WE MODERNS:

ENIGMAS AND GUESSES

By

EDWIN MUIR

THE FREE LANCE BOOKS

Edited with Introduction by H. L. Mencken

NEW YORK ALFRED. A. KNOPF

MCMXX

CONTENTS

[INTRODUCTION]

That a young Scotsman, reacting from the vast emotional assault of the late ferocious war, should have withdrawn himself into an ivory tower in Glasgow town, and there sat himself down in heroic calm to wrestle with the vexatious and no doubt intrinsically insoluble problems of being and becoming—this was surely nothing to cause, whispers among connoisseurs of philosophical passion, for that grim, persistent, cold-blooded concern with the fundamental mysteries of the world has been the habit of the Scots ever since they emerged from massacre and blue paint. From blue paint, indeed, the transition was almost instantaneous to blue souls, and the conscience of Britain, such as it is, has dwelt north of the Cheviot Hills ever since. Find a Scot, and you are at once beset by a metaphysician, or, at all events, by a theologian. But for a young man of those damp, desolate parts, throwing himself into the racial trance, to emerge with a set of ideas reaching back, through Nietzsche and even worse heretics, to the spacious, innocent, somewhat gaudy days of the Greek illumination—for such a fellow, so bred and circumscribed, to come out of his tower with a concept of life as a grand and glittering adventure, a tremendous spectacle, an overpowering ecstasy, almost an orgy—such a phenomenon was, and is, quite sufficient to lift the judicious eyebrow. Yet here is this Mr. Edwin Muir of Caledonia bearing just that outlandish contraband, offering just that strange flouting of all things traditionally Scotch. What he preaches in the ensuing aphorisms is the emancipation of the modern spirit from its rotting heritage of ingenuous fears and exploded certainties. What he denounces most bitterly is the abandonment of a world that is beautifully surprising and charming to the rule of sordid, timid and unimaginative men—the regimentation of ideas in a system that is half a denial of the obvious and half a conglomeration of outworn metaphors, all taken too literally. And what he pleads for most eloquently, with his cold, reserved northern eloquence, is the whole-hearted acceptance of "life as a sacrament,... life as joy triumphing over fate,... life made innocent,... life washed free from how much filth of remorse, guilt, contempt, 'sin'."...

It goes without saying that the red hand of Nietzsche is in all this. The Naumburg Antichrist, damned for five years running by the indignation of all right-thinking men, has made steady and enormous progress under cover. There has never been a time, indeed, when his notions enjoyed a wider dispersion or were poll-parrotted unwittingly by greater numbers of the righteous. Excessive draughts of the democratic cure-all, swallowed label, cork, testimonials and all, have brought Christendom to bed with Katzenjammer—and there stands the seductive antidote in its leering blue bottles. Where would philosophical opponents of Bolshevism be without Nietzsche? Who would devise arguments for them, eloquence for them, phrases for them? On all sides one hears echoes of him—often transformed from his harsh bass to a piping falsetto, but nevertheless recognizable enough. Any port in a storm! If God is asleep, then turn to the Devil! The show offers the best laughing that heathen have enjoyed, perhaps, since the Hundred Years' War. And there is an extra snicker in the fact that Scotland, once again, seems to resume the old trade of intellectual smuggling. If one Scot is to the front with so forthright a piece as "We Moderns," then surely there must be a thousand other Scots hard at it in a pianissimo manner. Thus, I suppose, the crime of Carlyle is repeated on a wholesale scale, and once again the poor Sassenach is inoculated with pathogenic Prussian organisms. On this side of the ocean the business is less efficiently organized; we have no race of illicit metaphysicians on our border. But the goods come in all the same. I have heard more prattling of stale Nietzscheism of late, from men bearing the flag in one hand and the cross in the other, than I ever heard in the old days from parlour anarchists and unfrocked priests. Nietzsche, belatedly discovered by a world beset by terrors too great for it and mysteries too profound, becomes almost respectable, nay, almost Episcopalian!

What ails it, at bottom, is the delusion that all the mysteries, given doctors enough, theories enough, pills enough, may be solved—that it is all a matter of finding a panacea, unearthing a prophet, passing a bill. If it turns to Nietzsche, however gingerly and suspiciously, it will turn only to fresh disappointment and dismay, for Nietzsche is no quack with another sure cure, but simply an iconoclast who shows that all the sure cures of the past and present have failed, and must fail—and particularly the sure cure of the mob, the scheme of determining the diagnosis by taking a vote, the notion that the medicine which most pleases the grossest palates is the medicine to get the patient upon his legs. Nietzsche is no reformer; he is an assassin of reformers; if he preaches anything at all, it is that reform is useless, illusory—above all, unnecessary. The patient is really not dying at all. Let him get up and dance! Let him pick up his bed and employ it upon the skulls of his physicians! Life is not a disease to be treated with boluses and philtres, not an affliction to be shirked and sentimentalized, but an adventure to be savoured and enjoyed—life, here and now, is the highest imaginable experience. What the world needs is not a cure for it, but room for it, freedom for it, innocent zest for it. So accepted and regarded, half of its terrors vanish at once, and even its unescapable catastrophes take on a certain high stateliness, a fine æsthetic dignity. This is the tragic view that Mr. Muir cries up—life as joy triumphing over fate. "For the character of tragedy is not negative and condemnatory, but deeply affirmative and joyous." The ideal man is not the time-serving slave of Christendom, in endless terror of God, forever flattering and bribing God, but the Nietzschean Ja-sager, the yes-sayer, facing destiny courageously and a bit proudly, living to the full the life that lies within his grasp in the present, accepting its terms as he finds them, undaunted by the impenetrable shadows that loom ahead.

What Mr. Muir, following Nietzsche, is most dissatisfied with in the modern spirt is its intolerable legalism—its fatuous frenzy to work everything out to nine places of constabulary decimals, to establish windy theories and principles, to break the soul of man to a rule. In part, of course, that effort is of respectable enough origin. It springs from intelligent self-assertion, healthy curiosity, the sense of competence; it is a by-product of the unexampled conquests of nature that have gone on in the modern age. But in other parts it is no more than a by-product of the democratic spirit, the rise of the inferior, the emancipation of the essentially in competent. Science is no longer self-sufficient, isolated from moral ideas, an end in itself; it tends to become a mere agent of mob tyranny; it takes on gratuitous and incomprehensible duties and responsibilities; like the theology that it has supplanted, it has friendlier and friendlier dealings with the secular arm. And art, too, begins to be poisoned by this moral obsession of the awakened proletariat. It ceases to be an expression of well-being, of healthy functioning, of unpolluted joy in life, and becomes a thing of obscure and snuffling purposes, a servant of some low enterprise of the cocksure. The mob is surely no scientist and no artist; it is, in fact, eternally the anti-scientist, the anti-artist; science and art offer it unscalable heights and are hence its enemies. But in a world dominated by mob yearnings and mob passions, even science and art must take on some colour from below. The enemies, if they cannot be met and overthrown on a fair field, can at least be degraded. And when the mob degrades, it always degrades to moral tunes. Morality is its one avenue to superiority—false but none the less soothing. It can always be good. It can always dignify its stupidity, its sordidness and its cowardice with terms borrowed from ethical revelation. The good man is a numskull, but nevertheless he is good.

Mr. Muir has at the modern spirit on many other counts, but nearly all of them may be converted with more or less plausibility into an objection to its ethical obsession, its idiotic craze to legislate and admonish. When he says, for example, that realism in the novel and the drama is hollow, he leaves his case but half stated; there is undoubtedly a void where imagination, feeling and a true sense of the tragic ought to be, but it is filled with the common garbage of mob thinking, to wit, with the common garbage of moral purpose. All of the chief realists, from Zola to Barbusse, are pre-eminently moralists disguised as scientists; what one derives from them, reading them sympathetically, is not illumination but merely indignation. They are always violently against something—and that something is usually the fact that the world is not as secure and placid a place as a Methodist Sunday-school. Their affectation of moral agnosticism need deceive no one. They are secretly appalled (and delighted) by their own "scientific" pornographies, just as their brethren of the vice crusades are appalled and delighted. Realism, of course, can never be absolute. It must always stress something and leave out something. What it commonly stresses is the colossal failure of society to fit into an orderly scheme of causes and effects, virtues and rewards, crimes and punishments. What it leaves out is the glow of romance that hangs about that failure—the poignant drama of blind chance, the fascination of the unknowable. The realists are bad artists because they are anæsthetic to beauty. And a good many scientists are bad scientists for precisely the same reason. In their hands the gorgeous struggle of man against the mysteries and foul ambuscades of nature is converted into a banal cause before a police court, with the complainant put on the stand to prove that his own hands are clean. One cannot read some of the modern medical literature, particularly on the side of public hygiene, without giving one's sympathy to the tubercle bacilli and the spirochætæ. Science of that sort ceases to be a fit concern for men of dignity, superior men, gentlemen; it becomes a concern for evangelists, uplifters, bounders. Its aim is no longer to penetrate the impenetrable, to push forward the bounds of human knowledge, to overreach the sinister trickeries of God; its aim is simply to lengthen the lives of human ciphers and to reinforce their delusion that they confer a favour upon the universe by living at all. Worse, it converts the salvation of such vacuums into a moral obligation, and sets up the absurd doctrine that human progress is furthered by diminishing the death-rate in the Balkans, by rescuing Georgia crackers from the hookworm and by reducing the whole American people, the civilized minority with the barbarian mass, to a race of teetotalling ascetics, full of pious indignations and Freudian suppressions.

The western world reeks with this new sentimentality. It came on in Europe with the fall of feudalism and the rise of the lower orders. Even war, the last surviving enterprise of natural man, has been transformed from a healthy play of innocent instincts into a combat of moral ideas, nine-tenths of them obviously unsound. It no longer offers a career to a Gustavus Adolphus, a Prince Eugene or a Napoleon I. It loses even the spirit of gallant adventure that dignified the theological balderdash of the Crusades—in which, as every one knows, the balderdash was quickly absorbed altogether by the adventure. It becomes the business of specialists in moral indignation. The modern general must not only know the elements of military science; he must also show some of the gifts of a chautauqua orator, including particularly the gift of right-thinking; it would do him more harm to speak of his opponent with professional politeness, as one lawyer might speak of another, than it would do him to lose an important battle. Worse, war gets out of the hands of soldiers altogether. It becomes an undertaking of boob-bumpers, spy-hunters, emotion-pumpers, propaganda-mongers—all sorts of disgusting cads. Its great prizes tend to go, not to the men fighting in the field, but to the man manufacturing shells, alarms, and moral indignation. At the time of the last great series of wars it was said that every musketeer of France carried a marshal's baton in his haversack. The haversack of the musketeer now contains only official literature, informing him of the causes of the war as most lately determined, the names of its appointed moral heroes, and the penalties for discussing its aims, for swapping tobacco with the boys on the other side, and for inviting a pretty peasant-girl into his shell-hole. The baton is being fought for by a press-agent, a labour leader and a Y.M.C.A. secretary.

