Twelve Types

by Chesterton · Cluster: Artist and Society · Truth · Regency Georgian England

Abstract

A 1902 collection of critical-biographical essays on figures such as Bronte, Byron, Pope, St Francis, Carlyle, Tolstoy, Savonarola and Scott; literary criticism probing each subject’s character and ideals.

Capitoli / Chapters

Connections

Historical References: Puritanism, Renaissance, Christianity, Bible, Catholic Church, Napoleonic Wars the Navy, Industrial Revolution, Medieval England

Archetypes: Hero, Prophet, Martyr Saint, Fool

Settings: Italy, London, Scotland the Highlands, Russia, Europe

Motifs: Fire, Light and Dark, Clothing and Costume, Swords and Weapons, Concealment Hidden Identity, Sea, Sea and Voyage

Topoi: Contemptus Mundi, Poet as Prophet

Characters: Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester, Christ, Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, Lord Byron, Alexander Pope, St Francis of Assisi, Edmond Rostand, Charles II, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Carlyle, Leo Tolstoy, Girolamo Savonarola, Sir Walter Scott, Cyrano de Bergerac, Prince Florizel of Bohemia, Rob Roy, Meg Merrilees

Themes & Concepts: Identity, Artist and Society, Heroism, Faith, Paradox, Democracy, Doubt, Greatness, Power of Language, Asceticism, Optimism and Pessimism, Cult of Simplicity, The Spirit of Romance, History Forms & Genres: Literary Criticism, Biography, Essay, Satire, Comedy, Verse Drama, Nonfiction

Testo integrale / Full text

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TWELVE TYPES

BY G.K. CHESTERTON

LONDON

ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS

1902

NOTE

These papers, with certain alterations and additions, are reprinted with

the kind permission of the Editors of The Daily News and The Speaker.

G.K.C.

KENSINGTON.

CONTENTS

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL

THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON

POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE

FRANCIS

ROSTAND

CHARLES II

STEVENSON

THOMAS CARLYLE

TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY

SAVONAROLA

THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

Objection is often raised against realistic biography because it reveals

so much that is important and even sacred about a man’s life. The real

objection to it will rather be found in the fact that it reveals about a

man the precise points which are unimportant. It reveals and asserts and

insists on exactly those things in a man’s life of which the man himself

is wholly unconscious; his exact class in society, the circumstances of

his ancestry, the place of his present location. These are things which

do not, properly speaking, ever arise before the human vision. They do

not occur to a man’s mind; it may be said, with almost equal truth, that

they do not occur in a man’s life. A man no more thinks about himself as

the inhabitant of the third house in a row of Brixton villas than he

thinks about himself as a strange animal with two legs. What a man’s

name was, what his income was, whom he married, where he lived, these

are not sanctities; they are irrelevancies.

A very strong case of this is the case of the Brontes. The Bronte is in

the position of the mad lady in a country village; her eccentricities

form an endless source of innocent conversation to that exceedingly mild

and bucolic circle, the literary world. The truly glorious gossips of

literature, like Mr Augustine Birrell and Mr Andrew Lang, never tire of

collecting all the glimpses and anecdotes and sermons and side-lights

and sticks and straws which will go to make a Bronte museum. They are

the most personally discussed of all Victorian authors, and the

limelight of biography has left few darkened corners in the dark old

Yorkshire house. And yet the whole of this biographical investigation,

though natural and picturesque, is not wholly suitable to the Brontes.

For the Bronte genius was above all things deputed to assert the supreme

unimportance of externals. Up to that point truth had always been

conceived as existing more or less in the novel of manners. Charlotte

Bronte electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and

more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person,

good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great

assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as

tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a ‘bal masque.’ She showed that

abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a

manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of

merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte

Bronte, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her

genius, was the first to take away from the heroine not only the

artificial gold and diamonds of wealth and fashion, but even the natural

gold and diamonds of physical beauty and grace. Instinctively she felt

that the whole of the exterior must be made ugly that the whole of the

interior might be made sublime. She chose the ugliest of women in the

ugliest of centuries, and revealed within them all the hells and heavens

of Dante.

It may, therefore, I think, be legitimately said that the externals of

the Brontes’ life, though singularly picturesque in themselves, matter

less than the externals of almost any other writers. It is interesting

to know whether Jane Austen had any knowledge of the lives of the

officers and women of fashion whom she introduced into her masterpieces.

It is interesting to know whether Dickens had ever seen a shipwreck or

been inside a workhouse. For in these authors much of the conviction is

conveyed, not always by adherence to facts, but always by grasp of them.

But the whole aim and purport and meaning of the work of the Brontes is

that the most futile thing in the whole universe is fact. Such a story

as ‘Jane Eyre’ is in itself so monstrous a fable that it ought to be

excluded from a book of fairy tales. The characters do not do what they

ought to do, nor what they would do, nor, it might be said, such is the

insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct

of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte

in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. ‘Then, resuming his

usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew,’ does perhaps

reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester

dresses up as an old gipsy has something in it which is really not to be

found in any other branch of art, except in the end of the pantomime,

where the Emperor turns into a pantaloon. Yet, despite this vast

nightmare of illusion and morbidity and ignorance of the world, ‘Jane

Eyre’ is perhaps the truest book that was ever written. Its essential

truth to life sometimes makes one catch one’s breath. For it is not true

to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost

always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true,

emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not

matter a single straw if a Bronte story were a hundred times more

moonstruck and improbable than ‘Jane Eyre,’ or a hundred times more

moonstruck and improbable than ‘Wuthering Heights.’ It would not matter

if George Read stood on his head, and Mrs Read rode on a dragon, if

Fairfax Rochester had four eyes and St John Rivers three legs, the story

would still remain the truest story in the world. The typical Bronte

character is, indeed, a kind of monster. Everything in him except the

essential is dislocated. His hands are on his legs and his feet on his

arms, his nose is above his eyes, but his heart is in the right place.

The great and abiding truth for which the Bronte cycle of fiction stands

is a certain most important truth about the enduring spirit of youth,

the truth of the near kinship between terror and joy. The Bronte

heroine, dingily dressed, badly educated, hampered by a humiliating

inexperience, a kind of ugly innocence, is yet, by the very fact of her

solitude and her gaucherie, full of the greatest delight that is

possible to a human being, the delight of expectation, the delight of an

ardent and flamboyant ignorance. She serves to show how futile it is of

humanity to suppose that pleasure can be attained chiefly by putting on

evening dress every evening, and having a box at the theatre every first

night. It is not the man of pleasure who has pleasure; it is not the man

of the world who appreciates the world. The man who has learnt to do all

conventional things perfectly has at the same time learnt to do them

prosaically. It is the awkward man, whose evening dress does not fit

him, whose gloves will not go on, whose compliments will not come off,

who is really full of the ancient ecstasies of youth. He is frightened

enough of society actually to enjoy his triumphs. He has that element

of fear which is one of the eternal ingredients of joy. This spirit is

the central spirit of the Bronte novel. It is the epic of the

exhilaration of the shy man. As such it is of incalculable value in our

time, of which the curse is that it does not take joy reverently because

it does not take it fearfully. The shabby and inconspicuous governess of

Charlotte Bronte, with the small outlook and the small creed, had more

commerce with the awful and elemental forces which drive the world than

a legion of lawless minor poets. She approached the universe with real

simplicity, and, consequently, with real fear and delight. She was, so

to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had

possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment being

as black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the first

and the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord

is the beginning of pleasure.

Upon the whole, therefore, I think it may justifiably be said that the

dark wild youth of the Brontes in their dark wild Yorkshire home has

been somewhat exaggerated as a necessary factor in their work and their

conception. The emotions with which they dealt were universal emotions,

emotions of the morning of existence, the springtide joy and the

springtide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some

midnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which

there was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress and

panic of ‘Wuthering Heights.’ Every one of us has had a day-dream of our

own potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than ‘Jane Eyre.’ And

the truth which the Brontes came to tell us is the truth that many

waters cannot quench love, and that suburban respectability cannot touch

or damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like every other earthly city, is

built upon a volcano. Thousands of people go to and fro in the

wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing a mean

religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have never found

any expression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to go on

working harder and yet harder at dull and automatic employments, at

scolding children or stitching shirts. But out of all these silent ones

one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant testimony, and her

name was Charlotte Bronte. Spreading around us upon every side to-day

like a huge and radiating geometrical figure are the endless branches of

the great city. There are times when we are almost stricken crazy, as

well we may be, by the multiplicity of those appalling perspectives, the

frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable population. But this thought of

ours is in truth nothing but a fancy. There are no chains of houses;

there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses

is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these

men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of

these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single

house of all those millions which has not seemed to some one at some

time the heart of all things and the end of travel.

WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL

It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris

should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many

men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have

been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious

hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious

problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that

honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of

workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time

has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be

described as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter

instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully

conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we

should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with

the grandeur of mediaeval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should

have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually

approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have

invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an

ironmonger, his nails would have had some noble pattern, fit to be the

nails of the Cross. The limitations of William Morris, whatever they

were, were not the limitations of common decoration. It is true that all

his work, even his literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in

some degree the qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His characters, his

stories, his religious and political views, had, in the most emphatic

sense, length and breadth without thickness. He seemed really to believe

that men could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no account of

the unexplored and explosive possibilities of human nature, of the

unnameable terrors, and the yet more unnameable hopes. So long as a man

was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring

consciousness that the chestnut colour of his hair was relieved against

the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he would

be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if he

were a piece of exquisitely coloured cardboard.

But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity of

human nature—took little account, so to speak, of human figures in the

round, it is altogether unfair to represent him as a mere aesthete. He

perceived a great public necessity and fulfilled it heroically. The

difficulty with which he grappled was one so immense that we shall have

to be separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge of

it. It was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the

most self-conscious of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of

the thing. He felt that it was monstrous that the modern man, who was

pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory

beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic, and

the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical

bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat.

He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in

raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It

is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness which

blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries. In

all created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly as

a pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height and

thickness just neutralising each other; its colour is the most

repulsive of colours—a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch of

blood or fire, like the scarlet of dead men’s sins. Yet there is no

reason whatever why such hideousness should possess an object full of

civic dignity, the treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of

a thousand souls. If the old Greeks had had such an institution, we may

be sure that it would have been surmounted by the severe, but graceful,

figure of the god of letter-writing. If the mediaeval Christians had

possessed it, it would have had a niche filled with the golden aureole

of St Rowland of the Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands at all

our street-corners, disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under

one of the most preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that the

miracles of science have not been such an incentive to art and

imagination as were the miracles of religion. If men in the twelfth

century had been told that the lightning had been driven for leagues

underground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing

human beings, and if they had then been told that the people alluded to

this pulverising portent chirpily as ‘The Twopenny Tube,’ they would

have called down the fire of Heaven on us as a race of half-witted

atheists. Probably they would have been quite right.

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anaesthetic

element in the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the work of a great

reformer: it requires a fine effort of the imagination to see an evil

that surrounds us on every side. The manner in which Morris carried out

his crusade may, considering the circumstances, be called triumphant.

