House of Commons without coming away with the general impression that the art cultivated by the young country gentleman is the art of doing his worst elegantly; and to do one’s worst, however elegantly, remains what it is, the one and solitary supreme insult. If a man throws his worst or his tenth best to anything, it matters nothing if the thing he throws be the Iliad or a casket of sapphires, it still remains an insult. And this insult to the ancient English Parliament is expressed in every line of the figures of the well-dressed Members of the House. A man with a million genuine and intellectual charms, is supposed to be a man with good manners. This simply means that he exhibits an unusual degree of physical grace in the act of putting his boots within a foot or two of the Mace of the King of England. It is a terrible thing that while true courtesy is a transcendental virtue and involves admiration, the most courteous man in modern politics is also the incarnation of indifference.
Sulle maniere
Una delle maggiori difficoltà in ogni discussione filosofica sulle maniere è il fatto che la presenza di cattive maniere e l’assenza di qualsiasi maniera vengano trattate come una cosa identica. Diciamo indifferentemente di un uomo di più o meno ripugnante inettitudine sociale sia che non ha maniere sia che ha cattive maniere. Quanto queste due cose siano interamente diverse può misurarsi dal fatto che in nessun’altra faccenda trattiamo queste espressioni come sinonime. C’è tutta la differenza del mondo tra il dire che un uomo non ha vino e il dire che ha del cattivo vino. C’è tutta la differenza del mondo tra la relativamente insignificante affermazione biografica «Non ha figli» e quella davvero inquietante «Ha figli cattivi». Se, mentre stiamo per fare colazione con un amico, un comune conoscente ci si avvicinasse e sussurrasse con enfasi «Non mangerai uova», l’espressione equivarrebbe a poco più di un dettaglio curioso; se sussurrasse «Mangerai uova andate a male», un elemento di tragedia apparirebbe all’istante. Ma la differenza tra nessuna maniera e cattive maniere è del tutto altrettanto netta e importante quanto la differenza tra nessun uovo e uova andate a male.
L’assenza di maniere è una cosa inconscia e caotica, il prodotto della vaghezza, della monomania, della distrazione, dell’ignoranza del mondo. Ma la presenza di cattive maniere è una cosa perfettamente solenne, deliberata e artificiale, il risultato dell’orgoglio e della vanagloria, dell’ipocrisia e della cecità e della durezza di cuore. Una gran massa della società umana può così essere divisa in modo semplice e soddisfacente in due sezioni ben definite. Ma la natura effettiva delle cattive maniere che costituiscono la caratteristica principale della buona società è degna, forse, di un esame e di una definizione alquanto più profondi. Poiché le maniere che vediamo nei centri della vita sociale, come la Camera dei Comuni, sono realmente cattive, non nel senso che siano insufficienti o ignoranti, ma nel senso che violano ciò che è l’intero scopo e significato delle maniere.
La cortesia è una cosa mistica; la si potrebbe definire un culto spontaneo. La buona educazione è, in verità, ancor più fantasticamente reverente della religione stessa, poiché tratta il salotto di una padrona di casa come il credente tratta un tempio. Per lui tutte le case sono sacre, e ovunque e in qualunque momento lo si incontri, il luogo coperto esige il capo scoperto. La buona educazione è dunque una cosa misteriosa ed elementare, che scende fino alle fondamenta del mondo. Poiché nessun uomo può esprimere quanto sorprendente e terribile e bello sia ogni oggetto su cui posiamo lo sguardo, il giorno in cui tutti diverremo veramente primitivi diverremo tutti stravagantemente cortesi; ci toglieremo il cappello davanti ai passeri, e chiederemo scusa per aver calpestato le margherite. La cortesia di questo tipo è semplicemente immaginazione. È l’inevitabile risultato del rendersi conto che le cose sono là. Qui, come in tanti altri casi, vediamo la singolare ottusità di tutte quelle sezioni della società che si dicono anticonvenzionali. Immaginano che l’anticonvenzionalità sia un segno dell’essere artistici o immaginativi. È, naturalmente, un segno dell’essere particolarmente prosaici e limitati. Poiché le grandi convenzioni sono, come il loro nome grammaticalmente implica, semplicemente i grandi accordi, e l’accordo è essenziale a ogni arte, e a ogni cerimonia, e, in verità, a ogni cosa, tranne la mera competizione chiassosa e le risse. Se un uomo è cerimonioso è convenzionale, e se è poetico è cerimonioso.
Nella misura, dunque, in cui le classi artistiche credono in un’esistenza oziosa e bohémien, esse combattono contro la natura stessa dell’arte, e anche contro la natura stessa di una vivida percezione delle cose. Se una volta percepissimo le cose vividamente, e vedessimo quanto sono preziose, diverremmo più elaboratamente urbani di qualsiasi dandy della vecchia scuola. Ciò che c’era di sbagliato nei dandy della vecchia scuola non era il fatto che la loro cortesia fosse stravagante, ma il fatto che non vi credevano davvero. Il tipo alla Brummell aveva torto, non perché s’inchinasse ripetutamente sulla mano di una dama, ma perché non la rispettava né nell’atto né nella conversazione. L’inchino era del tutto giusto; se vedessimo le cose per un solo istante come sono, ce ne staremmo a inchinarci per parecchi minuti sulla mano del ragazzo dei giornali o dello spazzino, suscitando così una certa sensazione nel vicinato.
Ora, se una volta si ammette che la cortesia è reverenza, un’espressione di reverenza per il nostro ambiente, non importa particolarmente attraverso quale effettiva pantomima fisica essa venga espressa. Può essere espressa, come nel caso delle religioni cristiana ed ebraica, togliendosi il cappello, oppure mettendoselo. In molti paesi orientali si esprime togliendosi le scarpe, e in alcune delle grandi Repubbliche degli Antipodi può darsi, per quel che ne so, che si esprima togliendosi il colletto o il panciotto. Certi selvaggi si strofinano il naso a vicenda quando si incontrano, e non ho alcun dubbio che se lo strofinino reverentemente. La forma non conta nulla, purché lo spirito che essa è destinata a trasmettere sia uno spirito di cavalleria e di poetica umiltà. Ma la cosa grande e centrale e notevole riguardo alle maniere della buona società in questo decennio è che esse non sono intese a esprimere l’idea di cortesia, l’idea, cioè, che siamo colpiti da ciò che ci circonda, ma, al contrario, sono appositamente ed elaboratamente intese a esprimere l’idea che non c’importa un fico secco di nessuno per un miglio all’intorno. Gli inchini e i salamelecchi all’antica potevano essere ridicoli e ipocriti, presi insieme alle pratiche materialistiche o immorali che li accompagnavano, ma almeno la forma stessa, l’inchino e il salamelecco effettivi, esprimevano deferenza e subordinazione del sé. Ma le maniere moderne della classe più ricca sono in realtà congegnate, come un’accurata opera d’arte, per esprimere indifferenza verso tutto e tutti.
Il gentiluomo moderno non è l’uomo che sa essere cortese; è l’uomo che sa essere scortese in una maniera del tutto signorile. Il suo unico scrupolo è di non essere scortese nello stesso modo in cui è scortese un bigliettaio d’autobus — vale a dire, in un modo divertente. Lo scopo dell’urbanità moderna non è di coltivare l’ipocrita servilismo dei vecchi bellimbusti e damerini, ma di coltivare un modo d’inchinarsi a una dama che è assai più personalmente offensivo che colpirla in faccia. In breve, non è affatto cortesia; non è un goffo e buffonesco tentativo d’indicare che teniamo a ciò che ci circonda; è un tentativo perfettamente levigato, deliberato e riuscito d’indicare che non ci importa nulla in terra o in Cielo. Le persone incolte, vale a dire, non hanno maniere, le persone colte hanno cattive maniere.
Nessuno può visitare la Camera dei Comuni senza portarne via l’impressione generale che l’arte coltivata dal giovane gentiluomo di campagna sia l’arte di fare il proprio peggio con eleganza; e fare il proprio peggio, per quanto elegantemente, resta ciò che è, l’unico e solitario supremo insulto. Se un uomo getta il proprio peggio o il proprio decimo meglio a una cosa qualsiasi, non conta nulla che la cosa che getta sia l’Iliade o uno scrigno di zaffiri, rimane pur sempre un insulto. E questo insulto all’antico Parlamento inglese è espresso in ogni linea delle figure dei Membri ben vestiti della Camera. Un uomo con un milione di fascini genuini e intellettuali si suppone sia un uomo dalle buone maniere. Ciò significa semplicemente che egli esibisce un grado insolito di grazia fisica nell’atto di posare gli stivali a un piede o due dalla Mazza del Re d’Inghilterra. È una cosa terribile che, mentre la vera cortesia è una virtù trascendentale e comporta ammirazione, l’uomo più cortese della politica moderna sia anche l’incarnazione dell’indifferenza.
For Persons of the Name of Smith
Some time ago Mr C. F. G. Masterman led a vigorous attack upon my timid and humble optimism, and declared in effect that when I maintained a poetry in all things it was I who supplied it. I wish I could claim that I had ever supplied poetry to anything; it seems to me that I am at the very best a humdrum scientific student noting it down. The sentimentalists, the sons of a passionate delusion, are those who do not think everything poetical. For they are wholly under the influence of words, of the vague current phraseology, which thinks ‘castle’ a poetical word and ‘Post-office’ an unpoetical word, which thinks ‘knight’ a poetical word and ‘policeman’ an unpoetical word, which thinks ‘eagle’ a poetical ward and ‘pig’ an unpoetical word. I do not say that there is not truth in this as a matter of literature; I do not say that in pure technical style there is not a difference between eagles and pigs. All I wish to point out is that the ordinary man in the street when he says that there is no poetry in a pig or a post-office is, in fact, merely intoxicated with literary style. He is not looking at the thing itself; if he did that he would see that it was not only poetical, but obviously and glaringly poetical. He thinks a railway-signal, let us say, must be prosaic, because the word sounds funny, and there is no rhyme in it. But if he looked straight and square at what a railway-signal is, he would realise that it was, to take a casual case, a red fire or light kindled to keep people from death, as poetical a thing as the spear of Britomart or the lamp of Aladdin. It is, in short, the man who thinks ordinary things common who is really the man living in an unreal world.
But of all the examples of this general fact that have recently been called to my notice, there is none more peculiar and interesting than that of the family name of Smith, in which we have a splendid example of the fact that the poetry of common things is a mere fact, while the commonplace character of common things is a mere delusion. For, if we look at the name Smith in a casual and impressionable way, remembering how we commonly hear it, what is commonly said about it, we think of it as something funny and trivial; we think of pictures in Punch, of jokes in comic songs, of all the cheapness and modernity which seem to centre round a Mr Smith. But, if we look at the plain word itself, we suddenly behold a poem. It is the name of a great rugged and primeval craft, a trade that is in the bones of every great epic of antiquity, a trade on which the ‘arma virumque’ have everlastingly depended, and which they have repeatedly acclaimed. It is a craft so poetical that even the babies of village yokels stand and stare into the cavern of its creative violence, with a dim sense that the dancing sparks and the deafening blows are in some way wonderful, as the shops of the village cobbler and the village baker are not wonderful. The mystery of flame, the mystery of metals, the fight between the hardest of earthly things and the weirdest of earthly elements, the defeat of the unconquerable iron by its only conqueror, the brute calm of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the origin of a thousand sciences and arts, the ploughing of fields, the hewing of wood, the arraying of armies, and the whole beginning of arms, these things are written with brevity indeed, but with perfect clearness, on the visiting card of Mr Smith. The Smiths are a house of arrogant antiquity, of prehistoric simplicity. It would not be at all remarkable if a certain contemptuous carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, marked people whose name was Smith. Yet novelists, when they wish to describe a hero as strong and romantic, persistently call him Vernon Aylmer, which means nothing, or Bertrand Vallance, which means nothing; while all the time it is in their power to give him the sacred name of Smith, this name made of iron and fire. From the very beginnings of history and fable this clan has gone forth to battle; their trophies are in every hand, their name is everywhere; they are older than the nations, and their sign is the Hammer of Thor.
Anyone whose name is Smith may be connected with a Smith who was a lawyer in the reign of Henry VIII, or a Smith who was a Colonel in the British army at Blenheim, or a Smith who was a Cavalier, or a Smith who was a Puritan, or a Smith who was a Bishop, or a Smith who was hanged. All this kind of historic information exists in a very perfect form. But it must be remembered that the origin of a great family should be not merely historic, but also prehistoric. Every single practical and triumphant thing in this world has begun, not with an accuracy, but with a legend. These dim, gigantic fables are the origins of all practical things. And behind the dimmest and most gigantic Smith, we may see the more tremendous outlines of the formless and fabulous Smith who was the son of Vulcan and the first conqueror of iron. The shame which many people seem to feel about owning to such a patronymic or tracing its origin, is an extraordinary thing, but it is part of a very deep and general evil which has been going on for some time back. The interest in race, the interest in genealogy, which were professed by the ancient aristocratic world, were not bad things; they were in themselves good things. It is, at least, as reasonable to investigate the origin of a man as to investigate the origin of a cowslip, or a periwinkle, or a prairie dog; the herald with his tabard and trumpet holds his perfectly legitimate place beside the botanist and the conchologist and the natural history expert. What was wrong with the old heraldic speculations was not that they existed, but that they did not go far enough. They did not interest themselves in the blood of the yokel and the mystic paternity of the tinker. In other words, the evil was not that there was too much genealogy, but that there was not enough. And the real work to which democracy ought to address itself is that of extending this racial interest to the case of all ordinary men, of teaching the butcher to be proud of his grandfather, and the railway porter to remember his name with pride. For the single case of the name ‘Smith’ is sufficient to indicate what profundities of origin and significance lie in all our names. The case of Smith is no mere accident; the case would be the same with any one of the common names which we account prosaic or absurd. ‘Jones’ is more mean and preposterous even than Smith, and even those who bear the name of Jones do not probably remember that it is but a corruption of the name that Christ loved. There is not one of us that is not noble in origin, whatever we may be in essence.
Per le persone di nome Smith
Qualche tempo fa il signor C. F. G. Masterman condusse un vigoroso attacco contro il mio timido e umile ottimismo, e dichiarò in sostanza che, quando io sostenevo esservi una poesia in tutte le cose, ero io a fornirla. Vorrei poter affermare di aver mai fornito poesia a qualcosa; mi sembra di essere, nel migliore dei casi, un monotono studioso scientifico che la annota. I sentimentali, i figli di un’appassionata illusione, sono coloro che non ritengono ogni cosa poetica. Poiché sono interamente sotto l’influsso delle parole, della vaga fraseologia corrente, che ritiene «castello» una parola poetica e «ufficio postale» una parola non poetica, che ritiene «cavaliere» una parola poetica e «poliziotto» una parola non poetica, che ritiene «aquila» una parola poetica e «maiale» una parola non poetica. Non dico che non vi sia verità in questo come questione di letteratura; non dico che, in puro stile tecnico, non vi sia differenza tra aquile e maiali. Tutto ciò che desidero far notare è che l’uomo qualunque per strada, quando dice che non c’è poesia in un maiale o in un ufficio postale, è, in realtà, semplicemente inebriato dallo stile letterario. Non sta guardando la cosa in sé; se lo facesse, vedrebbe che essa non è soltanto poetica, ma ovviamente e clamorosamente poetica. Egli pensa che un segnale ferroviario, poniamo, debba essere prosaico, perché la parola suona buffa, e non vi è rima in essa. Ma se guardasse dritto e in faccia ciò che un segnale ferroviario è, si renderebbe conto che esso è, per prendere un caso qualsiasi, un fuoco o una luce rossa accesa per tenere le persone lontane dalla morte, cosa altrettanto poetica quanto la lancia di Britomart o la lampada di Aladino. In breve, è l’uomo che ritiene comuni le cose ordinarie a essere davvero l’uomo che vive in un mondo irreale.
Ma di tutti gli esempi di questo fatto generale che di recente mi sono stati additati, non ve n’è alcuno più singolare e interessante di quello del cognome Smith, nel quale abbiamo uno splendido esempio del fatto che la poesia delle cose comuni è un mero dato di fatto, mentre il carattere banale delle cose comuni è una mera illusione. Poiché, se guardiamo il nome Smith in modo distratto e impressionabile, ricordando come lo udiamo comunemente, ciò che comunemente se ne dice, lo pensiamo come qualcosa di buffo e insignificante; pensiamo alle vignette del Punch, alle battute delle canzonette comiche, a tutta la volgarità e la modernità che sembrano concentrarsi attorno a un signor Smith. Ma, se guardiamo la semplice parola in sé, d’un tratto contempliamo un poema. È il nome di un grande mestiere rude e primordiale, un’arte che è nelle ossa di ogni grande epopea dell’antichità, un’arte da cui l’«arma virumque» sono eternamente dipese, e che essi hanno ripetutamente celebrato. È un mestiere così poetico che perfino i bimbi degli zoticoni di villaggio se ne stanno a fissare la caverna della sua creatrice violenza, con un vago senso che le scintille danzanti e i colpi assordanti siano in qualche modo meravigliosi, come non lo sono le botteghe del ciabattino e del fornaio del villaggio. Il mistero della fiamma, il mistero dei metalli, la lotta tra la più dura delle cose terrene e il più bizzarro degli elementi terreni, la sconfitta dell’inespugnabile ferro a opera del suo unico conquistatore, la bruta calma della Natura, l’appassionata astuzia dell’uomo, l’origine di mille scienze e arti, l’aratura dei campi, il taglio del legno, lo schieramento degli eserciti, e l’intero principio delle armi: queste cose sono scritte con brevità, sì, ma con perfetta chiarezza, sul biglietto da visita del signor Smith. Gli Smith sono una casata di arrogante antichità, di preistorica semplicità. Non sarebbe affatto sorprendente se un certo sprezzante portamento del capo, una certa piega del labbro, contrassegnassero le persone il cui nome fosse Smith. Eppure i romanzieri, quando vogliono descrivere un eroe come forte e romantico, ostinatamente lo chiamano Vernon Aylmer, che non significa nulla, o Bertrand Vallance, che non significa nulla; mentre in ogni momento è in loro potere dargli il sacro nome di Smith, questo nome fatto di ferro e fuoco. Fin dai primissimi inizi della storia e della favola questo clan è andato in battaglia; i loro trofei sono in ogni mano, il loro nome è ovunque; sono più antichi delle nazioni, e il loro segno è il Martello di Thor.
Chiunque porti il nome di Smith può essere imparentato con uno Smith che fu avvocato al tempo di Enrico VIII, o con uno Smith che fu colonnello nell’esercito britannico a Blenheim, o con uno Smith che fu Cavaliere realista, o con uno Smith che fu Puritano, o con uno Smith che fu Vescovo, o con uno Smith che fu impiccato. Tutte queste informazioni storiche esistono in forma assai perfetta. Ma bisogna ricordare che l’origine di una grande famiglia dovrebbe essere non meramente storica, ma anche preistorica. Ogni singola cosa pratica e trionfante di questo mondo è cominciata non con un’esattezza, ma con una leggenda. Queste favole vaghe e gigantesche sono le origini di tutte le cose pratiche. E dietro il più vago e gigantesco Smith, possiamo scorgere i più tremendi contorni dell’informe e favoloso Smith che fu figlio di Vulcano e primo conquistatore del ferro. La vergogna che molti sembrano provare nell’ammettere un tale patronimico o nel rintracciarne l’origine è una cosa straordinaria, ma è parte di un male molto profondo e generale che va avanti già da qualche tempo. L’interesse per la stirpe, l’interesse per la genealogia, che erano professati dall’antico mondo aristocratico, non erano cose cattive; erano in sé cose buone. È, quantomeno, altrettanto ragionevole indagare l’origine di un uomo quanto indagare l’origine di una primula, o di una pervinca, o di un cane della prateria; l’araldo con la sua cotta e la sua tromba occupa il suo posto perfettamente legittimo accanto al botanico e al malacologo e all’esperto di storia naturale. Ciò che c’era di sbagliato nelle vecchie speculazioni araldiche non era che esistessero, ma che non si spingevano abbastanza in là. Non si interessavano al sangue dello zoticone e alla mistica paternità del calderaio. In altre parole, il male non era che vi fosse troppa genealogia, ma che non ve ne fosse abbastanza. E il vero compito cui la democrazia dovrebbe volgersi è quello di estendere questo interesse per la stirpe al caso di tutti gli uomini comuni, d’insegnare al macellaio a essere fiero del proprio nonno, e al facchino della ferrovia a ricordare il proprio nome con orgoglio. Poiché il solo caso del nome «Smith» basta a indicare quali profondità di origine e di significato giacciono in tutti i nostri nomi. Il caso di Smith non è un mero accidente; il caso sarebbe lo stesso con uno qualsiasi dei nomi comuni che reputiamo prosaici o assurdi. «Jones» è ancor più meschino e assurdo persino di Smith, e perfino coloro che portano il nome di Jones probabilmente non ricordano che esso non è che una corruzione del nome che Cristo amò. Non ve n’è uno tra noi che non sia nobile per origine, qualunque cosa possiamo essere in essenza.
The True Vanity of Vanities
It will not, I imagine, be disputed that the one black and inexcusable kind of pride is the pride of the man who has something to be proud of. It is true that you often do hear people saying, as they say other idle and unmeaning things while they are really watching a bird fly or expecting the dinnerbell, that such and such a person is vain, but has some right to be. But you do not find these people actually regarded with anything short of the most delightful loathing; whereas the nice old donkeys who are vain without any earthly ground for vanity at all, are not only universally and rightly beloved, but are made Cabinet Ministers and Bishops, and covered with a continual admiration. And this popular feeling is right. The universal objection to the people who are proud of genuine calibre is not any mere jealousy of them; it is not a paltry or panic-stricken resentment of their admitted superiority. It is, like a great many other things which ordinary people feel in a flash and could not possibly defend, entirely philosophical. The instinct of the human soul perceives that a fool may be permitted to praise himself, but that a wise man ought to praise God. A man who really has a head with brains in it ought to know that this head has been gratuitously clapped on top of him like a new hat. A man who by genius can make masterpieces ought to know that he cannot make genius. A man whose thoughts are as high as the stars ought to know that they roll almost as regardless of his power. A man who possesses great powers ought to know that he does not really possess them.
So it certainly does in practice come about that the more right a man has to vanity the less the sensible human race permits him to be vain. The most really ennobling, the most really health-giving orders of conceit are those that concern something of which a man has no obvious right at all to be conceited, the things over which he exercises no control, which he did not create and which he could not terminate. If we want what we should all regard as the very kindliest and most harmless kind of pride a man could have, the kind of pride that does not in effect make him offensive and unbrotherly, we should all mention something like the love of country or the dim pride of some very ancient race. The people who, profess these are mostly dear old buffers, because they are proud of something they have not procured. Far more brutal than these are the people who have in some sort of way deserved their position—the capitalists, the parvenus, the children of the modern mercantile ferocity. Yet they, too, in their way have a silvery thread of graciousness, because they are stupid, and have been, like the aristocrats, the acceptors of some beautiful accident.
The sin of pride blackens into an unbearable infamy when we came to the artistic and literary people who are proud of their intellects. They are worse than the scientific people, because the scientific people have far less reason to be proud than the artistic and literary people. The scientists to a great extent inherit, like the aristocrats, and are thus kept tolerable; the literary people—such, for instance, as the present writer—create, and are too disgusting for words. The literary arrogance is very nearly the worst, but is not the worst. Those who swagger because they have intellects suppose that intellect is the most important thing on earth, and theirs would be an easy existence only that it happens that it is not. Those who pride themselves on intelligence are priding themselves on a quite subordinate and suburban sort of excellence. The highest thing in the world is goodness. It is so high that, fortunately, the great majority of people who have it are horribly frightened of it, and keep their own virtue as they would keep some sort of wild horse or griffin. But every now and then there do appear people who are good and who know they are good, and who are proud of being good. And if there be any reality burning through the written phrase, if there be any passion which strains at the strings of language, if there be any emotion which, through translations and re-translations and versions and diversions, is still alive, these were the people whom Jesus Christ could hardly forbear to scourge.
This is, I suppose, the whole subtlety of the sin of pride; all other sins attack men when they are weak and weary; but this attacks when men are happy and valuable and nearer to all the virtues. And when it attacks most easily the results are vilest. The whole difference betwen the religion of Christianity and such a religion, for instance, as that of Brahminism, is merely this. The castes of Christian Europe are insolent, abominable, unendurable things, which have been endured, as a matter of fact, for centuries; but they have one great virtue, they are irreligious. But in Brahminism the castes are religious things; it is a virtue to be aristocratic. And against any people who claim to rule me by spiritual superiority, I will everlastingly and happily rebel, conscious of that image of deity which equalises us all.
La vera Vanità delle Vanità
Non sarà, immagino, contestato che l’unica specie nera e imperdonabile di orgoglio sia l’orgoglio dell’uomo che ha qualcosa di cui essere fiero. È vero che si sente spesso la gente dire, come dice altre cose oziose e prive di senso mentre in realtà osserva un uccello che vola o attende la campana della cena, che il tal dei tali è vanitoso, ma ha qualche diritto di esserlo. Ma non si trovano queste persone considerate con nulla di meno del più delizioso disgusto; mentre i cari vecchi somari che sono vanitosi senza il benché minimo fondamento terreno per la vanità, non solo sono universalmente e giustamente amati, ma vengono fatti Ministri del Gabinetto e Vescovi, e ricoperti di una continua ammirazione. E questo sentimento popolare è giusto. L’universale obiezione contro le persone che sono fiere di genuino calibro non è una mera gelosia nei loro confronti; non è un meschino o panico risentimento della loro riconosciuta superiorità. È, come tante altre cose che la gente comune sente in un lampo e non saprebbe in alcun modo difendere, del tutto filosofica. L’istinto dell’anima umana percepisce che a uno stolto può essere consentito di lodare se stesso, ma che un uomo saggio dovrebbe lodare Dio. Un uomo che ha davvero una testa con del cervello dentro dovrebbe sapere che questa testa gli è stata gratuitamente calcata sul capo come un cappello nuovo. Un uomo che per genio sa creare capolavori dovrebbe sapere che non può creare il genio. Un uomo i cui pensieri sono alti come le stelle dovrebbe sapere che esse ruotano quasi con altrettanta noncuranza del suo potere. Un uomo che possiede grandi poteri dovrebbe sapere che in realtà non li possiede.
Così avviene certamente in pratica che quanto più diritto un uomo ha alla vanità, tanto meno la sensata razza umana gli permette di essere vanitoso. I generi di presunzione veramente più nobilitanti, veramente più salutari, sono quelli che riguardano qualcosa per cui un uomo non ha alcun ovvio diritto di essere presuntuoso, le cose sulle quali non esercita alcun controllo, che non ha creato e alle quali non potrebbe porre fine. Se volessimo ciò che tutti considereremmo la specie più benevola e più innocua di orgoglio che un uomo possa avere, quella specie di orgoglio che di fatto non lo rende offensivo e poco fraterno, tutti menzioneremmo qualcosa come l’amore per la patria o il vago orgoglio di qualche stirpe antichissima. Le persone che professano questi sentimenti sono per lo più cari vecchietti, perché sono fieri di qualcosa che non si sono procurati. Assai più brutali di questi sono coloro che in qualche modo hanno meritato la propria posizione — i capitalisti, i parvenu, i figli della moderna ferocia mercantile. Eppure anch’essi, a modo loro, hanno un argenteo filo di grazia, perché sono stupidi, e sono stati, come gli aristocratici, gli accettatori di qualche bell’accidente.
Il peccato dell’orgoglio si annerisce in un’insopportabile infamia quando giungiamo alle persone artistiche e letterarie che sono fiere del proprio intelletto. Esse sono peggiori delle persone scientifiche, perché le persone scientifiche hanno assai meno ragioni di essere fiere delle persone artistiche e letterarie. Gli scienziati in gran parte ereditano, come gli aristocratici, e sono così mantenuti tollerabili; i letterati — come, per esempio, chi scrive — creano, e sono troppo disgustosi per dirlo a parole. L’arroganza letteraria è pressoché la peggiore, ma non è la peggiore. Coloro che si pavoneggiano perché hanno intelletto suppongono che l’intelletto sia la cosa più importante sulla terra, e la loro sarebbe un’esistenza facile, se non fosse che per l’appunto non lo è. Coloro che si fanno un vanto dell’intelligenza si fanno un vanto di una specie di eccellenza del tutto subordinata e provinciale. La cosa più alta al mondo è la bontà. È così alta che, per fortuna, la grande maggioranza di coloro che la possiedono ne è orribilmente spaventata, e custodisce la propria virtù come custodirebbe una specie di cavallo selvaggio o di grifone. Ma di tanto in tanto compaiono davvero persone che sono buone e che sanno di essere buone, e che sono fiere di essere buone. E se vi è una qualche realtà che arde attraverso la frase scritta, se vi è una qualche passione che tende le corde del linguaggio, se vi è una qualche emozione che, attraverso traduzioni e ritraduzioni e versioni e diversioni, è ancora viva, costoro erano le persone che Gesù Cristo a stento poteva trattenersi dal flagellare.
Questa è, suppongo, l’intera sottigliezza del peccato dell’orgoglio; tutti gli altri peccati assalgono gli uomini quando sono deboli e stanchi; ma questo assale quando gli uomini sono felici e stimabili e più vicini a tutte le virtù. E quando assale con la massima facilità, i risultati sono i più vili. L’intera differenza tra la religione del Cristianesimo e una religione, per esempio, come quella del Brahmanesimo, è semplicemente questa. Le caste dell’Europa cristiana sono cose insolenti, abominevoli, insopportabili, che sono state sopportate, in effetti, per secoli; ma hanno una grande virtù: sono irreligiose. Nel Brahmanesimo, invece, le caste sono cose religiose; è una virtù essere aristocratici. E contro qualsiasi popolo che pretenda di governarmi per superiorità spirituale, mi ribellerò eternamente e felicemente, consapevole di quell’immagine della divinità che ci rende tutti uguali.
Written in the Sand
In the mid-way of this our mortal life, I find myself (as in one of the changes of a dream) at a watering-place on the East Coast. I find among other things that it is raining and that my fellow creatures, or at least my fellow visitors, are in a state of irrational indignation over that circumstance. ‘How paradoxical it is in you,’ I say to them with astonishment, ‘to come to a watering-place and exhibit distress when it waters you.’ I explain to them how unjust, how fundamentally unpoetic is the current prejudice against rain.
I point out to them how singular an example this prejudice affords of the perverse and artificial nature of our modern English patriotism… All Englishmen join in reviling that lovable and admirable English thing, the English climate. Everybody blasphemously rails against those mutable and magnificent skies which are a perpetual transformation scene. Everybody vilifies this land of violent and benignant clouds, the only land that could have produced the stormy summers of Constable or the red apocalypse of Turner. Of these mysterious phases rain is only one, and not the least beautiful. When I point this out to my fellow Englishmen their spirit takes on something of the turbid transformations of the English sky. ‘How colossal, how cosmic a vision,’ I say to them, ‘is the rain upon the sea. Worms, you are permitted to gaze upon a reversal of the fifth day of creation. The waters below the firmament were divided from the waters that were above the firmament. And lo! they are wedded again.’ This kind of conversation naturally makes me popular.
I am particularly beloved by those who are frustrated in their desire for sea-bathing. ‘What,’ I exclaim, ‘your whole heart is set on wetting yourself in that silly pool of salt. Give me,’ I cry ecstatically, ‘the Baths of Heaven!’ After thus discussing the matter with various groups of people, I find myself thrown back on a gentle solitude. I wander along the lean sands by the bright, bleak sea. The weather is clearing, and sky and sea shine like pale steel, as if they had been washed and rubbed by the rain. Along the empty sands two small boys are trailing their feet disconsolately. They do not know what to do; they do not know where to go. Only a dim and blind gregarious instinct, a brotherhood as deep as the brutes, leads them to do nothing together and to go nowhere together. They do not speak, they are too weary even to quarrel, though they have made no exertion; they are sunk in that strange and sudden and very occasional boredom which belongs to boyhood, and which is like all boyhood’s experiences, like its love and its fear, pure and intense, the undiluted essence of ennui.
At last, after what seems like leagues of drifting, something happens. Either the sun paints one strip of silver on the leaden sea, or, more likely, the soul itself, with its mysterious silences and activities, rebels and flashes; but one of the boys bounds suddenly into an excavation in the sand, the remains of some other boy’s fortress, and begins to bank it up again furiously, as if he were walling the wild sea out of the flats of England. The other stares a little while with a stupid curiosity, as at a trifle; then on him also comes the primeval will to action which drives metaphysicians to madness, and he also leaps, like Remus, over the wall and begins to build the city. Three minutes afterwards they are talking; six minutes afterwards, still happier sign, they are fighting.
I will not go so far as to say that these two boys were some dark and dreadful cherubim sent to act before my eyes a spiritual mystery, however fine a background for it would have been the grey edge of the sea and that strange blank light so white and wet which grows in the clearing sky. But it is certainly true that the episode of the two little boys depicts as in a small miracle play one of the least of the truths that lie behind our modern civilisation, and constitute the answer to that question which is asked in large letters all over the newspapers, ‘What is Wrong?’
The thing that is wrong is a certain fallacy with which we English have comforted ourselves for same decades, which may be called the fallacy of unity, or in another and slighter form, the fallacy of sociability. What I mean is this, that we have fallen into a habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is full of quarrelling as a sign that it is weak. And we have fallen into the more dangerous habit of regarding the fact that some school or nation is not full of quarrelling as a sign that it is strong or energetic. The reason that the Irish fight each other, and even hate each other, is not that they are Celts. It is not even that they are Irish. It is simply that they have something to do. The reason that the French groups split and fight is not that they are Latins; it is not even that they are French. It is simply that they have something to do. And the reason that English politicians work together in unity is certainly not that they are English. It is that they have nothing to do; when, for instance, they had James II to dethrone, or when they had Walpole to howl against, or when they had Napoleon to fight, they behaved exactly as the French and the Irish do; parties were broken by secessions; heads were broken by sticks.
We are like the two little boys walking along the sands. We go together easily enough as long as we are going nowhere. We can do as others do cheerfully enough, as long as we are doing nothing. But the moment we agree to do anything we begin to disagree about it.
Scritto sulla sabbia
Nel mezzo del cammino di questa nostra vita mortale, mi ritrovo (come in uno dei mutamenti di un sogno) in una stazione balneare della Costa Orientale. Trovo, tra le altre cose, che sta piovendo e che le mie creature simili, o almeno i miei compagni villeggianti, versano in uno stato d’irrazionale indignazione per tale circostanza. «Com’è paradossale da parte vostra», dico loro con stupore, «venire in un luogo di acque e mostrare afflizione quando esso vi annaffia.» Spiego loro quanto sia ingiusto, quanto fondamentalmente impoetico sia il pregiudizio corrente contro la pioggia.
Faccio loro notare quanto singolare esempio questo pregiudizio offra della perversa e artificiale natura del nostro moderno patriottismo inglese… Tutti gli Inglesi si uniscono nell’ingiuriare quella amabile e ammirevole cosa inglese, il clima inglese. Ognuno inveisce blasfemamente contro quei cieli mutevoli e magnifici che sono una perpetua scena di trasformazione. Ognuno vilipende questa terra di nuvole violente e benigne, l’unica terra che avrebbe potuto produrre le tempestose estati di Constable o la rossa apocalisse di Turner. Di queste fasi misteriose la pioggia è soltanto una, e non la meno bella. Quando faccio notare ciò ai miei conterranei inglesi, il loro animo assume qualcosa delle torbide trasformazioni del cielo inglese. «Che visione colossale, che visione cosmica», dico loro, «è la pioggia sul mare. Vermi, vi è concesso di contemplare un rovesciamento del quinto giorno della creazione. Le acque sotto il firmamento furono divise dalle acque che erano sopra il firmamento. Ed ecco! esse sono nuovamente sposate.» Questo genere di conversazione, naturalmente, mi rende popolare.
Sono particolarmente amato da coloro che sono frustrati nel loro desiderio di bagnarsi in mare. «Come!», esclamo, «tutto il vostro cuore è teso a bagnarvi in quella sciocca pozza di sale. Datemi», grido estatico, «i Bagni del Cielo!» Dopo aver così discusso la faccenda con vari gruppi di persone, mi ritrovo respinto in una dolce solitudine. Vago lungo le magre sabbie presso il mare luminoso e desolato. Il tempo si sta rasserenando, e cielo e mare splendono come pallido acciaio, come se fossero stati lavati e strofinati dalla pioggia. Lungo le sabbie deserte due ragazzini trascinano i piedi sconsolati. Non sanno cosa fare; non sanno dove andare. Soltanto un vago e cieco istinto gregario, una fratellanza profonda quanto quella dei bruti, li induce a non far nulla insieme e ad andare in nessun luogo insieme. Non parlano, sono troppo stanchi persino per litigare, benché non abbiano compiuto alcuno sforzo; sono sprofondati in quella strana e improvvisa e rarissima noia che appartiene alla fanciullezza, e che è, come tutte le esperienze della fanciullezza, come il suo amore e la sua paura, pura e intensa, l’essenza non diluita del tedio.
Alla fine, dopo quelle che paiono leghe di vagabondaggio, qualcosa accade. O il sole dipinge una striscia d’argento sul mare plumbeo, oppure, più probabilmente, l’anima stessa, con i suoi misteriosi silenzi e le sue attività, si ribella e lampeggia; ma uno dei ragazzi balza d’improvviso in uno scavo nella sabbia, i resti della fortezza di qualche altro ragazzo, e comincia a rialzarne furiosamente gli argini, come se stesse murando fuori il mare selvaggio dalle pianure d’Inghilterra. L’altro fissa per un poco con una stupida curiosità, come una sciocchezza; poi anche su di lui scende la primordiale volontà d’azione che spinge i metafisici alla follia, e anch’egli salta, come Remo, oltre il muro e comincia a costruire la città. Tre minuti dopo stanno parlando; sei minuti dopo, segno ancor più felice, stanno litigando.
Non mi spingerò fino a dire che questi due ragazzi fossero qualche oscuro e terribile cherubino inviato a recitare davanti ai miei occhi un mistero spirituale, per quanto bello sfondo per esso sarebbe stato il grigio orlo del mare e quella strana luce vuota, così bianca e umida, che cresce nel cielo che si rasserena. Ma è certamente vero che l’episodio dei due ragazzini raffigura, come in una piccola sacra rappresentazione, una delle più modeste tra le verità che stanno dietro la nostra moderna civiltà, e costituiscono la risposta a quella domanda che è posta a grandi lettere su tutti i giornali: «Cosa non va?»
La cosa che non va è un certo errore con cui noi Inglesi ci siamo consolati per alcuni decenni, e che può chiamarsi l’errore dell’unità, o, in altra e più lieve forma, l’errore della socievolezza. Ciò che intendo è questo: che siamo caduti nell’abitudine di considerare il fatto che una qualche scuola o nazione sia piena di litigi come un segno che essa è debole. E siamo caduti nell’abitudine più pericolosa di considerare il fatto che una qualche scuola o nazione non sia piena di litigi come un segno che essa è forte o energica. La ragione per cui gli Irlandesi si combattono l’un l’altro, e persino si odiano l’un l’altro, non è che siano Celti. Non è nemmeno che siano Irlandesi. È semplicemente che hanno qualcosa da fare. La ragione per cui i gruppi francesi si scindono e si combattono non è che siano Latini; non è nemmeno che siano Francesi. È semplicemente che hanno qualcosa da fare. E la ragione per cui i politici inglesi lavorano insieme in unità non è certo che siano Inglesi. È che non hanno nulla da fare; quando, per esempio, ebbero da detronizzare Giacomo II, o quando ebbero Walpole contro cui strepitare, o quando ebbero Napoleone da combattere, si comportarono esattamente come fanno i Francesi e gli Irlandesi; i partiti furono spezzati da scissioni; le teste furono spezzate dai bastoni.
Siamo come i due ragazzini che camminano lungo le sabbie. Andiamo d’accordo abbastanza facilmente finché non andiamo in nessun luogo. Sappiamo fare ciò che fanno gli altri abbastanza allegramente, finché non facciamo nulla. Ma nel momento in cui ci accordiamo per fare qualcosa, cominciamo a essere in disaccordo su di essa.
A Case of Comrades
There was once a lady of a very beautiful character (delicate, yet decisive, for that is the definition of a lady) who asked me whether I did not believe in the possibility of a simple comradeship between the sexes. Being somewhat in a corner, I replied that, as I understood the word comradeship, I did not.
I gave some of my reasons. I did not give my first and firmest and most unhesitating reason, which was this: that I knew quite well that if I had treated the lady herself for four consecutive minutes as a comrade she would have ordered me out of the house. But I gave some other reasons. I remarked that comradeship was a quite special thing; that it was quite different from friendship. I said (and this, oddly enough, I believe to be profoundly true) that a man can be the friend of a woman, but not her comrade. For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.
In the Greek grammar, which I learnt with difficulty and forgot with ease, there was one thing, I remember, which would by itself prove that the Greeks were a great people. I mean the fact that there is in Greek a dual as well as a plural. Two is quite different from any other number, just as one is quite different from any other number: that truth is the basis of marriage. When I knew there was a Greek dual I could easily realise that the Greeks gave philosophy to the world.
My concern here is that comradeship is essentially plural. Now, women are not plural. The very word ‘women’ has about it, I think, a sort of bad taste: it smacks of polygamous Turks or tired and cynical men-about-town. There are no such things as women. There is only the woman you are at this particular moment afraid of or in love with, or inclined to reverence or inclined to assassinate. I think a real crowd of women would be like fifty suns or half a hundred moons—it would be weaker for its numbers. The sun would not have room to shine.
In any case, what I had to say about comradeship to this particular lady was tolerably clear. I merely pointed out that comradeship is a particular sort of human association; and the essential paradox of it is this; that it is at once violent and cool. People talking in twos talk gently, because they feel emphatically: people talking in tens or twenties talk emphatically because they do not care a dump about anything. Friendship becomes comradeship when you have forgotten the presence of your friend. You are addressing the abstract thing, the club, which, when two or three are gathered together (of the male sort at least) is always in the midst of them. Men’s debating clubs have a pedantic phrase which exactly expresses this truth: they talk of ‘speaking to the motion’. It is true; men do speak to a motion, not about it; they talk to a topic. Women talk to each other; that is why their conversations are frightfully fascinating, but too terrible for us to listen to for long without running away.
Do you remember how Thackeray cries out, ‘O les laches que les hommes!’ when George Warrington and Lord Castlewood rush from the room merely because the young American girl has begun a sweet satiric conversation with old Beatrix Esmond? It is almost the truest thing in Thackeray. Our sex is not strong or bold enough to endure that agony of directly personal conversation in which women are supreme. We must have a topic— an impersonal one. And as I told my admirable lady friend, a male friend becomes a comrade when one has forgotten him. To forget a male friend is only to behave like a comrade. But to forget a woman friend is only to behave like a cad. She is herself; he is the club.
But if either that lady or any other lady really wants to know whether she and her sex should share masculine camaraderie; whether they would really be stronger and happier by doing so; whether, in short, we are in such a matter keeping them out of something they would naturally enjoy, I am just now in a position to enlighten them, by giving them an instance, realistically exact and universally typical, of what our masculine comradeship really is.
If any lady wants to know what she is letting herself in for if she goes in for Comradeship, what really happens when comrades meet together, this is what happens. It happened yesterday morning. I was breakfasting with a mob of undergraduates of one of our great Universities, and the whole company was broken up into groups of two or three extravagantly engaged in some argument. I myself was engaged in two arguments. I was trying to prove to an Agnostic on my right that there was such a place as Heaven, and to an Imperialist on my left that there was such a place as England: when suddenly all our minor clamours were cloven with a monstrous and crashing noise from the other end of the table. Ten men were talking at once, three were beating on the table in pure passion, one was screaming above the din, and then (as is common in such crises) there was, for an instant, an unmeaning silence, and then the voice of one of the best orators of the Union rose, piercing and pathetic, throbbing to the echoes of the roof, alone:
‘I do not say that the corridor ran the whole length of the train. What I say, what I say emphatically and with the full responsibility of my intellect, is that it ran on the left-hand side of our carriage. And I know that I speak the truth.’
We all rushed to the spot. I dropped England with one hand and Heaven with the other. I craned my neck to find out what it was all about. It was about this very profound and urgent question: whether when three persons present travelled to Scotland about two years ago in a luncheon car, the shape of that car had been such that there was a corridor down the left-hand side or a kind of passage down the middle. Only three persons present had ever seen the car, and they could not agree; but we soon took it out of their puny hands. We argued it in the abstract. We discussed whether in the nature of things the passage would have been in the middle. I founded a sect of my own, midway between the Orthodox Passagist position and the Extreme Corridorians’ position. Some held that the nature of the luncheon should be taken into account in all evidence of the shape of the luncheon-car. We made maps of the car with forks and spoons on the table, and little lumps of sugar to show where the people sat. The whole discussion took nearly two hours.
But, indeed, temporal measurements cannot express the length, for we talked as if we were the immortal Gods and had all eternity before us: for to be outside time is one of the strange elements of fraternity. We were only interrupted by some academic custom which required that the Union officials should be photographed. And even then one of them moved. He kept on quivering and stirring until the photographer broke into pathetic complaint. Then he, in return, broke out, ‘I never denied that there was a case for the corridor at the side. What I said—’ But we crushed him, reluctantly. All this is, to the best of my recollection, quite true.
I fancy that I do not see any very approving expression on the faces of my lady friends. They are not moved by this Homeric war. They feel, perhaps, that the question of whether one luncheon-car two years ago was of a particular shape was not an urgent question. They feel that when argued by eighteen youths for two hours it might even have become a tiring question. O mightiest of all things, O mothers of the gods, they are only little things that you do not understand, only a few sports and follies of the stags of the herd. Be you content as you are secure: you understand everything except comradeship.
Un caso di camerati
C’era una volta una dama di carattere assai bello (delicata, eppure decisa, ché questa è la definizione di una dama) che mi chiese se io non credessi nella possibilità di un semplice cameratismo tra i sessi. Trovandomi alquanto con le spalle al muro, risposi che, per come intendevo la parola cameratismo, no.
Addussi alcune delle mie ragioni. Non addussi la mia prima e più salda e più risoluta ragione, che era questa: che sapevo assai bene che, se avessi trattato la dama stessa per quattro minuti consecutivi da camerata, mi avrebbe fatto cacciare fuori di casa. Ma addussi alcune altre ragioni. Osservai che il cameratismo era una cosa del tutto speciale; che era del tutto diverso dall’amicizia. Dissi (e questo, per quanto strano, credo sia profondamente vero) che un uomo può essere l’amico di una donna, ma non il suo camerata. Poiché l’amicizia implica l’individualità; mentre il cameratismo implica in realtà la temporanea subordinazione, se non il temporaneo annegamento dell’individualità. Gli amici stanno meglio a essere due; ma i camerati stanno meglio a essere due milioni.
Nella grammatica greca, che imparai con difficoltà e dimenticai con facilità, c’era una cosa, ricordo, che da sola basterebbe a provare che i Greci erano un grande popolo. Intendo il fatto che in greco esiste un duale oltre che un plurale. Il due è del tutto diverso da ogni altro numero, proprio come l’uno è del tutto diverso da ogni altro numero: questa verità è il fondamento del matrimonio. Quando seppi che esisteva un duale greco potei facilmente rendermi conto che i Greci diedero la filosofia al mondo.
Ciò che qui mi preme è che il cameratismo è essenzialmente plurale. Ora, le donne non sono plurali. La parola stessa «donne» ha in sé, credo, una sorta di cattivo gusto: sa di Turchi poligami o di uomini di mondo stanchi e cinici. Non esistono cose come le donne. Esiste soltanto la donna di cui, in questo particolare momento, hai paura o sei innamorato, o che sei incline a riverire o incline ad assassinare. Penso che una vera folla di donne sarebbe come cinquanta soli o mezzo centinaio di lune — sarebbe più debole a causa del suo numero. Il sole non avrebbe spazio per risplendere.
In ogni caso, ciò che avevo da dire sul cameratismo a questa particolare dama era abbastanza chiaro. Mi limitai a far notare che il cameratismo è un particolare tipo di associazione umana; e il suo paradosso essenziale è questo: che è al tempo stesso violento e freddo. Le persone che parlano in due parlano dolcemente, perché sentono con enfasi: le persone che parlano in dieci o in venti parlano con enfasi perché non gliene importa un accidente di nulla. L’amicizia diventa cameratismo quando hai dimenticato la presenza del tuo amico. Ti stai rivolgendo alla cosa astratta, al circolo, che, quando due o tre sono radunati insieme (di sesso maschile, almeno) è sempre in mezzo a loro. I circoli di dibattito maschili hanno una frase pedante che esprime esattamente questa verità: parlano di «parlare alla mozione». È vero; gli uomini parlano a una mozione, non di essa; parlano a un argomento. Le donne parlano l’una con l’altra; ecco perché le loro conversazioni sono spaventosamente affascinanti, ma troppo terribili perché noi le si ascolti a lungo senza fuggire via.
Ricordate come Thackeray esclama «O les lâches que les hommes!» quando George Warrington e Lord Castlewood si precipitano fuori dalla stanza soltanto perché la giovane americana ha iniziato una dolce e satirica conversazione con la vecchia Beatrix Esmond? È quasi la cosa più vera in tutto Thackeray. Il nostro sesso non è abbastanza forte o audace da sopportare quell’agonia della conversazione direttamente personale in cui le donne sono sovrane. Ci occorre un argomento — uno impersonale. E come dissi alla mia ammirevole amica, un amico maschio diventa un camerata quando lo si è dimenticato. Dimenticare un amico maschio è soltanto comportarsi da camerata. Ma dimenticare un’amica donna è soltanto comportarsi da mascalzone. Lei è se stessa; lui è il circolo.
Ma se quella dama o qualsiasi altra dama desidera davvero sapere se lei e il suo sesso dovrebbero condividere la camaraderie maschile; se sarebbero davvero più forti e più felici facendolo; se, in breve, in tale faccenda le stiamo tenendo fuori da qualcosa di cui godrebbero naturalmente, sono proprio ora in grado d’illuminarle, dando loro un esempio, realisticamente esatto e universalmente tipico, di ciò che il nostro cameratismo maschile è davvero.
Se qualche dama vuol sapere in che cosa s’imbarca se si dà al Cameratismo, cosa accade davvero quando i camerati s’incontrano, ecco cosa accade. Accadde ieri mattina. Stavo facendo colazione con una folla di studenti di una delle nostre grandi Università, e l’intera compagnia era divisa in gruppi di due o tre stravagantemente impegnati in qualche discussione. Io stesso ero impegnato in due discussioni. Stavo cercando di provare a un Agnostico alla mia destra che esisteva un luogo come il Cielo, e a un Imperialista alla mia sinistra che esisteva un luogo come l’Inghilterra: quando all’improvviso tutti i nostri clamori minori furono squarciati da un rumore mostruoso e fragoroso proveniente dall’altro capo della tavola. Dieci uomini parlavano tutti insieme, tre battevano sulla tavola in pura passione, uno strillava sopra il frastuono, e poi (com’è comune in tali crisi) vi fu, per un istante, un silenzio privo di senso, e poi la voce di uno dei migliori oratori della Union si levò, penetrante e patetica, vibrando fino agli echi del soffitto, sola:
«Non dico che il corridoio corresse per tutta la lunghezza del treno. Ciò che dico, ciò che dico con enfasi e con la piena responsabilità del mio intelletto, è che esso correva sul lato sinistro della nostra carrozza. E so di dire la verità.»
Ci precipitammo tutti sul posto. Lasciai cadere l’Inghilterra con una mano e il Cielo con l’altra. Allungai il collo per scoprire di cosa si trattasse. Si trattava di questa profondissima e urgente questione: se, quando tre delle persone presenti viaggiarono in Scozia circa due anni fa in una carrozza ristorante, la forma di quella carrozza fosse stata tale da avere un corridoio sul lato sinistro o una specie di passaggio nel mezzo. Solo tre delle persone presenti avevano mai visto la carrozza, e non riuscivano a mettersi d’accordo; ma noi presto la togliemmo dalle loro deboli mani. La discutemmo in astratto. Dibattemmo se, nella natura delle cose, il passaggio sarebbe stato nel mezzo. Fondai una setta tutta mia, a metà strada tra la posizione Passaggista Ortodossa e la posizione dei Corridoriani Estremi. Alcuni sostenevano che la natura del pranzo dovesse essere presa in considerazione in ogni prova sulla forma della carrozza ristorante. Facemmo mappe della carrozza con forchette e cucchiai sulla tavola, e zollette di zucchero per mostrare dove sedevano le persone. L’intera discussione durò quasi due ore.
Ma, in verità, le misure temporali non possono esprimerne la durata, poiché parlavamo come se fossimo gli Dèi immortali e avessimo tutta l’eternità davanti a noi: poiché essere fuori dal tempo è uno degli strani elementi della fraternità. Fummo interrotti soltanto da qualche usanza accademica che richiedeva che i funzionari della Union fossero fotografati. E persino allora uno di loro si mosse. Continuò a tremare e ad agitarsi finché il fotografo non proruppe in un patetico lamento. Allora egli, di rimando, sbottò: «Non ho mai negato che vi fosse un argomento a favore del corridoio sul lato. Ciò che ho detto…» Ma lo schiacciammo, con riluttanza. Tutto ciò è, per quanto ricordo, del tutto vero.
M’immagino di non scorgere alcuna espressione molto approvante sui volti delle mie amiche. Non sono commosse da questa guerra omerica. Sentono, forse, che la questione se una certa carrozza ristorante di due anni fa fosse di una forma particolare non fosse una questione urgente. Sentono che, dibattuta da diciotto giovani per due ore, poteva persino diventare una questione stancante. O più possenti di tutte le cose, o madri degli dèi, sono solo piccole cose che voi non comprendete, solo alcuni giochi e follie dei cervi del branco. Siate contente, poiché siete al sicuro: comprendete ogni cosa tranne il cameratismo.
Something
It is customary for cultivated people from century to century to set up some artistic fashion and pretend to be more old-world or natural than they are. Thus the French noblesse played at being old Greek shepherds and shepherdesses; for the rich are always craving for barbarism while the poor are always pushing (rather blindly) for more civilisation. Within our own memory drawing-rooms have been full of dismal people in dingy garments who were supposed (I hardly know why) to recall the gay colours and coarse virtues of the Middle Ages. If ever I adopted one of these barbaric affectations it would be one which has been, I think, undeservedly neglected. In the British Museum, while others are admiring the bleak busts of Caesars or the placid horrors of Assyria, I always stray to a kindlier and more homely department. I am found worshipping the hairy and goggle-eyed images from the Sandwich Islands; idols to which I really feel a man might bow down. For the beautiful Gods of Greece are cruel; but one always feels that an ugly god might be kind. If therefore I ever arrange my house on one artistic plan (which God forbid) it shall be on a rugged Polynesion plan; it shall be on a goggle-eyed and hairy sort of plan. Everything I hear about these savages attracts me to them more and more. It is vain to tell me that under such a regime the man will be lazy and fond of pleasure while the woman is hard-working and practical; for that is already the case in the house which I inhabit at present. I do not mind painting myself; in fact, I never can paint anything else without doing so. If I colour so much as a cardboard figure for a toy theatre, I emerge painted like the leaves of autumn, painted like the sky of morning, as it says in Hiawatha.
I cannot imagine how the strange notion arose that ignorance is the origin of superstitions. It is true indeed, if we mean ignorance in the same sense that Plato and Bacon were ignorant; the common ignorance of all men about the meaning of their monstrous destiny. But if this be intended, the phrase that ignorance is the origin of all superstitions is a coarse and misleading way of stating the case. It would be much truer to say that agnosticism is the origin of all religions. That is true; the agnostic is at the beginning not the end of human progress. But those who speak of superstitions born of ignorance generally mean that myths and mystical assertions have arisen from mere accidental or animal incapacity to realise all the circumstances of the case. The old Victorian scientific theory was that men invented fairy tales because they had not yet grasped facts. They thought the moon was a woman because they had not the sense enough to see it was a moon. They thought the sea was a god because no kind scientist had ever passed by and pointed out that it was really the sea. They worshipped a stone as a fetish because their lack of geological knowledge prevented them from noting that it was a stone. They were so dull, inexperienced and narrowly materialistic that they could see no difference between a crackle in the clouds and a ringing hammer hurled by a red-headed giant; between a spat of yellow fire in the sky and a young god driving horses.
That is the materialistic theory of myths, and it is manifest nonsense. Nobody could ever have thought that the moon looked like a woman, even of the amplest contours. Nobody can ever have thought that the sun looked like a carriage and pair, because it doesn’t. If they used these terms in connection with sun or moon, mountain or river, rock or tree, they were certainly not using them because they knew no better. On the contrary, they were using them because they knew something much better; because a woman is more beautiful than moonlight and a young man more splendid than the sun.
This is essentially admitted about such fables as those of Phoebus and Artemis; or even Balder and Thor; here it is vaguely conceded that ‘poets’ and not mere ignorant savages, have had something to do with the matter. But what the folklorists of the Fraser type will not see is that the ruder savages also are poets; even if they are minor poets. All that they say about their totems, their taboos, their dances, and services to the dead must be understood with a certain poetic sympathy, as meant to be weird, glorious, shocking, or even impossible. They are the abrupt expressions of unique spiritual experiences, quiet and queerly coloured moods; dreams and glimpses that do really lie on the borderline between this existence and some other. If a savage says that a pepper-plant is his divine great-grandmother, he is not speaking from ignorance, for ignorance would leave him with the bare knowledge that it was a pepper-plant. Rather he is speaking from knowledge, fragmentary and perhaps dangerous knowledge. He may have seen something about a pepper-plant that it is better not to see.
There is one really tremendous question. The savage respecting the pepper-plant, the idolator adoring the stone, the sage choosing his star, the patriot dying for a boundary, all do unmistakably mean something—something far down in the abysses of the universe and the soul. Do they mean that everything is sacred? Or do they perhaps mean that something is sacred—something they have not found?
Qualcosa
È consuetudine che le persone colte, di secolo in secolo, istituiscano qualche moda artistica e fingano di essere più antiche o più naturali di quanto siano. Così la noblesse francese giocava a fare gli antichi pastori e le pastorelle di Grecia; poiché i ricchi bramano sempre la barbarie mentre i poveri spingono sempre (piuttosto ciecamente) verso maggiore civiltà. Entro i limiti della nostra memoria i salotti si sono riempiti di gente lugubre in vesti scialbe che si supponeva (a stento so perché) richiamasse i colori vivaci e le rozze virtù del Medioevo. Se mai adottassi una di queste affettazioni barbariche, sarebbe una che è stata, credo, immeritatamente trascurata. Al British Museum, mentre altri ammirano i gelidi busti dei Cesari o gli placidi orrori dell’Assiria, io me ne vado sempre verso un reparto più benevolo e più familiare. Mi si trova ad adorare le immagini pelose e dagli occhi sporgenti delle Isole Sandwich; idoli davanti ai quali sento davvero che un uomo potrebbe prostrarsi. Perché gli splendidi Dèi di Grecia sono crudeli; ma si ha sempre la sensazione che un dio brutto possa essere gentile. Se dunque disponessi mai la mia casa secondo un solo piano artistico (che Dio non voglia), sarà secondo un aspro piano polinesiano; sarà secondo una sorta di piano dagli occhi sporgenti e peloso. Tutto ciò che sento su questi selvaggi mi attira a loro sempre di più. È vano dirmi che sotto un simile regime l’uomo sarà pigro e amante del piacere mentre la donna è laboriosa e pratica; perché questo è già il caso nella casa che abito attualmente. Non mi dispiace dipingermi; anzi, non riesco mai a dipingere nient’altro senza farlo. Se coloro anche solo una figura di cartone per un teatrino, ne emergo dipinto come le foglie d’autunno, dipinto come il cielo del mattino, come dice in Hiawatha.
Non riesco a immaginare come sia sorta la strana idea che l’ignoranza sia l’origine delle superstizioni. È vero, in effetti, se intendiamo l’ignoranza nello stesso senso in cui Platone e Bacone erano ignoranti; la comune ignoranza di tutti gli uomini riguardo al significato del loro mostruoso destino. Ma se è questo che si intende, la frase che l’ignoranza è l’origine di tutte le superstizioni è un modo rozzo e fuorviante di esporre la questione. Sarebbe molto più vero dire che l’agnosticismo è l’origine di tutte le religioni. Questo è vero; l’agnostico sta all’inizio, non alla fine del progresso umano. Ma coloro che parlano di superstizioni nate dall’ignoranza generalmente intendono che i miti e le asserzioni mistiche siano sorti da una mera accidentale o animale incapacità di comprendere tutte le circostanze del caso. La vecchia teoria scientifica vittoriana era che gli uomini inventassero le fiabe perché non avevano ancora afferrato i fatti. Pensavano che la luna fosse una donna perché non avevano abbastanza senno da vedere che era una luna. Pensavano che il mare fosse un dio perché nessun gentile scienziato era mai passato di lì a far notare che in realtà era il mare. Adoravano una pietra come feticcio perché la loro mancanza di conoscenza geologica impediva loro di notare che era una pietra. Erano così ottusi, inesperti e gretti nel loro materialismo che non sapevano vedere alcuna differenza tra un crepitio tra le nubi e un martello risonante scagliato da un gigante dai capelli rossi; tra uno sprazzo di fuoco giallo nel cielo e un giovane dio che guida i cavalli.
Questa è la teoria materialistica dei miti, ed è manifesta insensatezza. Nessuno avrebbe mai potuto pensare che la luna somigliasse a una donna, foss’anche dei contorni più ampi. Nessuno può mai aver pensato che il sole somigliasse a una carrozza a due cavalli, perché non è così. Se usavano questi termini in connessione con il sole o la luna, il monte o il fiume, la roccia o l’albero, di certo non li usavano perché non sapessero fare di meglio. Al contrario, li usavano perché sapevano qualcosa di molto migliore; perché una donna è più bella del chiaro di luna e un giovane uomo più splendido del sole.
Questo viene sostanzialmente ammesso riguardo a favole come quelle di Febo e Artemide; o persino Balder e Thor; qui si concede vagamente che dei «poeti», e non meri selvaggi ignoranti, abbiano avuto qualcosa a che fare con la faccenda. Ma ciò che i folcloristi del tipo di Frazer non vogliono vedere è che anche i selvaggi più rozzi sono poeti; foss’anche poeti minori. Tutto ciò che dicono dei loro totem, dei loro tabù, delle loro danze e dei loro riti per i morti va inteso con una certa poetica simpatia, come inteso a essere strano, glorioso, sconvolgente o persino impossibile. Sono le espressioni brusche di uniche esperienze spirituali, di umori quieti e stranamente colorati; sogni e barlumi che davvero giacciono sul confine tra questa esistenza e qualche altra. Se un selvaggio dice che una pianta di pepe è la sua divina bisnonna, non parla dall’ignoranza, perché l’ignoranza lo lascerebbe con la nuda nozione che si tratta di una pianta di pepe. Piuttosto egli parla dalla conoscenza, una conoscenza frammentaria e forse pericolosa. Può aver visto qualcosa su una pianta di pepe che è meglio non vedere.
C’è una domanda davvero tremenda. Il selvaggio che rispetta la pianta di pepe, l’idolatra che adora la pietra, il saggio che sceglie la sua stella, il patriota che muore per un confine, tutti indubbiamente intendono qualcosa—qualcosa giù in fondo negli abissi dell’universo e dell’anima. Intendono forse che tutto è sacro? O intendono forse che qualcosa è sacro—qualcosa che non hanno trovato?
At about twenty-one minutes past two today I suddenly saw that asparagus is the secret of aristocracy. I was trying to put long limp stalks into my mouth, when the idea came into my head; and the stalk failed to do so. I do not refer to any merely metaphorical and superficial comparisons which could easily be made between them. We might say that most of the organism was left dead white; merely that a little button at the top might be bright green. We might draw the moral that average aristocrats are made out much stronger than they are; and illustrate it from average asparagi. They say that any stick is good enough to beat a dog with; but did anyone ever try to beat a dog with a stick of asparagus? We might draw the moral that aristocratic traditions are made out much more popular than they really were. ‘Norman’ gets mispronounced as English. In this way three French leopards were somehow turned into British lions. And in this way also the solemn word Asparagus, which means nothing so far as I know, was turned by the populace into ‘sparrowgrass’, which means two of the most picturesque things in the world. Asparagus, which I presume to have been the name of a Roman pro-consul, Marcus Asparagus Esculens, or what not, never deserved such luck as to lose its origin in two things so true and common as the bold birds of the town or the green democracy of the fields. Or again, we might say of sticks of asparagus that they have often lost their heads, and we might say the same of aristocrats. Both heads have been bitten off by the guillotine before now. But to complete the parallel we must maintain that the head of the aristocrat was the best part of him; and this is often hard to maintain. But, indeed, I do not base the view upon any such fancies from phraseology. Far deeper in earth are the roots of asparagus.
The one essential of an aristocracy is to be in advance of its age. That is, there must be something new known to a few. There must be a password; and it must always be a new password. Moreover, it must be by its nature, an irrational password, for anything quite rational might rapidly be calculated even by the uninitiated. In the same way it is essential to any social observance that involves a social distinction, that the observance should be, in this sense at least, artificial. That is, you can only know the observance as the soldier knows the password, because he has been told.
The working instance best known to us of the middle classes is the old arbitrary distinction about how to eat asparagus. Now, excluding cannibalism and the habit of eating sand (about which I can offer no opinion) there is really nothing one can eat which is less fitted to be eaten with the fingers than asparagus. It is long; it is greasy; it is loose and liable to every sort of soft yet sudden catastrophe; it is always eaten with some sort of oily sauce; and its nice conduct would involve the powers of a professional juggler confirmed with some practice in climbing the greasy pole. Most things could easily be eaten with one’s fingers. Cold beef could quite easily be eaten with one’s fingers; or simply with one’s teeth. I have seldom seen a noble cheese without an impulse merely to fix my fangs in it. New potatoes could be eaten with the fingers as cleanly as Easter eggs; and whitebait might as well be shovelled into our open mouths by a Whitebait Machine, for all the use we make of a knife and fork to dissect them. We could easily eat fish cakes as we eat seed cake. Cold Christmas pudding is a substance with all the majesty of coloured marble; far cleaner, stronger and more coherent than any ordinary bread or biscuit. Yet all these we are supposed to approach through the intervention of a little stunted sword or a stumpy trident. Only this one tiresome, toppling vegetable, I eat between my finger and thumb. I should be better off as a giraffe eating the top of a palm-tree: it doesn’t want any holding up.
We will not exaggerate. Eating soup with the fingers the young student should not attempt; and sauces, custards and even curries are no field for the manual labourer. I would not eat stewed rhubarb with my fingers, or, indeed, with any instrument that science could devise. Even with things involving treacle, I have not a good touch. But, while strictly avoiding anything like exaggeration or frivolity, I still note that the point of asparagus is that it is not the food—among other foods, specially fitted for the fingers. In other words, the principle could not have been deduced from abstract reason, or have grown out of the general instincts of men. It could not have been custom: that is why it was etiquette.
The brotherhood of man is a fact which in the long run wears down all other facts. Therefore, a privileged class, if it would avoid sliding naturally back into the body of mankind must keep up an incessant excitement about new projects, new cultures and new prejudices, new skirts and stockings. It must tell a new tale every day or perish, like the lady of the Arabian Nights. Tennyson, who was too much touched with this aristocratic—or snobbish—Futurism, wrote, ‘Lest one good custom should corrupt the world’, which really means lest everybody should learn the right way of eating asparagus. And so, out of luxury and waste and weariness, the fever they call Progress came into the world.
Do you tell me they don’t eat asparagus with their fingers now? Do I not know that in some of the best houses they have little tongs for each person, which are charming? Have I not heard that asparagus is now lowered into the open mouth on a string, or shot into the mouth with a small gun, or eaten with the toes, or not eaten at all? No; I do not know, that is what I wish to point out. They have changed the password.
Verso le due e ventuno minuti di oggi ho visto d’un tratto che l’asparago è il segreto dell’aristocrazia. Stavo cercando di infilarmi in bocca lunghi e molli gambi, quando l’idea mi venne in testa; e il gambo non ci riuscì. Non mi riferisco ad alcun confronto meramente metaforico e superficiale che si potrebbe facilmente fare tra loro. Potremmo dire che la maggior parte dell’organismo restava di un bianco morto; e che soltanto un piccolo bottone in cima poteva essere di un verde brillante. Potremmo trarne la morale che gli aristocratici medi sono rappresentati molto più robusti di quanto siano; e illustrarla con gli asparagi medi. Dicono che qualsiasi bastone sia buono abbastanza per bastonare un cane; ma qualcuno ha mai provato a bastonare un cane con un gambo di asparago? Potremmo trarne la morale che le tradizioni aristocratiche sono rappresentate molto più popolari di quanto in realtà fossero. «Norman» viene pronunciato erroneamente come inglese. In questo modo tre leopardi francesi furono in qualche modo trasformati in leoni britannici. E in questo modo anche la solenne parola Asparago, che per quanto ne so non significa nulla, fu trasformata dal popolino in «sparrowgrass», che significa due delle cose più pittoresche del mondo. Asparago, che presumo sia stato il nome di un proconsole romano, Marcus Asparagus Esculens, o quel che sia, non meritò mai tanta fortuna da perdere la propria origine in due cose così vere e comuni come gli arditi uccelli della città o la verde democrazia dei campi. Oppure ancora, potremmo dire dei gambi d’asparago che hanno spesso perso la testa, e potremmo dire lo stesso degli aristocratici. Entrambe le teste sono state morse via dalla ghigliottina, in passato. Ma per completare il parallelo dobbiamo sostenere che la testa dell’aristocratico era la parte migliore di lui; e questo è spesso difficile da sostenere. Ma, in verità, io non fondo la tesi su simili fantasie tratte dalla fraseologia. Molto più in profondità nella terra affondano le radici dell’asparago.