It is against such degradations that Mr. Muir raises his voice, and in particular against such degradations in the field of the fine arts. The superficial, I daresay, will mistake him (once they get over the sheer immorality of his relation to Nietzsche) as simply one more pleader for l'art pour l'art—one more prophet of a superior and disembodied æstheticism. Well, turn to his singularly acute and accurate estimate of Walter Pater: there is the answer to that error. He has, in fact, no leanings whatsoever in any such direction. The thing he argues for, despite all his fury against the debasement of art to mob uses, is not an art that shall be transcendental, but an art that shall relate itself to life primarily and unashamedly, an art that shall accept and celebrate life. He preaches, of course, out of season. There has never been a time in the history of the world when the natural delight of man in himself was held in greater suspicion. Christianity, after two thousand years, seems triumphant at last. From the ashes of its barbaric theology there arises the phoenix of its maudlin sentimentality; the worship of inferiority becomes its dominating cult. In all directions that worship goes on. It gives a new colour to politics, and not only to politics, but also to the sciences and the arts. Perhaps we are at the mere beginning of the process. The doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God is now defended and propagated by machine guns; it becomes a felony to deny it; one is already taxed in America to make good the lofty aspirations of Poles, Jugo-Slavs and Armenians. In England there are signs of a further step. An Ehrlich or a Koch, miraculously at work there, might be jailed for slitting the throat of a white rat: all the lower animals, too, it appears, are God's creatures. So viewed, a guinea-pig becomes the peer of a Beethoven, as a farm-hand is already the peer of a Bach. It is too late to turn back; let us hope that the logic of it is quickly worked out to its unescapable conclusion. Once the pediculus vestimenti and the streptococcus are protected, there will be a chance again, it may be, for the law of natural selection to achieve its benign purgation.

Meanwhile, Mr. Muir cannot expect his ideas to get much attention. A gaudy parade is passing and the populace is busy cheering. Nevertheless, they were ideas worth playing with, and they are now worth printing and pondering. It seems to me that, in more than one way, they help to illuminate the central æsthetic question—the problem as to the nature and function of artistic representation. They start from Nietzschean beginnings, but they get further than Nietzsche ever got. His whole æsthetic was hampered by the backwardness of psychology in his time. He made many a brilliant guess, but more than once he was hauled up rather sharply by his ignorance of the machinery of thought. Mr. Muir not only has Nietzsche behind him; he also has Freud, as he shows, for example, in §145. Beyond him there is still a lot of room. He will not stop the parade—but he will help the next man.

Edwin Muir was born in the Orkney Islands in 1887. His father was a small crofter there. When he was fourteen years old the family moved to Glasgow. Within four years his father, his mother and two older brothers died, and he was forced to fend for himself. He became a clerk in a Glasgow office and remained there until very recently, when he moved to London. Like all other young men with the itch to write, he tried poetry before prose, and his first verses were printed in The New Age. But his discovery of Nietzsche, at the age of twenty-two, exerted such a powerful influence upon him that he soon turned to prose, and five or six years later his first philosophical speculations were printed, again in The New Age. They attracted attention and were republished in book-form, in 1918, as "We Moderns." At the last minute the author succumbed to modesty and put the nom de plume of Edward Moore upon his book. But now, in this American edition (for which he has made certain revisions), he returns to his own name.

H. L. MENCKEN.

[I]

THE OLD AGE

1

The Advanced

Among the advanced one observes a strange contradiction: the existence in one and the same person of confidence and enthusiasm about certain aspects of life along with diffidence and pessimism about life itself. The advanced have made up their minds about all the problems of existence but not about the problem of existence. In dealing with these problems they find their greatest happiness; they are there sure-footed, convinced and convincing. But brought face to face with that other problem, how helpless, vacillating and spiritless are they! What! are propaganda, reform, and even revolution, perchance, with many of them simply their escape from their problem?

2

The Intellectual Coquettes

An intellectual coquetry is one of the worst vices of this age. From what does it arise? From fear of a decision? Or from love of freedom? It cannot be from the latter, for to abstain from a choice is not freedom but irresponsibility. To be free, is, on the contrary, itself a choice, a decision involving, in its acceptance, responsibility. And it is responsibility that the intellectual coquettes fear: rather than admit that one burden they will bear all the others of scepticism, pessimism and impotence. To accept a new gospel, to live it out in all its ramifications, is too troublesome, too dangerous. The average man in them pleads, "Be prudent! Where may not this resolution lead you? Through what perils? Into what hells?" And so they remain in their prison house of doubt, neither Pagans nor Christians, neither Theists nor Atheists, ignorant of the fact that they are slaves and that a decision would set them free.

But in the end the soul has its revenge, for their coquetry destroys not only the power but the will to choose. To flirt with dangerous ideas in a graceful manner: that becomes their destiny. For the intellectual coquette, like other coquettes, dislikes above everything passion—passion with its seriousness, sincerity and—demand for a decision.

3

Modern Realism

How crude and shallow is the whole theory of modern realism: a theory of art by the average man for the average man! It makes art intelligible by simplifying or popularizing it; in short, as Nietzsche would say, by vulgarizing it. The average man perceives, for instance, that there is in great drama an element of representation. Come, he says, let us make the representation as "thorough" as possible! Let every detail of the original be reproduced! Let us have life as it is lived! And when he has accomplished this, when representation has become reproduction, he is very well pleased and thinks how far he has advanced beyond the poor Greeks. But it is hardly so! For the Greeks did not aim at the reproduction but at the interpretation of life, for which they would accept no symbol less noble than those ideal figures which move in the world of classical tragedy. To the Greeks, indeed, the world of art was precisely this world: not a paltry, sober and conscientious dexterity in the "catching" of the aspects of existence (nothing so easy!), but a symbolizing of the deepest questions and enigmas of life—a thing infinitely more noble, profound and subtle than realistic art. The Greeks would have demanded of realism, Why do you exist? What noble end is served by the reproduction of ordinary existence? Are you not simply superfluous—and vilely smelling at that? And realism could have given no reply, for the truth is that realism is superfluous. It is without a raison d'être.

The average man, however, takes a second glance at classical tragedy and reaches a second discovery. There is something enigmatical, he finds, behind the Greek clearness of representation, something unexplained; in short, a problem. This problem, however, is not sufficiently clear. Let us state our problems clearly, he cries! Let us have problems which can be recognized at a glance by every one! Let us write a play about "the marriage question," or bad-housing, or the Labour Party! But, again, the theory of the Greeks, at least before Euripides, was altogether different. The "problem" in their tragedies was precisely not a problem which could be stated in a syllogism or solved in a treatise: it was the eternal problem, and it was not stated to be "solved."

Thus the Moderns, in their attempt to simplify art, to understand it or misunderstand it—what does it matter which word is used?—have succeeded in destroying it. The realistic and the "problem" drama alike are for the inartistic. The first is drama without a raison d'être, the second is a raison d'être without drama.

4

The Modern Tragic

In realistic novels and dramas a new type of the tragic has been evolved. It may be called tragedy without a meaning. In classical and Shakespearean tragedy, the inevitable calamities incident to human existence were given significance and nobility by the poets. That interpretive power of drama was, indeed, the essential thing to the great artists, to whom representation was only a means. But the realists with their shallow rationalizing of art have changed all that. They have cut out the essential part of drama so as to make the other part more "complete": in short, their tragedy is now simply "tragedy" in the newspaper sense. And it is obvious that this kind of "art" is much easier to produce than tragedy in the grand style: one has not even to read a meaning into it. This absence of meaning, however, is itself, in the long run, made to appear the last word of an unfathomably ironical wisdom. And in this light, how much modern wisdom is understood! The superficiality which can see only the surface here parades as the profundity which has dived into every abyss and found it empty. No! it is not tragedy but the modern tragedian who is without a raison d'être!

5

Realism as a Symptom of Poverty

In an age in which the power of creation is weak, men will choose the easiest forms: those in which sustained elevation is not demanded and creation itself is eked out in various ways. The world of our day has therefore as its characteristic production the realistic novel, which in form is more loose, in content and execution more unequal, and in imaginative power less rich and inventive than poetic drama, or any of the higher forms of literature. If we deduct from the modern "literary artist," the diarist, the sociologist, the reporter, and the collector of documents, there is not much left. For creation there is very little room in his works; perhaps it is as well!

6

Compliments and Art

The convention of gallantry observed by the sexes is the foundation of all refined understanding between them. For in the mutual game of compliment it is the spiritual attitude and not the spoken word that matters. There is truth in this attitude, however unreal the words may seem: a thousand times more truth than in the modern egalitarian, go-as-you-please camaraderie of the sexes. Here there is truth neither in the spirit nor in the letter. To be candid, about this new convention there is something faintly fatuous: the people who act thus are not subtle! Yet they are hardly to be blamed; it is the age that is at fault. There is no time for reflection upon men, women and manners, and consequently no refinement of understanding, no form in the true sense. We work so hard and have so little leisure that when we meet we are tired and wish to "stretch our legs," as Nietzsche said. It is far from our thoughts that a convention between men and women might be necessary; we are not disposed to inquire why this convention arose; it presents itself to us as something naively false; and we have time only to be unconventional.

The ceremonious in manners arose from the recognition that between the sexes there must be distance—respect as well as intimacy—understanding. The old gallantry enabled men and women to be intimate and distant at the same time: it was the perfection of the art of manners. Indeed, we can hardly have sufficient respect for this triumphant circumvention of a natural difficulty, whereby it was made a source of actual pleasure. But now distance and understanding have alike disappeared. The moderns, so obtuse have they become, see here no difficulty at all, consequently no need for manners: brotherhood—comradeship—laziness has superseded that. Nothing is any longer understood; but a convention means essentially that something is understood. Indeed, it is already a gaucherie to explain the meaning of a good convention. But what can one do? Against obtuseness the only weapon is obtuseness.