Our carpets began to bloom under our feet like the meadows in spring,

and our hitherto prosaic stools and sofas seemed growing legs and arms

at their own wild will. An element of freedom and rugged dignity came in

with plain and strong ornaments of copper and iron. So delicate and

universal has been the revolution in domestic art that almost every

family in England has had its taste cunningly and treacherously

improved, and if we look back at the early Victorian drawing-rooms it is

only to realise the strange but essential truth that art, or human

decoration, has, nine times out of ten in history, made things uglier

than they were before, from the ‘coiffure’ of a Papuan savage to the

wall-paper of a British merchant in 1830.

But great and beneficent as was the aesthetic revolution of Morris, there

was a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact that

his revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial

explanation of his partial failure. When he was denouncing the dresses

of modern ladies, ‘upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being draped

like women,’ as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practical

imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further than

this retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go. Now,

the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was at

least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They would

have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of the

bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting themselves an aesthetic blue,

after the custom of the ancient Britons. They would not have called that

a movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in their dress or manners

sprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led and preferred to

lead. And it may surely be maintained that any real advance in the

beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally out of the

life we lead and prefer to lead. We are not altogether without hints and

hopes of such a change, in the growing orthodoxy of rough and athletic

costumes. But if this cannot be, it will be no substitute or

satisfaction to turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dress

ball. But the limitation of Morris’s work lay deeper than this. We may

best suggest it by a method after his own heart. Of all the various

works he performed, none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly

valuable as his great protest for the fables and superstitions of

mankind. He has the supreme credit of showing that the fairy-tales

contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of men’s feeling

for things. Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack may not have

climbed up so tall a beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant; but it is not

such things that make a story false; it is a far different class of

things that makes every modern book of history as false as the father of

lies; ingenuity, self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. It

appears to us that of all the fairy-tales none contains so vital a

moral truth as the old story, existing in many forms, of Beauty and the

Beast. There is written, with all the authority of a human scripture,

the eternal and essential truth that until we love a thing in all its

ugliness we cannot make it beautiful. This was the weak point in William

Morris as a reformer: that he sought to reform modern life, and that he

hated modern life instead of loving it. Modern London is indeed a beast,

big enough and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with

a million eyes, and roaring with a million voices. But unless the poet

can love this fabulous monster as he is, can feel with some generous

excitement his massive and mysterious ‘joie-de-vivre,’ the vast scale of

his iron anatomy and the beating of his thunderous heart, he cannot and

will not change the beast into the fairy prince. Morris’s disadvantage

was that he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century: he could

not understand its fascination, and consequently he could not really

develop it. An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal influence in

the aesthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the Arts and Crafts

Exhibitions, which are steeped in his personality like a chapel in that

of a saint. If we look round at the exhibits in one of these aesthetic

shows, we shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that the

decorative school leaves untouched. There is a noble instinct for giving

the right touch of beauty to common and necessary things, but the things

that are so touched are the ancient things, the things that always to

some extent commended themselves to the lover of beauty. There are

beautiful gates, beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs,

beautiful reading-desks. But there are no modern things made beautiful.

There are no beautiful lamp-posts, beautiful letter-boxes, beautiful

engines, beautiful bicycles. The spirit of William Morris has not seized

hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. And

this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not the

supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from the

Beast and the fairy-tale had a different ending.

But herein, indeed, lay Morris’s deepest claim to the name of a great

reformer: that he left his work incomplete. There is, perhaps, no better

proof that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, than

that his work is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention to

needs he cannot supply. In after-years we may have perhaps a newer and

more daring Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not decorate the

armour of the twelfth century but the machinery of the twentieth. A

lamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the

sanctity of fire. A pillar-box shall be carved with figures emblematical

of the secrets of comradeship and the silence and honour of the State.

Railway signals, of all earthly things the most poetical, the coloured

stars of life and death, shall be lamps of green and crimson worthy of

their terrible and faithful service. But if ever this gradual and

genuine movement of our time towards beauty—not backwards, but

forwards—does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it.

Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art,

prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be

remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and

proved that this painful greenish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which

we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of

death, but the greyness of dawn.

THE OPTIMISM OF BYRON

Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of Byron.

The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when we wake

in the morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the world of

Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world, where men

were romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in bowers, and the

very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery. Roses and

nightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous elegance of a

wall-paper pattern. The whole is like a revel of dead men, a revel with

splendid vesture and half-witted faces.

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the

less ready shall we be to make use of the word “artificial.” Nothing in

the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many

works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity

and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental

thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in

darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around

him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity

is a voice out of the abyss.

The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present

position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is

remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not

savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of

this: a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see

some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial

woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent

explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe

that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some

of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks,

we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We

almost believe that they are toys out of a child’s play-box,

artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the great

convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism. The volcano is not an

extinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains

not of a natural but of an artificial fire.

But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than anything

that is represented by such a view as this: their real value and meaning

are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron lies

in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himself

as such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byron

without knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge of himself

that ever fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The real character of

what is known as Byron’s pessimism is better worth study than any real

pessimism could ever be.

It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost

everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably

extolled to the disadvantage of everything else.

One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has

been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books,

love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion,

money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life

close to Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately maintained

by somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwise

indefensible world. Thus while the world is almost always condemned in

summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail after

detail.

Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The

work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously

among them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House

of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind.

Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a

life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar

and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of

pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has

written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation, his one pang

of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with

the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird.

Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far

as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adored

by an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which despised

the majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a little

more deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this

popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated

pessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would

no more receive the news of the failure of existence or of the

harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than

they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance a

breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist is

popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but

because he shows some things to be good. Men can only join in a chorus

of praise even if it is the praise of denunciation. The man who is

popular must be optimistic about something even if he is only optimistic

about pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron and the

Byronists. Their real popularity was founded not upon the fact that they

blamed everything, but upon the fact that they praised something. They

heaped curses upon man, but they used man merely as a foil. The things

they wished to praise by comparison were the energies of Nature. Man was

to them what talk and fashion were to Carlyle, what philosophical and

religious quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practical

happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing which must be censured in order

that somebody else may be exalted. It was merely a recognition of the

fact that one cannot write in white chalk except on a blackboard.

Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron’s love of the

desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and

depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in

winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in

storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older

earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young

and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when

seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a

gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time

powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at

the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was

the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was

only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the

earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were

flaming like their own firesides.

Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and

lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr

Aubrey Beardsley’s allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with a

pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the

cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial

life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the

restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new

pessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an

affectation of sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into the

avenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation. And

it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their

sinister philosophy is sincere; in their lights and garlands and ribbons

we read their indwelling despair. It was so, indeed, with Byron himself;

his really bitter moments were his frivolous moments. He went on year

after year calling down fire upon mankind, summoning the deluge and the

destructive sea and all the ultimate energies of nature to sweep away

the cities of the spawn of man. But through all this his sub-conscious

mind was not that of a despairer; on the contrary, there is something of

a kind of lawless faith in thus parleying with such immense and

immemorial brutalities. It was not until the time in which he wrote ‘Don

Juan’ that he really lost this inward warmth and geniality, and a sudden

shout of hilarious laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron had

really become a pessimist.

One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his

metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a

hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron’s language is of

horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding ‘pas de quatre.’ He may

arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the

most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk

in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood

alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:

'Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,

When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull decay;

'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast,

But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past.'

That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.

The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the

unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most

uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their

nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the

whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident,

and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional

artifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard,

political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the

time that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of

that buried and sub-conscious happiness which is in all of us, and which

may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears

of the enemy.

POPE AND THE ART OF SATIRE

The general critical theory common in this and the last century is that

it was very easy for the imitators of Pope to write English poetry. The

classical couplet was a thing that anyone could do. So far as that goes,

one may justifiably answer by asking any one to try. It may be easier

really to have wit, than really, in the boldest and most enduring sense,

to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have

imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a sham

rhapsody, because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be

unintelligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is

the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet:

he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits

out of a hat without having learnt to be a conjuror. Therefore, it may

be submitted, there was a certain discipline in the old antithetical

couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great

liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did it

permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of

small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but

at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of

example, such a line as Pope’s

'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,'

the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written

such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.

Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with

such an idea as that expressed in Pope’s line about Man:

'A being darkly wise and rudely great.'

Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than

that old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would

really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. The

one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing

'A being darkly wise and rudely great,'

the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses,

would produce something like the following:—

'A creature

Of feature

More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,

Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:

Darkly wise as a formless fate

And if he be great

If he be great, then rudely great,

Rudely great as a plough that plies,

And darkly wise, and darkly wise.'

Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to

spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet

might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.

There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis of

the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have

occasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever

been artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element

of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the

realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we

cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a

space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of

divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was

truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, in

the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we

cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or

magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to

meanness. If Pope and his followers caught this echo of natural

irrationality, they were not any the more artificial. Their antitheses

were fully in harmony with existence, which is itself a contradiction in

terms.

Pope was really a great poet; he was the last great poet of

civilisation. Immediately after the fall of him and his school come

Burns and Byron, and the reaction towards the savage and the elemental.

But to Pope civilisation was still an exciting experiment. Its perruques

and ruffles were to him what feathers and bangles are to a South Sea

Islander—the real romance of civilisation. And in all the forms of art

which peculiarly belong to civilisation, he was supreme. In one

especially he was supreme—the great and civilised art of satire. And

in this we have fallen away utterly.

We have had a great revival in our time of the cult of violence and

hostility. Mr Henley and his young men have an infinite number of

furious epithets with which to overwhelm any one who differs from them.

It is not a placid or untroubled position to be Mr Henley’s enemy,

though we know that it is certainly safer than to be his friend. And

yet, despite all this, these people produce no satire. Political and

social satire is a lost art, like pottery and stained glass. It may be

worth while to make some attempt to point out a reason for this.

It may seem a singular observation to say that we are not generous

enough to write great satire. This, however, is approximately a very

accurate way of describing the case. To write great satire, to attack a

man so that he feels the attack and half acknowledges its justice, it is

necessary to have a certain intellectual magnanimity which realises the

merits of the opponent as well as his defects. This is, indeed, only

another way of putting the simple truth that in order to attack an army

we must know not only its weak points, but also its strong points.

England in the present season and spirit fails in satire for the same

simple reason that it fails in war: it despises the enemy. In matters of

battle and conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (an

idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on a

people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance

of trampling upon us. It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the

enemy; whereas when the enemy is strong every honest scout ought to

praise the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish an army without having a

full account of its strength. It is impossible to satirise a man without

having a full account of his virtues. It is too much the custom in

politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhumane, as

utterly careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever

was since the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may often

have a great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it

may raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there is

one man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it

hardly even touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. The

one person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man

whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. He

knows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he is

not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous

and revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can

count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours

of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But behind

all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:

behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven

silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly

visions of revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is to

touch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and

salute a whole army of virtues.

If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough but

firm grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of

their adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a

splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning

of the

'daring pilot in extremity,'

who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and

'Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit.'