L’unica cosa essenziale di un’aristocrazia è essere in anticipo sulla propria epoca. Vale a dire, ci deve essere qualcosa di nuovo noto a pochi. Ci deve essere una parola d’ordine; e deve essere sempre una parola d’ordine nuova. Inoltre, deve essere per sua natura una parola d’ordine irrazionale, poiché qualsiasi cosa del tutto razionale potrebbe rapidamente essere calcolata anche dai non iniziati. Allo stesso modo è essenziale a qualsiasi osservanza sociale che comporti una distinzione sociale, che l’osservanza sia, almeno in questo senso, artificiale. Cioè, puoi conoscere l’osservanza solo come il soldato conosce la parola d’ordine, perché gli è stata detta.
L’esempio pratico a noi meglio noto tra le classi medie è la vecchia distinzione arbitraria su come mangiare l’asparago. Ora, escludendo il cannibalismo e l’abitudine di mangiare sabbia (sui quali non posso esprimere alcun parere) non c’è davvero nulla che si possa mangiare che sia meno adatto a essere mangiato con le dita dell’asparago. È lungo; è unto; è molle e soggetto a ogni sorta di soffice ma improvvisa catastrofe; si mangia sempre con una qualche salsa oleosa; e la sua accorta manovra richiederebbe le doti di un giocoliere professionista confermate da un po’ di pratica nell’arrampicarsi sull’albero della cuccagna. La maggior parte delle cose potrebbe facilmente essere mangiata con le dita. La carne fredda potrebbe benissimo essere mangiata con le dita; o semplicemente con i denti. Raramente ho visto un nobile formaggio senza l’impulso di piantarci semplicemente le zanne. Le patate novelle potrebbero essere mangiate con le dita altrettanto pulitamente delle uova di Pasqua; e i bianchetti potrebbero benissimo essere spalati nelle nostre bocche aperte da una Macchina per Bianchetti, per tutto l’uso che facciamo di forchetta e coltello per sezionarli. Potremmo facilmente mangiare le crocchette di pesce come mangiamo la torta di semi. Il budino natalizio freddo è una sostanza con tutta la maestà del marmo colorato; assai più pulito, robusto e coerente di qualsiasi ordinario pane o biscotto. Eppure tutte queste cose siamo tenuti ad affrontarle con l’intervento di una piccola spada rachitica o di un tozzo tridente. Solo quest’unico fastidioso, vacillante ortaggio io lo mangio tra il pollice e l’indice. Starei meglio come una giraffa che mangia la cima di una palma: non ha bisogno di essere sorretto.
Non esagereremo. A mangiare la minestra con le dita il giovane studente non dovrebbe cimentarsi; e salse, creme e persino curry non sono un campo per il lavoratore manuale. Non mangerei il rabarbaro cotto con le dita, né, in verità, con qualsiasi strumento la scienza potesse escogitare. Persino con le cose che comportano la melassa, non ho una buona mano. Ma, pur evitando rigorosamente qualsiasi esagerazione o frivolezza, osservo comunque che il punto dell’asparago è che non è il cibo—tra gli altri cibi—particolarmente adatto alle dita. In altre parole, il principio non avrebbe potuto essere dedotto dalla ragione astratta, né essere cresciuto dagli istinti generali degli uomini. Non poteva essere consuetudine: ecco perché era etichetta.
La fratellanza umana è un fatto che alla lunga logora tutti gli altri fatti. Perciò, una classe privilegiata, se vuole evitare di scivolare naturalmente indietro nel corpo dell’umanità, deve mantenere un incessante fervore per nuovi progetti, nuove culture e nuovi pregiudizi, nuove gonne e calze. Deve raccontare una storia nuova ogni giorno o perire, come la dama delle Mille e una notte. Tennyson, che era troppo toccato da questo futurismo aristocratico—o snob—scrisse: «Affinché una sola buona consuetudine non corrompa il mondo», che in realtà significa affinché tutti non imparino il modo giusto di mangiare l’asparago. E così, dal lusso e dallo spreco e dalla stanchezza, la febbre che chiamano Progresso venne al mondo.
Mi venite a dire che ormai non mangiano più gli asparagi con le dita? Non so forse che in certe fra le case migliori tengono, per ciascun commensale, delle graziose pincette? Non ho forse sentito che ormai l’asparago lo si cala nella bocca aperta con uno spago, o lo si spara in bocca con un piccolo fucile, o lo si mangia con le dita dei piedi, oppure non lo si mangia affatto? No; non lo so: è proprio questo che voglio far notare. Hanno cambiato la parola d’ordine.
The English Spirit and the Flea
I met a man who was awaiting a letter from his family in the Eastern Counties. Before the letter came he learnt that the place where his family lived had been singled out specially as one of the places where the Germans have lately made hell in heaven with their colossal and destructive flying ships. He did not show much perturbation; but when the letter from his nearest relatives at last arrived, he naturally opened it with some interest.
It was all about a flea. I will not develop the topic, though Swift allegorised infinity under that image, and William Blake thought it worthwhile to paint a most careful portrait of the Ghost of a Flea. In the East Anglian household, anyhow, there had never before been the ghost of a flea. The solitary specimen was by the householder connected in some way with the imprudence of his relative in some slumming adventure: and it was held up before him, as it were, in derision and pursued with a wealth of detail. Its arrival, adventures, and personal eccentricities were scientifically set forth. Any entomologist writing on the habits and habitat of the East Anglian flea would find it a most careful compilation. It contained no reference to the war. There is another animal, not the East Anglian flea, on which the entomologist might gradually have gained a little light. I do not refer to the Zeppelin. Zeppelins did not occur in the letter. I refer to a little-known animal called the Englishman, whose habits, habitat, and other curious constituent elements the German entomologists might find it worthwhile to study, and of which this letter is a fragmentary but not quite valueless record.
I do not idolatrize this animal. I do not expect the German to fall dawn and worship the East Anglian inhabitant any more than the East Anglian flea—like an ancient Egyptian worshipping a beetle. The qualities he displays in such cases are characteristics rather than abstract virtues. No good ever came of merely flattering one’s nation: a man flatters the land he fears, but not the land he loves. The Englishman does not neglect war merely because he is calm and wise and strong; there are many respects in which he can be wayward and foolish and weak. Like the other animal, he can be at his best an irritant and at his worst a parasite. The Englishman is not simply calm and wise and strong; but he is English. I do not set my country above human temptations, like an allegory on a ceiling; I do not say that enemies could not conceivably perturb the British Lion or fluster the British Bulldog. I do say that I am not, as a fact, perturbed, and specially not perturbed by people who say ‘The British Lion is drawing in his horns’—I perceive that they have no vivid mental picture of a lion. I am not flustered by people who say ‘The British Bulldog will soon have his wings clipped’, because I know such curtailment to be both unnecessary and impossible. And the distinction is important. Our very weaknesses are strengths so long as they are undiscovered weaknesses. It is possible to remind my own countrymen very generally of whereabouts the strengths and weaknesses lie. I would not do even that if there were the smallest chance of a German understanding it.
Some of the best things the English have done were the things they didn’t do. For instance, in spite of a seething fuss of small leagues and committees, they cannot really be induced to ‘do anything for Shakespeare’. Lord Melbourne (who was almost as English as Shakespeare) used to solve the most intense diplomatic crises by saying, ‘Can’t we let it alone?’ We can. We let Shakespeare alone. Just as we have an enormous negative monument to Shakespeare, so we have an enormous negative victory over Count Zeppelin. As a nation we receive his flaming visitations with something more insulting than defiance—absentmindedness. Such absence of mind can co-exist with considerable presence of mind at particular moments. It did in Hamlet, who always struck me as a particularly English character—which was, no doubt, the reason why he could not get on with the Danes, and had to be sent to England. His sudden lunge at the curtain was very like the sudden rush our mob sometimes makes at the alien. But, on the whole, it is the other attitude that is our ultimate strength. Not anything we have done against the Zeppelins, but all that we have not done against them, is our monument aere perennius. Let us continue not to notice Zeppelins. I do not mean this with a dull literalism; and I disclaim responsibility for anyone who should take it so. Notice them, of course— but not so much as fleas.
There is one kindred characteristic of the English which is very subtle and easily expressed wrongly, but which plays a very great part in practical things of this kind. I know not what to call it, except perhaps, somewhere-elseness. It is a sort of distant optimism. It is a refusal to accept as final the facts immediately in front of us— a strong belief in the other side of the world, or even the other side of the moon. It was rather pompously expressed by the phrase about the sun never setting on the British Empire. The same thought was much more sincerely expressed in the popular ejaculation, ‘Somewhere the sun is shining!’ This came, I think, from one of our noble comic songs, and used to be uttered by people when they broke valuable teapots, or put their feet into cucumber-frames. Its excess was well satirised by Mr John Burns when he summed up Imperialism under the text, ‘The eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth’. And it is true, as of every true national characteristic, that it has the defect of its quality, and often goes with an undue laxity about the rights of our own field or the laws of our own parish. But it goes also with more imaginative generosity about remote lands like Bulgaria or Japan than is common in more closely logical countries. And there really exists many a City clerk who is more concerned for bombs in Belgium than bombs in the City.
I repeat that I will have nothing to do with bragging about these good qualities as if they were the only good qualities. It is not a good quality, but a defect in us that we do not understand the French revanche; it only means that we have not long enough memories to make tyrants and enemies keep their promises. Our people are courageous, not because of pride and praise, but rather in spite of it. In spite of our education we are still intelligent; and it was often in spite of our athletics that we were strong. The Battle of Waterloo was not won on Eton playing fields. The Battle of Waterloo (as the same authority said, and he certainly knew something about it) was won by the scum of the earth. And today also we are largely saved by the people whom we have failed to educate, failed to rule, failed to provide with land or religion, and very nearly failed to save from starvation. It is these people who in the travail and agony of the hour, provide the note which is most needed and most unexpected; the note of frivolity. And it is they, even more than their social superiors, who have seen the heavens filled with fire; and thought it less than a flea-bite.
Lo spirito inglese e la pulce
Ho incontrato un uomo che aspettava una lettera dalla sua famiglia nelle Contee Orientali. Prima che la lettera arrivasse, apprese che il luogo dove viveva la sua famiglia era stato preso di mira in modo particolare come uno dei luoghi dove i Tedeschi hanno di recente fatto un inferno in cielo con le loro colossali e distruttive navi volanti. Non mostrò molto turbamento; ma quando la lettera dei suoi parenti più stretti giunse infine, la aprì naturalmente con un certo interesse.
Parlava tutta di una pulce. Non svilupperò l’argomento, benché Swift abbia allegorizzato l’infinito sotto quell’immagine, e William Blake abbia ritenuto degno di dipingere un ritrattissimo accurato del Fantasma di una Pulce. Nella casa dell’Anglia Orientale, in ogni caso, non c’era mai stato prima il fantasma di una pulce. L’esemplare solitario fu dal padrone di casa collegato in qualche modo all’imprudenza del suo parente in una qualche avventura tra i bassifondi: e gli fu sventolato davanti, per così dire, in derisione e inseguito con dovizia di particolari. Il suo arrivo, le sue avventure e le sue eccentricità personali furono scientificamente esposti. Qualsiasi entomologo che scrivesse sulle abitudini e sull’habitat della pulce dell’Anglia Orientale lo troverebbe una compilazione assai accurata. Non conteneva alcun riferimento alla guerra. C’è un altro animale, non la pulce dell’Anglia Orientale, sul quale l’entomologo avrebbe potuto gradualmente farsi un po’ di luce. Non mi riferisco allo Zeppelin. Gli Zeppelin non comparivano nella lettera. Mi riferisco a un animale poco conosciuto chiamato l’Inglese, le cui abitudini, il cui habitat e i cui altri curiosi elementi costitutivi gli entomologi tedeschi potrebbero trovare degno di studiare, e di cui questa lettera è una testimonianza frammentaria ma non del tutto priva di valore.
Non idolatro questo animale. Non mi aspetto che il Tedesco cada prostrato e adori l’abitante dell’Anglia Orientale, non più di quanto la pulce dell’Anglia Orientale—come un antico Egizio che adorava uno scarabeo. Le qualità che egli mostra in tali casi sono caratteristiche più che virtù astratte. Nulla di buono venne mai dal mero adulare la propria nazione: un uomo adula la terra che teme, ma non la terra che ama. L’Inglese non trascura la guerra semplicemente perché è calmo e saggio e forte; ci sono molti aspetti nei quali egli può essere capriccioso e sciocco e debole. Come l’altro animale, al suo meglio può essere un irritante e al suo peggio un parassita. L’Inglese non è semplicemente calmo e saggio e forte; ma è inglese. Non pongo il mio paese al di sopra delle tentazioni umane, come un’allegoria su un soffitto; non dico che i nemici non potrebbero concepibilmente turbare il Leone britannico o scombussolare il Bulldog britannico. Dico bensì che io non sono, di fatto, turbato, e in particolare non turbato da chi dice: «Il Leone Britannico sta ritirando le corna»—colgo che costoro non hanno una vivida immagine mentale di un leone. Non sono scombussolato da chi dice: «Al Bulldog Britannico saranno presto tarpate le ali», perché so che tale mutilazione è tanto inutile quanto impossibile. E la distinzione è importante. Proprio le nostre debolezze sono forze, finché sono debolezze non scoperte. È possibile ricordare ai miei stessi connazionali in modo assai generale dove all’incirca giacciano le forze e le debolezze. Non lo farei nemmeno, se ci fosse la minima possibilità che un Tedesco lo comprendesse.
Alcune delle cose migliori che gli Inglesi hanno fatto sono state le cose che non hanno fatto. Per esempio, malgrado un ribollente trambusto di piccole leghe e comitati, non li si può davvero indurre a «fare qualcosa per Shakespeare». Lord Melbourne (che era quasi inglese quanto Shakespeare) soleva risolvere le più intense crisi diplomatiche dicendo: «Non possiamo lasciar perdere?» Possiamo. Lasciamo perdere Shakespeare. Proprio come abbiamo un enorme monumento negativo a Shakespeare, così abbiamo un’enorme vittoria negativa sul Conte Zeppelin. Come nazione riceviamo le sue fiammeggianti visitazioni con qualcosa di più insultante della sfida—la distrazione. Tale assenza di mente può coesistere con una considerevole presenza di spirito in momenti particolari. Così fu in Amleto, che mi è sempre parso un personaggio particolarmente inglese—il che, senza dubbio, fu la ragione per cui non riusciva ad andar d’accordo con i Danesi, e dovette essere spedito in Inghilterra. La sua improvvisa stoccata alla tenda era molto simile all’improvviso slancio che la nostra folla talvolta compie contro lo straniero. Ma, nel complesso, è l’altro atteggiamento a essere la nostra forza ultima. Non ciò che abbiamo fatto contro gli Zeppelin, ma tutto ciò che non abbiamo fatto contro di loro, è il nostro monumento aere perennius. Continuiamo a non notare gli Zeppelin. Non intendo questo con un ottuso letteralismo; e declino ogni responsabilità per chiunque dovesse prenderlo così. Notateli, certo— ma non più delle pulci.
C’è una caratteristica affine degli Inglesi che è assai sottile e facilmente esprimibile a sproposito, ma che gioca un ruolo assai grande nelle cose pratiche di questo genere. Non so come chiamarla, se non forse un altrove-ismo. È una sorta di distante ottimismo. È un rifiuto di accettare come definitivi i fatti immediatamente davanti a noi— una forte fede nell’altro lato del mondo, o persino nell’altro lato della luna. Fu espresso in modo piuttosto pomposo dalla frase sul sole che non tramonta mai sull’Impero Britannico. Lo stesso pensiero fu espresso in modo molto più sincero nella popolare esclamazione: «Da qualche parte il sole splende!» Questa venne, credo, da una delle nostre nobili canzoni comiche, e la si soleva pronunciare quando la gente rompeva preziose teiere, o metteva i piedi nei cassoni dei cetrioli. Il suo eccesso fu ben satireggiato dal signor John Burns quando riassunse l’Imperialismo sotto il versetto: «Gli occhi del folle sono ai confini della terra». Ed è vero, come di ogni vera caratteristica nazionale, che essa ha il difetto della propria qualità, e spesso va di pari passo con un’indebita lassità riguardo ai diritti del nostro stesso campo o alle leggi della nostra stessa parrocchia. Ma va anche di pari passo con una più immaginosa generosità verso terre remote come la Bulgaria o il Giappone di quanto sia comune in paesi più strettamente logici. E realmente esiste più di un impiegato della City che è più preoccupato per le bombe in Belgio che per le bombe nella City.
Ripeto che non voglio aver nulla a che fare con lo spavaldeggiare su queste buone qualità come se fossero le uniche buone qualità. Non è una buona qualità, ma un difetto in noi il fatto che non comprendiamo la revanche francese; significa solo che non abbiamo memorie abbastanza lunghe per costringere tiranni e nemici a mantenere le loro promesse. La nostra gente è coraggiosa, non per orgoglio e lode, ma piuttosto a dispetto di essi. A dispetto della nostra istruzione siamo ancora intelligenti; ed è stato spesso a dispetto della nostra atletica che siamo stati forti. La Battaglia di Waterloo non fu vinta sui campi da gioco di Eton. La Battaglia di Waterloo (come disse la stessa autorità, ed egli certamente ne sapeva qualcosa) fu vinta dalla feccia della terra. E anche oggi siamo in larga misura salvati dalle persone che abbiamo mancato di istruire, mancato di governare, mancato di dotare di terra o di religione, e per un pelo mancato di salvare dalla fame. Sono queste persone che, nel travaglio e nell’agonia dell’ora, forniscono la nota più necessaria e più inaspettata; la nota della frivolezza. E sono esse, ancor più dei loro superiori sociali, ad aver visto i cieli riempirsi di fuoco; e ad averlo giudicato meno di un morso di pulce.
The Hobby and the Head Waiter
In the matter of property we may find an obvious but useful parable in the difference between living in a house and living in an hotel. There are some practical conveniences in the hotel; but there is first of all a sort of megalomaniac glamour of great spaces and gilded ceilings that is not practical at all. At best there is the romance of personal adventure and accident; but there is no corporate and communal life.
It is when we pass to the practical difference between a house and an hotel that we come to the creative nature of property. I have taken this figure of speech for convenience and clarity, because I do not think everybody understands what we mean by this creative quality. Now a man in an hotel is entirely receptive. He may receive as many things as an average man in an average house. He may receive more things than most modern men in most modern houses. But these things must all be of a certain recognised and conventional character. He cannot add anything to the hotel. If he were to attempt to improve the hotel in any sweeping and striking fashion, his adventures would be somewhat sensational. Rich people in a rich hotel are in one sense protected and too much protected; but though they have protection they have not property. The point, however, is this; that nobody can provide beforehand for the creative needs, as people can provide for the protective need. It is in the nature of any creation that it is in some sense original; and it is in the nature of anything original that it cannot be foreseen. There is no prophecy of poetry; there is not even any prophecy of prophecy. A Futurist cannot predict a song even if he can produce a song; which is not always the case. He cannot foresee a poem or foresee a picture; he cannot even foresee a practical joke. If he did, indeed, it might possibly not occur.
In some hotels of the American sort there used to be an instrument erected in the bedroom; it had rather the general appearance of a clock, with a finger pivoted so as to point at various inscriptions on the dial, and these were supposed to be a complete list of the needs of man, in his highest capacity of an American hotel-frequenter. Whenever he wanted a Prairie Oyster or a Horse’s Neck, a secretary or a sandwich, or anything (for all I know) from a daily paper to a dentist, he had only to move the hand on the clock and a bell rang and the person or object was somehow produced from the interior mechanism of the hotel. Now it is quite true that even the real list was long and detailed, and that it could be extended and applied to almost any length along certain lines. It would no doubt include not only a dentist but a detective.
But we may here turn from the fancies about what a man might desire to the facts about what he does desire. The simplest course is for each man to take himself as an example; as a typical and not necessarily an egotistic example. I am not a person especially prone by nature to be a nuisance in an hotel; I am not a vegetarian; I am not an epicure; I can eat and drink and smoke the ordinary things provided in ordinary places. But if it came to living my life in an hotel, especially that part of my life that is creative in the sense of being personal, I think I should find the list of things on the bedroom clock a little insufficient. For instance, if I have a hobby or a potential hobby, it is probably a toy theatre. Hobbies imply holidays; and while it is very arguable that journalists do no real work; it is also true that they have no real holidays. But if I had no need to earn my bread and cheese, and no country and no conscience and none of all those nonsensical things, I should settle down with a serious aim in life, which would be working a toy theatre. It is to me almost as much a box of miracles today, as it was when I first saw it as a baby; and I feel as if I knew that mimic world before I knew the real one. The gilded figures of a prince and princess glow in my memory against black oblivion, almost before the memory of my father who had made them for me; which things may be an allegory. Now this example is an understatement. I am in no sense alone in this taste; Stevenson and my father and many others evidently shared it. But it is an excellent example of something which, without being exactly eccentric, is just sufficiently out of the ordinary way to make it most improbable that any practical organizer would see it; or provide it, or put it into any definite class of things. I do not think I could say carelessly to a waiter, over my shoulder, ‘Just get me a black coffee and Benedictine and a toy theatre, will you?’ I cannot imagine the headwaiter roaring down the speaking tube, ‘Three Manhattan cocktails and a toy theatre’. I cannot imagine it was mentioned among the minor luxuries printed on the piece of clockwork in the bedroom. But even if it was, it would not meet the case. Even if the waiter returned laden with toy theatres, as he sometimes comes laden with cigar-boxes, it would not solve the problem. For a hobby implies work as well as play; a process as well as a result. It would be a little nearer the mark if the head waiter brought me trays of tinsel and cardboard and that glorious metallic paper as intoxicating as all his wines, a crimson richer even than his burgundy and a green better than the greenest Chartreuse. Even then it would only work if the head waiter would sit down on the floor with me and help to cut the things out; and of this one could never be absolutely certain.
As these reflections pass through my mind, my abstracted eye is riveted on an ordinary wooden chair such as they make at Wycombe from the woods of South Bucks. And I see, as in a vision, that if one were to saw off the back of the chair, knock its bars out and screw it like a frame on to the four feet, the whole would make an almost exact model of a toy theatre, the bars between the legs forming the slips for the wings. I cannot pause for the experiment just now, having something worse to do; but the fancy happens to be an exact example of the sort of thing I mean; a fancy that could not possibly be foreseen, yet which might quite possibly be fulfilled. No great organizing mind would say, ‘See that seven thousand chairs are ordered from High Wycombe in case somebody wishes to turn them into toy theatres.’ It is a hundred to one that nobody ever thought of this nonsensical notion before, and that nobody will ever think of it again. I do not say the world would have lost anything, but I do say I should have lost something, and that something is my own. It is private property.
Now, when I am in my sumptuous and select suite of apartments at the Hotel Beelzebub, reclining on rugs of leopard and tiger skin under tapestries of cloth of gold, it is quite certain that I shall not be encouraged to rush at one of the hotel chairs and begin cutting it up with a chopper or a saw. My explanation that I am turning it into a toy theatre will be coldly received. It may even lead to my being removed from that cushioned apartment to a still more cushioned apartment, commonly called a padded cell. But the point here is that the two forms of human comfort and convenience run distinct and parallel; and no increase of the one comes an inch nearer to the other. The hotel might multiply its chairs by the million, it might vary its pattern of chairs by the thousand, but it would never come into the same world as that perverse and personal day-dream of turning a chair, first into a stool and then into a stage. In that world are all the wonders of the creative side of property; and though I have taken for convenience the lighter and more portable types of property, the same psychology applies to the larger business of production. A man wishes to own his field, primarily because its productiveness is the protection of his honour and independence; but partly also because he wishes to do things with his field which he cannot explain to anybody, and is only vaguely shaping for himself. He is considering a balance between particular necessities and particular luxuries which escapes classification; he is ready, so to speak, to live on turnips on a chance of growing tobacco. I mean he is ready to act on a calculation exactly like the turning of a wooden chair into a wooden stage; something at once fantastic and thrifty. Where that power is democratically distributed men are more than citizens, they are all artists.
With this note on the purely creative or spiritual side of property I conclude the sketch I have here attempted against communism. I need not repeat for the hundredth time that the case against communism is not a case for capitalism; indeed the case against communism is that it is much too like capitalism. It matters little whether our allegorical hotel is called by capitalists an hotel or by communists a hostel. The case against it is that it is not a home, and that the spirit of man will never feel at home in it. It can only be a home when it has a sense of something at once restful and capricious, which is the mood of all creative action. It is only by narrowing itself to locality and privacy that the soul can broaden itself with real imagination and novelty. To listen to all the modern talk about organization and trade and transport is like watching a man wandering about carrying an uprooted tree. The tree is intended for transplantation; it is involved in problems of transport; it enjoys all the educational improvements of travel. It is carried by cosmopolitan trains through various countries with marvellous speed; it is unpacked or carted about in colossal railway stations with marvellous organization. But there are only two things worth saying about it. One is that the tree may be already dead. The other is that there is only one possible way of seeing it again alive. Only when it is planted finally in one fixed place on the face of the earth, will it ever bear fruit or blossom or become a greenhouse of birds.
L’hobby e il capocameriere
In materia di proprietà possiamo trovare un’ovvia ma utile parabola nella differenza tra il vivere in una casa e il vivere in un albergo. Vi sono alcune comodità pratiche nell’albergo; ma vi è anzitutto una sorta di megalomane fascino di grandi spazi e soffitti dorati che non è affatto pratico. Al meglio c’è il romanzesco dell’avventura e del caso personale; ma non c’è alcuna vita corporativa e comunitaria.
È quando passiamo alla differenza pratica tra una casa e un albergo che giungiamo alla natura creativa della proprietà. Ho preso questa figura retorica per comodità e chiarezza, perché non credo che tutti comprendano cosa intendiamo con questa qualità creativa. Ora, un uomo in un albergo è interamente ricettivo. Può ricevere altrettante cose di un uomo medio in una casa media. Può ricevere più cose della maggior parte degli uomini moderni nella maggior parte delle case moderne. Ma queste cose devono essere tutte di un certo carattere riconosciuto e convenzionale. Egli non può aggiungere nulla all’albergo. Se tentasse di migliorare l’albergo in qualche modo radicale e clamoroso, le sue avventure sarebbero alquanto sensazionali. La gente ricca in un albergo ricco è in un certo senso protetta e troppo protetta; ma per quanto abbia protezione, non ha proprietà. Il punto, tuttavia, è questo: che nessuno può provvedere in anticipo ai bisogni creativi, come si può provvedere al bisogno di protezione. È nella natura di ogni creazione l’essere in qualche senso originale; ed è nella natura di ogni cosa originale il non poter essere prevista. Non c’è profezia della poesia; non c’è neppure alcuna profezia della profezia. Un Futurista non può prevedere un canto, anche se sa produrre un canto; il che non è sempre il caso. Non può prevedere un poema né prevedere un quadro; non può neppure prevedere uno scherzo. Se lo facesse, in verità, potrebbe darsi che non avvenga.
In alcuni alberghi del tipo americano si soleva erigere uno strumento nella camera da letto; aveva piuttosto l’aspetto generale di un orologio, con una lancetta imperniata così da puntare a varie iscrizioni sul quadrante, e queste dovevano essere un elenco completo dei bisogni dell’uomo, nella sua più alta capacità di frequentatore di un albergo americano. Ogni volta che voleva un Prairie Oyster o un Horse’s Neck, una segretaria o un panino, o qualsiasi cosa (per quanto ne so) da un quotidiano a un dentista, non doveva far altro che muovere la lancetta sull’orologio e una campanella suonava e la persona o l’oggetto veniva in qualche modo prodotto dal meccanismo interno dell’albergo. Ora è del tutto vero che persino l’elenco reale era lungo e dettagliato, e che poteva essere esteso e applicato quasi a qualsiasi lunghezza lungo certe linee. Comprenderebbe senza dubbio non solo un dentista ma un detective.
Ma qui possiamo passare dalle fantasie su ciò che un uomo potrebbe desiderare ai fatti su ciò che egli desidera davvero. Il modo più semplice è che ogni uomo prenda sé stesso come esempio; come esempio tipico e non necessariamente egoistico. Non sono una persona particolarmente incline per natura a essere una seccatura in un albergo; non sono vegetariano; non sono un epicureo; so mangiare e bere e fumare le cose ordinarie fornite in luoghi ordinari. Ma se si trattasse di vivere la mia vita in un albergo, specialmente quella parte della mia vita che è creativa nel senso di essere personale, credo che troverei l’elenco delle cose sull’orologio della camera un po’ insufficiente. Per esempio, se ho un hobby o un hobby potenziale, è probabilmente un teatrino. Gli hobby implicano vacanze; e per quanto sia assai discutibile che i giornalisti facciano un vero lavoro, è anche vero che non hanno vere vacanze. Ma se non avessi bisogno di guadagnarmi il pane e il formaggio, né un paese né una coscienza né tutte quelle cose insensate, mi metterei tranquillo con uno scopo serio nella vita, che sarebbe il far funzionare un teatrino. Esso è per me quasi tanto una scatola di miracoli oggi, quanto lo era quando lo vidi per la prima volta da bambino; e mi sembra di aver conosciuto quel mondo mimico prima di conoscere quello reale. Le figure dorate di un principe e di una principessa risplendono nella mia memoria contro il nero oblio, quasi prima del ricordo di mio padre che le aveva fatte per me; il che potrebbe essere un’allegoria. Ora questo esempio è un’attenuazione. Non sono in alcun senso solo in questo gusto; Stevenson e mio padre e molti altri evidentemente lo condividevano. Ma è un eccellente esempio di qualcosa che, senza essere esattamente eccentrico, è appena sufficientemente fuori dall’ordinario da rendere assai improbabile che un qualsiasi organizzatore pratico lo veda; o lo provveda, o lo collochi in una qualche precisa classe di cose. Non credo che potrei dire con noncuranza a un cameriere, da sopra la spalla: «Mi porti un caffè nero e del Benedictine e un teatrino, per favore?» Non riesco a immaginare il capocameriere che urla nel tubo acustico: «Tre cocktail Manhattan e un teatrino». Non riesco a immaginare che fosse menzionato tra i lussi minori stampati sul pezzo di meccanismo a orologeria nella camera. Ma anche se lo fosse, non risponderebbe al caso. Anche se il cameriere tornasse carico di teatrini, come talvolta viene carico di scatole di sigari, non risolverebbe il problema. Perché un hobby implica lavoro oltre al gioco; un processo oltre a un risultato. Sarebbe un po’ più vicino al segno se il capocameriere mi portasse vassoi di orpelli e cartone e quella gloriosa carta metallica inebriante quanto tutti i suoi vini, un cremisi più ricco persino del suo borgogna e un verde migliore della più verde Chartreuse. Anche allora funzionerebbe solo se il capocameriere si sedesse sul pavimento con me e aiutasse a ritagliare le cose; e di questo non si potrebbe mai essere assolutamente certi.
Mentre queste riflessioni mi attraversano la mente, il mio occhio distratto è inchiodato su un’ordinaria sedia di legno come quelle che fabbricano a Wycombe con i boschi del South Bucks. E vedo, come in una visione, che se si segasse via lo schienale della sedia, si togliessero le sue barre e la si avvitasse come una cornice sui quattro piedi, il tutto formerebbe un modello quasi esatto di un teatrino, le barre tra le gambe formando le guide per le quinte. Non posso fermarmi per l’esperimento proprio ora, avendo qualcosa di peggio da fare; ma la fantasia si dà il caso essere un esatto esempio del tipo di cosa che intendo; una fantasia che non potrebbe assolutamente essere prevista, eppure che potrebbe benissimo essere realizzata. Nessuna grande mente organizzatrice direbbe: «Provvedete che siano ordinate settemila sedie da High Wycombe nel caso qualcuno desideri trasformarle in teatrini». C’è cento contro uno che nessuno abbia mai pensato a questa insensata idea prima, e che nessuno ci penserà mai più. Non dico che il mondo avrebbe perso qualcosa, ma dico bensì che io avrei perso qualcosa, e quel qualcosa è mio. È proprietà privata.
Ora, quando mi trovo nella mia sontuosa e scelta suite di appartamenti all’Hotel Belzebù, reclinato su tappeti di pelle di leopardo e di tigre sotto arazzi di panno d’oro, è del tutto certo che non sarò incoraggiato a precipitarmi su una delle sedie dell’albergo e a cominciare a farla a pezzi con una mannaia o una sega. La mia spiegazione che la sto trasformando in un teatrino sarà accolta freddamente. Potrebbe persino condurre alla mia rimozione da quell’appartamento imbottito a un appartamento ancora più imbottito, comunemente chiamato cella imbottita. Ma il punto qui è che le due forme di conforto e comodità umana corrono distinte e parallele; e nessun aumento dell’una si avvicina di un pollice all’altra. L’albergo potrebbe moltiplicare le sue sedie per il milione, potrebbe variare il suo modello di sedie per il migliaio, ma non entrerebbe mai nello stesso mondo di quel perverso e personale sogno a occhi aperti di trasformare una sedia, prima in uno sgabello e poi in un palcoscenico. In quel mondo sono tutte le meraviglie del lato creativo della proprietà; e sebbene io abbia preso per comodità i tipi di proprietà più leggeri e più trasportabili, la stessa psicologia si applica al più grande affare della produzione. Un uomo desidera possedere il proprio campo, anzitutto perché la sua produttività è la protezione del suo onore e della sua indipendenza; ma in parte anche perché desidera fare col suo campo cose che non sa spiegare a nessuno, e che va solo vagamente plasmando per sé. Egli sta considerando un equilibrio tra particolari necessità e particolari lussi che sfugge alla classificazione; è pronto, per così dire, a vivere di rape sulla probabilità di coltivare tabacco. Voglio dire che è pronto ad agire secondo un calcolo esattamente simile alla trasformazione di una sedia di legno in un palcoscenico di legno; qualcosa a un tempo fantastico e parsimonioso. Dove quel potere è distribuito democraticamente gli uomini sono più che cittadini, sono tutti artisti.
Con questa nota sul lato puramente creativo o spirituale della proprietà concludo lo schizzo che ho qui tentato contro il comunismo. Non ho bisogno di ripetere per la centesima volta che l’accusa contro il comunismo non è una difesa del capitalismo; anzi l’accusa contro il comunismo è che esso è fin troppo simile al capitalismo. Poco importa se il nostro albergo allegorico venga chiamato dai capitalisti un albergo o dai comunisti un ostello. L’accusa contro di esso è che non è una casa, e che lo spirito dell’uomo non vi si sentirà mai a casa. Può essere una casa solo quando ha un senso di qualcosa a un tempo riposante e capriccioso, che è l’umore di ogni azione creativa. È solo restringendosi alla località e alla vita privata che l’anima può ampliarsi con vera immaginazione e novità. Ascoltare tutte le moderne chiacchiere sull’organizzazione e il commercio e i trasporti è come guardare un uomo che vaga qua e là portando un albero sradicato. L’albero è destinato al trapianto; è coinvolto in problemi di trasporto; gode di tutti i miglioramenti educativi del viaggio. Viene portato da treni cosmopoliti attraverso vari paesi con velocità meravigliosa; viene disimballato o carreggiato in colossali stazioni ferroviarie con meravigliosa organizzazione. Ma ci sono solo due cose degne d’esser dette a suo riguardo. Una è che l’albero potrebbe essere già morto. L’altra è che c’è un solo modo possibile di rivederlo vivo. Solo quando sarà piantato definitivamente in un unico luogo fisso sulla faccia della terra, potrà mai portare frutto o fiorire o divenire una serra di uccelli.
In Praise of Pie
We should like to utter our fervid and enthusiastic thanks to the clergyman who wrote to The Times the other day to protest against the neglect, both as a title and an Institution, of the glorious English possession known to our fathers as ‘Apple Pie’; and shamefully described by various degraded outcasts and aliens as Apple Tart. As he very acutely pointed out, nobody says that a room is in apple tart order. As he warmly affirmed, no practical joker ever made an apple tart bed. Whether in the arrangements of rooms or the disarrangement of bedrooms, the traditions of our fathers testify to the true form of the word. A hundred inspiring battle-hymns rise to inspire the march; as in that truly national anthem which says
‘I’m not a glutton But I do like pie.’
as well as those lyrics that form the foundation of all education and told us that A was an apple pie. ‘Pie’ is a full and powerful word, like pig or pork; which fills the mouth with an appropriate and anticipatory fullness; it is impossible to say the words ‘I do like tart’ and produce the desired effect of talking with your mouth full.
It is not a light or trivial matter. There are questions, seemingly accidental, that divide Society by a spiritual chasm far more real than the artificial frontiers of the factions. The armies of Piemen and Tarters confront each other across an abyss. The passionate consumers of Pie are divided from the frigid triflers with Tart by something far more essential than ever divided Whigs from Tories or Liberals from Conservatives. We could almost guess a man’s religion, or at least the religion towards which he tends, by his ignorant instincts on this solemn and profound matter. It is not only that he who says Pie, and disdains to say Tart, is preserving the language of Shakespeare and the legend of the English and pure religion, breathing household laws. There are in it yet more subtleties of doctrine. He who says ‘Pie’ is he who, being assured that a bodily thing is lawful is not ashamed merely because it is bodily; but finds far more of Christian humility in the frank confession of the body. But he, who shrinks from the old gross word, feeling in it a suggestion of greed or ignominy, is of the tribe that turn into Theosophists and Esoteric Buddhists and end as mere Manichees and haters of the creative word. They, who would insinuate that they are merely toying with a sort of light confectionery, when confronted with the solid duty of eating pie, are of the sort who complains of the coarseness of the Marriage Service or the clamour of church bells or the habit of singing carols at Christmas. We do not mean to blame those who, being in invincible ignorance, happen to say ‘tart’ through habit and the teaching of ill-advised pastors and masters; but when the question is fairly faced, it would be found true that the obstinate and unrepentant are of this order. They are also of the kind that turn pale at a pun; or, what is worse, gravely discuss whether the example of Shakespeare makes it permissible. For the pleasure of annoying them, we utter in a loud voice this protest on behalf of the ‘Pie’ as a symbol of Piety.
Elogio del Pasticcio
Vorremmo esprimere il nostro fervido ed entusiastico ringraziamento al sacerdote che l’altro giorno scrisse al Times per protestare contro la negligenza, sia come titolo sia come Istituzione, della gloriosa proprietà inglese nota ai nostri padri come ‘Apple Pie’; e vergognosamente descritta da vari reietti e stranieri degradati come Apple Tart. Come egli molto acutamente osservava, nessuno dice che una stanza è in ordine da apple tart. Come egli calorosamente affermava, nessun burlone ha mai rifatto un letto alla apple tart. Sia nell’ordine delle stanze sia nel disordine delle camere da letto, le tradizioni dei nostri padri attestano la vera forma della parola. Cento inni di battaglia esaltanti si levano a ispirare la marcia; come in quell’inno davvero nazionale che dice
‘Non sono un ghiottone Ma il pie mi piace davvero.’
così come quelle liriche che formano il fondamento di ogni educazione e che ci insegnarono che A stava per apple pie. ‘Pie’ è una parola piena e potente, come pig o pork; che riempie la bocca di una pienezza appropriata e anticipatrice; è impossibile dire le parole ‘I do like tart’ e produrre il desiderato effetto di parlare con la bocca piena.
Non è faccenda leggera o triviale. Vi sono questioni, apparentemente accidentali, che dividono la Società con un abisso spirituale assai più reale delle frontiere artificiali delle fazioni. Gli eserciti dei Pastai e dei Tartari si fronteggiano attraverso un baratro. I consumatori appassionati di Pie sono divisi dai freddi gingillatori con la Tart da qualcosa di assai più essenziale di ciò che mai divise i Whig dai Tory o i Liberali dai Conservatori. Potremmo quasi indovinare la religione di un uomo, o almeno la religione verso cui egli tende, dai suoi istinti ignoranti su questa solenne e profonda materia. Non è soltanto che colui che dice Pie, e sdegna di dire Tart, sta preservando la lingua di Shakespeare e la leggenda degli inglesi e la pura religione, che spira leggi domestiche. Vi sono in ciò ancora più sottigliezze di dottrina. Colui che dice ‘Pie’ è colui che, avendo l’assicurazione che una cosa corporea è lecita, non si vergogna di essa per il solo fatto che è corporea; ma trova assai più umiltà cristiana nella franca confessione del corpo. Ma colui che rifugge dall’antica parola grossolana, avvertendovi un’insinuazione di ingordigia o di ignominia, è della tribù di quelli che si volgono in Teosofi e Buddisti esoterici e finiscono come meri Manichei e odiatori della parola creatrice. Costoro, che vorrebbero insinuare di trastullarsi appena con una sorta di leggera pasticceria, posti di fronte al solido dovere di mangiare pie, sono della specie che si lagna della rozzezza del rito del Matrimonio o del clamore delle campane di chiesa o dell’usanza di cantare canti natalizi a Natale. Non intendiamo biasimare coloro che, versando in invincibile ignoranza, si trovano a dire ‘tart’ per abitudine e per l’insegnamento di malaccorti pastori e maestri; ma quando la questione è affrontata con lealtà, si troverà vero che gli ostinati e impenitenti sono di questa schiera. Sono anche del genere che impallidisce a un gioco di parole; o, ciò che è peggio, discute gravemente se l’esempio di Shakespeare lo renda ammissibile. Per il piacere di irritarli, pronunciamo a voce alta questa protesta in favore del ‘Pie’ come simbolo di Pietà.
Culture Versus Civilisation
An interesting distinction, which is almost a contradiction, has recently been drawn between Culture and Civilization. Two leading writers of the day, the one a Russian and the other a German, have accepted this difference, even if they use it rather differently. The German, being a freethinker and an agnostic, is, of course, rigidly bound by the iron rivets of the dogmas of materialism. The Russian, being a Greek Orthodox Christian and the relic of a ruined and persecuted Church, is a little more cheerful, and seems to think there is some such thing as human freedom and a chance for human liberty. But both agree, more or less, in a certain theory of the relation between Culture and Civilization; and it is roughly that Civilization is the end of Culture, even in the sense of the death of Culture.
Restating the matter roughly here, for my own purposes, the conception is that Culture is growth; the original sprouting of man’s spiritual or artistic nature, as it appears in the native folklore or primitive architecture of a whole people. Civilization is rather the limit or compromise laid upon this by the discovery that there are other peoples or other methods of production. In following Culture, a man develops his arts; that is to say, his tastes. Consequently, true Culture, like true Charity, begins at home. With Civilization there appears something that is not only purely public, but a little homeless. Culture is growing such flowering trees as you prefer in your own front garden, and planting them where you like. Civilization is having a lawsuit with the next-door neighbour about whether your trees overshadow his garden, or calling in the policeman to throw him out if he becomes violent upon the question.
It is possible to recognise a certain rough truth in this distinction, without committing oneself to the fatalistic and rather pessimistic view which Spengler takes of his geological epochs with their human fossils. It is enough to say that we are not fossils; and that Isaiah and Pythagoras and Augustine are not fossils. Spengler tends to treat the coming of a complete Civilization as the coming of an Ice Age, freezing all human life as the ice freezes all animal life. Berdyaev, the Russian, is, as I have said, rather more free and easy, but especially more free. It is not my purpose here, however, to adjudicate on the theory or on the two theorists. I am only concerned with one particular angle or aspect of it, which affects the Civilization in which most of my countrymen actually have to live—the Civilization of London and the big industrial towns— if you can call it a Civilization.
Here, for instance, is a doubt that troubles me. If there was one thing which we did suppose was done for us by Civilization, it was to make us civil. The very word politeness is really the Greek for civilization, just as the very word civilization is really the Latin for politeness. It is a pleasing thought that the word ‘policeman’ and the word ‘politeness’ not only have the same meaning, but are almost the same word. But the Romans inheriting from the Greeks had no sooner established the idea of what is civic, or belonging to a citizen, than there became somewhat vaguely attached to it the idea of civility. Up to a point, Civilization, or even public life, probably does act in this way. Men begin to feel a new and strange restraint, making them feel a little shy and bashful about knocking off the hats or pulling the noses of total strangers to whom they have not been introduced. A new delicacy, a new sense of what is tactful and fitting, leads them to beat, bash and kick only their nearest and dearest and their most intimate friends. But there is another side to the story, and it is becoming rather a tragic story, in the light of that thesis about Civilization as the fossilization and final end of the truly creative life of a culture. I think we have reason for grave criticism and apprehension when there is a tendency for civic and public life to become more coarse and brutal than private and educational life. It is a dark and sinister omen when men begin to be ruder to strangers than they are to friends.
After all, the home, insofar as any ruins of it are left standing, is still the school of good manners. Many make very great efforts, and most make some sort of effort, to train their children at least in some standard of social behaviour. Little trivial gestures of impatience in which you or I may have indulged—the soup-tureen hurled across the table, the carving-knife brandished with motions mistaken by the superficial for those prefatory to murder—do not alter the fact that, even in the same household, babies are still instructed with some care about spreading the jam or spilling the milk. The old traditions of behaviour, so far as they still exist, are still largely traditions of a household; they concern opening the door to a lady or passing the mustard to a guest. Almost all that remains of the forms of courtesy are the forms of hospitality. Whether you call it behaving like a gentleman or behaving like a snob, it is still inside a human house that the man generally tries to live up to his highest standards, and to perform what are, in fact, the ancient rites and ceremonies of his Culture.
But in public things have altered a good deal. There you have the sharp test and truth; that the man is generally not living up to the highest standards, even of his own family; but often abandoning them in despair, owing to the crush and crowding of modern street life. The man who would bow somebody else into a drawing room is content himself with barging into a tram. The man who would make room for his guest in a tiny villa will leave no room at all for his fellow-citizen in a great big Tube train. In other words, public life, the life that the Greeks called polite, the life that the Romans called civil, has become a great deal more barbarous than the solitary life or the life of the tribe.
We might tolerate the notion that civilization makes our culture more cold or official. But we cannot easily tolerate the notion that our civilization makes us more barbaric. Culture, in the connotation used by the writers I mention, is something interior and imaginative and almost sacred, which, when it takes form, we recognise as the characteristic work of a particular people; as we recognise certain art as the characteristic work of a certain artist. It is a growth of the English culture, for instance, that the poorest cottagers love to have a mass of flowers in their front gardens. It is even a growth of English culture, in a way, that English cottages and villages have a certain peculiar beauty, and are picturesque even when they are inconvenient. It would be with a certain sorrow, whatever our opinions, that we should yield to a more orderly civilization, which should make the village streets straight, or even the village buildings stately. But it does not do anything of the kind. Our civilization today does not make anything straight or anything stately. The romantic rubbish-heap of cottages and cottage gardens would not be replaced by ordered avenues or classical colonnades. They would be replaced by a patchwork of hoardings and a litter of bungalows. That is one aspect of the doom of civilization, over which these literary men lament. Civilization makes us more uncivil—like the man in the Tube.
Cultura Contro Civiltà
Una distinzione interessante, che è quasi una contraddizione, è stata di recente tracciata tra Cultura e Civiltà. Due scrittori di spicco del momento, l’uno russo e l’altro tedesco, hanno accolto questa differenza, anche se la usano piuttosto diversamente. Il Tedesco, essendo un libero pensatore e un agnostico, è, naturalmente, rigidamente vincolato dai chiodi di ferro dei dogmi del materialismo. Il Russo, essendo un cristiano greco-ortodosso e la reliquia di una Chiesa in rovina e perseguitata, è un po’ più allegro, e sembra pensare che esista qualcosa come la libertà umana e una possibilità per la libertà dell’uomo. Ma entrambi concordano, più o meno, in una certa teoria del rapporto tra Cultura e Civiltà; ed è, grosso modo, che la Civiltà è la fine della Cultura, persino nel senso della morte della Cultura.
Riesponendo la questione qui grossolanamente, per i miei scopi, la concezione è che la Cultura sia crescita; il germogliare originario della natura spirituale o artistica dell’uomo, come appare nel folclore nativo o nell’architettura primitiva di un intero popolo. La Civiltà è piuttosto il limite o il compromesso imposto a questo dalla scoperta che esistono altri popoli o altri metodi di produzione. Nel seguire la Cultura, un uomo sviluppa le sue arti; vale a dire, i suoi gusti. Di conseguenza, la vera Cultura, come la vera Carità, comincia in casa. Con la Civiltà appare qualcosa che non è soltanto puramente pubblico, ma un po’ senza casa. La Cultura è il coltivare gli alberi in fiore che preferisci nel tuo giardino sul davanti, e il piantarli dove ti pare. La Civiltà è l’intentare una causa contro il vicino di casa sul fatto che i tuoi alberi ombreggino il suo giardino, o il chiamare il poliziotto perché lo butti fuori se diventa violento sulla questione.
È possibile riconoscere una certa rozza verità in questa distinzione, senza impegnarsi nella visione fatalistica e piuttosto pessimistica che Spengler ha delle sue epoche geologiche con i loro fossili umani. Basti dire che noi non siamo fossili; e che Isaia e Pitagora e Agostino non sono fossili. Spengler tende a trattare l’avvento di una Civiltà completa come l’avvento di un’Era Glaciale, che congela tutta la vita umana come il ghiaccio congela tutta la vita animale. Berdjaev, il Russo, è, come ho detto, piuttosto più libero e disinvolto, ma soprattutto più libero. Non è mio scopo qui, tuttavia, giudicare la teoria o i due teorici. Mi interessa solo un particolare angolo o aspetto di essa, che riguarda la Civiltà nella quale la maggior parte dei miei connazionali deve di fatto vivere—la Civiltà di Londra e delle grandi città industriali— se la si può chiamare una Civiltà.
Ecco, per esempio, un dubbio che mi turba. Se c’era una cosa che supponevamo fosse fatta per noi dalla Civiltà, era di renderci civili. La parola stessa cortesia è in realtà il greco per civiltà, proprio come la parola stessa civiltà è in realtà il latino per cortesia. È un piacevole pensiero che la parola «poliziotto» e la parola «politesse» non solo abbiano lo stesso significato, ma siano quasi la stessa parola. Ma i Romani, ereditando dai Greci, non ebbero prima stabilito l’idea di ciò che è civico, o appartenente a un cittadino, che vi si attaccò in modo alquanto vago l’idea di civiltà nei modi. Fino a un certo punto, la Civiltà, o persino la vita pubblica, probabilmente agisce in questo modo. Gli uomini cominciano a sentire un nuovo e strano freno, che li fa sentire un po’ timidi e imbarazzati all’idea di far cadere i cappelli o tirare i nasi a perfetti sconosciuti a cui non sono stati presentati. Una nuova delicatezza, un nuovo senso di ciò che è tattoso e conveniente, li induce a picchiare, ammaccare e prendere a calci solo i loro più cari e i loro amici più intimi. Ma c’è un altro lato della storia, ed essa sta diventando una storia piuttosto tragica, alla luce di quella tesi sulla Civiltà come fossilizzazione e fine ultima della vita davvero creativa di una cultura. Penso che abbiamo motivo di grave critica e apprensione quando c’è una tendenza della vita civica e pubblica a diventare più rozza e brutale della vita privata ed educativa. È un presagio oscuro e sinistro quando gli uomini cominciano a essere più rudi con gli sconosciuti di quanto lo siano con gli amici.
Dopo tutto, la casa, per quanto ne restino in piedi delle rovine, è ancora la scuola delle buone maniere. Molti fanno grandissimi sforzi, e i più fanno un qualche sforzo, per educare i propri figli almeno a un certo standard di comportamento sociale. Piccoli gesti banali d’impazienza a cui io o tu possiamo esserci abbandonati—la zuppiera scagliata attraverso la tavola, il trinciante brandito con movimenti scambiati dai superficiali per quelli preliminari a un omicidio—non alterano il fatto che, persino nella medesima famiglia, i bambini vengono ancora istruiti con una certa cura sullo spalmare la marmellata o versare il latte. Le vecchie tradizioni di comportamento, per quanto ancora esistano, sono ancora in larga misura tradizioni domestiche; riguardano l’aprire la porta a una signora o il passare la mostarda a un ospite. Quasi tutto ciò che resta delle forme di cortesia sono le forme di ospitalità. Che tu lo chiami comportarsi da gentiluomo o comportarsi da snob, è ancora dentro una casa umana che l’uomo generalmente cerca di essere all’altezza dei suoi standard più elevati, e di compiere quelli che sono, di fatto, gli antichi riti e cerimonie della sua Cultura.
Ma in pubblico le cose sono cambiate parecchio. Là si ha la prova acuta e la verità; che l’uomo generalmente non è all’altezza degli standard più elevati, persino della propria famiglia; ma spesso li abbandona nella disperazione, a causa della ressa e dell’affollamento della moderna vita di strada. L’uomo che introdurrebbe con un inchino qualcun altro in un salotto si accontenta lui stesso di piombare a spintoni in un tram. L’uomo che farebbe posto al proprio ospite in una minuscola villetta non lascerà alcun posto al proprio concittadino in un grande, grosso treno della metropolitana. In altre parole, la vita pubblica, la vita che i Greci chiamavano cortese, la vita che i Romani chiamavano civile, è diventata assai più barbara della vita solitaria o della vita della tribù.
Potremmo tollerare l’idea che la civiltà renda la nostra cultura più fredda o più ufficiale. Ma non possiamo facilmente tollerare l’idea che la nostra civiltà ci renda più barbari. La Cultura, nella connotazione usata dagli scrittori che menziono, è qualcosa di interiore e immaginativo e quasi sacro, che, quando prende forma, riconosciamo come l’opera caratteristica di un particolare popolo; come riconosciamo una certa arte come l’opera caratteristica di un certo artista. È una crescita della cultura inglese, per esempio, che i più poveri casolari amino avere una massa di fiori nei loro giardini sul davanti. È persino una crescita della cultura inglese, in un certo senso, che le case di campagna e i villaggi inglesi abbiano una certa peculiare bellezza, e siano pittoreschi persino quando sono scomodi. Sarebbe con un certo dolore, quali che siano le nostre opinioni, che dovremmo cedere a una civiltà più ordinata, che rendesse diritte le vie del villaggio, o persino maestosi gli edifici del villaggio. Ma essa non fa nulla del genere. La nostra civiltà di oggi non rende diritto nulla né maestoso nulla. Il romantico cumulo di rifiuti di casolari e giardini di casolari non sarebbe sostituito da viali ordinati o classici colonnati. Sarebbe sostituito da un guazzabuglio di tabelloni pubblicitari e da un disordine di bungalow. Questo è un aspetto della rovina della civiltà, su cui questi letterati si lamentano. La civiltà ci rende più incivili—come l’uomo nella metropolitana.
The Winter Feast
These modern men, who are less anxious to be men than to be moderns, have one little habit that has not been spotted as it should be. They are very fond of first painting the lily, and then proving from the painted surface that it was always a paper flower. Nothing delights these intelligent little creatures more than gilding refined gold, and then scraping it furiously, on the plea of taking the gilt off the gingerbread. I mean that they will first take a natural thing, then daub it and disguise it and deface it with artificial things, and then complain that it is an unnatural thing and throw it away. At the beginning, such alteration must be accepted as an improvement. By the end, each improvement is used to show that the thing should be not so much altered as abolished.
Thus the seed of Democracy, the assembly of the village or the tribe, is as old as the world, and may perhaps go back to the similar assemblies of rooks or wolves. It still exists in many peasant communities, especially in the mountains, and when it is reasonably civilised, that is humanised, and above all when it is Christian, it is still about as just and decent and dignified a government as any, in a world whose governments are hardly its happiest products. Now we men of the modern and Western world took this ancient thing, and proceeded to improve it. We improved democracy by demagogy, that is by professional politicians; we improved election by electioneering, that is by organised lying; we improved announcement by advertisement; that is, we substituted for the horn blown to assemble men round the village tree the megaphone through which a statesman could speak like a salesman; facilitating every exchange in which the voters could sell their votes or the statesmen could sell his soul. We have been positively proud of it as a technical dexterity; that we could turn an act of representation into an art of misrepresentation. And then, when the whole idea has been improved out of recognition in this cynical fashion, we generally find that the cynics have become sceptics; and sceptics about the democratic idea itself. These men, with their wonderful progressive improvements, have themselves turned popular government into unpopular government. But since they also have probably become rather unpopular, they will now often turn round with a fine fastidious aristocratic pride, and express their contempt for popular opinion.
The same sort of ironic injustice is applied to any old popular festival like Christmas. Moving step by step, in the majestic march of Progress, we have first vulgarised Christmas and then denounced it as vulgar. Christmas has become too commercial; so many of these thinkers would destroy the Christmas that has been spoiled, and preserve the commercialism that has spoiled it. They will think me but a belated and bemused being, if I here am found roaming or drifting backwards to consider what Christmas is when it is defined, or what it was before it was spoiled. And it is not surprising that the same modern gentlemen, who have performed this peculiar feat of first pelting a thing with mud and then complaining that it is muddy, have also made a similar muddle about the actual history of the thing which they bury with insults, because they have killed it with improvements.
Thus, the first thing that such people will probably tell you today is that Christmas is really a Pagan festival; because many traditional features of it were taken from Pagans. What they do not seem to see is that, in so far as this is in any sense true, it only proves that the ancient Pagans were much more sensible than the modern Pagans. There are many psychological truths about such a human habit, which are hidden from those who talk day and night about psychology; but who do not really care about any psychology except what they call the psychology of salesmanship. The old Pagans knew that such a ritual must be old, that it must be religious, that it must be concerned fundamentally with simple elements like wood or water or fire, but that it must also be, in a queer way of its own, revolutionary: exalting the humble or putting down the mighty from their seat. That was expressed in a hundred ways, both among heathens and Christians. The Saturnalia was made for a society of slaves; but it gave one wild holiday to those slaves. The medieval Christmas had to exist in a feudal society; but all its carols and legends told again and again a story in which angels spoke to shepherds and a devil inspired a king. An ancient revolt is enshrined in an ancient ritual. Now the reason why Christianity found it quite easy to absorb these Pagan customs is that they were in this way almost Christian customs. The man who does not see that the Saturnalia was almost Christian is a man who has never read the Magnificat.
It is thoroughly bad history to suppose that it was the Paganism that absorbed the Christianity; when there are a thousand things to show that it was the Christianity that absorbed the Paganism. For instance, anything that the Early Church really regarded as horrible among the heathens did completely disappear. The butchery of human beings in amphitheatres, which had been the huge uproarious popular sport of all the vast populace of antiquity, completely disappeared. Doubtless, it disappeared partly because Christian martyrs had suffered there; partly because St Telemachus, the heroic hermit, had hurled himself into the arena to cry aloud to God and the human conscience, against human blood being poured out in festivity like wine. But anyhow, and for whatever reason, it did disappear. If various old Pagan popular customs, like the Winter Feast, did not disappear, it was quite certainly because they did not so insult the innocence and indignation of Christianity in its youth. When Constantine had made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, that religion could have suppressed any heathen thing it really wanted to suppress. The interesting point to note is how very few heathen things it really did want to suppress. There is, for instance, the whole great glorious mass of the Pagan literature, in which there are hardly ten pages without something that a Christian might be excused for wanting to suppress. The mere fact that that mass of culture has come down to us at all, is to me much more remarkable than a few random examples of alleged suppression. For instance, the first generations of the saints might surely be excused for drawing the line at Sappho if she did really preach Sapphism. But in fact, there is hardly a rag of historical evidence either that she did preach it or that they did suppress her. To anybody with a general view of history, the really remarkable and interesting thing is the toleration of the last Pagans by the first Christians. The Church certainly never swept away all record of the ancient gods as Mahomet swept away the ancient idols. It never merely burned books as the Iconoclasts destroyed statues. The attitude of Augustine towards Plato, as of Aquinas towards Aristotle, is really much more respectful and understanding than the attitude of Hobbes or Hume towards Aquinas. In short, Christians have always committed countless crimes; but these Christians did not commit this one crime. They were not unhistorical. Christianity failed in practice in many ways; but this was one thing it did not fail to do; to preserve continuity. The Christians were often criminals; but they were not Vandals. Platonists like St Augustine, living in besieged cities, knew too much about Vandals.
La Festa d’Inverno
Questi uomini moderni, che sono meno ansiosi di essere uomini che di essere moderni, hanno una piccola abitudine che non è stata individuata come si dovrebbe. Sono assai propensi prima a dipingere il giglio, e poi a dimostrare a partire dalla superficie dipinta che era da sempre un fiore di carta. Nulla diletta queste intelligenti creaturine più che indorare l’oro raffinato, e poi grattarlo furiosamente, con la scusa di togliere la doratura dal panpepato. Intendo dire che essi prima prendono una cosa naturale, poi la impiastricciano e la travestono e la deturpano con cose artificiali, e poi si lamentano che è una cosa innaturale e la buttano via. All’inizio, tale alterazione va accettata come un miglioramento. Alla fine, ogni miglioramento è usato per mostrare che la cosa dovrebbe essere non tanto alterata quanto abolita.
Così il seme della Democrazia, l’assemblea del villaggio o della tribù, è antico quanto il mondo, e può forse risalire alle simili assemblee delle cornacchie o dei lupi. Esiste ancora in molte comunità contadine, specialmente sui monti, e quando è ragionevolmente civilizzata, vale a dire umanizzata, e soprattutto quando è cristiana, è ancora un governo giusto e decente e dignitoso quanto qualsiasi altro, in un mondo i cui governi sono ben lungi dall’esserne i prodotti più felici. Ora noi uomini del mondo moderno e occidentale prendemmo questa cosa antica, e ci accingemmo a migliorarla. Migliorammo la democrazia con la demagogia, cioè con i politicanti di professione; migliorammo l’elezione con la propaganda elettorale, cioè con la menzogna organizzata; migliorammo l’annuncio con la pubblicità; cioè, sostituimmo al corno soffiato per radunare gli uomini attorno all’albero del villaggio il megafono attraverso cui uno statista poteva parlare come un venditore; agevolando ogni scambio in cui gli elettori potessero vendere i loro voti o lo statista potesse vendere la sua anima. Ne siamo stati positivamente fieri come di una destrezza tecnica; del fatto che sapevamo trasformare un atto di rappresentanza in un’arte di travisamento. E poi, quando l’intera idea è stata migliorata fino a renderla irriconoscibile in questo modo cinico, generalmente scopriamo che i cinici sono diventati scettici; e scettici sull’idea democratica stessa. Questi uomini, con i loro meravigliosi progressivi miglioramenti, hanno essi stessi trasformato il governo popolare in governo impopolare. Ma poiché anch’essi sono probabilmente diventati piuttosto impopolari, ora si volteranno spesso con un fine, schizzinoso orgoglio aristocratico, ed esprimeranno il loro disprezzo per l’opinione popolare.
Lo stesso genere di ironica ingiustizia è applicato a qualsiasi antica festa popolare come il Natale. Muovendo passo dopo passo, nella maestosa marcia del Progresso, abbiamo prima volgarizzato il Natale e poi lo abbiamo denunciato come volgare. Il Natale è diventato troppo commerciale; sicché molti di questi pensatori distruggerebbero il Natale che è stato guastato, e conserverebbero il commercialismo che lo ha guastato. Mi giudicheranno solo un essere attardato e istupidito, se qui mi si trova a vagare o a derivare all’indietro per considerare cosa sia il Natale quando lo si definisce, o cosa fosse prima di essere guastato. E non sorprende che gli stessi moderni signori, che hanno compiuto questa peculiare impresa di dapprima tempestare una cosa di fango e poi lamentarsi che è fangosa, abbiano anche fatto un simile pasticcio riguardo alla storia reale della cosa che essi seppelliscono con insulti, perché l’hanno uccisa con miglioramenti.
Così, la prima cosa che tale gente vi dirà probabilmente oggi è che il Natale è in realtà una festa Pagana; perché molte sue caratteristiche tradizionali furono prese dai Pagani. Ciò che non sembrano vedere è che, nella misura in cui questo è in qualche senso vero, prova soltanto che gli antichi Pagani erano assai più assennati dei Pagani moderni. Ci sono molte verità psicologiche su una simile abitudine umana, che sono nascoste a coloro che parlano giorno e notte di psicologia; ma che non si curano davvero di alcuna psicologia tranne quella che chiamano la psicologia dell’arte di vendere. I vecchi Pagani sapevano che un tale rituale deve essere antico, che deve essere religioso, che deve essere fondamentalmente attinente a elementi semplici come il legno o l’acqua o il fuoco, ma che deve anche essere, in un suo strano modo, rivoluzionario: innalzando gli umili o rovesciando i potenti dal loro seggio. Ciò era espresso in cento modi, sia tra i pagani sia tra i cristiani. I Saturnali erano fatti per una società di schiavi; ma davano una selvaggia vacanza a quegli schiavi. Il Natale medievale doveva esistere in una società feudale; ma tutti i suoi canti e le sue leggende raccontavano ancora e ancora una storia in cui gli angeli parlavano ai pastori e un diavolo ispirava un re. Un’antica rivolta è custodita in un antico rituale. Ora, la ragione per cui il Cristianesimo trovò assai facile assorbire queste usanze Pagane è che esse erano in questo modo quasi usanze Cristiane. L’uomo che non vede che i Saturnali erano quasi Cristiani è un uomo che non ha mai letto il Magnificat.
È del tutto cattiva storia supporre che fu il Paganesimo ad assorbire il Cristianesimo; quando ci sono mille cose a dimostrare che fu il Cristianesimo ad assorbire il Paganesimo. Per esempio, tutto ciò che la Chiesa primitiva considerava davvero orribile tra i pagani scomparve completamente. Il massacro di esseri umani negli anfiteatri, che era stato l’immenso, chiassoso sport popolare di tutta la vasta plebe dell’antichità, scomparve completamente. Senza dubbio, scomparve in parte perché vi avevano sofferto i martiri cristiani; in parte perché San Telemaco, l’eroico eremita, si era scagliato nell’arena per gridare a Dio e alla coscienza umana, contro il sangue umano versato in festa come vino. Ma comunque, e per qualsiasi ragione, scomparve davvero. Se varie vecchie usanze popolari Pagane, come la Festa d’Inverno, non scomparvero, fu di certo perché non insultavano tanto l’innocenza e l’indignazione del Cristianesimo nella sua giovinezza. Quando Costantino ebbe fatto del Cristianesimo la religione dell’Impero Romano, quella religione avrebbe potuto sopprimere qualsiasi cosa pagana avesse davvero voluto sopprimere. Il punto interessante da notare è quante pochissime cose pagane essa volle davvero sopprimere. C’è, per esempio, tutta la grande gloriosa massa della letteratura Pagana, in cui non vi sono quasi dieci pagine senza qualcosa che un Cristiano potrebbe essere scusato per voler sopprimere. Il mero fatto che quella massa di cultura ci sia pervenuta affatto, è per me assai più notevole di pochi casuali esempi di presunta soppressione. Per esempio, le prime generazioni di santi potrebbero certo essere scusate per aver tracciato un limite a Saffo, se davvero predicava il saffismo. Ma di fatto, non c’è quasi uno straccio di prova storica né che essa lo predicasse né che essi la sopprimessero. Per chiunque abbia una visione generale della storia, la cosa davvero notevole e interessante è la tolleranza degli ultimi Pagani da parte dei primi Cristiani. La Chiesa di certo non spazzò via ogni traccia degli antichi dèi come Maometto spazzò via gli antichi idoli. Mai si limitò a bruciare libri come gli Iconoclasti distrussero le statue. L’atteggiamento di Agostino verso Platone, come quello di Tommaso verso Aristotele, è in realtà assai più rispettoso e comprensivo dell’atteggiamento di Hobbes o di Hume verso Tommaso. In breve, i Cristiani hanno sempre commesso innumerevoli crimini; ma questi Cristiani non commisero questo unico crimine. Non furono antistorici. Il Cristianesimo fallì nella pratica in molti modi; ma questa era una cosa che non mancò di fare: preservare la continuità. I Cristiani furono spesso criminali; ma non furono Vandali. Platonici come Sant’Agostino, vivendo in città assediate, sapevano fin troppo dei Vandali.
It is, therefore, the greatest glory of the Christian tradition that it has incorporated so many Pagan traditions. But it is most glorious of all, to my mind, when they are popular traditions. And the best and most obvious example is the way in which Christianity did incorporate, in so far as it did incorporate, the old human and heathen conception of the Winter Feast. There are, indeed, two profound and mysterious truths to be balanced here. The first is that what was then heathen was still human; that is, it was both mystical and material; it expressed itself in sacred substances and sacramental acts; it understood the mystery of trees and waters and the holy flame. And the other, which will be a much more tactless and irritating assertion, is that while a thing is heathen it is not yet completely human. But the point here is that the Pagan element in Christmas came quite natural to Christians, because it was not in fact very far from Christianity.