In literature this decline into bad taste and denseness is most clearly to be seen. So incapable have readers become, so resourceless writers, that whatever is said now must be said right out; sex must be called sex; and no one has sufficient subtlety to suggest or to follow a suggestion. Hence, Realism. An artist has to write exactly what he means: the word must be word and nothing more. But this is to misunderstand art. For the words of the true artist undergo a transubstantiation and become flesh and blood, even spirit. His words are deeds—to say nothing of what he writes between his lines! Realism in art and "comradeship" between the sexes are two misunderstandings, or, rather, two aspects of a misunderstanding. And that misunderstanding is perhaps attributable to a lack of leisure? And that to modern hurry? And that to the industrial system?

7

A Modern Problem

It has been observed again and again that as societies—forms of production, of government, and so on—become more complex, the mastery of the individual over his destiny grows weaker. In other words, the more man subjugates "nature," the more of a slave he becomes. The industrial system, for instance, which is the greatest modern example of man's subjugation of nature, is at the same time the greatest modern example of man's enslavement. What are we to think, then? Is the problem a moral one, and shall we say that a conquest of nature which is not preceded by a conquest of human nature is bound to be bad? In a society which has not surpassed the phase of slavery does every addition to man's power over nature simply intensify the slavery? Or is the problem intellectual? And when the intellect concentrates upon one branch of knowledge to the neglect of the other, is the outcome bound to be the enslavement of the others? For instance the nineteenth century devoted far more of its brains to industry than to politics—its politics, indeed, was merely the reflection of its industry—with the result that industry has now enslaved us all. Yes, it has enslaved us all—not merely the wage-earners, not merely the salariat! In the old days the workman, indeed, was a slave, but now the employer is a slave as well.

In this age, therefore, in which man appears as the helpless appendage of a machine too mighty for him, it is natural that theories of Determinism should flourish. It is natural, also, that the will should become weak and discouraged, and, consequently, that the power of creation should languish. And so the world of art has withered and turned barren. The artist needs above all things a sense of power; it is out of the abundance of this sense that he creates. But confronted with modern society, that vast machine, and surrounded by its hopeless mechanics and slaves, he feels the sense dying within him; nor does the evil cease there, for along with the sense of power, power itself dies.

Well, does not the moral become clearer and clearer? If art and literature are to flourish again, artists, writers, nay, the whole community must regain the sense of power. Therefore, economic emancipation first!

8

Leisure and Good Things

The very greatest danger confronts a people who renounce leisure: that people will become shallow—just consider England! For of all things noble it is hard to see the immediate utility: patience and reverence are needed before one can see in them a meaning at all. Art, literature and philosophy are not obvious goods: at the first glance they appear even repellent: alas, then, for them in an age of first glances! In such an age, it is true, they will not altogether disappear. Something worse will happen. They will be degraded, made obvious, misunderstood; in one word, popularized—the fate of our time. Society should be organized so as to give to its members the maximum of leisure; thus would the dissemination of art and philosophy be made at least possible. But society should at the same time provide for a privileged class of artists and philosophers, with absolute leisure, who would work only when the inner compulsion made them. The second condition is at least as important as the first.

9

Wanted: A History of Hurry

Is there a critic who wishes to be at once edifying and entertaining? Let him write a history of hurry in its relation to literature and art. Has literature decayed as hurry has intensified? Have standards of balance, repose and leisured grace gradually shrunk since, say, the Industrial Revolution? Has the curtailment of the realm of literature, its reduction from the Romantic school to the Victorian circle and from that to the Decadent clique, been due to the everstrengthening encroachment of hurry? And has hurry now become finally triumphant so that our critics and even our artists and savants are nothing more than journalists? For certainly they seem to be so.

These are questions to be investigated by our historian.

10

The Sex Novel

How did the vogue of the sex novel arise? Perhaps from the great attention which was in the last century given to the sciences of biology and physiology; and perhaps, more especially from the popularization of these sciences. Love was, under the spell of science, translated by the novelists into sex. Not the psychology, but the physiology of love was found interesting: with the result that for the production of a modern novel one qualification alone is now necessary: a "knowledge of the simple facts of physiology," as the primer-writers say. Well, what is the remedy for this? Not a denial of physiology: those who have learned it cannot now erase it from their memory and become voluntarily ignorant. No; let, rather, the opposite course be taken! Let us popularize psychology as well!

11

These Advanced People

A. Free Love is all right in theory, but all wrong in practice. B. On the contrary! I think it is all right in practice, but all wrong in theory.

12

Sex in Literature

In English literature, until very modern times, sex was treated only within the limits of a very well-understood convention. From this convention the physiological was strictly excluded. Yet, of our classical writers, even in the most artificial periods, it cannot be said that they did not understand sex. No matter how "unreal" they might be in writing about Love, the physiological contingencies of Love were unmistakably implied in their works, but only, it is true, implied. The moderns, however, saw in this treatment of Love nothing but a convention, a "lie"; and they became impatient of the artificiality, as if art could be anything but artificial! To what was the change of attitude due? Not to a failure in the artistic convention: that was perfectly sound. No, it was the reader who had failed: a generation of readers had arisen who had not learnt the art of reading, who did not understand reading as a cultured amateur of the eighteenth century, for instance, understood it. Literature was to this reader a document, not an art. He had no eye for what is written between the lines—for symbolism, idealization, "literature." And it was to satisfy him that the realistic school arose: it arose, indeed, out of himself. In the realist the modern reader has become writer: the man who could not learn the art of reading has here essayed the more difficult art of writing—documentary art!

13

History of a Realist

Who will write a series of biographies of modern writers, illustrating this thesis: that they are nothing more than modern readers wielding a hasty pen? Such a set of memoirs would almost compensate us for having read the works of these writers. How interesting, for instance, it would be to know how many years—surely it would be years?—they spent in trying to understand literature before they dedicated themselves to its service. How interesting, again, to discover how many hours each day X, the celebrated novelist, devotes to contemplation, how many to writing for the newspapers, and how many to his present masterpiece. What! one hour's thought has actually preceded five hours' dictation! This revelation is, after all, not so startling. On second thought, these memoirs seem superfluous; we can read everything we wish to know of the moderns in their works.

Yet, for our better amusement, will not some one write his one and only novel, giving the true history of the novelist? A novel against novels! But for that we need a second Cervantes, yet how unlike the first! For on this occasion it is not Don Quixote that must be satirized, but Sancho Panza.

14

Novelists by Habit

All of us who read are novelists more or less nowadays: that is to say, we collect "impressions," "analyse" ourselves, make a pother about sex, and think that people, once they are divorced, live happily ever after. The habit of reading novels has turned us into this! When one of us becomes articulate, however—in the form of a novel—he only makes explicit his kinship with the rest; he proclaims to all the world that he is a mediocrity.

15

The Only Course

All the figures in this novel are paltry; we despise them, and, if we were in danger of meeting them in real life, would take steps to avoid them; yet such is the author's adroitness that we are led on helplessly through the narrative, through unspeakable sordidness of circumstance and soul, hating ourselves and him, and feeling nothing better than slaves. To rouse our anxiety lest Herbert lose five pounds, or Mabel find it impossible to get a new dress, this is art, this is modern art! But to feel anxiety about such things is ignoble; and to live in a sordid atmosphere, even if it be of a book, is the part of a slave. And yet we cannot but admire. For in this novel what subtlety in the treatment there must be overlying the fundamental vulgarity of the theme! How is Art, which should make Man free, here transformed into a potent means for enslaving him! It is impossible to yield oneself to the sway of a modern realist without a loss in one's self-respect. To what is due this conspicuous absence of nobility in modern writers? But is the question, indeed, worth the asking? For to the artist and to him who would retain freedom of soul, there is only one course with the paltry in literature—to avoid it.

16

The Average Man

It is surely one of G. K. Chesterton's paradoxes that he praises the average man. For he is not himself an average man, but a man of genius; he does not write of the average man, but of grotesques; he is not read by the average man, but by intellectuals and the nonconformist middle-class. The true prophets of the average man are the popular realistic novelists. For they write of him and for him—yes, even when they write "for themselves," when they are "serious artists." Who, then, but them should extol him? It is their métier.

17

The "New" Writers

The fault of the most modern writers—and especially of the novelists—is not that they are too modern, but that they are too traditional. It is true, they are not traditional in the historical manner of G. K. Chesterton, who wishes to destroy one tradition—the modern tradition—in order to get back to another—the mediæval. To Mr. Chesterton tradition is a matter of selection; the dead tradition seems to him nobler than the living; and, deliberately, therefore, he would return to it. The new writers, however, follow a tradition also, though a much narrower one; they, too, believe in the past, but only, alas, in the immediate past; they are slaves to the generation which preceded theirs. In short, that which is disgusting in them is their inability to rise high enough to see their little decade or two, and to challenge it, if they cannot from the standpoint of a nobler future, then, at least, from that of the noblest past. But how weak must a generation be which is not strong enough to challenge and supersede Arnold Bennett, for instance.

18

The Modern Reader

What is it that the modern reader demands from those who write for him? To be challenged, and again to be challenged, and evermore to be challenged—but on no account to be asked to accept a challenge, on no account to be expected to take sides! A seat at the tournament is all that he asks, where he may watch the most sincere and intrepid spirits of his time waging their desperate battle and spilling their life blood upon the sand. How he loves them when, with high gesture, they fling down their gauntlets and utter their blasphemies! His heart then exults within him; but, why? Simply because he is a connoisseur; simply because he collects gauntlets!

19

The Public

Of the modern writers who are in earnest, Mr. Chesterton has had the most ironical fate: he has been read by the people who will never agree with him. To the average man for whom he writes he is an intellectual made doubly inaccessible by his orthodoxy and his paradoxy. It is the advanced, his bête noire, who read him, admire him, and—disagree with him.

20

Reader and Writer

The modern reader loves to be challenged. The modern writer, if he is in earnest, however, is bound to challenge him. This is his greatest burden; that he must fall a victim of the advanced idlers. But one day he thinks he see a way of escape. He has noticed that the reader desires not only to be challenged, but to be able to understand the challenge at a glance. And here he sees his advantage. I shall write, he says, to himself, in a manner beautiful, exact, and yet not easily understood; so I shall throw off the intellectual coquettes and secure my audience of artists, for my style is beautiful; an audience of critics, for my style is exact; an audience of patient, resolute, conscientious intellects, for my style is difficult. This, perhaps, was the conscious practice of Nietzsche. But he did not foresee that, for the benefit of the intellectual coquettes, who must have hold of new thoughts by one end or another, a host of popularizers would be born; he did not reckon with the Nietzscheans!

