 16 On Mr. McCabe and her divine frivolity A critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant reasonableness, if you must make jokes, at least you need not make them on such serious subjects. I replied with a natural simplicity and wonder about what other subjects can one make jokes except serious subjects. It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all. If a joke is not a joke about religion or morals, it is a joke about police magistrates or scientific professors or undergraduates dressed up as Queen Victoria. And people joke about the police magistrate more than they joke about the Pope. Not because the police magistrate is a more frivolous subject, but on the contrary, because the police magistrate is a more serious subject than the Pope. The Bishop of Rome has no jurisdiction in this realm of England, whereas the police magistrate may bring his solemnity to bear quite suddenly upon us. Men make jokes about old scientific professors even more than they make them about bishops. Not because science is lighter than religion, but because science is always by its nature more solemn and austere than religion. It is not I. It is not even a particular class of journalists or gestures who make jokes about the matters which are of most awful import. It is the whole human race. If there is one thing more than another which anyone will admit who has the smallest knowledge of the world, it is that men are always speaking gravely and earnestly and with the utmost possible care about the things that are not important, but always talking frivolously about the things that are. And talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics. But all the most grave and dreadful things in the world are the oldest jokes in the world, being married, being hanged. One gentleman, however, Mr. McCabe, has in this matter made to me something that almost amounts to a personal appeal, and as he happens to be a man for whose sincerity in intellectual virtue I have a high respect, I do not feel inclined to let it pass without some attempt to satisfy my critic in the matter. Mr. McCabe devotes a considerable part of the last essay in the collection called Christianity and Rationalism on Trial to an objection, not to my thesis, but to my method, and a very friendly and dignified appeal to me to alter it. I am much inclined to defend myself in this matter out of mere respect for Mr. McCabe, and still more so out of mere respect for the truth, which is, I think, in danger by his error, not only in this question, but in others. In order that there may be no injustice done in the matter, I will quote Mr. McCabe himself. But before I follow Mr. Chesterton in some detail, I would make a general observation on his method. He is as serious as I am in his ultimate purpose, and I respect him for that. He knows as I do that humanity stands at a solemn parting of the ways. Toward some unknown goal it presses through the ages, impelled by an overmastering desire of happiness. Today it hesitates lightheartedly enough, but every serious thinker knows how momentous the decision may be. It is apparently deserting the path of religion and entering upon the path of secularism. Will it lose itself in quagmires of sensuality down this new path, and pant and toil through the years of civic and industrial anarchy, only to learn that it lost the road, and must return to religion? Or will it find that at last it is leaving the mists and the quagmires behind it, and that it is ascending the slope of the hills so long dimly discerned ahead, and making straight for the long sought utopia? This is the drama of our time, and every man and every woman should understand it. Mr. Chesterton understands it, further he gives us credit for understanding it. He has nothing of that paltry meanness or strange density of so many of his colleagues who put us down as aimless iconoclasts or moral anarchists. He admits that we are waging a thankless war for what we take to be truth and progress. He is doing the same. But why in the name of all that is reasonable should we, when we are agreed on the momentousness of the issue, either way, forthwith desert serious methods of conducting the controversy? Why when the vital need of our time is to induce men and women to collect their thoughts occasionally and be men and women, nay to remember that they are really gods that hold the destinies of humanity on their knees? Why should we think that this kaleidoscopic play of phrases is inopportune? The Baileys of the Alhambra and the fireworks of the Crystal Palace and Mr. Chesterton's daily news articles have their place in life, but how a serious social student can think of curing the thoughtlessness of our generation by strained paradoxes, of giving people the same grasp of social problems by literary sleight of hand, of settling important questions by a reckless shower of rocket metaphors and inaccurate facts, and the substitution of imagination for judgment I cannot see. I quote this passage with a particular pleasure, because Mr. McCabe certainly cannot put too strongly the degree to which I give him and his school credit for their complete sincerity and responsibility of philosophical attitude. I am quite certain that they mean every word they say. I also mean every word I say. But why is it that Mr. McCabe has some sort of mysterious hesitation about admitting that I mean every word I say? Why is it that he is not quite as certain of my mental responsibility as I am of his mental responsibility? If we attempt to answer the question directly and well, we shall, I think, have come to the root of the matter by the shortest cut. Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious, but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. The question of whether a man expresses himself in a grotesque or laughable phraseology, or in a stately and restrained phraseology, is not a question of motive or of moral state. It is a question of instinctive language and self-expression. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German. Whether a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. The question of whether Swift was funny in his irony is quite another sort of question to the question whether Swift was serious in his pessimism. Surely even Mr. McCabe would not maintain that the more funny Gulliver is in its method, the less it can be sincere in its object. The truth is, as I have said, that in his sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other. They are no more comparable than black and triangular. Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere. Mr. George Roby is funny and not sincere. Mr. McCabe is sincere and not funny. The average cabinet minister is not sincere and not funny. In short, Mr. McCabe is under the influence of a primary fallacy which I have found very common in men of the clerical type. Numbers of clergymen have from time to time reproached me for making jokes about religion, and they have almost always invoked the authority of that very sensible commandment which says, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. Of course I pointed out that I was not in any conceivable sense taking the name in vain. To take a thing and make a joke out of it is not to take it in vain. It is on the contrary to take it and use it for an uncommonly good object. To use a thing in vain means to use it without use, but a joke may be exceedingly useful. It may contain the whole earthly sense, not to mention the whole heavenly sense of a situation. And those who find in the Bible the commandment can find in the Bible any number of the jokes in the same book in which God's name is fenced from being taken in vain, God himself overwhelms Joe with a torrent of terrible levities. The same book which says that God's name must not be taken vainly talks easily and carelessly about God laughing and God winking. Evidently it is not here that we have to look for genuine examples of what is meant by a vain use of the name, and it is not very difficult to see where we have really to look for it. The people, as I tactfully pointed out to them, who really take the name of the Lord in vain are the clergymen themselves. The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is not a careless joke. The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is a careless solemnity. If Mr. McCabe really wishes to know what sort of guarantee of reality and solidity is afforded by the mere act of what is called talking seriously, let him spend a happy Sunday in going the round of the pulpits, or better still let him drop in the house of commons or the house of lords. Even Mr. McCabe would admit that these men are solemn, more solemn than I am, and even Mr. McCabe, I think, would admit that these men are frivolous, more frivolous than I am. Why should Mr. McCabe be so eloquent about the danger arising from fantastic and paradoxical writers? Why should he be so ardent in desiring grave and verbose writers? There are not so very many fantastic and paradoxical writers, but there are a gigantic number of grave and verbose writers, and it is by the efforts of the grave and verbose writers that everything that Mr. McCabe detests, and everything that I detest for that manner, is kept in existence and energy. How can it have come about that a man as intelligent as Mr. McCabe can think that paradox ingesting stopped the way? It is solemnity that is stopping the way in every department of modern effort. It is his own favored serious methods. It is his own favorite momentousness. It is his own favorite judgment which stops the way everywhere. Every man who has ever headed deputation to a minister knows this. Every man who has ever written a letter to the Times knows it. Every rich man who wishes to stop the miles of the poor talks about momentousness. Every cabinet minister who has not got an answer suddenly develops a judgment. Every sweater who uses vile methods recommends serious methods. I said a moment ago that sincerity had nothing to do with solemnity, but I confess that I am not so certain that I was right. In the modern world at any rate, I'm not so sure that I was right. In