Take, for example, the whole fundamental idea of a Winter Feast. There is a perfectly natural parallel between a religion that defies the world and a ritual that defies the weather. Heathenism in the sense of hedonism, the concentration of the mind on pure pleasure as such, would chiefly concentrate on the conception of a Summer Feast. But in winter even a rich man receives some faint hint of the problem of a poor man; he may avoid being hungry, but he cannot always avoid being cold. To choose that moment of common freezing for the assertion of common fraternity is, in its own intrinsic nature, a foreshadowing of what we call the Christian idea. It involves the suggestion that joy comes from within and not from without. It involves the suggestion that peril and the potentiality of pain are themselves a ground of gratitude and rejoicing. It involves the suggestion that even when we are merely Pagans we are not merely Pantheists. We are not merely Nature-worshippers; because Man smiles when Nature frowns. It has always involved, under varying limitations in varying societies, the idea of hospitality; especially hospitality to the stranger and generally to the poor. Of course, there are perfectly natural reasons for wanting to drink wine or warm ourselves at the fire in winter; but that is not an answer, except to those who already have the ill-informed prejudice that Christianity must be opposed to things merely because they are natural. The point is in making a point of it; the special interest is in the special occasion; in the fact that during the Winter Feast, whether Pagan or Christian, there always was, in some degree, the idea of extending the enjoyment to others; of passing round the wine or seating the wanderer by the hearth. It is no controversial point against the Christians that they felt they could take up and continue such traditions among the Pagans; it only shows that the Christians knew a Christian thing when they saw it.
It may seem a gloomy sentiment for the festive season; but the plain truth is that the old original Christians would have more reasons to quarrel with the new Christian Christmas than they had to quarrel with the old Pagan Christmas. In the congested commerce of our time, it has come to stand rather for goods being sold than for gifts being given. But if any revolutionary critic complains of it on this score, he must complain of his own revolutionary criticism; or at least of the previous revolutionary critics. I remember that Mr Bernard Shaw, the chief spokesman of the Socialism of the later nineteenth century, declared that Christmas is now only kept up for the sake of the tradesmen. I think he would find it hard to prove that every little boy or girl has hung up a stocking, or slept with one eye open on Christmas Eve, solely because they calculated that Santa Claus going his round would be Good for Trade. But if the complaint contains any truth, it is not to the disadvantage of the old tradition; but rather to the disadvantage of the recent revolutions. It is strangely forgotten that it was radicals and reformers who set up the Capitalism they now desire to pull down. It was done, if not by Socialists, certainly by revolutionists; in the sense of extreme pioneers of progress. For instance, it was precisely the progressive prophet of new things who brought Christmas, and everything else, out of the country into the town. It was he who told the young man that the streets of London were paved with gold; and that in great cities like Chicago and Philadelphia there was work for all. It was he who said that life on the farm was not life but death; that the rustics were all turnips and that their creeds were all turnip ghosts. Hence it was he who was responsible for making the old Christmas mysteries and mummeries relatively unmeaning; by taking them away from the fields where they grew to the markets where they could only be bought and sold. He took away the Yule Log from the place where it had really been part of a tree, to the place where it was only a lump of dead wood; he took away the mistletoe from where it was really gathered from the oak, to the store where it was only stacked like dead sticks; he would have brought in the Boar’s Head (supposing that he dealt at all in that delicacy) under conditions that made it highly improbable that he had himself slain the boar with a boar-spear in the forest, in the old heroic style of hunting, when men slew beasts stronger than themselves. All this genuine and even generous savour in the old Christmas symbols did undoubtedly suffer by being half-digested by the industrial town; but it was the same sort of reformer who built the town. True, he then called himself an Individualist and not a Socialist; and by this time he probably calls himself something else. But under all names, he is always exactly what the old Pagans and Christians would have called a profane person. He does not understand Christmas; he does not even understand the Saturnalia. Mr Scrooge hated Christmas because he was a Utilitarian; that is, he thought that economics only meant being economical. Mr Gradgrind of the Manchester School began by hating Christmas; but his partner Mr Bounderby soon perceived that he could make money by selling turkeys and toys, as well as coal or cotton. But these men in their day were all Reformers; they all called themselves Radicals. Perhaps it is time we ceased to concentrate on the Reform and went back again to the Form.
This real history of Christmas is very relevant to the real crisis of Christendom. We live in a terrible time of war and rumour of war; with a barbaric danger of the real reaction, that goes back not to the old form but to the old formlessness. International idealism in its effort to hold the world together, in a peace that can resist wars and revolutions, is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply that it does not go deep enough. Christianity could draw life out of the depths of Paganism; but mere Modernism cannot draw on the depths of either. Charity is too much of a manufactured article; and too little of a natural product. The League of Nations is too new to be natural. The modern materialistic humanitarianism is too young to be vigorous. If we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder, we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod. If we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the hunger of a human being, a pain as positive as toothache; and not as the fall in wages or the failure of imports, or even the lowering of the economic standard of living. We must say first of the beggar, not that there is insufficient housing accommodation, but that he has nowhere to lay his head. We must say first of the human family, not that there are no jobs for them in the factory, but that there is no room for them in the inn. That is, we must talk of the human family in language as plain and practical and positive as that in which mystics used to talk of the Holy Family. We must learn again to use the naked words that describe a natural thing; and dispense for a moment with all those sociological polysyllables, with which an artificial society has learned to talk of it as an artificial thing. Then we shall draw on the driving force of many thousand years; and call up a real humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity.
È, dunque, la più grande gloria della tradizione cristiana l’aver incorporato tante tradizioni Pagane. Ma è più glorioso di tutto, a mio giudizio, quando si tratta di tradizioni popolari. E il migliore e più ovvio esempio è il modo in cui il Cristianesimo incorporò davvero, nella misura in cui lo fece, l’antica concezione umana e pagana della Festa d’Inverno. Vi sono, in verità, due verità profonde e misteriose da bilanciare qui. La prima è che ciò che allora era pagano era ancora umano; cioè, era a un tempo mistico e materiale; si esprimeva in sostanze sacre e atti sacramentali; comprendeva il mistero degli alberi e delle acque e della santa fiamma. E l’altra, che sarà un’affermazione assai più indelicata e irritante, è che finché una cosa è pagana non è ancora completamente umana. Ma il punto qui è che l’elemento Pagano nel Natale venne del tutto naturale ai Cristiani, perché di fatto non era molto lontano dal Cristianesimo.
Prendiamo, per esempio, l’intera idea fondamentale di una Festa d’Inverno. C’è un parallelo perfettamente naturale tra una religione che sfida il mondo e un rituale che sfida il tempo atmosferico. Il paganesimo nel senso di edonismo, la concentrazione della mente sul puro piacere in quanto tale, si concentrerebbe soprattutto sulla concezione di una Festa d’Estate. Ma in inverno persino un uomo ricco riceve qualche debole accenno del problema di un uomo povero; può evitare di aver fame, ma non può sempre evitare di aver freddo. Scegliere quel momento di comune gelo per l’affermazione della comune fratellanza è, nella sua stessa natura intrinseca, una prefigurazione di ciò che chiamiamo l’idea Cristiana. Essa comporta il suggerimento che la gioia venga da dentro e non da fuori. Comporta il suggerimento che il pericolo e la potenzialità del dolore siano essi stessi motivo di gratitudine e di gioia. Comporta il suggerimento che persino quando siamo semplicemente Pagani non siamo semplicemente Panteisti. Non siamo meri adoratori della Natura; perché l’Uomo sorride quando la Natura si acciglia. Ha sempre comportato, sotto varie limitazioni in varie società, l’idea di ospitalità; specialmente l’ospitalità verso lo straniero e in genere verso il povero. Certo, ci sono ragioni perfettamente naturali per voler bere vino o scaldarci al fuoco d’inverno; ma questa non è una risposta, se non per coloro che hanno già il malinformato pregiudizio che il Cristianesimo debba opporsi alle cose semplicemente perché sono naturali. Il punto sta nel farne un punto; lo speciale interesse sta nella speciale occasione; nel fatto che durante la Festa d’Inverno, pagana o cristiana che fosse, ci fu sempre, in qualche misura, l’idea di estendere il godimento agli altri; di far girare il vino o di far sedere il viandante al focolare. Non è un punto controverso contro i Cristiani il fatto che sentissero di poter riprendere e continuare tali tradizioni tra i Pagani; mostra soltanto che i Cristiani riconoscevano una cosa Cristiana quando la vedevano.
Può sembrare un sentimento cupo per la stagione festiva; ma la pura verità è che gli antichi Cristiani originari avrebbero più ragioni di bisticciare col nuovo Natale Cristiano di quante ne avessero di bisticciare col vecchio Natale Pagano. Nel congestionato commercio dei nostri tempi, esso è giunto a rappresentare più delle merci vendute che dei doni donati. Ma se un qualche critico rivoluzionario se ne lamenta su questo punto, deve lamentarsi della propria critica rivoluzionaria; o quantomeno dei precedenti critici rivoluzionari. Ricordo che il signor Bernard Shaw, il principale portavoce del Socialismo del tardo Ottocento, dichiarò che il Natale è ormai mantenuto solo per il bene dei commercianti. Penso che gli riuscirebbe difficile dimostrare che ogni bambino o bambina abbia appeso una calza, o dormito con un occhio aperto la Vigilia di Natale, unicamente perché calcolava che Babbo Natale nel suo giro sarebbe stato Buono per gli Affari. Ma se la lagnanza contiene qualche verità, non è a svantaggio della vecchia tradizione; ma piuttosto a svantaggio delle recenti rivoluzioni. È stranamente dimenticato che furono i radicali e i riformatori a instaurare quel Capitalismo che ora desiderano abbattere. Fu fatto, se non da Socialisti, di certo da rivoluzionari; nel senso di estremi pionieri del progresso. Per esempio, fu proprio il profeta progressista delle cose nuove a portare il Natale, e ogni altra cosa, fuori dalla campagna dentro la città. Fu lui a dire al giovane che le vie di Londra erano lastricate d’oro; e che in grandi città come Chicago e Filadelfia c’era lavoro per tutti. Fu lui a dire che la vita nella fattoria non era vita ma morte; che i rustici erano tutti rape e che i loro credi erano tutti fantasmi di rapa. Perciò fu lui il responsabile di rendere i vecchi misteri e le pantomime del Natale relativamente privi di significato; togliendoli dai campi dove crescevano ai mercati dove potevano solo essere comprati e venduti. Portò via il Ceppo di Natale dal luogo dove era stato davvero parte di un albero, al luogo dove era solo un ciocco di legno morto; portò via il vischio da dove era davvero colto dalla quercia, al magazzino dove era solo accatastato come rami secchi; avrebbe portato la Testa di Cinghiale (supponendo che trattasse affatto quella prelibatezza) in condizioni che rendevano altamente improbabile che avesse egli stesso ucciso il cinghiale con uno spiedo da cinghiale nella foresta, nell’antico stile eroico della caccia, quando gli uomini uccidevano bestie più forti di sé stessi. Tutto questo genuino e persino generoso sapore negli antichi simboli natalizi soffrì indubbiamente per l’essere stato mezzo digerito dalla città industriale; ma fu lo stesso genere di riformatore a costruire la città. Vero, egli allora si definiva Individualista e non Socialista; e a quest’ora probabilmente si definisce qualcos’altro. Ma sotto ogni nome, egli è sempre esattamente ciò che gli antichi Pagani e Cristiani avrebbero chiamato un profano. Egli non comprende il Natale; non comprende nemmeno i Saturnali. Il signor Scrooge odiava il Natale perché era un Utilitarista; cioè, pensava che l’economia significasse soltanto essere economo. Il signor Gradgrind della Scuola di Manchester cominciò odiando il Natale; ma il suo socio, il signor Bounderby, si accorse presto che poteva far denaro vendendo tacchini e giocattoli, oltre che carbone o cotone. Ma questi uomini ai loro tempi erano tutti Riformatori; si definivano tutti Radicali. Forse è tempo che smettiamo di concentrarci sulla Riforma e torniamo di nuovo alla Forma.
Questa reale storia del Natale è assai pertinente alla reale crisi della Cristianità. Viviamo in un tempo terribile di guerra e di voci di guerra; con un barbaro pericolo di reale reazione, che risale non alla vecchia forma ma alla vecchia informità. L’idealismo internazionale nel suo sforzo di tenere insieme il mondo, in una pace che possa resistere a guerre e rivoluzioni, è, per unanime ammissione, indebolito e spesso deluso. Direi semplicemente che non va abbastanza in profondità. Il Cristianesimo poteva trarre vita dalle profondità del Paganesimo; ma il mero Modernismo non può attingere alle profondità né dell’uno né dell’altro. La carità è troppo un articolo fabbricato; e troppo poco un prodotto naturale. La Società delle Nazioni è troppo nuova per essere naturale. Il moderno umanitarismo materialistico è troppo giovane per essere vigoroso. Se davvero desideriamo rendere vividi gli orrori della distruzione e del mero omicidio disciplinato, dobbiamo vederli più semplicemente come attacchi al focolare e alla famiglia umana; e provare per Hitler ciò che gli uomini provavano per Erode. Se vogliamo parlare di povertà, dobbiamo parlarne come della fame di un essere umano, un dolore positivo quanto il mal di denti; e non come il calo dei salari o il fallimento delle importazioni, o persino l’abbassamento dello standard di vita economico. Dobbiamo dire per prima cosa del mendicante, non che vi sia insufficiente alloggio, ma che non ha dove posare il capo. Dobbiamo dire per prima cosa della famiglia umana, non che non ci siano posti di lavoro per essa in fabbrica, ma che non c’è posto per essa nella locanda. Cioè, dobbiamo parlare della famiglia umana in un linguaggio tanto piano e pratico e positivo quanto quello con cui i mistici solevano parlare della Sacra Famiglia. Dobbiamo imparare di nuovo a usare le nude parole che descrivono una cosa naturale; e fare a meno per un momento di tutti quei polisillabi sociologici, con cui una società artificiale ha imparato a parlarne come di una cosa artificiale. Allora attingeremo alla forza motrice di molte migliaia di anni; e faremo sorgere un vero umanitarismo dalle profondità dell’umanità.
They Tell a Story
The statement that the work of the Old Masters can be effective for popular education is not such a platitude as it will at first appear. It is both more disputable and more true than it seems. For the truth is that the great art of the past can be used for this purpose where a great many other methods now generally adapted are quite clumsy and futile. Something of this utility is shared by the plays of Shakespeare; and by no other agency I know except the paintings of such men as Titian and Leonardo.
To explain this peculiar kind of public value one must understand one of the deepest differences, and perhaps diseases, of our time. It was the mark of the art of the past, especially the art of the Renaissance, that the great man was a man. He was an extraordinary man, but only in the sense of being an ordinary man with something extra. Shakespeare or Rubens went with the plain man as far as the plain man went; they ate and drank, and desired and died as he did. That is what people mean when they say that these Gods had feet of clay; their giant boots were heavy with the mire of the earth. That is what people mean when they say that Shakespeare was often coarse; that is what people mean when they say that he was often dull. They mean that a great poet of the elder kind had spaces which were idle and absent-minded; that his sub-consciousness often guided him; that he sprawled; that he was not ‘artistic’. It is not only true that Homer sometimes nodded; but nodding was part of the very greatness of Homer. His sleepy nod shakes the stars like the nod of his own Jupiter.
The old artists, then, were plain and popular in the more fundamental or (if you will) lower parts of their personality. But the typical modern artist sets out to be a separate and fantastic sort of creature, who feeds and feels in a strange manner of his own. Compare Velazquez with Whistler; compare Shakespeare with Shaw; compare even Addison with Stevenson. Whistler professed to be a butterfly, feasting on strange flowers and following incalculable flights; Stevenson was called by many of his friends an elf; and though this did not mean that he was inhumane, it did mean that he was in a manner disembodied. Bernard Shaw is certainly a fairy: and an Irish fairy, which is worse. Shakespeare, like the Shepherd in Iolanthe, was only a fairy down to the waist. He would undoubtedly, to quote the same work of art, have left his legs kicking behind if he had tried to get through the keyhole.
Now this distinction between two conceptions of genius, the Something more and the Something different, very deeply influences the effect of painting upon the public. The great painters had all the things which we call weaknesses in the great poets; they constantly pot-boiled, they occasionally pandered. They often seemed to care little for glory, and sometimes not quite enough for honour; they threw things off, and as Ruskin truly said, gave their great frescoes ‘to be blasted by the sea wind, or wasted by the worm’. But if they had the everyday vices, they had the everyday virtues also; and whether they were good men or no, their idea of a good man was the same as everybody else’s. If they too seldom attempted to reform their conduct, they never attempted to reform their conscience. The consequence is that they preserved a mass of primitive intuitions, appetites, and unconscious instincts, which are the same as those of the common people even in our corrupt modern cities; and which in our corrupt modern cities have now a great part to play.
For without raising, even in parentheses, the old argument of Swift’s and Temple’s time about the relative merits of Ancients and Moderns, we may be quite certain that for democratic purposes the ancients are better. A few scratches of grey and green on a piece of brown paper may really be as good in its own way as a ‘still life’ by a Flemish painter or a Holy Family by an Italian painter. But it must be perfectly obvious to anybody that the two latter are more likely to make a plain man understand what painting means. We talk somewhat lightly about ‘schools’ of art. Whether or no the art of Raphael be better as an art it is certainly better as a school. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Post-post-Impressionism and the rest, are developments which may be credited or criticised according to every man’s aesthetic philosophy. It may be the end of art, in the sense of the object of art. It may be the end of art in the sense of the abolition of art. But anyhow it is not the beginning of art; it is not the initiation, the origin, the introductory motive. What art is to begin with, what it obviously is, what is the reason that anyone ever made it, that people can learn today from the Old Masters. And they can learn it from nobody else.
A hundred cases could be taken, but take the case of a common phrase: a common sneer with the art critics. I mean the phrase ‘a picture that tells a story’. There could not be a sharper instance of the difference between the old hero who was man and more than man and the new hero who is not man at all. A picture by Leonardo da Vinci tells a story. A picture by Paul Veronese tells a story. A picture by Titian or Tintoretto tells a story. The first and most important question is, what story? Most medieval and Renaissance pictures tell the story; the story on which all our European civilisation is founded, and is founded as finally if the thing is a fairy tale or if the thing is a truth. The objection to pictures which ‘tell a story’ only began in our time, for the very simple reason that the story was a dull story. I will not discuss here whether the great story of God made Man has been destroyed. I will confine myself to saying that it has certainly not been replaced.
There are other qualities in which the Old Masters are demagogues as well as demi-gods. I mean there are other elements in which they eternally appeal to a popular instinct which was in them and in their patrons and in their populace. I should select the two examples of clarity and solidity. In Michelangelo’s ‘Vision of Judgment’ a real man appears in the real skies. The man is solid. The skies are lucid. To the cultured it may appear incredible; but it will be much more credible to mankind, that universal church of which culture is a small and doubtful sect. To mankind, to men as they ordinarily are, a complete man appearing in a clear sky, will not be incredible. It will be much more credible than an impressionist portrait of a real person or a post-impressionist picture of a real place.
I should therefore urge the re-publication of old and good pictures as a real part of that grossly neglected thing—public education. Our historians lie much more than our journalists; our fashionable conceptions of the past change with every fashion; and like most fashions, are fantastic and hideous. But the old colours and the old canvases do not lie; they were really achieved in the ages which we parody or pervert; and the squareness of their drawing, the brightness of their colours, the substantial sincerity of their subject, will still tell us something of the fathers we have forgotten. I do not go so far as to say we have relapsed into barbarism. But I do say that we can just now learn best from picture writing.
Raccontano una storia
L’affermazione che l’opera dei Grandi Maestri possa essere efficace per l’educazione popolare non è un luogo comune tanto quanto sembrerà a prima vista. È insieme più discutibile e più vera di quanto appaia. Poiché la verità è che la grande arte del passato può essere impiegata a questo scopo là dove moltissimi altri metodi ora generalmente adottati risultano goffi e vani. Qualcosa di questa utilità è condiviso dalle opere teatrali di Shakespeare; e da nessun altro mezzo che io conosca, salvo i dipinti di uomini come Tiziano e Leonardo.
Per spiegare questa peculiare specie di valore pubblico bisogna comprendere una delle più profonde differenze, e forse delle malattie, del nostro tempo. Era il segno distintivo dell’arte del passato, specialmente dell’arte del Rinascimento, che il grande uomo fosse un uomo. Era un uomo straordinario, ma solo nel senso di essere un uomo ordinario con qualcosa in più. Shakespeare o Rubens andavano con l’uomo comune fin dove l’uomo comune andava; mangiavano e bevevano, e desideravano e morivano come lui. È questo che la gente intende quando dice che questi Dèi avevano i piedi d’argilla; i loro stivali da gigante erano pesanti del fango della terra. È questo che la gente intende quando dice che Shakespeare era spesso volgare; è questo che la gente intende quando dice che era spesso noioso. Intendono che un grande poeta della vecchia specie aveva spazi che erano oziosi e distratti; che il suo subconscio spesso lo guidava; che si sdraiava scompostamente; che non era «artistico». Non è solo vero che Omero talvolta sonnecchiava; ma il sonnecchiare era parte della vera e propria grandezza di Omero. Il suo assonnato cenno del capo scuote le stelle come il cenno del suo stesso Giove.
I vecchi artisti, dunque, erano semplici e popolari nelle parti più fondamentali o (se si vuole) più basse della loro personalità. Ma il tipico artista moderno si propone di essere una creatura separata e fantastica, di specie tutta sua, che si nutre e sente in un modo strano e suo proprio. Si confronti Velázquez con Whistler; si confronti Shakespeare con Shaw; si confronti perfino Addison con Stevenson. Whistler professava di essere una farfalla, che banchettava su strani fiori e seguiva voli incalcolabili; Stevenson era chiamato da molti dei suoi amici un elfo; e sebbene ciò non significasse che fosse inumano, significava però che era in un certo modo disincarnato. Bernard Shaw è certamente un folletto: e un folletto irlandese, il che è peggio. Shakespeare, come il Pastore in Iolanthe, era un folletto solo fino alla cintola. Egli avrebbe indubbiamente, per citare la stessa opera d’arte, lasciato le gambe a scalciare di dietro se avesse tentato di passare per il buco della serratura.
Ora questa distinzione fra due concezioni del genio, il Qualcosa di più e il Qualcosa di diverso, influenza assai profondamente l’effetto della pittura sul pubblico. I grandi pittori avevano tutte le cose che noi chiamiamo debolezze nei grandi poeti; dipingevano di continuo per far bollire la pentola, occasionalmente si prostituivano. Spesso parevano curarsi poco della gloria, e talora non abbastanza dell’onore; buttavano giù le cose alla svelta, e come Ruskin veramente disse, davano i loro grandi affreschi «a essere sferzati dal vento del mare, o consumati dal verme». Ma se avevano i vizi d’ogni giorno, avevano anche le virtù d’ogni giorno; e fossero buoni uomini o no, la loro idea di un buon uomo era la stessa di tutti gli altri. Se troppo di rado tentavano di riformare la propria condotta, mai tentavano di riformare la propria coscienza. La conseguenza è che essi conservarono una massa di intuizioni primitive, di appetiti e di istinti inconsci, che sono gli stessi di quelli della gente comune anche nelle nostre corrotte città moderne; e che nelle nostre corrotte città moderne hanno ora una grande parte da giocare.
Poiché senza sollevare, sia pure tra parentesi, l’antica disputa del tempo di Swift e di Temple sui meriti relativi degli Antichi e dei Moderni, possiamo essere del tutto certi che per scopi democratici gli antichi sono migliori. Pochi tratti di grigio e di verde su un pezzo di carta bruna possono davvero essere buoni a modo loro quanto una «natura morta» di un pittore fiammingo o una Sacra Famiglia di un pittore italiano. Ma dev’essere perfettamente ovvio a chiunque che questi due ultimi hanno più probabilità di far comprendere a un uomo comune che cosa significhi la pittura. Parliamo con una certa leggerezza di «scuole» d’arte. Che l’arte di Raffaello sia migliore o no come arte, essa è certamente migliore come scuola. L’Impressionismo, il Post-impressionismo, il Post-post-impressionismo e il resto, sono sviluppi che possono essere accreditati o criticati secondo la filosofia estetica di ciascuno. Può essere la fine dell’arte, nel senso dello scopo dell’arte. Può essere la fine dell’arte nel senso dell’abolizione dell’arte. Ma comunque non è l’inizio dell’arte; non è l’iniziazione, l’origine, il motivo introduttivo. Ciò che l’arte è per cominciare, ciò che essa manifestamente è, quale sia la ragione per cui chiunque mai la fece, questo la gente può impararlo oggi dai Grandi Maestri. E può impararlo da nessun altro.
Si potrebbero prendere cento casi, ma si prenda il caso di una frase comune: un beffardo motto comune tra i critici d’arte. Intendo la frase «un quadro che racconta una storia». Non potrebbe esserci esempio più netto della differenza fra il vecchio eroe che era uomo e più che uomo e il nuovo eroe che non è affatto uomo. Un quadro di Leonardo da Vinci racconta una storia. Un quadro di Paolo Veronese racconta una storia. Un quadro di Tiziano o del Tintoretto racconta una storia. La prima e più importante domanda è: quale storia? La maggior parte dei quadri medievali e del Rinascimento racconta la storia; la storia sulla quale è fondata tutta la nostra civiltà europea, ed è fondata altrettanto definitivamente sia che la cosa sia una fiaba sia che la cosa sia una verità. L’obiezione ai quadri che «raccontano una storia» cominciò soltanto ai nostri tempi, per la ragione assai semplice che la storia era una storia noiosa. Non discuterò qui se la grande storia di Dio fattosi Uomo sia stata distrutta. Mi limiterò a dire che essa non è certamente stata rimpiazzata.
Vi sono altre qualità per le quali i Grandi Maestri sono demagoghi tanto quanto semidei. Intendo che vi sono altri elementi coi quali essi si appellano eternamente a un istinto popolare che era in loro e nei loro committenti e nel loro popolo. Sceglierei i due esempi della chiarezza e della solidità. Nel «Giudizio Universale» di Michelangelo un uomo reale appare nei cieli reali. L’uomo è solido. I cieli sono lucidi. Ai colti ciò potrà apparire incredibile; ma sarà assai più credibile all’umanità, quella chiesa universale di cui la cultura è una piccola e dubbia setta. All’umanità, agli uomini quali ordinariamente sono, un uomo completo che appare in un cielo limpido non sarà incredibile. Sarà assai più credibile di un ritratto impressionista di una persona reale o di un quadro post-impressionista di un luogo reale.
Sollecito perciò la ristampa dei vecchi e buoni quadri come parte reale di quella cosa grossolanamente trascurata: l’educazione pubblica. I nostri storici mentono assai più dei nostri giornalisti; le nostre concezioni alla moda del passato cambiano a ogni moda; e come la maggior parte delle mode, sono fantastiche e orribili. Ma i vecchi colori e le vecchie tele non mentono; furono realmente compiuti nelle epoche che noi parodiamo o pervertiamo; e la quadratura del loro disegno, la vivezza dei loro colori, la sostanziale sincerità del loro soggetto, ci diranno ancora qualcosa dei padri che abbiamo dimenticato. Non mi spingo fino a dire che siamo ricaduti nella barbarie. Ma dico che proprio ora possiamo imparare meglio dalla scrittura per immagini.
Here and There Walking Tours
The close of the holiday season sets most of us reflecting on the philosophy of travel, and many of us upon the simplest form of it, the philosophy of walking tours. Among serious and imaginative pedestrians there are only two schools or parties, and one school maintains that the pedestrian should go forth without map or compass, and wander until a wood beckons to him or a pathway points like a finger. The other school maintains that he should map out with every circumstance of detail the place he is going to, and then go somewhere else. The idea of having a fixed intention on such an occasion, and adhering to it through thick and thin would make an excellent medieval religious vow, but makes a very poor holiday. Some people set out upon walking tours with the most horrible indifference to that idea of loneliness and liberty which is the essence of such an enterprise. Some even send a bag on before them to the hotels to which they intend to go: a dark and depraved aspect in which to regard human nature. They might as well station footmen in livery at intervals of every three miles carrying coffee and liqueurs. The whole beauty and meaning of pedestrianism vanishes if the pedestrian is once tied to a particular hotel, even if it is thirty miles away. Then he is no longer a wild thing like the hawk or the hare, he is only a cow on a particularly long tether. The sending on of bags is predestination: it is a sort of holiday Calvinism, when the very soul of walking is free will. If a travelling companion is sought he should always be sought among those lovers of the errant and the spontaneous. He should be sought among those true worshippers of liberty who feel a certain degradation whenever they take a return ticket. Those who are interested in antiquities should be avoided, but those who are interested in what they call nature are worse. Great public buildings were after all in some sense made to be stared at, but to regard our mother earth merely as a thing to be stared at is like exhibiting one’s maiden aunt in a cage. A man should walk in the country in order to become a part of the country, not in order to get to the top of a particular hill and see a distressing number of counties.
The man who goes upon a walking tour should be open to all the usual interests. He should enjoy the country and enjoy the churches and enjoy the beetles, but also, and as a very important item, he should enjoy the walk. He should not be consumed with any devouring preference for going anywhere. His desires should be no more fixed upon the end of the walk than the desire of a child upon the end of a sugarstick. The walk should be a work of art, the real colour and value of which do not appear until it is completed. The objects of a walk are often disappointing, but the accidents are magnificent. The true adventurer does not walk so much in the hope of finding cities or mountains as in the hope of discovering by the end of his journey why he came out. The darkness of this great mystery will always be present to his mind. Every twist of roadway, every knot of trees may conceal behind it the explanation of his own superb folly. He is in search of the central incident of his journey, and it may be a strange sunset or a fight with a foot-pad, a patch of primroses or a lunatic with a green umbrella. Just as some primitive hero trusted himself upon the back of a dragon or hippogriff, the traveller trusts himself upon that wildest of steeds—a runaway road. Upon the whole, it may be admitted that the pedestrian should carry a map, but he should not consult it often, and he should always cherish the thrilling and secret thought that it may be all wrong. In fact, a map should be taken chiefly because it is such a particularly beautiful thing in itself. A great many other things should be selected and retained on the same principle. A walking tour, for example, is unthinkable without a walking-stick, though the experienced will have the strongest internal doubts whether it is any use, and the walking-stick of all walking-sticks for such a purpose is one cut in the woods, as being the most rough and crooked and inconvenient. Carrying such a staff a man feels himself a thing of the earth. He is almost a walking portion of the woods, he carries a tree like the army which brought Birnam to Dunsinane. And if he has walked well and cheerfully, by the time he sticks his staff in the ground and sits down to rest in the evening he will do it in such a state of inward glory that he would scarcely be surprised if the staff broke into flower before him like the Pope’s rod in Tannhäuser. The essential ground of the unwisdom and unprofitableness of planning a walk too systematically with maps and guide books is a thing easy to feel, but not quite so easy to analyse. One point, however, may be noticed. In our days, when we have names for everything and accurate plans of everywhere, we tend very much to forget that there does exist a place called the world. The world was the place, for example, into which the heroes of the fairy tales went out to seek their fortune. It began at the end of their father’s garden, and it stretched away into infinity full of everything from birds’ nests to dragons, from apple trees to ogres. This remarkable place, the world, is the only place that is not marked even upon the latest and most accurate geographical charts. We have so cut up the face of the earth into our own arbitrary divisions, that it is always Sussex, or Essex, or Kent, or Norway, or Patagonia, and never simply the earth. Science has given us a vulgar familiarity with the earth, a familiarity without knowledge. We have set the seal of the commonplace upon inaccessible peaks that no man has ever trodden, and unfathomable seas inhabited by monsters that have never risen to the surface. We have names and tickets for sights and regions which we no more possess than if they existed only in someone else’s dreams. Thousands and thousands of leagues beyond the farthest limit of our possible personal experience the earth contains things as marvellous as any fairy tale. But we have not the wisdom as the men of the fairy tales had, the wisdom to call these places fairyland or the castle east of the sun and west of the moon. We call them Jonestown, and Smith’s River, and Snooksville, U.S.A.
The perfect pedestrian should always set forth like the third son in the fairy tale. It is a mystic and beautiful dispensation of Providence that every person in this world has an inward conviction that in the cosmic system he himself is the third son. He should go into Kent if he likes, or Buckinghamshire if he likes, or Normandy, or Italy, or China if he likes, but first and foremost into the world. He should go forth with any object he pleases: to shoot lions, or pick flowers, or collect fossils, or find a desert island, or find a wife, but first and foremost he should go out, in the old fairy tale phrase, to seek his fortune. In the life of industrial civilisation, where everything is done by a kind of clockwork, most of us have forgotten that we have a fortune. Most of us have forgotten that somewhere in the nooks and corners of the world there has, perhaps, been waiting for us all our lives a neglected destiny. When we praise the order of Nature it is only as we might praise a mangle or a mincing machine, useful for our own practical purpose, just as the old silversmiths cried ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Like them we have forgotten the true identity of the moon who was the patroness of lunatics and the goddess of crossroads.
Qui e là Gite a piedi
La fine della stagione delle vacanze spinge la maggior parte di noi a riflettere sulla filosofia del viaggiare, e molti di noi sulla forma più semplice di essa, la filosofia delle gite a piedi. Fra i pedoni seri e dotati di immaginazione vi sono soltanto due scuole o partiti, e una scuola sostiene che il pedone debba mettersi in cammino senza mappa né bussola, e vagare finché un bosco non lo inviti o un sentiero non gli faccia cenno come un dito. L’altra scuola sostiene che egli debba tracciare con ogni circostanza di dettaglio il luogo dove sta andando, e poi andare da tutt’altra parte. L’idea di avere un’intenzione fissa in una simile occasione, e di aderirvi a ogni costo, farebbe un eccellente voto religioso medievale, ma fa una ben misera vacanza. Certuni si mettono in cammino per gite a piedi con la più orribile indifferenza verso quell’idea di solitudine e di libertà che è l’essenza di una simile impresa. Alcuni mandano perfino una valigia in anticipo agli alberghi ai quali intendono recarsi: un aspetto oscuro e depravato sotto cui considerare la natura umana. Potrebbero altrettanto bene appostare valletti in livrea a intervalli di ogni tre miglia recanti caffè e liquori. Tutta la bellezza e il significato del pedonare svanisce se il pedone è una volta legato a un particolare albergo, anche se dista trenta miglia. Allora egli non è più una cosa selvatica come il falco o la lepre, è soltanto una mucca a una pastoia particolarmente lunga. L’inviare avanti le valigie è predestinazione: è una sorta di calvinismo da vacanza, mentre l’anima stessa del camminare è libero arbitrio. Se si cerca un compagno di viaggio, lo si dovrebbe sempre cercare fra quegli amanti dell’errante e dello spontaneo. Lo si dovrebbe cercare fra quei veri adoratori della libertà che provano una certa degradazione ogni volta che prendono un biglietto di andata e ritorno. Coloro che si interessano di antichità andrebbero evitati, ma coloro che si interessano di quel che chiamano natura sono peggiori. I grandi edifici pubblici, dopo tutto, furono in un certo senso fatti per essere osservati, ma considerare la nostra madre terra semplicemente come una cosa da osservare è come esibire la propria zia zitella in una gabbia. Un uomo dovrebbe camminare per la campagna per diventare una parte della campagna, non per giungere in cima a una particolare collina e vedere un deprimente numero di contee.
L’uomo che intraprende una gita a piedi dovrebbe essere aperto a tutti i consueti interessi. Dovrebbe godere della campagna e godere delle chiese e godere degli scarafaggi, ma anche, e come un elemento assai importante, dovrebbe godere della camminata. Non dovrebbe essere consumato da alcuna divorante preferenza per andare in qualche luogo. I suoi desideri non dovrebbero essere più fissati sulla meta della camminata di quanto il desiderio di un bambino lo sia sull’estremità di un bastoncino di zucchero. La camminata dovrebbe essere un’opera d’arte, il cui vero colore e valore non appaiono finché non è compiuta. Gli oggetti di una camminata sono spesso deludenti, ma gli accidenti sono magnifici. Il vero avventuriero non cammina tanto nella speranza di trovare città o montagne quanto nella speranza di scoprire, alla fine del suo viaggio, perché sia uscito. L’oscurità di questo grande mistero sarà sempre presente alla sua mente. Ogni svolta della strada, ogni gruppo d’alberi può celare dietro di sé la spiegazione della sua stessa superba follia. Egli è in cerca dell’incidente centrale del suo viaggio, e questo può essere uno strano tramonto o una lotta con un brigante, una macchia di primule o un pazzo con un ombrello verde. Proprio come qualche eroe primitivo si affidava al dorso di un drago o di un ippogrifo, il viaggiatore si affida a quel più selvaggio dei destrieri: una strada imbizzarrita. Nel complesso, si può ammettere che il pedone debba portare una mappa, ma non dovrebbe consultarla spesso, e dovrebbe sempre coltivare l’eccitante e segreto pensiero che essa possa essere tutta sbagliata. Anzi, una mappa dovrebbe essere presa principalmente perché è una cosa particolarmente bella in sé. Moltissime altre cose andrebbero scelte e conservate secondo lo stesso principio. Una gita a piedi, per esempio, è impensabile senza un bastone da passeggio, sebbene l’esperto nutrirà i più forti dubbi interiori se serva a qualcosa, e il bastone fra tutti i bastoni per un simile scopo è quello tagliato nei boschi, in quanto il più rozzo e storto e scomodo. Portando un tale bastone un uomo si sente una cosa della terra. È quasi una porzione ambulante dei boschi, porta un albero come l’esercito che condusse Birnam a Dunsinane. E se ha camminato bene e allegramente, quando, giunto il tempo, pianta il suo bastone al suolo e si siede a riposare la sera, lo farà in tale stato di gloria interiore che si stupirebbe appena se il bastone sbocciasse in fiore davanti a lui come la verga del Papa nel Tannhäuser. Il fondamento essenziale della insensatezza e dell’inutilità del pianificare una camminata troppo sistematicamente con mappe e guide è una cosa facile da sentire, ma non altrettanto facile da analizzare. Un punto, tuttavia, si può notare. Ai nostri giorni, quando abbiamo nomi per ogni cosa e piante accurate di ogni luogo, tendiamo assai a dimenticare che esiste davvero un luogo chiamato il mondo. Il mondo era il luogo, per esempio, in cui gli eroi delle fiabe uscivano a cercare la propria fortuna. Cominciava al termine del giardino del loro padre, e si stendeva nell’infinito pieno di ogni cosa, dai nidi di uccelli ai draghi, dai meli agli orchi. Questo luogo notevole, il mondo, è l’unico luogo che non è segnato nemmeno sulle più recenti e accurate carte geografiche. Abbiamo talmente ritagliato la faccia della terra nelle nostre arbitrarie divisioni, che è sempre il Sussex, o l’Essex, o il Kent, o la Norvegia, o la Patagonia, e mai semplicemente la terra. La scienza ci ha dato una volgare familiarità con la terra, una familiarità priva di conoscenza. Abbiamo posto il sigillo dell’ovvietà su vette inaccessibili che nessun uomo ha mai calpestato, e su mari insondabili abitati da mostri che non sono mai saliti in superficie. Abbiamo nomi e biglietti per spettacoli e regioni che non possediamo più di quanto li possederemmo se esistessero soltanto nei sogni di qualcun altro. Migliaia e migliaia di leghe oltre il limite più estremo della nostra possibile esperienza personale la terra contiene cose meravigliose quanto qualsiasi fiaba. Ma non abbiamo la saggezza che avevano gli uomini delle fiabe, la saggezza di chiamare questi luoghi paese delle fate o il castello a est del sole e a ovest della luna. Li chiamiamo Jonestown, e Smith’s River, e Snooksville, U.S.A.
Il pedone perfetto dovrebbe sempre mettersi in cammino come il terzo figlio nella fiaba. È una mistica e bella disposizione della Provvidenza che ogni persona a questo mondo abbia un’intima convinzione che nel sistema cosmico egli stesso sia il terzo figlio. Vada nel Kent se gli piace, o nel Buckinghamshire se gli piace, o in Normandia, o in Italia, o in Cina se gli piace, ma prima e innanzitutto nel mondo. Si metta in cammino con qualsiasi scopo gli aggradi: per cacciare leoni, o cogliere fiori, o raccogliere fossili, o trovare un’isola deserta, o trovare moglie, ma prima e innanzitutto dovrebbe uscire, nella vecchia frase delle fiabe, a cercare la propria fortuna. Nella vita della civiltà industriale, dove tutto è fatto da una sorta di meccanismo a orologeria, la maggior parte di noi ha dimenticato di avere una fortuna. La maggior parte di noi ha dimenticato che da qualche parte nei recessi e negli angoli del mondo ha forse atteso per noi per tutta la vita un destino trascurato. Quando lodiamo l’ordine della natura è solo come potremmo lodare un mangano o un tritacarne, utile al nostro pratico scopo, proprio come i vecchi argentieri gridavano «Grande è Diana degli Efesini». Come loro abbiamo dimenticato la vera identità della luna che era la patrona dei lunatici e la dea dei crocevia.
The Blindness of the Sightseer
I once had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of an American, a very intelligent and inspiriting person, who, during a pause in a discussion on scenery, said, with the inimitable accent, ‘Well, I can’t see when you have seen the highest mountain in Switzerland what you want to see the rest for’. So completely obsessed was he with this American sense of competition that he admitted competition even among mountains, and judged of some hundreds of the towering crests of the earth as he would have judged of six American hotel servants who struggled at the station for his bag. There is a very general idea—how general I cannot imagine— that competition is productive of or conducive to individuality. The defenders of the extreme forms of competition invariably insist upon this argument, that the struggle develops personality and variety. Of course, it does nothing of the sort. Competition is simply imitation, and however fierce and ruthless competition may be it only becomes a fierce and ruthless imitation. When the most important object in a landscape must be the thing which is down in the guidebook—the highest hill, the largest tree, the roundest hole in the wall—thousands of other beauties for miles round waste themselves like the neglected talents of humanity. People see the Madeleine and the Louvre, but they do not see Paris. They see the Pfalz Castle and the Drachenfels, but they do not see the Rhine. They see Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon, but they have never seen England; England is still to them an undiscovered Atlantis. They see pyramids, dolmens, sloping towers, great walls, hanging gardens, catacombs, colossal statues; but they have never seen that one miracle to which all these are nothing. They have seen the seven wonders of the world, but they have never seen the world.
Let me hasten to say at once that I have not a gleam of sympathy with that contempt which is sometimes expressed by the languid for those who travel. My complaint is not that people are enthusiastic about the Drachenfels, but that they are not enthusiastic about other things. The real evil is that which takes these sights out of their setting and holds them up as the reason for travel. A man of any imagination gains enormously by travelling in France or Germany. My only suggestion is that he would gain scarcely an atom less if he never saw any one of the places to which such tours are universally and systematically directed. If a man could come upon these places suddenly and naturally the effect would be magnificent. Statues and cathedrals would waylay him like a patch of blossom in the hedges or a shape in the clouds. To walk across the magnificent hills of Sussex, to come upon the long lines of a great forest and a great fortress, and to be told that it is the Castle of the Howards. To walk along the sands of the great Norman coast, and behold out at sea a village clinging upon a spire of rock, and to know that it is the Mountain of St Michael; this would indeed be to be educated by travel. But, then, the great sights would come as the culmination of a series of lesser ones, enjoyed and admired in the same manner. The man who did not enjoy the Sussex Downs would not really enjoy the Castle of Arundel. The man who was not impressed by mere sand and sea would not be impressed by the awful crag of the Archangel. But the system of modern travel takes these things out of their environment, makes them prodigies, valuable in themselves. There is not a pin to choose in essential superstition between the medieval pilgrim who would walk miles that for a moment he might touch a particular stone and the modern tourist who will drive leagues that for a moment he may stare at it. We can all feel this essential difference between seeing a sight as an example of its environment and seeing a sight as an exception to its environment, if we merely imagine the principle applied to other forms in nature. If we walked down a long lane in Surrey, and saw, let us say, an incomparable hedge of wild roses extending apparently for miles, we might be stricken still with an exceptionable wonder at the height and splendour of some exceptionable branch or bloom. But if, because this branch was the highest in the lane, it was suddenly given a name, and advertised through the country; if we heard that a station had been opened near it, that omnibuses and excursion trains were run down to it on Bank Holidays, and that by these facilities some hundreds of harmless human beings were dragged out of London, dropped down in front of it for a minute or two to stare, and then dragged back again, we should say that the magic had departed. And if we were wise, we should see that the magic had not departed, as some superfine people suppose, because trains and trippers are ugly. Trains are very poetical things, and so are trippers; for only the wildest kind of poetry can furnish any explanation of why they trip. But the magic would have gone from that branch of wild roses for the very simple reason that the magic had not resided in that alone; the magic was partly the magic of the lane itself and of loneliness, of the combination of the two strangest and most impressive of things— silence and life. Now, steamers and conducted tours have done precisely this very thing for places like the Rhine: they have found the wild rose and they have lost the lane. It is better a hundred times to wander about the lane and never see its most glorious and natural product than to see that product and regard it as a monstrosity. In so far as a thing is what people call marvellous it is not and cannot be representative. To judge of Italy by the leaning tower is like judging of the human race by the bearded woman at a fair. That type of wonders of the world is based upon the principle that the wonderful consists in things going wrong: to a somewhat more essential imagination the genuine wonder is that things go right. The leaning tower of Pisa is, if we realise man’s history seriously, by no means so astonishing as the nearest waterworks tower. The marvel is that all our turrets and tenements do not reel this way and that, like a scene from the Day of Judgment.
In one sense, the great buildings and great cities which we labour to visit are less worth the labour than those common scenes and figures in the street which we pass easily by. For great buildings belong to great traditions of European civilisation which are akin throughout Europe, and whether or no a man could get as much education from Westminster Abbey as from Cologne Cathedral, at least it would be education upon the same lines. It is in a chance strip of landscape, a chance group in the street that we see the real difference which it is worth while to cross the sea to find. The architecture of a German cathedral and that of an English one belong to the same school; but the architecture of a German and that of an Englishman exhibit the most fascinating differences. Every land, every town, has its dark and sacred individuality. The man who has found this out, and he alone, has visited that land or town. And, perhaps, when we have wandered, in obedience to modern culture, among all the kingdoms of the earth, and gathered the knowledge of them, we may begin to penetrate into that most unexplored of all territories, our own country. We may realise what it is that consitutes an English landscape, and in the wild developments of some future century, may begin to be patriots.
La cecità del turista
Ebbi una volta il piacere di fare la conoscenza di un americano, persona assai intelligente e vivificante, il quale, durante una pausa in una discussione sul paesaggio, disse, con l’inimitabile accento: «Be’, non capisco, quando si è veduta la montagna più alta della Svizzera, cosa si voglia vedere il resto». Tanto completamente ossessionato era da questo americano senso della competizione che ammetteva la competizione persino fra le montagne, e giudicava alcune centinaia delle torreggianti creste della terra come avrebbe giudicato sei camerieri d’albergo americani che si accapigliavano alla stazione per la sua valigia. C’è un’idea assai diffusa — quanto diffusa non riesco a immaginare — che la competizione produca o favorisca l’individualità. I difensori delle forme estreme della competizione insistono invariabilmente su questo argomento, che la lotta sviluppa la personalità e la varietà. Naturalmente non fa nulla del genere. La competizione è semplicemente imitazione, e per quanto feroce e spietata la competizione possa essere, essa diventa solo una feroce e spietata imitazione. Quando l’oggetto più importante di un paesaggio dev’essere la cosa che sta scritta nella guida — il colle più alto, l’albero più grande, il foro più tondo nel muro — migliaia di altre bellezze per miglia all’intorno si sprecano come i talenti trascurati dell’umanità. La gente vede la Madeleine e il Louvre, ma non vede Parigi. Vedono il Castello del Pfalz e il Drachenfels, ma non vedono il Reno. Vedono l’Abbazia di Westminster e Stratford-on-Avon, ma non hanno mai veduto l’Inghilterra; l’Inghilterra è ancora per loro un’Atlantide inesplorata. Vedono piramidi, dolmen, torri pendenti, grandi muraglie, giardini pensili, catacombe, statue colossali; ma non hanno mai veduto quell’unico miracolo di fronte al quale tutti questi sono nulla. Hanno veduto le sette meraviglie del mondo, ma non hanno mai veduto il mondo.
Mi affretto a dire subito che non ho un barlume di simpatia per quel disprezzo che talvolta è espresso dai languidi verso coloro che viaggiano. La mia lagnanza non è che la gente sia entusiasta del Drachenfels, ma che non sia entusiasta di altre cose. Il vero male è quello che toglie queste attrazioni dal loro contesto e le innalza come la ragione del viaggio. Un uomo di una qualche immaginazione guadagna enormemente viaggiando in Francia o in Germania. Il mio unico suggerimento è che egli guadagnerebbe appena un atomo di meno se non vedesse mai nessuno dei luoghi verso i quali simili giri sono universalmente e sistematicamente diretti. Se un uomo potesse imbattersi in questi luoghi all’improvviso e naturalmente, l’effetto sarebbe magnifico. Statue e cattedrali gli tenderebbero un agguato come una macchia di fiori nelle siepi o una forma nelle nuvole. Attraversare le magnifiche colline del Sussex, imbattersi nelle lunghe linee di una grande foresta e di una grande fortezza, e sentirsi dire che è il Castello degli Howard. Camminare lungo le sabbie della grande costa normanna, e scorgere al largo un villaggio abbarbicato su una guglia di roccia, e sapere che è il Monte di San Michele; questo sarebbe davvero essere educati dal viaggio. Ma, allora, le grandi attrazioni giungerebbero come il culmine di una serie di attrazioni minori, godute e ammirate allo stesso modo. L’uomo che non godesse delle Sussex Downs non godrebbe davvero del Castello di Arundel. L’uomo che non fosse colpito dalla mera sabbia e dal mare non sarebbe colpito dalla terribile rupe dell’Arcangelo. Ma il sistema del viaggio moderno toglie queste cose dal loro ambiente, ne fa prodigi, cose di valore in se stesse. Non c’è nulla da scegliere, quanto a superstizione essenziale, fra il pellegrino medievale che camminava per miglia perché per un attimo potesse toccare una particolare pietra e il turista moderno che percorrerà leghe perché per un attimo possa fissarla con gli occhi. Tutti possiamo sentire questa differenza essenziale fra il vedere un’attrazione come esempio del suo ambiente e il vedere un’attrazione come eccezione al suo ambiente, se soltanto immaginiamo il principio applicato ad altre forme della natura. Se camminassimo lungo una lunga stradina nel Surrey, e vedessimo, diciamo, un’incomparabile siepe di rose selvatiche che si estende apparentemente per miglia, potremmo restare impietriti per una eccezionale meraviglia di fronte all’altezza e allo splendore di qualche eccezionale ramo o fioritura. Ma se, poiché questo ramo era il più alto della stradina, gli fosse d’un tratto dato un nome, e lo si pubblicizzasse per tutto il paese; se sentissimo che una stazione era stata aperta accanto a esso, che omnibus e treni d’escursione vi venivano fatti scendere nei giorni festivi, e che grazie a queste comodità alcune centinaia di innocui esseri umani venivano trascinati fuori Londra, scaricati davanti a esso per un minuto o due a fissarlo con gli occhi, e poi trascinati indietro di nuovo, diremmo che la magia se n’è andata. E se fossimo saggi, vedremmo che la magia non se n’è andata, come suppone certa gente troppo raffinata, perché i treni e i gitanti sono brutti. I treni sono cose assai poetiche, e altrettanto lo sono i gitanti; poiché soltanto la più selvaggia specie di poesia può fornire una spiegazione del perché essi gitino. Ma la magia se ne sarebbe andata da quel ramo di rose selvatiche per la ragione assai semplice che la magia non risiedeva in esso soltanto; la magia era in parte la magia della stradina stessa e della solitudine, della combinazione delle due cose più strane e più impressionanti — il silenzio e la vita. Ora, i battelli a vapore e le gite guidate hanno fatto precisamente questa stessa cosa per luoghi come il Reno: hanno trovato la rosa selvatica e hanno perduto la stradina. È cento volte meglio vagare per la stradina e non vederne mai il prodotto più glorioso e naturale che vedere quel prodotto e considerarlo una mostruosità. Nella misura in cui una cosa è ciò che la gente chiama meraviglioso, essa non è e non può essere rappresentativa. Giudicare l’Italia dalla torre pendente è come giudicare il genere umano dalla donna barbuta a una fiera. Quel tipo di meraviglie del mondo si basa sul principio che il meraviglioso consiste nelle cose che vanno storte: per un’immaginazione alquanto più essenziale la genuina meraviglia è che le cose vadano diritte. La torre pendente di Pisa è, se prendiamo sul serio la storia dell’uomo, per nulla così stupefacente quanto la più vicina torre dell’acquedotto. La meraviglia è che tutte le nostre torrette e i nostri caseggiati non barcollino di qua e di là, come una scena del Giorno del Giudizio.
In un senso, i grandi edifici e le grandi città che ci affanniamo a visitare valgono meno la fatica di quelle comuni scene e figure per la strada accanto alle quali passiamo facilmente oltre. Poiché i grandi edifici appartengono alle grandi tradizioni della civiltà europea che sono affini in tutta Europa, e sia o no che un uomo possa trarre altrettanta educazione dall’Abbazia di Westminster quanta dalla Cattedrale di Colonia, per lo meno sarebbe educazione sulle stesse linee. È in un caso strato di paesaggio, in un caso gruppo per la strada che vediamo la differenza reale che vale la pena di attraversare il mare per trovare. L’architettura di una cattedrale tedesca e quella di una inglese appartengono alla stessa scuola; ma l’architettura di un tedesco e quella di un inglese esibiscono le più affascinanti differenze. Ogni terra, ogni città, ha la sua oscura e sacra individualità. L’uomo che l’ha scoperto, e lui soltanto, ha visitato quella terra o città. E, forse, quando avremo vagato, in obbedienza alla cultura moderna, fra tutti i regni della terra, e ne avremo raccolto la conoscenza, potremo cominciare a penetrare in quel più inesplorato di tutti i territori, il nostro stesso paese. Potremo renderci conto di ciò che costituisce un paesaggio inglese, e nei selvaggi sviluppi di qualche secolo futuro, potremo cominciare a essere patrioti.
The Aesthetes in the Kitchen Garden
When, a week or two ago, I came down among the hills of Kent, the country looked ancient and innocent enough. Save for birds and old men lapping hedges the visitor seemed to be in solitude. But all this was a mask—a delusion. This green England of ours is really bursting with literary men. Short story writers leap from behind hedges, minor poets drop from the trees like ripe fruit; you cannot walk through deep grass without stumbling over Sociologists. On dark, windy nights wild voices mingle with the wind, and the words ‘reactionary’, ‘superman’, ‘the Philistines’, and ‘raise the drama’ echo desolately from hill to hill. We see the vision of Fitz-James in ‘The Lady of the Lake’ which Scott describes in words (which I quote from memory):
At once from copse and heath arose Roundels and fugues and lyric prose, From shingles grey their nocturnes start, The bracken bush cries, ‘Art is Art’, And every tuft of broom is rife With highly beastly views of life.
I have met in meadows here some of the most terrible and beautiful people of Fleet Street. I have seen a cottage, decent and quiet on the outside, inside which, as I hope for heaven, there were Burne-Jones’s on the wall. In short, we are in the presence of a peculiar phenomenon. The people are not going ‘back to the land’ but the cultivated classes are.
But there is something about these intellectual people in flannel shirts who come out and live in the country, where they play tennis and read Thoreau which gives me a haunting notion that they do not really belong to the country; they dwell rather than live in it.
Now this is very false. Go into the country for your health; go into the country for your children; go into the country because the police are after you; go into the country because you like painting in water-colours, or because you like keeping chickens, or because you like spearing otters, or because you want beauty or contentment or the continual presence of cows. But do not go into the country because you like liberty, for there is of necessity less liberty in the country than anywhere else. The pressure of society on the individual must be much greater in a village than in a city. Public opinion must be much stronger; personal eccentricity much more difficult. And if the aesthetic people in the flannel shirts do not feel this pressure it is because they are not really living in the life of the village— that is to say, not really living in the life of the country. Liberty is a thing of the town; any Roman or Greek would have understood that. It is in the places where men live an intense and complicated life that they find the necessity for liberty, and that which is almost the same as liberty—loneliness. The routine of rural life, happy, dignified, sensible, but not inventive, and not free, has been going on almost unchanged from the beginning of the world.
Amid all these philosophers and artists who run like rabbits about the woods of Kent I met one who really loved the country. He was driving a sort of wagonette which was plastered all over with little bills and placards announcing that now for the first time people could go from Westerham or Limpsfield to various places that I have never heard of for some singularly small price which I did not read. He was trotting his coach up and down the country roads by way of a preliminary pageant or advertisement, giving free lifts to highly amused pedestrians, or proclaiming the nature and glories of the route to dazed stonebreakers or wild-eyed gypsies. Something led me to make the acquaintance of this individual, and I discovered that driving a coach was by no means the first of his adventures, nor the most amusing. He has written books; he has stood for Parliament; he has conducted, I believe, a kind of wild newspaper. His name is Stuart Gray, and will probably be familiar to many of my readers, especially if they are interested in the movement for the colonisation of England, the return of the people to the land. It was a single sentence of his that convinced me that he had that really poetic feeling which the minor poets in the neighbourhood tend to lack. Before us lay a roll of country like the back of an unbroken wave, spacious, silent, meeting the sky. He stretched out his whip towards it, and said in what I can only call an awestruck voice, ‘If this were all kitchen gardens! Then you’d have people—people—people.’ Three times he said the sacred word of the republic. This article, you will perceive, is also written in a kitchen garden, and a witchery of onions is wafted with it.
While standing in this kitchen garden I perceived what many of my readers must have perceived long ago, that of all things on earth the one perfectly beautiful thing is a kitchen garden. It has a hundred kinds of beauty richly blent into a solemn harmony. It has the beauty of an embroidery, for all the colours are quiet and yet varied infinitely. It has the beauty of an army, for all the vegetable regiments are set in ranks as if they had been drilled by God for the great battle against Nonentity. It has the beauty of a sepulchre, because so many of the shapes and colours that are seen are but the coloured crests or monuments upon the more precious bodies underground. It has the beauty of a store-cupboard, the beauty of a fairy tale. Cabbages alone have all the colours of the sea. I am forced, I find, to conclude these reflections for the moment. But I trust that before I resume my reflections on kitchen gardens someone will have brought out a book of amatory poems in which all the similes shall have been drawn from this nobler and more fruitful Eden. I do not see why he should not say that in a lady’s cheek the turnip and the carrot fought for supremacy. Such a description is far truer to the mellow and tawny quality in the human complexion than the violent similes of the rose and the lily. These latter, I may be fastidious, offend me as fantastic.
Gli esteti nell’orto
Quando, una settimana o due fa, scesi fra le colline del Kent, la campagna appariva antica e innocente abbastanza. Salvo per gli uccelli e i vecchi che potavano le siepi, il visitatore pareva essere in solitudine. Ma tutto questo era una maschera, un inganno. Questa nostra verde Inghilterra sta in realtà scoppiando di letterati. Novellisti balzano da dietro le siepi, poeti minori cadono dagli alberi come frutta matura; non si può camminare tra l’erba alta senza inciampare in Sociologi. Nelle notti buie e ventose voci selvagge si mescolano al vento, e le parole «reazionario», «superuomo», «i Filistei», e «risollevare il dramma» echeggiano desolate di colle in colle. Vediamo la visione di Fitz-James in «La Donna del Lago» che Scott descrive in parole (che cito a memoria):
D’un tratto da bosco e brughiera si levarono rondò e fughe e prosa lirica, dalle ghiaie grigie i loro notturni prendono avvio, il cespo di felce grida «l’Arte è Arte», e ogni ciuffo di ginestra è gremito di vedute della vita altamente bestiali.
Ho incontrato nei prati di qui alcune delle persone più terribili e belle di Fleet Street. Ho visto una casetta, decorosa e quieta all’esterno, al cui interno, com’io spero il cielo, c’erano dei Burne-Jones alle pareti. In breve, siamo alla presenza di un fenomeno peculiare. La gente non sta andando «indietro alla terra» ma le classi colte sì.
Ma c’è qualcosa in questa gente intellettuale in camicia di flanella che esce e va a vivere in campagna, dove giocano a tennis e leggono Thoreau, che mi dà l’ossessionante impressione che essi non appartengano realmente alla campagna; la abitano piuttosto che viverla.
Ora questo è ben falso. Andate in campagna per la salute; andate in campagna per i vostri figli; andate in campagna perché la polizia vi dà la caccia; andate in campagna perché vi piace dipingere ad acquerello, o perché vi piace allevare polli, o perché vi piace arpionare lontre, o perché volete bellezza o contentezza o la continua presenza di mucche. Ma non andate in campagna perché vi piace la libertà, poiché là c’è per necessità meno libertà che in ogni altro luogo. La pressione della società sull’individuo dev’essere assai maggiore in un villaggio che in una città. L’opinione pubblica dev’essere assai più forte; l’eccentricità personale assai più difficile. E se la gente estetizzante in camicia di flanella non sente questa pressione è perché non sta realmente vivendo nella vita del villaggio — vale a dire, non sta realmente vivendo nella vita della campagna. La libertà è una cosa della città; qualsiasi romano o greco l’avrebbe compreso. È nei luoghi dove gli uomini vivono una vita intensa e complicata che essi trovano la necessità della libertà, e di ciò che è quasi la stessa cosa della libertà: la solitudine. La routine della vita rurale, felice, dignitosa, assennata, ma non inventiva, e non libera, va avanti pressoché immutata dal principio del mondo.
In mezzo a tutti questi filosofi e artisti che corrono come conigli per i boschi del Kent ne incontrai uno che amava davvero la campagna. Guidava una specie di carrozzino tutto ricoperto di manifestini e affissi che annunciavano che ora per la prima volta si poteva andare da Westerham o Limpsfield a vari luoghi di cui non avevo mai udito per un prezzo singolarmente esiguo che non lessi. Faceva trottare la sua carrozza su e giù per le strade di campagna a mo’ di corteo preliminare o di réclame, dando passaggi gratuiti a pedoni assai divertiti, o proclamando la natura e le glorie del percorso a spaccapietre sbalorditi o a zingari dallo sguardo selvaggio. Qualcosa mi indusse a fare la conoscenza di questo individuo, e scoprii che guidare una carrozza non era affatto la prima delle sue avventure, né la più divertente. Ha scritto libri; si è candidato al Parlamento; ha diretto, credo, una specie di giornale scatenato. Il suo nome è Stuart Gray, e sarà probabilmente familiare a molti dei miei lettori, specialmente se sono interessati al movimento per la colonizzazione dell’Inghilterra, il ritorno del popolo alla terra. Fu una singola frase sua che mi convinse che egli aveva quel sentimento davvero poetico di cui i poeti minori del vicinato tendono a difettare. Davanti a noi si stendeva un ondeggiamento di campagna come il dorso di un’onda non ancora infranta, spaziosa, silenziosa, che si congiungeva al cielo. Egli tese la frusta verso di essa, e disse con quello che posso solo chiamare un tono di voce timoroso: «Se questo fosse tutto orti! Allora avresti gente — gente — gente». Tre volte pronunciò la sacra parola della repubblica. Anche questo articolo, come vedrete, è scritto in un orto, e uno stregamento di cipolle è recato con esso.
Mentre stavo in questo orto percepii ciò che molti dei miei lettori devono aver percepito da tempo, che di tutte le cose sulla terra l’unica cosa perfettamente bella è un orto. Ha cento specie di bellezza riccamente fuse in una solenne armonia. Ha la bellezza di un ricamo, poiché tutti i colori sono quieti e tuttavia variati all’infinito. Ha la bellezza di un esercito, poiché tutti i reggimenti di verdura sono schierati in file come se fossero stati addestrati da Dio per la grande battaglia contro il Nonessere. Ha la bellezza di un sepolcro, perché così tante delle forme e dei colori che si vedono non sono che i cimieri colorati o i monumenti sopra i più preziosi corpi sotterranei. Ha la bellezza di una dispensa, la bellezza di una fiaba. I cavoli soli hanno tutti i colori del mare. Sono costretto, mi accorgo, a concludere per il momento queste riflessioni. Ma confido che prima di riprendere le mie riflessioni sugli orti qualcuno avrà pubblicato un libro di poesie amorose in cui tutte le similitudini saranno tratte da questo più nobile e più fruttuoso Eden. Non vedo perché non dovrebbe dire che sulla guancia di una dama la rapa e la carota si contendessero il primato. Una simile descrizione è assai più veritiera della qualità matura e fulva nella carnagione umana delle violente similitudini della rosa e del giglio. Queste ultime, sarò forse schizzinoso, mi offendono come fantastiche.
The Need of Personalities in Politics
The village I now inhabit (as a locum tenens in the temporary absence of the Village Beauty) was in a great stir last night, owing to the arrival of the Liberal Van, which was regarded with more gravity than I should have thought possible. It drew up on the village green; its speakers opened a meeting, and everything would have gone smoothly and respectably if it had not happened that among the promoters of the meeting, standing beside the van, was a man with that air of strained intellectuality which marks a reader of The Daily News. He heard my name by some social accident; and remembered seeing it in the paper. ‘I have read your articles,’ said this excellent Liberal, with a friendly smile, while I faintly condoled with him. Then he said, after a pause of some length, ‘I think I know what some of them mean’. I implored him to share with me this secret and painful knowledge, but he refused, and I shall go to my grave without it. But my encounter with the man had drawn me into the dangerous circle. And when the Chairman, a local Liberal magnate, was obliged to leave halfway through the meeting, they hoisted me into the chair instead of him. The chair was a kind of wooden ledge a little way above the shafts; and I took the chair with so dignified a decisiveness as almost to wreck the van. Then, I regret to say, the proceedings took on a more turbulent character. My rising to say anything was greeted (I cannot explain this phenomenon) with loud shouts coming exclusively from little boys. I think I somehow stirred in them a sickening hope that after all it was going to be a circus.
Then there was a sombre Conservative on the outskirts of the crowd, who interrupted so consistently and continuously that it came to be a rather delicate logical question whether he was interrupting our speeches or we were interrupting his. But it was not so much the quantity as the quality of his interruptions that pleased and at the same time perplexed me. One thing was firmly embedded in his mind, the fruitful seed of continuously flowering satire. This was the conviction that all of us in the van were persons of enormous wealth. He even professed to know the sources of that wealth. When I was making some remarks about poverty, he hurled at my head, with a deadly aim, this mysterious sarcasm: ‘Ha! We ain’t all on the Civil List.’ I made, of course, the somewhat obvious retort, that some of us seemed to be on the Uncivil List; but to this moment I cannot imagine what was the meaning of that unfathomable sneer. Is there something in my air and manner, something of official dignity and decorum, touched with a servile prosperity, that suggests that I am in receipt of a bloated pension? Or has somebody really given or left me some money (poignant and improbable thought) since I have been away from town?
Let us leave this merely personal enigma and pass on to the final development, which from a deeper point of view, at any rate, was the most interesting. The temperature of the meeting, I am proud to say, rose higher and higher: a perfect rattle of repartees, the sympathisers on each side rocked and roared, a large fat farmer of Conservative opinions was beginning with a dreadful and dangerous slowness to think of something to say; and when I wound up the meeting and thanked everybody for their patience, politeness, and good temper, they were ready to kick each other round the green.
And then an interesting thing happened. Ten minutes after the end of the meeting the large, deliberate farmer of Conservative opinions was delivered of the thing that he wanted to say; and eclipse and thunder accompanied that portentous birth. The thing he wanted to say was—Could anybody there say he’d ever cut down any man’s wages? This seemed to me a very essential, a very serious, and a very manly challenge, immeasurably more important not only than anything said at our meeting, but than anything that is ever said in the House of Commons.
It was followed by a kind of restless silence, such as occurs in such mobs at such moments, and in the next instant there was drama. A pale, coarse-looking lad, his arm half out of his coat with eagerness and anger, thrust his face forward. His wages had been cut down, he said; he had been underpaid, and underpaid by this man. The farmer, staring at him through the darkness, at first denied all knowledge of his face. Then a voice broke out of him, a loud and wrathful and decisive voice, crying, ‘Why, I know yer now. I know yer now, I sacked yer for—’. Then the sense of English respectability awoke suddenly in everybody, and the men were torn apart and soothed wildly by their friends. Whatever happened, we must not be asked to decide on a matter of real and diurnal right and wrong. Whatever happened we must not have a plain personal challenge answered by a plain personal reply. The farmer went away, shaking with his furious secret; the lad went away shaking with his. Yet here was present on that dark green, in that dim group, what is often the eternal substance and whole meaning of society and government. Two men were calling upon their neighbours to give judgment on their wrongs. This is politics. We had fixed the frontiers of India; we had examined the imports of Canada; we had meditated on the quarrels between Dutchmen and German Jews; we had criticised kindly but firmly the condition of the Prussian working classes; we had thought imperially and also in continents; we had seen the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them.
But this doing of justice between one angry man and another never crossed our minds as a public duty. This was the last business that could be expected of us— this which would be the first business of a primitive community, this which would be the first business of a tribe of Zulus. Our politics for the night had ended. Our politics had ended exactly at the point where all politics ought to begin.
It seemed to me that on this little green, as on a green baize stage, was acted an allegory of the whole situation of our contemporary statesmanship. Everything goes on gaily as long as we are dealing with things. Everything stops abruptly the moment we come to men. We are allowed to say: ‘The supporters of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act are corrupt scoundrels.’ We are allowed to say, ‘Sir William Guppy is a supporter of the Blue-nosed Monkeys Modification and Improvement Act’. We are not allowed to complete the syllogism. Everybody says with one accord in our English Parliament: ‘Let us have no personalities in politics.’ Every Briton says at his breakfast table: ‘At least, we are not like the French and the Irish; we have no personalities in our politics.’ And because we have no personalities we have no responsibilities.