21

Popularity

How amazingly popular he is. Even the man in the street reads him. Yes; but it is because he has first read the man in the street.

22

Middle Age's Betrayals

It is not easy to tell by a glance what is the character of a young man; his soul has not yet etched itself clearly enough upon his body. But one may read a middle-aged man's soul with perfect ease; and not only his soul but his history. For when a man has passed five-and-forty, he looks—not what he is, perhaps—but certainly what he has been. If he has been invariably respectable, he is now the very picture of respectability. If he has been a man about town or a secret toper, the fact is blazoned so clearly on his face that even a child can read it. If he has studied, his very walk, to use a phrase of Nietzsche's, is learned. As for the poet, we know how terribly poetical he looks in middle age—poor devil! Well, to every one of you, I say, Beware!

23

The Novelists and the Artist

Is it the modern novelists who are to be blamed for the degraded image of the artist which lives in the minds of the cultured populace? Turgenieff in "On the Eve," and Henry James in "Roderick Hudson" display the artist simply as a picturesque waster, an oh so charming, impulsive, childlike, naïve waster. But, in doing so, they surely confused the artist with the man of artistic temperament. Of the artistic temperament, however, the great artists had very often little or nothing—far less, certainly, than either Shubin or Roderick. The great examples of last century, the Goethes, Ibsens, and Nietzsches, knew that there were qualities more essential to them than temperament; discipline, for instance, perseverance, truth to themselves, self-control. How is it possible, indeed, without these virtues—virtues of the most difficult and heroic kind—for the artist to bring his gifts to maturity, to become great? His discipline to beauty must be as severe as the discipline of the saint to holiness. And, then, how has his sensuousness been misconstrued and vulgarized; and treated precisely, indeed, as if it were the licentiousness of a present-day Tom Jones! That artists can be thought about in such a way proves only one thing, namely, in what poor esteem they are now held. We need a new ideal of the artist; or, failing that, an old one, that of Plato, perhaps, or of Leonardo, or of Nietzsche.

24

Decadence and Health

It is in the decadent periods that the most triumphantly healthy men—one or two—appear. The corrupt Italy of the Renaissance gave birth to Leonardo; the Europe of Gautier, Baudelaire and Wilde produced Nietzsche. In decadent eras both disease and health become more self-conscious; they are cultivated, enhanced and refined. It has been said that the best way to remain healthy is not to think of health. But lack of self-consciousness speaks here. Perhaps the Middle Ages were as diseased as our own—only they did not know it! Is decadence nothing more than the symptom of a self-conscious age? And is "objectivity" the antidote? Well, we might believe this if we could renounce our faith that mankind will yet become healthy—if we could become optimists in the present-day sense!

25

Art in Modern Society

An object of beauty has in modern surroundings a dangerous seduction which it did not possess in less hideous eras. In this is there to be found a contributory explanation of Decadence—the decadent being one who feels the power of beauty intensely, and the repulsion from his environment as intensely, and who plunges into the enjoyment of beauty madly, with abandonment? In a society, however, which was not hideous as ours is, and in which beauty was distributed widely over all the aspects and forms of existence, the intoxication of beauty would not be felt with the same terrible intensity; a beautiful object would be enjoyed simply as one among many lovely things. In short, it would be enjoyed in the manner of health, not in that of sickness. It is the contrast that is dangerous; the aridity of modern life arouses a terrible thirst, which is suddenly presented with the spectacle of a beauty unaccountable and awful; and this produces a dislocation and convulsion of the very soul. So that the present-day artist, if he would retain his health—if he would remain an artist—must curb his very love of the beautiful, and treat beauty, when he meets it, as he always does, in the gutter, a little cynically. Otherwise he will lose his wits, and Art will become his Circe. Therefore, mockery and hard laughter—alas, that it must be so!

26

Art in Industry

In those wildernesses of dirt, ugliness and obscenity, our industrial towns, there are usually art galleries, where the daintiest and most beautiful things, the flowers of Greek statuary, for instance, bloom among the grime like a band of gods imprisoned in a slum. The spectacle of art in such surroundings sometimes strikes us as being at once ludicrous and pathetic, like something delicate and lovely sprawling in the gutter, or an angel with a dirty face.

27

Conventions

The revolt against conventions in art, thought, life and manners may be due to at least more than one cause. It is usually ascribed to "vitality" which "breaks through" forms, because it desires to be "free." But common sense tells us that more than two or three of our friends abjure convention for an altogether different reason—to be candid, on account of a lack of vitality resulting in laziness and the inability to endure restraint of any kind. And, for the others, we shall judge their "vitality" to be justified when they build new conventions worthy of observance, instead of running their heads finally into illimitable space. Or does their strength not go just so far? There is something suspicious about this vitality which cannot create: it resembles impotence so much! Heaven preserve the moderns from their "vitality"!

28

"Vitality"

When moderns talk of the "vitality" of their most lauded writer, what they mean is finally the size of his muscles, physical energy, or, at the most, strong emotions; not vigour of mind. Well, let us on no account make the opposite mistake and revile the large muscle and energetic feelings: they are admirable things. Let us point out, however, that vitality of emotion undisciplined by vitality of thought leads nowhere, is often disruptive and cannot build. But to build is our highest duty and our peculiar form of freedom—we who have realized that there is no freedom without power. As for the old freedom—it is only the slaves who are not already tired of it.

29

Decadence

The decisive thing, determining whether an artist shall be major or minor, is very often not artistic at all, but moral. Yes, though it shock our modern ears, let this be proclaimed! The more "temperament" an artist has, the more character he requires to govern it, to make it fruitful for him, if he would not have it get beyond control, and wreck both him and itself. And, consequently, the great artists show, as a rule, less "temperament" than the minor; they appear more self-contained and less "artistic." Indeed, they smile with the hint of irony at the merely "artistic."

It is, perhaps, when the traditions of artistic morality and discipline have broken down, when the "temperament" has, therefore, become unfettered and lawless, that decadence in art is born. The sincerity of the artist, his chief virtue, is gone—the sincerity which commands him to create only under the pressure of an artistic necessity, which tells him, in other words, to produce nothing which is not genuine. Without sincerity, severity and patience, nothing great in art can be created. And it is precisely in these virtues that the decadent is lacking. A love of beauty is his only credential as an artist, but, undisciplined, it degenerates very soon into a love of mere effect. An effect of beauty at all costs, whether it be the true beauty or not! That becomes his object. Without a root in any soil, he aspires to the condition of the water lily, and, in due time, becomes a full-blown æsthete. Is it because he is incapable of becoming anything else? Has he in despair grown "artistic" simply because he is not an artist? Is Decadence the most subtle disguise of impotence? And are decadents those who, if they had submitted to an artistic discipline of sincerity, would never have written at all? Of some of them this is true, but of others it is not; and in that lies the tragedy of Decadence. Wilde himself was, perhaps, a decadent by misadventure; for on occasion he could rise above decadence into sincerity. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" proves that. He was the victim of a bad æsthetic morality, to which, it is true, he had a predisposition. And if this is true of him, it is true, also, of his followers. A baleful artistic ethic still rules, demoralizing the young artist at the moment when he should be disciplining himself; and turning, perhaps, some one with the potentiality of greatness into a minor artist. By neglecting the harder virtues, the decadents have made minor art inevitable and great art almost impossible.

The old tradition of artistic discipline must be regained, then, or a new and even more severe tradition inaugurated. A text-book of morality for artists is now overdue. When it has been written, and the new discipline has been hailed and submitted to by the artists, who can say if greatness may not again be possible?

30

Decadence Again

How is the dissolution of the tradition of artistic discipline to be explained? To what cause is it to be traced? Perhaps to the more general dissolution of tradition which has taken place in modern times. When theological dogmas and moral values are thrown into the melting-pot, and the discipline of centuries is dissolved into anarchy, it is natural that artistic traditions should perish along with them. Decadence follows free-thought: it appears at the time when the old values lie deliquescent and the new values have not yet risen, the dry land has not yet appeared. But this does not happen always: the old traditions of morality, theology, politics and industry are overthrown, the beginnings of a new tradition appear tentatively, everything fixed has vanished, the wildest hopes and the most chilling despair are the common possession of one and the same generation—but, throughout, the artistic tradition is held securely and confidently, it remains the one thing fixed in a world of dissolution. Then an art arises greater even than that of the eras of tradition. The pathos of the dying and the inexpressible hope of the newly born find expression side by side; all chains are broken, and the world appears suddenly to be immeasurable. Is this what happened at the Renaissance?

31

Wilde

The refined degeneracy of Oscar Wilde might be explained on the assumption that he was at once over—and under—civilized: he had acquired all the exquisite and superfluous without the necessary virtues. These "exquisite" virtues are unfortunately dangerous to all but those who have become masters of the essential ones; they are qualities of the body more than of the mind; they are developments and embellishments of the shell of man. In acquiring them, Wilde ministered to his body merely, and, as a consequence, it became more and more powerful and subtle—far more powerful and subtle than his mind. Eventually this body—senses, passions and appetite—actually became the intellectual principle in him, of which his mind was merely a drugged and stupefied slave!

32

Wilde and the Sensualists

The so-called Paganism of our time, the movement towards sensualism of the followers of Wilde, is not an attempt, however absurd, to supersede Christianity; nor is it even in essence anti-Christian. At the most it is a reaction—not a step beyond current religion into a new world of the spirit, but a changing from one foot to the other, a reliance on the senses for a little, so that the over-laboured soul may rest. And there is still much of Christianity in this modern Paganism. Its devotees are too deeply corrupted to be capable either of pure sensuousness or of pure spirituality. They speak of Christ like voluptuaries, and of Eros like penitents. But it is impossible now to become a Pagan: one must remember Ibsen's Julian and take warning. Two thousand years of "bad conscience," of Christian self-probing, with its deepening of the soul, cannot be disavowed, forgotten, unlived. For Paganism a simpler spirit, mind and sensuousness are required than we can reproduce. We cannot feel, we cannot think, above all, we cannot feel without thinking of our feelings, as the Pagans did. Our modern desire to take out our soul and look at it separates us from the naïve classic sensuousness.