the modern world, solemnity is the direct enemy of sincerity. In the modern world, sincerity is almost always on one side and solemnity almost always on the other. The only answer possible to the fierce and glad attack of sincerity is the miserable answer of solemnity. Let Mr. McCabe or anyone else who is much concerned that we should be grave in order to be sincere, simply imagine the scene in some government office in which Mr. Bernard Shaw should head a socialist deputation to Mr. Austin Chamberlain. On which side would be the solemnity and on which the sincerity? I am indeed delighted to discover that Mr. McCabe reckons Mr. Shaw along with me in his system of condemnation of friviality. He said once I believed that he always wanted Mr. Shaw to label his paragraphs serious or comic. I do not know which paragraphs of Mr. Shaw are paragraphs to be labeled serious, but surely they can be no doubt that this paragraph of Mr. McCabe's is one to be labeled comic. He also says in the article I am now discussing that Mr. Shaw has the reputation of deliberately saying everything which his hearers do not expect him to say. I need not labor the inconclusiveness and weakness of this because it has already been dealt with in my remarks on Mr. Bernard Shaw. Suffice it to say here that the only serious reason which I can imagine inducing any one person to listen to any other is that the first person looks to the second person with an ardent faith and affix the tension expecting him to say what he does not expect him to say. It may be a paradox, but that is because paradoxes are true. It may not be rational, but that is because rationalism is wrong. But clearly it is quite true that wherever we go to hear a prophet or a teacher, we may or may not expect wit. We may or may not expect eloquence, but we do expect what we do not expect. We may not expect the true. We may not even expect the wise, but we do expect the unexpected. If we do not expect the unexpected, why do we go there at all? If we expect the expected, why do we not sit at home and expect it by ourselves? If Mr. McCabe means merely this about Mr. Shaw that he always has some unexpected application of his doctrine to give to those who listen to him, what he says is quite true, and to say it is only to say that Mr. Shaw is an original man. But if he means that Mr. Shaw has ever professed or preached any doctrine but one, and that is his own, then what he says is not true. It is not my business to defend Mr. Shaw as he has been seen already. I disagree with him altogether, but I do not mind on his behalf of offering in this matter a flat defiance to all his ordinary opponents, such as Mr. McCabe. I defy Mr. McCabe or anybody else to mention one single instance in which Mr. Shaw has, for the sake of wit or novelty, taken up any position which was not directly deducible from the body of his doctrine as elsewhere expressed. I have been, I am happy to say, a tolerably close student of Mr. Shaw's utterances, and I request Mr. McCabe, if he will not believe that I mean anything else to believe, that I mean this challenge. All this, however, is a parenthesis. The thing with which I am here immediately concerned is Mr. McCabe's appeal to me, not to be so frivolous. Let me return to the actual text of that appeal. There are, of course, the great many things that I might say about it in detail, but I may start with saying that Mr. McCabe is an error in supposing that the danger which I anticipate from the disappearance of religion is the increase of sensuality. On the contrary, I should be inclined to anticipate a decrease in sensuality, because I anticipate a decrease in life. I do not think that under modern Western materialism we should have anarchy. I doubt whether we should have enough individual valor and spirit even to have liberty. It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to skepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to skepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint. The McCabe school advocates a political liberty, but it denies spiritual liberty. It is that it abolishes the laws which could be broken and substitutes laws that cannot, and that is the real slavery. The truth is that the scientific civilization in which Mr. McCabe believes has one rather particular defect. It is perpetually tending to destroy that democracy or power of the ordinary man in which Mr. McCabe also believes. This means specialism, and specialism means oligarchy. If you once established the habit of trusting particular men to produce particular results in physics or astronomy, you leave the door open for the equally natural demand that you should trust particular men to do particular things in government and the coercing of men. If you feel it to be reasonable that one beetle should be the only study of one man and that one man the only student of that one beetle, it is surely a very harmless consequence to go on to say that politics should be the only study of one man and that one man the only student of politics. As I have pointed out elsewhere in this book, the expert is more aristocratic than the aristocrat. Because the aristocrat is only the man who lives well, while the expert is the man who knows better. But if we look at the progress of our scientific civilization, we see a gradual increase everywhere of the specialist over the popular function. Once men sang together around the table in chorus, now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific civilization goes on, which is most improbable, only one man will laugh because he can laugh better than the rest. I do not know that I can express this more shortly than by taking a text with a single sentence of Mr. McCabe, which runs as follows. The ballets of the Alhambra and the fireworks of the Crystal Palace and Mr. Chesterton's daily news articles have their places in life. I wish that my article had as noble a place as either of the other two things mentioned. But let us ask ourselves, in a spirit of love, as Mr. Chad Band would say, what are the ballets of the Alhambra? The ballets of the Alhambra are institutions in which a particular selected row of persons in pink go through an operation known as dancing. Now in all commonwealths dominated by a religion, in the Christian commonwealths of the Middle Ages and in many rude societies, this habit of dancing was a common habit with everybody and was not necessarily confined to a professional class. A person could dance without being a dancer. A person could dance without being a specialist. A person could dance without being king. And in proportion as Mr. Cabe's scientific civilization advances, that is in proportion as religious civilization or real civilization decays, the more and more well trained, the more and more pink become the people who do dance. And the more and more numerous become the people who don't. Mr. McCabe may recognize an example of what I mean in the gradual discrediting and society of the ancient European waltz, or dance with partners, and the substitution of that horrible and degrading oriental interlude which is known as skirt dancing. That is the whole essence of decadence, the effacement of five people who do a thing for fun by one person who does it for money. Now it follows therefore that when Mr. McCabe says that the ballets of the Alhambra and my articles have their place in life, it ought to be pointed out to him that he is doing his best to create a world in which dancing, properly speaking, will have no place in life at all. He is indeed trying to create a world in which there will be no life for dancing to have a place in. The very fact that Mr. McCabe thinks of dancing as a thing belonging to some hired women at the Alhambra is an illustration of the same principle by which he is able to think of religion as a thing belonging to some hired men in white neckties. Both these things are things which should not be done for us, but by us. If Mr. McCabe were really religious, he would be happy. If he were really happy, he would dance. Briefly we may put the matter in this way. The main point of modern life is not that the Alhambra Ballet has its place in life. The main point, the main enormous tragedy of modern life is that Mr. McCabe has not his place in the Alhambra Ballet. The joy of changing and graceful posture, the joy of suiting the swing of music to the swing of limbs, the joy of whirling drapery, the joy of standing on one leg, all these should belong by rights to Mr. McCabe and to me, in short, to the ordinary healthy citizen. Probably we should not consent to go through these evolutions. That's because we are miserable moderns and rationalists. We do not merely love ourselves more than we love duty. We actually love ourselves more than we love joy. Then, therefore, Mr. McCabe says that he gives the Alhambra dances and my articles their place in life, I think we are justified in pointing out, that by the very nature of the case of his philosophy and of his favorite civilization, he gives them a very inadequate place. For if I may pursue the two-flattering parallel, Mr. McCabe thinks of the Alhambra and my articles as two very odd and absurd things, which some special people do, probably for money, in order to amuse him. But if he had ever felt himself the ancient, sublime, elemental, human instinct to dance, he would have discovered that dancing is not a frivolous thing at all, but a very serious thing. He would have discovered that it is the one grave and chaste and decent method of expressing a certain class of emotions. And similarly, if he ever had, as Shaw and I have had, the impulse to what he calls paradox, he would have discovered that paradox again is not a frivolous thing, but a very serious thing. He would have found that paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief. I should regard any civilization which was without a universal habit of uproarious dancing as being, from the full human point of view, a defective civilization. And I should regard any mind which had not got the habit in one form or another of uproarious thinking as being, from the full human point of view, a defective mind. It