Il bisogno di personalità in politica
Il villaggio che ora abito (come locum tenens nell’assenza temporanea della Bellezza del Villaggio) era in gran fermento la notte scorsa, per l’arrivo del Furgone Liberale, che veniva considerato con maggiore gravità di quanto avessi creduto possibile. Si fermò sul prato del villaggio; i suoi oratori aprirono un comizio, e tutto sarebbe andato liscio e rispettabile se non fosse accaduto che tra i promotori del comizio, in piedi accanto al furgone, ci fosse un uomo con quell’aria di forzata intellettualità che contraddistingue un lettore del Daily News. Egli udì il mio nome per qualche accidente sociale; e ricordò di averlo visto sul giornale. «Ho letto i suoi articoli», disse questo eccellente Liberale, con un sorriso amichevole, mentre io debolmente mi condolevo con lui. Poi disse, dopo una pausa di una certa lunghezza: «Credo di capire cosa alcuni di essi vogliano dire». Lo implorai di condividere con me questa segreta e dolorosa conoscenza, ma egli rifiutò, e andrò alla mia tomba senza di essa. Ma il mio incontro con l’uomo mi aveva trascinato nel cerchio pericoloso. E quando il Presidente, un magnate liberale locale, fu costretto ad andarsene a metà del comizio, mi issarono al suo posto sullo scranno invece di lui. Lo scranno era una specie di sporgenza di legno un po’ al di sopra delle stanghe; e presi posto con una decisività così dignitosa da quasi mandare a pezzi il furgone. Poi, mi dispiace dirlo, i lavori assunsero un carattere più turbolento. Il mio alzarmi per dire qualcosa era accolto (non riesco a spiegare questo fenomeno) con forti grida provenienti esclusivamente da ragazzini. Credo di aver in qualche modo suscitato in loro una nauseante speranza che dopo tutto sarebbe stato un circo.
Poi c’era un cupo Conservatore ai margini della folla, che interrompeva con tanta costanza e continuità che divenne una questione logica alquanto delicata se egli interrompesse i nostri discorsi o se noi interrompessimo il suo. Ma non era tanto la quantità quanto la qualità delle sue interruzioni che mi compiaceva e al tempo stesso mi lasciava perplesso. Una cosa era saldamente radicata nella sua mente, il fecondo seme di una satira continuamente fiorente. Era la convinzione che tutti noi sul furgone fossimo persone di enorme ricchezza. Professava perfino di conoscere le fonti di quella ricchezza. Mentre facevo alcune osservazioni sulla povertà, mi scagliò contro la testa, con mira mortale, questo misterioso sarcasmo: «Ah! Non siamo mica tutti sulla Lista Civile». Feci, naturalmente, la replica alquanto ovvia, che alcuni di noi parevano essere sulla Lista Incivile; ma fino a questo istante non riesco a immaginare quale fosse il significato di quel beffardo insondabile. C’è forse qualcosa nella mia aria e nei miei modi, qualcosa di ufficiale dignità e decoro, tinto di una servile prosperità, che suggerisce che io sia in ricezione di una gonfia pensione? O forse qualcuno mi ha davvero dato o lasciato del denaro (pensiero pungente e improbabile) da quando sono stato via dalla città?
Lasciamo questo enigma meramente personale e passiamo allo sviluppo finale, che da un punto di vista più profondo, in ogni caso, fu il più interessante. La temperatura del comizio, sono fiero di dirlo, salì sempre più in alto: un perfetto crepitìo di battute, i simpatizzanti di ciascuna parte si dondolavano e ruggivano, un grosso e grasso fattore di opinioni Conservatrici cominciava con una spaventosa e pericolosa lentezza a pensare a qualcosa da dire; e quando chiusi il comizio e ringraziai tutti per la loro pazienza, cortesia e buon umore, erano pronti a prendersi a calci l’un l’altro intorno al prato.
E poi accadde una cosa interessante. Dieci minuti dopo la fine del comizio il grosso e ponderato fattore di opinioni Conservatrici partorì la cosa che voleva dire; ed eclissi e tuono accompagnarono quella portentosa nascita. La cosa che voleva dire era: poteva qualcuno lì presente dire che egli avesse mai tagliato il salario a un uomo? Questa mi parve una sfida assai essenziale, assai seria, e assai virile, incommensurabilmente più importante non solo di qualsiasi cosa detta al nostro comizio, ma di qualsiasi cosa venga mai detta alla Camera dei Comuni.
Fu seguita da una sorta di irrequieto silenzio, come accade in simili folle in simili momenti, e nell’istante successivo ci fu dramma. Un giovane pallido e dall’aspetto rozzo, il braccio mezzo fuori dalla giacca per la foga e la collera, spinse in avanti il volto. Il suo salario era stato tagliato, disse; era stato sottopagato, e sottopagato da quest’uomo. Il fattore, fissandolo attraverso l’oscurità, dapprima negò ogni conoscenza del suo volto. Poi una voce eruppe da lui, forte e irata e decisa, gridando: «Ma sì, ti riconosco adesso. Ti riconosco adesso, t’ho licenziato perché—». Poi il senso della rispettabilità inglese si risvegliò d’un tratto in ognuno, e i due uomini furono strappati l’uno dall’altro e freneticamente placati dai loro amici. Qualunque cosa accadesse, non dovevamo essere chiamati a decidere su una questione di reale e quotidiano giusto e ingiusto. Qualunque cosa accadesse, non dovevamo avere una schietta sfida personale a cui rispondesse una schietta replica personale. Il fattore se ne andò, tremante del suo furioso segreto; il giovane se ne andò tremante del suo. Eppure era presente su quel prato oscuro, in quel fioco gruppo, ciò che è spesso la sostanza eterna e l’intero significato della società e del governo. Due uomini chiamavano i loro vicini a dare giudizio sui loro torti. Questa è la politica. Avevamo fissato le frontiere dell’India; avevamo esaminato le importazioni del Canada; avevamo meditato sulle contese fra Olandesi ed Ebrei tedeschi; avevamo criticato con benevolenza ma con fermezza la condizione delle classi lavoratrici prussiane; avevamo pensato imperialmente e anche in termini di continenti; avevamo veduto i regni della terra e la loro gloria.
Ma questo far giustizia fra un uomo adirato e un altro non ci passò mai per la mente come dovere pubblico. Questo era l’ultimo affare che ci si potesse attendere da noi — questo che sarebbe il primo affare di una comunità primitiva, questo che sarebbe il primo affare di una tribù di Zulù. La nostra politica per la serata era finita. La nostra politica era finita esattamente nel punto in cui ogni politica dovrebbe cominciare.
Mi parve che su questo piccolo prato, come su un verde palcoscenico di panno, fosse recitata un’allegoria dell’intera situazione della nostra arte di governo contemporanea. Tutto procede allegramente finché abbiamo a che fare con le cose. Tutto si arresta di colpo nel momento in cui arriviamo agli uomini. Ci è permesso dire: «I sostenitori della Legge di Modifica e Miglioramento delle Scimmie dal Naso Blu sono canaglie corrotte». Ci è permesso dire: «Sir William Guppy è un sostenitore della Legge di Modifica e Miglioramento delle Scimmie dal Naso Blu». Non ci è permesso completare il sillogismo. Tutti dicono di comune accordo nel nostro Parlamento inglese: «Non abbiamo personalismi in politica». Ogni britannico dice al suo tavolo della colazione: «Almeno, non siamo come i francesi e gli irlandesi; non abbiamo personalismi nella nostra politica». E poiché non abbiamo personalità non abbiamo responsabilità.
The Largest Window in the World
It is a terrible thing to have trod on battlefields before they were fought. It gives a man a cold and ghostly shiver, as of being the babe unborn. But I was a boy, and almost a babe, when I was first in Belgium; and I can only write down the reality that impressed me then. Beyond some streets burning with brassware, which seemed perpetually on sale, almost out of sight of the great Belfry, there is (or was) a sort of museum of the great Memlinc. Among the pictures was one which even as a boy I could not forget; and very few poets or prophets can even imagine how much a boy can forget. It was a picture in which the window seemed hardly wider than the crack of a door. Yet through that crack the human eye could almost, in the strong Scripture rhetoric, take the wings of the morning and abide in the uttermost parts of the sea.
And I remember a voice near me speaking in an accent that was neither French nor Flemish nor my own: ‘You see how narrow the windows were in those days.’
I did. I also began to see, for the first time, how narrow the minds are in these days. I looked at the little window again and I thought it the largest window in the world. Simply because the aperture was narrow, I knew the landscape was wide. If modern artists had swept it in a larger style, I should have noticed it no more than some hundred miles of wallpaper. Then note not only the pride of a small nation, but the pride of the rich peasantry. Look from the slit of a turret in Cumberland or Calabria and there is a chance that your eye may strike something slightly depressing. But any strip of Belgium will be a string of jewels. Note, thirdly, that the thinness of the outlook is largely due to the thickness of the walls. There is no trace of what vulgar people call ‘a vista’: the house does not open up indefinitely to the world outside. The man of Memlinc sees the world from his window. But it is still the final fact that the window was his window and the world is not his world. I should have thought it, then, quite inconceivable that any one would assail that turret. But I should have thought it equally inconceivable that any one should fail to defend it. A man living in such a house might almost shut the front door to protect the beauty of the window.
I have never been in Belgium since; I have never met any who would possibly be in connection with any revolutionary or anti-national idea. Yet for me Belgium has continued to mean that small field of vision, making certain so vast a field of prosperity. That keyhole is still the largest window in the world.
Since then I have not seen the country, except in frightful photographs. I have gradually begun to understand what was meant by my alien friend when he spoke of the needless narrowness of the medieval window. To judge by the photographs, he has broadened architectural effects very much; he has blown window into window and enlarged the premises; he has left long lines of street in which it is impossible to say whether he has combined the windows that exist, or spared the windows that never existed. He cannot make anything except a window; for a window is simply a hole. When he has blown everything to atoms, when no stack or stone stands about us for many miles, he will say, with an insane simplicity: ‘I have made the largest window in the world.’
La Più Grande Finestra del Mondo
È una cosa terribile aver calcato campi di battaglia prima che fossero combattuti. Dà a un uomo un brivido freddo e spettrale, come di essere il bimbo non ancora nato. Ma ero un ragazzo, e quasi un bimbo, quando fui la prima volta in Belgio; e non posso che mettere per iscritto la realtà che allora mi colpì. Oltre certe strade sfavillanti di oggetti d’ottone, che parevano perennemente in vendita, quasi fuori dalla vista del grande Campanile, c’è (o c’era) una specie di museo del grande Memling. Tra i quadri ve n’era uno che persino da ragazzo non riuscii a dimenticare; e ben pochi poeti o profeti possono immaginare quanto un ragazzo sappia dimenticare. Era un quadro in cui la finestra pareva a malapena più larga della fessura di una porta. Eppure attraverso quella fessura l’occhio umano poteva quasi, nella forte retorica delle Scritture, prendere le ali dell’aurora e dimorare negli estremi confini del mare.
E ricordo una voce vicino a me che parlava con un accento che non era né francese né fiammingo né il mio: ‘Vede quanto erano strette le finestre a quei tempi.’
Sì, lo vedevo. Cominciai anche a vedere, per la prima volta, quanto strette siano le menti a questi tempi. Guardai di nuovo la piccola finestra e la giudicai la più grande finestra del mondo. Semplicemente perché l’apertura era stretta, sapevo che il paesaggio era vasto. Se gli artisti moderni l’avessero spazzata in uno stile più ampio, non l’avrei notata più di qualche centinaio di miglia di carta da parati. Si noti poi non solo l’orgoglio di una piccola nazione, ma l’orgoglio del contadinato ricco. Guardate dalla feritoia di una torretta in Cumberland o in Calabria e c’è la possibilità che l’occhio incappi in qualcosa di lievemente deprimente. Ma qualunque striscia di Belgio sarà una collana di gioielli. Si noti, in terzo luogo, che la sottigliezza della veduta è in gran parte dovuta allo spessore delle mura. Non v’è traccia di ciò che la gente volgare chiama ‘una prospettiva’: la casa non si apre indefinitamente al mondo esterno. L’uomo di Memling vede il mondo dalla sua finestra. Ma resta pur sempre il fatto ultimo che la finestra era la sua finestra e il mondo non è il suo mondo. Avrei allora ritenuto del tutto inconcepibile che qualcuno assalisse quella torretta. Ma avrei ritenuto altrettanto inconcepibile che qualcuno mancasse di difenderla. Un uomo che vivesse in una tale casa potrebbe quasi chiudere la porta d’ingresso per proteggere la bellezza della finestra.
Non sono mai più stato in Belgio da allora; non ho mai incontrato alcuno che possa in qualche modo essere in relazione con un’idea rivoluzionaria o antinazionale. Eppure per me il Belgio ha continuato a significare quel piccolo campo di visione, che rendeva certo un così vasto campo di prosperità. Quel buco della serratura è ancora la più grande finestra del mondo.
Da allora non ho più visto quel paese, se non in spaventose fotografie. A poco a poco ho cominciato a capire che cosa intendesse il mio amico straniero quando parlava dell’inutile strettezza della finestra medievale. A giudicare dalle fotografie, egli ha allargato moltissimo gli effetti architettonici; ha dilatato una finestra dentro l’altra e ampliato i locali; ha lasciato lunghe file di strade in cui è impossibile dire se abbia combinato le finestre che esistono, o risparmiato le finestre che non sono mai esistite. Egli non sa fare altro che una finestra; perché una finestra non è che un buco. Quando avrà ridotto ogni cosa in atomi, quando nessuna catasta o pietra si ergerà attorno a noi per molte miglia, dirà, con folle semplicità: ‘Ho fatto la più grande finestra del mondo.’
The Apostle and the Wild Ducks
Last week I learned a historical lesson in some sense by going on a wild-goose chase. Perhaps it might more correctly be described as a wild-duck chase. Not that I had any intention of shooting wild ducks, though the country I visited was, I believe, specially suited to the sport; the country round about the Fens of Lincoln and the Broads of Norfolk. Those eastern flats generally are famous for such wild-fowl, as also for the remains of the rich medieval civilisation founded on the Flemish trade, and for expansive opportunities for the admiration of the sunset; or, for those of suitable habits, of the sunrise. Yet the wild duck I pursued was not entirely symbolical, though he was among other things a symbol. What happened in my own case was merely this: that a friend of mine told me that far in the interior of the Fens, in the heart of a labyrinth of lanes and dykes there was a little church which contained some medieval paintings in remarkable preservation. These pictures were said to represent scenes of medieval sport, dealing especially with ducks. After wanderings which might have led to the other end of nowhere, only that the endless road seemed to be perpetually turning inward instead of outward, we came at last to the place, in a wilderness of dusty grass and stunted and sprawling trees; with one of the great square towers of fine flints, that mark the Norfolk churches, alone filling the empty sky and dwarfing everything at its feet. And it was here that I found the feature that seemed to me a sort of symbol or summary for our understanding of the Middle Ages.
Incidentally, of course that great tower was something of a symbol itself. It was not only a beacon or thing to be seen; it is a symbol of blindness as well as sight. Nothing is so strange in human history as the things men do not see. Over all those flat lands the only mountains were made by men; and they were made by medieval men. For that matter, in a thousand little villages all over England there has been for centuries only one tall, stately ornate and orderly building; all the rest was obvious patchwork and poverty. Yet the Puritans could successfully teach five generations of English people, and especially of East Anglian people, that the men who built the big systematic building were living in savagery and superstition, while the men who still tolerated the little hovels had emerged into liberty and enlightenment. In this case it is curiously true that faith can remove mountains; it can remove the mountain opposite a man’s door, if his prejudice has taught him that a mountain is only a myth. But this is a parenthesis; for my purpose here is not concerned with the old English churches in general, but with something that is to be found in this old Norfolk church in particular.
I say it is something that can be found, though at first it seemed rather like something that could not be found. In truth, in that remarkable little fane of the flats, we might be said to have found everything but what we were looking for. There were indeed medieval paintings; and very fine ones, by no means hidden but splendidly displayed. Fronting us as we entered the church door, in a great row across the rood-screen, stood the Twelve Apostles, six on each side, with their rich colours somewhat darkened but their gold in full glow, and their emblems and tools of martyrdom unmistakable. Facing inwards, opposite each other, were two figures of St Michael and St George, treated somewhat in a heraldic manner. I mean the manner that looks arbitrary until we realise that it is decorative. The armament of St George seemed fantastic and top-heavy even for the tilting armour of the fourteenth century; the feathers of St Michael seemed to be sprouting from strange parts of him, as from the body of a monster. Only when we consider it as we do a coat of arms, as a pattern more than a picture, we suddenly realise that every line of it is in exactly the right place. High above all these there was a much more faded figure of St Etheldreda, the great Christian foundress and patron of those parts; looking down perhaps the more impressively for seeming more like a ghost or a great shadow on the wall.
This was, in the strict sense of the word, all very fine; but it was not what we had come to see. The attitude of the Apostles however darkly traced, could not be mistaken for the postures of gentlemen when duck-shooting. St George was clearly occupied in killing a dragon and not a duck. St Michael’s wings might seem to be sticking out of him in an arbitrary and ornamental fashion; but they did not recall the wings of a duck, or even what the Psalmist coveted as the wings of a dove. Besides, St Michael is more associated with a goose. Nobody would venture to call St Etheldreda a duck. We concluded that the rumour about pictures of duck-hunting in the Fens must have been a rumour without foundation. In short, the duck was only a canard.
Just as we were trailing out of the church in disappointment and even despair, so far as our duck-hunting expedition was concerned, my friend gave a cry; and I turned in the very porch to look back at him. He was bending over the figure representing St Paul, which wore a long inner garment elaborately embroidered with gold; we had both passed it over as a pattern merely adding richness to the general design. But on looking closer, I found that the Apostle of the Gentiles was all over ducks. He was, so to speak, crawling with ducks, with ducks and dogs pursuing them in one pantomimic dance all over the gilded pattern. It was here that the artist had crowded all his comic sketches of the sports of his native fens. It was a very good pattern, but it was made of quite grotesque pictures. It might have been the design for the fancy waistcoat of a fat gentleman in one of the Dickens novels. The first of all the Dickens novels, by the way, was originally written to illustrate some grotesque sketches of sport. It is not too much to say that, in the original scheme of the publishers, Mr Pickwick merely existed for the sake of Mr Winkle. Mr Winkle might very well have gone duck-shooting in the fens, as he went skating on the ice or riding on the famous horse that went sideways. The sporting artist employed on that occasion would doubtless have been ready to depict him surrounded by any number of ducks and dogs. But he would have been mildly surprised if he had been asked to depict them as part of the decoration of the parish church, to say nothing of the vestments of the parson. But the older artist saw nothing incongruous in depicting them thus in mazy detail between the massive book and the mighty sword, that stood for that terrible convert who was struck down upon the road to Damascus.
Now that is the answer to the question I have already asked and that is why this pointless anecdote is also a parable. People were able to shut their eyes to the big church because it was only a church, however big; and they did not think of deducing anything from it about the number of houses or the nature of households. Because the framework of so much of medieval life was a religious framework, they never even looked at the picture in the frame. They passed it over exactly as anyone looking at the painted figures of the Twelve Apostles passed over all the lively little animals of which its ornament was made up. Thus, to take only one example, popular history seldom takes account of the large numbers of medieval people more or less loosely attached to the Church without being in the full sense either priests or monks: students, members of lay orders and men who were merely clerks in the sense of pleading benefit of clergy; that is, being under the milder law of the Church rather than the harsher law of the State. All this popular life, I suspect, moved normally within more or less clerical enclosures, as the details of the decoration seemed to dance within the enclosure of the main lines of the design. In the gradual revival of the study of such a period, we have had to investigate the religious life in order to discover the secular life. We have had to search the cathedrals to find the guilds; as my friend had to scrutinise the saint in order to find the hounds and the birds. There is no way to those things except through that Gothic porch; and this was realised even by the great men like Morris and Rossetti who might well have wished, for some other reason, to come in by some other way. But none ever came in by any other way except the thieves and the robbers.
There are thousands of little things like that to be found in every corner of what is left of medieval craft and culture. I have taken this small instance because it is small, and because it is the last that has occurred to me. The study of these old things has to be intensive study; just as the cultivation of them anew would have to be an intensive cultivation.
L’apostolo e le anatre selvatiche
La settimana scorsa imparai una lezione storica in un certo senso andando a caccia di oche selvatiche. Forse la si potrebbe più correttamente descrivere come una caccia all’anatra selvatica. Non che avessi alcuna intenzione di sparare alle anatre selvatiche, sebbene la contrada che visitai fosse, credo, particolarmente adatta a quello sport; la contrada intorno alle Paludi di Lincoln e alle Broads di Norfolk. Quelle pianure orientali sono in genere famose per tale selvaggina di palude, come pure per i resti della ricca civiltà medievale fondata sul commercio fiammingo, e per ampie opportunità di ammirare il tramonto; o, per chi ne abbia l’abitudine, l’alba. Eppure l’anatra selvatica che inseguii non era interamente simbolica, benché fosse fra le altre cose un simbolo. Ciò che accadde nel mio caso fu semplicemente questo: che un amico mi disse che nel profondo interno delle Paludi, nel cuore di un labirinto di stradine e di argini c’era una piccola chiesa che conteneva alcune pitture medievali in notevole stato di conservazione. Si diceva che queste pitture rappresentassero scene di sport medievale, riguardanti specialmente le anatre. Dopo peregrinazioni che avrebbero potuto condurci all’altro capo del nulla, se non fosse che la strada infinita sembrava piegare perpetuamente verso l’interno anziché verso l’esterno, giungemmo finalmente al luogo, in una landa di erba polverosa e di alberi stentati e sdraiati; con una delle grandi torri quadrate di bella selce, che segnano le chiese del Norfolk, sola a riempire il cielo vuoto e a rimpicciolire ogni cosa ai suoi piedi. E fu qui che trovai il particolare che mi parve una sorta di simbolo o sunto per la nostra comprensione del Medioevo.
Per inciso, naturalmente quella grande torre era essa stessa qualcosa di un simbolo. Non era soltanto un faro o una cosa da vedere; è un simbolo di cecità non meno che di vista. Nulla è tanto strano nella storia umana quanto le cose che gli uomini non vedono. Su tutte quelle terre piatte le uniche montagne erano fatte dagli uomini; ed erano state fatte da uomini medievali. Del resto, in un migliaio di piccoli villaggi in tutta l’Inghilterra c’è stato per secoli un solo edificio alto, maestoso, ornato e ordinato; tutto il resto era manifesto rappezzo e povertà. Eppure i Puritani poterono con successo insegnare a cinque generazioni di inglesi, e specialmente di gente dell’Anglia Orientale, che gli uomini che costruirono il grande edificio sistematico vivevano nella selvatichezza e nella superstizione, mentre gli uomini che ancora tolleravano i piccoli tuguri erano emersi nella libertà e nell’illuminazione. In questo caso è curiosamente vero che la fede può rimuovere le montagne; può rimuovere la montagna di fronte alla porta di un uomo, se il suo pregiudizio gli ha insegnato che una montagna è soltanto un mito. Ma questa è una parentesi; poiché il mio scopo qui non riguarda le vecchie chiese inglesi in generale, bensì qualcosa che si trova in questa vecchia chiesa del Norfolk in particolare.
Dico che è qualcosa che può essere trovato, benché dapprima sembrasse piuttosto qualcosa che non poteva essere trovato. In verità, in quel notevole piccolo tempietto delle pianure, si potrebbe dire che vi trovammo ogni cosa tranne ciò che cercavamo. C’erano invero pitture medievali; e assai belle, per nulla nascoste ma splendidamente esposte. Di fronte a noi mentre entravamo nella porta della chiesa, in una grande fila attraverso il tramezzo, stavano i Dodici Apostoli, sei per lato, con i loro ricchi colori un po’ incupiti ma il loro oro in pieno bagliore, e i loro emblemi e strumenti del martirio inconfondibili. Rivolti verso l’interno, uno di fronte all’altro, c’erano due figure di San Michele e San Giorgio, trattate in un modo alquanto araldico. Intendo il modo che appare arbitrario finché non ci accorgiamo che è decorativo. L’armamento di San Giorgio pareva fantastico e sbilanciato in alto anche per l’armatura da torneo del quattordicesimo secolo; le piume di San Michele parevano spuntargli da parti strane, come dal corpo di un mostro. Solo quando lo consideriamo come consideriamo uno stemma, come un motivo più che un’immagine, ci accorgiamo d’un tratto che ogni sua linea è esattamente al posto giusto. Ben al di sopra di tutti questi c’era una figura assai più sbiadita di Sant’Etheldreda, la grande fondatrice cristiana e patrona di quelle contrade; che guardava dall’alto forse in modo più impressionante per il suo sembrare più simile a un fantasma o a una grande ombra sulla parete.
Questo era, nel senso stretto della parola, tutto assai bello; ma non era ciò che eravamo venuti a vedere. L’atteggiamento degli Apostoli, per quanto oscuramente tracciato, non poteva essere scambiato per le posture di gentiluomini a caccia di anatre. San Giorgio era chiaramente occupato a uccidere un drago e non un’anatra. Le ali di San Michele potevano sembrare sporgere da lui in modo arbitrario e ornamentale; ma non richiamavano le ali di un’anatra, o nemmeno ciò che il Salmista bramava come le ali di una colomba. Del resto, San Michele è più associato a un’oca. Nessuno oserebbe chiamare Sant’Etheldreda un’anatra. Concludemmo che la voce circa i quadri di caccia all’anatra nelle Paludi doveva essere una voce senza fondamento. In breve, l’anatra era soltanto un canard.
Proprio mentre ci trascinavamo fuori dalla chiesa nella delusione e perfino nella disperazione, per quel che riguardava la nostra spedizione di caccia all’anatra, il mio amico lanciò un grido; e mi voltai proprio sul portico a guardare indietro verso di lui. Era chino sulla figura che rappresentava San Paolo, la quale portava una lunga veste interna elaboratamente ricamata d’oro; entrambi l’avevamo trascurata come un motivo che aggiungeva semplicemente ricchezza al disegno generale. Ma guardando più da vicino, scoprii che l’Apostolo delle Genti era tutto coperto di anatre. Ne brulicava, per così dire, di anatre e di cani che le inseguivano in una danza pantomimica per tutto il dorato motivo. Era qui che l’artista aveva stipato tutti i suoi comici schizzi degli sport delle sue native paludi. Era un ottimo motivo, ma era fatto di quadretti del tutto grotteschi. Sarebbe potuto essere il disegno per il panciotto sfarzoso di un grasso gentiluomo in uno dei romanzi di Dickens. Il primo di tutti i romanzi di Dickens, tra parentesi, fu originariamente scritto per illustrare certi grotteschi schizzi di sport. Non è esagerato dire che, nel piano originale dei editori, il signor Pickwick esisteva soltanto per amore del signor Winkle. Il signor Winkle avrebbe benissimo potuto andare a caccia di anatre nelle paludi, come andava a pattinare sul ghiaccio o a cavalcare il famoso cavallo che andava di traverso. L’artista sportivo impiegato in quell’occasione sarebbe stato senza dubbio pronto a raffigurarlo circondato da un numero qualsiasi di anatre e di cani. Ma si sarebbe blandamente stupito se gli fosse stato chiesto di raffigurarle come parte della decorazione della chiesa parrocchiale, per non dire dei paramenti del parroco. Ma l’artista più antico non vide nulla di incongruo nel raffigurarle così in labirintico dettaglio fra il massiccio libro e la possente spada, che stavano per quel terribile convertito che fu abbattuto sulla strada di Damasco.
Ora questa è la risposta alla domanda che ho già posto ed è per questo che questo aneddoto senza scopo è anche una parabola. La gente era in grado di chiudere gli occhi sulla grande chiesa perché era solo una chiesa, per quanto grande; e non pensava di dedurne alcunché sul numero delle case o sulla natura dei nuclei familiari. Poiché la cornice di gran parte della vita medievale era una cornice religiosa, non guardavano nemmeno il quadro dentro la cornice. La trascuravano esattamente come chiunque, guardando le figure dipinte dei Dodici Apostoli, trascurava tutti i vivaci animaletti di cui era fatto il loro ornamento. Così, per prendere un solo esempio, la storia popolare di rado tiene conto del gran numero di persone medievali più o meno vagamente legate alla Chiesa senza essere nel pieno senso né sacerdoti né monaci: studenti, membri di ordini laici e uomini che erano meri chierici nel senso di invocare il beneficio del clero; vale a dire, di stare sotto la più mite legge della Chiesa anziché la più dura legge dello Stato. Tutta questa vita popolare, sospetto, si muoveva normalmente entro recinti più o meno clericali, come i dettagli della decorazione parevano danzare entro il recinto delle linee principali del disegno. Nel graduale risveglio dello studio di un simile periodo, abbiamo dovuto investigare la vita religiosa per scoprire la vita secolare. Abbiamo dovuto frugare le cattedrali per trovare le corporazioni; come il mio amico dovette scrutare il santo per trovare i segugi e gli uccelli. Non c’è via verso quelle cose se non attraverso quel portico gotico; e questo fu compreso perfino da grandi uomini come Morris e Rossetti, che ben avrebbero potuto desiderare, per qualche altra ragione, di entrare per qualche altra via. Ma nessuno mai entrò per alcun’altra via se non i ladri e i briganti.
Ci sono migliaia di piccole cose come quella da trovare in ogni angolo di ciò che resta della manifattura e della cultura medievale. Ho preso questo piccolo esempio perché è piccolo, e perché è l’ultimo che mi è venuto in mente. Lo studio di queste vecchie cose dev’essere uno studio intensivo; proprio come la loro coltivazione rinnovata dovrebbe essere una coltivazione intensiva.
Travellers’ Joys
Once when I was wandering about in the beautiful city of Bath, I fell into a vein of meditation not concerned with any of the antiquities of the place, as such things are counted in a guidebook. My reflections, though profound and philosophical, were not concerned with the Bath of Bath, which recalls the Roman foundation of Britain. They were not concerned with the Abbey of Bath, which recalls the Middle Ages; nor with the Pump Room or Assembly Room which recall the stately frivolity of the eighteenth century. I was not even thinking of that noble theme, the Wife of Bath, a medieval monument which seems even more gigantic than an abbey.
If anyone really wants to know why some of us have a taste for what is called ‘medievalism’, he can find a great deal of it in that grand and grotesque personality. But the point is that the Wife of Bath was coming from Bath, and not going to Bath. When we consider what her errand was, and then what she was, we realise the wide reach and grasp of religion upon the motley mob of mankind. The Wife of Bath is a sort of caricature carved in brass; as brazen as Mrs Gamp and with as broad a grin. But who can imagine Dickens, who described so many wanderings in Kent, describing Mrs Gamp as going on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint? I suppose the whole stretch of history from the medieval to the modern world, might be summed up in the reversal of that journey. It is the change from the time when the Wife of Bath went to sprinkle herself with holy water at Canterbury, to the time when the Archbishop of Canterbury probably went to sprinkle himself with medicinal water at Bath. But it was not of such trifles as the towers of Canterbury or the Roman floors of Bath that I was musing mystically at the moment.
My mind was uplifted and attuned to the subject of buns. I was reflecting upon the remarkable fact that, to a great extent, it is still necessary to go to Bath for Bath buns. I have, indeed, encountered in my travels in less civilised places something apparently intended for food, to which is attached the name of the Roman city of Somerset. But, after tasting it, I have come to the conclusion that the derivation is different. These other objects, I conceive, are very legitimately called Bath buns because they are made of soap and flannel. But to a great extent, in spite of the modern network of communications and dead level of standardisation, a Bath bun still means a bun of Bath. The same is true in its degree, I believe, in the case of Chelsey buns. It may be true, for all I know, of those unique cakes of Richmond, gloriously described as Maids of Honour. It may be that, before standardisation began, there were these local luxuries in nearly every locality. Perhaps there were Pimlico Pancakes which were the rich reward of crossing the meadows to the picturesque hamlet of Pimlico. Perhaps Clapham produced a sweetmeat as well as a sect; and Mayfair was famous for toffee before it was famous for toffs. But over all districts that have been surrounded and swallowed by the big industrial cities, there runs the rule of the great commercial combinations, and all such individual things have perished.
I do not insist that nobody must be allowed to eat Brussels sprouts except in Brussels. I do not demand that everyone who likes Jerusalem artichokes should take staff and scrip and make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I do not say that Turkish delight should delight none but Turks or travellers in Turkey. I do not even insist (though it would be a fine heroic idea, worthy of a romance of Scott or Stevenson) that no person should be permitted to taste Edinburgh Rock until he has earned it by scaling the steep and splendid facade of the Rock of Edinburgh. Some of these are merely names; and some of them do still carry with them something of the savour and the pride of nations. But in England, in those exquisitely English centres, the old provincial towns, we did manage to produce good things whose very glory was in being provincial.
It was worth a man’s while to go from one town to another, and even from one county to another, to find things that he could not find at home. Thus there was a very real romance of travel, for romantic as well as for religious pilgrims. The traveller plodded along the Bath Road sustained from afar by the vista of the Bath Bun. He saw the cake peculiar to Richmond shining like a guiding star more brilliant than the Star and Garter. And though this may not seem the loftiest sort of star for a wise man to follow, yet these material luxuries had their moral significance, and stand in social criticism today as the symbols of something much deeper and wider than themselves. They illustrate something that is not only wanting in our latest social development, but something not immediately likely to be developed.
Thus travel in the true sense has become impossible in the large urban or urbanised districts. There are twenty ways of going everywhere, and there is nowhere to go. There are a hundred improved means of communication and there is nothing to communicate. A traveller in simpler times travelled with two legitimate and even estimable objects; first to see strange things in the places he went to; and second, to boast about the country he came from. Both these admirable arts are bound to suffer neglect and negation under existing conditions, when the place he finds is exactly like the place he leaves. All such places are alike, plastered with the same advertisements, blocked up with the same big shops, selling the same newspapers, attending the same schools.
There is therefore no real meaning in his travels, apart from the permanent personal interest of humanity. But the general spirit of travel, the desire to see new folk or new customs, all that has been ruined by the commercial concentration of modern times. I do not object to a reasonable number of things being scattered over the whole world, to remind the traveller of home and of the bond of mankind. I have seen The Illustrated London News for instance, in remote mud villages of Spain, or in caravanserais on the edge of the desert; and I am quite prepared to find it in the dark forests of Africa or the islands of the Southern Seas. But the Spanish villages and the Arab settlements were themselves quite different from London and the London News.
If each of our separate towns and villages were cut off by some happy catastrophe such as being snowed up or turned into an island by a flood, that town or village might begin to produce its own magazines, It might produce its own style of architecture, its own school of poets. It might produce something of its own out of the soil, instead of passing on something from somewhere else to somewhere else; as if every human town were no more than a railway junction It might be encouraged to use all the talent within its reach; instead of having that talent swamped and swept away by mere floods of fashion and rumour, from the ends of the earth. Then the true type of the traveller and the pilgrim might reappear upon the earth. Then it would really be worth while to cross the hills from one valley to another; for, entering a new valley, he would enter a new world. There would be more fun to wander over a part of England than it is today to wander over all the earth. The old fairy-tales, that told of a man coming to one kingdom where the houses were built of gold, or another where the fountains ran with wine, were but the legitimate literary exaggeration of the experience of real travellers, who found one peasantry wearing gilded headdresses or another brewing golden ale. But in our present phase travel has destroyed the traveller; and there is nowhere for the pilgrim to go save on a spiritual journey— the only possible pilgrim’s progress.
Le gioie dei viaggiatori
Una volta, mentre gironzolavo per la bella città di Bath, caddi in una vena di meditazione che non riguardava alcuna delle antichità del luogo, per come tali cose vengono contate in una guida. Le mie riflessioni, benché profonde e filosofiche, non riguardavano il Bagno di Bath, che richiama la fondazione romana della Britannia. Non riguardavano l’Abbazia di Bath, che richiama il Medioevo; né la Pump Room o l’Assembly Room che richiamano la maestosa frivolezza del diciottesimo secolo. Non stavo nemmeno pensando a quel nobile tema, la Comare di Bath, un monumento medievale che sembra ancora più gigantesco di un’abbazia.
Se qualcuno vuole davvero sapere perché alcuni di noi hanno un gusto per ciò che si chiama «medievalismo», ne può trovare gran parte in quella grande e grottesca personalità. Ma il punto è che la Comare di Bath veniva da Bath, e non andava a Bath. Quando consideriamo quale fosse la sua incombenza, e poi che cosa fosse lei, ci rendiamo conto dell’ampia portata e presa della religione sulla variopinta folla dell’umanità. La Comare di Bath è una sorta di caricatura scolpita nell’ottone; sfacciata come la signora Gamp e con un sogghigno altrettanto largo. Ma chi può immaginare Dickens, che descrisse tante peregrinazioni nel Kent, descrivere la signora Gamp mentre va in pellegrinaggio al santuario di un santo? Suppongo che l’intero tratto di storia dal mondo medievale a quello moderno potrebbe essere riassunto nell’inversione di quel viaggio. È il passaggio dal tempo in cui la Comare di Bath andava ad aspergersi con l’acqua santa a Canterbury, al tempo in cui l’Arcivescovo di Canterbury andava probabilmente ad aspergersi con l’acqua medicinale a Bath. Ma non era di simili inezie come le torri di Canterbury o i pavimenti romani di Bath che io meditavo misticamente in quel momento.
La mia mente era elevata e sintonizzata sul tema delle focaccine. Riflettevo sul fatto notevole che, in gran parte, è ancora necessario andare a Bath per le focaccine di Bath. Ho invero incontrato nei miei viaggi in luoghi meno civilizzati qualcosa apparentemente destinato a essere cibo, cui è attaccato il nome della città romana del Somerset. Ma, dopo averlo assaggiato, sono giunto alla conclusione che la derivazione è diversa. Questi altri oggetti, io suppongo, sono assai legittimamente chiamati focaccine di Bath perché sono fatti di sapone e flanella. Ma in gran parte, malgrado la moderna rete di comunicazioni e il piatto livello della standardizzazione, una focaccina di Bath significa ancora una focaccina di Bath. Lo stesso vale, nel suo grado, credo, nel caso delle focaccine di Chelsey. Può essere vero, per quel che ne so, di quei dolci unici di Richmond, gloriosamente descritti come Damigelle d’Onore. Può darsi che, prima che cominciasse la standardizzazione, ci fossero questi lussi locali in quasi ogni località. Forse c’erano le Frittelle di Pimlico che erano la ricca ricompensa dell’attraversare i prati fino al pittoresco borgo di Pimlico. Forse Clapham produceva una leccornia oltre che una setta; e Mayfair era famosa per la caramella mou prima di essere famosa per i damerini. Ma su tutti i distretti che sono stati circondati e inghiottiti dalle grandi città industriali, corre la regola delle grandi combinazioni commerciali, e tutte queste cose individuali sono perite.
Non insisto che a nessuno debba essere permesso di mangiare cavolini di Bruxelles se non a Bruxelles. Non pretendo che chiunque ami i topinambur debba prendere bordone e bisaccia e fare un pellegrinaggio a Gerusalemme. Non dico che il gaudio turco debba deliziare nessuno tranne i turchi o i viaggiatori in Turchia. Non insisto nemmeno (benché sarebbe una bella idea eroica, degna di un romanzo di Scott o di Stevenson) che a nessuno debba essere permesso di assaggiare l’Edinburgh Rock finché non se lo sia guadagnato scalando la ripida e splendida facciata della Rocca di Edimburgo. Alcuni di questi sono meri nomi; e alcuni di essi portano ancora con sé qualcosa del sapore e dell’orgoglio delle nazioni. Ma in Inghilterra, in quei centri squisitamente inglesi, le vecchie città di provincia, riuscivamo davvero a produrre cose buone la cui gloria stessa consisteva nell’essere provinciali.
Valeva la pena per un uomo andare da una città a un’altra, e perfino da una contea a un’altra, per trovare cose che non poteva trovare a casa. C’era così un Romanticismo assai reale del viaggio, per pellegrini romantici oltre che religiosi. Il viaggiatore arrancava lungo la strada di Bath, sostenuto da lontano dalla vista della Focaccina di Bath. Vedeva il dolce peculiare di Richmond splendere come una stella guida più brillante dello Star and Garter. E benché questa possa non sembrare la più sublime specie di stella da seguire per un uomo saggio, tuttavia questi lussi materiali avevano il loro significato morale, e si ergono nella critica sociale odierna come i simboli di qualcosa di assai più profondo e vasto di se stessi. Essi illustrano qualcosa che non solo manca nel nostro più recente sviluppo sociale, ma qualcosa che non è immediatamente probabile che venga sviluppato.
Così il viaggio nel vero senso è divenuto impossibile nei grandi distretti urbani o urbanizzati. Ci sono venti modi di andare dappertutto, e non c’è nessun luogo dove andare. Ci sono cento migliorati mezzi di comunicazione e non c’è nulla da comunicare. Un viaggiatore in tempi più semplici viaggiava con due obiettivi legittimi e persino stimabili; primo, vedere cose strane nei luoghi dove andava; e secondo, vantarsi del paese da cui veniva. Entrambe queste ammirevoli arti sono destinate a subire trascuratezza e negazione nelle condizioni attuali, quando il luogo che trova è esattamente come il luogo che lascia. Tutti questi luoghi sono uguali, intonacati con le stesse pubblicità, ingombri degli stessi grandi negozi, che vendono gli stessi giornali, frequentano le stesse scuole.
Non c’è perciò alcun reale significato nei suoi viaggi, a parte il permanente interesse personale dell’umanità. Ma lo spirito generale del viaggio, il desiderio di vedere gente nuova o usanze nuove, tutto questo è stato rovinato dalla concentrazione commerciale dei tempi moderni. Non ho nulla in contrario a che un ragionevole numero di cose siano sparse per tutto il mondo, a ricordare al viaggiatore la casa e il vincolo dell’umanità. Ho visto The Illustrated London News, per esempio, in remoti villaggi di fango della Spagna, o in caravanserragli sull’orlo del deserto; e sono del tutto pronto a trovarlo nelle oscure foreste dell’Africa o nelle isole dei Mari del Sud. Ma i villaggi spagnoli e gli insediamenti arabi erano essi stessi del tutto diversi da London e dal London News.
Se ciascuna delle nostre singole città e villaggi fosse tagliata fuori da qualche felice catastrofe come l’essere sepolta dalla neve o trasformata in un’isola da un’inondazione, quella città o villaggio potrebbe cominciare a produrre le proprie riviste, potrebbe produrre il proprio stile di architettura, la propria scuola di poeti. Potrebbe produrre qualcosa di proprio dal suolo, anziché passare qualcosa da qualche altra parte a qualche altra parte; come se ogni città umana non fosse più di un nodo ferroviario Potrebbe essere incoraggiata a usare tutto il talento a sua portata; invece di avere quel talento sommerso e spazzato via da meri flutti di moda e di diceria, dai capi della terra. Allora il vero tipo del viaggiatore e del pellegrino potrebbe riapparire sulla terra. Allora varrebbe davvero la pena di attraversare i colli da una valle a un’altra; poiché, entrando in una nuova valle, egli entrerebbe in un nuovo mondo. Ci sarebbe più spasso a vagare per una parte dell’Inghilterra di quanto ce ne sia oggi a vagare per tutta la terra. Le vecchie fiabe, che narravano di un uomo che giungeva in un regno dove le case erano fatte d’oro, o in un altro dove le fontane sgorgavano vino, non erano che la legittima esagerazione letteraria dell’esperienza di viaggiatori reali, i quali trovavano un contadiname che portava copricapi dorati o un altro che fabbricava birra dorata. Ma nella nostra fase attuale il viaggio ha distrutto il viaggiatore; e non c’è alcun luogo dove il pellegrino possa andare se non in un viaggio spirituale — l’unico possibile cammino del pellegrino.
Understanding France
It is curious, but very obvious, that internationalists are never interpreters between nations. It is what their name almost implies; it is what we should logically expect them to be, or at any rate try to be. And yet they do not do it, and I rather doubt whether they really try. What happens is that the internationalist, while he is often mildly but sincerely horrified at the nationalism of his own nation, is almost always even more horrified at the nationalism of some other nation. And it so happens, as the history of humanity has in fact developed, that very often the nationalism is the nation.
Take the nearest and clearest case; the ancient but by no means primeval rivalry between England and France. In the early Middle Ages they were very nearly one nation. In the later Middle Ages, they were the first of the new and clearly distinguishable nations: on the one side by the splendid accident of Agincourt; on the other by something rather too splendid to be called an accident: St Joan. But ever since then, roughly speaking the two nations drifted further and further apart. And for anybody who is content with nations as nations, or with a very crude and clean-cut sort of nationalism, that might be natural enough. But what has the internationalist been doing? What about the man who talks with particular earnestness about the need for peace among the peoples, for mutual understanding among men of every race and realm, about friendliness to foreigners or humanity to natives? Has he, for instance, ever attempted to explain France to England? The extraordinary fact is that he has never done anything of the kind. He has always been the very last to do anything of the kind.
Few ordinary Englishmen, whether Imperialist or Internationalist, have ever really grasped even what was meant by the greatness of France. But the Internationalist has grasped it much less than the Imperialist. There is much more sense of it in the poems of Mr Kipling than in the pamphlets of Mr Wells. But what is really needed is a widening of English culture, so as to understand what was really valued in French culture. Passing over all that earlier French history, in which the King of Paris had not yet fully become the King of France, we may note even in passing that the Crusades were a French affair; and we only fail to realise the fact because at that time our own monarchy and nobility were as French as the French. St Louis did not succeed in his Crusade; not even with the abortive success of Coeur de Lion. But St Louis does explain the Crusades, while Coeur de Lion rather confuses them. The main modern matter of which I speak, however, begins with the Renaissance and all that gigantic tradition that springs from Rabelais. Does it strike you that the worthy Nonconformist minister, who preaches against militarism and in favour of international pacifism, would be the very best man in the world to translate Rabelais?
Then follows what the French call with a pride that is perfectly logical in a Frenchman but has been allowed to remain almost unintelligible to an Englishman, the Great Century. Nobody knows anything about France, or even about Europe, who does not know that the Great Century was great. Our historians have seen nothing but bombast in the instinct or imagination which compared Louis the Fourteenth to the Sun. But there is no historical truth without historical imagination. And it is much nearer the truth to compare him to a sun-god than to compare him to a pompous dancing-master, in the manner of the narrow national bigotry of Macaulay. Some English literary men have begun to do justice to the great age of Racine and Pascal and the fullness of the Golden Age of classicism. Mr Sacheverell Sitwell, in an excellent study of the Baroque, has a truly imaginative and therefore understanding description of one of those great pageants in which royalty was such a reality that it could carry any load of artifice; and in which it seemed something quite spiritual and spontaneous, like a song, that the King should not only go clad in gold, but clothed with the sun. Mr Maurice Baring has repeatedly insisted with great force and humour, that the notion that Racine is merely stilted and dull is worth as much as the impression of a Breton fisherman that Milton is only stilted and dull: it arises from the rather simple cause of incapacity to read a foreign language.
There have been some good English translations of good French books on the tremendous and even tragic religious quarrel, the Jansenists and the Jesuits and the rest; a huge hinge or turning point in the whole history of Christianity. There have even been a few English critics capable of reading and reviewing the English translations. But the Rev. Timothy Tooting, who is a pacifist because he disapproves of all fights except bun-fights, who serves out cocoa but has never touched ‘alcohol’, and who holds meetings to promote the peace of the world—do you suppose that he has contributed very much to the understanding of the procession of the great Kings and the pride in the glory of Gaul? But until we understand that pride we shall never understand the point of view of a Frenchman. Again, the odd thing is that the Rev. Timothy Tooting was equally shocked at the great Kings and at the great rebellion against the great Kings. His remarks about the French Revolution and especially about Napoleon are just as silly and sniffy as his remarks about the French Monarchy, and especially about Louis the Fourteenth. And the remarks made about Napoleon by Mr Wells, who has some prejudices in common with Mr Tooting, are of the sort that might be excusable in a very stupid half-pay Tory captain who had served under Nelson, but are certainly not worthy either of Napoleon or of Mr Wells. Yet it is precisely men like Mr Wells who set out elaborately to reconcile the nations; to bring about what they call a better understanding between them. I suggest that he begin by reconciling England and France, and achieving a better understanding, or any sort of understanding, of France.
It has often been said that signs and portents will accompany the advent of the Millennium, or the coming of the heavenly kingdom upon earth. Oliver Wendell Holmes demanded that certain miracles should precede that apocalypse; as that raspberries and strawberries should grow bigger downwards through the box; or that lawyers should take what they would give and doctors give what they would take. I would respectfully suggest that before peace, perfect peace, reigns in the United States of Europe, we shall probably have seen some strange things. We shall see that particular sort of pacifist in our country no longer content with being at peace with the same particular sort of pacifist in every other country. We shall see him do what is really needed to avert war: attempt to understand the patriots of the other country. We shall see Earl Russell explaining the ideals of Fascism as clearly and fairly and sympathetically as he would explain the ideals of Socialism. We shall see Mr H. G. Wells fighting o’er again the hundred battles of Napoleon, shouting the war-songs of the Revolutionary War, and beginning to realise how much of the modern world which he admires, and the European unity he values, are due to those who carried the Code Napoleon to the palaces of Vienna or Madrid. We shall see the Rev. Tooting himself, of whose soul no Christian must despair, sitting down to write some rousing and romantic record of the charging chivalry of Poland. It is barely possible that all this, at the moment, may appear slightly improbable. But it is the only way in which we shall ever have international peace, and the only way in which these men can work for international peace. What they are doing at present is to consolidate all the people of one particular philosophy against all the people of the opposite philosophy. They are drawing them up like two long lines of battle. It may be defensible to prepare for war; anyhow, the peacemakers of this school are preparing for it very thoroughly.
Capire la Francia
È curioso, ma assai evidente, che gli internazionalisti non siano mai interpreti fra le nazioni. È quasi ciò che il loro stesso nome implica; è ciò che logicamente ci aspetteremmo che fossero, o almeno che cercassero di essere. Eppure non lo fanno, e anzi dubito che ci provino davvero. Ciò che accade è che l’internazionalista, per quanto sia spesso lievemente ma sinceramente inorridito dal nazionalismo della propria nazione, è quasi sempre ancora più inorridito dal nazionalismo di qualche altra nazione. E si dà il caso, per come la storia dell’umanità si è di fatto sviluppata, che assai spesso il nazionalismo sia la nazione.
Prendiamo il caso più vicino e più chiaro; l’antica ma tutt’altro che primordiale rivalità fra l’Inghilterra e la Francia. Nell’alto Medioevo esse erano quasi una sola nazione. Nel basso Medioevo furono le prime fra le nuove e chiaramente distinguibili nazioni: da un lato per lo splendido accidente di Azincourt; dall’altro per qualcosa di troppo splendido per essere chiamato accidente: Giovanna d’Arco. Ma da allora in poi, grosso modo, le due nazioni sono andate sempre più allontanandosi l’una dall’altra. E per chiunque si accontenti delle nazioni in quanto nazioni, o di una forma di nazionalismo assai grezza e netta, ciò potrebbe risultare abbastanza naturale. Ma che cosa ha fatto l’internazionalista? Che dire dell’uomo che parla con particolare fervore del bisogno di pace fra i popoli, di reciproca comprensione fra gli uomini di ogni razza e regno, di cordialità verso gli stranieri o di umanità verso gli indigeni? Ha egli mai, per esempio, tentato di spiegare la Francia all’Inghilterra? Lo straordinario fatto è che non ha mai fatto nulla del genere. È sempre stato l’ultimissimo a fare qualcosa del genere.
Pochi inglesi comuni, siano essi imperialisti o internazionalisti, hanno mai davvero afferrato anche solo che cosa si intendesse per grandezza della Francia. Ma l’internazionalista l’ha afferrata assai meno dell’imperialista. Ve n’è molto più sentore nelle poesie del signor Kipling che negli opuscoli del signor Wells. Ma ciò di cui c’è davvero bisogno è un ampliamento della cultura inglese, tale da comprendere ciò che veniva davvero apprezzato nella cultura francese. Sorvolando su tutta quella più antica storia francese, in cui il re di Parigi non era ancora del tutto divenuto il re di Francia, possiamo notare anche solo di sfuggita che le crociate furono una faccenda francese; e non riusciamo a coglierne il fatto soltanto perché a quel tempo la nostra stessa monarchia e nobiltà erano francesi quanto i francesi. San Luigi non riuscì nella sua crociata; nemmeno con l’abortivo successo di Cuor di Leone. Ma San Luigi spiega davvero le crociate, mentre Cuor di Leone piuttosto le confonde. La principale questione moderna di cui parlo, tuttavia, comincia con il Rinascimento e con tutta quella gigantesca tradizione che scaturisce da Rabelais. Vi colpisce che il degno ministro nonconformista, che predica contro il militarismo e in favore del pacifismo internazionale, sarebbe l’uomo migliore al mondo per tradurre Rabelais?
Segue poi ciò che i francesi chiamano con un orgoglio che è perfettamente logico in un francese ma a cui si è lasciato di restare quasi inintelligibile per un inglese: il Grande Secolo. Nessuno sa nulla della Francia, né tantomeno dell’Europa, se non sa che il Grande Secolo fu grande. I nostri storici non hanno visto altro che ampollosità nell’istinto o nell’immaginazione che paragonava Luigi Quattordicesimo al Sole. Ma non vi è verità storica senza immaginazione storica. Ed è assai più vicino alla verità paragonarlo a un dio solare che paragonarlo a un pomposo maestro di ballo, alla maniera della gretta bigotteria nazionale di Macaulay. Alcuni letterati inglesi hanno cominciato a rendere giustizia alla grande età di Racine e Pascal e alla pienezza dell’Età dell’oro del classicismo. Il signor Sacheverell Sitwell, in un eccellente studio sul Barocco, offre una descrizione davvero immaginifica e perciò comprensiva di uno di quei grandi cortei in cui la regalità era una realtà tale da poter reggere qualsiasi carico di artificio; e in cui pareva qualcosa di tutto spirituale e spontaneo, come una canzone, che il re non solo andasse rivestito d’oro, ma ammantato di sole. Il signor Maurice Baring ha ripetutamente insistito con grande forza e umorismo sul fatto che l’idea che Racine sia soltanto ampolloso e noioso vale quanto l’impressione di un pescatore bretone secondo cui Milton è solo ampolloso e noioso: essa nasce dalla causa piuttosto semplice dell’incapacità di leggere una lingua straniera.
Vi sono state alcune buone traduzioni inglesi di buoni libri francesi sul tremendo e persino tragico dissidio religioso, i giansenisti e i gesuiti e tutto il resto; un enorme cardine o punto di svolta nell’intera storia del cristianesimo. Vi sono stati persino alcuni critici inglesi capaci di leggere e recensire le traduzioni inglesi. Ma il reverendo Timothy Tooting, che è pacifista perché disapprova tutte le zuffe tranne le zuffe a colpi di focaccia, che distribuisce cacao ma non ha mai toccato l’«alcool», e che tiene riunioni per promuovere la pace del mondo… credete forse che egli abbia contribuito granché alla comprensione della processione dei grandi re e dell’orgoglio nella gloria della Gallia? Ma finché non comprenderemo quell’orgoglio non comprenderemo mai il punto di vista di un francese. Di nuovo, la cosa strana è che il reverendo Timothy Tooting era ugualmente scandalizzato dai grandi re e dalla grande ribellione contro i grandi re. Le sue osservazioni sulla Rivoluzione francese e specialmente su Napoleone sono altrettanto sciocche e schifiltose delle sue osservazioni sulla Monarchia francese, e specialmente su Luigi Quattordicesimo. E le osservazioni fatte su Napoleone dal signor Wells, che ha alcuni pregiudizi in comune con il signor Tooting, sono del genere che potrebbe essere scusabile in un ottuso capitano tory a mezza paga che avesse servito sotto Nelson, ma non sono di certo degne né di Napoleone né del signor Wells. Eppure sono proprio uomini come il signor Wells che si accingono con gran cura a riconciliare le nazioni; a realizzare ciò che chiamano una migliore comprensione fra di esse. Suggerisco che egli cominci col riconciliare Inghilterra e Francia, e col conseguire una migliore comprensione, o una comprensione di qualsiasi sorta, della Francia.
Si è spesso detto che segni e portenti accompagneranno l’avvento del Millennio, o la venuta del regno celeste sulla terra. Oliver Wendell Holmes esigeva che certi miracoli precedessero quell’apocalisse; come che i lamponi e le fragole crescessero più grossi verso il basso attraverso la cassetta; o che gli avvocati prendessero ciò che darebbero e i medici dessero ciò che prenderebbero. Suggerirei rispettosamente che, prima che la pace, la pace perfetta, regni negli Stati Uniti d’Europa, avremo probabilmente visto alcune strane cose. Vedremo quel particolare genere di pacifista nel nostro paese non più contento di essere in pace con lo stesso particolare genere di pacifista in ogni altro paese. Lo vedremo fare ciò che davvero occorre per scongiurare la guerra: tentare di comprendere i patrioti dell’altro paese. Vedremo il conte Russell spiegare gli ideali del fascismo con la stessa chiarezza, equità e simpatia con cui spiegherebbe gli ideali del socialismo. Vedremo il signor H. G. Wells combattere di nuovo le cento battaglie di Napoleone, gridando i canti di guerra della Guerra Rivoluzionaria, e cominciare a rendersi conto di quanta parte del mondo moderno che egli ammira, e dell’unità europea a cui tiene, sia dovuta a coloro che portarono il Codice Napoleonico ai palazzi di Vienna o di Madrid. Vedremo lo stesso reverendo Tooting, della cui anima nessun cristiano deve disperare, sedersi a scrivere qualche appassionante e romantica cronaca della carica cavalleresca della Polonia. È appena possibile che tutto ciò, al momento, possa apparire lievemente improbabile. Ma è l’unica via per cui avremo mai la pace internazionale, e l’unica via per cui questi uomini possono operare per la pace internazionale. Ciò che stanno facendo al presente è consolidare tutta la gente di una particolare filosofia contro tutta la gente della filosofia opposta. Li stanno schierando come due lunghe linee di battaglia. Può essere difendibile prepararsi alla guerra; comunque sia, i costruttori di pace di questa scuola vi si stanno preparando assai a fondo.
Salute to New York
I said to somebody, as I was leaving New York and looking back at its aerial towers, that it was very lovely. I found I had only conveyed the impression that it was a very lovely place to leave. These double meanings or misunderstandings are common in such cases, and the stranger in America often feels that, while his blame sounds like insolence, his praise sounds like insincerity; or at least like irony. I remembered that I had myself been criticised, first for whitewashing Main Street in defiance of the Menckenites, and afterwards for saying that American villages were unsightly as compared with English villages. The general tendency is, however, to overrate the subtlety of the wicked foreigner. I said the skyline of New York was beautiful, because it is; and I said the ruck of the villages are ugly, because they are. The whole labyrinthine plot of perfidious Albion being thus laid bare, it occurred to me that there really is a parallel between the case of the city and of the villages; and that it offered a good opportunity of explaining to some of the more quarrelsome persons something which they did not seem to know; I mean what the quarrel was all about.
The queer thing about New York is that it goes on being new. It is the only case in which the name has not come to mean the very opposite of what it says. Nova Scotia does not sound particularly novel or particularly Scottish. New Orleans sounds older than Old Orleans. And if you meet anywhere a progressive prophet announcing the New Religion or the New Theology, you may be sure that they are about as recent and revolutionary as the New Forest. But New York is unique. It is truly to be called a vision; because a vision means something that is hardly ever visible. It is the dwelling place of a Spirit; which men may like or dislike in all kinds of ways, but which does express itself in a particular art; in an architecture that is akin to aviation. It is built out of winged stones; its architecture is like the law of gravity turned upside down. And those starry heights, those palaces riding the air like rainbows, those pale opalescent spears piercing the sky, lighter than the very light of heaven, have a meaning and are a sign. They do stand for something which the stranger, if he is wise, will recognise; however many things he may find alien to his own civilisation, however many he may think evil for any civilisation. It is a spirit not easy to name without cant, but much more real than all the cant with which it is covered… Lift up your heads, O ye gates… Lift up your hearts, O ye people… It is a sursum corda in the national soul that is not merely false or affected.
So that even all the old rant about the Starry Flag or the Bird of Freedom was right in its instinct for images exalted and far up in air; and a man in a sort of dream, grown dizzy with that dance of towers, may somewhere against the blinding sun, see suddenly the unblinded eagle.
Now suppose somebody said to me that New York was nothing but muck and money; that it might as well be carted away; that industrial capitalism is the same everywhere, I should tell him he was wrong. Industrialism began in England; but it never ended in anything like New York. The pilgrim approaching Pudsey does not behold palaces like rainbows. The traveller leaving Wigan does not look back on opalescent loveliness. The clerk in a poor suburb of Sheffield is not necessarily dizzy with stars and starry towers. This case is unique; it is a special spiritual expression; it probably could not be replaced. That is what I should say to them about New York. And that is what I said, to the protectors of rural England, about the English village.
The point was that a thing like English country life does not spring up merely out of living in the country. It does not spring up in America, or for that matter in Asia or Africa or a great part of Europe. It is the perfect artistic expression of something English, just as the best American architecture is the expression of something American. But you will not find the first in anything called a village or the second in anything called a city. And if you let it perish, you are like men who should look on at the ruin of the last Greek god or the last Christian cathedral.
Saluto a New York
Dissi a qualcuno, mentre lasciavo New York e mi voltavo a guardare le sue torri aeree, che era assai bella. Scoprii di aver soltanto trasmesso l’impressione che fosse un luogo assai bello da lasciare. Questi doppi sensi o fraintendimenti sono comuni in tali casi, e lo straniero in America sente spesso che, mentre il suo biasimo suona come insolenza, la sua lode suona come insincerità; o per lo meno come ironia. Ricordai di essere stato io stesso criticato, prima per aver imbiancato Main Street a dispetto dei menckeniani, e poi per aver detto che i villaggi americani erano brutti in confronto ai villaggi inglesi. La tendenza generale è, tuttavia, di sopravvalutare la sottigliezza del malvagio straniero. Dissi che il profilo di New York era bello, perché lo è; e dissi che l’accozzaglia dei villaggi è brutta, perché lo è. Messo così a nudo l’intero labirintico complotto della perfida Albione, mi venne in mente che vi è davvero un parallelo fra il caso della città e quello dei villaggi; e che esso offriva una buona occasione per spiegare ad alcune delle persone più litigiose qualcosa che non parevano sapere; intendo dire, di che cosa fosse la disputa.
La cosa curiosa di New York è che continua a essere nuova. È l’unico caso in cui il nome non è giunto a significare esattamente l’opposto di ciò che dice. Nuova Scozia non suona particolarmente nuova né particolarmente scozzese. Nuova Orleans suona più vecchia della Vecchia Orleans. E se incontrate in qualche luogo un profeta progressista che annuncia la Nuova Religione o la Nuova Teologia, potete essere certi che sono all’incirca tanto recenti e rivoluzionari quanto la New Forest. Ma New York è unica. È davvero da chiamarsi una visione; perché una visione significa qualcosa che è quasi mai visibile. È la dimora di uno Spirito; che gli uomini possono amare o detestare in ogni sorta di modi, ma che sì si esprime in un’arte particolare; in un’architettura affine all’aviazione. È costruita di pietre alate; la sua architettura è come la legge di gravità capovolta sottosopra. E quelle stellate altezze, quei palazzi che cavalcano l’aria come arcobaleni, quelle pallide lance opalescenti che trafiggono il cielo, più lievi della luce stessa del firmamento, hanno un significato e sono un segno. Essi stanno davvero per qualcosa che lo straniero, se è saggio, riconoscerà; per quante cose possa trovare estranee alla propria civiltà, per quante possa ritenerne malvagie per qualsiasi civiltà. È uno spirito non facile da nominare senza cadere nella retorica, ma assai più reale di tutta la retorica di cui è ricoperto… Alzate il capo, o voi porte… Alzate i vostri cuori, o voi popoli… È un sursum corda nell’anima nazionale che non è meramente falso o affettato.
Cosicché persino tutta la vecchia declamazione sulla Bandiera Stellata o sull’Uccello della Libertà era giusta nel suo istinto per immagini esaltate e in alto nell’aria; e un uomo in una sorta di sogno, fattosi stordito da quella danza di torri, può in qualche punto contro il sole accecante scorgere all’improvviso l’aquila non accecata.
Ora, supponiamo che qualcuno mi dicesse che New York non è nulla se non fango e denaro; che tanto varrebbe portarla via col carro; che il capitalismo industriale è lo stesso dappertutto: gli risponderei che ha torto. L’industrialismo cominciò in Inghilterra; ma non finì mai in qualcosa di simile a New York. Il pellegrino che si avvicina a Pudsey non contempla palazzi simili ad arcobaleni. Il viaggiatore che lascia Wigan non si volta a guardare una bellezza opalescente. L’impiegato in un povero sobborgo di Sheffield non è necessariamente stordito da stelle e stellate torri. Questo caso è unico; è una speciale espressione spirituale; probabilmente non potrebbe essere sostituito. Questo è ciò che direi loro riguardo a New York. Ed è ciò che dissi, ai protettori dell’Inghilterra rurale, riguardo al villaggio inglese.
Il punto era che una cosa come la vita di campagna inglese non sorge soltanto dal vivere in campagna. Non sorge in America, né del resto in Asia o in Africa o in gran parte dell’Europa. È la perfetta espressione artistica di qualcosa di inglese, proprio come la migliore architettura americana è l’espressione di qualcosa di americano. Ma non troverete la prima in ciò che si chiama un villaggio né la seconda in ciò che si chiama una città. E se la lasciate perire, siete come uomini che stessero a guardare la rovina dell’ultimo dio greco o dell’ultima cattedrale cristiana.
The British Beech
I am happy to say that I live in Beaconsfield; I mean, of course, that I live in Bekonsfield. I believe that there are some people who live in Beaconsfield, but I do not know where it is, and I cannot imagine why anybody should live there. By the sound of it, I should suppose that it is in some Colony, and was probably named after Disraeli who ought to have called himself Earl of Hughenden if he had followed out his own rustic, rugged and feudal dreams and not been led astray by the temptation to pick up the abandoned coronet of Burke. Now about the origin of the name of this town there is some dispute; but about the pronunciation of the name, there is no dispute whatever. There is only knowledge as possessed by those who know; and the often invincible and therefore innocent ignorance of the world outside. I need hardly say that those who know are those who are now commonly called ignorant and uneducated people. When you have heard the name of your own town for twenty years on the tongues of hedgers, ditchers, rat-catchers, gamekeepers, poachers and village idiots, then you know absolutely for certain that it is the correct pronunciation. When the intellectual aristocracy comes down to such a place and pronounces it as it is spelt, you know for a simple fact that they are wrong. If you have any real education, you know that spelling was never in the past a great part of education; that it is now treated by these people as the whole of education; simply because it is the whole of their education; or the only education they have. It never occurs to them that, while Shakespeare would write his own name in two or three totally different but equally illegible scrawls, he trusted the whole great load of his glory to the sound of words, to be spoken by living men. In dealing therefore with a word like ‘Beaconsfield’, they do not know how to choose between the men who can speak and the men who can only spell. It was always pronounced right. Only it is still spelt wrong.
Subject to this philological parenthesis, it is true that some at least maintain that the name is derived from an old word for a beech tree. Certainly there could be no more appropriate name and no more symbolic and inspiring thing. For the beech tree has a special representative quality in all this rolling wooded landscape, which makes up the central and southern parts of Buckinghamshire; and through the county a real relation to the country. A Sussex man, himself boiling over with enthusiasm for Sussex, once said to me of the beech-woods about my Beaconsfield home, ‘This is really the most English part of England; I confess that compared with this, Sussex is a thing quite separate and apart.’
We have all heard about the British oak; and I am traditional enough not to quarrel with a tradition full of many heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams, or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into battleships. A modern naval enthusiast, by the way, would find it difficult to scatter screws and bolts in the hope that they would turn themselves into the war-machines of today. There is something in that parable of the organic and mechanic growth. But detaching my mind as much as possible, I am forced to feel that the oak has qualities less intimately national. The oak, dedicated to Jupiter of the Romans, has the jagged angular branches that are like the bolts of Jove. Its hard texture and rectangular corners belong almost to the logic of the Latins. If I were choosing an entirely English emblem, I should choose the beech-tree. It is equally strong and expressive of strength; but the smoothness is also expressive of a certain slowness that is akin to mercy and mildness. Its curves are of the gradual sort found in everything in these parts; in the slow speech of the rustics; in the gradual curves in the hills; even far away to the downs of Hampshire and Sussex, that are the only mountains of the South. They have a power like that of lazy waves that are lifted slowly; and allow villages to grow up in their hollows, only because they are too lazy to fall. There is nothing in them of the oak-blasting thunderbolts and very little of the oaks. But here especially, in this section of Bucks, the beeches surround and overshadow us and cover our home; so that it is no accident that has called this particular stretch of England the Home Counties.
Perhaps there is something profane and unhistorical in thus suggesting the belated substitution of the British Beech for the British Oak. And yet there is an important truth in this, if used as a literary symbol; even if we would never wish it to be actually used as a pictorial emblem. For much of the English error about England, which has misled us ever since our real origins were shut off by the obscurantism of the Reformation, is expressed in the undue emphasis on the oak and the neglect of the nobler qualities of the beech. The tendency to turn John Bull into a braggart, and from that into a bully, was only too readily represented by giving him a great oaken cudgel, supposed to be as invincible as the club of Hercules. It left out all the better elements in the native temperament; the humour, the good humour and especially the good nature. These would have been much better expressed in the smoothness that can co-exist with the strength of the beech. Moreover, noble as was the Nelson legend and all the earlier part of our maritime romance, the consideration of oaks only with reference to ships did turn English thoughts too exclusively outwards to the ends of the earth, and too little inwards to England. Thus Britannia became merely a statue to be seen from afar, rather than a real woman and mother, to be made happy in her own home. Hence the dangerous neglect of agriculture and internal economic conditions from which we are already suffering. The whole thing was altogether too emblematic. The British Oak was a thing like the British Lion; but lions are really rather rare in our Buckinghamshire lanes. On the other hand, the British Beech could not suggest anything except the British Pig. The swine feed on the beech-mast; and the pig is more realistic, even if he is growing almost equally rare. The return to a real England, with real pigs for real Englishmen, would be a return to the beech-woods; which still make this town like a home.