What, then, does modern sensualism mean? What satisfaction does it bring to those, by no means few in number, its "followers"? A respite, an escapade, a holiday from Christianity, from the inevitable. For Christianity is assumed by them to be the inevitable, and it fills them with the loathing which is evoked by the enforced contemplation of things tyrannical and permanent. To escape from it they plunge madly into sensuality as into a sea of redemption. But the disgust which drives them there will eventually drive them forth again—into asceticism and the denial of the senses. Christianity will then appear stronger than ever, having been purged of its "uncleanness." Yes, the sensualists of our time are the best unconscious friends of Christianity, its "saviours," who have taken its sins upon their shoulders.

There still remain the few who do not assume Christianity to be inevitable, who desire, no matter how hopeless the fight may seem, to surmount it, and who see that men have played too long the game of reaction. "To cure the senses by the soul and the soul by the senses" seems to them a creed for invalids. And, therefore, that against which, above all, they guard, is a mere relapse into sensualism. Not by fleeing from Christianity do they hope to reach their goal; but by understanding it, perhaps by "seeing through" it, certainly by benefiting in so far as they can by it, and, finally, emancipating themselves from it. They know that the soil no longer exists out of which grew the flower of Paganism, and that they must pass through Christianity if they would reach a new sensuality and a new spirituality. But their motto is, Spirituality first, and, after that, only as much sensuality as our spirituality can govern! They hold that as men become more spiritual they may safely become more sensual; but that, to the man without spirit, sensuality and asceticism are alike an indulgence and a curse. That the spirit should rule—such is their desire; but it must rule as a constitutional governor, not as an arbitrary tyrant. For the senses, too, as Heine said, have their rights.

33

Arnold Going Down the Hill

One section of the realist school—that represented by Bennett and John Galsworthy—may be described as a reaction from asceticism. Men had become tired of experiencing Life only in its selected and costly "sensations," and sought an escape from "sensations," sought the ordinary. But another section of the school—George Moore, for example—was merely a bad translation of æstheticism. Equally tired of the exquisite, already having sampled all that luxury in "sensation" could provide, the artists now sought new "sensations"—and nothing else—in the squalid. It was the rôle of the æsthetes to go downhill gracefully, but when they turned realists they ceased even to do that. They went downhill sans art. Yet, in doing so, did they not rob æstheticism of its seductiveness? And should we not, therefore, feel grateful to them? Alas, no; for to the taste of this age, grace and art have little fascination: it is the heavy, unlovely and sordid that seduces. To disfigure æstheticism was to popularize it. And now the very man in the street is—artistically speaking—corrupted: a calamity second in importance only to the corruption of the artists and thinkers.

34

Pater and the Æsthetes

How much of Walter Pater's exclusiveness and reclusiveness was a revulsion from the ugliness of his time—an ugliness which he was not strong enough to contemplate, far less to fight—it is hard to say. Perhaps his phase of the Decadence may be defined as largely a reaction against industrialism, just as that of Wilde may be defined as largely a reaction against Christianity: but, in the former case as in the latter, that against which the reaction was made was assumed to be permanent. Indeed, by escaping from industrialism instead of fighting it, Pater and his followers made its persistence only a little more secure. It is true, there are excuses enough to palliate their weakness: the delicateness of their own nerves and senses, making them peculiarly liable to suffering, the ugliness and apparent invulnerability of industrialism, the beauty and repose of the world of art wherein they might take refuge and be happy. Art as forgetfulness, art as Lethe, the seduction of that cry was strong! But to yield to it was none the less unforgivable: it was an act traitorous not only to society but to art itself. For what was the confession underlying it? That the society of today and of tomorrow is, and must be, barren; that no great art can hereafter be produced; that there is nothing left but to enjoy what has been accomplished! Against that presumption, not the Philistines but the great artists will cry as the last word of Nihilism.

Pater's creed marks, therefore, a degradation of the conception of art. Art as something exclusive, fragile and a little odd, the occupation of a few æsthetic eccentrics—this is the most pitiable caricature! To make themselves understood by one another, this little clique invented a jargon of their own; in this jargon Pater's books are written, and not only his, but those of his followers to this day. It is a style lacking, above all, in good taste; it very easily drops into absurdity; indeed, it is always on the verge of absurdity. It has no masculinity, no hardness; and it is meant to be read by people a little insincerely "æsthetic," who are conscious that they are open to ridicule, and who are accordingly indulgent to the ridiculous; the Fabians of art. To admire Pater's style, it is necessary first to put oneself into the proper attitude.

35

Creator and Æsthete

The true creators and the mere æsthetes agree in this, that they are not realists. Neither of them copies existence in its external details: wherein do they differ? In that the creators write of certain realities behind life, and the æsthetes—of the words standing for these realities.

36

Hypocrisy of Words

The æsthetes, and Pater and Wilde in particular, made a cult of the use of decorative words. They demanded, not that a word should be true, nor even that it should be true and pretty at the same time, but simply that it should be pretty. It cannot be denied that writers here and there before them had been guilty of using a fine word where a common one was most honest; but this had been generally regarded as a forgiveable, "artistic" weakness. Wilde and his followers, however, chose "exquisite" words systematically, in conformity to an artistic dogma, and held that literature consisted in doing nothing else. And that was dangerous; for truth was thereby banished from the realm of diction and a hypocrisy of words arose. In short, language no longer grasped at realities, and literature ceased to express any thing at all, except a writer's taste in words.

37

The Average Man

In this welter of dissolving values, the intellectuals of our time find themselves struggling, and liable at any moment to be engulfed. A few of them, however, have snatched at something which, in the prevailing deliquescence, appears to be solid—the average man. Encamped upon him, they have won back sanity and happiness. But their act is nevertheless simply a reaction; here the real problem has not yet been faced! What is it that makes the average man more sane and happy than the modern man? The possession of dogmas, says G. K. Chesterton; let us therefore have dogmas! But, alas, for them he goes back and not forward. And not only back, but back to the very dogmas against which modern thought, and Decadence with it, are a reaction, nay, the inevitable reaction. What! has Mr. Chesterton, then, postponed the solution of the problem? And on the heels of his remedy does there tread the old disease over again? Perhaps it is so. The acceptance of the old dogmas will be followed by a new reaction from them, a new disintegration of values therefore, and a new Decadence. The hands of the clock can be put back, it is true; but they will eventually reach the time when the hour shall strike again for the solution of the modern problem.

And that is the criticism which modern men must pass upon Mr. Chesterton; that he interposed in the course of their malady to bring relief with a remedy which was not a remedy. The modern problem should have been worked out to a new solution, to its own solution. Instead of going back to the old dogmas, we should have strained on towards the new. And if, in this generation, the new dogmas are still out of sight, if we have meantime to live our lives without peace or stability, does it matter so very much? To do so is, perhaps, our allotted task. And as sacrifices to the future we justify our very fruitlessness, our very modernity!

[II]

ORIGINAL SIN

38

Original Sin

Original Sin and the Future are essentially irreconcilable conceptions. The believer in the future looks upon humanity as plastic: the good and the bad in man are not fixed quantities, always, in every age, past and future, to be found in the same proportions: an "elevation of the type man" is, therefore, possible. But the believer in Original Sin regards mankind as that in which—the less said about the good, the better—there is, at any rate, a fixed substratum of the bad. And that can never be lessened, never weakened, never conquered. Therefore, man has to fight constantly to escape the menace of an ever-present defeat. A battle in which victory is impossible; a contest in which man has to climb continually in order not to fall lower; existence as the tread mill: that is what is meant by Original Sin.

And as such it is the great enemy of the Future, the believers in which hold that there is not this metaphysical drag. But it is more. At all things aspiring it sets the tongue in the cheek, gladly provides a caricature for them, and becomes their Sancho Panza. To the great man it says, through the mouths of its chosen apostles, the average men, "What matter how high you climb! This load which you carry even as we will bring you back to us at last. And the higher you climb the greater will be your fall. Humanity cannot rise above its own level." And therefore, humility, equality, radicalism, comradeship in sin—the ideas of Christianity!

39

Again

Distrust of the future springs from the same root as distrust of great men. It derives from the belief in the average man, which derives from the belief in Original Sin. The egalitarian sentiment strives always to become unconditional. It claims not only that all men are equal, but that the men who live now are no more than the equals of those who lived one, or five, thousand years ago, and no less than the equals of those who will live in another one, or five, thousand years. And it desires that this should be so: its jealousy embraces not only the living, but the dead and the unborn.

40

Again

Society is a conspiracy, said Emerson, against the great man. And to blast him utterly in the centre of his being, it invented Original Sin. Is Original Sin, then, a theological dogma or a political device?

41

Equality

Is equality, in truth, a generous dogma? Does it express, as every one assumes, the solidarity of men in their higher attributes? It is time to question this, and to ask if inequality be not the more noble and generous belief. For, surely, it is in their nobler qualities that men are most unequal. It was not in his genius that Shakespeare was only the equal, for instance, of his commentators; it was in the groundwork of his nature, in those feelings and desires without which he would not have been a man at all, in the things which made him human, but which did not make him Shakespeare: in a word, in that which is for us of no significance. Equality in the common part of man's nature, equality in sin, equality before God—it is the same thing—that is the only equality which can be admitted. And if its admission is insisted upon by apologists for Christianity, that is because to the common part of man's nature they give so much importance, because they are believers in Original Sin. In their equality there is accordingly more malice than generosity. The belief that no one is other than themselves, the will that no one shall be other than themselves—there is nothing generous in that belief and that will. For man, according to them, is guilty from the womb. And what, then, is equality but the infinitely consoling consciousness of tainted creatures that every one on this earth is tainted?

The believer in Original Sin will, of course, deny this, and say that in his philosophy men are equals also in their higher rôle as "sons of God." But is this so? Is salvation, like sin, common to all men? Is it not, on the contrary, something conferred as the reward of a belief and a choice—a belief and a choice which an Atheist, for instance, simply cannot embrace? So that here, touching the highest part of men, their soul, there is introduced, by Christianity itself, a distinction, an inequality—the distinction, the inequality between the "saved" and the "lost." Men are equal inasmuch as they are all damned, but they are not equal inasmuch as they are not all redeemed.