is vain for Mr. McCabe to say that a ballet is part of him. He should be part of a ballet, or else he is only part of a man. It is vain for him to say that he is not quarreling with the importation of humor into the controversy. He ought himself to be importing humor into every controversy for, unless a man is in part a humorist. He is only in part a man. To sum up the whole matter very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer. Because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treating of life riotously, I reply, that life is a riot. And I say that the universe as I see it at any rate is very much more like the fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity, like preparations for Guy Fox Day. Eternity is the eve of something I never looked up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy's rocket fixed in their everlasting fall. On the wit of Whistler. That capable and ingenious writer, Mr. Arthur Simons, as included in a book of essays recently published, I believe an apologia for London Knights in which he says that morality should be wholly subordinated to art in criticism. And he uses the somewhat singular argument that art or the worship of beauty is the same in all ages. While morality differs in every period and in every respect. He appears to defy his critics or his readers to mention any permanent feature or quality in ethics. This is surely a very curious example of that extravagant bias against morality which makes so many ultra-modern esthetes as morbid and fanatical as any eastern hermit. Unquestionably it is very common phrase of modern intellectualism to say that the morality of one age can be entirely different to the morality of another. And, like the great many other phrases of modern intellectualism, it means literally nothing at all. If the two moralities are entirely different, why do you call them both moralities? It is, as if a man said, camels in various places are totally diverse. Some have six legs, some have none, some have scales, some have feathers, some have horns, some have wings, some are green, some are triangular. There is no point which they have in common. The ordinary man of sense would reply then, what makes you call them all camels? What do you mean by a camel? How do you know a camel when you see one? Of course there is a permanent substance of morality as much as there is a permanent substance of art. To say that is only to say that morality is morality and that art is art. An ideal art critic would no doubt see the enduring duty under every school equally an ideal moralist would see the enduring ethic under every code. But practically some of the best Englishmen that ever lived could see nothing but filth and idolatry in the starry piety of the Brahmin. And it is equally true that practically the greatest group of artists that the world has ever seen, the giants of the Renaissance, could see nothing but barbarism in the ethereal energy of Gothic. This bias against morality among the modern esthetes is nothing very much paraded. And yet it is not really a bias against morality. It is a bias against other people's morality. It is generally founded on a very definite moral preference for a certain sort of life. Pagan, plausible, humane. The modern esthetes wishes us to believe that he values beauty more than conduct, reads malarm, and drinks absinthe in a tavern. But this is not only his favorite kind of beauty. It is also his favorite kind of conduct. If he really wishes to believe that he cared for beauty only he ought to go to nothing but Wesleyan school treats and paint the sunlight in the hair of the Wesleyan babies. He ought to read nothing but very eloquent theological sermons by old-fashioned Presbyterian divines. Here the lack of all possible moral sympathy would prove that his interest was purely verbal or pictorial, as it is. In all the books he reads and writes he clings to the skirts of his own morality and his own immorality. The champion of Lard, poor Lard, is always denouncing Ruskin for his moralizing. If he were really a champion of Lard, poor Lard, he would be always insisting on Ruskin for his style. The doctrine of the distinction between art and morality owes a great part of his success to art and morality being hopelessly mixed up in the persons and performances of its greatest exponents. Of this lucky contradiction the very incarnation was Whistler. No man ever preached the impersonality of art so well. No man ever preached the impersonality of art so personally. For him pictures had nothing to do with the problems of character, but for all his fiercest admirers his character was, as a matter of fact, far more interesting than his pictures. He gloried in standing as an artist, apart from right and wrong, but he succeeded by talking from morning till night about his rights and about his wrongs. His talents were many, his virtues it must be confessed not many, beyond that kindness to tried friends on which many of his biographers insist, but which surely is a quality of all sane men, of pirates and pickpockets, beyond this his outstanding virtues limit themselves chiefly to two admirable ones, courage and an abstract love of good work. Yet I fancy he won at last more by those two virtues than by all his talents. A man must be something of a moralist if he is to preach, even if he is to preach on morality. Professor Walter Raleigh in his Memoriam James McNeill Whistler insists truly enough on the strong streak of an eccentric honesty in matters strictly pictorial, which ran through his complex and slightly confused character. He would destroy any of his works rather than leave a careless or inexpressive touch within the limits of the frame. He would begin again a hundred times over rather than attempt by patching to make his work seem better than it was. No one will blame Professor Raleigh, who had to read a sort of funeral oration over Whistler at the opening of the memorial exhibition, if finding himself in that position he can find himself mostly to the merits and the stronger qualities of his subject. We should naturally go to some other type of composition for a proper consideration of the weaknesses of Whistler. But these must never be omitted from our view of him. Indeed the truth is that it was not so much a question of the weakness of Whistler as of the intrinsic and primary weakness of Whistler. He was one of those people who live up to their emotional incomes, who are always taught and tingling with vanity, hence he had no strength to spare, hence he had no kindness, no geniality, for geniality is almost definable as strength to spare. He had no godlike carelessness. He never forgot himself. His whole life was to use his own expression and arrangement. He went in for the art of living, a miserable trick. In a word he was a great artist, but emphatically not a great man. In this connection I must differ strongly with Professor Rolly upon what is, from a superficial literary point of view, one of his most effective points. He compares Whistler's laughter to the laughter of another man, who was a great man, as well as a great artist. His attitude to the public was exactly the attitude taken up by Robert Browning, who suffered as long a period of neglect and mistake in those lines of the ring and the book. Well British public ye who like me not, God love ye, and will have your proper laugh. At the dark question laugh it, I'd laugh first. Mr. Whistler adds Professor Rolly, always laugh first. The truth is, I believe, that Whistler never laughed at all. There was no laughter in his nature because there was no thoughtlessness and self-abandonment, no humility. I cannot understand anybody reading the gentle art of making enemies, and thinking that there is any laughter in the wit. His wit is a torture to him. He twists himself into arabesques of verbal felicity. He is full of a fierce carefulness. He is inspired with the complete seriousness of sincere malice. He hurts himself to hurt his opponent. Browning did laugh because Browning did not care. Browning did not care because Browning was a great man. And when Browning said in brackets to the simple, sensible people who did not like his books, God love ye, he was not sneering in the least. He was laughing. That is to say, he meant exactly what he said. There are three distinct classes of great satirists who are also great men. That is to say, three classes of men who can laugh at something without losing their souls. The satirist of the first type is the man who, first of all, enjoys himself, and that enjoys his enemies. In this sense, he loves his enemy, and by a kind of exaggeration of Christianity, he loves his enemy the more the more he becomes an enemy. He has a sort of overwhelming and aggressive happiness in his assertion of anger. His curse is as human as a benediction. Of this type of satire, the great example is rabble. This is the first typical example of satire, the satire which is valuable, which is violent, which is indecent, but which is not malicious. The satire of Whistler was not this. He was never in any of his controversies simply happy. The proof of it is that he never talked absolute nonsense. There is the second type of mind which produces satire with the quality of greatness. That is embodied in the satirist whose passions are released and let go by some intolerable sense of wrong. He is maddened by the sense of men being maddened. His tongue becomes an unruly member and testifies against all mankind. Such a man was swift, in whom the Sevi indignato was a bitterness to others because it was a bitterness to himself. Such a satirist, Whistler, was not. He did not laugh because he was happy like rabble, but neither did he laugh because he was unhappy like swift. The third type of great satire is that in which the satirist is unable to rise superior to his victim in the only serious sense which superiority can bear, in that of pitying the sinner and respecting the man even while he satirizes both. Such an achievement can be found in a thing like Pope's Eticus, a poem in which the satirist feels that he is satirizing the weaknesses which belong specially to