At least, they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that several beech-forests have been removed to enable a motorist temporarily deaf and blind to go from Birmingham to Brighton.
Il faggio britannico
Sono lieto di dire che vivo a Beaconsfield; intendo, naturalmente, che vivo a Bekonsfield. Credo che vi siano alcune persone che vivono a Beaconsfield, ma non so dove sia, e non riesco a immaginare perché qualcuno dovrebbe abitarvi. Dal suono, supporrei che sia in qualche Colonia, e che fosse probabilmente chiamata così in onore di Disraeli, il quale avrebbe dovuto chiamarsi conte di Hughenden se avesse seguito fino in fondo i propri rustici, aspri e feudali sogni e non si fosse lasciato sviare dalla tentazione di raccogliere la corona abbandonata di Burke. Ora, sull’origine del nome di questa cittadina vi è una certa disputa; ma sulla pronuncia del nome non vi è disputa alcuna. Vi è soltanto la conoscenza posseduta da coloro che sanno; e l’ignoranza spesso invincibile e perciò innocente del mondo esterno. Non ho quasi bisogno di dire che coloro che sanno sono coloro che oggi si chiamano comunemente gente ignorante e incolta. Quando hai udito il nome della tua stessa cittadina per vent’anni sulle lingue di siepaioli, fossatori, acchiappatopi, guardacaccia, bracconieri e scemi del villaggio, allora sai con assoluta certezza che quella è la pronuncia corretta. Quando l’aristocrazia intellettuale scende in un tal luogo e lo pronuncia come si scrive, sai per semplice fatto che ha torto. Se hai una qualche vera istruzione, sai che l’ortografia non fu mai in passato gran parte dell’istruzione; che ora è trattata da questa gente come l’intera istruzione; semplicemente perché è l’intera loro istruzione; o la sola istruzione che possiedono. Non viene mai loro in mente che, mentre Shakespeare avrebbe scritto il proprio nome in due o tre scarabocchi totalmente diversi ma ugualmente illeggibili, egli affidò l’intero grande carico della sua gloria al suono delle parole, per essere pronunciate da uomini vivi. Trattando dunque una parola come «Beaconsfield», essi non sanno come scegliere fra gli uomini che sanno parlare e gli uomini che sanno soltanto compitare. Fu sempre pronunciata giusta. Solo, è ancora scritta sbagliata.
Fatta salva questa parentesi filologica, è vero che almeno alcuni sostengono che il nome derivi da un’antica parola per faggio. Certamente non potrebbe esservi nome più appropriato né cosa più simbolica e ispiratrice. Poiché il faggio ha una speciale qualità rappresentativa in tutto questo ondulato paesaggio boscoso, che compone le parti centrali e meridionali del Buckinghamshire; e attraverso la contea una vera relazione con la campagna. Un uomo del Sussex, egli stesso traboccante d’entusiasmo per il Sussex, mi disse una volta dei boschi di faggi attorno alla mia casa di Beaconsfield: «Questa è davvero la parte più inglese dell’Inghilterra; confesso che in confronto a questa, il Sussex è cosa del tutto separata e a sé.»
Abbiamo tutti udito parlare della quercia britannica; e sono abbastanza tradizionalista da non litigare con una tradizione colma di molte memorie eroiche; di Nelson morente sotto le basse travi di quercia, o di Collingwood che spargeva le ghiande affinché crescessero in navi da guerra. Un moderno entusiasta della marina, per inciso, troverebbe difficile spargere viti e bulloni nella speranza che essi si tramutino nelle macchine da guerra di oggi. Vi è qualcosa in quella parabola della crescita organica e meccanica. Ma, distaccando la mente quanto più possibile, sono costretto a sentire che la quercia ha qualità meno intimamente nazionali. La quercia, dedicata al Giove dei romani, ha i rami frastagliati e angolosi che sono come le folgori di Giove. La sua dura tessitura e i suoi angoli rettangolari appartengono quasi alla logica dei latini. Se dovessi scegliere un emblema interamente inglese, sceglierei il faggio. È ugualmente forte ed espressivo di forza; ma la levigatezza è anche espressiva di una certa lentezza che è affine alla misericordia e alla mitezza. Le sue curve sono di quella specie graduale che si trova in ogni cosa da queste parti; nel lento eloquio dei rustici; nelle graduali curve delle colline; persino lontano fino ai dossi dello Hampshire e del Sussex, che sono le sole montagne del Sud. Esse hanno una potenza come quella di pigre onde che si sollevano lentamente; e permettono ai villaggi di crescere nei loro incavi, solo perché sono troppo pigre per ricadere. Non vi è nulla in esse delle folgori spaccaquerce, e assai poco delle querce. Ma qui specialmente, in questa parte del Bucks, i faggi ci circondano e ci sovrastano e coprono la nostra casa; sicché non è un caso che si sia chiamato questo particolare tratto d’Inghilterra le Home Counties.
Forse vi è qualcosa di profano e antistorico nel suggerire così la tardiva sostituzione del faggio britannico alla quercia britannica. Eppure vi è in ciò un’importante verità, se usata come simbolo letterario; anche se non vorremmo mai che fosse davvero usata come emblema pittorico. Poiché gran parte dell’errore inglese sull’Inghilterra, che ci ha fuorviato fin da quando le nostre vere origini furono sbarrate dall’oscurantismo della Riforma, si esprime nell’eccessiva enfasi sulla quercia e nella trascuratezza delle più nobili qualità del faggio. La tendenza a trasformare John Bull in un fanfarone, e da questo in un prepotente, fu fin troppo prontamente rappresentata dandogli un gran randello di quercia, supposto invincibile quanto la clava di Ercole. Essa tralasciò tutti gli elementi migliori del temperamento nativo; lo spirito, il buon umore e specialmente la buona indole. Questi sarebbero stati assai meglio espressi nella levigatezza che può coesistere con la forza del faggio. Inoltre, per quanto nobile fosse la leggenda di Nelson e tutta la parte più antica del nostro romanzo marinaro, la considerazione delle querce solo in riferimento alle navi rivolse davvero i pensieri inglesi troppo esclusivamente all’esterno, ai confini della terra, e troppo poco all’interno, all’Inghilterra. Così Britannia divenne solo una statua da vedersi da lontano, piuttosto che una vera donna e madre, da rendere felice nella propria casa. Da qui la pericolosa trascuratezza dell’agricoltura e delle condizioni economiche interne di cui già soffriamo. L’intera faccenda fu del tutto troppo emblematica. La quercia britannica era una cosa come il leone britannico; ma i leoni sono in realtà piuttosto rari nei nostri viottoli del Buckinghamshire. D’altro canto, il faggio britannico non potrebbe suggerire nulla se non il maiale britannico. I suini si nutrono delle faggiole; e il maiale è più realistico, anche se sta divenendo quasi ugualmente raro. Il ritorno a una vera Inghilterra, con veri maiali per veri inglesi, sarebbe un ritorno ai boschi di faggi; che ancora rendono questa cittadina simile a una casa.
Almeno, lo facevano fino a poco tempo fa. Probabilmente mi si dirà domani che diverse foreste di faggi sono state rimosse per permettere a un automobilista temporaneamente sordo e cieco di andare da Birmingham a Brighton.
Public Monuments
I happened to have occasion recently to behold again the celebrated monument of King Victor Emmanuel in Rome, and it turned my thoughts backwards to monuments in general, and to the controversies about our own Cenotaph. They are, as I shall suggest in a moment, rather controversies about the place, the scale, and the formal use of the Cenotaph than controversies about the Cenotaph. It might be argued that the thing itself fulfils it own laws— and limitations. It may be unfair to complain that it is thin, when it is inherent in its intentional proportions to be thin. It may be unjust to object that it is naked and negative, when it was obviously meant to be naked and negative; it may be illogical to protest that it contains no symbol of any special spiritual significance, when it was obviously most carefully designed to contain nothing of the sort. But touching the emplacement and employment of the memorial, there is a great deal more to be said.
Nobody can complain that the Victor Emmanuel monument is too thin. Its thickness has the effect of a huge fortified wall which it is difficult to get round and unthinkable to get over. What is worse, this new Citadel actually bars the way to the old and real Citadel. The original rock of Rome, the high place from which the eagles flew, is practically overshadowed by this new wall of white marble. Victor Emmanuel of Savoy appears in the perspective of topography, if not precisely of history, as a considerably more important person than Julius Caesar. The road to the temple of Capitoline Jove, up which Caesar went with his roaring Triumphs, the place of the Capitol, where he met the end of the greatest human glory, seems no longer to dominate Rome, as I believe it did before the excited Liberals of the nineteenth century planned a mountain of marble that seemed ambitious to rise higher than the Seven Hills. And somehow, with all respect and sympathy, the purpose and the ambition seem hardly to fit. A particular Piedmontese prince, not without many virtues, and certainly not without most distressing difficulties, considerable as were, doubtless, his services to United Italy, does not now, in fact, bulk quite so big in history as Julius Caesar or even many a great Latin leader like Scipio or Marius. Its proportions in relation to the Capitol and the streets of Rome may yet need some explaining. It will probably be very difficult to convince our immediate posterity that it is not a monument to Mussolini.
Those whom in England we call Victorians, or, more properly, the men of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, are more completely misunderstood by most modern writers than if they were Ancient Britons. They are now always represented as stodgy and slow and paralysed by mere caution. The fact is that in most ways they were far too impetuous and enthusiastic. As romantic love was almost their religion, so in other ways they worshipped things, worthy indeed, but without enough discrimination between the sort of love that is fleeting and the sort of love that is lasting. They fell in love with public heroes, instead of merely following them. It is true that some return of this passion has appeared in some parts of Europe which were always specially prone to it, but I doubt whether even now the idolatries are so great as the noble idolatries of the English Victorians, and certainly not so great in England. Even in England we hear much of new movements and a need for leadership. But, with the greatest possible respect to all concerned, I doubt whether any mob actually makes a god out of Sir Oswald Mosley, as the middle-class Victorian mobs made a huge heroic legend out of Garibaldi or General Gordon. Remember that Victorianism was much more affected by its romantic side than by the later claims made on its scientific side. It was much more really moved by Carlyle than by Mill, let alone Herbert Spencer. And it did largely accept, among the apparent decay of many forms of religion, the form of religion which Carlyle invented and called ‘Hero-Worship’. And it acted on this religion, which it did not always do in relation to the other religions. The trouble is that it acted much too swiftly and ardently. It acted with a blind impetuosity which was the very reverse of stodgy. The evidence for it can be seen in many eyesores that we call public monuments. It is true that in England this is as far as their rage and madness went. In Europe as a whole, a great part of the nineteenth century might be called, and was called, the age of revolutions. It is true that the Victorians in England prided themselves on not being destructive, but only constructive. But those who have gazed on certain sculptured memorials, dedicated to eternal fame, have sometimes been tempted to think that construction can be more devastating than destruction.
By the way, may I be here excused if I enter once more a protest against that most meaningless distinction? If a man cuts down a tree and makes a mast, is he destructive or constructive? The emotional effect depends entirely on whether you happen to want a woodland shade or a sea-voyage. Except some of the Manichee heretics who attacked the Early Church, an Albigensian or two, and perhaps some of the old Russian Nihilists, I know of no political group which admits that it is destroying for the sake of destroying. And all political groups, if they are doing anything (a large assumption), are constructing by means of destroying. Compare this journalese jargon with the shrewd proverbs of popular life. It must have been a French peasant, I think, who invented the much wiser phrase: ‘You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.’
Victor Emmanuel’s monument has one great merit not easily to be found in London. It may seem to some merely to block the traffic, but it can seem to others to be really the goal of the traveller. The very fact that it fills the whole view, like a back-scene, does enable it to play the part of a great temple or theatre to which processions can march and seem to find their final goal. In other words, it is a shrine. It is a place to receive pilgrimages, if only patriotic pilgrimages. And when I saw an army of Italian Scouts grounding their poles or lowering their flags, like pilgrims laying down their staves, I thought they did really convey, by that halt and that salute, some sense of having come to the heart of their country.
Now, what is primarily the matter with the Cenotaph in London is simply what the Londoners did with it. They did not put it on a height or in an enclosure or with a background of finality, where it could possibly look like a national shrine to be the goal of pilgrimages. They put it down at random in the middle of the road, a road running both ways; and turned it into a mere stage in the traffic, one of many other objects, like a lamp-post. In fact, the Cenotaph looks like an unfortunate pedestrian who has started from one side of the street and is very doubtful of his chances of reaching the other. Under these disadvantages, he has even something a little weak-minded about his hesitation; as if, by some inversion of Einstein, the Hollow Tomb could be hollow outside as well as inside. But the fault is really in a lack of the sense, the true sense, of town-planning. And the moral is that we cannot make public monuments unless we recover the old imaginative instinct of public life; which did not mean sitting on committees, but marching in processions, organising into effective crowds, and learning how to salute the altar or the tomb.
Monumenti pubblici
Mi è capitato di recente d’avere occasione di contemplare di nuovo il celebre monumento di re Vittorio Emanuele a Roma, ed esso volse i miei pensieri indietro, ai monumenti in generale, e alle controversie sul nostro stesso Cenotafio. Sono, come suggerirò fra un istante, piuttosto controversie sul luogo, sulla scala e sull’uso formale del Cenotafio che controversie sul Cenotafio. Si potrebbe sostenere che la cosa in sé adempie le proprie leggi e limitazioni. Può essere ingiusto lamentarsi che sia sottile, quando è insito nelle sue intenzionali proporzioni l’essere sottile. Può essere iniquo obiettare che sia nudo e negativo, quando fu evidentemente inteso a essere nudo e negativo; può essere illogico protestare che non contiene alcun simbolo di qualche speciale significato spirituale, quando fu evidentemente progettato con la massima cura a non contenere nulla del genere. Ma toccando la collocazione e l’impiego del memoriale, vi è ben altro da dire.
Nessuno può lamentarsi che il monumento a Vittorio Emanuele sia troppo sottile. Il suo spessore ha l’effetto di un enorme muro fortificato che è difficile aggirare e impensabile scavalcare. Ciò che è peggio, questa nuova Cittadella sbarra di fatto la via alla vecchia e vera Cittadella. La roccia originaria di Roma, l’alto luogo da cui volarono le aquile, è praticamente adombrata da questo nuovo muro di marmo bianco. Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia appare, nella prospettiva della topografia, se non precisamente della storia, come persona considerevolmente più importante di Giulio Cesare. La strada al tempio di Giove Capitolino, per cui Cesare salì coi suoi rombanti Trionfi, il luogo del Campidoglio, dove egli incontrò la fine della più grande gloria umana, pare non più dominare Roma, come credo facesse prima che gli eccitati liberali del diciannovesimo secolo progettassero una montagna di marmo che pareva ambire a levarsi più in alto dei Sette Colli. E in qualche modo, con tutto il rispetto e la simpatia, il proposito e l’ambizione paiono a stento adattarsi. Un particolare principe piemontese, non privo di molte virtù, e certamente non privo delle più penose difficoltà, per quanto considerevoli fossero, senza dubbio, i suoi servigi all’Italia unita, non occupa ora, di fatto, un posto così ampio nella storia quanto Giulio Cesare, o persino molti grandi condottieri latini come Scipione o Mario. Le sue proporzioni in relazione al Campidoglio e alle vie di Roma potrebbero ancora esigere qualche spiegazione. Sarà probabilmente assai difficile convincere la nostra immediata posterità che non è un monumento a Mussolini.
Coloro che in Inghilterra chiamiamo vittoriani, o, più propriamente, gli uomini degli ultimi due terzi del diciannovesimo secolo, sono più completamente fraintesi dalla maggior parte degli scrittori moderni di quanto lo sarebbero se fossero antichi britanni. Sono ormai sempre rappresentati come indigesti, lenti e paralizzati da mera cautela. Il fatto è che nella maggior parte dei modi erano fin troppo impetuosi ed entusiasti. Come l’amore romantico era quasi la loro religione, così in altri modi essi adoravano cose, degne invero, ma senza abbastanza discernimento fra la sorta d’amore che è fugace e la sorta d’amore che è duratura. Si innamoravano degli eroi pubblici, invece di semplicemente seguirli. È vero che un certo ritorno di questa passione è apparso in alcune parti d’Europa che vi furono sempre specialmente inclini, ma dubito che anche ora le idolatrie siano grandi quanto le nobili idolatrie dei vittoriani inglesi, e certamente non così grandi in Inghilterra. Persino in Inghilterra sentiamo molto parlare di nuovi movimenti e di un bisogno di leadership. Ma, con tutto il possibile rispetto per tutti gli interessati, dubito che una folla faccia davvero un dio di Sir Oswald Mosley, come le folle borghesi vittoriane fecero un’enorme leggenda eroica di Garibaldi o del generale Gordon. Ricordate che il vittorianismo fu assai più influenzato dal suo lato romantico che dalle successive pretese avanzate sul suo lato scientifico. Fu assai più realmente mosso da Carlyle che da Mill, per non dire di Herbert Spencer. E accolse in larga misura, tra l’apparente decadenza di molte forme di religione, quella forma di religione che Carlyle inventò e chiamò «culto degli eroi». E agì secondo questa religione, cosa che non sempre fece in relazione alle altre religioni. Il guaio è che agì assai troppo rapidamente e ardentemente. Agì con una cieca impetuosità che era l’esatto rovescio dell’indigestione. La prova di ciò può essere vista in molti pugni nell’occhio che chiamiamo monumenti pubblici. È vero che in Inghilterra la loro rabbia e follia non andò più in là di così. In Europa nel suo insieme, gran parte del diciannovesimo secolo potrebbe chiamarsi, e fu chiamata, l’età delle rivoluzioni. È vero che i vittoriani in Inghilterra si vantavano di non essere distruttivi, ma soltanto costruttivi. Ma coloro che hanno contemplato certi memoriali scolpiti, dedicati alla fama eterna, sono stati talvolta tentati di pensare che la costruzione possa essere più devastante della distruzione.
A proposito, mi si conceda qui di sollevare ancora una volta una protesta contro quella più insensata delle distinzioni? Se un uomo abbatte un albero e ne fa un albero maestro, è distruttivo o costruttivo? L’effetto emotivo dipende interamente dal fatto che ti capiti di volere un’ombra boschiva o un viaggio per mare. Eccetto alcuni degli eretici manichei che attaccarono la Chiesa primitiva, un albigese o due, e forse alcuni dei vecchi nichilisti russi, non conosco alcun gruppo politico che ammetta di distruggere per il gusto di distruggere. E tutti i gruppi politici, se stanno facendo qualcosa (una gran bella supposizione), stanno costruendo per mezzo del distruggere. Confrontate questo gergo giornalistico con gli acuti proverbi della vita popolare. Dev’essere stato un contadino francese, credo, a inventare la ben più saggia frase: «Non si fanno frittate senza rompere le uova.»
Il monumento di Vittorio Emanuele ha un grande merito non facile a trovarsi a Londra. Può parere ad alcuni soltanto bloccare il traffico, ma può parere ad altri d’essere davvero la meta del viaggiatore. Il fatto stesso che riempia l’intera veduta, come una quinta di fondo, gli consente di recitare la parte di un gran tempio o teatro verso cui le processioni possono marciare e parere trovare la loro meta finale. In altre parole, è un santuario. È un luogo per ricevere pellegrinaggi, sia pure soltanto pellegrinaggi patriottici. E quando vidi un esercito di Scout italiani abbassare le loro aste o ammainare le loro bandiere, come pellegrini che depongono i loro bordoni, pensai che essi trasmettessero davvero, con quella sosta e quel saluto, un certo senso d’essere giunti al cuore del loro paese.
Ora, ciò che principalmente non va nel Cenotafio a Londra è semplicemente ciò che i londinesi ne fecero. Non lo posero su un’altura o in un recinto o con uno sfondo di finalità, dove esso potesse possibilmente parere un santuario nazionale, meta di pellegrinaggi. Lo posero a caso in mezzo alla strada, una strada che corre in entrambe le direzioni; e lo tramutarono in una mera tappa nel traffico, uno fra molti altri oggetti, come un lampione. Di fatto, il Cenotafio sembra uno sventurato pedone che è partito da un lato della via ed è assai dubbioso sulle sue possibilità di raggiungere l’altro. Sotto questi svantaggi, ha persino qualcosa d’un po’ debole di mente nella sua esitazione; come se, per una qualche inversione di Einstein, la Tomba Vuota potesse essere vuota all’esterno tanto quanto all’interno. Ma la colpa è in realtà in una mancanza del senso, del vero senso, dell’urbanistica. E la morale è che non possiamo fare monumenti pubblici se non recuperiamo il vecchio istinto immaginativo della vita pubblica; che non significava sedere in comitati, ma marciare in processioni, organizzarsi in folle efficaci, e imparare a salutare l’altare o la tomba.
THE MAKING OF HISTORY STATUES
Monuments last for ever. Therefore the mistakes of monuments last forever. That is what the modern world does not understand about the ancient dignity of marble or of stone. If I make a mistake in writing an article, I can cross it out. But if I make a mistake in carving a colossal figure of Rameses the Seventh (if there was a Rameses the Seventh) there is a tendency for that mistake to remain, and become unalterable; you cannot cross it out. If in carving Rameses you have given that slight curl to the nostril which suggests that his cynicism was cruel (as his enemies unreasonably maintained) rather than kindly (as those who knew him best are quite prepared to assert emphatically), in that case it is to be feared that your mistake about Rameses will remain, and be perpetuated for ever in that face of marble. If you have done him any injustice, you have done him an eternal injustice. If you have slandered him at all, you have slandered him forever.
Of course there is the method of smashing every statue you see. Personally I am in favour of it. I agree with the ancient Jews that the graven image has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind. That is, it has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind if mankind has no religion; and I am speaking of the modern world. Moreover, the ordinary statue has a curious power of falsifying the ordinary person. There was a great deal to be said for the old eighteenth century method of making monumental statues of great men. The eighteenth century method of making a statue of a great man was quite simple. You simply made the statue of the great man as unlike the great man as possible; you then gave him bare shoulders and a Roman toga, and you called it the classical style, which perhaps it was. There is something to be said for this classical style. There is also something to be said for the modern realistic style of Monsieur Rodin, in which you leave out a man’s leg or arm at random, to indicate that you have forgotten it in the frenzy of your genius. Both these styles have real ideas behind them; but I think there was an unfortunate period between them, especially in England, and that this period gave rise to the general disposition to smash statues which exists in all the healthy-minded English. I wonder if all the statues were as bad at the time when the army of Oliver Cromwell had finally defeated the army of Charles I. If they were as bad it would go a long way to explain the iconoclasm of the Puritans. We feel reasonably angry with them because they smashed to pieces many beautiful and celebrated images. Still, we never saw the images.
Perhaps the most pathetic instance of this English sculpture applied to the wrong purpose can be found in the five or six statues which stand in the square opposite the Houses of Parliament. The personality of the politician is there not expressed even in the smallest degree. Punch’s caricatures of Palmerston make him more dignified than his statue makes him. Punch, which hated Disraeli, represented him as a more real and admirable creature than the shapeless one before whom bunches of primroses are offered on Primrose Day. If the spirit of these statesmen could return they would prefer the fleeting caricatures of the comic papers to these everlasting caricatures in stone. They would prefer the thing drawn in ill-nature by their enemies to this thing conceived in adoration by their friends. And yet the definition of the deficiency is not quite easy to state. The figures are reasonably well designed; reasonably well dressed. There are no mistakes in costume or in anatomy that the eye of a layman can detect or denounce. Lord Palmerston wears a frock-coat; I suppose he did wear a frock-coat. He holds out his hand; I suppose that from time to time in the course of his animated and interesting career he did sometimes hold out his hand. He has whiskers; I presume he had whiskers. Sometimes, in a dark dream of ecstasy, I venture to hope not such whiskers; still I never saw him, and it may be so. There is nothing essentially unreasonable or unlikely about any part of his appearance or the appearance of the other stone statesmen who share with him that sacred and most impressive place. And yet when one thinks what a place it is, one suddenly sees that all those figures are hopelessly and incurably comic. If there is any England, this is the high historic Senate of England. If there is any England, there runs the sacred English river. And when we think of England as anything everlasting, even when we think of England as anything moderately lasting, those Victorian stone figures become suddenly like silly dolls. There must be some reason for this. And I think the reason is exactly that the men who put up those statues did not really feel as if they were putting up anything permanent at all; as if there was nothing in Palmerston (or at least, in their view of Palmerston), as if there was nothing in Beaconsfield (or at least, in their admiration of Beaconsfield), that suggested any line that was eternal, any grouping or massing that seemed able to endure the open day. For this is the real and final test of a statue. Its test is in two forms of trial. First, it must be able to endure publicity. Second, it must be able to endure solitude. One must be able to think of it as abandoned. The epic of war is for the feast of great princes; the old wives’ tale is for the circle of gossips and rustics; the picture is for the inhabited room; the miniature is for the locket. Even the carved church is mostly conceived for a common need, and even a common comfort. But the stone statue is something that one can leave alone under the stars.
It would be a strange thing if, after all, those four or five stone figures expressed all that has been wrong with England for so long a time. It would be strange if the bad carving of Lord Palmerston’s frock-coat were the only thing that really expressed what is wrong with the Party system. Yet I fancy that it is exactly there or thereabout that the truth lies. We admire our Party leaders. We do not believe in them. We praise them for making so much of our case, as if all the time it were really a bad case. They are all advocates and they were better in the eighteenth century, when they all wore wigs. You cannot make an enduring statue of an advocate, for you cannot make a statue unless you have an idea; and the essence of an advocate is that he has any ideas or all ideas. Exactly what men admired in Palmerston is exactly what men cannot carve in stone; his easy variety, his quickness to leap, which seemed almost like omnipresence. ‘What a faculty that fellow has,’ said Macaulay admiringly, ‘for falling on his feet!’ It is a splendid capacity, doubtless, to fall on one’s feet; but if one is a statue it is dangerous to fall on anything else.
What people admired in Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, was simply his jumpiness. But jumpiness cannot be expressed in stone. I am aware that Monsieur Rodin and others have brought the eccentricity of statuary to a high point; but even they have not yet succeeded in making a statue of a man who has jumped clean off the ground. It was the whole point of Beaconsfield that he jumped clean off the ground. Seriously speaking, I am not sure that he had ever been on the ground; hence he was a subject inappropriate for statuary, and his statue in front of the Houses of Parliament is simply a great gown with a goatish face on top of it. But indeed the sculptors are scarcely to be blamed if they showed inadequate results, for their art can only express eternal ideas, and they were called upon to deal with personalities whose whole boast was that no ideas could be eternal. What could the best sculptors do when they were told to make characteristic statues of six acrobats?
LA CREAZIONE DELLA STORIA STATUE
I monumenti durano per sempre. Perciò gli errori dei monumenti durano per sempre. Questo è ciò che il mondo moderno non comprende dell’antica dignità del marmo o della pietra. Se commetto un errore scrivendo un articolo, posso cancellarlo. Ma se commetto un errore scolpendo una figura colossale di Ramesse Settimo (se mai vi fu un Ramesse Settimo) vi è la tendenza che quell’errore rimanga, e divenga inalterabile; non puoi cancellarlo. Se scolpendo Ramesse hai dato a quel naso quella lieve arricciatura che suggerisce che il suo cinismo era crudele (come i suoi nemici irragionevolmente sostenevano) piuttosto che benevolo (come coloro che meglio lo conobbero sono ben disposti ad asserire con enfasi), in tal caso è da temere che il tuo errore su Ramesse rimanga, e sia perpetuato per sempre in quel volto di marmo. Se gli hai fatto una qualche ingiustizia, gli hai fatto un’eterna ingiustizia. Se lo hai calunniato in qualsivoglia modo, lo hai calunniato per sempre.
Naturalmente vi è il metodo di fracassare ogni statua che si vede. Personalmente ne sono favorevole. Concordo con gli antichi Ebrei sul fatto che l’immagine scolpita ha un influsso troppo ipnotico e orribile sull’umanità. Cioè, ha un influsso troppo ipnotico e orribile sull’umanità se l’umanità non ha religione; e sto parlando del mondo moderno. Inoltre, la statua ordinaria ha un curioso potere di falsare la persona ordinaria. Vi era molto da dire in favore del vecchio metodo settecentesco di fare statue monumentali di grandi uomini. Il metodo settecentesco di fare la statua di un grande uomo era assai semplice. Facevi semplicemente la statua del grande uomo il più dissimile possibile dal grande uomo; gli davi poi le spalle nude e una toga romana, e la chiamavi stile classico, il che forse era. Vi è qualcosa da dire in favore di questo stile classico. Vi è anche qualcosa da dire in favore del moderno stile realistico di Monsieur Rodin, in cui si tralascia a caso una gamba o un braccio d’un uomo, per indicare che l’hai dimenticato nella frenesia del tuo genio. Entrambi questi stili hanno vere idee dietro di sé; ma penso vi sia stato uno sfortunato periodo intermedio, specialmente in Inghilterra, e che questo periodo abbia dato origine alla generale disposizione a fracassare statue che esiste in tutti gli inglesi di mente sana. Mi domando se tutte le statue fossero altrettanto brutte al tempo in cui l’esercito di Oliver Cromwell ebbe finalmente sconfitto l’esercito di Carlo I. Se erano altrettanto brutte, ciò contribuirebbe di molto a spiegare l’iconoclastia dei Puritani. Ci arrabbiamo ragionevolmente con loro perché fecero a pezzi molte belle e celebri immagini. Eppure, non abbiamo mai visto quelle immagini.
Forse l’istanza più patetica di questa scultura inglese applicata allo scopo sbagliato si può trovare nelle cinque o sei statue che stanno nella piazza di fronte al Parlamento. La personalità del politico non vi è espressa nemmeno nel più piccolo grado. Le caricature di Palmerston fatte da «Punch» lo rendono più dignitoso di quanto lo renda la sua statua. «Punch», che odiava Disraeli, lo rappresentò come una creatura più reale e ammirevole di quell’informe figura davanti alla quale mazzetti di primule vengono offerti nel Primrose Day. Se lo spirito di questi statisti potesse tornare, preferirebbe le fugaci caricature dei giornali umoristici a queste sempiterne caricature di pietra. Preferirebbe la cosa disegnata con malanimo dai loro nemici a questa cosa concepita in adorazione dai loro amici. Eppure la definizione della manchevolezza non è del tutto facile da enunciare. Le figure sono ragionevolmente bene disegnate; ragionevolmente ben vestite. Non vi sono errori nel costume o nell’anatomia che l’occhio di un profano possa scorgere o denunciare. Lord Palmerston indossa una redingote; suppongo che indossasse una redingote. Tende la mano; suppongo che di tempo in tempo nel corso della sua animata e interessante carriera egli talvolta tendesse la mano. Ha basette; presumo che avesse basette. Talvolta, in un oscuro sogno d’estasi, mi azzardo a sperare non tali basette; tuttavia non lo vidi mai, e può darsi che sia così. Non vi è nulla di essenzialmente irragionevole o improbabile in alcuna parte del suo aspetto o dell’aspetto degli altri statisti di pietra che con lui condividono quel sacro e più imponente luogo. Eppure quando si pensa a che luogo sia, si vede all’improvviso che tutte quelle figure sono irrimediabilmente e incurabilmente comiche. Se esiste una qualche Inghilterra, questo è l’alto storico Senato d’Inghilterra. Se esiste una qualche Inghilterra, là scorre il sacro fiume inglese. E quando pensiamo all’Inghilterra come a qualcosa di sempiterno, anche quando pensiamo all’Inghilterra come a qualcosa di moderatamente durevole, quelle vittoriane figure di pietra divengono a un tratto come sciocche bambole. Deve esservi una ragione di ciò. E penso che la ragione sia esattamente che gli uomini che eressero quelle statue non sentivano davvero d’erigere alcunché di permanente; come se non vi fosse nulla in Palmerston (o per lo meno, nella loro visione di Palmerston), come se non vi fosse nulla in Beaconsfield (o per lo meno, nella loro ammirazione di Beaconsfield), che suggerisse una qualche linea che fosse eterna, un qualche raggruppamento o addensamento che paresse capace di reggere l’aperto giorno. Poiché questa è la vera e ultima prova di una statua. La sua prova è in due forme di cimento. In primo luogo, deve saper reggere la pubblicità. In secondo luogo, deve saper reggere la solitudine. Si deve poter pensare ad essa come abbandonata. L’epopea di guerra è per il banchetto dei grandi principi; il racconto delle vecchie comari è per il circolo dei pettegoli e dei rustici; il quadro è per la stanza abitata; la miniatura è per il medaglione. Persino la chiesa scolpita è per lo più concepita per un bisogno comune, e persino per un comune conforto. Ma la statua di pietra è qualcosa che si può lasciare sola sotto le stelle.
Sarebbe cosa strana se, dopo tutto, quelle quattro o cinque figure di pietra esprimessero tutto ciò che è andato storto in Inghilterra per un tempo così lungo. Sarebbe strano se il cattivo intaglio della redingote di Lord Palmerston fosse la sola cosa che davvero esprimesse ciò che non va nel sistema dei partiti. Eppure immagino che sia esattamente là o lì attorno che risiede la verità. Ammiriamo i nostri capi di partito. Non crediamo in loro. Li lodiamo per aver sostenuto così bene la nostra causa, come se per tutto il tempo fosse in realtà una causa cattiva. Sono tutti avvocati ed erano migliori nel diciottesimo secolo, quando portavano tutti la parrucca. Non si può fare una statua durevole di un avvocato, perché non si può fare una statua se non si ha un’idea; e l’essenza di un avvocato è che egli ha qualsiasi idea o tutte le idee. Esattamente ciò che gli uomini ammiravano in Palmerston è esattamente ciò che gli uomini non possono scolpire nella pietra; la sua disinvolta varietà, la sua prontezza a balzare, che pareva quasi onnipresenza. «Che facoltà ha quel tipo,» disse ammirato Macaulay, «di ricadere in piedi!» È una splendida capacità, senza dubbio, ricadere in piedi; ma se si è una statua è pericoloso ricadere su qualcos’altro.
Ciò che la gente ammirava in Benjamin Disraeli, conte di Beaconsfield, era semplicemente il suo saltare. Ma il saltare non si può esprimere nella pietra. Sono consapevole che Monsieur Rodin e altri hanno portato l’eccentricità della statuaria a un alto grado; ma nemmeno essi sono ancora riusciti a fare la statua di un uomo che è balzato netto via da terra. Era l’intero punto di Beaconsfield l’essere balzato netto via da terra. Parlando seriamente, non sono sicuro che egli fosse mai stato a terra; di qui egli era un soggetto inappropriato per la statuaria, e la sua statua di fronte al Parlamento è semplicemente una gran toga con una faccia caprina in cima. Ma invero gli scultori difficilmente sono da biasimare se mostrarono risultati inadeguati, poiché la loro arte può solo esprimere idee eterne, ed essi furono chiamati a trattare personalità il cui intero vanto era che nessuna idea potesse essere eterna. Che cosa potevano fare i migliori scultori quando fu loro ordinato di fare statue caratteristiche di sei acrobati?
A Theory of Tyrants
I have come to be convinced of late of a certain theory of the nature of tyranny. It may be right or wrong, but I think it is at least worthy of thought in connection with a highly interesting matter. Broadly speaking, the common theory of tyranny has been this: That men have groaned under some system for centuries, and have at last rebelled against it. But I think that men have actually done quite otherwise; they have rebelled against the system against which they have not groaned. But the matter is so mixed and also so acute that I may be permitted to state it in a more explanatory manner.
Let us take, for the sake of argument, the two risings against tyranny most commonly considered in current literature— the English rebellion of the early seventeenth century and the French Revolution. According to the common theory, Charles I should have been the heir of at least twenty intolerable despots. The truth is that he was the heir of one tolerable despot (who had not quite effected despotism), and beyond that everything was different. Queen Elizabeth was not tolerable, and she was not tolerated. In so far as she was endured she was adored. Cavaliers and Puritans alike looked back to her reign (most mistakenly, doubtless, but most certainly) as a midsummer of popular monarchy.
In short the English Puritans did not rebel against an old system; whatever else it was it was not old. Even if Charles I had been a much worse king than he was there would not have been enough time for him to have created a complete and cruel tradition against the tradition of Elizabeth. A few years before Charles’ head was cut off, most Englishmen would have died to keep Elizabeth’s on. If you turn to the case of the French Monarchy before the French Revolution you will find exactly the same thing. A very short time before the Revolution the French Monarchy was the generally accepted French symbol. The King before Louis the Guillotined was Louis the Well Beloved. The Monarchy (in France as in England) became the most unpopular thing very soon after it had been the most popular thing. There was no weakness, there was no long decline: the defeat of the thing followed swiftly on its first victory. Charles I was not the last of the English despots. He was one of the first of the English despots— only there happened to have been no more of them. Encouraged by the arrogance and popularity of Elizabeth, who had stood for patriotism and Protestantism and the defiance of Spain, Charles tried to work with Elizabethan England and found that Elizabethan England was not there. It was not too old to last, it was too new to last. Louis XVI was not the last of a line of unpopular kings. On the contrary, he was the first of a line of popular kings to be unpopular.
I can only explain all this by my private theory of tyrants; which is this. Men do not rebel against the old; rather they rebel against the new. They turn upon something when they find that it has them in a trap. They do not revolt against something that has been unpopular. They revolt (and very rightly) against something that has been popular. They hated Charles I because they had loved Elizabeth. They killed Louis XVI because they had been killed for Louis XIV. In fact, this is probably what is meant by that seemingly meaningless phrase, the fickleness of the mob. It probably means that the mob is quicker than other people in discovering that man has walked into a man-trap. England went mad with joy for the English Monarchy, because the Armada had not conquered England. And then England suddenly went mad with rage because it discovered that (during that exciting interlude) the English Monarchy had conquered England. We had escaped the snare of Philip; we walked into the snare of Elizabeth; we broke out of the snare of Charles I.
This is the essential mark of tyranny: that it is always new. Tyranny always enters by the unguarded gate. The tyrant is always shy and unobtrusive. The tyrant is always a traitor. He has always come there on the pretence that he was protecting something which people really wanted protected—religion, or public justice, or patriotic glory. Men staring at the Armada; did not watch the King; so they strengthened the King. Later when they watched the King they unconsciously strengthened the aristocracy. Again, when they attacked the aristocracy, they did not watch the big merchants who were attacking it— and who wanted watching. All tyrannies are new tyrannies. There are no such things really as old tyrannies; there are hardly any such things as old superstitions.
There is one moral to these evident facts of history. When you look for tyrants, do not look for them among the obvious types that have oppressed men in the past—the king, the priest, or the soldier. If you do, you are merely looking at the Spanish Armada while England is being turned into a despotism behind your back. Monarchy was once a popular organ; yet it was turned against the people. Remember that newspapers are popular organs that may be turned against the people. Whatever the new tyrant is, he will not wear the exact uniform of the old tyrant.
An Anecdote of Persecution
There are many tales in Joinville’s reminiscences of St Louis which would be worth retelling; I will, however, be reasonable, and retell only one of them. I will tell it with strict reference to the record; I will only expand it in so far as obvious inference and historical circumstances are clear in the case; whenever I am ornamenting it I will say so, and anybody can buy the book and bowl me out. But it is a tale which seems to me to tell in the most vivid and everyday style how it is in practice that persecution arises. It is common talk in these days that we ought to be imaginative, if only in order to be charitable. If a man commits forgery we must try to understand his temptations and his original trend. But no such mercy is generally shown to the enthusiast for ideas. The sins of the intolerant are seldom considered with any intellectual tolerance. It seems that we are to find excuses for the crimes of good men.
Una teoria dei tiranni
Mi sono convinto di recente di una certa teoria sulla natura della tirannia. Può essere giusta o sbagliata, ma penso sia almeno degna di riflessione in connessione con una questione altamente interessante. In termini generali, la teoria comune della tirannia è stata questa: che gli uomini abbiano gemuto sotto un qualche sistema per secoli, e alla fine si siano ribellati contro di esso. Ma penso che gli uomini abbiano in realtà fatto tutt’altro; si sono ribellati contro il sistema sotto il quale non hanno gemuto. Ma la faccenda è così ingarbugliata e insieme così acuta che mi si potrà permettere di enunciarla in maniera più esplicativa.
Prendiamo, per amor di discussione, le due insurrezioni contro la tirannia più comunemente considerate nella letteratura corrente: la ribellione inglese del primo Seicento e la Rivoluzione francese. Secondo la teoria comune, Carlo I avrebbe dovuto essere l’erede di almeno venti intollerabili despoti. La verità è che egli era l’erede di un tollerabile despota (che non aveva ben effettuato il dispotismo), e al di là di ciò tutto era diverso. La regina Elisabetta non era tollerabile, e non fu tollerata. Nella misura in cui fu sopportata, fu adorata. Cavalieri e Puritani ugualmente guardavano indietro al suo regno (assai erroneamente, senza dubbio, ma con assoluta certezza) come a una piena estate della monarchia popolare.
In breve, i Puritani inglesi non si ribellarono contro un vecchio sistema; qualunque cosa fosse, non era vecchio. Anche se Carlo I fosse stato un re assai peggiore di quanto fu, non vi sarebbe stato abbastanza tempo perché egli creasse una completa e crudele tradizione contro la tradizione di Elisabetta. Pochi anni prima che la testa di Carlo fosse mozzata, la maggior parte degli inglesi sarebbe morta per tenere quella di Elisabetta al suo posto. Se ci si volge al caso della Monarchia francese prima della Rivoluzione francese si troverà esattamente la stessa cosa. Assai poco tempo prima della Rivoluzione la Monarchia francese era il simbolo francese generalmente accettato. Il re prima di Luigi il Ghigliottinato fu Luigi il Beneamato. La Monarchia (in Francia come in Inghilterra) divenne la cosa più impopolare assai presto dopo essere stata la cosa più popolare. Non vi fu debolezza, non vi fu un lungo declino: la disfatta della cosa seguì rapida alla sua prima vittoria. Carlo I non fu l’ultimo dei despoti inglesi. Fu uno dei primi dei despoti inglesi; solo che si dà il caso che non ve ne furono altri. Incoraggiato dall’arroganza e dalla popolarità di Elisabetta, che aveva rappresentato il patriottismo e il protestantesimo e la sfida alla Spagna, Carlo tentò di operare con l’Inghilterra elisabettiana e scoprì che l’Inghilterra elisabettiana non c’era. Non era troppo vecchia per durare, era troppo nuova per durare. Luigi XVI non fu l’ultimo di una linea di re impopolari. Al contrario, fu il primo di una linea di re popolari a essere impopolare.
Posso spiegare tutto ciò solo con la mia privata teoria dei tiranni; che è questa. Gli uomini non si ribellano contro il vecchio; piuttosto si ribellano contro il nuovo. Si rivoltano contro qualcosa quando scoprono che li tiene in trappola. Non si rivoltano contro qualcosa che è stato impopolare. Si rivoltano (e assai giustamente) contro qualcosa che è stato popolare. Odiarono Carlo I perché avevano amato Elisabetta. Uccisero Luigi XVI perché erano stati uccisi per Luigi XIV. Di fatto, questo è probabilmente ciò che si intende con quella apparentemente insensata frase: l’incostanza della folla. Probabilmente significa che la folla è più rapida di altre persone nello scoprire che l’uomo è entrato in una tagliola. L’Inghilterra impazzì di gioia per la Monarchia inglese, perché l’Armada non aveva conquistato l’Inghilterra. E poi l’Inghilterra a un tratto impazzì di rabbia perché scoprì che (durante quell’eccitante intermezzo) la Monarchia inglese aveva conquistato l’Inghilterra. Eravamo sfuggiti al laccio di Filippo; entrammo nel laccio di Elisabetta; ci liberammo dal laccio di Carlo I.
Questo è il segno essenziale della tirannia: che essa è sempre nuova. La tirannia entra sempre per la porta non sorvegliata. Il tiranno è sempre schivo e discreto. Il tiranno è sempre un traditore. È sempre giunto là col pretesto di proteggere qualcosa che la gente voleva davvero protetta: la religione, o la giustizia pubblica, o la gloria patriottica. Gli uomini che fissavano l’Armada non sorvegliarono il re; così rafforzarono il re. Più tardi, quando sorvegliarono il re, rafforzarono inconsciamente l’aristocrazia. Di nuovo, quando attaccarono l’aristocrazia, non sorvegliarono i grandi mercanti che la stavano attaccando; e che avevano bisogno d’essere sorvegliati. Tutte le tirannie sono nuove tirannie. Non esistono in realtà cose come vecchie tirannie; non esistono quasi cose come vecchie superstizioni.
Vi è una morale in questi evidenti fatti di storia. Quando cercate tiranni, non cercateli fra i tipi ovvi che hanno oppresso gli uomini nel passato: il re, il prete, o il soldato. Se lo fate, state semplicemente guardando l’Armada spagnola mentre l’Inghilterra viene tramutata in un dispotismo alle vostre spalle. La monarchia fu un tempo un organo popolare; eppure fu volta contro il popolo. Ricordate che i giornali sono organi popolari che possono essere volti contro il popolo. Qualunque cosa sia il nuovo tiranno, egli non indosserà l’esatta uniforme del vecchio tiranno.
Un aneddoto di persecuzione
Vi sono molti racconti nelle memorie di Joinville su San Luigi che varrebbe la pena di ripetere; sarò, tuttavia, ragionevole, e ne ripeterò uno solo. Lo racconterò con stretto riferimento al documento; lo amplierò soltanto nella misura in cui l’ovvia inferenza e le circostanze storiche sono chiare nel caso; ogni volta che lo starò ornando lo dirò, e chiunque può comprare il libro e cogliermi in fallo. Ma è un racconto che mi pare narri nel modo più vivido e quotidiano come sia, in pratica, che la persecuzione sorge. È discorso comune in questi giorni che dovremmo essere immaginativi, non fosse che per essere caritatevoli. Se un uomo commette una falsificazione dobbiamo cercare di comprendere le sue tentazioni e la sua originaria inclinazione. Ma nessuna tale misericordia è generalmente mostrata all’entusiasta delle idee. I peccati degli intolleranti sono di rado considerati con una qualche tolleranza intellettuale. Pare che dobbiamo trovare scuse per i crimini degli uomini buoni.
Wherever we have read history we have noticed one class of statements or allegations. I mean simply incredible allegations; and statements that cannot be believed. For instance, it cannot be believed (at least, I cannot believe it) that the French Jacobins who ran the Terror were diseased and hysterical doctrinaires. They fought all Europe and beat it; the thing is impossible. Now exactly in this sense it is impossible to believe the ordinary modern version of the position of the Jew in the Middle Ages. Whatever else the Jew was, he was important. If he had really lived like Isaac in Ivanhoe he could not have been important; he could not have been at all. A man from whom anybody could steal money would not have any money to steal. A man utterly outlawed must perish. Now I will tell a little tale out of Joinville. The Monastery of Our Lady at Cluny was prosperous and charitable; when the snow was on the ground in winter it showed a maze of footprints of the poor folk who came to its doors. Most of these, of course, were not only poor but of plain rank; but it sometimes happened that a man of good estate was so impoverished as to receive such aid. Among the many figures familiar at the door was one especially who crawled to it more slowly than the others, for he was crippled and hung upon a crutch. He was an old knight with white hair, quite disabled, and entirely penniless; but his eyes (I think) were fierce and restless, as are the eyes of all those. whose activity has been shifted from the body to the mind. His clothes were dropping off his back; he was a perfect gentleman, and very much of a nuisance.
Now it happened that he came to the Monastery on a day that was somewhat solemnly set apart for one of those intellectual tournaments which the men of the Middle Ages loved as much as bodily tournaments. The Abbot was presumably something of a philosopher as well as a philanthropist, and he was liberal in his mental interests as well as liberal with his corn. In the exact words of Joinville’s Chronicle, ‘There was a great disputation between clergy and Jews at the Monastery of Cluny.’ That single sentence knocks flat for ever the whole picture and conception of the medieval Jew which we all have from Scott’s romances or from general report. Ignorant fools who insult a strange sect merely because it is strange, do not arrange public debates to give it a chance of explaining itself. People bent on rooting out a tribe ruthlessly like rats or weeds do not invite the heads of the tribe to make speeches about themselves on a platform. The truth is, of course, that the medievals, like all other sane human beings, started with a preference for reasonable argument and peaceable settlement. It is always afterwards, if at all, that these excellent intentions break down. And they did, unfortunately, break down in the philanthropic and philosophical Monastery of Cluny; as you shall hear.
I think we can call up some rude and dim conception of the scene. The architecture would still be Norman with the low, almost sullen arch and short, almost brutal columns; for though no date is given to the story, the Gothic can hardly have been greatly spread. Such laymen as were present would be people of all conditions; and while there would be more initial ceremony of precedence between these classes, there would be far less practical shyness or contemptuous shrinking than at the present day. Prominently, and probably in a row, would sit the Christian theologians, eager with the eagerness of all men who live much with their own sex in schools and clubs and universities, for an unending war of words. Like all men who have a complete theory of things, they would be fretting and on fire with the chance of expounding it, many of them stirring and stamping. For men who have much to say are more nervous than men who have nothing to say.
Over against them, probably calmer, probably more prosperous in appearance, certainly more observant of all that was going on, would sit the great Rabbis of the mysterious race. In their hands they would hold parchments undecipherable to all the children of the West; but their very faces would be more undecipherable parchments. Their smiles would seem carved like hieroglyphics. Into that place of plain arches and Latin logicians with shaven heads they brought the memory of things cloudy and monstrous, as of many-headed cherubim or winged bulls walking enormous in the desert. For though both theologies were by this time twisted and elaborate, each worked back like a tangled tree to its original root. All the arabesque of Rabbinical riddle and commentary referred eventually to the ultimate Jewish idea; the idea of the awful distance between man and God. All the roaring and grinding syllogisms of the Schoolmen were tools and symbols of the awful union of God and man. The Jewish angel had ten eyes or twelve wings to express the idea that if ever we saw the beauty and wisdom of God it would seem to us outrageous or frightful. The Christian angel often had two wings only, in addition to eyes and two arms; to show that human beauty and dignity were divine realities which would survive and break the doors of death. Two sublime creeds were in collision; the creed that flesh is grass, and the creed that flesh was God. And at the moment, before any of the philosophers could move, the old man of the crutch stood up and asked to speak.
Joinville in his Chronicle gently says that this was received ‘with doubt’. Human life is so startlingly the same in all ages that one can see the scene as clearly as if it were a modern meeting when some peppery and impractical Colonel insists on addressing the meeting. One can imagine the whispers between the Abbot and his chief supporters. ‘If he speaks there will be a row,’ and the unanswerable answer, ‘If we stop him there will be a worse row’. The assembled philosophers, who had been about to pose the Rabbis with the awful rationalism of medieval argument, ‘Why do you believe in God if He is not manifest?’ or ‘Could anyone believe in Heaven except through revelation?’ stood for a moment aside. The old cripple said, ‘At least you admit that Our Lady was the Mother of God.’
The Rabbi who was addressed smiled, perhaps, that rich smile which some find repulsive even when it is benevolent, and said that he did not admit this. The old man said steadily, ‘Then if you do not love Our Lady you were very silly to come into her house.’ He plucked the crutch from under his arm, and whirling it suddenly aloft, caught the Jew a stunning crack behind the ear, bringing him to the ground. Instantly, of course, there was a scuffle, and the Jews were driven from the place. The Abbot rushed up to the old Knight and told him in no measured terms that he had made a horrible fool of himself. The old gentleman, still panting and blowing, no doubt from his exertion, told the Abbot that he thought him the greater fool of the two. Thus unfortunately ended the great experiment of religious inquiry in the Monastery of Cluny. I leave it to anyone to say whether it is not as human a tale as any that might have happened in Surbiton during the War.
Ovunque abbiamo letto storia abbiamo notato una classe di affermazioni o asserzioni. Intendo semplicemente asserzioni incredibili; e affermazioni che non si possono credere. Per esempio, non si può credere (per lo meno, io non riesco a crederlo) che i giacobini francesi che condussero il Terrore fossero dottrinari malati e isterici. Combatterono contro tutta l’Europa e la batterono; la cosa è impossibile. Ora, esattamente in questo senso è impossibile credere l’ordinaria versione moderna della posizione dell’ebreo nel Medioevo. Qualunque altra cosa fosse l’ebreo, egli era importante. Se avesse davvero vissuto come Isacco in Ivanhoe non avrebbe potuto essere importante; non avrebbe potuto esistere affatto. Un uomo a cui chiunque potesse rubare denaro non avrebbe alcun denaro da rubare. Un uomo del tutto messo al bando deve perire. Ora racconterò un piccolo aneddoto tratto da Joinville. Il monastero di Nostra Signora a Cluny era prospero e caritatevole; quando la neve era al suolo d’inverno mostrava un intrico d’orme dei poveretti che venivano alle sue porte. La maggior parte di questi, s’intende, erano non solo poveri ma di umile rango; ma talvolta accadeva che un uomo di buona condizione fosse tanto impoverito da ricevere tale aiuto. Fra le molte figure familiari alla porta ve n’era una specialmente che vi strisciava più lentamente delle altre, poiché era storpio e appeso a una gruccia. Era un vecchio cavaliere dai capelli bianchi, del tutto invalido, e interamente senza un soldo; ma i suoi occhi (credo) erano fieri e irrequieti, come sono gli occhi di tutti coloro la cui attività si è spostata dal corpo alla mente. Le sue vesti gli cadevano di dosso; era un gentiluomo perfetto, e assai molesto.
Ora avvenne che egli giunse al monastero in un giorno che era in qualche modo solennemente riservato a uno di quei tornei intellettuali che gli uomini del Medioevo amavano quanto i tornei del corpo. L’abate era presumibilmente qualcosa di un filosofo oltre che un filantropo, ed era liberale nei suoi interessi mentali oltre che liberale col suo grano. Nelle esatte parole della Cronaca di Joinville: «Vi fu una gran disputa fra il clero e gli ebrei al monastero di Cluny.» Quella singola frase abbatte per sempre l’intero quadro e concezione dell’ebreo medievale che tutti abbiamo dai romanzi di Scott o dalla voce comune. Sciocchi ignoranti che insultano una setta straniera solo perché è straniera non organizzano pubblici dibattiti per darle occasione di spiegarsi. Gente intenta a estirpare una tribù spietatamente come topi o erbacce non invita i capi della tribù a tenere discorsi su se stessi da un palco. La verità è, s’intende, che i medievali, come tutti gli altri esseri umani sani di mente, cominciavano con una preferenza per l’argomentazione ragionevole e la composizione pacifica. È sempre in seguito, se mai, che queste eccellenti intenzioni vengono meno. E vennero meno, purtroppo, nel filantropico e filosofico monastero di Cluny; come udrete.
Penso che possiamo evocare una rozza e fioca concezione della scena. L’architettura sarebbe stata ancora normanna, con l’arco basso, quasi cupo, e le colonne corte, quasi brutali; poiché, benché nessuna data sia data alla storia, il gotico può a stento essersi già molto diffuso. I laici presenti sarebbero stati gente d’ogni condizione; e mentre vi sarebbe stato più cerimoniale iniziale di precedenza fra queste classi, vi sarebbe stata assai meno pratica timidezza o sprezzante ritrosia di quanto ai giorni nostri. In posizione di rilievo, e probabilmente in fila, siederebbero i teologi cristiani, smaniosi con lo smaniare di tutti gli uomini che vivono molto col proprio stesso sesso in scuole e circoli e università, per un’interminabile guerra di parole. Come tutti gli uomini che hanno una completa teoria delle cose, essi sarebbero fremebondi e infiammati dalla possibilità di esporla, molti di loro agitandosi e pestando i piedi. Poiché gli uomini che hanno molto da dire sono più nervosi degli uomini che non hanno nulla da dire.
Di fronte a loro, probabilmente più calmi, probabilmente più prosperi d’aspetto, certamente più attenti a tutto ciò che accadeva, siederebbero i grandi rabbini della razza misteriosa. Nelle loro mani terrebbero pergamene indecifrabili a tutti i figli dell’Occidente; ma i loro stessi volti sarebbero pergamene ancor più indecifrabili. I loro sorrisi parrebbero incisi come geroglifici. In quel luogo di semplici archi e di logici latini dalle teste rasate essi portavano la memoria di cose nebulose e mostruose, come di cherubini dalle molte teste o tori alati che camminavano enormi nel deserto. Poiché, benché entrambe le teologie fossero ormai contorte ed elaborate, ciascuna risaliva come un albero aggrovigliato alla sua radice originaria. Tutto l’arabesco dell’enigma e del commento rabbinico si riferiva in ultimo all’idea ebraica ultima; l’idea dell’immane distanza fra l’uomo e Dio. Tutti i rombanti e stridenti sillogismi degli Scolastici erano strumenti e simboli dell’immane unione di Dio e dell’uomo. L’angelo ebraico aveva dieci occhi o dodici ali per esprimere l’idea che se mai vedessimo la bellezza e la sapienza di Dio ci parrebbe oltraggiosa o spaventosa. L’angelo cristiano aveva spesso due ali soltanto, oltre agli occhi e a due braccia; per mostrare che la bellezza e la dignità umane erano realtà divine che sarebbero sopravvissute e avrebbero infranto le porte della morte. Due sublimi credi erano in collisione; il credo che la carne è erba, e il credo che la carne era Dio. E in quel momento, prima che alcuno dei filosofi potesse muoversi, il vecchio dalla gruccia si alzò e chiese di parlare.
Joinville nella sua Cronaca dice gentilmente che ciò fu accolto «con dubbio». La vita umana è così sorprendentemente la stessa in tutte le età che si può vedere la scena tanto chiaramente come se fosse una moderna assemblea in cui qualche collerico e poco pratico colonnello insiste per rivolgersi all’adunanza. Si possono immaginare i sussurri fra l’abate e i suoi principali sostenitori. «Se parla ci sarà una rissa,» e l’irrefutabile risposta, «Se lo fermiamo ci sarà una rissa peggiore». I filosofi raccolti, che stavano per mettere in imbarazzo i rabbini col terribile razionalismo dell’argomentazione medievale, «Perché credete in Dio se Egli non è manifesto?» o «Potrebbe qualcuno credere nel Cielo se non attraverso la rivelazione?» rimasero per un istante in disparte. Il vecchio storpio disse: «Almeno ammettete che Nostra Signora fu la Madre di Dio.»
Il rabbino a cui ci si rivolse sorrise, forse, di quel ricco sorriso che alcuni trovano ripugnante persino quando è benevolo, e disse che non lo ammetteva. Il vecchio disse fermamente: «Allora, se non amate Nostra Signora, foste assai sciocco a venire nella sua casa.» Strappò la gruccia da sotto il braccio, e roteandola all’improvviso in alto, assestò all’ebreo un colpo tramortente dietro l’orecchio, gettandolo a terra. All’istante, s’intende, vi fu una zuffa, e gli ebrei furono cacciati dal luogo. L’abate si precipitò dal vecchio cavaliere e gli disse in termini per nulla misurati che aveva fatto di sé un orribile sciocco. Il vecchio gentiluomo, ancora ansimante e sbuffante, senza dubbio per lo sforzo, disse all’abate che riteneva lui il maggiore sciocco dei due. Così sventuratamente terminò il grande esperimento di indagine religiosa nel monastero di Cluny. Lascio a chiunque di dire se non è un racconto tanto umano quanto qualsiasi altro che possa essere accaduto a Surbiton durante la Guerra.
The Return of Pageantry
The Puritans, in their hours of pride, seem actually to claim that our nation is fundamentally Puritan, was made by the Puritan spirit. They put Cromwell in the place of Alfred; they put him not only at the head of English patriotism, but at the beginning of English history. They make old England a sort of Puritan colony like New England. All this is, of course, a ludicrous delusion. The first facts or names that jump to the mind will remind any Englishman that his country had a splendid national literature and a very unmistakable type of national life before the hat of a single Puritan had been seen and hooted in England. Chaucer is even more English than Bunyan; Shakespeare is certainly more English than Milton. The Tabard and the Mermaid, Lady Godiva and St George, Robin Goodfellow and Robin Hood, belong to a national tradition that has not even been touched by Puritanism; yet which is quite different from the tradition of Spain, of Scotland, or of France. Chaucer’s Franklin, whose beard was white as a daisy, and in whose house ‘it snewed meate and drinke’, was as certainly an Englishman as he most certainly was not a Puritan.
Puritanism was something put into the Englishman after he had grown to his full national stature. Some hated it as an alien poison; some praised it as a violent medicine. But nobody pretended that it was the natural bread and ale that had built up the countrymen of Colet or Ben Jonson. It might indeed be maintained that in all the three cases of nations thus raided by Puritanism, the Scotch, the English and the Dutch, this religion has been rather a sort of spell or possession than a true change of personality. It might be suggested that in each case a merrier and more medieval nation went alive into that land of bondage and is now coming alive out of it. Thus the Scotch romance and witchery which Scott and Stevenson have brought to life is only the return of a spirit most marked in the old Scottish ballads and chronicles, in the tales of Tamlane in the Forest, and Thomas the Rhymer among the fairies; and in that almost Arthurian romance of the roving court of Robert Bruce, which left, like a gypsy blood for generations, a tradition of wandering Scottish kings. Even in Scotland, I believe, Calvinism has only been an episode. The Scotch are taking off their ‘blacks’ and appearing again in the purple of their ancient poetry. We may yet hear the twang of the last precentor before we really hear the Lay of the Last Minstrel.
Even in the third case of Holland, of which I know far less, something of the same kind could be suggested. Before the coming of the Puritan, the people of the flat country had already shown that talent for a certain detail and domesticity in art which fills so many galleries with their quaint interiors and their convincing still life. It might well be maintained that the same note of half religious realism, of an almost mystical silence and solidity, is being sounded in much of the new literature of the Netherlands. It is marked in Maeterlinck’s love of interiors and the unconscious shapes of things; in the way in which he writes of a window standing open or a passage leading to a door. He lives in a dumb fairyland of furniture. Nothing could be more like the almost conventual quietude and neatness of the pre-Reformation art among the Flemings. And nothing certainly could be more unlike the somewhat vulgar yet really demonic energy, the curious mixture of bourgeois smugness and visionary anarchy that marked the mighty days of the Puritan. Nothing could be further from the sensational art and literature of the Protestant extremists, as you may see it in old Bibles or illustrations of Bunyan; an atmosphere at once monstrous and prosaic, mixed of a mild view of this world, and a mad view of the other; the earth an endless Clapham and the sky a permanent apocalypse. It left on the mind a confused sense that angels had whiskers and saints had top hats; and certainly the dull energy in it was at the opposite extreme from the spirit of a small room either described by Maeterlinck or painted by Memlinc.
But the case of England at least admits of no mistake. Not only did England produce a most anti-Puritan literature before the Puritans existed, but it went on, under the Puritans and in spite of the Puritans, producing a literature that was quite anti-Puritan. There is as little that is Puritan about Fielding and Dickens as there is about Chaucer and Shakespeare. Dickens quite obviously existed to champion everything that the Puritans existed to destroy; when Mr Scrooge is converted to Christmas, the Puritan would have thought that Scrooge was relapsing and not repenting. When Scrooge and his clerk sit down to ‘a bowl of smoking Bishop’, the Puritan would have been equally disgusted with the spirit and with the name. Nevertheless the Ironside element, though alien to England, was to a certain extent mixed with it; and I myself believe that it is to this partial mingling of a foreign and a native idea that we owe the curious attitude of the English, until lately, towards processions and pomps.
The Calvinist colour, mixing with each separate national colour, made in each case a different blend or tint. The Scotch had been restless, rebellious, fond of mystery, valiant, and sometimes cruel. The combinations of Calvinism with this produced a sort of sombre romanticism which one can feel very strongly in Burns and in the blacker tales of Stevenson. The Dutch, I imagine, were domestic and devout; the combination of Calvinism with this produced a slight dullness and a rage for keeping things clean. The English certainly were lusty, casual and fond of broad fun. The combination of Calvinism with this produced a curious kind of bourgeois embarrassment, part humour, part respectability and part good sense. Since the Englishman was not to wear crimson clothes carelessly, the next most English thing was to wear black clothes casually and unobtrusively. Where the Catholic Englishman had been modest enough to make a fool of himself, the Protestant Englishman had only that lower sort of modesty that will not make a show of itself. He objected to making a Pageant, because it is, literally speaking, ‘making a scene’. It is said that the Frenchman shrugs his shoulders; but the Victorian Englishman was born with his shoulders shrugged. His whole attitude until lately has been ‘What’s the good of making a fuss?’ It is a sensible and pleasant temper; it is the remains of the real Englishman who gave its patient Pickwickian cheerfulness to the Canterbury Pilgrimage. But it will be gain and not loss if this minor humility of drab and grey can give place to that higher, and much more humble humility, which can forget itself in flowers and fireworks and in the colours of Carnival.
Il ritorno del fasto
I Puritani, nelle loro ore di orgoglio, sembrano davvero pretendere che la nostra nazione sia fondamentalmente puritana, che sia stata plasmata dallo spirito puritano. Mettono Cromwell al posto di Alfredo; lo collocano non solo alla testa del patriottismo inglese, ma all’inizio della storia inglese. Fanno dell’antica Inghilterra una sorta di colonia puritana come la Nuova Inghilterra. Tutto questo è, naturalmente, un’illusione ridicola. I primi fatti o nomi che balzano alla mente ricorderanno a ogni inglese che il suo paese ebbe una splendida letteratura nazionale e un tipo di vita nazionale del tutto inconfondibile prima che il cappello di un solo Puritano fosse stato visto e fischiato in Inghilterra. Chaucer è ancora più inglese di Bunyan; Shakespeare è certamente più inglese di Milton. La Tabard e la Sirena, Lady Godiva e san Giorgio, Robin Goodfellow e Robin Hood, appartengono a una tradizione nazionale che non è stata nemmeno sfiorata dal Puritanesimo; eppure è del tutto diversa dalla tradizione di Spagna, di Scozia o di Francia. Il Franklin di Chaucer, la cui barba era bianca come una margherita, e nella cui casa ‘nevicava carne e bevande’, era altrettanto certamente un inglese quanto altrettanto certamente non era un Puritano.
Il Puritanesimo fu qualcosa immesso nell’inglese dopo che egli era cresciuto alla sua piena statura nazionale. Alcuni lo odiarono come un veleno straniero; altri lo lodarono come una medicina violenta. Ma nessuno pretese che fosse il pane e la birra naturali che avevano formato i compatrioti di Colet o di Ben Jonson. Si potrebbe anzi sostenere che in tutti e tre i casi delle nazioni così invase dal Puritanesimo, gli Scozzesi, gli Inglesi e gli Olandesi, questa religione sia stata piuttosto una sorta di incantesimo o possessione che un vero mutamento di personalità. Si potrebbe suggerire che in ciascun caso una nazione più allegra e più medievale entrò viva in quella terra di schiavitù e ora ne sta uscendo viva. Così la romanza e la magia scozzese che Scott e Stevenson hanno riportato in vita non è che il ritorno di uno spirito massimamente marcato nelle antiche ballate e cronache scozzesi, nei racconti di Tamlane nella Foresta, e di Thomas il Rimatore tra le fate; e in quella romanza quasi arturiana della corte errante di Robert Bruce, che lasciò, come un sangue zingaresco per generazioni, una tradizione di re scozzesi vagabondi. Persino in Scozia, credo, il Calvinismo è stato soltanto un episodio. Gli Scozzesi si stanno togliendo i loro ‘abiti neri’ e riappaiono di nuovo nella porpora della loro antica poesia. Potremmo ancora udire il nasale del vecchio precentore prima di udire davvero il Canto dell’Ultimo Menestrello.
Persino nel terzo caso dell’Olanda, di cui so assai meno, si potrebbe suggerire qualcosa dello stesso genere. Prima della venuta del Puritano, il popolo del paese piatto aveva già mostrato quel talento per un certo dettaglio e per l’intimità domestica nell’arte che riempie tante gallerie con i loro pittoreschi interni e le loro convincenti nature morte. Si potrebbe ben sostenere che la stessa nota di realismo semireligioso, di un silenzio e di una solidità quasi mistici, stia risuonando in gran parte della nuova letteratura dei Paesi Bassi. È marcata nell’amore di Maeterlinck per gli interni e le forme inconsce delle cose; nel modo in cui egli scrive di una finestra che sta aperta o di un corridoio che conduce a una porta. Egli vive in un muto paese delle fate fatto di mobilio. Nulla potrebbe essere più simile alla quasi conventuale quiete e ordine dell’arte pre-Riforma tra i Fiamminghi. E nulla certamente potrebbe essere più dissimile dall’energia alquanto volgare eppure davvero demoniaca, la curiosa mescolanza di compiacimento borghese e di anarchia visionaria che segnò i possenti giorni del Puritano. Nulla potrebbe essere più lontano dall’arte e dalla letteratura sensazionali degli estremisti protestanti, quali le si può vedere in vecchie Bibbie o in illustrazioni di Bunyan; un’atmosfera insieme mostruosa e prosaica, mescolata di una mite visione di questo mondo e di una folle visione dell’altro; la terra un’infinita Clapham e il cielo una permanente apocalisse. Lasciava nella mente un confuso senso che gli angeli avessero i favoriti e i santi il cilindro; e certamente la sorda energia che vi era stava all’estremo opposto rispetto allo spirito di una piccola stanza sia descritta da Maeterlinck sia dipinta da Memlinc.