The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the

great Shaftesbury. It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and

picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill. But here comes in very

pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the

ancient achievement of it. The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill,

both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly,

as one of those great wits to madness near allied. They represented him

as a mere puppy, a silly and irreverent upstart whose impudence supplied

the lack of policy and character. Churchill had grave and even gross

faults, a certain coarseness, a certain hard boyish assertiveness, a

certain lack of magnanimity, a certain peculiar patrician vulgarity. But

he was a much larger man than satire depicted him, and therefore the

satire could not and did not overwhelm him. And here we have the cause

of the failure of contemporary satire, that it has no magnanimity, that

is to say, no patience. It cannot endure to be told that its opponent

has his strong points, just as Mr Chamberlain could not endure to be

told that the Boers had a regular army. It can be content with nothing

except persuading itself that its opponent is utterly bad or utterly

stupid—that is, that he is what he is not and what nobody else is. If

we take any prominent politician of the day—such, for example, as Sir

William Harcourt—we shall find that this is the point in which all

party invective fails. The Tory satire at the expense of Sir William

Harcourt is always desperately endeavouring to represent that he is

inept, that he makes a fool of himself, that he is disagreeable and

disgraceful and untrustworthy. The defect of all this is that we all

know that it is untrue. Everyone knows that Sir William Harcourt is not

inept, but is almost the ablest Parliamentarian now alive. Everyone

knows that he is not disagreeable or disgraceful, but a gentleman of the

old school who is on excellent social terms with his antagonists.

Everyone knows that he is not untrustworthy, but a man of unimpeachable

honour who is much trusted. Above all, he knows it himself, and is

therefore affected by the satire exactly as any one of us would be if we

were accused of being black or of keeping a shop for the receiving of

stolen goods. We might be angry at the libel, but not at the satire; for

a man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because

it is true.

Mr Henley and his young men are very fond of invective and satire: if

they wish to know the reason of their failure in these things, they need

only turn to the opening of Pope’s superb attack upon Addison. The

Henleyite’s idea of satirising a man is to express a violent contempt

for him, and by the heat of this to persuade others and himself that the

man is contemptible. I remember reading a satiric attack on Mr Gladstone

by one of the young anarchic Tories, which began by asserting that Mr

Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If these people would, as I have

said, go quietly and read Pope’s ‘Atticus,’ they would see how a great

satirist approaches a great enemy:

'Peace to all such! But were there one whose fires

True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires,

Blest with each talent, and each art to please,

And born to write, converse, and live with ease.

Should such a man--'

And then follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was not

such a fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew that

Addison was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, in

Pope’s case, had become so great and, I was almost going to say, so

pure, that it illuminated all things, as love illuminates all things. He

said what was really wrong with Addison; and in calm and clear and

everlasting colours he painted the picture of the evil of the literary

temperament:

'Bear like the Turk, no brother near the throne,

View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,

And hate for arts that caused himself to rise.

       *       *       *       *       *

Like Cato give his little Senate laws,

And sit attentive to his own applause.

While wits and templars every sentence raise,

And wonder with a foolish face of praise.'

This is the kind of thing which really goes to the mark at which it

aims. It is penetrated with sorrow and a kind of reverence, and it is

addressed directly to a man. This is no mock-tournament to gain the

applause of the crowd. It is a deadly duel by the lonely seashore.

In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption

that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can

benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his

merits, we cannot even hurt him.

FRANCIS

Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature, we tend in these days to

misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation of

the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the

one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined

to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts

that truth is alone satisfying: there is aesthetic asceticism which

asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which

asserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean

asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying.

Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the

speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and

essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that ‘love

is enough,’ it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art,

science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts, gloves,

walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and any

other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar

Khayyam says:

'A book of verse beneath the bough

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou

Sitting beside me in the wilderness

O wilderness were Paradise enow.'

It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does

aesthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more.

The same thing was done by a mediaeval monk. Examples might, of course,

be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our

younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that

'From quiet home and first beginning

  Out to the undiscovered ends--

There's nothing worth the wear of winning

  But laughter and the love of friends.'

Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true

joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.

But if in any case it should happen that a class or a generation lose

the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they

immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and

self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called

the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of

liberty and marriage. They might as well call the trippers on a Bank

Holiday melancholy because they deny themselves, as a rule, the

pleasures of silence and meditation. A simpler and stronger example is,

however, to hand. If ever it should happen that the system of English

athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if

science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting

the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute

contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is

easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state

that in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and

Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They

were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or

tobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain

brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at

unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many

men ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there.

All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an

asceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strained

themselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There is

one difference and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not

feel the love of religious offices. We see only the price in the one

case and only the purchase in the other.

The only question that remains is what was the joy of the old Christian

ascetics of which their ascetism was merely the purchasing price. The

mere possibility of the query is an extraordinary example of the way in

which we miss the main points of human history. We are looking at

humanity too close, and see only the details and not the vast and

dominant features. We look at the rise of Christianity, and conceive it

as a rise of self-abnegation and almost of pessimism. It does not occur

to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe

is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit

to set all men capering. The detail over which these monks went mad with

joy was the universe itself; the only thing really worthy of enjoyment.

The white daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood

up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea

gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these

disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one

dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy.

That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly

tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We

insist, however, upon treating this matter tail foremost. We insist that

the ascetics were pessimists because they gave up threescore years and

ten for an eternity of happiness. We forget that the bare proposition

of an eternity of happiness is by its very nature ten thousand times

more optimistic than ten thousand pagan saturnalias.

Mr Adderley’s life of Francis of Assisi does not, of course, bring this

out; nor does it fully bring out the character of Francis. It has rather

the tone of a devotional book. A devotional book is an excellent thing,

but we do not look in it for the portrait of a man, for the same reason

that we do not look in a love-sonnet for the portrait of a woman,

because men in such conditions of mind not only apply all virtues to

their idol, but all virtues in equal quantities. There is no outline,

because the artist cannot bear to put in a black line. This blaze of

benediction, this conflict between lights, has its place in poetry, not

in biography. The successful examples of it may be found, for instance,

in the more idealistic odes of Spenser. The design is sometimes almost

indecipherable, for the poet draws in silver upon white.

It is natural, of course, that Mr Adderley should see Francis primarily

as the founder of the Franciscan Order. We suspect this was only one,

perhaps a minor one, of the things that he was; we suspect that one of

the minor things that Christ did was to found Christianity. But the vast

practical work of Francis is assuredly not to be ignored, for this

amazingly unworldly and almost maddeningly simple—minded infant was one

of the most consistently successful men that ever fought with this

bitter world. It is the custom to say that the secret of such men is

their profound belief in themselves, and this is true, but not all the

truth. Workhouses and lunatic asylums are thronged with men who believe

in themselves. Of Francis it is far truer to say that the secret of his

success was his profound belief in other people, and it is the lack of

this that has commonly been the curse of these obscure Napoleons.

Francis always assumed that everyone must be just as anxious about their

common relative, the water-rat, as he was. He planned a visit to the

Emperor to draw his attention to the needs of ‘his little sisters the

larks.’ He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their

misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It

was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often ‘got round him,’

as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had

‘got round’ them, and discovered the other side, the side of secret

nobility.

Conceiving of St Francis as primarily the founder of the Franciscan

Order, Mr Adderley opens his narrative with an admirable sketch of the

history of Monasticism in Europe, which is certainly the best thing in

the book. He distinguishes clearly and fairly between the Manichaean

ideal that underlies so much of Eastern Monasticism and the ideal of

self-discipline which never wholly vanished from the Christian form. But

he does not throw any light on what must be for the outsider the

absorbing problem of this Catholic asceticism, for the excellent reason

that not being an outsider he does not find it a problem at all.

To most people, however, there is a fascinating inconsistency in the

position of St Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than

any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears.

He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take

pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell

from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet

this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we

think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty,

chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most,

property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and

poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in

these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were

blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk, and

not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully

here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked;

we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find

that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.

So it was with the monks. The two great parties in human affairs are

only the party which sees life black against white, and the party which

sees it white against black, the party which macerates and blackens

itself with sacrifice because the background is full of the blaze of an

universal mercy, and the party which crowns itself with flowers and

lights itself with bridal torches because it stands against a black

curtain of incalculable night. The revellers are old, and the monks are

young. It was the monks who were the spendthrifts of happiness, and we

who are its misers.

Doubtless, as is apparent from Mr Adderley’s book, the clear and

tranquil life of the Three Vows had a fine and delicate effect on the

genius of Francis. He was primarily a poet. The perfection of his

literary instinct is shown in his naming the fire ‘brother,’ and the

water ‘sister,’ in the quaint demagogic dexterity of the appeal in the

sermon to the fishes ‘that they alone were saved in the Flood.’ In the

amazingly minute and graphic dramatisation of the life, disappointments

and excuses of any shrub or beast that he happened to be addressing,

his genius has a curious resemblance to that of Burns. But if he avoided

the weakness of Burns’ verses to animals, the occasional morbidity,

bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a

cleaner and more transparent life.

The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a

kind of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in

‘Alice in Wonderland’—‘Why not?’ impresses us as his general motto. He

could not see why he should not be on good terms with all things. The

pomp of war and ambition, the great empire of the Middle Ages and all

its fellows begin to look tawdry and top-heavy, under the rationality of

that innocent stare. His questions were blasting and devastating, like

the questions of a child. He would not have been afraid even of the

nightmares of cosmogony, for he had no fear in him. To him the world was

small, not because he had any views as to its size, but for the reason

that gossiping ladies find it small, because so many relatives were to

be found in it. If you had taken him to the loneliest star that the

madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it

the features of a new friend.

ROSTAND

When ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ was published, it bore the subordinate title

of a heroic comedy. We have no tradition in English literature which

would justify us in calling a comedy heroic, though there was once a

poet who called a comedy divine. By the current modern conception, the

hero has his place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is

systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power

of a man’s spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy

into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive

legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have

a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain

optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of

the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential

disastrous character of life, when seriously considered, connects itself

with a hyper-aesthetic view of tragedy and comedy which is largely due to

the influence of modern France, from which the great heroic comedies of

Monsieur Rostand have come. The French genius has an instinct for

remedying its own evil work, and France gives always the best cure for

‘Frenchiness.’ The idea of comedy which is held in England by the school

which pays most attention to the technical niceties of art is a view

which renders such an idea as that of heroic comedy quite impossible.

The fundamental conception in the minds of the majority of our younger

writers is that comedy is, ‘par excellence,’ a fragile thing. It is

conceived to be a conventional world of the most absolutely delicate and

gimcrack description. Such stories as Mr Max Beerbohm’s ‘Happy

Hypocrite’ are conceptions which would vanish or fall into utter

nonsense if viewed by one single degree too seriously. But great comedy,

the comedy of Shakespeare or Sterne, not only can be, but must be, taken

seriously. There is nothing to which a man must give himself up with

more faith and self-abandonment than to genuine laughter. In such

comedies one laughs with the heroes and not at them. The humour which

steeps the stories of Falstaff and Uncle Toby is a cosmic and

philosophic humour, a geniality which goes down to the depths. It is not

superficial reading, it is not even, strictly speaking, light reading.

Our sympathies are as much committed to the characters as if they were

the predestined victims in a Greek tragedy. The modern writer of

comedies may be said to boast of the brittleness of his characters. He

seems always on the eve of knocking his puppets to pieces. When John

Oliver Hobbes wrote for the first time a comedy of serious emotions, she

named it, with a thinly-disguised contempt for her own work, ‘A

Sentimental Comedy.’ The ground of this conception of the artificiality

of comedy is a profound pessimism. Life in the eyes of these mournful

buffoons is itself an utterly tragic thing; comedy must be as hollow as

a grinning mask. It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly

speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over

the eternal waters of bitterness.

‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ came to us as the new decoration of an old truth,

that merriment was one of the world’s natural flowers, and not one of

its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the

Rabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had

been in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as

old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong

and haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at

his highest moment of happiness. ‘Il me faut des geants.’ An essential

aspect of this question of heroic comedy is the question of drama in

rhyme. There is nothing that affords so easy a point of attack for the

dramatic realist as the conduct of a play in verse. According to his

canons, it is indeed absurd to represent a number of characters facing

some terrible crisis in their lives by capping rhymes like a party

playing ‘bouts rimes.’ In his eyes it must appear somewhat ridiculous

that two enemies taunting each other with insupportable insults should

obligingly provide each other with metrical spacing and neat and

convenient rhymes. But the whole of this view rests finally upon the

fact that few persons, if any, to-day understand what is meant by a

poetical play. It is a singular thing that those poetical plays which

are now written in England by the most advanced students of the drama

follow exclusively the lines of Maeterlinck, and use verse and rhyme for

the adornment of a profoundly tragic theme. But rhyme has a supreme

appropriateness for the treatment of the higher comedy. The land of

heroic comedy is, as it were, a paradise of lovers, in which it is not

difficult to imagine that men could talk poetry all day long. It is far

more conceivable that men’s speech should flower naturally into these

harmonious forms, when they are filled with the essential spirit of

youth, than when they are sitting gloomily in the presence of immemorial

destiny. The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an

unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the

moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we

have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or

artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering

attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like

Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised

or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. Rhymes answer

each other as the sexes in flowers and in humanity answer each other.

Men do not speak so, it is true. Even when they are inspired or in love

they talk inanities. But the poetic comedy does not misrepresent the

speech one half so much, as the speech misrepresents the soul. Monsieur

Rostand showed even more than his usual insight when he called ‘Cyrano

de Bergerac’ a comedy, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, it ends

with disappointment and death. The essence of tragedy is a spiritual

breakdown or decline, and in the great French play the spiritual

sentiment mounts unceasingly until the last line. It is not the facts

themselves, but our feeling about them, that makes tragedy and comedy,

and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeterlinck. The same

apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of

‘L’Aiglon,’ now being performed with so much success. Although the hero

is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and a

personal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme, which might have

been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable paean of the

praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet’s song swells so

high that at the end it seems to drown all the weak voices of the

characters in one crashing chorus of great things and great men. A

multitude of mottoes might be taken from the play to indicate and

illustrate, not only its own spirit, but much of the spirit of modern

life. When in the vision of the field of Wagram the horrible voices of

the wounded cry out, ‘Les corbeaux, les corbeaux,’ the Duke, overwhelmed

with a nightmare of hideous trivialities, cries out, ‘Ou, ou sont les

aigles?’ That antithesis might stand alone as an invocation at the

beginning of the twentieth century to the spirit of heroic comedy. When

an ex-General of Napoleon is asked his reason for having betrayed the

Emperor, he replies, ‘La fatigue,’ and at that a veteran private of the

Great Army rushes forward, and crying passionately, ‘Et nous?’ pours out

a terrible description of the life lived by the common soldier. To-day

when pessimism is almost as much a symbol of wealth and fashion as

jewels or cigars, when the pampered heirs of the ages can sum up life in

few other words but ‘la fatigue,’ there might surely come a cry from the

vast mass of common humanity from the beginning ‘et nous?’ It is this

potentiality for enthusiasm among the mass of men that makes the

function of comedy at once common and sublime. Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado

about Nothing’ is a great comedy, because behind it is the whole

pressure of that love of love which is the youth of the world, which is

common to all the young, especially to those who swear they will die

bachelors and old maids. ‘Love’s Labour Lost’ is filled with the same

energy, and there it falls even more definitely into the scope of our

subject since it is a comedy in rhyme in which all men speak lyrically

as naturally as the birds sing in pairing time. What the love of love is

to the Shakespearian comedies, that other and more mysterious human

passion, the love of death, is to ‘L’Aiglon.’ Whether we shall ever have

in England a new tradition of poetic comedy it is difficult at present

to say, but we shall assuredly never have it until we realise that

comedy is built upon everlasting foundations in the nature of things,

that it is not a thing too light to capture, but too deep to plumb.

Monsieur Rostand, in his description of the Battle of Wagram, does not

shrink from bringing about the Duke’s ears the frightful voices of

actual battle, of men torn by crows, and suffocated with blood, but when

the Duke, terrified at these dreadful appeals, asks them for their final

word, they all cry together ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Monsieur Rostand,

perhaps, did not know that he was writing an allegory. To me that field

of Wagram is the field of the modern war of literature. We hear nothing

but the voices of pain; the whole is one phonograph of horror. It is

right that we should hear these things, it is right that not one of them

should be silenced; but these cries of distress are not in life as they

are in modern art the only voices, they are the voices of men, but not

the voice of man. When questioned finally and seriously as to their

conception of their destiny, men have from the beginning of time

answered in a thousand philosophies and religions with a single voice

and in a sense most sacred and tremendous, ‘Vive l’Empereur.’

CHARLES II

There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles II.,

one of the idlest men of one of the idlest epochs. Among other things

Charles II. represented one thing which is very rare and very

satisfying; he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scepticism both in its

advantages and disadvantages is greatly misunderstood in our time. There

is a curious idea abroad that scepticism has some connection with such

theories as materialism and atheism and secularism. This is of course a

mistake; the true sceptic has nothing to do with these theories simply

because they are theories. The true sceptic is as much a spiritualist as

he is a materialist. He thinks that the savage dancing round an African

idol stands quite as good a chance of being right as Darwin. He thinks

that mysticism is every bit as rational as rationalism. He has indeed

the most profound doubts as to whether St Matthew wrote his own gospel.

But he has quite equally profound doubts as to whether the tree he is

looking at is a tree and not a rhinoceros.

This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in

the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in

the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between

atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and

fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the

most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day

of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man

to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there

are no insects in any of the stars.

Thus it was with that wholesome and systematic sceptic, Charles II. When

he took the Sacrament according to the forms of the Roman Church in his

last hour he was acting consistently as a philosopher. The wafer might

not be God; similarly it might not be a wafer. To the genuine and

poetical sceptic the whole world is incredible, with its bulbous

mountains and its fantastic trees. The whole order of things is as

outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

Transubstantiation might be a dream, but if it was, it was assuredly a

dream within a dream. Charles II. sought to guard himself against hell

fire because he could not think hell itself more fantastic than the

world as it was revealed by science. The priest crept up the staircase,

the doors were closed, the few of the faithful who were present hushed

themselves respectfully, and so, with every circumstance of secrecy and

sanctity, with the cross uplifted and the prayers poured out, was

consummated the last great act of logical unbelief.

The problem of Charles II. consists in this, that he has scarcely a

moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that

some of the virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the

saints and sages, and that Charles II. was pre-eminently successful in

these wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and

the real relation of Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth somewhat

more exhaustive study.

It is a commonplace that the Restoration movement can only be understood

when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it is

insufficiently realised that the tyranny which half frustrated all the

good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was not the fire

of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint,

which passed away; that still burns in the heart of England, only to be

quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered that

the Puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that

they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that

they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans

fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life,

through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never

satisfy. Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French

Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the lesson

that men’s wants have always been right and their arguments always

wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the

head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily

men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do

nothing to his head but hit it. The tyranny of the Puritans over the

bodies of men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and

conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the

tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human

spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved

and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial,

madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were

fanatics, but because they were rationalists.

When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism, which

means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude, meant in

that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall comprehend a

little more the grain of good that lay in the vulgarity and triviality

of the Restoration. The Restoration, of which Charles II. was a

pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed

parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be

left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely

account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and

horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts

also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a

nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it

something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and

nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as the

type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide of

politeness. There was some moral and social value in his perfection in

little things. He could not keep the Ten Commandments, but he kept the

ten thousand commandments. His name is unconnected with any great acts

of duty or sacrifice, but it is connected with a great many of those

acts of magnanimous politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which

lie on the dim borderland between morality and art. ‘Charles II.,’ said

Thackeray, with unerring brevity, ‘was a rascal but not a snob.’ Unlike

George IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys

strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises

strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.

So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that it was

the revolt of something human, if only the debris of human nature. But

more cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall and not an ascent, a

recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness and not a sudden strength.

That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too

far, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of an

almost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Restoration

infinitely more excusable, but it does not make it any the less a

collapse. Nothing can efface the essential distinction that Puritanism

was one of the world’s great efforts after the discovery of the true

order, whereas it was the essence of the Restoration that it involved no

effort at all. It is true that the Restoration was not, as has been

widely assumed, the most immoral epoch of our history. Its vices cannot

compare for a moment in this respect with the monstrous tragedies and

almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of James I. But

the dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia of Charles II.

seem at once more human and more detestable than the passions and

poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that a monkey appears

inevitably more human and more detestable than a tiger. Compared with

the Renaissance, there is something Cockney about the Restoration. Not

only was it too indolent for great morality, it was too indolent even

for great art. It lacked that seriousness which is needed even for the

pursuit of pleasure, that discipline which is essential even to a game

of lawn tennis. It would have appeared to Charles II.’s poets quite as

arduous to write ‘Paradise Lost’ as to regain Paradise.

All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors, which,

though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in themselves, and

poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no phrase is so terribly

significant as the phrase ‘killing time.’ It is a tremendous and

poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide. There is on the

earth a race of revellers who do, under all their exuberance,

fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of these were Charles II. and the

men of the Restoration. Whatever may have been their merits, and as we

have said we think that they had merits, they can never have a place

among the great representatives of the joy of life, for they belonged

to those lower epicureans who kill time, as opposed to those higher

epicureans who make time live.

Of a people in this temper Charles II. was the natural and rightful

head. He may have been a pantomime King, but he was a King, and with all

his geniality he let nobody forget it. He was not, indeed, the aimless

flaneur that he has been represented. He was a patient and cunning

politician, who disguised his wisdom under so perfect a mask of folly

that he not only deceived his allies and opponents, but has deceived

almost all the historians that have come after him. But if Charles was,

as he emphatically was, the only Stuart who really achieved despotism,

it was greatly due to the temper of the nation and the age. Despotism is

the easiest of all governments, at any rate for the governed.

It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the slave.

Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight for them,

professionals to dance for them, and a professional to rule them.

Almost all the faces in the portraits of that time look, as it were,

like masks put on artificially with the perruque. A strange unreality

broods over the period. Distracted as we are with civic mysteries and

problems, we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are less desolate than

their laughter, our restraints are larger than their liberty.