literary genius. Consequently he takes pleasure in pointing out his enemy's strength before he points out his weakness. That is perhaps the highest and most honorable form of satire. That is not the satire of Whistler. He is not full of a great sorrow for the wrong done to human nature. For him the wrong is altogether done to himself. He was not a great personality because he thought so much about himself. In the case the stronger even than that he was sometimes not even a great artist because he thought so much about art. Any man with a vital knowledge of the human psychology ought to have the most profound suspicion of anybody who claims to be an artist and talks the great deal about art. Art is a right and a human thing like walking or saying one's prayers, but the moment it begins to be talked about very solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing has come into congestion and a kind of difficulty. The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from then not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is helpful to every sane man to utter the art within him. It is essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force the thing becomes a pressure and produces a definite pain which is called the artistic temperament. Thus very great artists are able to be ordinary men, men like Shakespeare or Browning. There are many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or violence or fear, but the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art. Whistler could produce art and in so far he was a great man, but he could not forget art and in so far was only a man with the artistic temperament. There can be no stronger manifestation of the man who is really great artist than the fact that he can dismiss the subject of art, that he can upon due occasion wish art at the bottom of the sea. Similarly we should always be much more inclined to trust a solicitor who did not talk about conveyancing over the nuts and wine. What we really desire of any man conducting any business is that the full force of an ordinary man should be put into that particular study. We do not desire that the full force of that study should be put into an ordinary man. We do not in the least wish that our particular lawsuit should pour its energy into our barrister's games with his children or rides on his bicycle or meditations on the morning star. What we do as a matter of fact, desire that his games with his children and his rides on his bicycle and his meditations on the morning star should pour something of their energy into our lawsuit. We do desire that if he has gained any special lung development on the bicycle or any bright and pleasing metaphors from the morning star, that they should be placed at our disposal in that particular forensic controversy. In a word, we're very glad that he is an ordinary man, since that may help him to be an exceptional lawyer. Whistler never ceased to be an artist. As Mr. Max Beerbaum pointed out in one of his extraordinarily sensible and sincere critiques, Whistler really regarded Whistler as his greatest work of art. The white lock, the single eyeglasses, the remarkable hat, these were much dearer to him than any nocturnes or arrangements that he ever threw off. He could throw off the nocturnes for some mysterious reason he could not throw off the hat. He never threw off from himself that disproportionate accumulation of aestheticism, which is the burden of the amateur. It need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing which has puzzled so many dilettante critiques. The problem of the extreme ordinariness of the behavior of so many great geniuses in history. Their behavior was so ordinary that it was not recorded. Hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious. Hence people say that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The modern artistic temperament cannot understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a little town in Warwickshire. The explanation is simple enough. It is that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did not prevent him from being an ordinary man. Any more than being a sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an ordinary man. All the very great teachers and leaders have had this habit of assuming their point of view to be one which was humane and casual, one which would readily appeal to every passing man. If a man is genuinely superior to his fellows, the first thing that he believes is in the equality of man. We can see this, for instance, in that strange and innocent rationality with which Christ addresses any motley crowd that happened to stand about him. What man of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one, would not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which was lost? Or again, what man of you, if his son asked for bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? This plainness, this almost prosaic comrade, is the note of all very great minds. To very great minds the things on which men agree are so immeasurably more important than the things on which they differ that the latter, for all practical purposes, disappear. They have too much in them of an ancient laughter, even to endure, to discuss the difference between the hats of two men who were both born of a woman, or between the subtly varied cultures of the two men who have both to die. The first great great man is equal with other men like Shakespeare. The second great great man is on his knees to other men like Whitman, and the third great great man is superior to other men like Whistler. CHAPTER 18 THE FALLACY OF THE YOUNG NATION To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man, but nevertheless it might be possible to affect some valid distinction between one kind of idealist and another. One possible distinction, for instance, could be affected by saying that humanity is divided into conscious idealists and unconscious idealists. In a similar way, humanity is divided into conscious ritualists and unconscious ritualists. The curious thing is, in that example, as in others, that it is the conscious ritualism which is comparatively simple, and the unconscious ritual which is really heavy and complicated. The ritual which is comparatively rude and straightforward is the ritual which people call ritualistic. It consists of plain things like bread and wine and fire, and men falling on their faces. But the ritual which is really complex and many-colored and elaborate, and needlessly formal, is the ritual which people enact without knowing it. It consists not of plain things like wine and fire, but of really peculiar and local and exceptional and ingenious things, things like doormats and doorknockers and electric bells and silk hats and white ties and shiny cards and confetti. The truth is that the modern man scarcely ever gets back to very old and simple things except when he is performing some religious mummary. The modern man can hardly get away from ritual except by entering a ritualistic church. In the case of these old and mystical formalities, we can at least say that the ritual is not mere ritual, that the symbols employed are in most cases symbols which belong to a primary human poetry. The most ferocious opponent of the Christian ceremonials must admit that if Catholicism had not so instituted the bread and wine, somebody else most probably would have done so. Anyone with a poetical instinct will admit that to the ordinary human instinct bread symbolizes something which cannot very easily be symbolized otherwise, that wine to the ordinary human instinct symbolizes something which cannot very easily be symbolized otherwise. But white ties in the evening are ritual and nothing else but ritual. No one would pretend that white ties in the evening are primary and poetical. Nobody would maintain that the ordinary human instinct would in any age or country tend to symbolize the idea of evening by a white necktie. Rather the ordinary human instinct would, I imagine, tend to symbolize evening by cravats with some of the colors of the sunset. Not white neckties, but tawny or crimson neckties. Neckties of purple or olive or some darkened gold. Mr. J. A. Kenseth, for example, is under the impression that he is not a ritualist. But the daily life of Mr. J. A. Kenseth, like that of any ordinary modern man, is, as a matter of fact, one continual and compressed catalog of mystical mummary and flummary. To take one instance out of an inevitable hundred, I imagine that Mr. Kenseth takes off his hat to a lady. And what can be more solemn and absurd considered in the abstract than symbolizing the existence of the other sex by taking off a portion of your clothing and waving it in the air? This, I repeat, is not a natural and primitive symbol, like fire or food. A man might just as well have to take off his waistcoat to a lady, and if a man, by social ritual of his civilization, had to take off his waistcoat to a lady, every chivalrous and sensible man would take off his waistcoat to a lady. In short, Mr. Kenseth and those who agree with him may think and quite sincerely think that men give too much incense and ceremonial to their adoration of the other world. But nobody thinks that he can give too much incense and ceremonial to the adoration of this world. All men, then, are ritualists, but are either conscious or unconscious ritualists. The conscious ritualists are generally satisfied with the very few simple and elementary signs. The unconscious ritualists are not satisfied with anything, short of the whole of human life being almost insanely ritualistic. The first is called a ritualist because he invents and remembers one right. The other is called an anti-ritualist because he obeys and forgets a thousand. And a somewhat similar distinction to this, which I have drawn with some unavoidable length between the conscious ritualist and the unconscious ritualist, exists between the conscious idealist and the unconscious idealist. It is idle to invade against cynics and materialists. There are no cynics. There are no materialists. Every man is idealistic. Only it so often happens that he has the