Ma il caso dell’Inghilterra almeno non ammette equivoco. Non solo l’Inghilterra produsse una letteratura quanto mai anti-puritana prima che i Puritani esistessero, ma continuò, sotto i Puritani e a dispetto dei Puritani, a produrre una letteratura del tutto anti-puritana. C’è tanto poco di puritano in Fielding e in Dickens quanto in Chaucer e in Shakespeare. Dickens è esistito, del tutto ovviamente, per difendere tutto ciò che i Puritani sono esistiti per distruggere; quando il signor Scrooge si converte al Natale, il Puritano avrebbe pensato che Scrooge stesse ricadendo e non pentendosi. Quando Scrooge e il suo commesso si siedono davanti a ‘una scodella di fumante Vescovo’, il Puritano sarebbe stato ugualmente disgustato dallo spirito e dal nome. Nondimeno l’elemento delle Teste Rotonde, per quanto estraneo all’Inghilterra, vi fu in certa misura mescolato; e io stesso credo che sia a questa parziale fusione di un’idea straniera e di una nativa che dobbiamo la curiosa attitudine degli inglesi, fino a poco tempo fa, verso i cortei e le pompe.
Il colore calvinista, mescolandosi a ciascun distinto colore nazionale, produsse in ogni caso una miscela o tinta diversa. Gli Scozzesi erano stati inquieti, ribelli, amanti del mistero, valorosi e talvolta crudeli. Le combinazioni del Calvinismo con questo produssero una sorta di cupo romanticismo che si può avvertire molto forte in Burns e nei racconti più foschi di Stevenson. Gli Olandesi, immagino, erano domestici e devoti; la combinazione del Calvinismo con questo produsse una leggera monotonia e una smania di tenere le cose pulite. Gli Inglesi erano certamente gagliardi, disinvolti e amanti dello scherzo grossolano. La combinazione del Calvinismo con questo produsse una curiosa specie di imbarazzo borghese, in parte umorismo, in parte rispettabilità e in parte buon senso. Poiché l’inglese non doveva portare vesti cremisi con noncuranza, la cosa immediatamente più inglese era portare vesti nere con disinvoltura e discrezione. Là dove l’inglese cattolico era stato tanto modesto da rendersi ridicolo, l’inglese protestante ebbe soltanto quella specie inferiore di modestia che non vuole darsi in spettacolo. Egli obiettava al fare un Fasto, perché è, letteralmente parlando, ‘fare una scenata’. Si dice che il francese scrolli le spalle; ma l’inglese vittoriano nacque con le spalle già scrollate. Tutta la sua attitudine fino a poco tempo fa è stata ‘Che senso ha fare tante storie?’ È un temperamento assennato e piacevole; è ciò che resta del vero inglese che diede la sua paziente allegria pickwickiana al Pellegrinaggio di Canterbury. Ma sarà guadagno e non perdita se questa minore umiltà del grigio e dello smorto potrà cedere il posto a quella più alta, e assai più umile umiltà, che sa dimenticare se stessa tra i fiori e i fuochi d’artificio e tra i colori del Carnevale.
Rational History
There is a sort of phrase or joke about ‘whitewashing’ the villains of history; but to be quite just there ought to be some phrase such as ‘blackwashing’ also. For the truth is that such rehabilitations are of two very different kinds. One is a mere anarchist itch to upset a traditional and universal verdict. The other is a reasonable petition to appeal against a very hasty and sectarian verdict. In other words, we may appeal for whitewashing if we can prove that there has been blackwashing. There are men in history who may rationally be held to be better than they appear in history. And they are those who have been, for fairly obvious reasons, blackened immediately after their death. We have a right to doubt in every case where it was indispensable (to a new dynasty or regime) that a man who was dead should also be damned. Two very interesting cases of such rational rehabilitation have appeared of late. An American writer has written a romantic sketch of the sympathetic view of Richard III. A French writer has written a scholarly and historic study of the sympathetic view of Napoleon. In both cases there is the same real and intellectual reason for a reconsideration. We are right to remember that these victorious soldiers were at the mercy of their ultimate victors. It is common sense to ask ourselves what tales would most probably be set about by the enemies of one after Bosworth or of the other after Waterloo.
Shakespeare was a very English type of genius; but so was Gillray. And it may fairly be said that Shakespeare’s version of Richard is pretty much like Gillray’s version of Napoleon. He is a diabolic dwarf, far less temperately and sanely conceived than Quilp. But Richard of Gloucester was not a dwarf, either physically or morally. And Napoleon was not a devil, either in incredible crime or incredible capacity. He made many concessions—and many mistakes. It was his normality that succeeded not his abnormality. In so far as he conquered Europe, it was as Man not as Superman. The Rights of Man formed his only working and real droits de seigneur. He was popular with soldiers not only because he was a conqueror, but also because he was a soldier. He ruled France not because he had conquered it, but because he had conquered its enemies. A great French writer put the truth in its unfavourable form by saying that men of the world sympathise with Napoleon because he had no internal life. He did not think about himself; he was not a Higher Thinker, a Buddhist. He was a creator—that is, a Christian. He did not know his own portrait till he saw it in his own works.
The sins of the Superman are unpardonable. But the sins of man are as the hairs of his head. So long as we regard Napoleon as a Superman, we are bound to regard all his cruelties as cold-blooded, all his pride as blasphemous, all his diplomacy as ‘black causeless duplicity’ (as Stevenson said of his own Master of Ballantrae), all his sins, in short, as sins against the Holy Ghost—and, above all, all his misfortunes as deserved. But if we regard him as Man, we pretty soon find that his sins were the sins of a selfish, simple, generous, crude Corsican officer of artillery. His few cruelties were of the half-constrained kind—the kind that twenty other officers of artillery would have committed if they had been in the same hole. His pride was pure vanity; as innocent and as active as the vanity of a schoolboy. His diplomacy was at once less secret and less bullying than nearly all the diplomacy before and after his time. Compared with Metternich or with Bismarck, he was a straightforward but persuasive person. Unlike these other diplomatists, he did appeal to the reason and conscience of other nations and other Kings. He did not merely try to conceal; he did not merely try to convict. He did not even merely try to conquer. He did really try to convert—that is, to convince. And as for his misfortunes, he may have deserved to be called the Corsican Ogre, but he never really deserved to be called the Man of Destiny. It was a slander of which his misfortunes should have purged him for ever.
Much of the same is true, as I have said, of the last stand of the remote Plantagenet at Bosworth: when Henry Tudor rode as best he could into battle, making up his pedigree as he went along. The real medieval king was the man who died calling out ‘Treason’ and killing men on every side of him. Richard III was doing exactly what would have been expected of Richard I. But nothing was ever expected of the Tudors except the unexpected. They were the first English monarchs who were Sultans instead of Kings. They acted by a caprice, and not by a creed. It was owing to their brief and impatient despotism that England, ever since, has been capricious and creedless. One can almost see the lean, long face of the Welsh usurper, as he rode with the great nobles who had deserted to his standard; one can see his smile as he entered London; and one can guess what kind of tale he would tell of the fallen King.
Storia razionale
Esiste una sorta di frase o di battuta sul ‘dare la calce bianca’ ai malvagi della storia; ma, a voler essere del tutto giusti, dovrebbe esistere anche una frase come ‘dare la calce nera’. Poiché la verità è che tali riabilitazioni sono di due specie molto diverse. Una è un mero prurito anarchico di rovesciare un verdetto tradizionale e universale. L’altra è una ragionevole istanza per appellarsi contro un verdetto assai frettoloso e settario. In altre parole, possiamo chiedere la calce bianca se sappiamo provare che c’è stata la calce nera. Vi sono uomini nella storia che possono razionalmente essere ritenuti migliori di come appaiono nella storia. E sono coloro che sono stati, per ragioni abbastanza ovvie, anneriti subito dopo la loro morte. Abbiamo il diritto di dubitare in ogni caso in cui fosse indispensabile (a una nuova dinastia o a un nuovo regime) che un uomo morto fosse anche dannato. Due casi molto interessanti di siffatta riabilitazione razionale sono comparsi di recente. Uno scrittore americano ha scritto un bozzetto romantico della visione benevola di Riccardo III. Uno scrittore francese ha scritto uno studio erudito e storico della visione benevola di Napoleone. In entrambi i casi vi è la stessa reale e intellettuale ragione per un ripensamento. Facciamo bene a ricordare che questi soldati vittoriosi furono alla mercé dei loro definitivi vincitori. È buon senso domandarci quali racconti sarebbero stati con ogni probabilità messi in giro dai nemici dell’uno dopo Bosworth o dell’altro dopo Waterloo.
Shakespeare fu un tipo di genio molto inglese; ma lo fu anche Gillray. E si può ben dire che la versione shakespeariana di Riccardo somigli parecchio alla versione di Gillray di Napoleone. Egli è un nano diabolico, concepito assai meno temperatamente e sanamente di Quilp. Ma Riccardo di Gloucester non era un nano, né fisicamente né moralmente. E Napoleone non era un diavolo, né per incredibile delitto né per incredibile capacità. Fece molte concessioni—e molti errori. Fu la sua normalità a riuscire, non la sua anormalità. Nella misura in cui conquistò l’Europa, lo fece come Uomo, non come Superuomo. I Diritti dell’Uomo costituirono il suo unico effettivo e reale droit de seigneur. Fu popolare presso i soldati non solo perché era un conquistatore, ma anche perché era un soldato. Governò la Francia non perché l’avesse conquistata, ma perché ne aveva conquistato i nemici. Un grande scrittore francese espresse la verità nella sua forma sfavorevole dicendo che gli uomini di mondo simpatizzano con Napoleone perché egli non aveva vita interiore. Non pensava a se stesso; non era un Pensatore Superiore, un buddista. Era un creatore—cioè, un cristiano. Non conobbe il proprio ritratto finché non lo vide nelle proprie opere.
I peccati del Superuomo sono imperdonabili. Ma i peccati dell’uomo sono come i capelli del suo capo. Finché consideriamo Napoleone come un Superuomo, siamo tenuti a considerare tutte le sue crudeltà come premeditate, tutto il suo orgoglio come blasfemo, tutta la sua diplomazia come ‘nera duplicità senza causa’ (come disse Stevenson del suo Master di Ballantrae), tutti i suoi peccati, in breve, come peccati contro lo Spirito Santo—e, soprattutto, tutte le sue sventure come meritate. Ma se lo consideriamo come Uomo, ben presto scopriamo che i suoi peccati erano i peccati di un egoista, semplice, generoso, rozzo ufficiale corso d’artiglieria. Le sue poche crudeltà erano di quella specie mezza forzata—la specie che venti altri ufficiali d’artiglieria avrebbero commesso se si fossero trovati nello stesso frangente. Il suo orgoglio era pura vanità; innocente e attiva come la vanità di uno scolaretto. La sua diplomazia era insieme meno segreta e meno prepotente di quasi tutta la diplomazia prima e dopo il suo tempo. A confronto con Metternich o con Bismarck, egli era una persona schietta ma persuasiva. A differenza di questi altri diplomatici, egli si appellava davvero alla ragione e alla coscienza delle altre nazioni e degli altri Re. Non cercava soltanto di nascondere; non cercava soltanto di incolpare. Non cercava nemmeno soltanto di conquistare. Cercava davvero di convertire—cioè, di convincere. E quanto alle sue sventure, potrà aver meritato di essere chiamato l’Orco Corso, ma non meritò mai davvero di essere chiamato l’Uomo del Destino. Fu una calunnia dalla quale le sue sventure avrebbero dovuto purgarlo per sempre.
Lo stesso vale in gran parte, come ho detto, per l’ultima resistenza del remoto Plantageneto a Bosworth: quando Enrico Tudor cavalcò come meglio poté verso la battaglia, inventandosi la genealogia strada facendo. Il vero re medievale era l’uomo che moriva gridando ‘Tradimento’ e uccidendo uomini a ogni suo fianco. Riccardo III faceva esattamente ciò che ci si sarebbe aspettati da Riccardo I. Ma dai Tudor non ci si aspettò mai nulla se non l’inatteso. Furono i primi monarchi inglesi che furono Sultani anziché Re. Agivano per capriccio, e non per credo. Fu a causa del loro breve e impaziente dispotismo che l’Inghilterra, da allora in poi, è stata capricciosa e priva di credo. Si può quasi vedere il viso magro e lungo dell’usurpatore gallese, mentre cavalcava con i grandi nobili che avevano disertato passando al suo stendardo; si può vedere il suo sorriso mentre entrava a Londra; e si può indovinare quale sorta di racconto avrebbe fatto sul Re caduto.
The Unknown Warrior
The recent ritual of Armistice Day was overshadowed, as everyone knows, by the shadowy figure of the Unknown Warrior. And this was well; for that figure, however like a shadow, alone possesses something of the character of a statue. It is one of the very few monumental things in modern civilisation. The world will never forget that altar which St Paul saw as he passed by, where the Greeks had built a shrine to the Unknown God. So it is in this case, almost alone among all modern cases; it is really possible that the world may never forget that we built a shrine to the Unknown Man.
For whatever the future is like, it will not be Futurist. The very notion of always talking in terms of tomorrow is a passing taste that will soon be a thing of yesterday. Those who are concerned for the coming thing are really rather concerned for the vanishing thing, concerned to catch a fashion before it vanishes. Most of the artistic experiments and social prophecies which appeal to the next age, are in fact stamped with all the special marks and limitations of this age. Our Utopian predictions may not be very easily fulfilled, but they will be very easily dated. Our Futurist pictures may be mistaken at the first glance for the primitive drawings of the Sandwich Islanders, but a more expert examination will certainly reveal the characteristic conventions of the twentieth century. This is as true of War Memorials as of everything else; and those who insisted on things of immediate usefulness were mostly denying and destroying the whole of their ultimate use. Whatever else might be said of such War Memorials, they do not happen to discharge the function of being memorials of the war. With a changing Society these practical things will become impracticable; these useful things will be disused. The building of cottages, let us say, is vital to the present shortage of housing; but it might become almost unintelligible in a society with a decently distributed power over the means of production, where a common man could afford to build his own cottage. A club or institute may be established with enthusiasm and applause; it may be regarded as a mere saving of wealth and life by ‘keeping people out of the public house’. But it may be regarded as a meaningless waste by people who will, perhaps, have restored the public house to the proper public dignity, and made the old Christian inn a place for Christian men. These things are at best modern medicines for modern maladies. They will appear to another age like some special provisions against the Black Death, or some particular warning against the Norse pirates. But though the advanced ideas of our own age are the very last that are likely to endure into another age, neither is it enough to express common ideas in the sense of conventional ideas. That is, it is not enough to express common ideas in a conventional way.
If there are many mad pamphlets and queer pictures and fantastic flags of revolt in the dust-bin of the ages, it is equally true that there are whole rubbish-heaps of lost Latin epitaphs and dead English epics, and pompous monuments like the urns and nymphs in a deserted garden. The thing that survives is that which has a certain combination of normality with distinction. It has simplicity with a slight touch of strangeness; as has the style of Milton or Michelangelo. It is a tale just sufficiently unusual to be worth telling, and yet immediately intelligible when told. It is what the hero is to the human being; a thing magnified but made to scale. Of this really enduring quality I know no other modern example except the burial of the Unknown Warrior, with a King for his chief Mourner.
It is a tale that could be told in any future society, and remain simple and striking. It is a monument that could be looked at by any future generation, with any customs or costumes, and looked at with the same mixture of mystery and familiarity. If we wish to imagine the feelings of the future, the best approximation to it is not to trust the fancies of our own futurism, but to note the facts of our own attitude towards the past, especially the remote past. Now this story of the Unknown Warrior would have a point and a pathos if it were told about a prehistoric tribe burying a man in a barrow, or an ancient Egyptian procession bearing a faceless mummy to a pyramid. If we read that a nameless legionary was buried high upon the Capitol, and that the Roman Emperor offered some sacrifice or libation to his manes, we should understand what was meant. If we were told that some great medieval king spent wealth on masses to be sung in some great cathedral for the soul of some unknown archer, picked up at random on the field of Courtrai or Crecy, we should feel what we were meant to feel. We should feel what we felt on Armistice Day in London. It is something perhaps better expressed, in any age, by the silent symbol of gesture and action than by any definition of a thing so deep. It is strange that the same thinkers who disapprove of dogma often disapprove of ritualism. For ritualism is the only possible alternative to dogma. In this case the dogma is so deep and vital that its verbal definition invariably leads to disputes and absurd misunderstandings. It is a truth that worries people when put into words; so that they talk the wildest nonsense about it, and especially against it. Perhaps, therefore, it is just as well that their subconscious faith in this dogma should only be expressed in a grave and graceful ceremonial action. But the dogma itself, the truth symbolised itself, is something that was almost rediscovered in the realities of war: it is that in the darkness of battle, and in the very heart of the whirlwind of death, is discovered that mystery whose name is the quality of men.
Men are not equal in their realisation of equality. They are really equal in many other essentials of the true egalitarian idea, but they are not equal in that. Certain conditions favour the growth of plutocratic fashions obscuring our brotherhood; certain other conditions make intensely vivid the great things we have in common, as compared with the small things that divide us. And anyone who understands the real doctrine of equality (there are not very many in the modern world who do) will understand that some sense of it vaguely but invariably comes to the surface under the hideous conditions of war. An army, which in one sense would seem the very home of subordination, has nevertheless an ultimate tendency to encourage equality; because, whatever may be the rule or the orders, the facts are those of an intense independence. If any man really fails to understand the mystical dogma of the equality of man, he can immediately test it by thinking of two men, of totally different types and fortunes, falling on the same field at some terrible crisis in the war which saved our country. One might be, and often was, a gentleman of the finer tradition, fortunate in his friends, in his tastes, in his culture as well as his character.
Another might be some stunted serf of our servile industrial slums, a man whom all modern life conspired to crush and deform. In the hour when the flag of England was saved, there was no man who dared to say, or would have dreamed of saying, that one death was less glorious than the other.
Il Milite Ignoto
Il recente rito del Giorno dell’Armistizio fu adombrato, come tutti sanno, dalla figura oscura del Milite Ignoto. E ciò fu bene; poiché quella figura, per quanto simile a un’ombra, sola possiede qualcosa del carattere di una statua. È una delle pochissime cose monumentali della civiltà moderna. Il mondo non dimenticherà mai quell’altare che san Paolo vide mentre passava, dove i Greci avevano innalzato un santuario al Dio ignoto. Così è in questo caso, quasi unico fra tutti i casi moderni; è davvero possibile che il mondo non dimentichi mai che noi innalzammo un santuario all’Uomo ignoto.
Poiché, qualunque sarà il futuro, non sarà Futurista. La nozione stessa di parlare sempre in termini di domani è un gusto passeggero che presto sarà cosa di ieri. Coloro che si affannano per la cosa che viene sono in realtà piuttosto affannati per la cosa che svanisce, affannati di afferrare una moda prima che scompaia. La maggior parte degli esperimenti artistici e delle profezie sociali che si rivolgono all’età ventura, sono in realtà improntate a tutti i marchi e i limiti speciali di questa età. Le nostre predizioni utopiche potranno non compiersi molto facilmente, ma saranno molto facilmente datate. I nostri quadri futuristi potranno a prima vista essere scambiati per i disegni primitivi degli Isolani delle Sandwich, ma un esame più esperto rivelerà certamente le convenzioni caratteristiche del ventesimo secolo. Questo è vero dei Monumenti ai Caduti come di ogni altra cosa; e coloro che insistevano su cose di immediata utilità per lo più negavano e distruggevano l’intero loro uso ultimo. Qualunque altra cosa si possa dire di simili Monumenti ai Caduti, essi non adempiono per caso la funzione di essere memoriali della guerra. Con una Società che muta queste cose pratiche diverranno impraticabili; queste cose utili cadranno in disuso. La costruzione di casette, poniamo, è vitale rispetto all’attuale penuria di alloggi; ma potrebbe divenire quasi incomprensibile in una società con un potere decentemente distribuito sui mezzi di produzione, dove un uomo comune potesse permettersi di costruirsi la propria casetta. Un circolo o un istituto può essere fondato con entusiasmo e con applausi; può essere considerato un mero risparmio di ricchezza e di vita, nel ‘tenere la gente fuori dall’osteria’. Ma può essere considerato uno spreco insensato da gente che avrà, forse, restituito all’osteria la giusta pubblica dignità, e fatto della vecchia locanda cristiana un luogo per uomini cristiani. Queste cose sono, nella migliore delle ipotesi, medicine moderne per mali moderni. Appariranno a un’altra età come certe provvidenze speciali contro la Morte Nera, o come qualche particolare avvertimento contro i pirati norreni. Ma benché le idee avanzate della nostra età siano le ultimissime che abbiano probabilità di durare in un’altra età, neppure basta esprimere idee comuni nel senso di idee convenzionali. Cioè, non basta esprimere idee comuni in un modo convenzionale.
Se vi sono molti opuscoli folli e strane figure e fantastici vessilli di rivolta nella pattumiera delle età, è ugualmente vero che vi sono interi cumuli di rifiuti di epitaffi latini perduti e di poemi epici inglesi morti, e pomposi monumenti come le urne e le ninfe in un giardino abbandonato. La cosa che sopravvive è quella che possiede una certa combinazione di normalità e distinzione. Ha semplicità con un lieve tocco di stranezza; come lo stile di Milton o di Michelangelo. È un racconto appena abbastanza insolito da valere la pena di narrarlo, eppure immediatamente comprensibile quando è narrato. È ciò che l’eroe è per l’essere umano; una cosa ingrandita ma fatta in scala. Di questa qualità davvero duratura non conosco altro esempio moderno se non la sepoltura del Milite Ignoto, con un Re come suo primo Doliente.
È un racconto che potrebbe essere narrato in qualsiasi società futura, e restare semplice e suggestivo. È un monumento che potrebbe essere guardato da qualsiasi generazione futura, con qualsiasi costume o foggia, e guardato con la stessa mescolanza di mistero e familiarità. Se vogliamo immaginare i sentimenti del futuro, la migliore approssimazione a essi non è fidarsi delle fantasie del nostro futurismo, ma notare i fatti della nostra attitudine verso il passato, specialmente il passato remoto. Ora, questa storia del Milite Ignoto avrebbe un senso e un pathos se fosse narrata di una tribù preistorica che seppellisce un uomo in un tumulo, o di un antico corteo egizio che porta una mummia senza volto a una piramide. Se leggessimo che un legionario senza nome fu sepolto in cima al Campidoglio, e che l’Imperatore romano offrì qualche sacrificio o libagione ai suoi mani, comprenderemmo ciò che si intendeva. Se ci fosse detto che qualche grande re medievale spese ricchezze in messe da cantarsi in qualche grande cattedrale per l’anima di qualche arciere ignoto, raccolto a caso sul campo di Courtrai o di Crécy, sentiremmo ciò che eravamo destinati a sentire. Sentiremmo ciò che sentimmo nel Giorno dell’Armistizio a Londra. È qualcosa che forse è meglio espresso, in ogni età, dal muto simbolo del gesto e dell’azione che da qualsiasi definizione di una cosa così profonda. È strano che gli stessi pensatori che disapprovano il dogma spesso disapprovino il ritualismo. Poiché il ritualismo è la sola possibile alternativa al dogma. In questo caso il dogma è così profondo e vitale che la sua definizione verbale conduce invariabilmente a dispute e ad assurdi fraintendimenti. È una verità che turba la gente quando è messa in parole; sicché essa dice le più sfrenate assurdità al riguardo, e specialmente contro di essa. Forse, dunque, è appunto bene che la loro subconscia fede in questo dogma sia espressa soltanto in un’azione cerimoniale grave e aggraziata. Ma il dogma stesso, la verità simboleggiata stessa, è qualcosa che fu quasi riscoperto nelle realtà della guerra: è che nelle tenebre della battaglia, e nel cuore stesso del turbine della morte, si scopre quel mistero il cui nome è la qualità degli uomini.
Gli uomini non sono uguali nella loro realizzazione dell’uguaglianza. Sono davvero uguali in molti altri elementi essenziali della vera idea egualitaria, ma non sono uguali in quello. Certe condizioni favoriscono il crescere di mode plutocratiche che offuscano la nostra fratellanza; certe altre condizioni rendono intensamente vive le grandi cose che abbiamo in comune, a paragone delle piccole cose che ci dividono. E chiunque comprenda la vera dottrina dell’uguaglianza (non sono molti nel mondo moderno a comprenderla) capirà che un qualche senso di essa vagamente ma invariabilmente affiora sotto le orrende condizioni della guerra. Un esercito, che in un senso sembrerebbe la dimora stessa della subordinazione, ha nondimeno una tendenza ultima a incoraggiare l’uguaglianza; perché, quali che siano la regola o gli ordini, i fatti sono quelli di un’intensa indipendenza. Se un uomo davvero non riesce a comprendere il dogma mistico dell’ uguaglianza dell’uomo, può metterlo subito alla prova pensando a due uomini, di tipi e fortune del tutto diversi, che cadono sullo stesso campo in qualche terribile crisi della guerra che salvò il nostro paese. Uno poteva essere, e spesso era, un gentiluomo della tradizione più raffinata, fortunato negli amici, nei gusti, nella cultura non meno che bene nel carattere.
Un altro poteva essere qualche servo rattrappito dei nostri servili bassifondi industriali, un uomo che tutta la vita moderna congiurava a schiacciare e a deformare. Nell’ora in cui la bandiera d’Inghilterra fu salvata, non vi fu uomo che osasse dire, o che avesse sognato di dire, che una morte fosse meno gloriosa dell’altra.
William Penn and His Royalist Friends
The Americans have established a Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the fact that the Pilgrim Fathers reached America. The English might very well establish another Thanksgiving Day to celebrate the happy fact that the Pilgrim Fathers left England. I know this is still regarded as a historical heresy by those who have long ceased to worry about a religious heresy. For while these persons still insist that the Pilgrim Fathers were champions of religious liberty nothing is more certain than the fact that an ordinary modern liberal sailing with them would have found no liberty and would have intensely disliked almost all that he found of religion. Even Thanksgiving Day itself, though it is now kept in a most kindly and charming fashion by numbers of quite liberal and large-minded Americans, was originally intended, I believe, as a sort of iconoclastic expedient for destroying the celebration of Christmas, which does not encourage me, for one, to develop a special and spiritual fervour for Puritanism. Oddly enough, however, the Puritan tradition in America has always celebrated Thanksgiving Day by often eliminating the Christmas Pudding but preserving the Christmas Turkey. I do not know why, unless the very name of Turkey reminded them of the Prophet of Islam, who was also the first Prophet of Prohibition.
It is not, however, in connection with either Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Day, that I recur for a moment to the somewhat controversial question of the Pilgrim Fathers. It is merely to note anew that there has always seemed to me too much emphasis on the Pilgrim Fathers, as compared with many others who were at least as truly Fathers of the Republic. There has certainly been in recent times a considerable combination between Puritanism and Publicity. The Puritans may not always have approved of the stage, but for all that they got a great deal of the limelight. Somebody managed to make the Mayflower as legendary as the Ark or the Argo; indeed, it is legendary in more ways than one, so far as the aim and atmosphere of the expedition are concerned. But I doubt whether most people even know the names of the ships in which many of the other devoted or heroic colonists of America sailed; I, for one, most certainly do not. I will not insist especially on the very noble example of Lord Baltimore and the founders of the State of Maryland, who established the first system of religious toleration in history, for there I might be accused of favouring my own religious sympathies and ideas. But I am at least detached and impartial in the subsequent and somewhat similar story of the founding of the State of Pennsylvania. And whatever ship brought the great Quakers to that settlement has a rather better right than the Mayflower to be called a Peace Ship.
These reflections occurred to me when I was recently standing in the city of Philadelphia, on which looks down the great statue of William Penn, whose unmarked grave lies a mile or two from my own house at home. And it struck me as very strange that all the millions of men with modern humanitarian sympathies have said so little of the immense superiority of that intellectual and spiritual leader to the clamorously advertised Calvinists of the Mayflower. I gravely fear that a great many of them do not see much difference between the two.
Among the most curious of all curiosities of literature or of legend, I have actually heard a sort of romantic rumour (which I have never been able either to trace or test) that portions of the timber of the Mayflower were found in some strange way attached to the old Quaker meeting-house which stands beside Penn’s grave. I cannot imagine what the story could possibly mean, or how the incident can possibly be supposed to have come about; unless, indeed, some enthusiastic American globetrotter merely threw fragments of Mayflower furniture (said to be rather suspiciously common in the States) at any house that had any connection with any founder of any American State. Anyhow, he might just as well have said that Sir Walter Raleigh sailed in the Mayflower as connect William Penn and his people with the fanaticism that filled that famous vessel. He might as well have hung the first Calvinistic meeting-house with rosaries and relics and scapularies belonging to the Catholic Calverts as pretend to have patched up the house of the first Friends with the relics of their mortal enemies and persecutors, the Old Puritans.
An American Puritan in the seventeenth century would have regarded a Quaker very much as an American Puritan in the twentieth century would regard a Bolshevist. And, though Bolshevists are supposed to be fierce and Quakers were supposed to be meek, they were at least like each other in this: they were what modern America would call Radical, in the sense of going to the real root of the question and answering it rightly or wrongly. In short, they were really Fundamentalists, and most Fundamentalists are not Fundamentalists. For whatever we think of the thing now called Fundamentalism, it is not fundamental. It is not particularly fundamental to throw a big Bible at people’s heads (or rather, a particular translation of the Bible, with a lot of books left out as Apocrypha) any more than to throw the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Institutes of Calvin. Even if it be a truth, it is not a first principle. But it is fundamental and it is a first principle, right or wrong, to go back, as William Penn did, to the doctrine of the Inner Light. For William Penn really was a great man and not merely a seventeenth-century sectarian; his thoughts, whether we think with him or no, having a meaning in the twentieth century or any century; and he founded something much larger than Pennsylvania and much greater than Philadelphia—a faith that has not yet failed.
I think I know why Penn has been thrown into the shade by the Pilgrim Fathers. It was his politics; and for some they are still a dreadful secret. I was once asked by some worthy modern pacifists, of the Nonconformist culture, to lecture on something in one of the oldest meeting-houses of the Society of Friends. I agreed to lecture upon William Penn and with secret and malignant joy drew up an elaborate plan for a eulogium on that Quaker hero. I set myself specially to express boundless admiration for all those parts of his life and opinion which his modern Puritan admirers do not admire. I proposed to praise extravagantly his loyal and devoted sympathy with the House of Stuart. I intended to point out eagerly how worthy he was of the gracious and glorious friendship of a man like Charles the Second. I meant to rub in every detail of his diplomatic and political support of the admirable political designs of James the Second. I intended to insist on the intellectual amity, almost amounting to intellectual alliance which so often bound him to Cavaliers and even to Catholics. In short, it was my evil intention to praise him for everything for which Macaulay blamed him. Then, I thought, when I had explained how intimately identified was Penn with Royalists, and especially with Papists, then surely all the Nonconformist ministers would be frightfully pleased. Then should I be acclaimed and admired by all the modern Puritans for my perfect understanding of the great seventeenth-century sectary. Then should I become the idol of all the people who glorify the Pilgrim Fathers and talk enthusiastically about the Mayflower. Then it would be admitted that I also was a grand, grim old Puritan, like all the rest of them. Unfortunately, I fancy I must have boasted of my intention, and some rumour of it must have reached them. For I received at the eleventh hour a hurried request to give a lecture on Dickens. And from this we may learn that, if Dickens was an enemy of the Puritans, he was not so much of an enemy as Penn.
William Penn e i suoi amici realisti
Gli Americani hanno istituito un Giorno del Ringraziamento per celebrare il fatto che i Padri Pellegrini raggiunsero l’America. Gli Inglesi potrebbero bene istituire un altro Giorno del Ringraziamento per celebrare il felice fatto che i Padri Pellegrini lasciarono l’Inghilterra. So che ciò è tuttora ritenuto un’eresia storica da coloro che da tempo hanno cessato di preoccuparsi di un’eresia religiosa. Poiché mentre queste persone insistono ancora nel dire che i Padri Pellegrini furono campioni della libertà religiosa, nulla è più certo del fatto che un ordinario liberale moderno il quale avesse veleggiato con loro non avrebbe trovato alcuna libertà e avrebbe intensamente detestato quasi tutto ciò che vi avrebbe trovato di religione. Persino lo stesso Giorno del Ringraziamento, benché ora sia celebrato in modo quanto mai gentile e affascinante da numerosi Americani del tutto liberali e di larghe vedute, fu originariamente inteso, credo, come una sorta di espediente iconoclasta per distruggere la celebrazione del Natale, il che non incoraggia me, per lo meno, a sviluppare un fervore speciale e spirituale per il Puritanesimo. Assai stranamente, tuttavia, la tradizione puritana in America ha sempre celebrato il Giorno del Ringraziamento eliminando spesso il Budino di Natale ma conservando il Tacchino di Natale. Non so perché, a meno che il nome stesso della Turchia non ricordasse loro il Profeta dell’Islam, che fu anche il primo Profeta del Proibizionismo.
Non è, tuttavia, in connessione né col Giorno del Ringraziamento né col Giorno di Natale, che torno per un momento all’alquanto controversa questione dei Padri Pellegrini. È soltanto per notare di nuovo che mi è sempre parso che vi sia troppa enfasi sui Padri Pellegrini, a paragone di molti altri che furono almeno altrettanto veramente Padri della Repubblica. C’è stata certamente in tempi recenti una notevole combinazione tra Puritanesimo e Pubblicità. I Puritani non sempre avranno approvato il palcoscenico, ma con tutto ciò ottennero una gran quantità di ribalta. Qualcuno riuscì a rendere la Mayflower leggendaria come l’Arca o l’Argo; anzi, essa è leggendaria in più modi di uno, per quanto riguarda lo scopo e l’atmosfera della spedizione. Ma dubito che la maggior parte della gente conosca persino i nomi delle navi sulle quali veleggiarono molti degli altri devoti o eroici coloni dell’America; io, per uno, di certo non li conosco. Non insisterò in particolare sul nobilissimo esempio di Lord Baltimore e dei fondatori dello Stato del Maryland, che istituirono il primo sistema di tolleranza religiosa nella storia, poiché lì potrei essere accusato di favorire le mie simpatie e idee religiose. Ma sono almeno distaccato e imparziale nella successiva e alquanto simile storia della fondazione dello Stato della Pennsylvania. E qualunque nave portò i grandi Quaccheri a quell’insediamento ha un diritto piuttosto migliore della Mayflower a essere chiamata una Nave della Pace.
Queste riflessioni mi vennero mentre me ne stavo di recente nella città di Filadelfia, sulla quale guarda dall’alto la grande statua di William Penn, la cui tomba senza iscrizione giace un miglio o due dalla mia stessa casa, a casa mia. E mi colpì come cosa assai strana che tutti i milioni di uomini dalle moderne simpatie umanitarie abbiano detto così poco dell’immensa superiorità di quel condottiero intellettuale e spirituale sui clamorosamente reclamizzati Calvinisti della Mayflower. Temo gravemente che moltissimi di loro non vedano gran differenza tra i due.
Fra le più curiose di tutte le curiosità della letteratura o della leggenda, ho effettivamente udito una sorta di romantica diceria (che non sono mai riuscito né a rintracciare né a verificare) secondo cui porzioni del legname della Mayflower sarebbero state trovate in qualche strano modo attaccate alla vecchia casa di riunione quacchera che sorge accanto alla tomba di Penn. Non riesco a immaginare cosa la storia possa significare, o come l’episodio possa essersi mai verificato; a meno che, in verità, qualche entusiasta globetrotter americano non abbia semplicemente scagliato frammenti di mobilio della Mayflower (che si dice siano piuttosto sospettosamente comuni negli Stati) contro ogni casa che avesse qualche connessione con qualche fondatore di qualche Stato americano. Comunque, avrebbe potuto altrettanto bene dire che sir Walter Raleigh veleggiò sulla Mayflower quanto collegare William Penn e la sua gente col fanatismo che riempiva quel famoso vascello. Avrebbe potuto altrettanto bene adornare la prima casa di riunione calvinista con rosari e reliquie e scapolari appartenenti ai Calvert cattolici, quanto pretendere di aver rappezzato la casa dei primi Amici con le reliquie dei loro nemici mortali e persecutori, i Vecchi Puritani.
Un Puritano americano nel diciassettesimo secolo avrebbe considerato un Quacchero press’a poco come un Puritano americano nel ventesimo secolo considererebbe un Bolscevico. E, benché si supponga che i Bolscevichi siano feroci e si supponesse che i Quaccheri fossero miti, essi almeno si somigliavano in questo: erano ciò che la moderna America chiamerebbe Radicale, nel senso di andare alla vera radice della questione e di risolverla, giustamente o ingiustamente. In breve, erano davvero Fondamentalisti, e la maggior parte dei Fondamentalisti non è Fondamentalista. Poiché, comunque la pensiamo sulla cosa oggi chiamata Fondamentalismo, essa non è fondamentale. Non è particolarmente fondamentale scagliare una grande Bibbia contro le teste della gente (o piuttosto, una particolare traduzione della Bibbia, con un mucchio di libri lasciati fuori come Apocrifi) più di quanto lo sia scagliare l’Enciclopedia Britannica o le Istituzioni di Calvino. Anche se fosse una verità, non è un primo principio. Ma è fondamentale ed è un primo principio, a torto o a ragione, tornare, come fece William Penn, alla dottrina della Luce Interiore. Poiché William Penn fu davvero un grand’uomo e non semplicemente un settario del diciassettesimo secolo; i suoi pensieri, sia che siamo d’accordo con lui o no, avendo un significato nel ventesimo secolo o in qualsiasi secolo; ed egli fondò qualcosa di assai più grande della Pennsylvania e assai più grande di Filadelfia—una fede che non ha ancora fallito.
Credo di sapere perché Penn sia stato gettato nell’ombra dai Padri Pellegrini. Fu la sua politica; e per alcuni essa è ancora un segreto tremendo. Fui una volta invitato da certi degni pacifisti moderni, di cultura Nonconformista, a tenere una conferenza su qualcosa in una delle più antiche case di riunione della Società degli Amici. Acconsentii a tenere una conferenza su William Penn e con segreta e maligna gioia stesi un elaborato piano per un elogio di quell’eroe quacchero. Mi proposi specialmente di esprimere sconfinata ammirazione per tutte quelle parti della sua vita e della sua opinione che i suoi moderni ammiratori puritani non ammirano. Mi proposi di lodare in modo stravagante la sua leale e devota simpatia con la Casa degli Stuart. Intendevo far notare con ardore quanto egli fosse degno della graziosa e gloriosa amicizia di un uomo come Carlo Secondo. Intendevo insistere su ogni dettaglio del suo appoggio diplomatico e politico agli ammirevoli disegni politici di Giacomo Secondo. Intendevo insistere sull’amicizia intellettuale, quasi giungente a un’alleanza intellettuale, che così spesso lo legò ai Cavalieri e persino ai Cattolici. In breve, era mia malvagia intenzione lodarlo per tutto ciò per cui Macaulay lo biasimava. Poi, pensai, quando avessi spiegato quanto intimamente identificato fosse Penn coi Realisti, e specialmente coi Papisti, allora di sicuro tutti i ministri Nonconformisti sarebbero stati terribilmente contenti. Allora sarei stato acclamato e ammirato da tutti i moderni Puritani per la mia perfetta comprensione del grande settario del diciassettesimo secolo. Allora sarei divenuto l’idolo di tutta la gente che glorifica i Padri Pellegrini e parla con entusiasmo della Mayflower. Allora si sarebbe ammesso che anch’io ero un grande, arcigno vecchio Puritano, come tutti gli altri. Sfortunatamente, immagino di essermi vantato della mia intenzione, e qualche diceria al riguardo deve averli raggiunti. Poiché ricevetti all’ultimo momento una frettolosa richiesta di tenere una conferenza su Dickens. E da questo possiamo imparare che, se Dickens fu un nemico dei Puritani, non fu tanto nemico quanto Penn.
On Literature Ruskin: the Humorist
I do not think any one could find any fault with the way in which Mr Collingwood has discharged his task in The Life of John Ruskin except, of course, Mr Ruskin himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies in passionate red ink and declared that his dear friend had selected for admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless and revolting. That, however, was merely Ruskin’s humour, and one of the deepest disappointments with Mr Collingwood is that he, like every one else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humorist. Yet he was a great humorist: half the explosions which are solemnly scolded as ‘one-sided’ were simply meant to be one-sided, were mere laughing experiments in language. Like a woman, he saw the humour of his own prejudices, did not sophisticate them by logic, but deliberately exaggerated them by rhetoric. One-tenth of his paradoxes would have made the fortune of a modern young man with gloves of an art yellow. He was as fond of nonsense as Mr Max Beerbohm. Only … he was fond of other things too. He did not ask humanity to dine on pickles.
But while his kaleidoscope of fancy and epigram gives him some kinship with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type: he was the last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit above the head of his fellows. Many elements, good and bad, have destroyed it, humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as scepticism, have bred in us a desire to give our advice lightly and persuasively, to mask our morality, to whisper a word and glide away. The contrast was in some degree typified in the House of Commons under the last leadership of Mr Gladstone: the old order with its fist on the box, and the new order with its feet on the table. Doubtless the wine of that prophesy was too strong even for the strong heads that carried it. It made Ruskin capricious and despotic, Tennyson lonely and whimsical, Carlyle harsh to the point of hatred, and Kingsley often rabid to the ruin of logic and charity. One alone of that race of giants, the greatest and most neglected, was sober after the cup. No mission, no frustration could touch with hysteria the humanity of Robert Browning.
But though Ruskin seems to close the roll of the militant prophets, we feel how needful are such figures when we consider with what pathetic eagerness men pay prophetic honours even to those who disclaim the prophetic character. Ibsen declares that he only depicts life, that as far as he is concerned there is nothing to be done, and still armies of ‘Ibsenites’ rally to the flag and enthusiastically do nothing. I have found traces of a school which avowedly follows Mr Henry James: an idea full of humour. I like to think of a crowd with pikes and torches shouting passages from The Awkward Age. It is right and proper for a multitude to declare its readiness to follow a prophet to the end of the world, but if he himself explains, with pathetic gesticulations, that he is only going for a walk in the park, there is not much for the multitude to do. But the disciple of Ruskin had plenty to do. He made roads; in his spare moments he studied the whole of geology and botany. He lifted up paving stones and got down into early Florentine cellars, where, by hanging upside down, he could catch a glimpse of a Cimabue unpraisable but by divine silence. He rushed from one end of a city to the other comparing ceilings. His limbs were weary, his clothes were torn, and in his eyes was that unfathomable joy of life which man will never know again until once more he takes himself seriously.
Mr Collingwood’s excellent chapters on the art criticism of Ruskin would be better, in my opinion, if they showed more consciousness of the after revolutions that have reversed, at least in detail, much of Ruskin’s teaching. We no longer think that art became valueless when it was first corrupted with anatomical accuracy. But if we return to that Raphaelism to which he was so unjust, let us not fall into the old error of intelligent reactionaries, that of ignoring our own debt to revolutions. Ruskin could not destroy the market of Raphaelism, but he could and did destroy its monopoly. We may go back to the Renaissance, but let us remember that we go back free. We can picnic now in the ruins of our dungeon and deride our deliverer.
But neither in Mr Collingwood’s book nor in Ruskin’s own delightful Praeterita shall we ever get to the heart of the matter. The work of Ruskin and his peers remains incomprehensible by the very completeness of their victory. Fallen for ever is that vast brick temple of Utilitarianism, of which we may find the fragments but never renew the spell. Its records read with something of the mysterious arrogance of Chinese: hardly a generation away from us, we read of a race who believed in the present with the same sort of servile optimism with which the Oriental believes in the past. It may be that banging his head against that roof for twenty years did not improve the temper of the prophet. But he made what he praised in the old Italian pictures—‘an opening into eternity’.
Sulla letteratura Ruskin: l’umorista
Non credo che alcuno potrebbe trovare da ridire sul modo in cui il signor Collingwood ha assolto il suo compito nella Vita di John Ruskin, tranne, naturalmente, lo stesso signor Ruskin, che avrebbe di certo cassato tutti gli elogi con appassionato inchiostro rosso e dichiarato che il suo caro amico aveva scelto per l’ammirazione proprio quelle parti della sua opera che erano vili, insensate e ripugnanti. Questo, tuttavia, era semplicemente l’umorismo di Ruskin, e una delle più profonde delusioni col signor Collingwood è che egli, come tutti gli altri, manchi di apprezzare Ruskin come umorista. Eppure fu un grande umorista: metà delle esplosioni che vengono solennemente rimproverate come ‘unilaterali’ erano semplicemente intese a essere unilaterali, erano meri esperimenti giocosi di linguaggio. Come una donna, egli vedeva l’umorismo dei propri pregiudizi, non li sofisticava con la logica, ma deliberatamente li esagerava con la retorica. Un decimo dei suoi paradossi avrebbe fatto la fortuna di un moderno giovanotto dai guanti d’un giallo estetizzante. Era ghiotto di nonsenso quanto il signor Max Beerbohm. Solo che … era ghiotto anche di altre cose. Non chiedeva all’umanità di cenare a sottaceti.
Ma mentre il suo caleidoscopio di fantasia ed epigramma gli conferisce una certa affinità coi giorni presenti, egli era essenzialmente di un tipo anteriore: era l’ultimo dei profeti. Con lui svanisce il segreto di quella semplicità del primo periodo vittoriano che dava a un uomo il coraggio di salire su un pulpito al di sopra del capo dei suoi simili. Molti elementi, buoni e cattivi, l’hanno distrutto; l’umiltà non meno della paura, il cameratismo non meno dello scetticismo, hanno generato in noi il desiderio di dare i nostri consigli con leggerezza e in modo persuasivo, di mascherare la nostra moralità, di sussurrare una parola e dileguarci. Il contrasto fu in qualche misura tipizzato nella Camera dei Comuni sotto l’ultima leadership del signor Gladstone: il vecchio ordine col pugno sul banco, e il nuovo ordine coi piedi sul tavolo. Senza dubbio il vino di quella profezia era troppo forte anche per le teste forti che lo reggevano. Rese Ruskin capriccioso e dispotico, Tennyson solitario e bizzarro, Carlyle aspro fino all’odio, e Kingsley spesso rabbioso fino alla rovina della logica e della carità. Uno solo di quella razza di giganti, il più grande e il più trascurato, fu sobrio dopo la coppa. Nessuna missione, nessuna frustrazione poté sfiorare con isteria l’umanità di Robert Browning.
Ma benché Ruskin sembri chiudere il rotolo dei profeti militanti, sentiamo quanto necessarie siano tali figure quando consideriamo con quale patetico ardore gli uomini rendano onori profetici persino a coloro che rinnegano il carattere profetico. Ibsen dichiara che egli si limita a raffigurare la vita, che per quanto lo riguarda non c’è nulla da fare, e ancora eserciti di ‘ibseniani’ si radunano intorno alla bandiera e con entusiasmo non fanno nulla. Ho trovato tracce di una scuola che dichiaratamente segue il signor Henry James: un’idea piena di umorismo. Mi piace pensare a una folla con picche e torce che grida passi da The Awkward Age. È giusto e proprio che una moltitudine dichiari la propria prontezza a seguire un profeta fino ai confini del mondo, ma se egli stesso spiega, con patetiche gesticolazioni, che sta solo andando a fare una passeggiata nel parco, non c’è granché da fare per la moltitudine. Ma il discepolo di Ruskin aveva molto da fare. Costruiva strade; nei suoi momenti liberi studiava tutta la geologia e la botanica. Sollevava lastre di pavimentazione e scendeva in antiche cantine fiorentine, dove, appendendosi a testa in giù, poteva cogliere una fugace visione di un Cimabue non lodabile se non con divino silenzio. Correva da un capo all’altro di una città confrontando soffitti. Le sue membra erano stanche, i suoi abiti erano strappati, e nei suoi occhi c’era quell’insondabile gioia di vivere che l’uomo non conoscerà mai più finché non tornerà a prendere sul serio se stesso.
I capitoli eccellenti del signor Collingwood sulla critica d’arte di Ruskin sarebbero migliori, a mio parere, se mostrassero maggiore consapevolezza delle rivoluzioni successive che hanno rovesciato, almeno nel dettaglio, molto dell’insegnamento di Ruskin. Non pensiamo più che l’arte divenisse priva di valore quando fu corrotta per la prima volta dall’accuratezza anatomica. Ma se torniamo a quel raffaellismo verso il quale egli fu così ingiusto, non cadiamo nel vecchio errore dei reazionari intelligenti, quello di ignorare il nostro debito verso le rivoluzioni. Ruskin non poté distruggere il mercato del raffaellismo, ma poté distruggerne, e distrusse, il monopolio. Possiamo tornare al Rinascimento, ma ricordiamoci che vi torniamo liberi. Possiamo ora fare un picnic tra le rovine della nostra prigione e deridere il nostro liberatore.
Ma né nel libro del signor Collingwood né nella deliziosa Praeterita di Ruskin stesso giungeremo mai al cuore della questione. L’opera di Ruskin e dei suoi pari resta incomprensibile per la completezza stessa della loro vittoria. Caduto per sempre è quel vasto tempio di mattoni dell’Utilitarismo, di cui possiamo trovare i frammenti ma mai rinnovare l’incantesimo. Le sue testimonianze si leggono con qualcosa della misteriosa arroganza del cinese: a stento a una generazione da noi, leggiamo di una razza che credeva nel presente con la stessa specie di servile ottimismo con cui l’orientale crede nel passato. Può darsi che il battere la testa contro quel tetto per vent’anni non abbia migliorato l’umore del profeta. Ma egli fece ciò che lodava nei vecchi dipinti italiani—‘uno squarcio verso l’eternità’.
Literature of Information
It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition stored up in detective stories, and the replete and solid sweet-stuff shops which are called sentimental novelettes, should be popular with the ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realise that all of us, ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with the most indisputed and depressing facts; men are not apparently so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latch-key which exist in London, or the time it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely circulated papers, such as Tit Bits, Science Siftings, and many of the illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous passages in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings. It is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother Seigel’s Syrup, because he wished to know what eventually happened to the young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap detective stories and cheap novelettes we can most of us feel, whatever our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures. But the literature of information is absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory. To read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise. It is this fact which constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this particular branch of popular literature.
Primarily, at least, there is one rather peculiar thing which must, in justice, be said about it. The readers of this strange science must be allowed to be, upon the whole, as disinterested as a prophet seeing visions or a child reading fairy tales. Here, again, we find, as we so often do, that whatever view of this matter of popular literature we can trust, we can trust least of all the comment and censure current among the vulgar educated. The ordinary version of the ground of this popularity for information, which would be given by a person of greater cultivation, would be that common men are chiefly interested in those sordid facts that surround them on every side. A very small degree of examination will show us that whatever ground there is for the popularity of these insane encyclopaedias, it cannot be the ground of utility. The version of life given by a penny novelette may be very moonstruck and unreliable, but it is at least more likely to contain facts relevant to daily life than compilations and the subject of the number of cows’ tails that would reach the North Pole. There are many more people who are in love than there are people who have any intention of counting or collecting cows’ tails. It is evident to me that the grounds of this widespread madness of information for information’s sake must be sought in other and deeper parts of human nature than those daily needs that lie so near the surface that even social philosophers have discovered them, somewhere in that profound and eternal instinct for enthusiasm and minding other people’s business which made great popular movements like the Crusades or the Gordon Riots.
I once had the pleasure of knowing a man who actually talked in private life after the manner of these papers. His conversation consisted of fragmentary statements about height and weight and depth, and time and population, and his conversation was a nightmare of dullness. During the shortest pause he would ask whether his interlocutors were aware how many tons of rust were scraped every year off the Menai Bridge, and how many rival shops Mr Whiteley had bought up since he opened his business. The attitude of his acquaintances towards this inexhaustible entertainer varied according to his presence or absence between indifference and terror. It was frightful to think of a man’s brain being stocked with such inexpressibly profitless treasures. It was like visiting some imposing British Museum and finding its galleries and glass cases filled with specimens of London mud, of common mortar, or broken walking sticks, and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered that this intolerable prosaic bore had been in fact a poet. I learnt that every item of this multitudinous information was totally and unblushingly untrue, that for all I knew he had made it up as he went along, that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that the rival tradesmen and Mr Whiteley were creatures of the poet’s brain. Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him it must have been a case of art for art’s sake. The joke sustained so gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true, immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they were inventions of the human fancy. And here, as it seems to me, I laid my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which prevents it, and will, perhaps, always prevent it, from seeing with the eyes of popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place; when they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested, but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art, though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous. They look to life for interest with the same kind of cheerful and ineradicable assurance with which we look for interest at a comedy, for which we have paid money at the door. To the eyes of the ultimate school of contemporary fastidiousness, the universe is indeed an ill-drawn and over-coloured picture, the scrawling in circles of a baby upon the slate of night; its starry skies are a vulgar pattern which they would not have for a wallpaper, its flowers and fruits have a Cockney brilliancy, like the holiday hat of a flower-girl. Hence, degraded by art to its own level, they have lost altogether that primitive and typical taste of man, the taste for news. By this essential taste for news, I mean the pleasure in hearing the mere fact that a man has died at the age of one hundred and ten in South Wales, or that the horses ran away at a funeral in San Francisco. Large masses of the early faiths and politics of the world, numbers of the miracles and heroic anecdotes, are based primarily upon this love of something that has just happened, this divine institution of gossip. When Christianity was named the good news, it spread rapidly, not only because it was good, but also because it was news. So it is that if any of us have ever spoken to a navvy in a train about the daily paper, we have generally found the navvy interested, not in those struggles of Parliaments and trades unions which sometimes are, and are always supposed to be, for his benefit, but in the fact that an unusually large whale has been washed up on the coast of Orkney, or that some leading millionaire like Mr Harmsworth is reported to break a hundred pipes a year. The educated classes, cloyed and demoralised with the mere indulgence of art and mood, can no longer understand the idle and splendid disinterestedness of the reader of Pearson’s Weekly. He still keeps something of that feeling which should be the birthright of men, the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value, and with a truly sportsmanlike instinct the average man takes most pleasure in the details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the were-wolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature, a refuge indicating the dullness of the world; it was an incident pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.
That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial, it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it may spoil the chance of better work, certainly by wasting time, possibly by ruining taste. But these obvious objections are the objections which we hear so persistently from everyone that one cannot help wondering where the papers in question procure their myriads of readers. The natural necessity and natural good underlying such crude institutions is far less often a subject of speculation; yet the healthy hungers which lie at the back of the habits of modern democracy are surely worthy of the same sympathetic study that we give to the dogmas of the fanatics long dethroned and the intrigues of commonwealths long obliterated from the earth. And this is the base and consideration which I have to offer: that perhaps the taste for the shreds and patches of journalistic science and history is not, as is continually asserted, the vulgar and senile curiosity of a people that has grown old, but simply the babyish and indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young, and entering history for the first time. In other words, I suggest that they only tell each other in magazines the same kind of stories of commonplace portents and conventional eccentricities which, in any case, they would tell each other in taverns. Science itself is only the exaggeration and specialisation of this thirst for useless fact, which is the mark of the youth of man. But science has become strangely separated from the mere news and scandal of flowers and birds; men have ceased to see that a pterodactyl was as fresh and natural as a flower, that a flower is as monstrous as a pterodactyl. The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind. We have all to show that before we go on to any visions or creations we can be contented with a planet of miracles.
La letteratura dell’informazione
È abbastanza naturale e giusto che le masse di esplosive munizioni accumulate nei romanzi polizieschi, e le repiene e solide botteghe di dolciumi che si chiamano romanzetti sentimentali, siano popolari presso il cliente comune. Non è difficile rendersi conto che tutti noi, ignoranti o colti, siamo primariamente interessati all’assassinio e al fare l’amore. La cosa davvero straordinaria è che le più spaventose finzioni non sono in realtà così popolari quanto quella letteratura che tratta dei fatti più indiscussi e deprimenti; gli uomini non sono, a quanto pare, tanto interessati all’assassinio e al fare l’amore quanto lo sono al numero di diverse forme di chiave a scatto che esistono a Londra, o al tempo che una cavalletta impiegherebbe a saltare dal Cairo al Capo. L’enorme massa di fatua e inutile verità che riempie i giornali più largamente diffusi, come Tit Bits, Science Siftings, e molte delle riviste illustrate, è certamente una delle più straordinarie specie di pabulum emotivo e mentale di cui l’uomo si sia mai nutrito. È quasi incredibile che queste statistiche insensate siano davvero più popolari dei più agghiaccianti misteri e delle più lussuose orge del sentimento. Immaginarlo è come immaginare i passi umoristici della Guida ferroviaria di Bradshaw letti ad alta voce nelle sere d’inverno. È come concepire un uomo incapace di posare una réclame dello Sciroppo di Madre Seigel, perché desiderava sapere che cosa alla fine accadde al giovane che era gravemente malato a Edimburgo. Nel caso dei romanzi polizieschi a buon mercato e dei romanzetti a buon mercato la maggior parte di noi può sentire, qualunque sia il nostro grado di istruzione, che sarebbe possibile leggerli se dessimo piena indulgenza a una parte più bassa e più facile della nostra natura. Ma la letteratura dell’informazione ci è assolutamente misteriosa. Non riusciamo a pensare di divertirci con essa più di quanto riusciamo a pensare di leggere intere pagine di un annuario locale di Surbiton. Leggere cose simili non sarebbe un atto di volgare indulgenza; sarebbe un’impresa quanto mai ardua e meritoria. È questo fatto che costituisce un profondo e quasi insondabile interesse in questa particolare branca della letteratura popolare.
Primariamente, almeno, c’è una cosa piuttosto singolare che deve, per giustizia, essere detta al riguardo. Ai lettori di questa strana scienza si deve concedere di essere, nel complesso, tanto disinteressati quanto un profeta che vede visioni o un bambino che legge fiabe. Anche qui, di nuovo, troviamo, come tanto spesso ci accade, che qualunque visione di questa questione della letteratura popolare noi possiamo fidarci, meno di tutto possiamo fidarci del commento e della censura correnti fra i volgari colti. La versione ordinaria della ragione di questa popolarità dell’informazione, quale sarebbe data da una persona di maggiore cultura, sarebbe che gli uomini comuni sono interessati soprattutto a quei sordidi fatti che li circondano da ogni lato. Un grado assai piccolo di esame ci mostrerà che qualunque fondamento vi sia per la popolarità di queste folli enciclopedie, non può essere il fondamento dell’utilità. La versione della vita data da un romanzetto da un soldo può essere assai lunatica e inaffidabile, ma è almeno più probabile che contenga fatti pertinenti alla vita quotidiana che le compilazioni sul tema del numero di code di vacca che raggiungerebbero il Polo Nord. Vi sono molte più persone innamorate di quante siano le persone che abbiano qualche intenzione di contare o collezionare code di vacca. Mi è evidente che i fondamenti di questa diffusa follia dell’informazione per l’informazione stessa vanno cercati in altre e più profonde parti della natura umana che quei bisogni quotidiani che stanno così vicini alla superficie che persino i filosofi sociali li hanno scoperti, in qualche punto di quel profondo ed eterno istinto di entusiasmo e di impicciarsi degli affari altrui che generò grandi movimenti popolari come le Crociate o i tumulti di Gordon.
Ebbi una volta il piacere di conoscere un uomo che effettivamente parlava nella vita privata alla maniera di questi giornali. La sua conversazione consisteva di frammentari asserti su altezza e peso e profondità, e tempo e popolazione, e la sua conversazione era un incubo di monotonia. Durante la più breve pausa avrebbe chiesto se i suoi interlocutori fossero al corrente di quante tonnellate di ruggine venissero raschiate ogni anno dal Ponte di Menai, e di quanti negozi rivali il signor Whiteley avesse rilevato da quando aprì la sua attività. L’attitudine dei suoi conoscenti verso questo inesauribile intrattenitore variava a seconda della sua presenza o assenza tra l’indifferenza e il terrore. Era spaventoso pensare che il cervello di un uomo fosse rifornito di tesori così inesprimibilmente infruttuosi. Era come visitare qualche imponente Museo Britannico e trovarne le gallerie e le teche di vetro riempite di campioni di fango di Londra, di malta comune, o di bastoni da passeggio rotti, e di tabacco a buon mercato. Anni dopo scoprii che questo intollerabile prosaico seccatore era stato in realtà un poeta. Appresi che ogni voce di questa molteplice informazione era totalmente e senza vergogna falsa, che per quanto ne sapevo l’aveva inventata strada facendo, che nessuna tonnellata di ruggine viene raschiata dal Ponte di Menai, e che i rivali commercianti e il signor Whiteley erano creature del cervello del poeta. Immediatamente concepii una consumante stima per l’uomo che era un bugiardo così circostanziato, così monotono, così interamente senza scopo. Con lui doveva essere stato un caso di arte per l’arte. Lo scherzo sostenuto con tanta gravità attraverso una vita rispettata era di quell’ordine di scherzo che si condivide con l’onniscienza. Ma ciò che mi colpì più cogentemente, a riflettervi, fu il fatto che queste smisurate banalità, che mi avevano colpito come del tutto volgari e aride quando le credevo vere, divennero immediatamente pittoresche e quasi brillanti quando le credetti invenzioni della fantasia umana. E qui, così mi pare, posai il dito su una qualità fondamentale della classe colta che le impedisce, e forse le impedirà sempre, di vedere con gli occhi dell’immaginazione popolare. I meramente istruiti non possono quasi mai essere indotti a credere che questo mondo sia in se stesso un luogo interessante; quando guardano un’opera d’arte, buona o cattiva, si aspettano di essere interessati, ma quando guardano la réclame di un giornale o un capannello per la strada, non si aspettano, propriamente e letteralmente parlando, di essere interessati. Ma per la gente comune e semplice questo mondo è un’opera d’arte, benché sia, come molte grandi opere d’arte, anonima. Essi guardano alla vita in cerca di interesse con la stessa specie di allegra e inestirpabile fiducia con cui noi cerchiamo interesse in una commedia, per la quale abbiamo pagato del denaro alla porta. Agli occhi della scuola ultima della schizzinosità contemporanea, l’universo è invero un quadro mal disegnato e sovraccarico di colore, lo scarabocchio a cerchi di un neonato sulla lavagna della notte; i suoi cieli stellati sono un motivo volgare che non vorrebbero per una carta da parati, i suoi fiori e i suoi frutti hanno una brillantezza plebea, come il cappello festivo di una fioraia. Perciò, degradati dall’arte al proprio livello, hanno perduto del tutto quel primitivo e tipico gusto dell’uomo, il gusto per le notizie. Con questo essenziale gusto per le notizie, intendo il piacere di udire il mero fatto che un uomo è morto all’età di centodieci anni nel Galles meridionale, o che i cavalli sono fuggiti a un funerale a San Francisco. Grandi masse delle fedi e delle politiche primitive del mondo, numerosi dei miracoli e degli aneddoti eroici, si fondano primariamente su questo amore per qualcosa che è appena accaduto, questa divina istituzione del pettegolezzo. Quando il Cristianesimo fu chiamato la buona novella, si diffuse rapidamente, non solo perché era buono, ma anche perché era novella. Così avviene che se qualcuno di noi ha mai parlato con uno sterratore in treno del giornale del giorno, generalmente abbiamo trovato lo sterratore interessato, non a quelle lotte di Parlamenti e di sindacati che talvolta sono, e sempre si suppone siano, a suo beneficio, ma al fatto che una balena insolitamente grande è stata gettata sulla costa delle Orcadi, o che qualche milionario di spicco come il signor Harmsworth risulta rompere un centinaio di pipe l’anno. Le classi colte, sazie e demoralizzate dalla mera indulgenza dell’arte e dell’umore, non riescono più a comprendere l’ozioso e splendido disinteresse del lettore del Pearson’s Weekly. Egli conserva ancora qualcosa di quel sentimento che dovrebbe essere il diritto di nascita degli uomini, il sentimento che questo pianeta è come una nuova casa nella quale abbiamo appena traslocato i nostri bagagli. Ogni dettaglio di esso ha un valore, e con un istinto veramente sportivo l’uomo medio prova il maggior piacere nei dettagli che sono più complicati, irrilevanti, e insieme difficili e inutili da scoprire. Quelle parti del giornale che annunciano l’uva spina gigante e la pioggia di rane sono davvero i moderni rappresentanti della tendenza popolare che produsse l’idra e il lupo mannaro e gli uomini dalla testa di cane. La gente nel Medioevo non era interessata a un drago o a un’apparizione del diavolo perché pensasse che fosse un bell’idillio in prosa, ma perché pensava che fosse stato davvero appena visto. Non era, come tanta letteratura artistica, un rifugio che indicava la monotonia del mondo; era un episodio che nettamente illustrava la feconda poesia del mondo.
Che molto si possa dire, e si dica, contro la letteratura dell’informazione, non lo nego neppure per un momento. È informe, è banale, può dare un’aria irreale di sapere, essa senza dubbio giace, insieme al resto della letteratura popolare, sotto la generale accusa che possa guastare l’occasione di un lavoro migliore, certamente sprecando il tempo, forse rovinando il gusto. Ma queste ovvie obiezioni sono le obiezioni che udiamo così ostinatamente da tutti che non si può fare a meno di chiedersi dove i giornali in questione procaccino le loro miriadi di lettori. La naturale necessità e il naturale bene che soggiacciono a tali rozze istituzioni sono assai meno spesso oggetto di speculazione; eppure le sane fami che stanno dietro alle abitudini della moderna democrazia sono di certo degne dello stesso simpatetico studio che riserviamo ai dogmi dei fanatici da tempo detronizzati e agli intrighi di comunità da tempo cancellate dalla terra. E questa è la base e la considerazione che ho da offrire: che forse il gusto per i brandelli e le pezze della scienza e della storia giornalistiche non è, come si asserisce di continuo, la volgare e senile curiosità di un popolo che è invecchiato, ma semplicemente la puerile e indiscriminata curiosità di un popolo ancora giovane, che entra nella storia per la prima volta. In altre parole, io suggerisco che essi si raccontino soltanto l’un l’altro nelle riviste lo stesso genere di storie di banali prodigi e di convenzionali eccentricità che, in ogni caso, si racconterebbero l’un l’altro nelle taverne. La scienza stessa non è che l’esagerazione e la specializzazione di questa sete di fatti inutili, che è il marchio della giovinezza dell’uomo. Ma la scienza si è stranamente separata dalla mera novella e dallo scandalo dei fiori e degli uccelli; gli uomini hanno cessato di vedere che uno pterodattilo era fresco e naturale quanto un fiore, che un fiore è mostruoso quanto uno pterodattilo. La ricostruzione di questo ponte tra la scienza e la natura umana è uno dei più grandi bisogni dell’umanità. Dobbiamo tutti mostrare che, prima di procedere verso qualsiasi visione o creazione, possiamo accontentarci di un pianeta di miracoli.
Eulogy of Robin Hood
The notion that the historic past, and particularly the Middle Ages, was a mass of negligible darkness is pretty well gone by this time; and there are quite a large number of people engaged in collecting the original costumes, and the genuine ballads, and the authentic frying pans of the twelfth century. The only thing that I never can understand about these people is why instead of admiring the doings of these ages, they do not merely do them. If ever there does appear a valid instance of these ancient observances continuing in actual operation at the present day, the antiquarians simply faint in the street at the sight of it. For example, most of my aesthetic friends lie awake at night dreaming of the reinstitution of some beautiful pagan festival, and yet none of them (for I have tempted them all) can eat four helpings of Christmas pudding. Christmas, with its sausages and its stars, is the very historic thing that they are talking about, but they resent it merely because it is still alive.
Another and much stronger instance of this truth occurred to me the other day. I was walking down a small and ugly street and happened to be reading the first printed version of a ballad of Robin Hood. Raising my eyes (I had just knocked over a man selling matches) I found myself staring at a glaring stack of ‘penny dreadfuls’ in a dirty paper shop. They were inscribed, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘I have at last an unbroken English tradition, known in the time of Edward I, known in the time of Mr Harmsworth.’ And the more I compared the old ballad with the ‘penny dreadful’, the more I saw their resemblance to each other. Both were traditional; both contained repetitions; both were multiplied endlessly; both were adventurous; both were popular; both were anonymous. In both cases the great bulk of the work was not interesting from a literary, but most interesting from an ethical and historic point of view. Both kinds of work were profoundly English; both were profoundly, and almost depressingly, moral. In one point only they differed; that the antiquarians and the aesthetes adore the one without any reason, and despise the other without any reason. Both stand as an everlasting protest of the human spirit against the modern idolatry of art; and in nothing more than in their most fascinating characteristic, their inordinate length. The modern world thinks short stories artistic, mistaking a weak digestion for a fine palate. So has arisen the preposterous paradox that the old spirit exhibited in the long books and the long ballads was not literary, because it liked to have so much literature. It is somewhat parallel to the equally strange assertion that religion was at enmity with life because it refused to believe in the finality and victory of death. Sceptics say that the saints were the foes of life because they desired life to last for ever. And pedants say that the old story-tellers were the foes of literature because they desired a book to last for ever.