STEVENSON[A]

A recent incident has finally convinced us that Stevenson was, as we

suspected, a great man. We knew from recent books that we have noticed,

from the scorn of ‘Ephemera Critica’ and Mr George Moore, that Stevenson

had the first essential qualification of a great man: that of being

misunderstood by his opponents. But from the book which Messrs Chatto &

Windus have issued, in the same binding as Stevenson’s works, ‘Robert

Louis Stevenson,’ by Mr H. Bellyse Baildon, we learn that he

has the other essential qualification, that of being misunderstood by

his admirers. Mr Baildon has many interesting things to tell us about

Stevenson himself, whom he knew at college. Nor are his criticisms by

any means valueless. That upon the plays, especially ‘Beau Austin,’ is

remarkably thoughtful and true. But it is a very singular fact, and goes

far, as we say, to prove that Stevenson had that unfathomable quality

which belongs to the great, that this admiring student of Stevenson can

number and marshal all the master’s work and distribute praise and blame

with decision and even severity, without ever thinking for a moment of

the principles of art and ethics which would have struck us as the very

things that Stevenson nearly killed himself to express.

Mr Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his

‘pessimism’; surely a strange charge against the man who has done more

than any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. But

he complains that, in ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ and ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr

Hyde,’ Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good. Now if there was

one point that Stevenson more constantly and passionately emphasised

than any other it was that we must worship good for its own value and

beauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in space

and time. ‘Whatever we are intended to do,’ he said, ‘we are not

intended to succeed.’ That the stars in their courses fight against

virtue, that humanity is in its nature a forlorn hope, this was the very

spirit that through the whole of Stevenson’s work sounded a trumpet to

all the brave. The story of Henry Durie is dark enough, but could anyone

stand beside the grave of that sodden monomaniac and not respect him? It

is strange that men should see sublime inspiration in the ruins of an

old church and see none in the ruins of a man.

The author has most extraordinary ideas about Stevenson’s tales of blood

and spoil; he appears to think that they prove Stevenson to have had (we

use Mr Baildon’s own phrase) a kind of ‘homicidal mania.’ ‘He

(Stevenson) arrives pretty much at the paradox that one can hardly be

better employed than in taking life.’ Mr Baildon might as well say that

Dr Conan Doyle delights in committing inexplicable crimes, that Mr Clark

Russell is a notorious pirate, and that Mr Wilkie Collins thought that

one could hardly be better employed than in stealing moonstones and

falsifying marriage registers. But Mr Baildon is scarcely alone in this

error: few people have understood properly the goriness of Stevenson.

Stevenson was essentially the robust schoolboy who draws skeletons and

gibbets in his Latin grammar. It was not that he took pleasure in death,

but that he took pleasure in life, in every muscular and emphatic action

of life, even if it were an action that took the life of another.

Let us suppose that one gentleman throws a knife at another gentleman

and pins him to the wall. It is scarcely necessary to remark that there

are in this transaction two somewhat varying personal points of view.

The point of view of the man pinned is the tragic and moral point of

view, and this Stevenson showed clearly that he understood in such

stories as ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ and ‘Weir of Hermiston.’ But there

is another view of the matter—that in which the whole act is an abrupt

and brilliant explosion of bodily vitality, like breaking a rock with a

blow of a hammer, or just clearing a five-barred gate. This is the

standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘The

Wrecker.’ It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that he

loved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouring

universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as

has not been known since St Francis called the sun brother and the well

sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch

that Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy Bones

left at the ‘Admiral Benbow,’ with the knife that Wicks drove through

his own hand and the table. There is always in his work a certain

clean-cut angularity which makes us remember that he was fond of cutting

wood with an axe.

Stevenson’s new biographer, however, cannot make any allowance for this

deep-rooted poetry of mere sight and touch. He is always imputing

something to Stevenson as a crime which Stevenson really professed as an

object. He says of that glorious riot of horror, ‘The Destroying Angel,’

in ‘The Dynamiter,’ that it is ‘highly fantastic and putting a strain on

our credulity.’ This is rather like describing the travels of Baron

Munchausen as ‘unconvincing.’ The whole story of ‘The Dynamiter’ is a

kind of humorous nightmare, and even in that story ‘The Destroying

Angel’ is supposed to be an extravagant lie made up on the spur of the

moment. It is a dream within a dream, and to accuse it of improbability

is like accusing the sky of being blue. But Mr Baildon, whether from

hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least

comprehend the rich and romantic irony of Stevenson’s London stories. He

actually says of that portentous monument of humour, Prince Florizel of

Bohemia, that, ‘though evidently admired by his creator, he is to me on

the whole rather an irritating presence.’ From this we are almost driven

to believe (though desperately and against our will) that Mr Baildon

thinks that Prince Florizel is to be taken seriously, as if he were a

man in real life. For ourselves, Prince Florizel is almost our favourite

character in fiction; but we willingly add the proviso that if we met

him in real life we should kill him.

The fact is, that the whole mass of Stevenson’s spiritual and

intellectual virtues have been partly frustrated by one additional

virtue—that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his great

message on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and straggling letters,

it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his

light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-book hand that everyone

supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his

versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every department well

enough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney,

pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could

not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can

play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he

is called an Admirable Crichton, but if he does all three thoroughly

well, he is apt to be regarded, in the several departments, as a common

fiddler, a common lawyer, and a common boot-black. This is what has

happened in the case of Stevenson. If ‘Dr Jekyll,’ ‘The Master of

Ballantrae,’ ‘The Child’s Garden of Verses,’ and ‘Across the Plains’ had

been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone

would have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but by

succeeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once,

he has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But

the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mahomet, as moral

as that of Dante, as confident as that of Whitman, and as practical as

that of James Watt.

The conception which unites the whole varied work of Stevenson was that

romance, or the vision of the possibilities of things, was far more

important than mere occurrences: that one was the soul of our life, the

other the body, and that the soul was the precious thing. The germ of

all his stories lies in the idea that every landscape or scrap of

scenery has a soul: and that soul is a story. Standing before a stunted

orchard with a broken stone wall, we may know as a mere fact that no one

has been through it but an elderly female cook. But everything exists

in the human soul: that orchard grows in our own brain, and there it is

the shrine and theatre of some strange chance between a girl and a

ragged poet and a mad farmer. Stevenson stands for the conception that

ideas are the real incidents: that our fancies are our adventures. To

think of a cow with wings is essentially to have met one. And this is

the reason for his wide diversities of narrative: he had to make one

story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary monolith: for

the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It

is quite inappropriate to judge ‘The Teller of Tales’ (as the Samoans

called him) by the particular novels he wrote, as one would judge Mr

George Moore by ‘Esther Waters.’ These novels were only the two or

three of his soul’s adventures that he happened to tell. But he died

with a thousand stories in his heart.

[Footnote A: ‘Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism.’ By H.

Bellyse Baildon. Chatto & Windus.]

THOMAS CARLYLE

There are two main moral necessities for the work of a great man: the

first is that he should believe in the truth of his message; the second

is that he should believe in the acceptability of his message. It was

the whole tragedy of Carlyle that he had the first and not the second.

The ordinary capital, however, which is made out of Carlyle’s alleged

gloom is a very paltry matter. Carlyle had his faults, both as a man and

as a writer, but the attempt to explain his gospel in terms of his

‘liver’ is merely pitiful. If indigestion invariably resulted in a

‘Sartor Resartus,’ it would be a vastly more tolerable thing than it is.

Diseases do not turn into poems; even the decadent really writes with

the healthy part of his organism. If Carlyle’s private faults and

literary virtues ran somewhat in the same line, he is only in the

situation of every man; for every one of us it is surely very difficult

to say precisely where our honest opinions end and our personal

predilections begin. But to attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savage

egotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to grasp

Carlyle’s gospel. ‘Ruskin,’ says a critic, ‘did, all the same, verily

believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself.’ This is certainly a

distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has

not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have

believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God,

because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin,

themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was

not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief

in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his

message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St Francis,

Bunyan, Wesley, Mr Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable

variety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average man

as their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear

and without condescension. It was this simplicity of confidence, not

only in God, but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.

But the attempts to discredit Carlyle’s religious sentiment must

absolutely fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle’s sense

of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has

the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets—humour. A man

must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan

delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysius, no vague, half-converted

Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of

cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion

was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of

its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow.

So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and

literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had

seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of

them. Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and

eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something

elemental and eternal in a joke. No one who ever read it will forget the

passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates

that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as ‘falling asleep in the

Lord.’ ‘Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick

night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through

unending ages, insult the face of the sun any more … and we go on, if

not to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher ones.’

The supreme value of Carlyle to English literature was that he was the

founder of modern irrationalism; a movement fully as important as modern

rationalism. A great deal is said in these days about the value or

valuelessness of logic. In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive

tool so much as a weapon of defence. A man building up an intellectual

system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the

trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality, is the

trowel, and argument is the sword. A wide experience of actual

intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic

is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.

But though this may be true enough in practice, it scarcely clears up

the position of logic in human affairs. Logic is a machine of the mind,

and if it is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion.

When people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using

words in a fair sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything by

bad logic. Deep in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an

extraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ, when what is meant

is the abuse or decay of that organ. Thus we speak of a man suffering

from ‘nerves,’ which is about as sensible as talking about a man

suffering from ten fingers. We speak of ‘liver’ and ‘digestion’ when we

mean the failure of liver and the absence of digestion. And in the same

manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the

danger of fallacy.

But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partial

overthrow of logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and somewhat

different. The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they

bring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all.

Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend to

forget that there are two parts of a logical process—the first the

choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it; and

humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound

reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound

assumption. It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rational

and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as ‘He did not prove the

very thing with which he started,’ or ‘The whole of his case rested upon

a pure assumption,’ two peculiarities which may be found by the curious

in the works of Euclid. It is astonishing, again, how constantly one

hears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic, apparently without

troubling about the deep assumptions involved, having lost their sense,

as it were, of the real colour and character of a man’s assumption. For

instance, two men will argue about whether patriotism is a good thing

and never discover until the end, if at all, that the cosmopolitan is

basing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, become

as God, with equal sympathies and no prejudices, while the nationalist

denies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animal

who has preferences, as a bird has feathers.

   *       *       *       *       *

Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments but

assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of

the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed

directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be

true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and

more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where

his view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing and

beneficent heresy. He denied every one of the postulates upon which the

age of reason based itself. He denied the theory of progress which

assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth

century. Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth century

according to him depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved to

be.

He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which

threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but

the individual conscience. He has often been called a prophet. The real

ground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected. Since the last

era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there

has been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.

Carlyle was, as we have suggested, a mystic, and mysticism was with him,

as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of

common-sense. Mysticism and common-sense alike consist in a sense of the

dominance of certain truths and tendencies which cannot be formally

demonstrated or even formally named. Mysticism and common-sense are

alike appeals to realities that we all know to be real, but which have

no place in argument except as postulates. Carlyle’s work did consist in

breaking through formulas, old and new, to these old and silent and

ironical sanities. Philosophers might abolish kings a hundred times

over, he maintained, they could not alter the fact that every man and

woman does choose a king and repudiate all the pride of citizenship for

the exultation of humility. If inequality of this kind was a weakness,

it was a weakness bound up with the very strength of the universe.

About hero worship, indeed, few critics have done the smallest justice

to Carlyle. Misled by those hasty and choleric passages in which he

sometimes expressed a preference for mere violence, passages which were

a great deal more connected with his temperament than with his

philosophy, they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle’s theory

of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and

arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some

questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is not

that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided

and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous

and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it in

them to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer loyalty to

rebellion. When he speaks of this trait in human nature Carlyle’s tone

invariably softens. We feel that for the moment he is kindled with

admiration of mankind, and almost reaches the verge of Christianity.