wrong ideal. Every man is incurably sentimental, but unfortunately it is so often a false sentiment. When we talk, for instance, of some unscrupulous commercial figure and say that he would do anything for money, we use a quite inaccurate expression and we slander him very much. He would not do anything for money. He would do some things for money. He would sell his soul for money, for instance, and as Maribau humorously said, he would be quite wise to take money for muck. He would oppress humanity for money, but then it happens that humanity and the soul are not things that he believes in. They are not his ideals. But he has his own dim and delicate ideals, and he would not violate those for money. He would not drink out of the soup terrine for money. He would not wear his coat tails in front for money. He would not spread a report that he had softening of the brain for money. In the actual practice of life we find in the matter of ideals exactly what we have already found in the matter of ritual. We find that while there is perfectly genuine danger of fanaticism from men who have unworldly ideals, the permanent and urgent danger of fanaticism is from men who have worldly ideals. People who say that an ideal is a dangerous thing, that it deludes and intoxicates, are perfectly right. But the ideal which intoxicates most is the least idealistic kind of ideal. The ideal which intoxicates least is the very ideal ideal that sobers us suddenly as all heights and precipices in great distances do. Granted that it is a great evil to mistake a cloud for a cape, still the cloud which can be most easily mistaken for a cape is the cloud that is nearest the earth. Similarly we may grant that it may be dangerous to mistake an ideal for something practical, but we shall still point out that in this respect the most dangerous ideal of all is the ideal which looks a little practical. It is difficult to attain a high ideal, consequently it is almost impossible to persuade ourselves that we have attained it. But it is easy to attain a low ideal, consequently it is easier still to persuade ourselves that we have attained it when we have done nothing of the kind. To take a random example it might be called a high ambition to wish to be an archangel. The man who entertained such an idea would very possibly exhibit asceticism or even frenzy, but not I think delusion. He would not think he was an archangel and go about flapping his hands under the impression that they were wings. But suppose that a sane man had a low ideal. Suppose he wished to be a gentleman. Anyone who knows the world knows that in nine weeks he would have persuaded himself that he was a gentleman. And this being manifestly not the case, the result will be very real and practical dislocations and calamities in social life. It is not the wild ideals which wreck the practical world, it is the tame ideals. The matter may perhaps be illustrated by a parallel from our modern politics. When men tell us that the old liberal politicians of the type of Gladstone cared only for ideals, of course they are talking nonsense. They cared for a great many other things, including votes. And when men tell us that modern politicians of the type Mr. Chamberlain, or in another way Lord Rosemary, care only for votes or for material interest, then again they are talking nonsense. These men care for ideals like all other men. But the real distinction which may be drawn is this, that to this older politician the ideal was an ideal, and nothing else. To the new politician his dream is not only a good dream, it is a reality. The old politician would have said it would be a good thing if there were a republican federation dominating the world. But the modern politician does not say it would be a good thing if there were a British imperialism dominating the world. He says that it is a good thing that there is a British imperialism dominating the world. As clearly there is nothing of the kind. The old liberal would say there ought to be a good Irish government in Ireland. But the ordinary modern unionist does not say there ought to be a good English government in Ireland, he says. There is a good English government in Ireland which is absurd. In short the modern politicians seem to think that a man becomes practical merely by making assertions entirely about practical things. Apparently a delusion does not matter as long as it is a materialistic delusion. Instinctively most of us feel that as a practical matter even a contrary is true. I certainly would much rather share my apartments with a gentleman who thought he was God than with a gentleman who thought he was a grasshopper. To be continually haunted by practical images and practical problems, to be constantly thinking of things as actual, as urgent, as in process of completion, these things do not prove a man to be practical. These things indeed are among the most ordinary signs of a lunative. That our modern statesmen are materialistic is nothing against their being also morbid. Seeing angels in a vision may make a man's supernaturalist to excess, but merely seeing snakes in a delirium tremens does not make him a naturalist. And when we come actually to examine the main stock notions of our modern practical politicians we find that those main stock notions are mainly delusions. A great many instances might be given of the fact. We might take for example the case of that strange class of notions which underlie the word union, and all the eulogies heaped upon it. Of course union is no more a good thing in itself than separation is a good thing in itself. To have a party in favor of union and a party in favor of separation is as absurd as to have a party in favor of going upstairs and a party in favor of going downstairs. The question is not whether we go up or down stairs, but where we are going to and what are we going for? Union is strength. Union is also weakness. It is a good thing to harness two horses to a cart, but it is not a good thing to try and turn two handsome cabs into one four-wheeler. Turning ten nations into one empire may happen to be as feasible as turning ten shillings into one half sovereign. It also may happen to be as preposterous as turning ten terriers into one mastiff. The question in all cases is not a question of union or absence of union, but of identity or absence of identity. Owing to certain historical and moral causes, two nations may be so united as upon the whole to help each other. Thus England and Scotland pass their time in paying each other compliments, but their energies and atmospheres run distinct and parallel and consequently do not clash. Scotland continues to be educated and Calvinistic. England continues to be uneducated and happy. But owing to certain other moral and certain other political causes, two nations may be so united as only to hamper each other. Their lines do clash and do not run parallel. Thus, for instance, England and Ireland are so united that the Irish can sometimes rule England, but can never rule Ireland. The educational systems, including the last Education Act, are here, as in the case of Scotland, a very good test of the manner. The overwhelming majority of Irishmen believe in a strict Catholicism. The overwhelming majority of Englishmen believe in a vague Protestantism. The Irish Parmy in the Parliament of Union is just large enough to prevent the English education being indefinitely Protestant and just small enough to prevent the Irish education being definitely Catholic. Here we have a state of things which no man in his senses would ever dream of wishing to continue if he had not been bewitched by the sentimentalism of the mere word union. This example of union, however, is not the example which I propose to take of the ingrained futility and deception underlying all the assumptions of the modern practical politician. I wish to speak especially of another and much more general delusion. It pervades the minds and speeches of all the practical men of all parties, and it is a childish blunder built upon a single false metaphor. I refer to the universal modern talk about young nations and new nations, about America being young, about New Zealand being new. The whole thing is a trick of words. America is not young, New Zealand is not new. It is a very discussable question whether they are not both much older than England or Ireland. Of course we may use the metaphor views about America or the colonies if we use it strictly as implying only a recent origin. But if we use it as we do use it as implying vigor or vivacity or crudity or inexperience or hope or a long life before them of any of the romantic attributes of youth, then it is surely as clear as daylight that we are duped by a stale figure of speech. We can easily see the matter clearly by applying it to any other institution parallel to the institution of an independent nationality. If a club called the Milk and Soda League, let us say, was set up yesterday, as I have no doubt it was, then of course the Milk and Soda League is a young club in the sense that it was set up yesterday, but in no other sense. It may consist entirely of more abundant old gentlemen. It may be more abundant itself. We may call it a young club in the light of the fact it was founded yesterday. We may also call it a very old club in the light of the fact that it will most probably go bankrupt tomorrow. All disappears very obvious when we put it in this form. Anyone who adopted the young community delusion with regard to a bank or a butcher shop would be sent to an asylum. But the whole modern political notion that America and the colonies must be very vigorous because they are very new. Rest upon no better foundation. That America was founded long after England does not make it even in the faintest degree more probable. That America will not perish a long time before England. That England existed before her colonies does not make it any less likely that she will exist after her colonies. And when we look at the actual history of the world, we find that great European nations almost invariably have survived the vitality of their colonies. When we look at the actual