In these Robin Hood ballads there is almost every bracing and popular element; there is one above all, the moral and melodramatic. We can all remember when we began first to feel that there was something pompous and ludicrous in the morals of the melodrama, began to feel uncomfortable when the heroine said, ‘Would you have me sell my child?’ or when the burglar spared the infant because of the little ones at home. Then we read Kipling and the realists, and were refreshed and invigorated with their salt and stinging candour; we wept sacred tears when we read of a woman whose personal affection expressed itself not by saying, ‘How can I sell my own child?’ but by saying, ‘Took for a common drunk. Gawd send they don’t look at ‘is boots.’ Artistically we were quite right. The Kipling story, with its savage pleasantry and its colossal cynicism, is immeasurably superior in almost everything there is to the strained romantic melodrama; but it has one inferiority. It is not so like life. The Adelphi play gives a much more accurate version of the solemn, magnanimous, vainglorious pose which the average man really adopts in matters he thinks important. The poor do, indeed, employ a gross fantasy of speech (such as ‘Gawd send’, etc.) when they wish to be satiric or frivolous; but that is simply their literature; slang is a kind of deliberate song. But when they are talking seriously they do talk pompously. A man has only to walk down the Battersea Highroad on a Saturday night to hear round him one universal chatter of such things as ‘How can I sell my own child?’ And as for the burglar who thinks of the little ones at home, every evidence in life and the newspapers seems to support the hypothesis that criminals are sentimental, and I can readily believe in that burglar.
Now, these Robin Hood ballads, as I say, show among other things an amusing proof of this popularity, this antiquity, this intense realism of sentimental melodrama. Let me give an example. Mr W. S. Gilbert (perhaps the most brilliant Rationalist writer of the nineteenth century) made admirable fun in The Pirates of Penzance of the preposterous tradition of the generosity of freebooters. He represented the pirate as making it a rule to spare orphans, and being in consequence somewhat perplexed to find them apparently crossing the sea in shiploads. But when we look at these rude and bloody legends of a rude and bloody age, the ballads of Robin Hood, we find an altruism wilder than that of the Pirate of Penzance. The capering satire of the nineteenth century is positively less fantastic than the reality of the thirteenth. For while Mr Gilbert’s pirate only marked off one class, that of orphans, the oldest ballad of Robin Hood (which I was reading in the street) depicts that hero as giving a whole catalogue of people who are not to be molested. And it is scarcely any exaggeration to say that the catalogue includes almost everyone whom it would occur to an outlaw to molest. No honest yeoman working his plot of land, no good farmer, no brave knight kind to his people, etc., etc., is to be touched by these discriminating bandits. What is the use of denouncing sentimentalism as something artificial and protected when we have it here plainly written in the black letter of a brutal and naked age? No, it is realism that is artificial and melodrama that is human. The slangy short stories are written by pale men in libraries; the melodramas are written by men of the people. The case of the people is very like the similar case of schoolboys. Stalky and Co. is undoubtedly a much more artistic creation than Eric or Little by Little. But Eric is immeasurably more like school life, and more like it precisely because it is crude, because it is precocious, because it is moral.
I may be carried away by an excessive patriotism (I hope I am), but I cannot help fancying that there is something about this egregious nobility in the old ballads that is peculiarly English. There is certainly in these Robin Hood tales an element which can only be described as a sort of stupid magnanimity, a certain kind of generosity which is quite distinct in its colour from the chivalry of France or the tenderness of Ireland. It consists in a great natural gusto in the recognition of opponents. The collected records of Robin Hood become perfectly monotonous at last, as they relate the number of people who vanquished the hero, and whom he warmly commended. There is, of course, a great deal of English vanity about these admissions; the implication is, ‘How splendid you must be, as you have conquered such a one as I’. But this self-satisfaction is an eternal English trait. The great English generosity is really in these ballads. There is nothing that Robin Hood seems to like so much as being knocked down by somebody, and getting up and telling him how fine a fellow he must be. It is useless for Mr Henley and such prophets of revenge to go back to our old English literature; they will not find what they want. Here are songs written by a rude people in an age of bludgeons and gibbets, here is the rawest and plainest utterance of primitive England, and if there be one truth that runs from one end of it to the other, it is ‘the policy of Majuba’.
Elogio di Robin Hood
L’idea che il passato storico, e in particolare il Medioevo, fosse una massa di trascurabile oscurità è ormai ben tramontata a questo punto; e c’è un numero piuttosto grande di persone impegnate a collezionare i costumi originali, e le ballate genuine, e le autentiche padelle del dodicesimo secolo. L’unica cosa che io non riesco mai a capire di questa gente è perché, invece di ammirare le imprese di queste età, non si limiti a compierle. Se mai compare un valido esempio di queste antiche usanze che continuano a operare effettivamente ai giorni nostri, gli antiquari semplicemente svengono per strada alla vista di ciò. Per esempio, la maggior parte dei miei amici estetizzanti giace insonne di notte sognando la reistituzione di qualche bella festa pagana, eppure nessuno di loro (poiché li ho tentati tutti) sa mangiare quattro porzioni di budino di Natale. Il Natale, con le sue salsicce e le sue stelle, è proprio la cosa storica di cui essi parlano, ma lo detestano semplicemente perché è ancora vivo.
Un’altra e assai più forte istanza di questa verità mi venne in mente l’altro giorno. Camminavo lungo una via piccola e brutta e per caso stavo leggendo la prima versione a stampa di una ballata di Robin Hood. Alzando gli occhi (avevo appena urtato un uomo che vendeva fiammiferi) mi trovai a fissare una vistosa pila di ‘penny dreadful’ in una sudicia cartoleria. Portavano la dicitura, ‘Le avventure di Robin Hood’. ‘Ecco,’ dissi, ‘ho finalmente una ininterrotta tradizione inglese, nota al tempo di Edoardo I, nota al tempo del signor Harmsworth.’ E più confrontavo la vecchia ballata col ‘penny dreadful’, più ne vedevo la reciproca rassomiglianza. Entrambi erano tradizionali; entrambi contenevano ripetizioni; entrambi erano moltiplicati all’infinito; entrambi erano avventurosi; entrambi erano popolari; entrambi erano anonimi. In entrambi i casi la gran mole dell’opera non era interessante dal punto di vista letterario, ma quanto mai interessante da un punto di vista etico e storico. Entrambi i generi di opera erano profondamente inglesi; entrambi erano profondamente, e quasi deprimentemente, morali. In un solo punto differivano; nel fatto che gli antiquari e gli esteti adorano l’uno senza alcuna ragione, e disprezzano l’altro senza alcuna ragione. Entrambi si ergono come una perpetua protesta dello spirito umano contro la moderna idolatria dell’arte; e in nulla più che nella loro caratteristica più affascinante, la loro smisurata lunghezza. Il mondo moderno pensa che i racconti brevi siano artistici, scambiando una debole digestione per un palato fine. Così è sorto il preposterо paradosso che il vecchio spirito manifestato nei libri lunghi e nelle lunghe ballate non fosse letterario, perché amava avere tanta letteratura. È in qualche modo parallelo all’altrettanto strana asserzione secondo cui la religione era nemica della vita perché rifiutava di credere nella finalità e nella vittoria della morte. Gli scettici dicono che i santi erano nemici della vita perché desideravano che la vita durasse per sempre. E i pedanti dicono che i vecchi narratori erano nemici della letteratura perché desideravano che un libro durasse per sempre.
In queste ballate di Robin Hood c’è quasi ogni elemento tonificante e popolare; ce n’è uno soprattutto, quello morale e melodrammatico. Tutti possiamo ricordare quando cominciammo per la prima volta a sentire che c’era qualcosa di pomposo e ridicolo nella morale del melodramma, cominciammo a sentirci a disagio quando l’eroina diceva, ‘Vorreste che vendessi mio figlio?’ o quando il ladro risparmiava il neonato per amore dei piccoli a casa. Poi leggemmo Kipling e i realisti, e fummo rinfrescati e rinvigoriti dal loro candore salato e pungente; versammo sacre lacrime quando leggemmo di una donna il cui affetto personale si esprimeva non col dire, ‘Come posso vendere il mio proprio figlio?’ ma col dire, ‘Portalo dentro come un ubriaco. Dio voglia che non gli guardino gli stivali.’ Artisticamente avevamo del tutto ragione. Il racconto di Kipling, con la sua feroce arguzia e il suo colossale cinismo, è incommensurabilmente superiore in quasi tutto ciò che c’è allo sforzato melodramma romantico; ma ha un’inferiorità. Non è così simile alla vita. Il dramma dell’Adelphi dà una versione assai più accurata della posa solenne, magnanima, vanagloriosa che l’uomo medio adotta realmente nelle cose che ritiene importanti. I poveri, in verità, impiegano una grossolana fantasia di linguaggio (come ‘Dio voglia’, ecc.) quando vogliono essere satirici o frivoli; ma questa è semplicemente la loro letteratura; il gergo è una sorta di canto deliberato. Ma quando parlano seriamente parlano davvero pomposamente. Basta che un uomo cammini giù per la Battersea Highroad un sabato sera per udire intorno a sé un universale cicaleccio di cose come ‘Come posso vendere il mio proprio figlio?’ E quanto al ladro che pensa ai piccoli a casa, ogni testimonianza nella vita e nei giornali sembra suffragare l’ipotesi che i criminali siano sentimentali, e io posso prontamente credere in quel ladro.
Ora, queste ballate di Robin Hood, come dico, mostrano tra le altre cose una divertente prova di questa popolarità, di questa antichità, di questo intenso realismo del melodramma sentimentale. Lasciatemi dare un esempio. Il signor W. S. Gilbert (forse il più brillante scrittore razionalista del diciannovesimo secolo) fece ammirevole ironia in The Pirates of Penzance sulla preposterа tradizione della generosità dei filibustieri. Rappresentò il pirata come uno che si faceva regola di risparmiare gli orfani, e che di conseguenza rimaneva alquanto perplesso nel trovarli a quanto pare attraversare il mare a intere navate. Ma quando guardiamo queste rozze e sanguinarie leggende di un’età rozza e sanguinaria, le ballate di Robin Hood, vi troviamo un altruismo più sfrenato di quello del Pirata di Penzance. La saltellante satira del diciannovesimo secolo è positivamente meno fantastica della realtà del tredicesimo. Poiché, mentre il pirata del signor Gilbert isolava una sola classe, quella degli orfani, la più antica ballata di Robin Hood (che stavo leggendo per la strada) raffigura quell’eroe mentre dà un intero catalogo di persone che non devono essere molestate. E non è quasi alcuna esagerazione dire che il catalogo include quasi chiunque venga in mente a un fuorilegge di molestare. Nessun onesto contadino che lavora il suo appezzamento di terra, nessun buon fattore, nessun prode cavaliere benevolo verso la sua gente, ecc., ecc., dev’essere toccato da questi discriminanti banditi. Che senso ha denunciare il sentimentalismo come qualcosa di artificiale e protetto quando lo abbiamo qui chiaramente scritto nei caratteri gotici di un’età brutale e nuda? No, è il realismo a essere artificiale ed è il melodramma a essere umano. I racconti brevi in gergo sono scritti da uomini pallidi nelle biblioteche; i melodrammi sono scritti da uomini del popolo. Il caso del popolo somiglia molto al simile caso degli scolari. Stalky and Co. è indubbiamente una creazione assai più artistica di Eric or Little by Little. Ma Eric è incommensurabilmente più simile alla vita scolastica, e più simile a essa proprio perché è rozzo, perché è precoce, perché è morale.
Potrò essere trascinato da un eccessivo patriottismo (spero di esserlo), ma non posso fare a meno di immaginare che ci sia qualcosa in questa madornale nobiltà nelle vecchie ballate che è peculiarmente inglese. C’è certamente in questi racconti di Robin Hood un elemento che si può descrivere soltanto come una sorta di stupida magnanimità, un certo genere di generosità del tutto distinto, nel suo colore, dalla cavalleria di Francia o dalla tenerezza d’Irlanda. Consiste in un grande gusto naturale nel riconoscimento degli avversari. Le raccolte testimonianze su Robin Hood divengono alla fine perfettamente monotone, mentre narrano il numero di persone che vinsero l’eroe, e che egli calorosamente lodò. C’è, naturalmente, una gran dose di vanità inglese in queste ammissioni; l’implicazione è, ‘Come dovete essere splendido, giacché avete vinto uno come me’. Ma questa autocompiacenza è un eterno tratto inglese. La grande generosità inglese è davvero in queste ballate. Non c’è nulla che Robin Hood sembri gradire tanto quanto l’essere atterrato da qualcuno, e il rialzarsi e dirgli che gran bel tipo dev’essere. È inutile che il signor Henley e simili profeti della vendetta risalgano alla nostra vecchia letteratura inglese; non vi troveranno ciò che vogliono. Ecco canti scritti da un popolo rozzo in un’età di randelli e di forche, ecco l’espressione più cruda e più semplice dell’Inghilterra primitiva, e se c’è una verità che la percorre da un capo all’altro, è ‘la politica di Majuba’.
A Plea for Hasty Journalism
My last week’s article, which reads worse in print than anything I have ever had the misfortune to read, was written under an opulent beech-tree on a walking tour, and only just caught the post. I do not mention this fact merely in order to introduce the adjective ‘opulent’—admirable as it is—nor do I do it out of mere egotism; for egotism is even more of a nuisance to the ego than it is to other people. The precept ‘know thyself’ did not fall from heaven; it fell upstairs from the other place. I decline to know myself; he is not in my set. He is an unknown benefactor of mine, who prefers to remain anonymous. Nor do I mention it out of any pride in the walking tour; for, to tell the truth, my walking tour chiefly consisted of sitting under opulent beech-trees for very long periods and at very short intervals. I state the circumstances under which the article was written because I am convinced that this is the only moral thing to do. Journalism would be far more honest if it dropped its tone of monastic meditation and Papal gravity, and talked a little more about the commonplace conditions of muddle and procrastination and flurry and scurry in which it is really produced. And I wish that at the beginning or end of all the articles we read, there were a brief note stating the situation in which the work was written. Thus we should read, ‘Will Australia adopt Bimetallism?’ then, in small letters, ‘Top of Omnibus’; or some such place in which we journalists do most of our learned research and compilation. We should see in some excited morning paper the headlines, ‘Battle at Ping Cho still in Progress, by an Eyewitness. Latest’. Then in the usual place would be the note, ‘A.B.C. shop, Strand’. The title, ‘Should Spinsters Marry Widowers?’ would be annotated with ‘Swan and Elephant, 12.15’, and so on. Perhaps, as rather longer descriptions would often be required, it might be as well to confine the matter to a system of easily recognised initials. Thus, for instance, ‘How England could be Invaded. L.S.R.D.’ (Lodgings at the Seaside. Rainy Day); or ‘Buddhism and the German Pessimists: a Parallel. C.W.P.P.S.’ (Cottage. Wallpaper with Pink Spots). The thing would throw a kind of flush of colour into our articles. Nature would creep into them as she creeps into the colour of flowers and wine.
Of course I am for righteousness, and all that. But, as I say, I think this plan of talking about the way the thing is done is really a vast deal more righteous than the present habit of keeping up an enormous pomposity of veil and temple. A good many people who say they want journalism to be honest really want it to be solemn. But honesty is never solemn; it is only hypocrisy that can be that. Honesty always laughs, because things are so laughable. It remembers what a queer thing is man—a creature that picks up objects lying all round him (eggs, water-melons, sheep, and so on), and packs them into himself as if he were a carpetbag. It remembers that the very bones of our heads are grinning. And so you will always find in every age that very sincere men are accused of what is called ‘blasphemy’ (it was Caiaphas’s charge)—blasphemy, which means taking things too lightly. The people who can be consistently and entirely solemn are the people who have no convictions at all. Look at them, as they walk down Band Street, in their burnished hats. No belief on any earthly subject has ever broken into the perfection of that innocent and colossal gravity. It is the same, I fear, with most of the great bigwigs of our trade, with the men who write leading articles especially. They are not sincere enough to take anything lightly. If the leader-writer on The Times were sincere (intellectually sincere, I mean), if he became in his own mind serious and real for a second, the consequences would be awful. The terrified sub-editors would peer into his room and see him rolling about on the floor in an agony of laughter, curled up, screaming and kicking—a new problem in the office.
The first step in the making and keeping of journalism an honest thing, is to confess that it is journalism and nothing more. It is a thing produced in a violent hurry, generally in the middle of the night, by men who (terrible as it may sound to say so) are commonly of the average human intelligence. It cannot be accurate. It can be honest; and if it is honest it will own—nay, vaunt— its ingrained and necessary inaccuracy. Its object is not to tell the absolute truth about Russian gunnery or Canadian finance. But its object is, or ought to be, to tell the absolute truth about the minds and convictions of the men who write it.
The real journalistic sin is not that the leading article should misrepresent history (for who will ever be certain what represents history?); the real sin is that the articles should misrepresent the journalist’s own soul. This is vile and by no means uncommon. But it is less likely, obviously, to happen when a man writes hastily than when he writes carefully. The slap-dash style is all on the side of morality.
A paper ought not to be an encyclopaedia—nor, perhaps, to puff one. Both the paper and the encyclopaedia have, of course, eventually the same fate. They are both proved wrong. But the difference is this: that the paper comes out so quickly that even its mistakes are important, while the encyclopaedia comes out so late that even its discoveries do not matter. The newspaper should be the best account of the daily impressions of an intelligent man on one side or the other. If it is anything else but this, it is, or tends to be, a fraud. Honest milk is milk that is milky; honest wine is wine that is wine, and nothing else; honest journalism is journalism that is journalistic. To be journalistic is to be daily, to be constantly receiving impressions vividly and expressing them with absolute fidelity. Give us a frivolous journalism, and we will save England.
Un elogio del giornalismo frettoloso
Il mio articolo della settimana scorsa, che alla stampa risulta peggiore di qualunque cosa io abbia mai avuto la sventura di leggere, fu scritto sotto un opulento faggio durante un’escursione a piedi, e fece appena in tempo a prendere la posta. Non menziono questo fatto soltanto per introdurre l’aggettivo «opulento» — per quanto sia ammirevole — né lo faccio per puro egotismo; giacché l’egotismo è ancora più molesto per l’io di quanto non lo sia per gli altri. Il precetto «conosci te stesso» non è caduto dal cielo; è caduto all’insù, dall’altro luogo. Rifiuto di conoscere me stesso; non è della mia cerchia. È un mio ignoto benefattore, che preferisce restare anonimo. Né lo menziono per qualche orgoglio riguardo all’escursione; poiché, a dire il vero, la mia escursione consistette per lo più nel sedere sotto opulenti faggi per periodi lunghissimi e a brevissimi intervalli. Espongo le circostanze in cui l’articolo fu scritto perché sono convinto che questa sia l’unica cosa morale da fare. Il giornalismo sarebbe assai più onesto se abbandonasse il suo tono di meditazione monastica e di gravità papale, e parlasse un poco di più delle banali condizioni di confusione e di rinvio e di agitazione e trambusto in cui viene realmente prodotto. E vorrei che all’inizio o alla fine di tutti gli articoli che leggiamo vi fosse una breve nota che indicasse la situazione in cui l’opera è stata scritta. Così leggeremmo: «L’Australia adotterà il bimetallismo?», e poi, in caratteri minuti, «Imperiale dell’omnibus»; o qualche altro luogo simile in cui noi giornalisti svolgiamo la maggior parte delle nostre dotte ricerche e compilazioni. Vedremmo in qualche concitato giornale del mattino i titoli: «Battaglia a Ping Cho ancora in corso, da un testimone oculare. Ultimissime». Poi, nel solito posto, ci sarebbe la nota: «Caffè A.B.C., Strand». Il titolo «Le zitelle dovrebbero sposare i vedovi?» sarebbe annotato con «Swan and Elephant, 12.15», e così via. Forse, poiché spesso occorrerebbero descrizioni piuttosto più lunghe, sarebbe opportuno limitare la cosa a un sistema di iniziali facilmente riconoscibili. Così, per esempio: «Come l’Inghilterra potrebbe essere invasa. A.M.G.P.» (Alloggio al Mare. Giorno di Pioggia); oppure «Il buddhismo e i pessimisti tedeschi: un parallelo. V.C.P.P.R.» (Villetta. Carta da Parati a Pois Rosa). La cosa getterebbe una sorta di vampata di colore nei nostri articoli. La natura vi si insinuerebbe come si insinua nel colore dei fiori e del vino.
Naturalmente sono per la rettitudine, e tutto il resto. Ma, come dico, penso che questo progetto di parlare del modo in cui la cosa è fatta sia in realtà assai più retto dell’attuale abitudine di mantenere un’enorme pomposità di velo e di tempio. Un buon numero di persone che dicono di volere il giornalismo onesto lo vogliono in realtà solenne. Ma l’onestà non è mai solenne; solo l’ipocrisia può esserlo. L’onestà ride sempre, perché le cose sono tanto risibili. Ricorda che strana cosa sia l’uomo — una creatura che raccoglie gli oggetti sparsi tutt’attorno a sé (uova, cocomeri, pecore e così via), e se li stipa dentro come se fosse una borsa da viaggio. Ricorda che le ossa stesse del nostro capo stanno sogghignando. E così troverete sempre, in ogni epoca, che gli uomini molto sinceri vengono accusati di ciò che si chiama «bestemmia» (era l’accusa di Caifa) — bestemmia, che significa prendere le cose troppo alla leggera. Le persone che sanno essere costantemente e interamente solenni sono le persone che non hanno alcuna convinzione. Guardatele, mentre scendono per Bond Street, coi loro cappelli lucenti. Nessuna convinzione su alcun tema terreno ha mai fatto irruzione nella perfezione di quella innocente e colossale gravità. Lo stesso vale, temo, per la maggior parte dei grandi pezzi grossi del nostro mestiere, e specialmente per gli uomini che scrivono gli editoriali. Non sono abbastanza sinceri per prendere qualcosa alla leggera. Se l’editorialista del Times fosse sincero (sincero intellettualmente, intendo), se nella propria mente diventasse serio e reale per un secondo, le conseguenze sarebbero spaventose. I redattori terrorizzati farebbero capolino nella sua stanza e lo vedrebbero rotolarsi sul pavimento in un’agonia di risa, rannicchiato, urlante e scalciante — un nuovo problema in ufficio.
Il primo passo per fare e mantenere del giornalismo una cosa onesta è confessare che è giornalismo e nient’altro. È una cosa prodotta in una fretta violenta, generalmente nel cuore della notte, da uomini che (per quanto terribile possa suonare a dirsi) sono comunemente di intelligenza umana media. Non può essere accurato. Può essere onesto; e se è onesto riconoscerà — anzi, vanterà — la sua inveterata e necessaria inaccuratezza. Il suo scopo non è dire la verità assoluta sull’artiglieria russa o sulla finanza canadese. Ma il suo scopo è, o dovrebbe essere, dire la verità assoluta sulle menti e sulle convinzioni degli uomini che lo scrivono.
Il vero peccato giornalistico non è che l’editoriale travisi la storia (giacché chi sarà mai certo di che cosa rappresenti la storia?); il vero peccato è che gli articoli travisino l’anima stessa del giornalista. Questo è vile e per nulla raro. Ma è meno probabile, ovviamente, che accada quando un uomo scrive in fretta che quando scrive con cura. Lo stile raffazzonato sta tutto dalla parte della moralità.
Un giornale non dovrebbe essere un’enciclopedia — né, forse, farne la réclame. Sia il giornale sia l’enciclopedia hanno, naturalmente, alla fine lo stesso destino. Entrambi vengono smentiti. Ma la differenza è questa: che il giornale esce così in fretta che perfino i suoi errori sono importanti, mentre l’enciclopedia esce così in ritardo che perfino le sue scoperte non contano. Il giornale dovrebbe essere il miglior resoconto delle impressioni quotidiane di un uomo intelligente, dell’una o dell’altra parte. Se è qualcos’altro che questo, è, o tende a essere, una frode. Il latte onesto è latte che sa di latte; il vino onesto è vino che è vino, e nient’altro; il giornalismo onesto è giornalismo che è giornalistico. Essere giornalistico significa essere quotidiano, ricevere costantemente impressioni in modo vivido ed esprimerle con assoluta fedeltà. Dateci un giornalismo frivolo, e salveremo l’Inghilterra.
The Voice of Shelley
I have recently been remonstrated with upon two points—first, that I called Nero an artist; and second, that I called Shelley a typical aristocrat. The first query is somewhat easily answered. I called Nero an artist because he was an artist. He loved art in every form all his life, and his last words were a poetical quotation. If he fiddled while Rome was burning, he thought quite as much of the fiddle as he did of the fire. And if he thought a great deal of the fire, it was from the simple, and from his point of view unanswerable, reason that a fire is a very artistic thing. Mr Max Beerbohm in one of his most delightful and absurd essays has denounced the fire brigade as a band of vandals who destroy a ‘fair thing’. He has threatened to start an opposition fire brigade whose pipes shall be filled not with water but with oil. Nero was only Max made serious; Nero was only Max without his good nature; Nero was only Max in action.
But the aim I had in mentioning him is very simple. A defender of undenominationalism spoke of giving his hand to every man who was working for his highest, thereby implying, as it seemed to me, that if a man put something or other highest it did not in practice matter very much what it was. To this I replied that it seemed to me a very awful and urgent matter whether a man put the right thing or the wrong thing highest; that to put the right thing highest was very difficult, and to put the wrong thing very deadly. A salient example of this is the pursuit of mere art or beauty. The moment a man puts beauty higher than love Nero becomes a logical possibility.
The other matter, it may be, is less obvious, but not, I think, less true. When I call Shelley a typical aristocrat; I have fully in remembrance all his revolutionary ardour and his almost anarchic ideality; I do not call Shelley an aristocrat in spite of these things; I call him an aristocrat because of them. The true aristocrat is by nature an anarchist. The aristocrat was and is the person desiring to do as he liked. His castle was a defiance of the decent orders of the king. His motorcar was a defiance of the decent orders of the democracy. The gentlemen of real history were never anything but rowdy. They were admired for being rowdy. They were hanged for being rowdy. They are no longer hanged which seems to me to mark a considerable falling-off in the fullness of the control of the democracy. They are still admired.
Now all this patrician rebelliousness seems to me to have been built into the blood and bone of Shelley, as into the blood and bone of Byron. It was the subconscious foundation upon which he erected his republican idealism. Shelley loved liberty as all aristocrats love liberty. Shelley hated kings as all aristocrats hated kings; the feud between them has flamed since the beginning of the world. Shelley hated priests, and hated them most of all; for priests represent a startling and supernatural denial of the gradations of mankind; an aristocracy can submit to a king or humour a democracy, but another aristocracy is too much for them. Of course, Shelley, a man of quite crystalline sincerity, did not know that his anarchism had this feudal foundation; he imagined, I have no doubt, that he was a veritable voice of the people. His voice is the voice of liberty, it is the voice of beauty, it is the voice of change, and even the voice of revolution, but whatever it is it is never the voice of the people. There is not enough pain in it, and there is not enough laughter. There is not enough of that clean thing which Shelley and many other fine gentlemen would call coarseness. Shelley was idealistic; he was lyric; he was a hundred things, but there were two things that he never was. He was never comic and he was never tragic. Everything that comes out of the common heart, the heart of the real people, is comic and tragic.
There are only two kinds of ballads, recurrent and permanent, coming from the community itself. There are sad ballads about broken hearts and cheerful ballads about broken heads. There is not a trace of this popular quality in Shelley anywhere. It is not necessary, however, in order to indicate this truth to compare Shelley with any folk literature of other times or places. We can compare him with another poet, another democratic idealist, another man moved by the French Revolution, living almost in Shelley’s time, and almost in Shelley’s country, a man who differed from Shelley in nothing except that he was really a man of the people. To think of him after Shelley is like swallowing fire after swallowing water. It is not so easy to get out of one’s mouth the stinging taste of the sweetness and bitterness of Burns.
Shelley never came to that queer common place where grand passion meets the grotesque; where the cross is a sublime gibbet and the gibbet a caricature of the cross. That is the first and best reason why he was never of the people. But there were other reasons as well. One wholly non-popular element in him was his anarchism. The poor are not anarchists, and never can be anarchists. They live too close to life for such artistic trifling. When I speak of anarchism, of course I do not use the term in the exact sense which indicates a political programme. I do not mean that Shelley disapproved of all government though he sometimes used phrases which might be taken in this sense. But his trend and tone was to offer liberty and an escape from rule as a panacea for the misfortunes of the people; and this is not a genuine popular trend or tone. The people know that life cannot be conducted without rules. The people is the maker and keeper of all custom, tradition and convention, just as it is the maker and (except, perhaps, in modern England) the keeper of all religion. Shelley never understood any of these deep tides in the profanum vulgus. And with all his many princely virtues I do not think I am doing him any injustice if I say that he never tried to understand them.
La voce di Shelley
Di recente mi si è rimproverato su due punti: primo, di aver definito Nerone un artista; e secondo, di aver definito Shelley un tipico aristocratico. Al primo quesito è piuttosto facile rispondere. Ho definito Nerone un artista perché era un artista. Amò l’arte in ogni forma per tutta la vita, e le sue ultime parole furono una citazione poetica. Se suonò il violino mentre Roma bruciava, teneva al violino tanto quanto teneva al fuoco. E se teneva molto al fuoco, era per la semplice, e dal suo punto di vista inconfutabile, ragione che un incendio è una cosa assai artistica. Il signor Max Beerbohm, in uno dei suoi più deliziosi e assurdi saggi, ha denunciato i vigili del fuoco come una banda di vandali che distruggono una «cosa bella». Ha minacciato di fondare un corpo rivale di vigili del fuoco i cui idranti siano riempiti non d’acqua ma d’olio. Nerone era solo Max reso serio; Nerone era solo Max senza il suo buon carattere; Nerone era solo Max in azione.
Ma lo scopo che avevo nel menzionarlo è molto semplice. Un difensore dell’aconfessionalismo parlava di tendere la mano a ogni uomo che lavorasse per il proprio ideale più alto, lasciando così intendere, a quanto mi parve, che se un uomo poneva al sommo una cosa o l’altra non importava poi molto, in pratica, quale essa fosse. A ciò risposi che mi pareva una faccenda assai tremenda e urgente se un uomo ponesse al sommo la cosa giusta o la cosa sbagliata; che porre al sommo la cosa giusta era molto difficile, e porvi quella sbagliata molto letale. Un esempio saliente di ciò è la ricerca della mera arte o bellezza. Nel momento in cui un uomo pone la bellezza più in alto dell’amore, Nerone diventa una possibilità logica.
L’altra questione, può darsi, è meno ovvia, ma non, credo, meno vera. Quando definisco Shelley un tipico aristocratico, ho ben presente tutto il suo ardore rivoluzionario e la sua idealità quasi anarchica; non definisco Shelley un aristocratico a dispetto di queste cose; lo definisco un aristocratico proprio a causa di esse. Il vero aristocratico è per natura un anarchico. L’aristocratico era ed è colui che desidera fare a modo suo. Il suo castello era una sfida ai decorosi ordini del re. La sua automobile era una sfida ai decorosi ordini della democrazia. I gentiluomini della storia reale non furono mai altro che turbolenti. Erano ammirati per la loro turbolenza. Erano impiccati per la loro turbolenza. Non vengono più impiccati, il che mi pare segnare un notevole regresso nella pienezza del controllo della democrazia. Sono ancora ammirati.
Ora, tutta questa ribellione patrizia mi pare essere stata edificata nel sangue e nelle ossa di Shelley, come nel sangue e nelle ossa di Byron. Era il fondamento subconscio su cui egli eresse il suo idealismo repubblicano. Shelley amava la libertà come tutti gli aristocratici amano la libertà. Shelley odiava i re come tutti gli aristocratici odiavano i re; la faida tra loro divampa fin dal principio del mondo. Shelley odiava i preti, e li odiava più di ogni altra cosa; giacché i preti rappresentano una sconcertante e soprannaturale negazione delle gradazioni del genere umano; un’aristocrazia può sottomettersi a un re o assecondare una democrazia, ma un’altra aristocrazia è troppo per essa. Naturalmente Shelley, uomo di sincerità del tutto cristallina, non sapeva che il suo anarchismo avesse questo fondamento feudale; immaginava, non ho alcun dubbio, di essere una genuina voce del popolo. La sua voce è la voce della libertà, è la voce della bellezza, è la voce del cambiamento, e persino la voce della rivoluzione, ma qualunque cosa sia non è mai la voce del popolo. Non vi è abbastanza dolore in essa, e non vi è abbastanza riso. Non vi è abbastanza di quella cosa schietta che Shelley e molti altri raffinati gentiluomini chiamerebbero volgarità. Shelley era idealista; era lirico; era cento cose, ma vi erano due cose che non fu mai. Non fu mai comico e non fu mai tragico. Tutto ciò che sgorga dal cuore comune, il cuore del popolo vero, è comico e tragico.
Vi sono solo due specie di ballate, ricorrenti e permanenti, che provengono dalla comunità stessa. Vi sono ballate tristi sui cuori infranti e ballate allegre sulle teste rotte. Non vi è traccia alcuna di questa qualità popolare in Shelley, in nessun luogo. Non è necessario, tuttavia, per indicare questa verità, paragonare Shelley con una qualsiasi letteratura popolare di altri tempi o luoghi. Possiamo paragonarlo a un altro poeta, un altro idealista democratico, un altro uomo mosso dalla Rivoluzione francese, vissuto quasi nel tempo di Shelley, e quasi nel paese di Shelley, un uomo che differiva da Shelley in nulla, se non nel fatto che era davvero un uomo del popolo. Pensare a lui dopo Shelley è come inghiottire fuoco dopo aver inghiottito acqua. Non è così facile togliersi dalla bocca il sapore pungente della dolcezza e dell’amarezza di Burns.
Shelley non giunse mai a quello strano luogo comune dove la grande passione incontra il grottesco; dove la croce è un sublime patibolo e il patibolo una caricatura della croce. Questa è la prima e migliore ragione per cui non fu mai del popolo. Ma vi erano anche altre ragioni. Un elemento del tutto non popolare in lui era il suo anarchismo. I poveri non sono anarchici, e non possono mai esserlo. Vivono troppo a ridosso della vita per simili frivolezze artistiche. Quando parlo di anarchismo, naturalmente non uso il termine nel senso esatto che indica un programma politico. Non intendo che Shelley disapprovasse ogni governo, benché talvolta usasse frasi che potrebbero essere intese in tal senso. Ma la sua tendenza e il suo tono erano di offrire la libertà e una fuga dalla regola come panacea per le sventure del popolo; e questa non è una genuina tendenza o un genuino tono popolare. Il popolo sa che la vita non si può condurre senza regole. Il popolo è l’artefice e il custode di ogni costume, tradizione e convenzione, così come è l’artefice e (tranne, forse, nell’Inghilterra moderna) il custode di ogni religione. Shelley non comprese mai alcuna di queste profonde maree nel profanum vulgus. E, con tutte le sue molte virtù principesche, non credo di fargli alcun torto se dico che non tentò mai di comprenderle.
The Great Translation
The Jacobean translation of the Bible has one real claim to be English. Many of the eulogies about its Protestant purity and its Anglo-Saxon empire building are partisan and fantastic. But it is in this immense sense national, that it is anonymous. The translation, as a translation, is as English as the ballads about Robin Hood, which were written by everybody and nobody. It is true that the learned bishops and dons who translated it were far from regarding themselves as nobodies. But in the history of English literature they are nobodies; only they are immortal nobodies. It is impossible to point to a single great man who is responsible for this masterpiece of verbal music. At the very time when the translation was being made there were in England greater literary men than she is ever likely to see again. But by no conceivable trick or turn of circumstance can Bacon or Burton, Jonson or Shakespeare, have had anything to do with the translation of the Bible. It was done by a mob of bishops; that is, a mob of simple and well-meaning men. The enemies of the Bible have been heard to describe it as Jewish folklore; of course, in a bad sense. In any case, our translation is English folklore—and that in the best sense. England wrote it; no mere Englishman could have done so.
‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good news.’ That is as light and as leaping and as classically pure as Spenser. But Spenser had nothing to do with it; some ordinary parson wrote it.
‘And his driving is as the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi; for he drives furiously.’ That is far more vigorous than Chapman or Ford. But Chapman and Ford had nothing to do with it; it was done by some common clergyman.
‘Where there is no vision the people perish.’ That is as plain and picturesque as Bunyan. But Bunyan had nothing to do with it; in fact, he was not born. It may seem a strange matter that these pompous big-wigs summoned by so stiff a Scotch pedant as James I should be ultimately urged as an argument for popularism and the populace. And yet they are one of its strongest arguments. They show how well quite commonplace people can write when they are writing about something that is not commonplace.
That is the plain element of patriotic importance in the translation. It is the last collective creation of our people. It is the last case in which everybody reads the book and nobody asks the author. After that England left off writing. Englishmen rushed into the breach and tried to write, not altogether without success. Milton, Dryden, Addison, Dr Johnson, made a very good show of it. But almost at once they were flooded by forces not English; by Irishmen like Swift and Goldsmith, by Scotchmen like Hume and Scott. We are right to treat this book, even as an English book, as authoritative. It may or may not record the real origin of the Jews; but I am sure that it records the real end of the English.
There comes a perfect moment when there is no difference between language and literature. Prose is poetry without knowing it; it is as if an absentminded poet always said good morning in metre, or asked us to pass the potatoes in impromptu and unconscious rhyme. Imagine that we all talked poetry all day long; suppose we asked for a ticket with a triolet; suppose we used a post-card only for the purpose (which its shape obviously suggests) of writing a sonnet. Suppose, whenever we talk about the weather, we talk as Shelley wrote about the weather. Suppose, whenever we use a term of affection, it is like one of the great love songs. If we fancy some such condition, we may begin to imagine what really happens when a language is in its perfection. Everything said goes to an inaudible tune; as to a march of totally muffled drums. The poetry has got inside the prose of life, and moves all its limbs into a rhythm and beat of beauty.
The English of the English Bible is not merely splendid about splendid things; it is splendid about everything. In any modern leading article we might see the words ‘We cannot understand why English watering-places like Bath or Brighton are not as adequate as foreign watering-places like Baden or Dieppe; nor why those who seek the one should not as reasonably seek the other.’ And that would be perfectly good modern English. It is not mere religious association that makes us see better English in ‘Are not Pharpar and Abanah, the waters of Damascus, better than all the waters of Jordan, and may I not wash in them and be clean?’ It is really the perfection of style; it is poetry inside prose.
Any magazine article might contain the paragraph: ‘The enthusiast must always be discouraged by certain perishability in all popular things. The mass of mankind seems so plainly a mere part of nature, that it is hard to believe that all their ideas are not at once as monotonous and as fickle as the physical universe; nevertheless, the best philosopher will always return to the idea of an order and a reason in things.’ That would be perfectly sound, intelligent modern English.
It is not mere religious tradition that makes us think that this is better: ‘The voice said, Cry; and he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.’
And then, as in an answer across an abyss: ‘The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.’
It is not the glamour of an ancient language. It is simply a much better use of the modern one.
In one of those tremendous passages that pierce through all languages and belong to the sacred Scripture itself, one of the prophets speaks of the perfect time as a time when all the vessels shall be as vessels before the altar, and on every pot in Jerusalem shall be written ‘Holy unto the Lord’. That is what the English translation, by a literary accident, really managed to achieve. The phrase ‘verbal inspiration’ may be orthodox or unorthodox about the Bible in its supernatural sense. But it is very nearly true about the English translation in a secondary and merely human sense. The dull parts of the narrative are not dull; the trivial details are not trivial, because they are all lifted up on this last great wave of the poetical English language. Everyone, revolutionist and reactionary, is in our time saying that domestic things must be dull, that common things must be commonplace. Everyone is saying, though with much less literary brevity, ‘Surely the people is grass’. But in our sterile time we have never guessed how tall the grass can grow.
La grande traduzione
La traduzione giacomiana della Bibbia ha un solo titolo reale per dirsi inglese. Molti degli elogi sulla sua purezza protestante e sulla sua costruzione dell’impero anglosassone sono di parte e fantasiosi. Ma è nazionale in questo immenso senso: che è anonima. La traduzione, in quanto traduzione, è inglese quanto le ballate su Robin Hood, che furono scritte da tutti e da nessuno. È vero che i dotti vescovi e accademici che la tradussero erano ben lungi dal considerarsi delle nullità. Ma nella storia della letteratura inglese sono nullità; solo che sono nullità immortali. È impossibile additare un singolo grande uomo responsabile di questo capolavoro di musica verbale. Proprio nel tempo in cui la traduzione veniva compiuta vi erano in Inghilterra uomini di lettere più grandi di quanti essa sia mai probabile riveda. Ma per nessun concepibile giro o rovescio di circostanze Bacone o Burton, Jonson o Shakespeare possono aver avuto qualcosa a che fare con la traduzione della Bibbia. Fu compiuta da una folla di vescovi; ossia, una folla di uomini semplici e beneintenzionati. Si è udito i nemici della Bibbia descriverla come folklore ebraico; in senso cattivo, naturalmente. In ogni caso, la nostra traduzione è folklore inglese — e questo nel senso migliore. L’Inghilterra la scrisse; nessun mero inglese avrebbe potuto farlo.
«Come sono belli sui monti i piedi di colui che reca la buona novella.» Ciò è tanto lieve e tanto balzante e tanto classicamente puro quanto Spenser. Ma Spenser non c’entrò nulla; lo scrisse un qualche comune parroco.
«E il suo modo di guidare è come il modo di guidare di Ieu, figlio di Nimsi; poiché egli guida furiosamente.» Ciò è assai più vigoroso di Chapman o Ford. Ma Chapman e Ford non c’entrarono nulla; fu opera di un qualche comune ecclesiastico.
«Dove non c’è visione il popolo perisce.» Ciò è tanto piano e pittoresco quanto Bunyan. Ma Bunyan non c’entrò nulla; anzi, non era ancora nato. Può sembrare cosa strana che questi pomposi pezzi grossi convocati da un pedante scozzese così rigido come Giacomo I debbano infine essere addotti come argomento a favore del popolarismo e della plebe. Eppure sono uno dei suoi argomenti più forti. Mostrano quanto bene sappiano scrivere persone del tutto comuni quando scrivono di qualcosa che non è comune.
Questo è il semplice elemento di importanza patriottica nella traduzione. È l’ultima creazione collettiva del nostro popolo. È l’ultimo caso in cui tutti leggono il libro e nessuno chiede dell’autore. Dopo di ciò l’Inghilterra smise di scrivere. Gli inglesi si precipitarono sulla breccia e tentarono di scrivere, non del tutto senza successo. Milton, Dryden, Addison, il dottor Johnson ne fecero un’ottima prova. Ma quasi subito furono sommersi da forze non inglesi; da irlandesi come Swift e Goldsmith, da scozzesi come Hume e Scott. Abbiamo ragione di trattare questo libro, anche come libro inglese, come autorevole. Può darsi che registri o no la vera origine degli ebrei; ma sono certo che registra la vera fine degli inglesi.
Viene un momento perfetto in cui non vi è differenza tra lingua e letteratura. La prosa è poesia senza saperlo; è come se un poeta distratto dicesse sempre buongiorno in metrica, o ci chiedesse di passargli le patate in rima estemporanea e inconsapevole. Immaginate che parlassimo tutti in poesia tutto il giorno; supponete che chiedessimo un biglietto con un triolet; supponete che usassimo una cartolina solo allo scopo (che la sua forma ovviamente suggerisce) di scrivere un sonetto. Supponete che, ogni volta che parliamo del tempo, parlassimo come Shelley scriveva del tempo. Supponete che, ogni volta che usiamo una parola d’affetto, essa sia come uno dei grandi canti d’amore. Se immaginiamo una simile condizione, possiamo cominciare a immaginare ciò che accade realmente quando una lingua è nella sua perfezione. Ogni cosa detta procede su una melodia inudibile; come al ritmo di una marcia di tamburi del tutto ovattati. La poesia è penetrata dentro la prosa della vita, e ne muove tutte le membra in un ritmo e in una cadenza di bellezza.
L’inglese della Bibbia inglese non è splendido soltanto riguardo a cose splendide; è splendido riguardo a tutto. In un qualsiasi moderno editoriale potremmo vedere le parole: «Non riusciamo a capire perché stazioni termali inglesi come Bath o Brighton non siano altrettanto adeguate di stazioni termali straniere come Baden o Dieppe; né perché coloro che cercano le une non debbano, con altrettanta ragione, cercare le altre.» E questo sarebbe inglese moderno perfettamente buono. Non è la mera associazione religiosa a farci vedere un inglese migliore in «Non sono forse il Parpar e l’Abana, i fiumi di Damasco, migliori di tutte le acque del Giordano, e non potrei io lavarmi in essi ed essere mondato?» È davvero la perfezione dello stile; è poesia dentro la prosa.
Un qualsiasi articolo di rivista potrebbe contenere il paragrafo: «L’entusiasta deve sempre essere scoraggiato da una certa deperibilità in tutte le cose popolari. La massa dell’umanità appare così chiaramente una mera parte della natura, che è difficile credere che tutte le sue idee non siano al contempo monotone e volubili quanto l’universo fisico; ciò nondimeno, il miglior filosofo tornerà sempre all’idea di un ordine e di una ragione nelle cose.» Questo sarebbe inglese moderno perfettamente sano e intelligente.
Non è la mera tradizione religiosa a farci pensare che questo sia migliore: «La voce disse: Grida; ed egli disse: Che cosa griderò? Ogni carne è erba, e ogni sua avvenenza è come il fiore del campo. L’erba inaridisce, il fiore appassisce: poiché il soffio del Signore vi alita sopra: certo il popolo è erba.»
E poi, come in una risposta attraverso un abisso: «L’erba inaridisce, il fiore appassisce: ma la parola del nostro Dio dura in eterno.»
Non è il fascino di una lingua antica. È semplicemente un uso assai migliore di quella moderna.
In uno di quei tremendi passi che trapassano tutte le lingue e appartengono alla sacra Scrittura stessa, uno dei profeti parla del tempo perfetto come di un tempo in cui tutti i vasi saranno come vasi dinanzi all’altare, e su ogni pentola di Gerusalemme sarà scritto «Consacrato al Signore». Questo è ciò che la traduzione inglese, per un accidente letterario, riuscì davvero a conseguire. L’espressione «ispirazione verbale» può essere ortodossa o eterodossa riguardo alla Bibbia nel suo senso soprannaturale. Ma è quasi del tutto vera riguardo alla traduzione inglese in un senso secondario e meramente umano. Le parti noiose della narrazione non sono noiose; i banali dettagli non sono banali, perché sono tutti sollevati su quest’ultima grande onda della lingua inglese poetica. Tutti, rivoluzionari e reazionari, nel nostro tempo vanno dicendo che le cose domestiche devono essere noiose, che le cose comuni devono essere banali. Tutti vanno dicendo, benché con assai minore brevità letteraria: «Certo il popolo è erba». Ma nel nostro tempo sterile non abbiamo mai indovinato quanto alta possa crescere l’erba.
Jane Austen’s Juvenilia
In a recent newspaper controversy about the conventional silliness and sameness of all the human generations previous to our own, somebody said that in the world of Jane Austen a lady was expected to faint when she received a proposal. To those who happen to have read any of the works of Jane Austen, the connection of ideas will appear slightly comic. Elizabeth Bennet, for instance, received two proposals from two very confident and even masterful admirers; and she certainly did not faint. It would be nearer the truth to say that they did. But in any case it may be amusing to those who are thus amused, and perhaps even instructive to those who thus need to be instructed, to know that the earliest work of Jane Austen might be called a satire on the fable of the fainting lady. ‘Beware of fainting fits … though at times they may be refreshing and agreeable yet believe me they will in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your Constitution.’ Such were the words of the expiring Sophia to the afflicted Laura; and there are modern critics capable of adducing them as a proof that all society was in a swoon in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But in truth it is the whole point of this little skit that the swoon of sensibility is not satirised solely because it was a fiction. Laura and Sophia are made ludicrously unlike life by being made to faint as real ladies do not faint. Those ingenious moderns, who say that the real ladies did faint, are actually being taken in by Laura and Sophia, and believing them against Jane Austen. They are believing, not the people of the period but the most nonsensical novels of the period, which even the people of the period who read them did not believe. They have swallowed all the solemnities of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and never even seen the joke of Northanger Abbey.
For if these juvenilia of Jane Austen anticipate especially any of her after works, they certainly anticipate the satiric side of Northanger Abbey. Of their considerable significance on that side something may be said presently; but it will be well to preface it by a word about the works themselves as items of literary history. Everyone knows that the novelist left an unfinished fragment, since published under the name of The Watsons, and a finished story called Lady Susan, in letters, which she had herself apparently decided not to publish. These preferences are all prejudices, in the sense of matters of unmanageable taste; but I confess I think it a strange historical accident that things so comparatively dull as Lady Susan should have been printed already, while things so comparatively lively as Love and Friendship should never have been printed until now. It is at least a curiosity of literature that such curiosities of literature should have been almost accidentally concealed. Doubtless it was very rightly felt that we may go much too far in the way of emptying the waste-paper basket of a genius on the head of the public; and that there is a sense in which the waste-paper basket is as sacred as the grave. But without arrogating to myself any more right in the matter than anybody has to his own taste, I hope I may be allowed to say that I for one would have willingly left Lady Susan in the waste-paper basket, if I could have pieced together Love and Friendship for a private scrap-book; a thing to laugh over again and again as one laughs over the great burlesques of Peacock or Max Beerbohm.
Jane Austen left everything she possessed to her sister Cassandra, including these and other manuscripts; and the second volume of them containing these was left by Cassandra to her brother, Admiral Sir Francis Austen. He gave it to his daughter Fanny, who left it in turn to her brother Edward, who was the Rector of Barfrestone in Kent, and the father of Mrs Sanders, to whose wise decision we owe the publication of these first fancies of her great-aunt; whom it might be misleading here to call her great great-aunt. Everyone will judge for himself; but I myself think she has added something intrinsically important to literature and to literary history; and that there are cartloads of printed matter, regularly recognised and printed with the works of all great authors, which are far less characteristic and far less significant than these few nursery jests.
For Love and Friendship, with some similar pages in the accompanying fragments, is really a rattling burlesque; something much better than what the ladies of the time called an agreeable rattle. It is one of those things that can be the more readily read with enjoyment through being written with enjoyment; in other words, it is all the better for being juvenile in the sense of being joyful. She is said to have written these things at the age of seventeen, evidently in much the same spirit in which people conduct a family magazine; for the medallions included in the manuscript were the work of her sister Cassandra. The whole thing is full of the sort of high spirits that are always higher in private than in public; as people laugh louder in the house than in the street. Many of her admirers would not expect, perhaps many of her admirers would not admire, the sort of fun to be found in the letter to the young lady ‘whose feelings were too strong for her judgment’, and who remarks incidentally ‘I murdered my father at a very early period in my life, I have since murdered my mother, and I am now going to murder my sister’. Personally, I think it admirable; not the conduct, but the confession. But there is much more than hilarity in the humour, even at this stage of its growth. There is almost everywhere a certain neatness in the nonsense. There is not a little of the true Austen irony. ‘The noble Youth informed us that his name was Lindsay—for particular reasons, however, I shall conceal it under that of Talbot.’ Did anyone really desire that to disappear into the waste-paper basket? ‘She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her— she was only an object of contempt.’ Is not that something like the first faint line in the figure of Fanny Price? When a loud knocking is heard on the door of the Rustic Cot by the Uske, the heroine’s father enquires the nature of the noise, and by cautious steps of inference they are enabled to define it as somebody outside striking the door. ‘“Yes” (exclaimed I) “I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance.” “That is another point” (replied he) “we must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock—tho’ that some one does rap at the door I am partly convinced”.’ In the aggravating leisure and lucidity of that reply, is there not the foreshadowing of another and more famous father; and do we not hear for a moment, in the rustic cottage by the Uske, the unmistakable voice of Mr Bennet?
Gli juvenilia di Jane Austen
In una recente controversia giornalistica sulla convenzionale stoltezza e uniformità di tutte le generazioni umane anteriori alla nostra, qualcuno disse che nel mondo di Jane Austen ci si aspettava che una signora svenisse quando riceveva una proposta di matrimonio. A coloro che per caso abbiano letto una qualsiasi delle opere di Jane Austen, l’associazione di idee apparirà lievemente comica. Elizabeth Bennet, per esempio, ricevette due proposte da due assai sicuri di sé e persino autoritari ammiratori; e di certo non svenne. Sarebbe più vicino al vero dire che furono loro a svenire. Ma in ogni caso può essere divertente per coloro che così si divertono, e forse persino istruttivo per coloro che così hanno bisogno di essere istruiti, sapere che la primissima opera di Jane Austen potrebbe dirsi una satira sulla favola della dama che sviene. «Guardati dagli accessi di svenimento … per quanto a volte possano essere ristoratori e piacevoli, pure, credimi, alla fine, se troppo spesso ripetuti e in stagioni sconvenienti, si riveleranno rovinosi per la tua Costituzione.» Tali furono le parole della morente Sophia all’afflitta Laura; e vi sono critici moderni capaci di addurle come prova che tutta la società era in deliquio nel primo decennio del diciannovesimo secolo. Ma in verità tutto il senso di questa breve farsa sta nel fatto che il deliquio della sensibilità non è satireggiato unicamente perché era una finzione. Laura e Sophia sono rese ridicolmente dissimili dalla vita col farle svenire come le vere signore non svengono. Quegli ingegnosi moderni, che affermano che le vere signore svenivano davvero, si stanno in realtà lasciando ingannare da Laura e Sophia, e credono a loro contro Jane Austen. Credono non alla gente del periodo ma ai romanzi più assurdi del periodo, ai quali persino la gente del periodo che li leggeva non credeva. Hanno inghiottito tutte le solennità dei Misteri di Udolpho, e non hanno mai nemmeno colto lo scherzo dell’Abbazia di Northanger.
Poiché se questi juvenilia di Jane Austen anticipano in particolare qualcuna delle sue opere posteriori, essi anticipano di certo il lato satirico dell’Abbazia di Northanger. Del loro considerevole significato su quel versante qualcosa si dirà tra poco; ma sarà bene premettervi una parola sulle opere stesse in quanto elementi di storia letteraria. Tutti sanno che la romanziera lasciò un frammento incompiuto, poi pubblicato col nome di The Watsons, e un racconto compiuto intitolato Lady Susan, in forma epistolare, che ella stessa aveva apparentemente deciso di non pubblicare. Queste preferenze sono tutte pregiudizi, nel senso di questioni di gusto ingovernabile; ma confesso di ritenere uno strano accidente storico che cose comparativamente così noiose come Lady Susan siano già state stampate, mentre cose comparativamente così vivaci come Love e Friendship non siano mai state stampate fino ad ora. È quantomeno una curiosità della letteratura che simili curiosità della letteratura siano state quasi accidentalmente celate. Senza dubbio si è avvertito, e molto giustamente, che si può andare assai troppo oltre nel rovesciare il cestino della carta straccia di un genio sul capo del pubblico; e che vi è un senso in cui il cestino della carta straccia è sacro quanto la tomba. Ma senza arrogarmi in questa faccenda alcun diritto maggiore di quello che ciascuno ha sul proprio gusto, spero mi sia consentito dire che io, per parte mia, avrei volentieri lasciato Lady Susan nel cestino della carta straccia, se avessi potuto ricomporre Love e Friendship per un album privato; una cosa su cui ridere ancora e ancora come si ride sulle grandi parodie di Peacock o di Max Beerbohm.
Jane Austen lasciò tutto ciò che possedeva alla sorella Cassandra, compresi questi e altri manoscritti; e il secondo volume di essi che li conteneva fu lasciato da Cassandra al fratello, l’ammiraglio Sir Francis Austen. Egli lo diede alla figlia Fanny, che lo lasciò a sua volta al fratello Edward, il quale era rettore di Barfrestone nel Kent, e padre della signora Sanders, alla cui saggia decisione dobbiamo la pubblicazione di queste prime fantasie della sua prozia; che qui sarebbe fuorviante chiamare la sua bis-prozia. Ciascuno giudicherà da sé; ma io per parte mia penso che ella abbia aggiunto qualcosa di intrinsecamente importante alla letteratura e alla storia letteraria; e che vi siano carrettate di materiale stampato, regolarmente riconosciuto e stampato con le opere di tutti i grandi autori, assai meno caratteristiche e assai meno significative di questi pochi scherzi da camera dei bambini.
Poiché Love e Friendship, con alcune pagine simili nei frammenti che l’accompagnano, è davvero una parodia scoppiettante; qualcosa di assai migliore di ciò che le signore del tempo chiamavano una piacevole chiacchiera brillante. È una di quelle cose che si possono leggere con godimento tanto più prontamente in quanto scritte con godimento; in altre parole, è tanto migliore per il fatto di essere giovanile nel senso di essere gioiosa. Si dice che ella abbia scritto queste cose all’età di diciassette anni, evidentemente pressoché nello stesso spirito con cui si conduce una rivista di famiglia; giacché i medaglioni inclusi nel manoscritto erano opera della sorella Cassandra. Il tutto è pieno di quel genere di allegria che è sempre più alta in privato che in pubblico; come la gente ride più forte in casa che per la strada. Molti dei suoi ammiratori non si aspetterebbero, e forse molti dei suoi ammiratori non ammirerebbero, il genere di spasso che si trova nella lettera alla giovane signora «i cui sentimenti erano troppo forti per il suo giudizio», e che osserva incidentalmente: «Assassinai mio padre in un periodo assai precoce della mia vita, da allora ho assassinato mia madre, e ora sto per assassinare mia sorella». Personalmente, la trovo ammirevole; non la condotta, ma la confessione. Ma vi è molto più che ilarità nell’umorismo, persino a questo stadio della sua crescita. Vi è quasi ovunque una certa nitidezza nel nonsenso. Non vi è poca della vera ironia austeniana. «Il nobile Giovane ci informò che il suo nome era Lindsay — per ragioni particolari, tuttavia, lo celerò sotto quello di Talbot.» Qualcuno desiderava davvero che ciò sparisse nel cestino della carta straccia? «Ella non era nulla più di una mera giovane donna di buon carattere, cortese e compiacente; come tale a stento potevamo provarne avversione — era soltanto un oggetto di disprezzo.» Non è questo qualcosa di simile al primo tenue tratto nella figura di Fanny Price? Quando un forte bussare si ode alla porta della Rustica Casetta presso l’Uske, il padre dell’eroina indaga la natura del rumore, e per caute tappe di inferenza essi riescono a definirlo come qualcuno che, fuori, batte alla porta. «“Sì” (esclamai) “non posso fare a meno di pensare che debba essere qualcuno che bussa per essere ammesso.” “Questo è un altro punto” (replicò egli) “non dobbiamo pretendere di stabilire per quale motivo la persona possa bussare — benché che qualcuno picchi alla porta io sia in parte convinto”.» Nell’esasperante lentezza e lucidità di quella risposta, non vi è forse il presagio di un altro e più famoso padre; e non udiamo forse per un istante, nel rustico casolare presso l’Uske, l’inconfondibile voce del signor Bennet?
But there is a larger critical reason for taking pleasure in the gaiety of these various travesties and trifles. Mr Austen-Leigh seems to have thought them not sufficiently serious for the reputation of his great relative; but greatness is not made up of serious things, in the sense of solemn things. The reason here, however, is as serious as even he or anyone else could desire; for it concerns the fundamental quality of one of the finest talents in letters.
A very real psychological interest, almost amounting to a psychological mystery, attaches to any early work of Jane Austen. And for that one reason, among others, which has hardly been sufficiently emphasised. Great as she was, nobody was likely to maintain that she was a poet. But she was a marked example of what is said of the poet; she was born, not made. As compared with her, indeed, some of the poets really were made. Many men who had the air of setting the world on fire have left at least a reasonable discussion about what set them on fire. Men like Coleridge or Carlyle had certainly kindled their first torches from the flambeaux of equally fantastic German mystics or Platonic speculators; they had gone through furnaces of culture where even less creative people might have been inflamed to creation. Jane Austen was not inflamed or inspired or even moved to be a genius; she simply was a genius. Her fire, what there was of it, began with herself; like the fire of the first man who rubbed two dry sticks together. Some would say that they were very dry sticks which she rubbed together. It is certain that she by her own artistic talent made interesting what thousands of superficially similar people would have made dull. There was nothing in her circumstances, or even in her materials, that seems obviously meant for the making of such an artist. It might seem a very wild use of the wrong word to say that Jane Austen was elemental. It might even seem even a little wanton to insist that she was original. Yet this objection would come from the critic not really considering what is meant by an element or an origin. Perhaps it might be as well expressed in what is really meant by an individual. Her ability is an absolute; it cannot be analysed into influences. She has been compared to Shakespeare; and in this sense she really does recall the joke about the man who said he could write like Shakespeare if he had the mind. In this case we seem to see a thousand spinsters sitting at a thousand tea-tables; and they could all have written Emma, if they had the mind.
There is therefore, in considering even her crudest early experiments, the interest of looking at a mind and not at a mirror. She may not be conscious of being herself; yet she is not, like so many more cultivated imitators, conscious of being somebody else. The force, at its first and feeblest, is coming from within and not merely from without. This interest, which belongs to her as an individual with a superior instinct for the intelligent criticism of life, is the first of the reasons that justify a study of her juvenile works; it is an interest in the psychology of the artistic vocation. I will not say of the artistic temperament; for nobody ever had less of the tiresome thing commonly so described than Jane Austen. But while this alone would be a reason for finding out how her work began, it becomes yet more relevant when we have found out how it did begin. This is something more than the discovery of a document; it is the discovery of an inspiration. And that inspiration was the inspiration of Gargantua and of Pickwick; it was the gigantic inspiration of laughter.
If it seemed odd to call her elemental, it may seem equally odd to call her exuberant. These pages betray her secret; which is that she was naturally exuberant. And her power came, as all power comes, from the control and direction of exuberance. But there is the presence and pressure of that vitality behind her thousand trivialities; she could have been extravagant if she liked. She was the very reverse of a starched or a starved spinster; she could have been a buffoon like the Wife of Bath if she chose. This is what gives an infallible force to her irony. This is what gives a stunning weight to her understatements. At the back of this artist also, counted as passionless, there was passion; but her original passion was a sort of joyous scorn and a fighting spirit against all that she regarded as morbid and lax and poisonously silly. The weapons she forged were so finely finished that we might never have known this, but for these glimpses of the crude furnace from which they came. Finally there are two additional facts involved which I will leave the modern critics and correspondents in newspapers to ponder and explain at their leisure. One is that this realist, in rebuking the romantics, is very much concerned with rebuking them for the very thing for which revolutionary sentiment has so much admired them; as for their glorification of ingratitude to parents and their easy assumption that the old are always wrong. ‘No!’ says the noble Youth in Love and Friendship, ‘never shall it be said that I obliged my father.’ And the other is that there is not a shadow of indication anywhere that this independent intellect and laughing spirit was other than contented with a narrow domestic routine, in which she wrote a story as domestic as a diary in the intervals of pies and puddings, without so much as looking out of the window to notice the French Revolution.
Ma vi è una ragione critica più ampia per trarre piacere dalla giovialità di queste varie parodie e inezie. Il signor Austen-Leigh sembra averle ritenute non sufficientemente serie per la reputazione della sua grande parente; ma la grandezza non è fatta di cose serie, nel senso di cose solenni. La ragione, qui, tuttavia, è seria quanto persino lui o chiunque altro potrebbe desiderare; giacché concerne la qualità fondamentale di uno dei più fini talenti delle lettere.
Un interesse psicologico assai reale, quasi assurgente a un mistero psicologico, si lega a qualsiasi opera giovanile di Jane Austen. E per quella ragione, tra le altre, che a stento è stata sufficientemente sottolineata. Grande com’era, nessuno sarebbe stato incline a sostenere che fosse una poetessa. Ma era un esempio spiccato di ciò che si dice del poeta; ella nacque tale, non fu fatta tale. In confronto a lei, invero, alcuni dei poeti furono davvero fatti tali. Molti uomini che avevano l’aria di dar fuoco al mondo hanno lasciato almeno una ragionevole discussione su ciò che diede fuoco a loro. Uomini come Coleridge o Carlyle avevano di certo acceso le loro prime torce dalle fiaccole di mistici tedeschi o speculatori platonici altrettanto fantastici; erano passati attraverso fornaci di cultura in cui persino persone meno creative avrebbero potuto essere infiammate alla creazione. Jane Austen non fu infiammata o ispirata o nemmeno spinta a essere un genio; ella semplicemente era un genio. Il suo fuoco, quel poco che ce n’era, cominciò con lei stessa; come il fuoco del primo uomo che sfregò insieme due bastoncini secchi. Alcuni direbbero che erano bastoncini assai secchi quelli che ella sfregava insieme. È certo che ella, col proprio talento artistico, rese interessante ciò che migliaia di persone superficialmente simili avrebbero reso noioso. Non vi era nulla nelle sue circostanze, o persino nei suoi materiali, che sembri ovviamente destinato alla formazione di un simile artista. Potrebbe sembrare un uso assai sfrenato della parola sbagliata dire che Jane Austen fosse elementare. Potrebbe persino sembrare un po’ arbitrario insistere sul fatto che fosse originale. Eppure questa obiezione verrebbe dal critico che non considera davvero ciò che si intende per un elemento o un’origine. Forse ciò potrebbe altrettanto bene esprimersi in ciò che davvero si intende per un individuo. La sua abilità è un assoluto; non può essere scomposta in influenze. È stata paragonata a Shakespeare; e in questo senso ella richiama davvero la battuta sull’uomo che diceva di saper scrivere come Shakespeare, se solo ne avesse avuto l’intenzione. In questo caso ci pare di vedere un migliaio di zitelle sedute a un migliaio di tavoli da tè; e tutte avrebbero potuto scrivere Emma, se solo ne avessero avuto l’intenzione.
Vi è dunque, nel considerare persino i suoi più grezzi esperimenti giovanili, l’interesse di guardare una mente e non uno specchio. Può darsi che ella non sia consapevole di essere se stessa; eppure non è, come tanti imitatori più coltivati, consapevole di essere qualcun altro. La forza, al suo primo e più fioco manifestarsi, proviene dall’interno e non meramente dall’esterno. Questo interesse, che le appartiene come individuo dotato di un istinto superiore per l’intelligente critica della vita, è la prima delle ragioni che giustificano uno studio delle sue opere giovanili; è un interesse per la psicologia della vocazione artistica. Non dirò per il temperamento artistico; giacché nessuno ebbe mai meno della fastidiosa cosa comunemente così descritta di quanta ne ebbe Jane Austen. Ma se questo da solo sarebbe già una ragione per scoprire come cominciò la sua opera, esso diviene ancor più rilevante quando abbiamo scoperto come cominciò davvero. Questo è qualcosa di più della scoperta di un documento; è la scoperta di un’ispirazione. E quell’ispirazione era l’ispirazione di Gargantua e di Pickwick; era la gigantesca ispirazione del riso.
Se sembrava strano chiamarla elementare, può sembrare altrettanto strano chiamarla esuberante. Queste pagine tradiscono il suo segreto; ossia che era naturalmente esuberante. E la sua forza veniva, come viene ogni forza, dal controllo e dalla direzione dell’esuberanza. Ma vi è la presenza e la pressione di quella vitalità dietro le sue mille banalità; avrebbe potuto essere stravagante, se avesse voluto. Era l’esatto contrario di una zitella inamidata o affamata; avrebbe potuto essere una buffona come la Comare di Bath, se avesse scelto di esserlo. È questo che conferisce una forza infallibile alla sua ironia. È questo che conferisce un peso sbalorditivo alle sue litoti. In fondo a questa artista, anch’essa ritenuta priva di passione, vi era passione; ma la sua passione originaria era una sorta di gioioso disprezzo e uno spirito combattivo contro tutto ciò che ella considerava morboso e lasso e velenosamente sciocco. Le armi che ella forgiò erano rifinite così finemente che non l’avremmo forse mai saputo, se non fosse per questi scorci della rozza fornace da cui provennero. Infine vi sono due fatti ulteriori implicati, che lascerò ai critici moderni e ai corrispondenti dei giornali ponderare e spiegare a loro agio. Il primo è che questa realista, nel rimproverare i romantici, è assai preoccupata di rimproverarli proprio per quella cosa per cui il sentimento rivoluzionario li ha tanto ammirati; come per la loro glorificazione dell’ingratitudine verso i genitori e la loro facile presunzione che i vecchi abbiano sempre torto. «No!» dice il nobile Giovane in Love e Friendship, «mai si dirà che io abbia compiacuto mio padre.» E il secondo è che non vi è ombra di indizio, in alcun luogo, che questo intelletto indipendente e questo spirito ridente fosse altro che appagato da una ristretta routine domestica, in cui ella scriveva un racconto domestico come un diario negli intervalli tra pasticci e budini, senza nemmeno affacciarsi alla finestra per accorgersi della Rivoluzione francese.
The Countrymen of Mary Webb and Thomas Hardy
The work of Mary Webb had an aspect distinct from all the debate about it merely as a case of something first neglected because it was not advertised and then advertised because it was neglected. I am not claiming to be one of the discoverers: nor am I one of those who hastened to discover the thing after it had been discovered. I only read one of the writer’s books, Precious Bane, and that struck me as strangely and very individually beautiful; but I thought it unique in every sense of the word, and never even knew if the writer’s name were known, or if she had written anything else. But the book left a very strong impression on my mind, and especially in one respect. It is very vivid and at the same time indescribable. Perhaps the hint is in the word ‘precious’ in Precious Bane. Not that Mrs Webb was in the least precious in the priggish sense. I mean in the things of price: a richness in things commonly connected with bareness and poverty. Something of what is spoken of as the gorgeous East, rested like the transparent colours of a rainbow, upon a landscape very typical of the West. Perhaps we sometimes forget, when we talk of Orient pearls and gold, that the sunset can be rich as well as the sunrise.