Gazing at man, however, no longer through the eyes of the serpent, shall we not be bound to find, if we look high enough, distinction, superiority, inferiority, valuation? The dogma of equality is itself a device to evade valuation. For valuation is difficult, and demands generosity for its exercise. To recognize that one is greater than you, and cheerfully to acknowledge it; to see that another is less than you, and to treat the inferiority as a trifling thing, that is difficult, that requires generosity. But one who believes in inequality will always be looking for greatness in others; his eye, habituated to the contemplation of lofty things, will become subtle in the detection of concealed nobility; while to the ignoble he will give only a glance—and is it not good, where one may not help, to pass on the other side? The egalitarians will cry that it is ungenerous to believe that some men are vile; but it is a strange generosity which would persuade us with them that all men are vile. Let us be frank. To those who believe in the future, inequality is a holy thing; their pledge that greatness shall not disappear from the earth; the rainbow assuring them that Man shall not go down beneath the vast tide of mankind. All great men are to them at once forerunners and sacrifices; the imperfect forms which the Future has shattered in trying to incarnate itself; the sublime ruins of future greatness.

42

If Men Were Equal

If men had been equal at the beginning, they would never have risen above the savage. For in absolute equality even the concept of greatness could not have come into being. Inequality is the source of all advancement.

43

The Fall of Man

In very early times men must have had a deep sense of the tragicality of existence: life was then so full of pain; death, as a rule, so sudden and unforeseen, and the world generally so beset with terrors. The few who were fortunate enough to escape violent death had yet to toil incessantly to retain a footing on this unkind star. Life would, accordingly, appear to them in the most sombre tones and colours. And it was to explain this human misfortune, and not sin at all, that the whole fable of Adam and Eve and the Fall was invented. The doctrine of Original Sin was simply an interpretation which was afterwards read into the story, an interpretation, perhaps, as arbitrary as the orthodox interpretation of the Song of Songs.

How would the fable arise? Well, a primitive poet one day in a fit of melancholy made the whole thing up. Out of his misery his desires created for him an imaginary state, its opposite, the Garden of Eden. But this state being created, the problem arose, How did Man fall from it? And the Tree was brought in. But to the naïve, untheological poet, this tree had nothing to do with metaphysics or with sin, the child of metaphysics. It was simply a magical tree, and if Man ate of the fruit of it, something terrible would happen to him. The Fall of Man was a mystery to the poet, which he did not rationalize or theologize. Well, Man succumbed to curiosity, and pain and misfortune befell the human race. But we must not assume in the modern manner that with the eating of the fruit early man associated any idea of guilt. Rather the contrary; he regarded the act simply as unfortunate, just as at the present day we regard as unfortunate the foolish princess in some fairy tale. So the Fall was not to him a crime, branding all mankind with a metaphysical stigma.

That conception came much later, when the conscience had become deeper, more subtle and more neurotic; when individualism had been introduced into morality. And at that time, too, the ideal of the Redeemer became vitiated. Early man, if he did envisage a Redeemer, envisaged him as one who would set him back in the Garden of Eden again, in the literal, terrestrial Garden of Eden, be it understood: theology had not yet been etherealized. And this Redeemer would redeem all men: the distinction of the individual came afterwards. It was not until later, too, that this ideal was "interpreted," and, as a concession to the conscience, salvation was made a conditional thing: the reward of those who were successful in a competition in credulity, in which the first prize went to the most simple, most stupid. The "guilt" now implicated in the Fall was not purged away from all men by the Redeemer, but only from such as would "accept" it. And, lastly, with the passing of Jesus, the redemption was still further de-actualized. It was found that acceptance of the Redeemer did not reinstate Man in an earthly Garden: paradise was, therefore, drawn on the invisible wires of theology into the inaccessible heavens. Salvation lay at the other side of the grave, and there it was safe from assault.

Nevertheless, what our primitive poet meant by the Fall and the Redemption was probably something entirely different. The Fall to him was the fall into misfortune, not into sin: the Redemption to him was the redemption from misfortune, not from sin. And his Redeemer would be, therefore—whom? Perhaps it is impossible for us to imagine the nature of such a being.

This is not an interpretation, but an attempted explanation of the story of the Fall.

44

Interpretations

How inexhaustible is myth! In the story of the Fall is a meaning for every age and every creed. The interpretation called Original Sin is only one of a thousand, and not the greatest of them. Let us dip our bucket into the well.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil—that was the tree of morality! And morality was then the original sin? And through it Man lost his innocence? The antithesis of morality and innocence is as old as the world. And if we are to capture innocence again, if the world is to become æsthetically acceptable to us, we must dispense more and more with morality and limit its domain. This, one desperate glance into the depths of the myth tells us. Instinct is upheld in it against isolated reason and exterior law. Detached, "abstract" Reason brought sin into the world, but Instinct, which is fundamentally Love, Creation, Will to Power, is forever innocent, beyond good and evil. It was when Reason, no longer the sagacity of Instinct, no longer the eyes of Love, became its opponent and oppressor, that morality arose and Man fell.

Or to take another guess, granted we read Original Sin in the Fall, must we not read there, also, the way to get rid of it? If by Original Sin Man fell, then by renouncing it let him arise again. But how renounce it? What! Cannot Man renounce a metaphor?

Yet how powerful is metaphor! Man is ruled by metaphor. The gods were nothing but that, some sublime, some terrible, some lovely, all metaphors, Jehovah, Moloch, Apollo, Eros. Life is now stained through and through with metaphor. And there are further transfigurations still possible! Yet we would not destroy the beauty already starring Life's skies, the lovely hues lent by Aphrodite, and Artemis, and Dionysos, or the sublime colours of Jehovah and Thor. But the heavy disfiguring blot tarnishing all, Love, Innocence, Ecstasy, Wrath, that we would rather altogether extirpate and annul. Original Sin we would cut off as a disfigurement and disease of Life.

Or, again, may not the myth be an attempt to glorify Man and to clothe him with a sad splendour. And not Original Sin, but Original Innocence is the true reading of the fable? Its raison d'être is the Garden of Eden, not the Fall? To glorify Humanity at its source it set there a Superman. The fall from innocence—that was the fall from the Superman into Man. And how, then, is Man to be redeemed? By the return of the Superman! Let that be our reading of the myth!

45

The Use of Myth

In the early world myth was used to dignify Man by idealizing his origin. Henceforward it must be used to dignify him by idealizing his goal. That is the task of the poets and artists.

46

Before the Fall

Innocence is the morality of the instincts. Original Sin—that was war upon the instincts, morality become abstract, separate, self-centred, accusing and tyrannical. This self-consciousness of morality, this disruption in the nature of Man, was the Fall.

47

Beyond Original Sin

How far is Man still from his goal? How sexual, foul in word and thought, naively hedonistic! How little of spirit is in him! How clumsily his mind struggles in the darkness! How far he is still from his goal!—This is a cry which the believer in Original Sin cannot understand, because he accepts all this imperfection as inevitable, as the baleful heritage of Man, from which he cannot escape.

The feeling of pure joy in life, the feeling that Life is a sacrament—that also is forever denied to the believer in Original Sin. For Life is not a sacrament to him, but a sin of which joy itself is only an aggravation.

48

The Eternal Bluestocking

The bluestocking is as old as mankind. Her original was Eve, the first dabbler in moral philosophy.

49

The Sin of Intellectualism

The first sin, the original sin was that of the intellectuals. The knowledge of Good and Evil was not an instantaneous "illumination"; it was the result of long experiment and analysis: the apple took perhaps hundreds of years to eat! Before that, in the happy day of innocence, Good and Evil were not, for instinct and morality were one and not twain. As time passed, however, the physically lazy, who had been from the beginning, became weaker and wiser. Enforced contemplation, the contemplation of those who were not strong enough to hunt or to labour, made them more subtle than their simple brethren; they formed themselves into a priesthood, and created a theology. In these priests instinct was not strong: they were invalids with powerful reason. But they had the lust for power; they wished to conquer by means of their reason; therefore, they said to themselves, belittle instinct, tyrannize over instinct, discover an absolute "good" and an absolute "evil," become moral. Morality, which had in the days of innocence been unconscious, the harmony of the instincts, was now given a separate existence. The cry was morality against the instincts. Thus triumphed the priests, the intellectuals, by means of their reason. Original Sin was their sin—the result of the analysis by which they had separated morality and the instincts. If we are to speak of Original Sin at all, let it be in this manner.

50

Once More

The belief in Original Sin—that was itself Man's original sin.

51

Apropos Gautier

He had just read "Mlle. de Maupin," "What seduction there is still for Man in the senses!" he exclaimed. "How much more of an animal than a spirit he must be to be charmed and enslaved by this book!" Yet, what ground had he to conclude that because the sensual intoxicates Man, therefore Man is more sensual than spiritual? For we are most fatally attracted by what is most alien to us.

52

Psychology of the Humble

There is something very naïve in those who speak of humility as a certain good and of pride as a proven evil. In the first place these are not opposites at all; there are a hundred kinds of both, and humility is sometimes simply a refined form of pride. Humility may be prudence, or good taste, or timidity, or a concealment, or a sermon, or a snub. How much of it, for instance, is simple prudence? Is not this, indeed, its chief utility, that it saves men from the dangers which accompany pride? On the day on which some one discovered that "Pride goeth before a fall," humility became no mean virtue. For if one become the servant and proclaim himself the least of all, how can he still fall? Yet if he does it is a fall into greater humility, and his virtue only shows the brighter. This is the sagacity of the humble, that they turn even ignominy to their glorification.

Humility is most commonly used with a different meaning, however. There are people who wish to be anonymous and uniform, and people who desire to be personal and distinct. Or, more exactly, it is their instincts that seek these ends. The first are humble in the fundamental sense that they are instinctively so; the latter are proud in the same sense. Humility, then, is the desire to be as others are and to escape notice; and this desire can only be realized in conformity. It is true, people become conceited after a while about their very conformity, and would be wounded in their vanity if they failed to comply with fashion; but vanity and humility are not incompatible.