Whatever else was acid and captious about Carlyle’s utterances, his hero

worship was not only humane, it was almost optimistic. He admired great

men primarily, and perhaps correctly, because he thought that they were

more human than other men. The evil side of the influence of Carlyle and

his religion of hero worship did not consist in the emotional worship of

valour and success; that was a part of him, as, indeed, it is a part of

all healthy children. Where Carlyle really did harm was in the fact that

he, more than any modern man, is responsible for the increase of that

modern habit of what is vulgarly called ‘Going the whole hog.’ Often in

matters of passion and conquest it is a singularly hoggish hog. This

remarkable modern craze for making one’s philosophy, religion, politics,

and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for opportunities

to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is a thing which

existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon and Horace,

Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were melancholy, and

optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obliged

to prove that gout and unrequited love make him dance with joy, and the

pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a good supper convulse

him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly possessed with this

mania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take the same view of the

wars of the angels and of the paltriest riot at Donnybrook Fair. It was

this species of insane logic which led him into his chief errors, never

his natural enthusiasms. Let us take an example. Carlyle’s defence of

slavery is a thoroughly ridiculous thing, weak alike in argument and in

moral instinct. The truth is, that he only took it up from the passion

for applying everywhere his paradoxical defence of aristocracy. He

blundered, of course, because he did not see that slavery has nothing in

the world to do with aristocracy, that it is, indeed, almost its

opposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its thoughtful defenders

have made for aristocracy was that a few persons could more rapidly and

firmly decide public affairs in the interests of the people. But slavery

is not even supposed to be a government for the good of the governed. It

is a possession of the governed avowedly for the good of the governors.

Aristocracy uses the strong for the service of the weak; slavery uses

the weak for the service of the strong. It is no derogation to man as a

spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed he was, that he should be

ruled and guided for his own good like a child—for a child who is

always ruled and guided we regard as the very type of spiritual

existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute contradiction to that

human spirituality in which Carlyle believed that a man should be owned

like a tool for someone else’s good, as if he had no personal destiny

in the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular error of Carlyle’s

because we think that it is a curious example of the waste and unclean

places into which that remarkable animal, ‘the whole hog,’ more than

once led him.

In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and an

unquestionably bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethic

which conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for

once and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberately

deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example.

Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern

times the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency. Though

Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle

being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat,

they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and

pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to

everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed,

embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges

himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with

which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as

a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient

necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madhouse, it

can hardly be denied, has Carlyle’s intellectual courage brought many at

last.

TOLSTOY AND THE CULT OF SIMPLICITY

The whole world is certainly heading for a great simplicity, not

deliberately, but rather inevitably. It is not a mere fashion of false

innocence, like that of the French aristocrats before the Revolution,

who built an altar to Pan, and who taxed the peasantry for the enormous

expenditure which is needed in order to live the simple life of

peasants. The simplicity towards which the world is driving is the

necessary outcome of all our systems and speculations and of our deep

and continuous contemplation of things. For the universe is like

everything in it; we have to look at it repeatedly and habitually before

we see it. It is only when we have seen it for the hundredth time that

we see it for the first time. The more consistently things are

contemplated, the more they tend to unify themselves and therefore to

simplify themselves. The simplification of anything is always

sensational. Thus monotheism is the most sensational of things: it is as

if we gazed long at a design full of disconnected objects, and,

suddenly, with a stunning thrill, they came together into a huge and

staring face.

Few people will dispute that all the typical movements of our time are

upon this road towards simplification. Each system seeks to be more

fundamental than the other; each seeks, in the literal sense, to

undermine the other. In art, for example, the old conception of man,

classic as the Apollo Belvedere, has first been attacked by the realist,

who asserts that man, as a fact of natural history, is a creature with

colourless hair and a freckled face. Then comes the Impressionist, going

yet deeper, who asserts that to his physical eye, which alone is

certain, man is a creature with purple hair and a grey face. Then comes

the Symbolist, and says that to his soul, which alone is certain, man is

a creature with green hair and a blue face. And all the great writers of

our time represent in one form or another this attempt to re-establish

communication with the elemental, or, as it is sometimes more roughly

and fallaciously expressed, to return to nature. Some think that the

return to nature consists in drinking no wine; some think that it

consists in drinking a great deal more than is good for them. Some think

that the return to nature is achieved by beating swords into

ploughshares; some think it is achieved by turning ploughshares into

very ineffectual British War Office bayonets. It is natural, according

to the Jingo, for a man to kill other people with gunpowder and himself

with gin. It is natural, according to the humanitarian revolutionist, to

kill other people with dynamite and himself with vegetarianism. It would

be too obviously Philistine a sentiment, perhaps, to suggest that the

claim of either of these persons to be obeying the voice of nature is

interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of

paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth

of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike

in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the

return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of

fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to

nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much he

can reject.

Now, this heroic desire to return to nature is, of course, in some

respects, rather like the heroic desire of a kitten to return to its own

tail. A tail is a simple and beautiful object, rhythmic in curve and

soothing in texture; but it is certainly one of the minor but

characteristic qualities of a tail that it should hang behind. It is

impossible to deny that it would in some degree lose its character if

attached to any other part of the anatomy. Now, nature is like a tail in

the sense that it is vitally important if it is to discharge its real

duty that it should be always behind. To imagine that we can see nature,

especially our own nature, face to face is a folly; it is even a

blasphemy. It is like the conduct of a cat in some mad fairy-tale, who

should set out on his travels with the firm conviction that he would

find his tail growing like a tree in the meadows at the end of the

world. And the actual effect of the travels of the philosopher in search

of nature when seen from the outside looks very like the gyrations of

the tail-pursuing kitten, exhibiting much enthusiasm but little dignity,

much cry and very little tail. The grandeur of nature is that she is

omnipotent and unseen, that she is perhaps ruling us most when we think

that she is heeding us least. ‘Thou art a God that hidest Thyself,’ said

the Hebrew poet. It may be said with all reverence that it is behind a

man’s back that the spirit of nature hides.

It is this consideration that lends a certain air of futility even to

all the inspired simplicities and thunderous veracities of Tolstoy. We

feel that a man cannot make himself simple merely by warring on

complexity; we feel, indeed, in our saner moments that a man cannot make

himself simple at all. A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more

intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of the

pomp and sumptuousness of the world’s history was simple in the truest

sense. It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the work

of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.

'King Solomon brought merchant men

  Because of his desire

With peacocks, apes and ivory,

  From Tarshish unto Tyre.'

But this proceeding was not a part of the wisdom of Solomon; it was a

part of his folly—I had almost said of his innocence. Tolstoy, we feel,

would not be content with hurling satire and denunciation at ‘Solomon in

all his glory.’ With fierce and unimpeachable logic he would go a step

further. He would spend days and nights in the meadows stripping the

shameless crimson coronals off the lilies of the field.

The new collection of ‘Tales from Tolstoy,’ translated and edited by Mr

R. Nisbet Bain, is calculated to draw particular attention to this

ethical and ascetic side of Tolstoy’s work. In one sense, and that the

deepest sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a genuine and noble

appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an artist may not teach is

pretty well exploded by now. But the truth of the matter is, that an

artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his

landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique—all the part of his

work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by

the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his

opinions. The real distinction between the ethics of high art and the

ethics of manufactured and didactic art lies in the simple fact that the

bad fable has a moral, while the good fable is a moral. And the real

moral of Tolstoy comes out constantly in these stories, the great moral

which lies at the heart of all his work, of which he is probably

unconscious, and of which it is quite likely that he would vehemently

disapprove. The curious cold white light of morning that shines over all

the tales, the folklore simplicity with which ‘a man or a woman’ are

spoken of without further identification, the love—one might almost say

the lust—for the qualities of brute materials, the hardness of wood,

and the softness of mud, the ingrained belief in a certain ancient

kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man—these

influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and

tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene

purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small

sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect

to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan

and an uncivilised prig, then, indeed, we scarcely know whither Tolstoy

has vanished. We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist

who is inhabiting one corner of a great and good man.

It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with

Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a

man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of

humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that

dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a

man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending

emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of

their pitiful pleasures, from courtship to tobacco. It is difficult to

believe that a poet in prose who has so powerfully exhibited the

earth-born air of man, the essential kinship of a human being, with the

landscape in which he lives, can deny so elemental a virtue as that

which attaches a man to his own ancestors and his own land. It is

difficult to believe that the man who feels so poignantly the detestable

insolence of oppression would not actually, if he had the chance, lay

the oppressor flat with his fist. All, however, arises from the search

after a false simplicity, the aim of being, if I may so express it, more

natural than it is natural to be. It would not only be more human, it

would be more humble of us to be content to be complex. The truest

kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done,

accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called,

the star of our happiness, and the fortunes of the land of our birth.

The work of Tolstoy has another and more special significance. It

represents the re-assertion of a certain awful common-sense which

characterised the most extreme utterances of Christ. It is true that we

cannot turn the cheek to the smiter; it is true that we cannot give our

cloak to the robber; civilisation is too complicated, too vainglorious,

too emotional. The robber would brag, and we should blush; in other

words, the robber and we are alike sentimentalists. The command of

Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached

to a planet of lunatics. If the whole world was suddenly stricken with a

sense of humour it would find itself mechanically fulfilling the Sermon

on the Mount. It is not the plain facts of the world which stand in the

way of that consummation, but its passions of vanity and

self-advertisement and morbid sensibility. It is true that we cannot

turn the cheek to the smiter, and the sole and sufficient reason is that

we have not the pluck. Tolstoy and his followers have shown that they

have the pluck, and even if we think they are mistaken, by this sign

they conquer. Their theory has the strength of an utterly consistent

thing. It represents that doctrine of mildness and non-resistance which

is the last and most audacious of all the forms of resistance to every

existing authority. It is the great strike of the Quakers which is more

formidable than many sanguinary revolutions. If human beings could only

succeed in achieving a real passive resistance they would be strong with

the appalling strength of inanimate things, they would be calm with the

maddening calm of oak or iron, which conquer without vengeance and are

conquered without humiliation. The theory of Christian duty enunciated

by them is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can,

conquer by persuasion. In their mythology St George did not conquer the

dragon: he tied a pink ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer of

milk. According to them, a course of consistent kindness to Nero would

have turned him into something only faintly represented by Alfred the

Great. In fact, the policy recommended by this school for dealing with

the bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this world is accurately summed

up in the celebrated verse of Mr Edward Lear:

'There was an old man who said, "How

Shall I flee from this terrible cow?

I will sit on a stile and continue to smile,

Till I soften the heart of this cow."'

Their confidence in human nature is really honourable and magnificent;

it takes the form of refusing to believe the overwhelming majority of

mankind, even when they set out to explain their own motives. But

although most of us would in all probability tend at first sight to

consider this new sect of Christians as little less outrageous than some

brawling and absurd sect in the Reformation, yet we should fall into a

singular error in doing so. The Christianity of Tolstoy is, when we come

to consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our

modern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religion

more sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars.