The romance described rustics in an age when they were even ruder than they were in the tales of Hardy or the poems of Housman. Nor was there the smallest attempt to idealise the life in the sense of suiting it to the rather low ideal of modern sentiment and comfort. The country was not turned into an Arcadia even of the really natural grace of Virgil or Theocritus; still less are the peasants turned into stage peasants or the shepherdess to a china shepherdess. The thing I mean by riches is something more subtle even than happiness. These peasants live a hard life; they probably on occasion live a hungry life; they are quite capable in some circumstances of living a gross or ferocious life. But they do, in a very deep sense, live a full life. And that is where the very atmosphere of the book differs from that of Hardy or of many striking and valuable books upon the same theme; books that have, indeed, found grandeur and even beauty in such a primitive existence, but have found only the beauty of bare rocks or the grandeur of the desert. The atmosphere of such books is that of stoicism, if not pessimism. The atmosphere of this book is that of mysticism; and we feel that the rustics themselves are not only the mysteries but also the mystics. It is inadequate to say, by one of those critical phrases which become only too quickly cant phrases, that the story is full of colour. The stories of Thomas Hardy, for instance, are undoubtedly full of colour. Men have used the metaphors of cloud and darkness in talking, whether justly or unjustly, of his metaphysical and moral ideas. But whatever may be true of his ideas, this is certainly not true of his imagery. The pictures that remain in my own memory, and I imagine in most other memories, of a first reading of the Wessex Tales, are rather specially picked out in strong sunlight. Nothing could be clearer than the outlines or brighter than the hues of some of those bright and cruel comedies of love and hate, along the white roads or on the great green hills. If his characters were indeed only puppets of destiny, they were often very gaily dressed puppets. There is no lack of light, if it be sometimes as deadly as lightning; and though he insisted too much that there is no rose without a thorn, he never failed to give very rich tints to the roses.
But there is in Hardy’s work, as in all work really belonging to a pagan world, this character: that all the light is shining on things and not through them. It is all the difference between the gaiety of an old pagan painting or mosaic and the burning clarity of a medieval window. And we do sometimes feel, in mere poverty, as in medieval austerity, that things may be bright by being transparent and transparent by being thin. If Hardy made a tragedy out of a tree and a well and a thunderstorm, he wanted to turn the strong sunlight on the scene almost like a theatrical limelight. He wanted the daylight to explore the well, we might almost say that he wanted the daylight to shine on and show up the darkness. But he did not mean, at any rate, not as the mystics can mean, that there was a mystery within the tree, making it truly a tree of life; or a special providence even in a falling thunderbolt. And if he thought that truth lay at the bottom of the well, I think it was commonly in the form of a corpse. At any rate, it was not in the form of a goddess or a nymph of the spring. He did not specially feel that a positive life, still less that a joyful life, was irradiating outwards through these things. He did not think that they meant something; he only thought that he meant something in saying that they meant nothing. The whole irony of his meaning is in that unmeaning world.
Now, Mary Webb and her peasants live in a very meaning world. Life, quite apart from the proportions of its sadness or gladness, is stuffed with significance. There is the silent pressure of a second sense in things; and a sort of halo round every object, whether of horror or tenderness. Thunderstorms are more than thunderstorms, and trees are more than trees, and the well is deeper than any man has known. This is expressed, merely externally, in a tangle of associations and traditions about all sorts of things; so that candles or cabbages or common objects of the kitchen may have dark properties. But it is the expression of a sense of fullness, as in the rain-cloud or even the thundercloud; and richness not only in the soul, but in the dark subsoil of existence. And I think this atmosphere is true, touching simple people, and all those who are near to the earth. Stupid people, hopelessly, hideously stupid people, generally call it superstition.
I mean that the more grimly realistic school is not wrong in being realistic, certainly not wrong in being tragic, but it is wrong, touching humanity of this type, in not being mystic. Common country folk like Tess or Jude the Obscure might well have been hurt as much as they were hurt, and cried out when they were hurt in a human fashion, and died when they were hurt too much, in the manner of all tragedy. But they would not have seen themselves in such hard and naked outline as the pessimistic novelist sees them. The whole thing would have been at once enriched and confused by the mystical traditions of mankind; by the remains of religion, by the hints of superstition, by the mystery of death which cuts both ways, like the two-edged sword of the angel. They would have felt desperate, but they would not have felt insignificant; they would have felt significant. That is the quality that clings to my memory out of that remarkable story, which I read so long ago—the story called Precious Bane. And it is connected with another quality in it, a quality very rare in recent literature; something which I can only call the note of nobility. Here again, there is something even in the title that suggests the truth. A precious thing does not merely mean a sumptuous thing, in the sense of something connected with gross luxury and wealth. A precious thing means something that is bought with a price; and in this case there is present the whole of that idea of the ancient price of sacrifice. That a bane can be precious is not a fashionable doctrine just now. Nor do I propose to debate its moral implications in this passing literary note. But it is certain that, wherever that conception is present in literature, there is made possible a poetic height and the breathing of a spiritual air that are never known where it is neglected; that even in the world of what is purely artistic, that degree of dignity is only attainable through something moral; and that, if there be art critics who care only for art, they would do well to keep martyrdom in the world, if only by making other people the martyrs.
I compaesani di Mary Webb e Thomas Hardy
L’opera di Mary Webb aveva un aspetto distinto da tutto il dibattito che la riguardava semplicemente come caso di qualcosa dapprima trascurato perché non pubblicizzato e poi pubblicizzato perché trascurato. Non pretendo di essere uno degli scopritori: né sono uno di coloro che si affrettarono a scoprire la cosa dopo che era stata scoperta. Lessi soltanto uno dei libri della scrittrice, Precious Bane, e quello mi colpì come stranamente e assai singolarmente bello; ma io lo ritenni unico in ogni senso della parola, e non seppi mai nemmeno se il nome della scrittrice fosse noto, o se ella avesse scritto qualcos’altro. Ma il libro lasciò un’impressione assai forte sulla mia mente, e specialmente sotto un rispetto. È assai vivido e al tempo stesso indescrivibile. Forse l’indizio sta nella parola «precious» in Precious Bane. Non che la signora Webb fosse minimamente preziosa nel senso lezioso del termine. Intendo nelle cose di pregio: una ricchezza in cose comunemente associate alla nudità e alla povertà. Qualcosa di ciò che si dice essere il fastoso Oriente posava, come i colori trasparenti di un arcobaleno, su un paesaggio assai tipico dell’Occidente. Forse a volte dimentichiamo, quando parliamo di perle e d’oro d’Oriente, che il tramonto può essere ricco tanto quanto l’alba.
Il romanzo descriveva rustici in un’epoca in cui erano ancor più rudi di quanto lo fossero nei racconti di Hardy o nelle poesie di Housman. Né vi era il minimo tentativo di idealizzare quella vita nel senso di adattarla al piuttosto basso ideale del sentimento e della comodità moderni. La campagna non era trasformata in un’Arcadia neppure della davvero naturale grazia di Virgilio o di Teocrito; ancor meno i contadini sono trasformati in contadini da palcoscenico o la pastorella in una pastorella di porcellana. La cosa che intendo per ricchezza è qualcosa di più sottile persino della felicità. Questi contadini vivono una vita dura; probabilmente all’occasione vivono una vita affamata; sono del tutto capaci, in certe circostanze, di vivere una vita grossolana o feroce. Ma essi, in un senso assai profondo, vivono una vita piena. Ed è qui che l’atmosfera stessa del libro differisce da quella di Hardy o di molti libri notevoli e pregevoli sullo stesso tema; libri che hanno, invero, trovato grandezza e persino bellezza in una simile esistenza primitiva, ma hanno trovato soltanto la bellezza delle nude rocce o la grandezza del deserto. L’atmosfera di simili libri è quella dello stoicismo, se non del pessimismo. L’atmosfera di questo libro è quella del misticismo; e sentiamo che i rustici stessi non sono soltanto i misteri ma anche i mistici. È inadeguato dire, con una di quelle frasi critiche che diventano fin troppo presto frasi fatte, che il racconto è pieno di colore. I racconti di Thomas Hardy, per esempio, sono indubbiamente pieni di colore. Si sono usate le metafore della nube e delle tenebre nel parlare, a torto o a ragione, delle sue idee metafisiche e morali. Ma qualunque cosa sia vera delle sue idee, questo non è certo vero delle sue immagini. Le immagini che restano nella mia memoria, e io immagino nella maggior parte delle altre memorie, di una prima lettura dei Wessex Tales, sono piuttosto particolarmente stagliate in una forte luce solare. Nulla potrebbe essere più netto dei contorni o più vivido delle tinte di alcune di quelle luminose e crudeli commedie d’amore e d’odio, lungo le bianche strade o sulle grandi verdi colline. Se i suoi personaggi erano davvero soltanto burattini del destino, erano spesso burattini vestiti in modo assai gaio. Non manca la luce, anche se talvolta è letale come la folgore; e benché insistesse troppo sul fatto che non c’è rosa senza spina, non mancò mai di dare tinte assai ricche alle rose.
Ma vi è nell’opera di Hardy, come in ogni opera davvero appartenente a un mondo pagano, questo carattere: che tutta la luce risplende sulle cose e non attraverso di esse. È tutta la differenza che passa tra la gaiezza di un’antica pittura pagana o di un mosaico e l’ardente chiarezza di una vetrata medievale. E talvolta sentiamo, nella mera povertà come nell’austerità medievale, che le cose possono essere luminose per il fatto di essere trasparenti e trasparenti per il fatto di essere sottili. Se Hardy ricavava una tragedia da un albero e da un pozzo e da un temporale, voleva volgere la forte luce solare sulla scena quasi come una ribalta teatrale. Voleva che la luce del giorno esplorasse il pozzo, potremmo quasi dire che voleva che la luce del giorno risplendesse su e mettesse in mostra le tenebre. Ma non intendeva, in ogni caso, non come possono intendere i mistici, che vi fosse un mistero dentro l’albero, che ne facesse veramente un albero della vita; o una speciale provvidenza persino in un fulmine che cade. E se egli pensava che la verità giacesse in fondo al pozzo, credo che fosse comunemente nella forma di un cadavere. In ogni caso, non era nella forma di una dea o di una ninfa della sorgente. Non sentiva particolarmente che una vita positiva, ancor meno che una vita gioiosa, si irradiasse verso l’esterno attraverso queste cose. Non pensava che esse significassero qualcosa; pensava soltanto di significare lui qualcosa nel dire che esse non significavano nulla. Tutta l’ironia del suo significato sta in quel mondo privo di significato.
Ora, Mary Webb e i suoi contadini vivono in un mondo assai ricco di significato. La vita, del tutto a prescindere dalle proporzioni della sua tristezza o della sua letizia, è gremita di significato. Vi è la silenziosa pressione di un secondo senso nelle cose; e una sorta di alone intorno a ogni oggetto, sia esso di orrore o di tenerezza. I temporali sono più che temporali, e gli alberi sono più che alberi, e il pozzo è più profondo di quanto alcun uomo abbia mai saputo. Ciò è espresso, meramente in modo esteriore, in un groviglio di associazioni e tradizioni riguardo a ogni sorta di cose; sicché candele o cavoli o comuni oggetti della cucina possono avere oscure proprietà. Ma è l’espressione di un senso di pienezza, come nella nube di pioggia o persino nella nube di tempesta; e di ricchezza non solo nell’anima, ma nell’oscuro sottosuolo dell’esistenza. E penso che questa atmosfera sia vera, riguardo alla gente semplice, e a tutti coloro che sono vicini alla terra. Le persone stupide, irrimediabilmente, orribilmente stupide, generalmente la chiamano superstizione.
Intendo che la scuola più cupamente realistica non ha torto nell’essere realistica, di certo non ha torto nell’essere tragica, ma ha torto, riguardo a un’umanità di questo tipo, nel non essere mistica. Comuni contadini come Tess o Jude l’Oscuro avrebbero ben potuto essere feriti tanto quanto furono feriti, e gridare quando furono feriti in modo umano, e morire quando furono feriti troppo, alla maniera di ogni tragedia. Ma non si sarebbero visti in un contorno così duro e nudo come li vede il romanziere pessimista. Il tutto sarebbe stato al contempo arricchito e confuso dalle tradizioni mistiche del genere umano; dai resti della religione, dagli accenni della superstizione, dal mistero della morte che taglia da entrambe le parti, come la spada a doppio taglio dell’angelo. Si sarebbero sentiti disperati, ma non si sarebbero sentiti insignificanti; si sarebbero sentiti significativi. Questa è la qualità che si aggrappa alla mia memoria di quel notevole racconto, che lessi tanto tempo fa — il racconto intitolato Precious Bane. Ed è connessa a un’altra qualità in esso, una qualità assai rara nella letteratura recente; qualcosa che posso solo chiamare la nota della nobiltà. Anche qui, vi è qualcosa persino nel titolo che suggerisce la verità. Una cosa preziosa non significa semplicemente una cosa sontuosa, nel senso di qualcosa legato al lusso grossolano e alla ricchezza. Una cosa preziosa significa qualcosa che è comprato a un prezzo; e in questo caso è presente tutta intera quell’idea dell’antico prezzo del sacrificio. Che una sciagura possa essere preziosa non è una dottrina di moda in questo momento. Né mi propongo di dibatterne le implicazioni morali in questa passeggera nota letteraria. Ma è certo che, ovunque quella concezione sia presente nella letteratura, vi è resa possibile un’altezza poetica e il respiro di un’aria spirituale che non si conoscono mai là dove essa è trascurata; che persino nel mondo di ciò che è puramente artistico, quel grado di dignità è raggiungibile solo attraverso qualcosa di morale; e che, se vi sono critici d’arte a cui importa solo dell’arte, farebbero bene a mantenere il martirio nel mondo, non fosse che facendo di altri i martiri.
The Words of Strong Poetry
The writing of Free Verse is currently compared to talking, as in the accepted French phrase about a causerie. And indeed any one who has conducted it so continuously and so long is apt to forget that anything he says may be taken down and used in evidence against him. I have always done my best to remember that I am rather in the dock than in the pulpit, and that I have very little to say, though I have said a good deal, to show why sentence of death should not be passed on me. When Science has really completed all these comforts which it promises mankind, and when all conversations are automatically taken down on a dictaphone or repeated on a phonograph, I rather doubt whether many people will want to put on the records. But, just as many a man has said that he hardly knew his own voice when it came back to him out of a gramophone, so I often wonder, when I chance to come in contact with some of the cracked and dreary records, how I failed to make my voice properly heard or my meaning sufficiently clear. Sometimes it arises from unavoidable hurry or pressure of work; sometimes from neglecting to explain things in their proper order and to put first things first. Sometimes I find I have taken things for granted, used words that have six or seven meanings, left out important steps of the argument, jumped to conclusions, and acted in short as if I were a Professor of Universal Science expounding an Outline of Universal History for Neglected Aunts and Uncles.
Many of these things are merely the inevitable disadvantages of the causerie; but there is one very real advantage in a causerie, even in the literal sense of a talk. Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed it excellently when he said that writing to a man was like firing at him with a gun, while talking to him was like playing on him with a garden-hose. In the first case it is hit and miss; in the second a man can correct his mistakes and correct his line of fire, or rather of water. In such a case, this kind of causerie has really some of the advantages of conversation. I will, therefore, have a shot at the free versifier; or rather (being too humane to shoot him, and very likely to miss him) I will continue to play on him benevolently with the hose, till he is soaked and dripping with the refreshing waters of Helicon, the true fount of free verse, with which I have the joy of sprinkling or asperging him.
I think the first truth about traditional metres is that there is a sort of speech that is stronger than speech. Not merely smoother or sweeter or more melodious or even more beautiful; but stronger. Words are jointed together like bones; they are mortared together like bricks; they are close and compact and resistant; whereas, in all common conversational speech, every sentence is falling to pieces. Perhaps we recognise this latter fact when we talk about letting fall a remark or dropping a hint or throwing out an observation. All conversational speech or writing is under the curse of the Fall; it is under the law of gravitation; it is perpetually falling down, like the universe of Lucretius. But great poets do not drop hints or let observations fall; they lift them and hold them aloft, as the keystone of a strong arch thrusts up the stones, defying the law of gravity and the devil and all his angels. The words of strong poetry are packed as tight and solid as the stones of the arch. The lines of a good sonnet are like bridges of sound across abysses of silence. The boast of the bridges is that you could march armies across them; that a man can rest his weight on every word. The awful cry out of the last tragic trance of Othello, when he realises that death is as real as love, finds words worthy of itself; megalithic words; words not only of weight but weight-bearing; words strong enough to support him above the abyss. ‘If I quench thee, thou flaming minister …’ The address to the candle might almost be called obscure, but it is not doubtful; it is not hesitant or wavering in words or the sound of words; it is rather as if a man were granted a greater thing than speech. And the effect is gained by this firmness in the words and the weight that can rest on them. ‘I know not where is that Promethean heat.’ You could stand an elephant on that line. It is true, first of all, as a mere fact of acoustics, that there is not one weak syllable in the line. At the same time, there is also that strength of style that is like the strength of gesture. ‘I know not where’ is the essential elemental cry of man, eternally ignorant of the beginning of life, or of how it may truly be renewed. And it is a plain and simple fact, whether we like it or not, that the words ‘I know not where’ do sound like some such ancestral city; while the words, ‘I don’t know where’ certainly do not.
Now half the current case for free against traditional verse turns simply on that. It consists in calling ‘I know not where’ pompous and theatrical; and calling ‘I don’t know where’ natural and sincere. It is not more natural and it is not more sincere; it is only more conversational. And the fact that it is conversational only means that it is conventional. In our time, especially, slang is merely the most conventional mode of address. But it is not a mode of expression, as poetry is a mode of expression, for the emotions and indescribable imaginations of men, for the simple reason that it does not express them. Common speech is not the thing by which men express their emotions; it is only the thing by which they fail to express them.
The distinction does not necessarily exclude all free verse; nor, indeed, do I wish to exclude it. But it does indicate why many poets, who would seem capable of writing good free verse, do in fact write bad free verse. They are misled by this fallacy of verse being free in the sense in which conversation is free. But conversation is not free; that is to say it is not free to sing and it is not free to satisfy. Above all, as above explained, it is not free to build; to pick words for their permanent and massive character; or to recast or rearrange them so, as to weld them closer together. A gentleman lighting a cigarette, in talk over the tea-table, would rather unduly suspend social intercourse if he refused to blow out the match until he had composed a line as full and satisfying as ‘If I quench thee, thou flaming minister’. In truth, of course, it would apply to tragic occasions as well as trivial occasions in real life. A man, after murdering a woman, would not talk about Prometheus; he is more likely to confess to the nearest policeman that he has done Desdemona in. But it is none the less true that ‘done in’ is a very weak description of what he has done. It is that weakness in the mere words, and especially in the relation of words, which seems to me to paralyse in practice a vast amount of what is called free verse. If anyone asks why free verse should not be written which included this close grip and gravity and resistant strength in a sentence, I am content to answer: ‘Why indeed!’ But the real repartee of the free versifier in such a case is not to ask why it should not be done, but to do it.
Le parole della poesia forte
Lo scrivere versi liberi è attualmente paragonato al parlare, come nell’accettata espressione francese sulla causerie. E invero chiunque l’abbia condotta così di continuo e così a lungo è incline a dimenticare che qualunque cosa dica possa essere messa per iscritto e usata come prova contro di lui. Ho sempre fatto del mio meglio per ricordare che mi trovo piuttosto sul banco degli imputati che sul pulpito, e che ho ben poco da dire, benché abbia detto parecchio, per mostrare perché non si debba pronunciare su di me una sentenza di morte. Quando la Scienza avrà davvero completato tutte queste comodità che promette al genere umano, e quando tutte le conversazioni saranno automaticamente registrate su un dittafono o ripetute su un fonografo, dubito piuttosto che molti vorranno finire sui dischi. Ma, proprio come più d’uno ha detto di riconoscere a stento la propria voce quando gli tornava da un grammofono, così io spesso mi domando, quando mi capita di venire a contatto con alcuni dei dischi incrinati e tetri, come mai non sia riuscito a far udire come si deve la mia voce o a rendere sufficientemente chiaro il mio pensiero. Talvolta ciò deriva da inevitabile fretta o pressione del lavoro; talvolta dal trascurare di spiegare le cose nel loro giusto ordine e di mettere per prime le cose che vengono prime. Talvolta scopro di aver dato per scontate le cose, di aver usato parole che hanno sei o sette significati, di aver tralasciato passaggi importanti del ragionamento, di essere saltato alle conclusioni, e di aver agito insomma come se fossi un Professore di Scienza Universale che espone un Compendio di Storia Universale per Zie e Zii Trascurati.
Molte di queste cose sono soltanto gli inevitabili svantaggi della causerie; ma vi è un vantaggio assai reale in una causerie, persino nel senso letterale di una chiacchierata. Oliver Wendell Holmes lo espresse in modo eccellente quando disse che scrivere a un uomo era come sparargli con un fucile, mentre parlargli era come innaffiarlo con una manichetta da giardino. Nel primo caso è un colpire a caso; nel secondo un uomo può correggere i propri errori e correggere la propria linea di tiro, o piuttosto d’acqua. In tal caso, questo genere di causerie ha davvero alcuni dei vantaggi della conversazione. Farò dunque un tiro al verseggiatore libero; o piuttosto (essendo troppo umano per fucilarlo, e assai propenso a mancarlo) continuerò a innaffiarlo benevolmente con la manichetta, finché non sia inzuppato e gocciolante delle ristoratrici acque dell’Elicona, la vera fonte del verso libero, con cui ho la gioia di aspergerlo o irrorarlo.
Penso che la prima verità sui metri tradizionali sia che esiste una sorta di linguaggio più forte del linguaggio. Non semplicemente più liscio o più dolce o più melodioso o persino più bello; ma più forte. Le parole sono connesse insieme come ossa; sono cementate insieme come mattoni; sono strette e compatte e resistenti; mentre, in tutto il comune linguaggio conversazionale, ogni frase va in pezzi. Forse riconosciamo quest’ultimo fatto quando parliamo di lasciar cadere un’osservazione o di lasciar sfuggire un’allusione o di buttar lì un rilievo. Tutto il linguaggio o lo scritto conversazionale è sotto la maledizione della Caduta; è sotto la legge di gravitazione; sta perpetuamente cadendo, come l’universo di Lucrezio. Ma i grandi poeti non lasciano sfuggire allusioni né lasciano cadere osservazioni; le sollevano e le tengono in alto, come la chiave di volta di un arco robusto spinge in su le pietre, sfidando la legge di gravità e il diavolo e tutti i suoi angeli. Le parole della poesia forte sono serrate strette e solide come le pietre dell’arco. I versi di un buon sonetto sono come ponti di suono attraverso abissi di silenzio. Il vanto dei ponti è che vi si potrebbero far marciare eserciti sopra; che un uomo può posare il proprio peso su ogni parola. Il tremendo grido che erompe dall’ultima estasi tragica di Otello, quando si accorge che la morte è reale quanto l’amore, trova parole degne di sé; parole megalitiche; parole non soltanto di peso ma portanti; parole abbastanza forti da sostenerlo sopra l’abisso. «Se ti spengo, tu fiammeggiante ministro …» L’apostrofe alla candela potrebbe quasi dirsi oscura, ma non è dubbiosa; non è esitante o vacillante nelle parole o nel suono delle parole; è piuttosto come se a un uomo fosse concessa una cosa più grande della parola. E l’effetto è ottenuto grazie a questa fermezza nelle parole e al peso che può posarvi sopra. «Non so dove sia quel calore prometeico.» Si potrebbe far reggere un elefante su quel verso. È vero, anzitutto, come mero fatto di acustica, che non vi è una sola sillaba debole nel verso. Al tempo stesso, vi è anche quella forza di stile che è come la forza del gesto. «Non so dove» è l’essenziale grido elementare dell’uomo, eternamente ignaro del principio della vita, o di come essa possa davvero essere rinnovata. Ed è un fatto piano e semplice, che ci piaccia o no, che le parole «Non so dove» suonano davvero come una qualche città ancestrale di quel genere; mentre le parole «Non lo so dove» di certo non lo fanno.
Ora, metà dell’attuale argomentazione a favore del verso libero contro quello tradizionale ruota semplicemente attorno a questo. Consiste nel definire «Non so dove» pomposo e teatrale; e nel definire «Non lo so dove» naturale e sincero. Non è più naturale e non è più sincero; è soltanto più conversazionale. E il fatto che sia conversazionale significa soltanto che è convenzionale. Nel nostro tempo, specialmente, il gergo non è che il modo di rivolgersi più convenzionale. Ma non è un modo di espressione, come la poesia è un modo di espressione, per le emozioni e le indescrivibili immaginazioni degli uomini, per la semplice ragione che non le esprime. Il linguaggio comune non è ciò con cui gli uomini esprimono le loro emozioni; è soltanto ciò con cui non riescono a esprimerle.
La distinzione non esclude necessariamente ogni verso libero; né, invero, desidero escluderlo. Ma indica bensì perché molti poeti, che parrebbero capaci di scrivere buoni versi liberi, di fatto scrivono cattivi versi liberi. Sono tratti in inganno da questa fallacia che il verso sia libero nel senso in cui è libera la conversazione. Ma la conversazione non è libera; vale a dire non è libera di cantare e non è libera di appagare. Soprattutto, come sopra spiegato, non è libera di costruire; di scegliere le parole per il loro carattere permanente e massiccio; o di rifonderle o riordinarle in modo da saldarle più strettamente insieme. Un gentiluomo che accende una sigaretta, chiacchierando al tavolo da tè, sospenderebbe piuttosto indebitamente i rapporti sociali se rifiutasse di spegnere il fiammifero finché non avesse composto un verso tanto pieno e appagante quanto «Se ti spengo, tu fiammeggiante ministro». In verità, naturalmente, ciò si applicherebbe alle occasioni tragiche non meno che alle occasioni banali nella vita reale. Un uomo, dopo aver assassinato una donna, non parlerebbe di Prometeo; è più probabile che confessi al poliziotto più vicino di aver fatto fuori Desdemona. Ma non è per questo meno vero che «fatto fuori» è una descrizione assai debole di ciò che ha fatto. È quella debolezza nelle mere parole, e specialmente nella relazione tra le parole, che mi pare paralizzi in pratica una vasta quantità di ciò che si chiama verso libero. Se qualcuno chiede perché versi liberi non si dovrebbero scrivere che comprendano questa stretta presa e gravità e resistente forza in una frase, mi accontento di rispondere: «E perché no, davvero!» Ma la vera risposta pronta del verseggiatore libero in tal caso non è chiedere perché non si dovrebbe fare, ma farlo.
The Refrain of the Rover
A modern man of genius, Gauguin I think, said that an artist must be either a revolutionist or a plagiarist. He might, in fairness, have added that most of the very great artists were plagiarists. Antiquated authors of the type of Chaucer and Shakespeare were quite enthusiastic for copying; until more modern authors became more enthusiastic for copyright. But there runs through all poetry, through medieval down even to modern times, something like an everlasting echo that has in it an element of enchantment. There are refrains that recur in any sort of song; such as ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, or ‘On Christmas Day in the Morning’, or ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. But I was recently rather amused to note two or three cases in which two or three poets had repeated the same sentence, as well as the same sentiment. I mean that they had avowedly used a verbal repetition, which the vulgar might really call plagiarism. One series began, as I imagined, with that spirited song of Byron, ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’. Its chief beauty is that Byronic beauty of swiftness, which is often neglected. It consists of three verses of four lines each; but it could all be said in a breath. The one great quality which Byron always retained was exactly the duality which he was always boasting that he had lost. It was Gusto; a boyish power of enjoyment, especially of his own poetry. Now, it reappears in almost the same words, in the works of W. E. Henley, who professed the widely different creed of a rather stormy optimism; though its storminess sometimes led him to throw his crutch at his friends, when they differed on some fine shade of criticism. He is probably best known by the poem in which he thanks whatever gods there be for his unconquerable soul; though I have my private doubts about the unconquerable soul which goes with the unconquerable temper. Still, he was a fine fellow in his way, and his friends loved him, though he did throw his crutch at them. He wrote a lyric which simply changes, ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’, to ‘We’ll go no more a-roaming’. It might at least be called an echo; but I am now defending echoes. And now I discover, from the recent and most fascinating memoirs of a common sailor, that both the poems may have been echoes; and both the poets plagiarists. For he quotes a sea-shanty, as sung by common sailors, which I myself like better than either of the literary productions. I can imagine a seaman singing with the proper doleful boom:
A-roving—, a-roving—, since roving’s been my ru-u-in I’ll go no more a-roving With you, fair maid!
The small coincidence is worth noting; because it is well to remember that there is a whole literature which is lucky in being quite unconnected with literary men.
Il ritornello del vagabondo
Un moderno uomo di genio, Gauguin credo, disse che un artista deve essere o un rivoluzionario o un plagiario. Avrebbe potuto, in tutta onestà, aggiungere che la maggior parte dei grandissimi artisti erano plagiari. Autori antiquati del tipo di Chaucer e Shakespeare erano assai entusiasti del copiare; finché autori più moderni non divennero più entusiasti del copyright. Ma attraverso tutta la poesia, dal medioevo giù fino ai tempi moderni, corre qualcosa come un’eco sempiterna che porta in sé un elemento d’incanto. Vi sono ritornelli che ricorrono in ogni sorta di canzone; come ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, o ‘On Christmas Day in the Morning’, o ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. Ma di recente mi sono piuttosto divertito a notare due o tre casi in cui due o tre poeti avevano ripetuto la stessa frase, così come come lo stesso sentimento. Voglio dire che avevano dichiaratamente usato una ripetizione verbale, che il volgo potrebbe davvero chiamare plagio. Una serie cominciava, come immaginavo, con quel briosa canto di Byron, ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’. La sua bellezza precipua è quella byroniana bellezza della rapidità, che spesso viene trascurata. Consta di tre strofe di quattro versi ciascuna; ma potrebbe dirsi tutto in un fiato. L’unica grande qualità che Byron conservò sempre era esattamente quella dualità che andava di continuo vantandosi d’aver perduto. Era il Gusto; una fanciullesca capacità di godimento, specialmente della propria poesia. Ora, essa riappare quasi con le medesime parole nelle opere di W. E. Henley, che professava il credo assai diverso di un ottimismo piuttosto burrascoso; sebbene la sua burrascosità lo inducesse talvolta a scagliare la stampella contro gli amici, quando dissentivano su qualche sottile sfumatura di critica. È probabilmente più noto per la poesia in cui ringrazia qualsiasi dio vi sia per la sua anima indomabile; benché io nutra i miei privati dubbi sull’anima indomabile che si accompagna a un temperamento indomabile. Eppure era un bravo tipo a modo suo, e i suoi amici lo amavano, sebbene scagliasse loro la stampella. Scrisse una lirica che semplicemente muta ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’ in ‘We’ll go no more a-roaming’. Potrebbe almeno chiamarsi un’eco; ma io ora sto difendendo le echi. E ora scopro, dalle recenti e affascinantissime memorie di un comune marinaio, che entrambe le poesie potrebbero essere state echi; ed entrambi i poeti plagiari. Poiché egli cita una canzone di mare, cantata dai comuni marinai, che a me stesso piace più di entrambe le produzioni letterarie. Posso immaginare un marinaio cantare con il debito lugubre rimbombo:
A-roving—, a-roving—, since roving’s been my ru-u-in I’ll go no more a-roving With you, fair maid!
La piccola coincidenza merita d’esser notata; perché è bene ricordare che esiste tutta una letteratura fortunata nell’essere del tutto slegata dagli uomini di lettere.
On Reflection What is Right With the World
The above excellent title is not of my own invention. It was suggested to me by the Editor of this paper, and I consented to fill up the bill, partly because of the pleasure I have always had from the paper itself, and partly because it gives me an opportunity of telling an egotistical story, a story which may enlighten the public about the general origin of such titles.
I have always heard of the brutality of publishers and how they crush and obscure the author; but my complaint has always been that they push him forward far too much. I will not say that, so far from making too little of the author, they make too much of him; that this phrase is capable of a dark financial interpretation which I do not intend. But I do say that the prominent personalities of the literary world are very largely the creations of their publishers, in so far as they are not solely the creations of their wives. Here is a small incident out of my own existence. I designed to write a sort of essay, divided into sections, on one particular point of political error. This fallacy, though small and scholastic at first sight, seemed to me to be the real mistake in most modern sociological works. It was, briefly, the idea that things that have been tried have been found wanting. It was my purpose to point out that in the entanglements of practice this is untrue; that an old expedient may easily be the best thing for a new situation; that its principle may be useful though its practice failed; that its practice may have failed because its principle was abandoned; and so on. Therefore, I claimed, we should look for the best method, the ideal, whether it is in the future or the past. I imagined this book as a drab-coloured, decorous little philosophical treatise, with no chapters, but the page occasionally broken by section-headings at the side. I proposed to call my analysis of a radical error ‘What is wrong’, meaning where the mistake is in our logical calculation. But I had highly capable and sympathetic publishers, whose only weakness was that they thought my unhappy monologue much more important than I did. By some confusion of ecstasy (which entirely through my own fault I failed to check) the title was changed into the apocalyptic trumpet-blast ‘What’s Wrong With the World’. It was divided up into three short, fierce chapters, like proclamations in a French riot. Outside there was an enormous portrait of myself looking like a depressed hairdresser, and the whole publication had somehow got the violence and instancy of a bombshell. Let it be understood that I do not blame the publishers in the least for this. I could have stopped it if I had minded my own affairs, and it came out of their beautiful and ardent souls. I merely mention it as an instance of the error about publishers. They are always represented as cold and scornful merchants, seeking to keep your writers in the background. Alas (as Wordsworth so finely says), alas! the enthusiasm of publishers has oftener left me mourning.
Upon the whole, I am rather inclined to approve of this method of the publisher or editor making up the title, while the author makes up the remarks about it. Any man with a large mind ought to be able to write about anything. Any really free man ought to be able to write to order. Some of the greatest books in the world—Pickwick, for instance— were written to fulfil a scheme partly sketched out by a publisher. But I only brought together these two cases of titles that came to me from outside because they do illustrate the necessity of some restatement in such a case. For these two titles are, when it comes to the fulfilment, at once too complex and too simple. I would never have dreamed of announcing, like some discovery of my own, what is wrong with the world. What is wrong with the world is the devil, and what is right with it is God; the human race will travel for a few more million years in all sorts of muddle and reform, and when it perishes of the last cold or heat it will still be within the limits of that very simple definition. But in an age that has confused itself with such phrases as ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’, it is necessary to distinguish along more delicate lines. One of the strangest things about the use of the word ‘optimist’ is that it is now so constantly used about the future. The house of man is criticised not as a house, but as a kind of caravan; not by what it is; but by where it is going to. None are more vitally and recklessly otherworldly than those modern progressives who do not believe in another world.
Now, for the matter of that, I do think the world is getting very much better in very many vital respects. In some of them, I think, the fact could hardly be disputed. The one perfectly satisfactory element at the present crisis is that all the prophecies have failed. At least the people who have been clearly proved to be wrong are the people who were quite sure they were right. That is always a gratifying circumstance. Now why is it that all these prophecies of the wise have been confounded and why has the destiny of men taken so decisive and so different a course? It is because of the very simple fact that the human race consists of many millions of two-legged and tolerably cheerful, reasonably unhappy beings who never read any books at all and certainly never hear of any scientific predictions. If they act in opposition to the scheme which science has foreseen for them, they must be excused. They sin in ignorance. They have no notion that they are avoiding what was really unavoidable. But, indeed, the phrases loosely used of that obscure mass of mankind are a little misleading. To say of the bulk of human beings that they are uneducated is like saying of a Red Indian hunter that he has not yet taken his degree. He has taken many other things. And so, sincerely speaking, there are no uneducated men. They may escape the trivial examinations, but not the tremendous examinations of existence. The dependence of infancy, the enjoyment of animals, the love of woman, and the fear of death—these are more frightful and more fixed than all conceivable forms of the cultivation of the mind. It is idle to complain of schools and colleges being trivial. Schools and colleges must always be trivial. In no case will a college ever teach the important things. For before a man is twenty he has always learnt the important things. He has learnt them right or wrong, and he has learnt them all alone.
Sulla riflessione
Cosa va bene nel mondo
Il titolo eccellente sopra non è di mia invenzione. Mi fu suggerito dal Direttore di questo giornale, e io acconsentii a completare il compito, in parte per il piacere che ho sempre provato per il giornale stesso, e in parte perché mi dà l’opportunità di raccontare una storia egocentrica, una storia che può illuminare il pubblico sull’origine generale di titoli del genere.
Ho sempre sentito parlare della brutalità degli editori e di come schiaccino e oscurino l’autore; ma la mia lamentela è stata sempre che lo spingono in avanti troppo. Non dirò che, lungi dal fare troppo poco dell’autore, ne fanno troppo; questa frase può essere interpretata finanziariamente in senso oscuro, cosa che non intendo. Ma dico che le personalità prominenti del mondo letterario sono per lo più creazioni degli editori, nella misura in cui non siano esclusivamente creazioni delle loro mogli. Ecco un piccolo episodio della mia vita. Mi proponevo di scrivere una sorta di saggio, diviso in sezioni, su un particolare punto d’errore politico. Questo sofisma, benché a prima vista piccolo e scolastico, mi sembrava il vero errore nella maggior parte delle opere sociologiche moderne. In breve, l’idea che le cose che sono state provate si siano rivelate insufficienti. Il mio scopo era di far notare che, nelle complicazioni della pratica, questo è falso; che un vecchio espediente può facilmente essere la cosa migliore per una nuova situazione; che il suo principio può essere utile anche se la sua pratica ha fallito; che la sua pratica potrebbe aver fallito perché il suo principio è stato abbandonato; e così via. Perciò, sostenevo, dovremmo cercare il metodo migliore, l’ideale, sia che si trovi nel futuro o nel passato. Immaginavo questo libro come un trattato filosofico modesto, di colore sobrio, senza capitoli ma con le pagine occasionalmente interrotte da titoli di sezione sul lato. Proponevo di chiamare la mia analisi di un errore radicale “Che cosa non va”, nel senso di dove sta l’errore nel nostro calcolo logico. Ma avevo editori molto capaci e comprensivi, la cui unica debolezza era che ritenevano il mio infelice monologo molto più importante di quanto lo considerassi io. Per una confusione d’estasi (che, per mia colpa, non sono riuscito a controllare) il titolo è stato cambiato in un apocalittico suono di tromba: “Che cosa non va nel mondo”. È stato diviso in tre brevi, fierissimi capitoli, come proclami in una rivolta francese. Fuori c’era un enorme ritratto mio che sembrava un parrucchiere depresso e l’intera pubblicazione aveva assunto la violenza e l’immediatezza di una bomba. Sia chiaro che non biasimo affatto gli editori per questo. Avrei potuto fermarli se mi fossi occupato dei miei affari, e tutto è nato dalle loro belle anime ardenti. Lo cito semplicemente come esempio dell’errore riguardante gli editori. Vengono sempre rappresentati come freddi e sprezzanti mercanti che cercano di tenere i vostri scrittori in secondo piano. Ahimè (come dice Wordsworth con tanta finezza), ahimè! l’entusiasmo degli editori mi ha spesso lasciato in lutto.
Nel complesso, sono piuttosto incline ad approvare questo metodo dell’editore o del curatore di inventare il titolo mentre l’autore scrive le considerazioni al riguardo. Un uomo con una mente aperta dovrebbe essere in grado di scrivere su qualsiasi argomento. Un uomo veramente libero dovrebbe essere in grado di scrivere su commissione. Alcuni dei più grandi libri del mondo — Pickwick, per esempio — sono stati scritti per soddisfare uno schema parzialmente delineato da un editore. Ma ho riunito solo questi due casi di titoli che mi sono arrivati dall’esterno perché illustrano la necessità di una riformulazione in tal caso. Perché questi due titoli, quando si tratta di realizzarli, sono allo stesso tempo troppo complessi e troppo semplici. Non avrei mai sognato di annunciare, come se fosse una mia scoperta, cosa non va nel mondo. Ciò che non va nel mondo è il diavolo, e ciò che va bene in esso è Dio; la razza umana continuerà a viaggiare per qualche altro milione di anni in ogni sorta di confusione e riforma, e quando perirà per l’ultimo freddo o calore sarà ancora entro i limiti di quella definizione molto semplice. Ma in un’epoca che si è confusa con frasi come “ottimista” e “pessimista”, è necessario distinguere lungo linee più delicate. Una delle cose più strane nell’uso della parola “ottimista” è che ora viene usata costantemente riguardo al futuro. La casa dell’uomo viene criticata non come una casa, ma come un genere di roulotte; non per quello che è; ma per dove sta andando. Nessuno è più vitalmente e temerariamente ultraterreno di quei progressisti moderni che non credono in un altro mondo.
Ora, per quel che riguarda questo argomento, ritengo che il mondo stia diventando molto migliore sotto molti aspetti vitali. In alcuni di essi, credo, il fatto non potrebbe essere messo in discussione. L’unico elemento perfettamente soddisfacente nella presente crisi è che tutte le profezie si sono rivelate fallaci. Almeno le persone che sono state chiaramente dimostrate errate sono quelle che erano assolutamente sicure di avere ragione. Questa è sempre una circostanza gratificante. Ora, perché mai tutte queste profezie dei saggi sono state smentite e perché il destino degli uomini ha preso un corso così decisivo e diverso? È a causa del fatto molto semplice che la razza umana consiste di molti milioni di esseri bipedi e abbastanza allegri, ragionevolmente infelici, che non leggono mai libri e certamente non sentono parlare di alcuna previsione scientifica. Se agiscono in opposizione allo schema che la scienza ha previsto per loro, devono essere perdonati. Peccano nell’ignoranza. Non hanno idea di evitare ciò che era davvero inevitabile. Ma, infatti, le frasi usate in modo vago riguardo a quella massa oscura dell’umanità sono un po’ fuorvianti. Dire della maggior parte degli esseri umani che sono non istruiti è come dire di un cacciatore indiano d’America che non ha ancora preso la laurea. Ha preso molte altre cose. E così, sinceramente parlando, non ci sono uomini non istruiti. Possono sfuggire agli esami banali, ma non ai tremendi esami dell’esistenza. La dipendenza dell’infanzia, il godimento degli animali, l’amore per la donna e la paura della morte - queste sono più spaventose e più fisse di tutte le forme concepibili del coltivamento della mente. È inutile lamentarsi che scuole e college siano banali. Scuole e college devono sempre essere banali. In nessun caso un college insegnerà mai le cose importanti. Perché prima che un uomo abbia vent’anni ha già imparato le cose importanti. Le ha apprese giuste o sbagliate, e le ha apprese tutte da solo.
We therefore come back to the primary truth, that what is right with the world has nothing to do with future changes, but is rooted in original realities. If groups or peoples show an unexpected independence or creative power; if they do things no one had dreamed of their doing; if they prove more ferocious or more self-sacrificing than the wisdom of the world had ever given them credit for, then such inexplicable outbursts can always be referred back to some elementary and absolute doctrine about the nature of men. No traditions in this world are so ancient as the traditions that lead to modern upheaval and innovation. Nothing nowadays is so conservative as a revolution. The men who call themselves Republicans are men walking the streets of deserted and tiny city-states, and digging up the great bones of pagans. And when we ask on what republicanism really rests, we come back to that great indemonstrable dogma of the native dignity of man. And when we come back to the Lord of creation, we come back of necessity to creation; and we ask ourselves that ultimate question which St Thomas Aquinas (an extreme optimist) answered in the affirmative: Are these things ultimately of value at all?
What is right with the world is the world. In fact, nearly everything else is wrong with it. This is that great truth in the tremendous tale of Creation, a truth that our people must remember or perish. It is at the beginning that things are good, and not (as the more pallid progressives say) only at the end. The primordial things—existence, energy, fruition—are good so far as they go. You cannot have evil life, though you can have notorious evil livers. Manhood and womanhood are good things, though men and woman are often perfectly pestilent. You can use poppies to drug people, or birch trees to beat them, or stones to make an idol, or corn to make a corner; but it remains true that, in the abstract, before you have done anything, each of these four things is in strict truth a glory, a beneficent specialty and variety. We do praise the Lord that there are birch trees growing amongst the rocks and poppies amongst the corn; we do praise the Lord, even if we do not believe in Him. We do admire and applaud the project of a world, just as if we had been called to council in the primal darkness and seen the first starry plan of the skies. We are, as a matter of fact, far more certain that this life of ours is a magnificent and amazing enterprise than we are that it will succeed. These evolutionary optimists who call themselves Meliorists (a patient and poor-spirited lot they are) always talk as if we were certain of the end, though not of the beginning. In other words, they don’t know what life is aiming at, but they are quite sure it will get there. Why anybody who has avowedly forgotten where he came from should be quite so certain of where he is going to I have never been able to make out; but Meliorists are like that. They are ready to talk of existence itself as the product of purely evil forces. They never mention animals except as perpetually tearing each other in pieces; but a month in the country would cure that. They have a real giddy horror of stars and seas, as a man has on the edge of a hopelessly high precipice. They sometimes instinctively shrink from clay, fungoids, and the fresh young of animals with a quivering gesture that reveals the fundamental pessimist. Life itself, crude, uncultivated life, is horrible to them. They belong very largely to the same social class and creed as the lady who objected that the milk came to her from a dirty cow, and not from a nice clean shop. But they are sure how everything will end.
I am in precisely the opposite position. I am much more sure that everything is good at the beginning than I am that everything will be good at the end. That all this frame of things, this flesh, these stones, are good things, of that I am more brutally certain than I can say. But as for what will happen to them, that is to take a step into dogma and prophecy. I speak here, of course, solely of my personal feelings, not even of my reasoned creed. But on my instincts alone I should have no notion what would ultimately happen to this material world I think so magnificent. For all I know it may be literally and not figuratively true that the tares are tied into bundles for burning, and that as the tree falleth so shall it lie. I am an agnostic, like most people with a positive theology. But I do affirm, with the full weight of sincerity, that trees and flowers are good at the beginning, whatever happens to them at the end; that human lives were good at the beginning, whatever happens to them in the end. The ordinary modern progressive position is that this is a bad universe, but will certainly get better. I say it is certainly a good universe, even if it gets worse. I say that these trees and flowers, stars and sexes, are primarily, not merely ultimately, good. In the Beginning the power beyond words created heaven and earth. In the Beginning He looked on them and saw that they were good.
All this unavoidable theory (for theory is always unavoidable) may be popularly pulled together thus. We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from this is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being. The pessimist of the ordinary type, the pessimist who thinks he would be better dead, is blasted with the crime of Iscariot. Spiritually speaking, we should be justified in punishing him with death. Only, out of polite deference to his own philosophy, we punish him with life.
But this faith (that existence was fundamentally and purposely good) is not attacked only by the black, consistent pessimist. The man who says that he would sooner die is best answered by a sudden blow with the poker, for the reply is rightly logical, as well as physically very effective. But there has crept through the culture of modern Europe another notion that is equally in its own way an attack on the essential rightness of the world. It is not avowedly pessimistic, though the source from which it comes (which is Buddhism) is pessimistic for those who really understand it. It can offer itself—as it does among some of the high-minded and distinguished Theosophists—with an air of something highly optimistic. But this disguised pessimism is what is really wrong with the world— at least, especially with the modern world. It is essential to arrest and to examine it.
Torniamo dunque alla verità primaria, che ciò che vi è di giusto nel mondo non ha nulla a che fare con i mutamenti futuri, ma affonda le radici nelle realtà originarie. Se gruppi o popoli mostrano un’inattesa indipendenza o una potenza creatrice; se compiono cose che nessuno aveva mai sognato in loro; se si rivelano più feroci o più capaci di sacrificio di quanto la saggezza del mondo avesse mai loro riconosciuto, allora simili inesplicabili esplosioni si possono sempre ricondurre a qualche dottrina elementare e assoluta sulla natura degli uomini. Nessuna tradizione a questo mondo è tanto antica quanto le tradizioni che portano allo sconvolgimento e all’innovazione moderni. Nulla, oggi, è tanto conservatore quanto una rivoluzione. Gli uomini che si dicono Repubblicani sono uomini che camminano per le strade di minuscole città-stato deserte, dissotterrando le grandi ossa dei pagani. E quando ci chiediamo su che cosa poggi davvero il repubblicanesimo, torniamo a quel grande dogma indimostrabile della nativa dignità dell’uomo. E quando torniamo al Signore della creazione, torniamo per necessità alla creazione; e ci poniamo quell’ultima domanda a cui San Tommaso d’Aquino (un ottimista estremo) rispondeva in senso affermativo: queste cose hanno, in fin dei conti, un qualche valore?
Ciò che vi è di giusto nel mondo è il mondo. Di fatto, quasi tutto il resto in esso è sbagliato. Questa è quella grande verità nel tremendo racconto della Creazione, una verità che il nostro popolo deve ricordare o perire. È al principio che le cose sono buone, e non (come dicono i più pallidi progressisti) soltanto alla fine. Le cose primordiali—l’esistenza, l’energia, il fruire—sono buone per quel tanto che sono. Non si può avere una vita malvagia, benché si possano avere notori viventi malvagi. La virilità e la femminilità sono cose buone, benché uomini e donne siano spesso perfettamente pestilenziali. Si possono usare i papaveri per drogare la gente, o le betulle per bastonarla, o le pietre per farne un idolo, o il grano per fare un accaparramento; ma resta vero che, in astratto, prima di aver fatto alcunché, ciascuna di queste quattro cose è in stretta verità una gloria, una benefica specialità e varietà. Noi lodiamo il Signore che vi siano betulle che crescono tra le rocce e papaveri tra il grano; lodiamo il Signore, anche se non crediamo in Lui. Ammiriamo e applaudiamo il progetto di un mondo, proprio come se fossimo stati chiamati a consiglio nella tenebra primordiale e avessimo veduto il primo stellato disegno dei cieli. Siamo, di fatto, assai più certi che questa nostra vita sia un’impresa magnifica e stupefacente di quanto lo siamo che essa riuscirà. Questi ottimisti evoluzionisti che si chiamano Melioristi (gente paziente e di povero spirito) parlano sempre come se fossimo certi della fine, ma non del principio. In altre parole, non sanno a che cosa miri la vita, ma sono ben sicuri che vi arriverà. Perché chiunque abbia dichiaratamente dimenticato da dove venga debba essere così certo di dove stia andando, non sono mai riuscito a capirlo; ma i Melioristi sono fatti così. Sono pronti a parlare dell’esistenza stessa come del prodotto di forze puramente malvagie. Non menzionano mai gli animali se non intenti a sbranarsi perpetuamente a vicenda; ma un mese in campagna li guarirebbe. Provano un vero, vertiginoso orrore delle stelle e dei mari, come lo prova un uomo sull’orlo di un precipizio disperatamente alto. Talora istintivamente rifuggono dall’argilla, dai funghi e dai teneri nati degli animali con un gesto tremante che rivela il pessimista di fondo. La vita stessa, la vita cruda, incolta, è per loro orribile. Appartengono in gran parte alla stessa classe sociale e allo stesso credo di quella dama che obiettava che il latte le veniva da una vacca sporca, e non da una bella bottega pulita. Ma sono sicuri di come tutto finirà.
Io mi trovo in una posizione esattamente opposta. Sono assai più sicuro che tutto sia buono al principio di quanto lo sia che tutto sarà buono alla fine. Che tutta questa intelaiatura delle cose, questa carne, queste pietre, siano cose buone, di questo sono più brutalmente certo di quanto sappia dire. Ma quanto a ciò che ne sarà, questo significa fare un passo nel dogma e nella profezia. Parlo qui, s’intende, unicamente dei miei sentimenti personali, e nemmeno del mio credo ragionato. Ma sui soli miei istinti non avrei alcuna nozione di che cosa alla fine accadrà a questo mondo materiale che ritengo tanto magnifico. Per quanto ne so, potrebbe essere letteralmente e non figuratamente vero che la zizzania venga legata in fasci per essere bruciata, e che come l’albero cade così esso giaccia. Sono un agnostico, come la maggior parte delle persone con una teologia positiva. Ma affermo, con tutto il peso della sincerità, che gli alberi e i fiori sono buoni al principio, qualunque cosa ne sia di loro alla fine; che le vite umane erano buone al principio, qualunque cosa ne sia di loro alla fine. L’ordinaria posizione progressista moderna è che questo sia un cattivo universo, ma che certamente migliorerà. Io dico che è certamente un buon universo, anche se peggiora. Io dico che questi alberi e fiori, stelle e sessi, sono primariamente, e non solo in ultima istanza, buoni. Nel Principio la potenza al di là delle parole creò il cielo e la terra. Nel Principio Egli li guardò e vide che erano buoni.
Tutta questa inevitabile teoria (perché la teoria è sempre inevitabile) si può popolarmente riassumere così. Dobbiamo considerare l’esistenza come una scorreria o una grande avventura; essa va giudicata, dunque, non dalle calamità che incontra, ma dalla bandiera che segue e dall’alta città che assale. La cosa più pericolosa al mondo è essere vivi; si è sempre in pericolo della propria vita. Ma chiunque rifugga da questo è un traditore del grande disegno ed esperimento dell’essere. Il pessimista del tipo ordinario, il pessimista che pensa che gli converrebbe esser morto, è colpito dal delitto dell’Iscariota. Spiritualmente parlando, saremmo giustificati nel punirlo con la morte. Solo che, per cortese deferenza verso la sua stessa filosofia, lo puniamo con la vita.
Ma questa fede (che l’esistenza fosse fondamentalmente e intenzionalmente buona) non è attaccata soltanto dal nero, coerente pessimista. All’uomo che dice che preferirebbe morire si risponde meglio con un improvviso colpo di attizzatoio, poiché la replica è giustamente logica, oltre che fisicamente assai efficace. Ma si è insinuata attraverso la cultura dell’Europa moderna un’altra nozione che è ugualmente, a suo modo, un attacco all’essenziale rettitudine del mondo. Non è dichiaratamente pessimistica, benché la fonte da cui proviene (che è il Buddhismo) sia pessimistica per chi davvero la comprende. Può presentarsi—come fa presso alcuni degli elevati e distinti Teosofi—con un’aria di qualcosa di altamente ottimistico. Ma questo pessimismo travestito è ciò che davvero non va nel mondo— almeno, specialmente nel mondo moderno. È essenziale fermarlo ed esaminarlo.
There has crept into our thoughts, through a thousand small openings, a curious and unnatural idea. I mean the idea that unity is itself a good thing; that there is something high and spiritual about things being blended and absorbed into each other. That all rivers should run into one river, that all vegetables should go into one pot— that is spoken of as the last and best fulfilment of being. Boys are to be ‘at one’ with girls; all sects are to be ‘at one’ in the New Theology; beasts fade into men and men fade into God; union in itself is a noble thing. Now union in itself is not a noble thing. Love is a noble thing; but love is not union. Nay, it is rather a vivid sense of separation and identity. Maudlin, inferior love poetry does, indeed, talk of lovers being ‘one soul’, just as maudlin, inferior religious poetry talks of being lost in God; but the best poetry does not. When Dante meets Beatrice, he feels his distance from her, not his proximity; and all the greatest saints have felt their lowness, not their highness, in the moment of ecstasy. And what is true of these grave and heroic matters (I do not say, of course, that saints and lovers have never used the language of union too, true enough in its own place and proper limitation of meaning)—what is true of these is equally true of all the lighter and less essential forms of appreciation of surprise. Division and variety are essential to praise; division and variety are what is right with the world. There is nothing specially right about mere contact and coalescence.
In short, this vast, vague idea of unity is the one ‘reactionary’ thing in the world. It is perhaps the only connection in which that foolish word ‘reactionary’ can be used with significance and truth. For this blending of men and women, nations and nations, is truly a return to the chaos and unconsciousness that were before the world was made. There is, of course, another kind of unity of which I do not speak here; unity in the possession of truth and the perception of the need for these varieties. But the varieties themselves; the reflection of man and woman in each other, as in two distinct mirrors; the wonder of man at nature as a strange thing at once above and below him; the quaint and solitary kingdom of childhood; the local affections and the colour of certain landscapes— these actually are the things that are the grace and honour of the earth; these are the things that make life worth living and the whole framework of things well worthy to be sustained. And the best thing remains; that this view, whether conscious or not, always has been and still is the view of the living and labouring millions. While a few prigs on platforms are talking about ‘oneness’ and absorption in ‘The All’, the folk that dwell in all the valleys of this ancient earth are renewing the varieties forever. With them a woman is loved for being unmanly, and a man loved for being unwomanly. With them the church and the home are both beautiful, because they are both different; with them fields are personal and flags are sacred; they are the virtue of existence, for they are not mankind but men.
The rooted hope of the modern world is that all these dim democracies do still believe in that romance of life, that variation of man, woman and child upon which all poetry has hitherto been built. The danger of the modern world is that these dim democracies are so very dim, and that they are especially dim where they are right. The danger is that the world may fall under a new oligarchy— the oligarchy of prigs. And if anyone should promptly ask (in the manner of the debating clubs) for the definition of a prig, I can only reply that a prig is an oligarch who does not even know he is an oligarch. A circle of small pedants sit on an upper platform, and pass unanimously (in a meeting of none) that there is no difference between the social duties of men and of women, the social instruction of men or of children. Below them boils that multitudinous sea of millions that think differently, that have always thought differently, that will always think differently. In spite of the overwhelming majority that maintains the old theory of life, I am in some real doubt about which will win. Owing to the decay of theology and all the other clear systems of thought, men have been thrown back very much upon their instincts, as with animals. As with animals, their instincts are right; but, as with animals, they can be cowed. Between the agile scholars and the stagnant mob, I am really doubtful about which will be triumphant. I have no doubt at all about which ought to be.
Europe at present exhibits a concentration upon politics which is partly the unfortunate result of our loss of religion, partly the just and needful result of our loss of our social inequality and iniquity. These causes, however, will not remain in operation forever. Religion is returning from her exile; it is more likely that the future will be crazily and corruptly superstitious than that it will be merely rationalist.
On the other hand, our attempts to right the extreme ill-balance of wealth must soon have some issue; something will be done to lessen the perpetual torture of incompetent compassion; some scheme will be substituted for our malevolent anarchy, if it be only one of benevolent servitude. And as these two special unrests about the universe and the State settle down into more silent and enduring system, there will emerge more and more those primary and archaic truths which the dust of these two conflicts has veiled. The secondary questions relatively solved, we shall find ourselves all the more in the presence of the primary questions of Man.
For at present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget how huge a part of a man’s life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under Nero or St Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won’t, to the end of the last evening. And the worst peril is that in our just modern revolt against intolerable accidents we may have unsettled those things that alone make daily life tolerable. It will be an ironic tragedy if, when we have toiled to find rest, we find we are incurably restless. It will be sad if, when we have worked for our holiday, we find we have unlearnt everything but work. The typical modern man is the insane millionaire who has drudged to get money, and then finds he cannot enjoy even money. There is danger that the social reformer may silently and occultly develop some of the madness of the millionaire whom he denounces. He may find that he has learnt how to build playgrounds but forgotten how to play. He may agitate for peace and quiet, but only propagate his own mental agitation. In his long fight to get a slave a half-holiday he may angrily deny those ancient and natural things, the zest of being, the divinity of man, the sacredness of simple things, the health and humour of the earth, which alone make a half-holiday even half a holiday or a slave even half a man.
There is danger in that modern phrase ‘divine discontent’. There is truth in it also, of course; but it is only truth of a special and secondary kind. Much of the quarrel between Christianity and the world has been due to this fact; that there are generally two truths, as it were, at any given moment of revolt or reaction, and the ancient underlying truism which is nevertheless true all the time. It is sometimes worth while to point out that black is not so black as it is painted; but black is still black, and not white. So with the merits of content and discontent. It is true that in certain acute and painful crises of oppression or disgrace, discontent is a duty and shame could call us like a trumpet. But it is not true that man should look at life with an eye of discontent, however high-minded. It is not true that in his primary, naked relation to the world, in his relation to sex, to pain, to comradeship, to the grave or to the weather, man ought to make discontent his ideal; it is black lunacy. Half his poor little hopes of happiness hang on his thinking a small house pretty, a plain wife charming, a lame foot not unbearable, and bad cards not so bad. The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.
T.P’s Weekly.
Si è insinuata nei nostri pensieri, attraverso mille piccole aperture, un’idea curiosa e innaturale. Intendo l’idea che l’unità sia in sé una cosa buona; che vi sia qualcosa di alto e di spirituale nel fatto che le cose si mescolino e si assorbano l’una nell’altra. Che tutti i fiumi debbano scorrere in un solo fiume, che tutti gli ortaggi debbano finire in una sola pentola—questo si predica come l’ultimo e migliore compimento dell’essere. I ragazzi devono essere ‘una cosa sola’ con le ragazze; tutte le sette devono essere ‘una cosa sola’ nella Nuova Teologia; le bestie sfumano negli uomini e gli uomini sfumano in Dio; l’unione in sé è una cosa nobile. Ora, l’unione in sé non è una cosa nobile. L’amore è una cosa nobile; ma l’amore non è unione. Anzi, è piuttosto un vivido senso di separazione e d’identità. La poesia d’amore sdolcinata e inferiore parla, sì, di amanti che sono ‘una sola anima’, proprio come la sdolcinata, inferiore poesia religiosa parla di perdersi in Dio; ma la migliore poesia non lo fa. Quando Dante incontra Beatrice, egli sente la propria distanza da lei, non la propria vicinanza; e tutti i più grandi santi hanno sentito la propria bassezza, non la propria altezza, nel momento dell’estasi. E ciò che è vero di queste gravi ed eroiche cose (non dico, s’intende, che i santi e gli amanti non abbiano mai usato il linguaggio dell’unione anch’essi, abbastanza vero al suo giusto posto e nella propria limitazione di significato)—ciò che è vero di queste è ugualmente vero di tutte le forme più lievi e meno essenziali di apprezzamento e di sorpresa. La divisione e la varietà sono essenziali alla lode; la divisione e la varietà sono ciò che vi è di giusto nel mondo. Non vi è nulla di specialmente giusto nel mero contatto e nella coalescenza.
In breve, questa vasta, vaga idea dell’unità è l’unica cosa ‘reazionaria’ al mondo. È forse l’unica connessione in cui quella sciocca parola ‘reazionario’ possa essere usata con significato e verità. Poiché questo fondersi di uomini e donne, di nazioni e nazioni, è davvero un ritorno al caos e all’incoscienza che erano prima che il mondo fosse fatto. Vi è, s’intende, un altro tipo di unità di cui qui non parlo; l’unità nel possesso della verità e nella percezione della necessità di queste varietà. Ma le varietà stesse; il riflesso dell’uomo e della donna l’uno nell’altra, come in due specchi distinti; la meraviglia dell’uomo dinanzi alla natura come cosa strana insieme al di sopra e al di sotto di lui; il bizzarro e solitario regno dell’infanzia; gli affetti locali e il colore di certi paesaggi— queste sono in realtà le cose che sono la grazia e l’onore della terra; queste sono le cose che rendono la vita degna di essere vissuta e l’intera intelaiatura delle cose ben degna di essere sostenuta. E la cosa migliore rimane; che questa visione, consapevole o no, è sempre stata ed è tuttora la visione dei milioni che vivono e faticano. Mentre pochi saccenti sui palchi discorrono di ‘unicità’ e di assorbimento nel ‘Tutto’, la gente che abita in tutte le valli di questa antica terra rinnova per sempre le varietà. Presso di loro una donna è amata per essere non virile, e un uomo amato per essere non femmineo. Presso di loro la chiesa e la casa sono entrambe belle, perché sono entrambe differenti; presso di loro i campi sono personali e le bandiere sacre; essi sono la virtù dell’esistenza, poiché non sono l’umanità ma gli uomini.
La radicata speranza del mondo moderno è che tutte queste fioche democrazie credano ancora in quel romanticismo della vita, in quella variazione di uomo, donna e bambino su cui finora ogni poesia è stata costruita. Il pericolo del mondo moderno è che queste fioche democrazie siano tanto fioche, e che siano fioche specialmente là dove hanno ragione. Il pericolo è che il mondo possa cadere sotto una nuova oligarchia— l’oligarchia dei saccenti. E se qualcuno chiedesse prontamente (alla maniera dei circoli di dibattito) la definizione di saccente, non posso che rispondere che un saccente è un oligarca che nemmeno sa di essere un oligarca. Un circolo di piccoli pedanti siede su un palco elevato, e delibera all’unanimità (in un’assemblea di nessuno) che non vi è differenza tra i doveri sociali degli uomini e delle donne, tra l’istruzione sociale degli uomini o dei bambini. Sotto di loro ribolle quel moltitudinario mare di milioni che la pensano diversamente, che hanno sempre pensato diversamente, che penseranno sempre diversamente. Nonostante la schiacciante maggioranza che sostiene la vecchia teoria della vita, io sono in un vero dubbio su chi vincerà. A causa della decadenza della teologia e di tutti gli altri limpidi sistemi di pensiero, gli uomini sono stati ricacciati in gran parte sui loro istinti, come gli animali. Come per gli animali, i loro istinti sono giusti; ma, come per gli animali, possono essere intimoriti. Tra gli agili dotti e la stagnante folla, sono davvero in dubbio su chi trionferà. Non ho alcun dubbio su chi dovrebbe.
L’Europa mostra al presente una concentrazione sulla politica che è in parte lo sfortunato risultato della nostra perdita della religione, in parte il giusto e necessario risultato della perdita della nostra iniquità e disuguaglianza sociale. Queste cause, tuttavia, non resteranno in azione per sempre. La religione sta tornando dal suo esilio; è più probabile che il futuro sarà follemente e corrottamente superstizioso piuttosto che meramente razionalista.
D’altra parte, i nostri tentativi di raddrizzare lo squilibrio estremo della ricchezza dovranno pur avere presto qualche esito; qualcosa si farà per alleviare la tortura perpetua di una compassione incompetente; a questa nostra anarchia malevola si sostituirà un qualche disegno, foss’anche soltanto quello di una servitù benevola. E man mano che queste due inquietudini particolari, quella intorno all’universo e quella intorno allo Stato, si acquieteranno in un ordine più silenzioso e più durevole, emergeranno sempre più quelle verità primarie e arcaiche che la polvere di questi due conflitti aveva velato. Risolte in via relativa le questioni secondarie, ci ritroveremo tanto più alla presenza delle questioni primarie dell’Uomo.
Poiché al presente tendiamo tutti a un errore; tendiamo a fare la politica troppo importante. Tendiamo a dimenticare quanto grande parte della vita di un uomo sia la medesima sotto un Sultano e un Senato, sotto Nerone o San Luigi. L’alba è una gloria senza fine, alzarsi dal letto è una seccatura senza fine; il cibo e gli amici saranno accolti; il lavoro e gli estranei vanno accettati e sopportati; gli uccelli andranno a dormire e i bambini no, fino alla fine dell’ultima sera. E il peggior pericolo è che nella nostra pur giusta rivolta moderna contro gli intollerabili accidenti possiamo aver scompaginato quelle cose che sole rendono tollerabile la vita quotidiana. Sarà un’ironica tragedia se, dopo aver faticato per trovare riposo, scopriremo di essere inguaribilmente irrequieti. Sarà triste se, dopo aver lavorato per la nostra vacanza, scopriremo di aver disimparato tutto tranne il lavoro. Il tipico uomo moderno è il milionario impazzito che ha sgobbato per far denaro, e poi scopre di non poter godere nemmeno del denaro. Vi è il pericolo che il riformatore sociale possa silenziosamente e occultamente sviluppare un poco della follia del milionario che denuncia. Può scoprire di aver imparato a costruire parchi giochi ma di aver dimenticato come giocare. Può agitarsi per la pace e la quiete, ma non fare che propagare la propria agitazione mentale. Nella sua lunga lotta per ottenere a uno schiavo una mezza vacanza, può negare adiratamente quelle antiche e naturali cose, il gusto dell’essere, la divinità dell’uomo, la sacralità delle cose semplici, la salute e l’umorismo della terra, che sole rendono una mezza vacanza anche solo mezza vacanza o uno schiavo anche solo mezzo uomo.
Vi è pericolo in quella frase moderna, ‘divino scontento’. Vi è anche verità in essa, s’intende; ma è soltanto verità di specie particolare e secondaria. Molta della contesa tra il Cristianesimo e il mondo è stata dovuta a questo fatto; che vi sono generalmente due verità, per così dire, in ogni dato momento di rivolta o di reazione, e l’antico sottostante truismo che è nondimeno vero per tutto il tempo. È talora utile far notare che il nero non è così nero come lo si dipinge; ma il nero è pur sempre nero, e non bianco. Così è dei meriti della contentezza e dello scontento. È vero che in certe acute e dolorose crisi di oppressione o di disonore, lo scontento è un dovere e la vergogna potrebbe chiamarci come una tromba. Ma non è vero che l’uomo debba guardare la vita con un occhio di scontento, per quanto nobile. Non è vero che nel suo primario, nudo rapporto col mondo, nel suo rapporto col sesso, col dolore, col cameratismo, con la tomba o col tempo atmosferico, l’uomo debba fare dello scontento il suo ideale; è nera follia. Metà delle sue povere piccole speranze di felicità dipende dal suo trovare graziosa una piccola casa, affascinante una moglie dimessa, non insopportabile un piede zoppo, e non così cattive le cattive carte. La voce dei particolari ribelli e profeti, che raccomandano lo scontento, dovrebbe, come ho detto, risuonare di tanto in tanto d’improvviso, come una tromba. Ma le voci dei santi e dei savi, che raccomandano la contentezza, dovrebbero risuonare senza posa, come il mare.
T.P’s Weekly.