Pride, however, is something much more subtle. The naïve, unconditional contemners of pride, who plead with men to cast it out, have certainly no idea what would happen if they were obeyed. For pride is the condition of all fruitful action. This thought must be consciously or subconsciously present in the doer, What I do is of value! I am capable of doing a thing which is worth doing! The Christian, it is true, still acts, though he is convinced that all action is sinful and of little worth. But it is only his mind that is convinced: his instincts are by no means persuaded of the truth of this! For though in the conscious there may be self-doubt, in the unconscious there must be pride, or actions would not be performed at all. Moreover, in all those qualities which are personal and not common—in personality—pride is an essential ingredient. The pronoun "I" is itself an affirmation of pride. The feeling, This is myself, this quality is my quality, by possessing it I am different from you, these things constitute my personality and are me: what a naïve assumption of the valuableness of these qualities do we have there, how much pride is there in that unconscious confession! And without this instinctive pride, these qualities, personality could never have been possible. In the heart of all distinct, valuable and heroic things, pride lies coiled. Yes, even in the heart of humility, of the most refined, spiritual humility. For such humility is not a conformity; it separates and individualizes its possessor as effectually as pride could; it takes its own path and not that of the crowd; and so its source must be in an inward sense of worth, of independence: it is a form of pride. But pride is so closely woven into life that to wound it is to wound life; to abolish it, if that were possible, would be to abolish life. Well do its subtler defamers know that! And when they shoot their arrows at pride, it is Life they hope to hit.

53

Les Humbles

Humility is the chief virtue, said a humble man. Then are you the vainest man, said his friend, for you are renowned for your humility. Good taste demands from writers who praise humility a little aggressiveness and dogmatism, lest they be taken for humble, and, therefore, proud. On the other hand, if humility is the chief virtue, it is immoral not to practise it. And, therefore, one should praise humility, and practise it? Or praise it and not practise it? Or not praise it and practise it? There is contradiction in every course. That is the worst of believing in paradoxical virtues!

54

Against the Ostentatiously Humble

He who is truly humble conceals even his humility.

55

The Pessimists

In pessimistic valuations of Life, the alternative contemplated is generally not between Life and Death, but between different types of Life. The real goal of Schopenhauerism is not the extinction of life, for death is a perfectly normal aspect of existence, and Life would not be denied even if death became universal. In order to deny Life and to triumph over it, the pessimist must continue at least to exist, in a sort of death in life: he must be dead, but he must also know it. That is the goal of Schopenhauerism; perhaps not so difficult, perhaps frequently attained! "They have not enough life even to die," said Nietzsche.

56

Sickness and Health

Some men have such unconquerable faith in Life that they defy their very maladies, creating out of them forms of ecstasy: that is their way of triumphing over them. Perhaps some poetry, certainly not a little religion has sprung from this. In religions defaming the senses and enjoining asceticism, or, in other words, a lowering of vitality, the chronic sufferers affirm Life in their own way; for sickness is their life: their praise of sickness is their praise of Life. And if they sometimes morbidly invite death, that is because death is nothing but another form of experience, of Life. To the sick, if they are to retain self-respect and pride, these doctrines are perhaps the best possible; it is only to the healthy that they are noxious. For the healthy who are converted by them, become sick through them, yet not so sick as to find comfort in them. The aspiration after an ascetic life contends in these men with their old health, their desire to live fully, and causes untold perplexities and conflicts; leaving them at last with nothing but a despairing desire for release. Thus, a religion of consolation becomes for the strong a Will to Death—the very opposite of that which it was to those who created it.

57

The Pride of the Sterile

Ecclesiastical, ceremonious humility is the pride of those who cannot create or initiate, either because they are sterile, or because the obstacles in their way are too great. Their pride is centred, not on what they can do, but on what they can endure. The anchorite goes into the wilderness, perhaps rather to get his background than to escape attention, and there imposes upon himself the most difficult and loathsome tasks, enduring not only outward penances, fasting and goading of the flesh, but such inward convulsions, portents and horrors, as the soul of man has by no other means experienced. Here, in endurance, is his power, and here, therefore, is his pride: the poor Atlas, who does not remove, but supports mountains, and these of his own making!

Men who have the power to create but are at the same time extremely timid belong to this class. Rather than venture outside themselves they will do violence to their own nature. The forces which in creation would have been liberated are pent within them and cause untold restlessness, uneasiness and pain. Religions which stigmatize "self-expression," separating the individual into an "outward" and an "inward" and raising a barrier between the two, encourage the growth of this type of man. These religions themselves have their roots in a timidity, a fear of pain. For self-expression is by no means painless; it is, on the contrary, a great cause of suffering. Essentially its outcome is strife, the clash of egos: Tragedy is the great recognition in Art of this truth. Christianity saw the suffering which conflict brought with it, said it was altogether evil, and sought to abolish it. But a law of Life cannot be abolished: strife, driven from the world of outward event, retreated into the very core of man, and there became baleful, indeed, disintegrating, and subversive. The early Christians did not see that men would suffer more from that inward psychic conflict than from the other. It was the Greeks who elevated conflict to an honourable position in their outward actions; with them, as Nietzsche said, there was no distinction between the "outward" and "inward"; they lived completely and died once. But the Christians, to use the words of St. Paul, "died daily." How true was that of those proudly humble anchorites! What a light it throws upon their sternly endured convulsions of the soul! In the end, Death itself came no doubt to many of them as a relief from this terribly protracted "dying." Perhaps one thing, however, made their lives bearable and even enjoyable—the power of the soul to plumb its own sufferings and capacity for endurance. Psychology arose first among the ecclesiastically humble men.

Well, let us count up our gains and losses. Spiritual humility, wherever it has spread, has certainly weakened the expression of Life: for it has weakened man by introducing within him a disrupting conflict. But it has also made Life subtler and deeper; it has enlarged the inward world of man, even if it has straitened the world outside. So that when we return—as we must—to the Pagan ideal of "expression," our works shall be richer than those of the Pagans, for man has now more to express.

58

When Pride is Necessary

Perhaps in all great undertakings into which uncertainty enters pride is necessary. In the Elizabethan age, our most productive and adventurous age, pride was at its zenith. Was that pride the necessary condition of that productiveness? Would the poets, the thinkers and the discoverers have attempted what they did attempt, had they been humble men? What is needed is more enquiry: a new psychology, and, above all, a new history of pride.

59

Humility and the Artists

There is one man, at any rate, who has always owed more to pride than to humility—the artist. Whether it be in himself, where it is almost the condition of productiveness, or in others, where it is the cause of all actions and movements æsthetically agreeable, Pride is his great benefactor. All artists are proud, but not all have the good conscience of their pride. In their thoughts they permit themselves to be persuaded too much by the theologians; they have not enough "free spirit" to say, "Pride is my atmosphere, in which I create. I do not choose to refuse my atmosphere."

But if pride were banished even from the remainder of Life, how poor would the artists be left! For every gesture that is beautiful, all free, spirited, swift movement and all noble repose have in them pride. Humility uglifies, except, indeed, the humility which is a form of pride; that has a sublimity of its own. Even the Christian Church—the Church of the humble—had to make its ceremonies magnificent to make itself æsthetically presentable; without its magnificence it would have been an impossible institution. Humility, to be supportable, must have in it an admixture of pride. That gives it standing. It was His subtle pride that communicated to the humility of Jesus its gracious "charm."

Poetic tragedy and pride are profoundly associated. No event is tragic which has not arisen out of pride, and has not been borne proudly: the Greeks knew that. But, as well, is not pride at times laughable and absurd? Well, what does that prove, except that comedy as well as tragedy has been occasioned by it? Humility is not even laughable!

60

Love and Pride

Pride is so indissolubly bound up with everything great—Joy, Beauty, Courage, Creation—that surely it must have had some celestial origin. Who created it? Was it Love, who wished to shape a weapon for itself, the better to fashion things? Pride has so much to do with creation that sometimes it imagines it is a creator. But that it is not. Only Love can create. Pride was fashioned out of a rib taken from the side of Love.

61

Pride and the Fall

It was not humility that was the parent of the fable of the Fall. Or is it humility to boast of one's high ancestry, and if the ancestry does not exist, to invent it? The naïve poet who created that old allegory did not foresee the number of interpretations which would be read into it. He did not foresee that it would be used to humiliate Man instead of to exalt him; he did not at all foresee Original Sin. As less than justice, then, has been meted to him, let us now accord him more than justice. Let us say that he was a divine philosopher who perceived that in unconditional morality lay the grand misfortune of mankind. Man is innocent; thus, he said, it is an absolute ethic that defiles him—the knowledge of Good and Evil. Sweep that away, and he is innocent and back in the Garden of Eden again. Let us say this of the first poet, for certainly he did not mean it! Perhaps he knew nothing at all about morality! All that he wished for was to provide a dignified family tree for his generation.

62

The Good Conscience

What a revolution for mankind it would be to get back "the good conscience"? Life made innocent, washed free from how much filth of remorse, guilt, contempt, "sin"—that vision arouses a longing more intense than that of the religious for any heaven. And it seems at least equally possible of realization! Bad conscience arises when religion and the instincts are in opposition; the more comprehensive and deep this conflict, the more guilty the conscience. But there have been religions not antagonistic to the instincts, which, instead of condemning them, have thought so well of them as to become their rule, their discipline. The religion of the Greeks was an example of this; and in Greece, accordingly, there was no "bad conscience" in our sense. Well, how is it possible, if it is possible, to regain "the good conscience"? Not by any miracle! Not by an instantaneous "change of heart," for even the heart changes slowly. But suppose that a new instinctive religion and morality were to be set up, and painfully complied with, until they became a second nature as ours have become, should we not then gradually lose our bad conscience, born as it is out of the antagonism between instinct and morality? Nay, if we were to persevere still further until instinct and religion and morality became intermingled and indistinguishable, might we not enter the Garden of Eden again, might not innocence itself become ours? But to attain that end, an unremitting discipline, extending over hundreds of years, might be necessary; and who, in the absence of gods, is to impose that discipline?

63

The Other Side

The life-defaming creeds are not to be condemned unconditionally: even they are not evil. "Guilt," asceticism, contempt for the world—these are the physiologically bad things which have sharpened, deepened and made subtle the soul of man. The Greeks were simple compared with modern man; a thousand times more healthy, it is true—perhaps because they were incapable of contracting our maladies. Well, let us judge Christianity, which in Europe was mainly responsible for this deepening of Man, by an artistic criterion: let us judge it by the effects it achieved, not by what it said.

64

Effects of Christianity

If there are gods who take an interest in Man, and experiment upon him, what better means could they have devised for getting out of him certain "effects," not Christian at all, than Christianity? Far more significant for mankind than the virtues of Christianity, are its contradictions, excesses and "states of mind." The "way of life," Christian morality, is of little account compared with the permanent physiological and psychological transformations effected upon Man by the discipline of centuries of religion. Not that Man has been forced into the mould of Christian morality, but that in the process he has undergone the most unique convulsions, adaptations and permutations, that an entire new world of conflict, pain, fear, horror, exaltation, faith and scepticism has been born within him, that Life, driven within itself, has deepened, enriched and invested him—that is from the standpoint of human culture the most important thing, beside which what is usually understood by the Christianizing of Europe is relatively insignificant. Not Christian morality, but the effects of Christian morality it is that now concern us. And these effects are not themselves Christian; rather the contrary. Christianity has made Man more complex, contradictory, sceptical, tragic and sublime; it has given him more capacity for good and for evil, and has added to these two qualities subtlety and spirituality.