history of the world, we find that if there is a thing that is born old and dies young, it is a colony. The Greek colonies went to pieces long before the Greek civilization. The Spanish colonies have gone to pieces long before the nation of Spain. Nor does there seem to be any reason to doubt the possibility or even the probability of the conclusion that the colonial civilization which owes its origin to England will be much briefer and much less vigorous than the civilization of England itself. The English nation will still be going the way of all European nations when the Anglo-Saxon race has gone the way of all fads. Now of course the interesting question is, have we, in the case of America and the colonies, any real evidence of a moral and intellectual youth as opposed to the indisputable triviality of a merely chronological youth? Consciously or unconsciously, we know that we have no such evidence and conscious or unconsciously therefore we proceed to make it up. Of this pure and placid invention a good example, for instance, can be found in the recent poem by Mr. Rudyard Kipling, speaking of the English people and the South African War. Mr. Kipling says that we fond on the younger nations for the men that could shoot and ride. Some people consider this sentence insulting. All that I'm concerned with at present is the evident fact that it is not true. The colonies provided very useful volunteer troops but they did not provide the best troops nor achieved the most successful exploits. The best work in the war, on the English side, was done, as might have been expected, by the best English regiments. The men who could shoot and ride were not the enthusiastic corn merchants from Melbourne any more than they were the enthusiastic clerks from Cheepside. The men who could shoot and ride were the men who had been taught to shoot and ride in the discipline of the standing army of a great European power. Of course the Colonials are as brave and athletic as any other average white men. Of course they acquitted themselves with reasonable credit. All I have here to indicate is that for the purposes of this theory of the new nation it is necessary to maintain that the colonial forces were more useful or more heroic than the gunners at Colenso or the fighting fifth. And of this contention there is not and never has been one stick or straw of evidence. A similar attempt is made and with even less success to represent the literature of the colonies as something fresh and vigorous and important. The imperialist magazines are constantly springing upon us some genius from Queensland or Canada through whom we are expected to smell the odors of the Bush or the Prairie. As a matter of fact anyone who is even slightly interested in literature as such and I for one confess that I am only slightly interested in literature as such will freely admit that the stories of these geniuses smell of nothing but printers ink. And that not of first quality. By a great effort of imperial imagination the generous English people reads into these words of force and a novelty. But the force and the novelty are not in the new writers. The force and the novelty are in the ancient heart of the English. Anybody who studies them impartially will know that the first great writers of the colonies are not even particularly novel in their note and atmosphere are not only not producing a new kind of good literature but are not even in any particular sense producing a new kind of bad literature. The first great writers of the new countries are really almost exactly like the second great writers of the old countries. Of course they do feel the mystery of the wilderness the mystery of the bush for all simple and honest men feel this in Melbourne or Margate or South St. Pancras. But when they write most sincerely and most successfully it is not with the background of the mystery of the bush but with a background expressed or assumed of our own romantic cockney civilization. What really moves their souls with a kindly terror is not the mystery of the wilderness but the mystery of a handsome cab. Of course there are some exceptions to this generalization. The one really arresting exception is Olive Shreiner and she is quite a certainly an exception that proves the rule. Olive Shreiner is a fierce brilliant and realistic novelist but she is all this precisely because she is not English at all. The tribal kinship is with the country of Teniers and Martin Martens with the country of realists. Her literary kinship is with other pessimistic fiction of the continent with the novelist whose very pity is cruel. Olive Shreiner is the one English colonial who is not conventional but the simple reason that South Africa is the one English colony which is not English and probably never will be. And of course there are individual exceptions in a minor way. I remember in particular some Australian tales by Mr. McElwain which were really able and effective and which for that reason I suppose are not presented to the public with blasts of a trumpet. But my general contention, if but before anyone with a love of letters will not be disputed if it is understood. It is not the truth that the colonial civilization as a whole is giving us or shows us any signs of giving us a literature which will startle and renovate our own. It may be a very good thing for us to have an affectionate illusion in a matter that is quite another affair. The colonies may have given England a new emotion. I only say that they have not given the world a new book. Touching these English colonies I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do not say of them or of America that they have not a future or that they will not be great nations. I merely deny the whole established modern expression about them. I deny that they are destined to a future. I deny that they are destined to be great nations. I deny of course that any human thing is destined to be anything. All the absurd physical metaphors such as youth and age, living and dying, are one applied to nations but pseudo-scientific attempts to conceal from men the awful liberty of their lonely souls. In the case of America indeed, a warning to this effect is instant and essential. America, of course, like every other human thing, can in spiritual sense live or die as much as it chooses. But at the present moment the matter which America has very seriously considered is not how nearer it is to its birth and beginning but how near it may be to its end. It is only a verbal question whether the American civilization is young. It may become a very practical and urgent question whether it is dying. When once we have cast aside, as we inevitably have after a moment's thought, the fanciful physical metaphor involved in the world youth, what serious evidence have we that America is a fresh force and not a stale one? It has a great many people like China. It has a great deal of money like defeated Carthage or dying Venice. It is full of bustle and excitability like Athens after its ruin and all the Greek cities in there decline. It is fond of new things but the older always fond of new things. Young men read chronicles but old men read newspapers. It admires strength and good looks. It admires a big and barbaric beauty in its women for instance but so did Rome when the goth was at the gates. All these are things quite compatible with fundamental tedium and decay. There are three main shapes or symbols in which a nation can show itself essentially glad and great. By the heroic in government, by the heroic in arms, and by the heroic in art. Beyond government, which is as it were the very shape and body of a nation, the most significant thing about any citizen is his artistic attitude toward a holiday and his moral attitude towards a fight. That is his way of accepting life and his way of accepting death. Subjected to these eternal tests, America does not appear by any means as particularly fresh or untouched. She appears with all the weakness and weariness of modern England or of any other western power. In her politics she has broken up exactly as England has broken up into a bewildering opportunism and insincerity. In the matter of war and the national attitude towards war, her resemblance to England is even more manifest and melancholy. It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of the strong people. First it is the small power and fight small powers. Then it is a great power and fights great powers. Then it is a great power and fights small powers but pretends that they are great powers in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that the next step is to become a small power itself. England exhibited this symptom of decadence very badly in the war with the Transfall but America exhibited it worse in the war with Spain. It was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy. America added to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of the carousel and triumph the triumph over nobody but when we come to the last test of nationality the test of art and letters the case is almost terrible. The English colonies have produced no great artists and that fact may prove that they are still full of silent possibilities and a reserve force but America has produced great artists and that fact almost certainly proves that she is full of a fine utility and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are they are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave barbaric art happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a schoolboy? No, the colonies have not spoken and they are safe. Their silence may be the silence of the unborn but out of America has come a sweet and startling cry as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man. End of chapter 18. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Heretics by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 19 Slum Novelists and the Slums. Odd ideas are entertained in our time about the real nature of the doctrine of human fraternity. The real doctrine is something which we do not with all our modern humanitarianism. Very clearly understand, much less very closely practice. There is nothing for instance particularly undemocratic about kicking your butler downstairs. It may be wrong but it is not unfraternal. In a certain sense the blow or kick may be considered as a confession of equality. You are meeting your butler body to body. You are almost according to him the privilege of the dual. There is nothing undemocratic though there may be something unreasonable in expecting a great deal from the butler and being filled with a kind of frenzy of surprise when he falls short of the divine stature. The thing which is really undemocratic and unfraternal is not to expect the butler to be more or less divine. The thing which is really undemocratic and unfraternal is to say as so many modern humanitarians say, of course one myths make allowances for those on a lower plane. All things considered indeed it may be said without undue exaggeration that the really undemocratic and unfraternal thing is the common practice of not kicking the butler downstairs. It is only because such a vast section of the modern world is out of sympathy with the serious democratic sentiment that this statement will seem too many to be lacking in seriousness. Democracy is not philanthropy. It is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is not founded on pity for the common man. Democracy is found on reverence for the common man or if you will even on fear of him. It does not champion man because man is so miserable but because man is so sublime. It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king. For its dream is always the dream of the first Roman republic, a nation of kings. Next to a genuine republic the most democratic thing in the world is a hereditary despotism. I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post. Rational despotism that is selective despotism is always a curse to mankind because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some trig who has no brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational despotism is always democratic because it is the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form of slavery is that which is called caesarism or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. But that means that men choose a representative not because he represents them but because he does not. Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV because they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great man always appears in times of weakness and cowardice. We never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small. Hereditary despotism is then in essence and sentiment democratic because it chooses from mankind at random. If it does not declare that every man may rule it declares the next most democratic thing it declares that any man may rule. Hereditary aristocracy is a far worse and more dangerous thing because the numbers and multiplicity of an aristocracy make it sometimes possible for it to figure as an aristocracy of intellect. Some of its members will presumably have brains and thus they at any rate will be an intellectual aristocracy within the social one. They will rule the aristocracy by virtue of their intellect and they will rule the country by virtue of their aristocracy. Thus double falsity will be set up and millions of the images of God who fortunately for their wives and families are neither gentlemen nor clever men will be represented by a man like Mr. Belfour or Mr. Wyndham because he is too gentlemanly to be called merely clever and just too clever to be called merely a gentleman. But even an hereditary aristocracy may exhibit by a sort of accident from time to time some of the basically democratic quality which belongs to a hereditary despotism. It is amusing to think how much conservative ingenuity has been wasted in the deference of the House of Lords by men who were desperately endeavoring to prove that the House of Lords consisted of clever men. There is one really good defense of the House of Lords though admirers of the period are strangely coy about using it and that is that the House of Lords in its full and proper strength consists of stupid men. It really would be a plausible defense of that otherwise indefensible body to point out that the clever men in the commons who owed their power to cleverness ought in the last resort to be checked by the average man in the Lords who owed their power to accident. Of course there would be many answers to such a contention as for instance that the House of Lords is largely no longer a House of Lords but a House of Tradesmen and Financiers or that the bulk of the commonplace nobility do not vote and so leave the chamber to the prigs and the specialists and the mad old gentlemen with hobbies. But on some occasion the House of Lords even under all these disadvantages is in some sense representative. When all the peers flock together to vote against Mr Gladstone's second home rule bill for instance those who said that the peers represented the English people were perfectly right. All those dear old men who happened to be born peers were at that moment and upon that question the precise counterpart of all the dear old men who happened to be born paupers or middle-class gentlemen. That mob of peers did really represent the English people that is to say it was honest, ignorant, vaguely excited, almost unanimous and obviously wrong. Of course rational democracy is better as an expression of the public will than the haphazard hereditary method while we're about having any kind of democracy let it be rational democracy but if we are to have any kind of oligarchy let it be irrational oligarchy then at least we shall be ruled by men. But the thing which is really required for the proper working of democracy is not merely the democratic system or even the democratic philosophy but the democratic emotion. The democratic emotion like most elementary and indisputable things is the thing difficult to describe at any time but it is peculiarly difficult to describe it in our enlightened age for the simple reason that it is peculiarly difficult to find it it is a certain instinctive attitude which feels the things in which all men agree to be unspeakably important and all things in which they differ such as mere brains to be almost unspeakably unimportant. The nearest approach to it in our ordinary life would be the prothitude with which we should consider mere humanity in any circumstance of shock or death. We should say after a somewhat disturbing discovery there is a dead man under the sofa. We should not be likely to say there is a dead man of considerable personal refinement under the sofa. We should say a woman has fallen into the water. We should not say a highly educated woman has fallen into the water. Nobody would say there are the remains of a clear thinker in your back garden. Nobody would say unless you hurry up and stop him a man with a very fine ear for music will have jumped off that cliff. But this emotion which all of us have in connection with such things as birth and death is to some people native and constant at all ordinary times and in all ordinary places. It was native to St. Francis of Assisi. It was native to Walt Whitman. In this strange and splendid degree it cannot be expected perhaps to pervade a whole Commonwealth or a whole civilization. But one Commonwealth may have it much more than another Commonwealth. One civilization much more than another civilization. No community perhaps ever had it so much as the early Franciscans. No community perhaps ever had it so little as ours. Everything in our age has when carefully examined this fundamentally undemocratic quality in religion and morals we should admit in the abstract that the sins of the educated classes were as great as or perhaps greater than the sins of the poor and ignorant. But in practice the great difference between the medieval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all. We are always talking about the sin of intemperate drinking because it is quite obvious that the poor have it more than the rich. But we are always denying that there is any such thing as the sin of pride because it would be quite obvious that the rich have it more than the poor. We're always ready to make a saint or prophet of the educated man who goes into the cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval idea of a saint or prophet was something quite different. The medieval saint or prophet was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little kindly advice to the educated. The old tyrants had enough insolence to dispoil the poor but they had not enough insolence to preach to them. It was the gentlemen who oppressed the slums but it was the slums that admonished the gentlemen. And just as we are undemocratic in faith and morals so we are by the very nature of our attitude in such matters, undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics, it is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were Democrats we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, what laws shall we make? In a purely democratic state you'd always be saying what laws can we obey? A purely democratic state perhaps there never has been but even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic that every feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all probability return upon himself. His feathers might be cut off for breaking a sumptuary law. His head might be cut off for high treason. But the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed class but not the governing. We have public house licensing laws but not sumptuary laws. That is to say we have laws against the festivity and hospitality of the poor but no laws against the festivity and hospitality of the rich. We have laws against blasphemy. It is against a kind of course an offensive speaking in which nobody but a rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge. But we have no laws against heresy that is against the intellectual poisoning of the whole people in which only prosperous and prominent man would be likely to be successful. The evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones. The evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never suffer. Whether what they inflict is in their intention good or bad they become equally frivolous. The case against the governing class of modern England is not in the least that it is selfish. If you like you may call the English oligarchs too fantastically unselfish. The case against them is simply that when they legislate for all men they always omit themselves. We are undemocratic then in our religion as is proved by our efforts to raise the poor. We are undemocratic in our government as is proved by our innocent attempt to govern them well. But above all we are undemocratic in our literature as is proved by the torrential novels about the poor and serious studies of the poor which pour from our publishers every month. And the more modern the book is the more certain it is to be devoid of democratic sentiment. A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple and unnecessary description but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction it seems very necessary indeed. Most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator. There is no more need to study the psychology of poverty than to study the psychology of bad temper or the psychology of vanity or the psychology of animal spirits. A man ought to know something of the emotions of an insulted man not by being insulted but simply by being a man. And he ought to know something of the emotions of a poor man not by being poor but simply by being a man. Therefore in any writer who is describing poverty my first objection to him will be that he has studied his subject. A democrat would have imagined it. A great many hard things have been said about religious slumming and political or social slumming but surely the most despicable of all is artistic slumming. The religious teacher is at least supposed to be interested in the Kostermager because he is a man. The politician is in some dim and perverted sense interested in the Kostermager because he is a citizen. It is only the wretched writer who is interested in the Kostermager merely because he is a Kostermager. Nevertheless so long as he is merely seeking impressions or in other words copy his trade though dull is honest but when he endeavors to represent that he is describing the spiritual core of a Kostermager his dim vices and his delicate virtues then we must object that his claim is preposterous. We must remind him that he is a journalist and nothing else. He has far less psychological authority even than the foolish missionary for he is in the literal and derivative sense a journalist while a missionary is an eternalist. The missionary at least pretends to have a version of the man's lot for all time. The journalist only pretends to have a version of it from day to day. The missionary comes to tell the poor man that he is in the same condition with all men. The journalist comes to tell other people how different the poor man is from everybody else. If the modern novels about slums such as novels of Mr Arthur Morrison or the exceedingly evil novels of Mr Somerset Mom are intended to be sensational I can only say that it is a noble and reasonable object and that they attain it. A sensation a shock to the imagination like the contact with cold water is always a good and exhilarating thing and undoubtedly men will always seek this sensation among other forms in the form of the study of the strange antics of remote or alien peoples. In the 12th century men obtained this sensation by reading about dog-headed men in Africa. In the 20th century they obtained it by reading about pig-headed boars in Africa. The men of the 12th century were certainly it must be admitted some are the more credulous of the two for it is not recorded of the men of the 12th century that they organized a sanguinary crusade solely for the purpose of altering the singular formation of the heads of the Africans. But it may be and it may even legitimately be that since all these monsters have faded from the popular mythology it is necessary to have in our fiction the image of the horrible and hairy East Ender merely to keep alive in us a fearful and childlike wonder at external peculiarities. But the Middle Ages with the great deal more common sense than it would now be fashionable to admit regarded natural history at bottom rather as a kind of joke. They regarded the soul as very important. Hence while they had a natural history of dog-headed men they did not profess to have a psychology of dog-headed men. They did not profess to mirror the mind of a dog-headed man to share his tenderest secrets or mount with his most celestial musings. They did not write novels about the semi-cane nine creature attributing to him all the oldest morbidities and all the newest fads. It is permissible to present men as monsters if we wish to make the reader jump and to make anybody jump is always the Christian act. But it is not permissible to present men as regarding themselves as monsters or as making themselves jump. To summarize our slum fiction it is quite defensible as aesthetic fiction. It is not defensible as spiritual fact. One enormous obstacle stands in the way of its actuality. The men who write it and the men who read it are men of the middle classes or the upper classes at least of those who are loosely termed the educated classes. Hence the fact that it is the life as the refined man sees it proves that it cannot be the life as the unrefined man lives it. Rich man writes stories about poor men and describe them as speaking with a coarse or heavy or husky enunciation. But if four men wrote novels about you or me they would describe us as speaking with some observed shrill or affected voice such as we only hear from a duchess in a three act farce. The slum novelist gains his whole effect by the fact that some detail is strange to the reader but that detail by the nature of the case cannot be strange in itself. It cannot be strange to the soul which he's professing to study. The slum novelist gains his effects by describing the same gray mist as draping the dingy factory and the dingy tavern. But to the man he is supposed to be studying there must be exactly the same difference between the factory and the tavern that there is to a middle class man between a late night at the office and a supper at Paganes. The slum novelist is content with pointing out that to the eye of his particular class the pickaxe looks dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty but the man he is supposed to be studying sees the difference between them exactly as a clerk sees the difference between a ledger and an addition deluxe. The carousel of the life is inevitably lost or to us the highlights and the shadows are a light gray but the highlights and the shadows are not a light gray in that life any more than in any other. The kind of man who could really express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind of man who could share them. In short these books are not a record of the psychology of poverty they are a record of the psychology of wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty. They are not a description of the state of the slums they are only a very dark and dreadful description of the state of the slumbers. One might give innumerable examples of the essentially unsympathetic and unpopular quality of these realistic writers but perhaps the simplest and most obvious example with which we could conclude is the mere fact that these writers are realistic. The poor have many other vices but at least they are never realistic. The poor are melodramatic and romantic ingrain. The poor all believe in high moral platitudes and copy book maxims. Probably this is the ultimate meaning of the great saying blessed are the poor. Blessed are the poor for they are always making life or trying to make life like an Adelfe play. Some innocent educationalists and philanthropists or even philanthropists can be innocent have expressed the grave astonishment that the masses prefer shilling chakras to scientific treatises and melodramas to problem plays. The reason is very simple. The realistic story is certainly more artistic than the melodramatic story. If what you desire is deft handling delicate proportions a unit of artistic atmosphere the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. In everything that is light and bright and ornamental the realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. But at least the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic story. The melodrama is much more like life. It is much more like man and especially the poor man. It is very banal and very inartistic when a poor woman at the Adelfi says you think I will sell my own child but the poor woman in the Battersea high roads who say do you think I will sell my own child they say it on every available occasion you can hear a sort of murmur or babel of it all the way down the street it is very stale and weak dramatic art if that is all when the working man confronts his master and says I'm a man what a workman does say I'm a man two or three times every day in fact it is tedious possibly to hear poor men being melodramatic behind the footlights but that is because one can always hear them being melodramatic in the street outside. In short melodrama if it is dull is dull because it is too accurate somewhat the same problem exists in the case of stories about schoolboys Mr. Kipling's stalky and company is much more amusing if you are talking about amusement than the late Dean Ferrar's Eric or little by little but Eric is immeasurably more like real school life for real school life real boyhood is full of the things of which Eric is full. Pregishness a crude piety a silly sin a weak but continual attempt at the heroic in a word melodrama and if we wish to lay a firm basis for any efforts to help the poor we must not become realistic and see them from outside we must become melodramatic and see them from the inside the novelist must not take out his notebook and say I am an expert no he must imitate the workman in the Adelphi play he must slap himself on the chest and say I am a man end of chapter 19