From the point of view of a rationalist, the whole world is rendered

almost irrational by the single phenomenon of Christian Socialism. It

turns the scientific universe topsy-turvy, and makes it essentially

possible that the key of all social evolution may be found in the dusty

casket of some discredited creed. It cannot be amiss to consider this

phenomenon as it really is.

The religion of Christ has, like many true things, been disproved an

extraordinary number of times. It was disproved by the Neo-Platonist

philosophers at the very moment when it was first starting forth upon

its startling and universal career. It was disproved again by many of

the sceptics of the Renaissance only a few years before its second and

supremely striking embodiment, the religion of Puritanism, was about to

triumph over many kings, and civilise many continents. We all agree that

these schools of negation were only interludes in its history; but we

all believe naturally and inevitably that the negation of our own day

is really a breaking up of the theological cosmos, an Armageddon, a

Ragnorak, a twilight of the gods. The man of the nineteenth century,

like a schoolboy of sixteen, believes that his doubt and depression are

symbols of the end of the world. In our day the great irreligionists who

did nothing but dethrone God and drive angels before them have been

outstripped, distanced, and made to look orthodox and humdrum. A newer

race of sceptics has found something infinitely more exciting to do than

nailing down the lids upon a million coffins, and the body upon a single

cross. They have disputed not only the elementary creeds, but the

elementary laws of mankind, property, patriotism, civil obedience. They

have arraigned civilisation as openly as the materialists have

arraigned theology; they have damned all the philosophers even lower

than they have damned the saints. Thousands of modern men move quietly

and conventionally among their fellows while holding views of national

limitation or landed property that would have made Voltaire shudder like

a nun listening to blasphemies. And the last and wildest phase of this

saturnalia of scepticism, the school that goes furthest among thousands

who go so far, the school that denies the moral validity of those ideals

of courage or obedience which are recognised even among pirates, this

school bases itself upon the literal words of Christ, like Dr Watts or

Messrs Moody and Sankey. Never in the whole history of the world was

such a tremendous tribute paid to the vitality of an ancient creed.

Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven

asunder, or the sun did stand still at mid-day. We are faced with the

phenomenon that a set of revolutionists whose contempt for all the

ideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves’ kitchen,

who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the

gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilisation, cannot rid

themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes

written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it

something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in

its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees

the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way

of a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the

dark sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may, indeed, contain

in themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.

This value which we have above suggested, unquestionably belongs to the

Tolstoians, who may roughly be described as the new Quakers. With their

strange optimism, and their almost appalling logical courage, they offer

a tribute to Christianity which no orthodoxies could offer. It cannot

but be remarkable to watch a revolution in which both the rulers and the

rebels march under the same symbol. But the actual theory of

non-resistance itself, with all its kindred theories, is not, I think,

characterised by that intellectual obviousness and necessity which its

supporters claim for it. A pamphlet before us shows us an extraordinary

number of statements about the New Testament, of which the accuracy is

by no means so striking as the confidence. To begin with, we must

protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time.

When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all

what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had

expressed Himself more clearly. Here is an instance of question and

answer:

Q. ‘How did our Master Himself sum up the law in a few words?’

A. ‘Be ye merciful, be ye perfect even as your Father; your Father in

the spirit world is merciful, is perfect.’

There is nothing in this, perhaps, which Christ might not have said

except the abominable metaphysical modernism of ‘the spirit world’; but

to say that it is recorded that He did say it, is like saying it is

recorded that He preferred palm trees to sycamores. It is a simple and

unadulterated untruth. The author should know that these words have

meant a thousand things to a thousand people, and that if more ancient

sects had paraphrased them as cheerfully as he, he would never have had

the text upon which he founds his theory. In a pamphlet in which plain

printed words cannot be left alone, it is not surprising if there are

mis-statements upon larger matters. Here is a statement clearly and

philosophically laid down which we can only content ourselves with

flatly denying: ‘The fifth rule of our Lord is that we should take

special pains to cultivate the same kind of regard for people of foreign

countries, and for those generally who do not belong to us, or even have

an antipathy to us, which we already entertain towards our own people,

and those who are in sympathy with us.’ I should very much like to know

where in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent,

unnatural, and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind of

regard for one person as for another. We are specifically told that

there were certain persons whom He specially loved. It is most

improbable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own.

The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highest

compliment He paid was, ‘Behold an Israelite indeed.’ The author has

simply confused two entirely distinct things. Christ commanded us to

have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to

speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering

nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he produces on us must

be vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom we

love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about as

sensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards.

Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity: He loved

men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a

gigantic centipede. And the reason that the Tolstoians can even endure

to think of an equally distributed affection is that their love of

humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their

own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.

But the greatest error of all lies in the mere act of cutting up the

teaching of the New Testament into five rules. It precisely and

ingeniously misses the most dominant characteristic of the teaching—its

absolute spontaneity. The abyss between Christ and all His modern

interpreters is that we have no record that He ever wrote a word, except

with His finger in the sand. The whole is the history of one continuous

and sublime conversation. Thousands of rules have been deduced from it

before these Tolstoian rules were made, and thousands will be deduced

afterwards. It was not for any pompous proclamation, it was not for any

elaborate output of printed volumes; it was for a few splendid and idle

words that the cross was set up on Calvary, and the earth gaped, and the

sun was darkened at noonday.

SAVONAROLA

Savonarola is a man whom we shall probably never understand until we

know what horror may lie at the heart of civilisation. This we shall not

know until we are civilised. It may be hoped, in one sense, that we may

never understand Savonarola.

The great deliverers of men have, for the most part, saved them from

calamities which we all recognise as evil, from calamities which are the

ancient enemies of humanity. The great law-givers saved us from anarchy:

the great physicians saved us from pestilence: the great reformers

saved us from starvation. But there is a huge and bottomless evil

compared with which all these are flea-bites, the most desolating curse

that can fall upon men or nations, and it has no name, except we call it

satisfaction. Savonarola did not save men from anarchy, but from order;

not from pestilence, but from paralysis; not from starvation, but from

luxury. Men like Savonarola are the witnesses to the tremendous

psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name

has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and

civilisation potentially the end of man.

For I fancy that Savonarola’s thrilling challenge to the luxury of his

day went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern

rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards,

dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of

Savonarola’s anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the

crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not

be so anxious to show that Savonarola was no ascetic, that he merely

picked out the black specks of wickedness with the priggish

enlightenment of a member of an Ethical Society. Probably he did hate

the civilisation of his time, and not merely its sins; and that is

precisely where he was infinitely more profound than a modern moralist.

He saw that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen

jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms;

that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and

pictures. This is a thing constantly forgotten in judging of ascetics

and Puritans in old times. A denunciation of harmless sports did not

always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist

would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred

of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are

sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.

Such, at least, was the hatred in the heart of Savonarola. He was making

war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless

quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which

all creation fell. He was preaching that severity which is the

sign-manual of youth and hope. He was preaching that alertness, that

clean agility and vigilance, which is as necessary to gain pleasure as

to gain holiness, as indispensable in a lover as in a monk. A critic has

truly pointed out that Savonarola could not have been fundamentally

anti-aesthetic, since he had such friends as Michael Angelo, Botticelli,

and Luca della Robbia. The fact is that this purification and austerity

are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than

for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell patiently

the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires

a discipline in pleasure, and an education in gratitude.

The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a

civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that

leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow

old with confounding rapidity, but in which no old things ever grow new.

The monstrosity of the crimes of the Renaissance was not a mark of

imagination; it was a mark, as all monstrosity is, of the loss of

imagination. It is only when a man has really ceased to see a horse as

it is, that he invents a centaur, only when he can no longer be

surprised at an ox, that he worships the devil. Diablerie is the

stimulant of the jaded fancy; it is the dram-drinking of the artist.

Savonarola addressed himself to the hardest of all earthly tasks, that

of making men turn back and wonder at the simplicities they had learnt

to ignore. It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines is

the doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which

Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is

nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings.

Christianity, in Savonarola’s mind, identical with democracy, is the

hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as

the saying that they are all the sons of God.

Savonarola and his republic fell. The drug of despotism was administered

to the people, and they forgot what they had been. There are some at the

present day who have so strange a respect for art and letters, and for

mere men of genius, that they conceive the reign of the Medici to be an

improvement on that of the great Florentine republican. It is such men

as these and their civilisation that we have at the present day to fear.

We are surrounded on many sides by the same symptoms as those which

awoke the unquenchable wrath of Savonarola—a hedonism that is more sick

of happiness than an invalid is sick of pain, an art sense that seeks

the assistance of crime since it has exhausted nature. In many modern

works we find veiled and horrible hints of a truly Renaissance sense of

the beauty of blood, the poetry of murder. The bankrupt and depraved

imagination does not see that a living man is far more dramatic than a

dead one. Along with this, as in the time of the Medici, goes the

falling back into the arms of despotism, the hunger for the strong man

which is unknown among strong men. The masterful hero is worshipped as

he is worshipped by the readers of the ‘Bow Bells Novelettes,’ and for

the same reason—a profound sense of personal weakness. That tendency to

devolve our duties descends on us, which is the soul of slavery, alike

whether for its menial tasks it employs serfs or emperors. Against all

this the great clerical republican stands in everlasting protest,

preferring his failure to his rival’s success. The issue is still

between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of liberty and the

licence of slavery, between the perils of truth and the security of

silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of pleasure. The

supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among us, men for

whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the moment, men to

whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp and wintry

spring. They have an art, a literature, a political philosophy, which

are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon the taste, not for

what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their statuettes and

sonnets are rounded and perfect, while ‘Macbeth’ is in comparison a

fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their campaigns and

battles are always called triumphant, while Caesar and Cromwell wept for

many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance,

the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoils

into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely a

cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.

This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent

his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course.

Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a

charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have

understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them

from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and

sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent

danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also

are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.

Mr M’Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works

of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much

exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of

incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment

more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola’s friend Michael

Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other, and

burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow

transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.

THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own

high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now

dwindling, schools of severely technical and aesthetic criticism have

been unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if

there is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it is

in consistency and equality. It would perhaps be unkind to inquire

whether the level of the modern man of letters, as compared with Scott,

is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in any

case, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effects

carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in the

incidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to arrange.

It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter

could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are

neglected by Providence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as it

exists, must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like

the beard of Polonius, he is too long. Yet it is surely a peculiar thing

that in literature alone a house should be despised because it is too

large, or a host impugned because he is too generous. If romance be

really a pleasure, it is difficult to understand the modern reader’s

consuming desire to get it over, and if it be not a pleasure, it is

difficult to understand his desire to have it at all. Mere size, it

seems to me, cannot be a fault. The fault must lie in some

disproportion. If some of Scott’s stories are dull and dilatory, it is

not because they are giants but because they are hunchbacks or cripples.

Scott was very far indeed from being a perfect writer, but I do not

think that it can be shown that the large and elaborate plan on which

his stories are built was by any means an imperfection. He arranged his

endless prefaces and his colossal introductions just as an architect

plans great gates and long approaches to a really large house. He did

not share the latter-day desire to get quickly through a story. He

enjoyed narrative as a sensation; he did not wish to swallow a story

like a pill that it should do him good afterwards. He desired to taste

it like a glass of port, that it might do him good at the time. The

reader sits late at his banquets. His characters have that air of

immortality which belongs to those of Dumas and Dickens. We should not

be surprised to meet them in any number of sequels. Scott, in his heart

of hearts, probably would have liked to write an endless story without

either beginning or close.