[III]

WHAT IS MODERN?

65

Whither?

The fever of modern thought which burns in our veins, and from which we refuse to escape by reactionary backdoors—Christianity and the like—is not without its distinction: it is an "honourable sickness," to use the phrase of Nietzsche. I speak of those who sincerely strive to seek an issue from this fever; to pass through it into a new health. Of the others to whom fever is the condition of existence, who make a profession of their maladies, the valetudinarians of the spirit, the dabblers in quack soul-remedies for their own sake, it is impossible to speak without disdain. Our duty is to exterminate them, by ridicule or any other means found effectual. But we are ourselves already too grievously harassed; we are caught in the whirlwind of modern thought, which contains as much dust as wind. We see outside our field of conflict a region of Christian calm, but never, never, never can we return there, for our instincts as well as our intellect are averse to it. The problem must have a different solution. And what, indeed, is the problem? To some of us it is still that of emancipation—that which confronted Goethe, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and the other great spirits of last century. It is an error to think that these men have yet been refuted or even understood; they have simply been buried beneath the corpses of later writers. And it is the worst intellectual weakness, and, therefore, crime, of our age that ideas are no longer disproved, but simply superseded by newer ideas. The latest is the true, and Time refutes everything! That is our modern superstition. We have still, then, to go back—or, rather, forward—to Goethe, Ibsen and Nietzsche. Our problem is still that of clearing a domain of freedom around us, of enlarging our field of choice, and so making destiny itself more spacious; and, then, having delivered ourselves from prejudice and superstition—and how many other things!—of setting an aim before us for the unflinching pursuit of which we make ourselves responsible.

Greater freedom, and therefore greater responsibility, above all greater aims, an enlargement of life, not a whittling of it down to Christian standards—that is our problem still!

66

The "Restoration" of Christianity

Will Christianity ever be established again? It is doubtful. At the most, it may be "restored"—in the manner of the architectural "restorations," against which Ruskin declaimed. The difficulty of re-establishing it must needs be greater than that of establishing it. For it has now been battered by science (people no longer believe in miracles) and by history (people have read what the Church has done—or has not done). Christianity has become a Church, and the Church, an object of criticism. As the body which housed the spirit of Christianity, men have studied it with secular eyes, and have found little to reverence, much to censure; and in the disrepute into which the body has fallen, the spirit, also, has shared. And now the atmosphere cannot be created in which Christianity may grow young again and recapture its faith. The necessary credulity, or, at any rate, the proper kind of credulity, is no longer ours. For Christianity grew, like the mushrooms, in the night. Had there been newspapers in Judea, there had been no Christianity. And this age of ours, in which the clank of the printing press drowns all other sounds, is fatal to any noble mystery, to any noble birth or rebirth. That night, at all events, we can never pass through again, and, therefore, Christianity will probably never renew itself.

67

A Drug for Diseased Souls

The utmost that can be expected is a "restoration," and in that direction we have gone already a long way. For Christianity is not now, as it was at the beginning, a spring of inspiration, a thing spiritual, spontaneous, Dionysian. It is mainly a remedy, or, more often, a drug for diseased souls; and, therefore, to be husbanded strictly by the modern medicine men, to be dispensed carefully, and, yes, to be advertised as well! Its birth was out of an exuberance of spiritual life; its "restoration" will be out of a hopeless debility and fatigue. And, therefore——

68

The Dogmatists

All religions may be regarded from two sides; from that of their creators, and from that of their followers. Among the creators are to be numbered not only the founders of religion, but the saints, the inspired prophets and every one who has in some degree the genius for religion. They are not distinguished by much reverence for dogma, but by the "religious feeling"; and when this emotion carries them away in its flood they often treat dogma in a way to make the orthodox gape with horror. But, in truth, they do not themselves take much account of dogma; every dogma is a crutch, and they do not feel the need of one. But the people who are not sustained by this inward spring of emotion, who can never know what religion really is, these need a crutch; it is for them that dogma was designed. And, of course, the real religious men see their advantage also in the adherence of the dogmatists, the many; for the more widely a religion is spread, the more secure it becomes, and the greater chance it has of enduring. Dogma, then, is religion for the irreligious. To the saint religion is a thing inward and creative; to the dogmatist it is a thing outward, accomplished and fixed, to which he may cling. The former is the missionary of religion, the latter, its conserver. The one is religious because he has religion, the other, because he needs it.

69

The Religious Impulse

The time comes in the history of a faith when the "religious feeling" dies, and nothing is left but dogma. The dogmatists then become the missionaries of religion. The fount is dried up; there is no longer an inward force seeking for expression; there is only the fear of the dogmatist lest his staff, his guide, his horizon should be taken from him. Religion is then supported most frenziedly by the irreligious; weakness then speaks with a more poignant eloquence than strength itself. And that is what is happening with Christianity. Its "religious feeling" is dead: there has been no great religious figure in Europe in our time. And the Church is now being defended on grounds neither religious nor theological, but secular and even utilitarian. The real religious impulse is now to be found in the movement outside, and, therefore, against Christianity. But, alas, as Nietzsche feared, there may not after all be "sufficient religion in the world to destroy religion."

70

The Decay of Prophecy

The past should be studied only in order to divine the future. The new soothsayers should seek for omens, not, as their ancient brethren did, in the stars and the entrails of animals, but in the book of history, past and becoming. "The new soothsayers," for soothsaying has not died; it has become popular—and degenerate. Every one may now foretell the future, but no one may believe what is foretold. And that is because the soothsayers do not themselves believe their auguries; when they happen to speak the truth, no one is more surprised than they. But in the antique world the augurs had, at any rate, responsibility; to foretell the future was not to them an amusement but a vocation.

To what is due the decay of the art of soothsaying? Partly, no doubt, to the dissemination of popular knowledge, by which people have become less credulous; partly to the "scientific temper" of those who, had they lived in the old world, would have been the soothsayers; partly to other causes known to every one. But, allowing for these, may there not be something due to the fact that people are no longer interested, as they used to be, in the future? They know the past, ah, perhaps too well: they have looked into it so long that at length they feel that the future holds nothing which it has not held, that Fate has now no fresh metamorphosis or apotheosis, and that Time must henceforth be content to plagiarize itself. And so the future has lost the seduction which it once held for the noblest spirits. It is true, men still amuse themselves by guessing which of Time's well-thumbed and greasy cards will turn up at the next deal, or by playing at patience with the immemorial possibilities. But that is not soothsaying, nor is it even playing with the future: it is playing with the past. And the great modern discovery is not the discovery of the future, but the discovery of the past.

And as with soothsaying, so with prophecy. If we could but look for a moment into the soul of an old prophet and see his deepest thoughts and visions, what a conception of the future would be ours! But that is impossible. We cannot now understand the faith of the men who, unmoved, prophesied the advent of supernatural beings, the Christ or another; to whom the future was a new world more strange than America was to Columbus. That attitude of mind has been killed; and now comes one who says the belief in the future is a weakness. Would he, perchance, have said that to John the Baptist, the great modern of his time? Had he lived in that pre-Christian world, would he have believed in the God in whom he now believes? The orthodox Christian here finds himself in a laughable dilemma. Admitting nothing wonderful in the future, he is yet constrained to believe in a past wonderful beyond the dreams of poets or of madmen—a past in which supernatural beings, miracles and portents were almost the rule. And so the future is to him not even so wonderful as the past. It is an expurgated edition of the past—an edition with the incidents and marvels left out, a novel without a hero or a plot.

So, for good or for evil, we no longer believe in the future as we did: it is steadily becoming less marvellous, and, therefore, less seductive for us. But, without the bait of the strange and the new to lure it on, must not humanity halt on its way? Can man act at all without believing in the future in some fashion? Must not things be foreseen before they can be accomplished? Is not soothsaying implicit in every deliberate act? Are not all sincere ideals involuntary auguries? Is it not the future rather than the prophecy which "comes true"? Did not the old prophecies "come true" because they were prophesied? Did not Christ arise because He was foretold? And are not the believers in the future, then, the creators of the future, and the true priests of progress? When we can envisage a future noble enough, it will not then be weakness to believe in it.

71

The Great Immoralists

The morality of Nietzsche is more strict and exacting than that of Christianity. When the Christians argue against it, therefore, they are arguing in favour of a morality more comfortable, pleasing and indulgent to the natural man; consequently, even on religious grounds, of a morality more immoral. What! is Nietzsche, then, the great moralist, and are the Christians the great immoralists?

This notion may appear to us absurd, or merely ingenious, but will it appear so to future generations? Will timidity, conformity, mediocrity, judicious blindness, unwillingness to offend, be synonymous, to them also, with morality? Or will they look back upon Christianity as a creed too indulgent and not noble enough? As a sort of Epicureanism, for instance?

72

The First and the Last

We all know what the weak have suffered from the strong; but who shall compute what the strong have suffered from the weak?" The last shall be first"; but when they become first they become also the worst tyrants—impalpable, anonymous and petty.

73

Humility in Pride

The pride of some gifted men is not pride in their person, but in something within them, of which they regard themselves the guardians and servants. If there is dignity in their demeanour it is a reflected, impersonal dignity. Just so a peasant might feel ennobled who guarded a king in danger and exile.

74

The Modern Devil

The devil is not wicked but corrupt, in modern phraseology, decadent. The qualities of the mediæval devil, rage, cruelty, hatred, pride, avarice, are in their measure necessary to Life, necessary to virtue itself. But corruption is wholly bad; it contaminates even those who fight it. Hell relaxes: Mr. Shaw's conception is profoundly true.

But if the devil is corruption, cannot the devil be abolished? It is true, Man cannot extirpate cruelty, hatred and pride without destroying Life; but Life is made more powerful by the destruction of the corrupt. God created Man; but it was Man that created the devil.

75

Master and Servant

To summon out of the void a task, and then incontinently to make of himself its slave: that is the happiness of many a man. A great means of happiness!

76

Criterions