Walter Scott is a great, and, therefore, mysterious man. He will never

be understood until Romance is understood, and that will be only when

Time, Man, and Eternity are understood. To say that Scott had more than

any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic seems, in these

days, a slight and superficial tribute. The whole modern theory arises

from one fundamental mistake—the idea that romance is in some way a

plaything with life, a figment, a conventionality, a thing upon the

outside. No genuine criticism of romance will ever arise until we have

grasped the fact that romance lies not upon the outside of life but

absolutely in the centre of it. The centre of every man’s existence is a

dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like

toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege

and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

The boast of the realist (applying what the reviewers call his scalpel)

is that he cuts into the heart of life; but he makes a very shallow

incision if he only reaches as deep as habits and calamities and sins.

Deeper than all these lies a man’s vision of himself, as swaggering and

sentimental as a penny novelette. The literature of candour unearths

innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called

romance. It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, but

it does not perceive the deepest of sins—the sin of vanity—vanity

which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that

is not shared with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest.

In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott’s pre-eminence in romance

we must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or

adventure are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a

plot or the multiplicity of drawn swords. We must remember that it is,

like tragedy or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and

elemental reason which we can never understand, this state of the soul

is evoked in us by the sight of certain places or the contemplation of

certain human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and covered

wooden bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber.

In the selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romance

as in a net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached. His

finest scenes affect us like fragments of a hilarious dream. They have

the same quality which is often possessed by those nocturnal

comedies—that of seeming more human than our waking life—even while

they are less possible. Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and the

old beggar crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the

tide closes around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of

practical situations. Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only

be called boyish. It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible

sunset. Rob Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie

Nicol Jarvie, draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the

dazzling external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that

plain and humorous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of

romance which is an almost equal betting upon man and destiny. Perhaps

the most profoundly thrilling of all Scott’s situations is that in

which the family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage which

may or may not arrive by night to bring an unknown man into a princely

possession. Yet almost the whole of that thrilling scene consists of a

ridiculous conversation about food, and flirtation between a frivolous

old lawyer and a fashionable girl. We can say nothing about what makes

these scenes, except that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that

here the wind blows strong.

It is in this quality of what may be called spiritual adventurousness

that Scott stands at so different an elevation to the whole of the

contemporary crop of romancers who have followed the leadership of

Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great and inspiriting revival of

romance in our time, but it is partly frustrated in almost every case

by this rooted conception that romance consists in the vast

multiplication of incidents and the violent acceleration of narrative.

The heroes of Mr Stanley Weyman scarcely ever have their swords out of

their hands; the deeper presence of romance is far better felt when the

sword is at the hip ready for innumerable adventures too terrible to be

pictured. The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to eat his supper

except in the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other hand is

employed in lunging with a rapier. In Scott’s heroes, on the other hand,

there is no characteristic so typical or so worthy of honour as their

disposition to linger over their meals. The conviviality of the Clerk of

Copmanhurst or of Mr Pleydell, and the thoroughly solid things they are

described as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott’s poetic

touches. In short, Mr Stanley Weyman is filled with the conviction that

the sole essence of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity from

incident to incident. In the truer romance of Scott there is more of the

sentiment of ‘Oh! still delay, thou art so fair’; more of a certain

patriarchal enjoyment of things as they are—of the sword by the side

and the wine-cup in the hand. Romance, indeed, does not consist by any

means so much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them. How

little the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison to tools and

weapons may be tested by the fact that the most popular story of

adventure is concerned with a man who lived for years on a desert

island with two guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.

Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought

against Scott, particularly in his own day—the charge of a fanciful and

monotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The critic

in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ said indignantly that he could tolerate a

somewhat detailed description of the apparel of Marmion, but when it

came to an equally detailed account of the apparel of his pages and

yeomen the mind could bear it no longer. The only thing to be said about

that critic is that he had never been a little boy. He foolishly

imagined that Scott valued the plume and dagger of Marmion for Marmion’s

sake. Not being himself romantic, he could not understand that Scott

valued the plume because it was a plume, and the dagger because it was a

dagger. Like a child, he loved weapons with a manual materialistic love,

as one loves the softness of fur or the coolness of marble. One of the

profound philosophical truths which are almost confined to infants is

this love of things, not for their use or origin, but for their own

inherent characteristics, the child’s love of the toughness of wood, the

wetness of water, the magnificent soapiness of soap. So it was with

Scott, who had so much of the child in him. Human beings were perhaps

the principal characters in his stories, but they were certainly not the

only characters. A battle-axe was a person of importance, a castle had a

character and ways of its own. A church bell had a word to say in the

matter. Like a true child, he almost ignored the distinction between the

animate and inanimate. A two-handed sword might be carried only by a

menial in a procession, but it was something important and immeasurably

fascinating—it was a two-handed sword.

There is one quality which is supreme and continuous in Scott which is

little appreciated at present. One of the values we have really lost in

recent fiction is the value of eloquence. The modern literary artist is

compounded of almost every man except the orator. Yet Shakespeare and

Scott are certainly alike in this, that they could both, if literature

had failed, have earned a living as professional demagogues. The feudal

heroes in the ‘Waverley Novels’ retort upon each other with a

passionate dignity, haughty and yet singularly human, which can hardly

be paralleled in political eloquence except in ‘Julius Caesar.’ With a

certain fiery impartiality which stirs the blood, Scott distributes his

noble orations equally among saints and villains. He may deny a villain

every virtue or triumph, but he cannot endure to deny him a telling

word; he will ruin a man, but he will not silence him. In truth, one of

Scott’s most splendid traits is his difficulty, or rather incapacity,

for despising any of his characters. He did not scorn the most revolting

miscreant as the realist of to-day commonly scorns his own hero. Though

his soul may be in rags, every man of Scott can speak like a king.

This quality, as I have said, is sadly to seek in the fiction of the

passing hour. The realist would, of course, repudiate the bare idea of

putting a bold and brilliant tongue in every man’s head, but even where

the moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems

frozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the

scene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then

compare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing

bore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy’s declaration of himself,

or Athelstane’s defiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion

upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just

now at a low ebb. We have even gone the length of congratulating

ourselves because we can see the mud and the monsters at the bottom. In

politics there is not a single man whose position is due to eloquence in

the first degree; its place is taken by repartees and rejoinders purely

intellectual, like those of an omnibus conductor. In discussing

questions like the farm-burning in South Africa no critic of the war

uses his material as Burke or Grattan (perhaps exaggeratively) would

have used it—the speaker is content with facts and expositions of

facts. In another age he might have risen and hurled that great song in

prose, perfect as prose and yet rising into a chant, which Meg Merrilees

hurled at Ellangowan, at the rulers of Britain: ‘Ride your ways, Laird

of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram—this day have ye

quenched seven smoking hearths. See if the fire in your ain parlour

burns the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack of seven cottar

houses. Look if your ain roof-tree stands the faster for that. Ye may

stable your stirks in the sheilings of Dern-cleugh. See that the hare

does not couch on the hearthstane of Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey

Bertram.’

The reason is, of course, that these men are afraid of bombast and Scott

was not. A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just

as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object

of all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men’s souls,

to fall just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously have

any chance with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside

it. It is quite right to invent subtle analyses and detached

criticisms, but it is unreasonable to expect them to be punctuated with

roars of popular applause. It is possible to conceive of a mob shouting

any central and simple sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible to

think of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In the matter of

eloquence, the whole question is one of the immediate effect of

greatness, such as is produced even by fine bombast. It is absurd to

call it merely superficial; here there is no question of superficiality;

we might as well call a stone that strikes us between the eyes merely

superficial. The very word ‘superficial’ is founded on a fundamental

mistake about life, the idea that second thoughts are best. The

superficial impression of the world is by far the deepest. What we

really feel, naturally and casually, about the look of skies and trees

and the face of friends, that and that alone will almost certainly

remain our vital philosophy to our dying day.

Scott’s bombast, therefore, will always be stirring to anyone who

approaches it, as he should approach all literature, as a little child.

We could easily excuse the contemporary critic for not admiring

melodramas and adventure stories, and Punch and Judy, if he would admit

that it was a slight deficiency in his artistic sensibilities. Beyond

all question, it marks a lack of literary instinct to be unable to

simplify one’s mind at the first signal of the advance of romance. ‘You

do me wrong,’ said Brian de Bois-Guilbert to Rebecca. ‘Many a law, many

a commandment have I broken, but my word, never.’ ‘Die,’ cries Balfour

of Burley to the villain in ‘Old Mortality.’ ‘Die, hoping nothing,

believing nothing—’ ‘And fearing nothing,’ replies the other. This is

the old and honourable fine art of bragging, as it was practised by the

great worthies of antiquity. The man who cannot appreciate it goes along

with the man who cannot appreciate beef or claret or a game with

children or a brass band. They are afraid of making fools of themselves,

and are unaware that that transformation has already been triumphantly

effected.

Scott is separated, then, from much of the later conception of fiction

by this quality of eloquence. The whole of the best and finest work of

the modern novelist (such as the work of Mr Henry James) is primarily

concerned with that delicate and fascinating speech which burrows deeper

and deeper like a mole; but we have wholly forgotten that speech which

mounts higher and higher like a wave and falls in a crashing peroration.

Perhaps the most thoroughly brilliant and typical man of this decade is

Mr Bernard Shaw. In his admirable play of ‘Candida’ it is clearly a part

of the character of the Socialist clergyman that he should be eloquent,

but he is not eloquent, because the whole ‘G.B.S.’ condition of mind

renders impossible that poetic simplicity which eloquence requires.

Scott takes his heroes and villains seriously, which is, after all, the

way that heroes and villains take themselves—especially villains. It is

the custom to call these old romantic poses artificial; but the word

artificial is the last and silliest evasion of criticism. There was

never anything in the world that was really artificial. It had some

motive or ideal behind it, and generally a much better one than we

think.

Of the faults of Scott as an artist it is not very necessary to speak,

for faults are generally and easily pointed out, while there is yet no

adequate valuation of the varieties and contrasts of virtue. We have

compiled a complete botanical classification of the weeds in the

poetical garden, but the flowers still flourish neglected and nameless.

It is true, for example, that Scott had an incomparably stiff and

pedantic way of dealing with his heroines: he made a lively girl of

eighteen refuse an offer in the language of Dr Johnson. To him, as to

most men of his time, woman was not an individual, but an

institution—a toast that was drunk some time after that of Church and

King. But it is far better to consider the difference rather as a

special merit, in that he stood for all those clean and bracing shocks

of incident which are untouched by passion or weakness, for a certain

breezy bachelorhood, which is almost essential to the literature of

adventure. With all his faults, and all his triumphs, he stands for the

great mass of natural manliness which must be absorbed into art unless

art is to be a mere luxury and freak. An appreciation of Scott might be

made almost a test of decadence. If ever we lose touch with this one

most reckless and defective writer, it will be a proof to us that we

have erected round ourselves a false cosmos, a world of lying and

horrible perfection, leaving outside of it Walter Scott and that

strange old world which is as confused and as indefensible and as

inspiring and as healthy as he.

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